Book Review – The Dispossessed by Andrew Lansdown

Before I get onto my review of this volume, a word on remainder piles. I am well aware that the ‘remaindering’ process is a last-resort option for publishers and booksellers alike, and that it represents a failure to sell a particular book. I am aware, too, that the author likely receives nothing from the meagre sales of remaindered books. And yet, from the perspective of the impoverished reader, remainder piles at the front of bookstores like Dymocks and Collins are a gold mine of cheap books. For the price of perhaps $5-6 for a small paperback, $9 for trade paperback size and maybe even $12 for hardcover, readers are given the opportunity to pick up something they might never consider at full price. Given the exorbitant price of books in Australia, I have spent many hours trawling the remainder piles for a bargain or three. I often get lucky, as I did at Dymocks in Joondalup, where I picked up two Interactive Press titles, The Dispossessed and The House of Given, for less than $6 each. The remainder pile is a sort of ‘last chance saloon’ for books on their way to the executioner, and they represent an author’s final chance to get their work ‘out there’ before it is condemned to oblivion.

The Dispossessed, then. Andrew Lansdown is an author I’m not familiar with, despite the fact that, according to the author credits, he has been a very prolific writer of poetry and prose over the years. What we have here is a fairly slim volume packed with more than fifteen stories. The stories range from very short to moderately short in length, which is a good thing in my opinion. Despite the brevity of the stories, I did not enjoy reading them all, although it must be said that I ripped through the volume in around two days, so I must have derived some enjoyment from them.

Lansdown has a number of talents as a short story writer. Firstly, he writes excellent prose on the technical level, a skill that has probably been honed by his poetry writing. His prose is seldom elaborate and never flashy, giving his work an enviable clarity. In these stories, the author also demonstrates an impressive range of subject of matter and emotional content. Many are set in historic Western Australia, but others are in contemporary settings. Lansdown seems to me to be a dark, moody writer. His stories are often cutting and satirical, and are rarely uplifting. This is not a criticism, but I left this volume with my own cynicism toward human life very much intact. Books really do offer a window into the mental world of a writer, and thus I imagine Lansdown himself as an intelligent, introspective and perhaps gloomy individual.

Some of these stories were excellent. I particularly enjoyed “The Bowgada Birds”, “The Lepers”, “The Thing That Amused Them”, “The Launching”, “The Only Things”, “The Arrival”, and my personal favourite “The Story”. Given that there are 23 stories in the volume, that’s a strike rate of around 1 in 3. Some of the others I found moderately enjoyable, but I was perplexed by a number of the shorter stories, many of which seemed, in my opinion, pointless. Some of these stories are no more than brief sketches of characters and locations, rather than fully-fledged narratives, but I suppose that my disapproval reveals as much about my own reading preferences as it does about the stories themselves.

To focus on one particular story, “The Story”, I will try to explain why I liked this particular piece so much. Lansdown has a talent for bringing bygone times to life, which he does in several stories in this volume. Personally, however, I find tales of colonial life in Western Australia particularly grim and unrelenting. This story is basically a conversation between an old man and his wife, and their adult grandson. The grandson is writing a story about life during the Depression and wants to elicit some particular information from the grandfather. The grandfather, hurt by the younger man’s lack of care for his stories, keeps narrating an entirely different story to the one required. This seemed particularly touching, for some reason, and I enjoyed reading this immensely. The young man is trying to discover a number of details relating to the hitching of horses to a harvester, and I was surprised to find this particular tidbit embedded in another story in the volume, “The Arrival.” I doubt that Lansdown’s aim was particularly metafictional here, but it had an impact on me nonetheless.

In summary, I’m not sure I particularly like Lansdown’s work, but I can recognise him as an adept and multi-talented writer. I would recommend this to anyone who likes reading about the colonial history of WA, or ‘the bush’ in general.

Yellowcake Springs: 20 in 10?

In the past, I never had any success in working on my novels during the three two-week holidays I get during the school year. I am hoping that this year will be different. Over the summer of 08/09 I managed to write around 40,000 words toward my new novel, Yellowcake Springs, which I imagine represents around 40% of the entire first draft. During the first term holidays (i.e. April) I was too busy with the impending launch of my first novel, The Kingdom of Four Rivers, to give much thought to the new novel, but this time I’ve got no excuses.

