Breakfast At Libraries: September 2016

Thursday, 22 September 2016

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

In 1976, eight-year-old Peggy lives in London with her German mother Ute, and her father James. Ute is a world-renowned pianist who seems dissatisfied with domestic life, while James, somewhat younger, seems resentful of her talent and preoccupied with his obnoxious friends, all of whom have a paranoid obsession with planning and preparing for survival in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

One day, James takes Peggy to 'die Hutte', a remote cabin in the forests of Bavaria, cut off by a river with a waterfall that non-swimmer Peggy almost dies crossing. And when James tells her that his worst fears have been realised, the world beyond the river has been destroyed and everyone and everything she knows has gone, she has no option but to believe him. The title, Our Endless Numbered Days, refers in part to the point at which James stops marking off the passing days at die Hutte and any connection to civilisation is finally lost. The story is told by Peggy, and alternates between her time in the woods with her father and her eventual return to the outside world nine years later.

I must say that I found it tense and slightly disturbing right from the beginning, even before Peggy is abducted by her father. Claire Fuller excels at making even the perfectly ordinary feel just that little bit off-kilter, without ever telling us outright exactly what's wrong - Peggy herself can't articulate what it is that makes Ute and James's marriage somehow odd, what it is that disturbs her about her father's friend Oliver Harrington, or why she feels the need to tell a strange lie about her mother to cover up for her long-term absence from school.

It's clear to any adult reader that James is not only immature and selfish but also obsessive and delusional, while Peggy as our narrator is painfully innocent and vulnerable, a little girl who adores her LP of The Railway Children and her favourite doll, Phyllis, who eventually (and heartbreakingly) becomes a voice for her own doubts and fears. There's hardly a page where you won't want to reach into the book and rescue Peggy from her father, but only as the story of their nine years of isolation unfolds do we realise the full extent of her ordeal - and most importantly of all, the toll it's taken on her.

I have only one criticism of this book, which is that the pace feels a little unbalanced, with too much detail about the early part of Peggy's life with her father at die Hutte and not enough about the end of it. I think it's perhaps written like this to reflect Peggy's own mental state - she is, after all, not only terribly traumatised but also suffering from permanent memory problems caused by years of malnutrition - and of course, once James stops bothering to mark off the days on the wall of die Hutte, the weeks, months and years start to merge for her. However, it does mean that the final portion of the book feels rather rushed, and I'd have liked Peggy's situation to be explored more fully.

Our Endless Numbered Days is full of the imagery of dark German fairy-tales and post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction and there are some moments that feel like a twisted, nightmarish take on the early pioneer tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder - rather than presenting a family's isolation as somehow both intrepid and cosy, here it becomes furtive and claustrophobic, full of hardship and squalor. It's an excellent read overall and an exceptionally accomplished debut.

Sunday, 18 September 2016

Diary of an Oxygen Thief by Anonymous

After I finished reading Diary of an Oxygen Thief, I ran a Twitter search for mentions of it. This produced many, many tweets from people praising the book - and interestingly many of them were from teenagers, mostly American, but some British. "Really wanna read Diary of an Oxygen Thief." "OMG, this book literally describes me." "Finally got my copy of Diary of an Oxygen Thief [photo of manicured teenage hand resting on the book open at the first page]."

I've no idea if there's been a social media marketing campaign that's fuelled this buzz, but if there has, and it's been aimed at teenagers, it's an interesting strategy because this really isn't a young adult book at all. The narrator is an advertising executive in his 30s, a relatively wealthy recovering alcoholic from Ireland and now working in the US - despite the publisher's blurb, he is absolutely not a Holden Caulfield figure and this is a million miles from being The Catcher In The Rye. He's a grown man, not a voice of disaffected youth. (The blurb also compares another character to Lolita, which is also wildly inaccurate given that Aisling is a grown woman who deliberately sets out to seduce and humiliate, and says a great deal about the disturbing way in which some people read Lolita.) My assumption is that teenagers might like this book because they consider it grown-up, edgy and dangerous - much as teenagers often read Brett Easton Ellis Jay McInerney or Chuck Palahniuk, perhaps. Unfortunately, the quality of Diary of an Oxygen Thief just doesn't measure up to the work of any of these writers.

The 'anonymous' authorship is, I think, simply an attempt to make people think the book is a memoir, which I strongly doubt it really is. The narrator begins by announcing 'I liked hurting girls' and goes on to outline the pleasure he took in deliberately being cruel to (and in one case, raping) various women during his drinking years in London. His other hobby is deliberately getting himself beaten up in bars. Eventually he stops drinking, at which point his hobby becomes attending AA meetings instead, and he takes an exceptionally well-paid job at an American advertising agency in the Mid-West, where he buys a beautiful house and constantly complains about it.

