Book Review – Psalm 119 by Heather McRobie

I picked up Psalm 119 for two reasons: one, because of my desire to read more books by women, and two, because of the startling cover. From the blurb, the book appeared to be about post-2001 student travels through various war zones. Okay, I thought, I’ll give it a try. Psalm 119 opens with some moderately interesting poetry, and then we are introduced to Marie (or Maria, or Anne-Marie), who appears at first to be our protagonist. This is where I encountered my first problem with this novel, as Marie (as I’ll call her) isn’t especially likeable. At the beginning, we witness her meeting David, a rich young Jewish boy. She proceeds to spend lot of his parents’ money and do very little else, except for screwing him I guess.

I should mention at this point that McRobie is a few years younger than myself, and that her novel was the winner of the Helene du Coudray Award for a novel by an undergraduate under 25 years of age at an English university. What I’m trying to say is that McRobie has done very well for herself just to get a novel in print at her age, and as such I am going to cut her a little slack. So Marie isn’t the most sympathetic of characters, but we soon realise that the novel isn’t so much about her as about David, and another young man named Mohammad. These three form the core characters of the novel, and they all end up in sexual relationships with each other at various times.

The plot of Psalm 119 is, to my mind, rather weak. It details the Oxford student life of Marie and co, where they meet a Palestinian professor (and Marie manages to screw him too – in fact she does rather a lot of this in the novel). David and Marie go to live for a while in the Palestinian territories (which are of course very topical at the moment), and there are various escapades in Israel and later in Europe. There’s not much of a grand narrative here, which is something I like books to have. I suppose you could call this a more personal tale of three intertwined lives.

The further I read, the more I disliked Marie. To McRobie’s credit, the reader is positioned to view Marie’s facile nature with disdain, so that was okay, but there is a shift needed, from thinking we are to sympathise with Marie, to thinking (with the author) that she is beyond redemption. David and Mohammad are more likeable characters, and the latter of which is probably the best drawn character in the book. One thing that this book has going for it is in its descriptions of the Palestinian territories, which I thought were done well (even though I wouldn’t know any better if McRobie made the whole thing up). It’s interesting to note that Psalm 119 is already a quasi-historical document in that it describes a time when Palestinian-Israeli relations were decidedly better than they are today.

There is another dimension to this novel. Several chapters don’t concern David, Marie and Mohammad at all, and instead seem to be told from the point of view of the poet Rumi or something of that nature. There are letters to God and the like, and a lot of discussion of Samson and Delilah. Not having much of a background in Biblical studies myself, I found this perplexing and of little relevance to the rest of the book. Perhaps I could have tried harder, but toward the end I was skipping these chapters altogether. Whatever McRobie was trying to do here, it didn’t work. I feel confident in saying that, because it should not be necessary to have particular Biblical knowledge to make head or tail of large sections of a fictional text.

The plot meanders along in somewhat slow fashion. The various characters fall in love with each other, engage in relationships, and split up again. By around two-thirds of the way through, I was struggling to maintain an interest. The prose, at least, is quite easy to read. And then, at long last, we get an event of some interest, which takes the form of Marie’s breakdown in Tel Aviv. In this, Psalm 119’s most powerful scene, Marie tries to rescue a dying cat that she has seen be run over by a car. Her increasingly desperate wanderings lead her nowhere good, but she does confront her own vapidity. And then we get a fairly major event in terms of the main characters (which I wont’ spoil) and a fairly unsatisfactory aftermath.

Did I enjoy reading Psalm 119? In parts. This is the kind of book that reviewers say shows ‘promise.’ My hope is that in future novels McRobie will be clearer about what she is trying to say through these events, and also that she will construct a more robust narrative. It’s not essential to have a sympathetic main character, but I feel that the reader needs to know the rules of the game from an early stage. My confusion regarding this causes me to feel that I was failing to symapathise with Marie early on, when in fact McRobie was working toward this very understanding. But who I am to complain? Heather McRobie has had a novel published at the tender age of twenty-three or so, and there aren’t many people who can say that.

Anyhow, this was my fifty-eighth and final book for 2008. Happy new year to you all.

Yellowcake Springs – back on track

After a difficult time over the Christmas period, in which I was able to write a meagre 1000 words in 4 (!) days,  I’m now back on track. After a good session this morning I’m up to just over 12,000 words in 12 days.  That’s 42 double spaced pages, and at this rate I should have close to 150 by the time I’m due back at work on Jan 29.