Thus, the aim is to write 20,000 words in a mere ten days over the next two weeks. I will give myself weekends off, which will mean I will have a daily target of 2000 words. I’ve already achieved this goal today, so there’s only 9 days and 18,000 words to go!

Incidentally, it takes me around two hours to write 2000 words, which might cause one to wonder why I couldn’t put in a few eight hour days and be done with it by Thursday. There are several reasons why this can’t happen, at least not in my case. Firstly, writing is exhausting. Two hours of actual writing represents a good effort for me, and three hours would be about as much as I could do in one day without fear of the quality suffering. Secondly, and just as importantly, I need to make sure that I don’t progress the plot faster than I can actually plan said plot. As it stands, I am about a day in advance of the actual writing, so I can’t afford to write much faster than this.

Wish me luck. I might not get to 20,000 words, but even 15,000 would be great. Here’s a nuclear explosion to tide you over until Yellowcake Springs is finished. There won’t be an actual nuclear blast in this novel, but there will be the next worst thing…

Book Review – The Owl in Daylight by Tessa B. Dick

When I wrote my review of Voices From the Street, Philip K Dick’s last published novel (25+ years after his death), I said I was surprised to be reading a ‘new’ PKD book and that I found the matter ‘phildickian’ – that is, strange and entirely in keeping with the man, his work, and his life. How much greater my surprise is, then, to be reviewing The Owl in Daylight, PKD’s fabled and entirely unwritten final novel. When reviewing the long interview What if Our World is Their Heaven?, I discussed the plot Phil envisioned for Owl, which was to be, not his last book, but simply his next book. Now I hold The Owl in Daylight in hand and ponder the unlikely (and somewhat regrettable) circumstances that have caused this book to appear now, 27 or so years after PKD’s death.

The author of this book is, of course, PKD’s wife Tessa, and the publisher is not a mainstream house, but Amazon.com’s self publishing department, Create Space. All of this came (very recently) as a complete and utter surprise to me, as I had been following matters phildickian closely over the past decade or so, and had no inkling that Tessa Dick was about to publish, not one, but at least five or six books, including a memoir on PKD and that famous unwritten novel, The Owl in Daylight. It also seems that Tessa has run afoul of an organisation known as the Philip K Dick Trust (I’m not making this up) and that ‘they’ (a consortium run by PKD’s descendants, including, it seems, her own son) were threatening her with legal action over the use of the ‘Philip K Dick’ name and associated rights. It would appear that Tessa is now suing the PKD Trust in response over proceeds to some of the late author’s later works, most notably A Scanner Darkly. No, I’m really not making any of this up. It seems that Tessa B Dick’s The Owl in Daylight will be something of a collector’s item, given that only a limited number have been sold, and that there remains some threat of the book being withdrawn (as occurred with the memoir of another PKD relative, Anne Mini, whose book A Family Darkly was withdrawn before publication, apparently due to the ubiquituous PKD Trust).

‘But is The Owl in Daylight any good?’ I hear you ask. There was a part of me that was afraid to start reading, in case the words were awful, the plot plodding. But thankfully, Tessa has pulled it off :  not only is The Owl in Daylight a fitting tribute to her late husband, but it’s actually a strong novel of its own accord and–wait for it– in the opinion of this humble reviewer, superior to PKD’s VALIS. I’m not so much a fan of VALIS anymore, as my review of more than a year ago will attest to. The Owl in Daylight reads much more like a direct sequel to that novel than The Divine Invasion ever did, although I am due to re-read that book too.

Owl concerns, for the most part, a hack composer by the name of Arthur Grimley. (Somewhere, probably on Tessa’s blog, she explains that the name Arthur is because he’s an artist, and Grimley as his is a grim situation.) Arthur longs to write serious music, but his trashy stuff pays the bills and ends up adorning various B-grade slasher films. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, not to read much of this as standing symbolically for PKD himself, and indeed there are many similarities between Arthur and a younger PKD, the young man who wrote “Roog!” and Solar Lottery. Grimley’s latest music is intended for the film “Bad Moon Rising,” a great title that Tessa incidentally seems to have used for another of her novels. This is the first of the similarities between VALIS and The Owl in Daylight.