Having avoided women for quite some time, he no longer makes a point of hurting them, although the desire certainly remains in him and he is still an obvious misogynist. He's then introduced to Aisling, with whom he immediately becomes obsessed - not least because although she's in her 20s, she looks to him as if she could be under age. But Aisling, it seems, is not going to play his game. Could it be that our narrator is finally to get his comeuppance for his obnoxious, abusive past?

I have many problems with this book. The fact that the narrator is repulsive isn't one of them, but the fact that he's dull really is. There is nothing very interesting about him: he's a self-pitying, paranoid, self-destructive misogynist arsehole, and that's pretty much it. There are lots of men like him knocking around in real life, and they aren't very interesting people either. There's nothing new here, nothing complicated, nothing to learn (unless, perhaps, you're very young and a little naive, which might account for some of the book's popularity with teenagers). Because the narrator is so endlessly self-absorbed and we only see people in the book through his eyes, the other characters are paper-thin - including Aisling. It's hard to see a character as a fascinating nemesis when she's being described as looking like a 16-year-old Virgin Mary.

The other issue I had with Diary of an Oxygen Thief is that while the book constantly promises the narrator is about to fall victim to a shocking, humiliating revenge, the narrator in question is also exceptionally paranoid, so it's rather unclear whether what happens to him is real or imagined. He is also convinced, for example, that he is being stalked by his own employer. Most frustratingly of all, when the supposed comeuppance occurs - even if we read it as something that definitely happened and means what he believes it to mean - it's incredibly anticlimactic. It's pretty obvious that the point the book seems to be making is the narrator is his own worst enemy and that's he's effectively trapped himself in the cesspool of his own repressed guilt and paranoia, but it's clumsily executed - to the point where it's even pointed out to us: "They say you're not punished for your sins, you're punished by them," the narrator says. Subtle it certainly isn't.

This is one of those books that tries far too hard to shock, far too hard to be edgy. I recently reviewed Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen, which also has a deeply unlikeable narrator leading a largely squalid life, but in that book, the author's skill renders Eileen fascinating despite, or perhaps even because, of her damaged, bitter way of thinking. The anonymous writer of Diary of an Oxygen Thief never comes close to making his narrator someone I'd find interesting on any level, let alone making me care about what might happen to him. Antiheroes are great, but there has to be something bewitching or fascinating about them. The narrator of this book has none of those qualities.

Monday, 12 September 2016

Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by [Porter, Max]

Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter is not a novel as such, more a series of vignettes that form a rumination on loss and grief.

'Dad' is in the process of writing a book about Ted Hughes when his wife dies suddenly, leaving him a widowed single father to two sons, collectively called 'Boys' in the text. Just as Dad thinks his grief is too much to bear, a visitor arrives uninvited: 'Crow', who has left the pages of Hughes' famous poetry collection to stay with the family "until you don't need me any more".

It's up the reader to decide whether Crow is real, symbolic, or a imaginary manifestation of Dad's obsession, but certainly he seems almost uncomfortably physical, literally knocking Dad off his feet and overwhelming him with his clumsy, feathery embrace and his stink of "just-beyond-edible-food, and moss, and leather, and yeast".

What follows is a collection of observations from Dad, Boys and Crow that articulate their feelings in the wake of Mum's death - not just in the immediate aftermath, but right up until Boys are grown up and making sure their late Mum becomes Granny at the same time Dad becomes Grandad. Some are desperately sad, some are tempered with humour (the time, for instance, when Boys think their father might have died too until a fart reveals he's only sleeping) and some are painfully honest (such as the time the boys trap and kill a fish in a delayed expression of anger and bitterness). Each piece is presented as free verse or prose poem, with some requiring more thought than others and having many different possible interpretations.

This is an unusual book and I'm sure it won't be to everyone's taste, but I loved it and thought it was beautifully written. It's very touching and profoundly thoughtful, and at times it's a little unnerving. Crow can be quite an ambiguous figure and his narrative can be violent and visceral as you'd expect that of a carrion eater to be. Sometimes he is immensely kind - he's a sentimental bird, he often tells us - and sometimes he's a capricious trickster. Sometimes he's fiercely protective, sometimes dangerous and unpredictable.

The use of language in this book means that it requires some thought (and probably re-reading) to really get to grips with it - it's almost as much about the difficulty of writing about grief as it is about grief itself, and that's reflected in the author's style. You will also possibly get a little more out of it if you're familiar with Ted Hughes and his work. But this slim little volume of barely more than 100 pages was one of the most captivating and thought-provoking things I'd read for a long time, and almost entirely like anything else with which I'm familiar. The thing it reminded me of most was Rebecca Hunt's excellent Mr Chartwell, but even that is really very different indeed in form and tone.

Don't expect to buy this book and get a clear, unambiguous story with a discernible plot, and don't expect it to offer all the answers about death and grief, either - what it mostly tells you is that a bereaved family will just have to muddle through and that the loss of a loved one will never stop being sad, although there's a strong thread of hope that weaves through the book as a whole and ultimately I found it a profoundly life-affirming read. I'll return to this book many times, I'm sure.