Five new books to read…

…although you couldn’t call all of them ‘new.’

Having greatly enjoyed Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, I’m now moving on to Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, two more novels featuring detective Philip Marlowe.  All three of the above are collected in Penguin Classics’ The Big Sleep and other novels. If those go well, then there’s another tome I’ve got my eye on, The Lady of the Lake and other novels, which also includes The High Window and The Little Sister. That makes six Chandler novels in two newish Penguin editions.

Thomas M. Disch, who killed himself on July 4 this year, has two new books out from Tachyon Publications, The Wall of America and The Word of God. I could only afford the former of these, which is a collection of short stories. Having read the first four stories already, I have to say that my estimation of Disch has just gone up 200% These are fabulous stories.

But what of my resolution to read more books by women? Determined to pursue this ambition, I picked up a new novel called Psalm 119 by a English writer by the name of Heather McRobie. I’ve read 70 pages of this so far and it’s solid if not spectacular.

Lastly, I picked up Lijia Zhang’s “Socialism is Great!,” a memoir of living and working in China in the eighties and presumably beyond. This one has been published locally by UWA Press.

So I’m spoiled for choice at the minute. And hey, two out of five ain’t bad.

My reading in 2008, and a resolution for 2009

It looks like I read at least 57 books in 2008, which I’m pretty proud of. I would read more books if a) there was a reasonable library within 100 km and b) I had more money to buy books. As neither are the case, I don’t read quite as much as I possibly could. I also never read ‘trashy’ fiction:  for mindless entertainment, I would much prefer to play PC games.

57 books is, of course, roughly a book a week over the course of the year. The one thing that disappoints me about this list (50 of these books featured in an earlier list) is that only 8 of the books were by women. 8 out of 57. How can this be? And most of those 8 were TAG Hungerford Award winners. Looking at my bulging bookshelves, the ratio of books by women is little better.

So my resolution for 2009 is to read more books by women writers. I doubt I’ll reach parity with male authors, but 8 out of 57 is not good enough! The first of these will probably be Socialism is Great! by somebody Zhang (a woman). But I need recommendations.  These days I claim (somewhat controversally) that I don’t read anything before 1900, and maybe even 1918. So try to limit suggestions to 20th or 21st century writers. Cheers.

Shortcuts to Success? Can I write Yellowcake Springs in 28 days or less?

I stumbled upon this while trawling the net today. It’s well worth a look for any aspiring author or interested person:

www.writequickly.com/author/menu.aspx

It turns out I can write a novel in just 28 days, working for less than 1 hour a day! You beauty! I can be finished with Yellowcake Springs shortly before school starts in something like 35 more days. Thereafter, I can presumably get cracking on another novel, which can be done well inside the end of Term 1.

Madness.

Some of the secrets include the ‘Freewriting’ method (hey, it’d be way too difficult to think about what you’re doing while you’re doing it, right?), writing in five minute segments, so as not to lose interest, and Power-Editing, in which you can edit your entire book in just one hour. Far out. And to think I’ve been struggling on for all these years, thinking 1000 words a day for 40 or so days a year was a reasonable effort. No, my own progress has been glacial at best. No wonder I haven’t made my millions yet. I’d better hurry up and order Nick Daws’ Write Any Book in Just 28 Days…Or Less! quick smart.

Listen up, dear reader. I’ve got a piece of advice to give you…for free. There aren’t any shortcuts to success. No yellowbrick road. You could probably write a book in 28 days, in fact several people can do it. But why? It’s not a race. In five years or fifty years, who will care how long a book took to write?

So there’s my thought for the day. If people took more time thinking about what they were doing, and less time ‘galloping forward in their course, unable to stop’ (thanks Zhuangzi), then we’d all be in better shape than we are today.

Oh, and I’ve managed a paltry 6000 words in the past five days.

Yellowcake Springs: it begins

School is finished for the year, which means I have 41 days of (comparative) freedom ahead of me. In the summers of 06/07 and 07/08 I wrote The Kingdom of Four Rivers, which is currently looking for a home. With any luck, my new novel, Yellowcake Springs, can be written in the summers of 08/09 and 09/10. At least that’s the theory. To make this happen, I need to write the first half of the first draft in the next 41 days. Say I give myself Xmas Day off, that gives me 40 days to do it in. I will set myself two targets: a lower target of 40,000 words (i.e. 1000 words a day) and an upper target of 50,000. I like the length of The Kingdom of Four Rivers, which was almost 100,000 words in first draft and 82,000 by the latest draft, so I will aim for around 100,000 words again for the first draft of this new novel.