I haven’t mentioned the Archons and the alien slugs, but that’s half the fun of the novel, so I won’t try to explain that in too much detail. Suffice to say that where in VALIS we had an ancient sattelite and a pink beam of light, here we have an alien implant and some ‘men in black.’ Early in the novel, Arthur loses consciousness for some unknown reason, which proves to be the beginning in a psychedelic and disorientating sequence of events that recalls PKD’s best work, namely Ubik, Martian Time-Slip, A Maze of Death and also the obscure Radio Free Albemuth (which students of PKD will recognise as the original ‘VALIS’ novel). Arthur recovers from his episode to some extent, and here we discover the extent of his similarities with the younger PKD – both worked in a record store, both were had a domineering mother, both had some fear of turning out to be homosexual.

Here I thought it prudent to mention one aspect of the novel I found a little perplexing. Arthur’s memories of his childhood appear to have taken place in roughly the same period as PKD’s own life (i.e. as a young adult in the early 1950s). And yet the older Arthur appears to inhabit our own times (there is even some brief mention of the global financial crisis), which is more than 50 years later. I certainly didn’t picture the older Arthur as being over seventy, so perhaps the author intended this discontinous sense of time, this fracture, as a clue to the fundamental unreality of time (as per VALIS – The Empire Never Ended etc) There’s even an old hobo holding up a sign that says precisely this early in the novel. I thought that this was a subtlety that might easily be missed by an unwary reader. In fact, I wonder what someone who hadn’t read VALIS and PKD’s other work would make of The Owl in Daylight.

I quite enjoyed the beginning section of the novel, but in Chapter Two the narrative really took off for me, and before I knew it I had read half the book. The plot is too phantasmagoric and shifting to describe in detail, but it includes elements such as:  strange mathematical equations; a motorised wheelchair; alien slugs and a flying saucer; a theme park; an ersatz reality; the process of anamnesis and Dante’s Inferno. Here we learn of a young man named Tony and the woman he is fated to marry, Candy.  Meanwhile, Art Grimley lies in a coma in the theme park.

By page 108, at the beginning of Chapter Six, we can no longer be sure what is real and what fake (like the famous ending of Ubik, in which Joe Chip realises that he may not have reached true reality after all). Tony’s narrative, a narrative that seems very much in keeping with PKD’s own life, is a delight to read, but the ‘alien slugs’ are eager to “anxious to accelerate the game” (page 112), setting the narrative into freefall again. Somewhere in here, Tony starts to look for his lost ‘Lorelei,’ who turns out to have a surprising double later in the story.  The weakest part of the novel, to my mind, centre around the Ordeals which begin in Chapter Seven. While Tony battles through various ordeals (with a friend called Bobby) surgeons in our own times are preparing to operate on the tumour in Art Grimley’s head.

Things pick up again in the final third, when Art wakes from his coma to find that he now lives in a small apartment. His wife Edna tries to help him, but all he can say is something about the Plasmate (which the reader knows is the alien slug). Somewhere in here are the Archons, who are forever a step behind the sneaky slug. I couldn’t help but think of the Men in Black films hereabouts, and in general I thought the Archons could have been fleshed out better or gotten rid of entirely. On page 177 we are introduced to the character who forms the final piece of this novel’s puzzle – the madman Kelvin Waggle. PKD pretty much perfected the character of the idiot savant in a number of novels, from Raggle Gumm in Time Out of Joint, through Jack Isidore in Confessions of a Crap Artist, and finally a similar character whose named I have forogtten in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. The character type was immortalised in the film Blade Runner, as Sebastian. Anyway, Tessa Dick deploys this character type to excellent effect here, in the final section of The Owl in Daylight.

It couldn’t be a VALIS novel without the appearance of Sophia (”the embodiment of God’s Holy Wisdom on Earth” – p 203), who turns out to be a cipher for Lorelei AND Angelica (the reader really needs to pay attention!). Sophia seems to represent the cool ‘feminine’ voice that guides and shapes the narrative, and finally helps Arthur to recover from his ordeal here at novel’s end. I’ve managed not to mention that Arthur has composed some beautiful ‘Golden Mean’ music while under influence of the alien slug, and that he and his wife now live partly on the proceeds of this music. This reminds me of PKD’s own ‘2-3-74′ experiences, which I’m sure the author had in mind here. Tony, Bobby and Candy even manage to make a late reappearance, but the novel’s final image, and one very true to PKD’s vision and especially the ‘note of humility’ he tended to end his novels on, is brilliant. I guess I shouldn’t spoil it, but suffice to say that Arthur and Kelvin Waggle finally meet, but with an inconclusive outcome.  Then in the Appendix we discover just how similar the minds of these two characters are (both having been occupied, at different times, by the alien slug).

The Owl in Daylight isn’t a perfect novel by any means. The presentation is frankly a little sloppy in terms of typos and small inconsistencies (I counted at least 20-30 small errors), but there again the resemblance to the work of PKD himself is uncanny. This is a novel that demands a great deal of the reader in terms of piecing together various clues in order to make meaning of the overall narrative. But The Owl in Daylight actually has something that so many of PKD’s novels do have but NOT, in my opinion, VALIS: a ripping storyline. I found this to be a thoroughly entertaining read and I would highly recommend it to the legions of PKD fans around the world. On a more personal note, it seems that Tessa Dick has fallen on hard times of late and is living to some extent on the proceeds of her self-published novels. So before you think about picking up YET ANOTHER copy of Ubik or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, spare a thought for the great man’s widow and muse, Tessa Dick. You’ll be glad you did.

Book Review – The Middle Kingdom by Andrea Barrett

I picked up this book for two reasons: firstly, the name ‘The Middle Kingdom’ (which had the connotation of something Chinese), and second, the outstanding cover, depicting the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. There was no way I wasn’t going to buy the book, based on those two factors.  I hadn’t heard of Andrea Barrett, so I did a bit of research and discovered that she was (is) an American writer famous for more recent work than this (published 1991 in the US and not until 2000 in the UK). Barrett was an obscure writer over the course of her first three novels (this is the third), and having read The Middle Kingdom, it’s apparent as to why. More on that a little later.

I loved the beginning of this book, and I loved the fact that it had four sections, but that they weren’t told in chronological order. To be honest, I’m a bit of a sucker for gimmickry of this kind, which perhaps helps to explain why I like David Mitchell’s work (most famously, Cloud Atlas).  Part One is a short section set during the Tiananmen Square massacre period in Beijing. Here our American protagonist, Grace, is forced to flee the country with her infant son, Jody. Part One whetted my appetite, and Part Two, set three or so years before Tiananmen, delivered. In Part Two, we learn that Grace is suffering in an unhappy marriage to a scientist named Walter Hoffenmeir, and that she is timid, overweight, and desirous of escape from her pampered but empty life. This she finds in Beijing. Great stuff, I thought: interesting story, full of the flavour of China as told from the perspective of an outsider.

But then Part Three. Part Three. This is where the book fell down for me. I’ll try to explain why. Part One is around 18 pages in length, Part Two is about 75 pages, and Part Three is 110 pages long. In a four part book that weighs in at a trim 280 pages in total, the third part is by far the fattest. Here we are taken back even further to bear witness to Grace’s earlier experiences (1974-86). In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this, but in The Middle Kingdom, the technique causes the narrative to sag heavily. All that the third part does is develop the characters of Grace and Walter. That’s it. This section contributes nothing toward the later plot, except in that we understand the motivations of the central characters better. And the material itself is not especially interesting either. It’s mainly about Grace’s various love troubles, spanning two husbands, as well as her weight battles (she tends to binge eat) and various other minor details. Worse, nothing really comes to life in terms of actual events being described in much detail either. It’s a long, long recount and not a particularly interesting one either.