I won’t be posting daily but I might provide the occasional update. I’m sure that this isn’t of interest to anyone, but it might help to motivate me. Wish me luck!

Book Review – A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion by Geoffrey Gates

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion isn’t my kind of novel. I might as well mention that straight up, because this review will probably be unfairly lukewarm toward Geoffrey Gates’ IP Picks Award-winning novel. My kind of novel, I’ve decided, has a strong, even monolithic narrative. It is between 200 and 400 pages in length, and there is plenty of action (but not of the Bruce Willis kind). The actual subject of the novel isn’t as important to me as the way that the writer invites us into the mind of someone interesting and/or different. Andrew McGahan’s Praise is the perfect example of this, and Deane’s Another hovers in the same territory, even if it does use multiple narrators. I’m not against multiple narrators per se, but what really appeals to me is narrative drive. I also tend to favour dark and gloomy themes to light and breezy ones.

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion, then, isn’t my kind of book. It is light, zany even, and it is full of different viewpoint characters. The central premise of the novel is one that will be familiar to readers of Calvino or other metafictioneers. Perpetual Locomotion is a concept in which travellers renounce their routine lives in favour of eternal travel, for which they will never have to pay a cent. The catch is they can never re-trace their footsteps. We are introduced to a young man called Carlos who is about to begin his adventure in Perpetual Locomotion, which we soon discover is also the name of a novel by Eduardo Maranda.

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion takes place, for the most part, in Australia and Mexico. There is a substantial cast of characters, from the beautiful Manon to the wily Eduardo. Gates employs a technique in which sections (very short chapters for the most part) are told often out of chronological order. Presumably this is supposed to be weaving a rich tapestry, but I found it confusing. Worse, the characters began to blur together by around the mid-point of the novel, which left me bemused. It’s my own fault, of course, for not paying sufficient attention, but if I have a real criticism of this novel it is that the characters feel very same-y. There isn’t often much to differentiate them, except for Eduardo himself, who is well realised. Gates also employs a slippery shifting from past to present tense and back again. What this is supposed to achieve, I can’t quite say.

What I can say about Gates’ novel is that it is technically well written, and features an excellent cover. I suspect that others might enjoy this a fair bit more than I did. There wasn’t anything wrong with A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion, but it simply wasn’t to my tastes. By my grand old age (27) I know my likes and dislikes, and to a large extent the pattern for future reading is set. I would be willing to give Gates a second go, however, because he is certainly a talented writer.

Book Review – Another by Joel Deane

Joel Deane’s Another won the Interactive Publications IP Picks ‘Best Fiction’ Award in 2004, and was published in the same year. This is my first Joel Deane book, and my first IP book as well, so I was interested to start reading straight away. In terms of the physical production of the book, I was pleased to discover that Another was professionally put together. The only problem I had was that a few of the lines had not been printed correctly, i.e. they were faded. This was only 3 or 4 lines in the book, so it’s a small issue. From what I had read about the book, I imagined that Another would cover a similar terrain to that in Andrew McGahan’s Praise and 1988. This assumption was partially correct, but if Another can’t match the stunning narrative drive of McGahan’s Vogel winner, it certainly rose above anything else that I’ve read of McGahan’s.

Another is a novel about a working class (if I am being unkind I would say white trash) family living in outer Brisbane, presumably in the  mid-nineties. Late teen Toby Purcell is our main ‘protagonist’ (the inverted commas are because his actions can hardly be described as positive in any way). He lives with his Mum, his Gran, and a woman called Michelle. We soon discover that Michelle is in fact the girlfriend of Toby’s older brother Danny, who seems to have disappeared somewhere. The novel opens with an image of fire which, on reflection, never really leaves us as the book progresses. There is the fire which consumes Toby’s flesh, the fire of the burning Brisbane sun, and the fire of rage in the hearts of virtually everyone in this novel. This isn’t a bedtime read type of novel. Being the way that I am (read: a little odd) it was water off a duck’s back for me, however.

Okay, what happens in this book? Well, in time-honoured fashion Deane weaves his narrative to reveal events occurring in the past at specific times. This was an area that I felt Another really shone, for the method was more sophisticated than the overused ‘one chapter present, one chapter past’ technique. I would have to re-read the book to discern precisely how Deane achieved this, but suffice to say that the narrative is constructed around family secrets.  Having said that, a couple of Another’s secrets were all too obvious, even for a dense reader like me. The nature of Danny’s current condition is a prime example of this.