Part Four is better, but by then I was reading to finish, not reading for enjoyment. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that the reader knows that Grace will end up leaving Walter and staying in Beijing (we have already witnessed the aftermath of this), robbing the finale of its dramatic potential. This kind of structure can work exceptionally well, but I get the sense that Barrett botched it in The Middle Kingdom. I realise that I haven’t really described the plot of the novel at all, but as I didn’t find it especially interesting, I won’t bother now. Suffice to say that while Barrett showed flashes of brilliance and definite potential, The Middle Kingdom ended up being something of a fizzer. For once, it seems, popular opinion was right in condemning this author to the obscurity she languished in at that time.

I’ll definitely pick up one of her later books if I see one around the place though. I’m open minded about this author. Any suggestions are to her better books would be welcomed.

A new reading list, and some incomplete reviews (14/6/09)

Well, my resolution to read and review the three books on my list has been a complete failure, as I’ve now abandoned all three of them midway through. It’s a nasty reading habit I’ve developed, but there it is. I’ve figured life is too fleeting to spend reading things I don’t feel like reading. So here are my incomplete reviews of the three:

The Coffin is Too Big for The Hole by Kuo Pao Kun

This is a book of plays by a Singaporean (though Chinese born) playwright. The introduction was boring, and I’m sorry to report that it was a foretaste of things to come. I guess I don’t know a great deal about drama, but I know what I like, and it isn’t this.

Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee

I was on a roll reading Coetzee after Youth and Disgrace, but this one (his first) proved too obscure for my liking. The first part was about a guy writing a report about Vietnam, or something. I found this nowhere near as readable as his later work, although it’s probably true that I didn’t apply myself to the ask as well as I might have.

Sounds of the River by Da Chen

I usually gobble up memoirs by Chinese writers greedily, but this one left me (on page 78) bored. Apparently it’s the second part in a trilogy of memoirs, but there didn’t seem to be anything of great interest to report (country boy goes to Beijing in the eighties to study). Compared with, for instance, Ma Jian’s Red Dust, this seems rather minor fare. Perhaps it gets better in the second half.
Fresh from these failures, I’m moving on to four very promising looking titles I picked up today in the new secondhand bookstore/coffee shop in Northam. I think it might be called ‘Two Stories’ but I’ll have to check up on that.

Confucius: The Golden Rule by Russell Freedman

You could say that the three philosophical schools in China, roughly speaking, are Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Daoist thought has had a major influence on my thinking (particularly the writings of Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi in pinyin]) but Confucius generally leaves me cold. I have tried to get through The Analects, without success, but I am aware that my ignorance in these matters leaves a massive hole in my learning. Thus, I was glad to find an illustrated, 48 page hardback where seems to be a kind of summary of Confucius’ thinking! Even I can get through that.

The Middle Kingdom by Andrea Barrett

More stuff on China. This appears to be a novel (memoir?) about a Western woman’s travels in China in the eighties. Sold.

Soviet Women Writing by I. Grekova (editor?)

I haven’t really taken an interest in Russian writing in the past, except for a couple of fascinating memoirs: one on Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl), and the other on random drunkenness (Russia Through a Shot Glass). I did read and enjoy Solsenitzyn’s Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was younger too. So I get the idea that I might take to Russian, and perhaps specifically Soviet-era literature. This seems as good a place to start as any.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I used to steer well clear of the Crime shelves in bookstores new and old. Twelve months ago I could probably say truthfully that I’d never read a novel of crime fiction through to the end in my life. Then I started reading Raymond Chandler. I am still skeptical about modern crime fiction, but I figure that seeing as I like Chandler, I might like Dash Hammett too.

Okay, no promises this time. I think it’s highly likely that I’ll have read Confucius: The Golden Rule within the next day or two, however. Whether it’s worth me reviewing it, I’m not sure.

From the Avon Advocate – 3/6/09

Looks like I’m famous…again. I like this photo better than the last one. I’ve been gratified by the response to the novel, and sales have reached or exceeded expectations. Avon Valley residents can still get a copy of The Kingdom of Four Rivers from Monopolies Toys & Books in Northam, or direct from the author (me). Leave a comment hereabouts if you desire…

The Kingdom of Four Rivers – officially launched

Yesterday I had my book launch for The Kingdom of Four Rivers in the Northam Boulevard. It was a nerve-wracking experience for me, but I was mightily relieved at the end to discover I had sold all but five copies of my stock. The event had been well supported by the Avon Advocate, Monopolies Toys & Books, the Avon Valley Arts Society and Northam Senior High School – all of which helped to make the day a success. My heartfelt thanks go out to anyone who has helped in any way with this project, and especially to those of you who came and bought a book yesterday! I even got a ticking off from one astute gentleman over a grammatical issue on the book’s blurb. I won’t point it out here, but I wish someone had pointed this out before it was too late! Extra points will be awarded for those who can discover any proofreading issues in the book itself. I counted four (very) minor issues in total, which seems reasonable.

So where to now? Those still interested in obtaining a signed copy of The Kingdom of Four Rivers have a couple of options. Firstly, you can make your way into Monopolies Toys & Books in Northam, which has plenty of stock. Secondly, you can order direct from the publisher at Equilibrium Books . Thirdly, you can leave a comment hereabouts and I’ll see what I can do for you.

I am hoping to expand the retail availability of the novel somewhat, but I’m under no illusions as to how grinding this process is likely to be. If you can help in any way with this, let me know.

Books Read – Books to Read – 3/5/09

Okay, so I haven’t been writing a lot of reviews (or any) in the past couple of months. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, and mainly, this is because my actual reading has been on hiatus. This happens once in a while, and it’s been happening. Secondly, I’ve been distracted by my own impending novel launch. I did manage to read two novels by J. M. Coetzee in the past little while though, but I couldn’t really be bothered reviewing them. Mini reviews to follow:

Youth by J. M. Coetzee

This is actually something of a memoir and not very novellistic. I felt that the book lacked any kind of narrative shape, and thus was unsatisfying in its conclusion. Despite this, I could see that Coetzee was a very talented writing with an appealing, minimalist style. Some of the description of life in Britain in the sixties was interesting, and very much in contrast to the stereotype of the ‘Swinging Sixties,’ which Coetzee appears to have missed out on on the grounds of demeanour, if nothing else.

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

This novel won the Booker prize in 1999 and it is widely regarded as Coetzee’s most famous novel. The book is about a university professor who sleeps with one of his students and is subsequently stripped of his post (partly due to his own bullish comments). He goes to live with his daughter in rural South Africa, where they are subjected to a fairly horrific attack at the hands of some local men. The professor gets more and more depressed, and ends the novel in a state where a J. G. Ballard novel would usually start (i.e. in a state of decay). Recommended, but I don’t really know what’s so great about this that it deserved a major prize. Hey, I didn’t read the other entries.

So now I have three books on the to-do list, two of which I’ve actually started. The first is Coetzee’s first ‘novel’ (actually two novellas): Dusklands. This is obscure, Ballardian (in that it concerns the Vietnam War, sex, and general oddity) and just quite strange. I’ve actually put it down for the moment. The second slender tome is a book of plays by a Singaporean (although born in China) playwright by the name of Kuo Pao Kun: The Coffin is Too Big For The Hole and other plays. I tend to read anything I can get my hands on by Chinese writers, but I’m not sure if this is really going to do it for me. The third volume, which I picked up today, is a memoir of sorts by a Chinese writer by the name of Da Chen: Sounds of the River. Fascinated as I am by Chinese history and culture, I love reading any kind of memoir by Chinese writers. Apparently this is the second in a series of memoirs, but I haven’t read (or even heard of) the first volume.

So, if I’m good, Guy Salvidge’s reading blog may be resuming normal transmission in the coming weeks.

From the Avon Advocate 29/4/09

The Kingdom of Four Rivers is now available!

The publication of my novel The Kingdom of Four Rivers has been completed slightly ahead of schedule, which means that that it now available for purchase from the publisher, Equilibrium Books. Total price including postage anywhere in Australia is approximately $30.

Check it out here:

http://www.equilibriumbooks.com/kingdom.htm

You can read more about the novel on my official site:

http://www.guysalvidge.com