I still haven’t talked about the plot. It’s basically a narrative about Toby and his self-harming girlfriend Suzie’s crime spree. As the narrative progresses, their crimes become more brazen, but they always manage to elude capture. Just as much as this, though, the book is about personal tragedies, particularly the tragedies of women who are the victims of domestic violence. This is a sour, sometimes shocking book. One scene, in which Toby breaks into a house to find a baby left alone for hours in a crib, is particularly moving. Toby bludgeons a service station attendant half to death for $45, and later remembers how good it felt to wreak violence on another person. This is harsh, unapologetic, and grim. I suspect that people who aren’t as addicted to tales of destruction and dissolution as I am might find it difficult to enjoy reading this. But enjoy it I did.

This is also about racial intolerance (this is Brisbane in the One Nation years) and the crippling effects of poverty. Deane isn’t one to ram a theme down you’re throat, however. The closest he comes to direct satire is a quip about an Aboriginal man walking into a bookstore being a bigger security threat than the rampaging Toby and Suzie. And yet a sensitive reading of Another can’t but notice Deane’s cool rejection of much of the material here. It is a subtle art to write so candidly about such horrific matters, without anything but the merest hint of authorial disapproval, and expect the reader to interpret the novel ‘correctly’. (If I am interpreting it correctly.) But here I found Another to be a success. This is literature without needing to be Literature. I respect Deane for being able to write as clearly and as candidly as he does.

Two Short Reviews – The Big Sleep and Revolutionary Road

The name of Raymond Chandler is fairly well known to me, but I wasn’t expecting to ever read one of his books. Since crime fiction isn’t really my thing, I reasoned, I had no interest in Chandler. This was a mistake, and one that I have partly rectified by reading The Big Sleep.

This is an exceptional novel and one that apparently set the standard of the crime fiction of the decades following its publication in 1939. I’m not an expert on this at all, so I won’t attempt to give a potted history here, but I can see how Chandler’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe, might have provided the archetype for the genre of detective fiction. Chandler’s late thirties Hollywood is a fascinating place, full of gangsters, crooked cops and pornography-peddling pederasts. There are gun battles, car chases and even someone who is murdered by being given a cup with cyanide in it. There’s a dying millionaire and his two wayward daughters, who spend their time drinking, gambling and trying to get into bed with our hero (who heroically demurs every time). This is the kind of thing that seems absurdly stereotypical now, but The Big Sleep is pulsing with life.

Chandler also proves himself to be a keen observer; his novel is full of surprising detail about a California that no longer exists in our own time. There’s a wry, world weary intelligence at work here. Marlowe is tough, but he isn’t a womaniser. He’s smart, but he manages to get himself into trouble at every turn. He’s a rounded character with strengths and weaknesses, and as such is a much more interesting character than the Supermen of today’s action blockbusters (e.g. Jason Bourne and James Bond). In summary, I was entralled by The Big Sleep. It didn’t take me more than around four hours to get through this, but it was four hours well spent. I look forward to reading more of Raymond Chandler.

I had a hard time getting through Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, but now I’m glad I did. My initial indifference toward this novel was based on two factors: one, that it concerns the angst experienced by midde-class Americans in the middle of the twentieth century; and two, that I started reading this late at night, at an airport. The novel skips around a little in terms of viewpoint characters, but mostly focuses on the lives of Frank and April Wheeler, parents of two and inhabitants of a normal suburban estate called Revolutionary Road.

Yates is certainly a confident writer, but the subject matter left me cold for approximately the first half of the novel. It’s a domestic tragedy, and one that I felt built in momentum toward an admittedly impressive finale. One chapter toward the end, in which April Wheeler is thrown into a casual affair with her love-smitted neighbour, really caught my attention. There’s even a lunatic on a day-pass from the asylum, which gives me fond memories of Philip K. Dick’s Jack Isidore.

For me there wasn’t anything especially noteworthy about any of this. I can’t help but wonder what such affluent Americans had to be worried about, although worry they clearly did. Perhaps I am trying to say that I have more sympathy with a more working-class mentality than the one on evidence in Revolutionary Road. But it’s a stong novel nonetheless.

Popular Penguins

This is the Popular Penguins series I mentioned before. You can use the widget thingy to find out what books are on the list.