1Q84 – Haruki Murakami (2009 -10 / 2011 English translation)

I finally got around to reading 1Q84 after probably just about every other Murakimi fan in the English-speaking world had already read it. Like Murakami’s prose, I’m not in that much of a hurry usually. The publication of 1Q84 in English was a huge event, just as it had been in Japan - such is the impact Murakami has on literature culture. Murakami deserves the attention because one of the great things about his writing is that when you first discover him you can feel invigorated by his unique sensibility and style. 1Q84 certainly has its share of such quality moments, but unfortunately it also suffers from over familiarity and a sense of over-stretching on the author’s part.

1Q84 was published as three books in one – a huge 925 pages of pure Murakami. This is both its strength and its weakness. To try and describe the plot of 1Q84 is perhaps folly; fortunately it is enough to know that it contains most of Murakami’s typical tropes and obsessions. Once again Murakami has set a book in the 1980’s and I wonder why he is so fixated with this period. Perhaps it represents a lost ‘innocent’ era when the web didn’t exist, there were very few mobile phones, vinyl records still sold in their millions and pop music was arguably far less cynical and self conscious.

1Q84 bears all the hallmarks of Murakami’s distinctive style. The narrative quite often has a glacial pace, with plenty of nuance and space. There is also the usual peculiar attention to mundane details about the character’s lives, such as what they eat, and how they prepare their food. Sometimes I wonder if Murakami has Aspergers Syndrome, such is his obsessive attention to detail! Logically it’s more likely that it is a device that helps build tension between the ordinary and the preternatural.

Typically for a Murakami narrative both the main protagonists are in their early 30’s. This is a symbolic age for Murakami characters – an in between age; too old to be innocent and yet too young to be wise. Aomame is a distinctly strange woman, an ex member of a religious cult turned murderess. Tengo is a writer, teacher and is one of Murakami’s lonely men. For all 1Q84’s strangeness it is essentially a love story between these two characters. Their connection is interwoven into the plot, acting as a counterpoint to the obtuse weirdness that percolates through their otherwise every-day lives.

Another hallmark of Murakami’s writing is his tendency to have unresolved narrative arcs, and there’s plenty on offer here. 1Q84 is a mysterious novel and the more you try and make sense of it the more it slips away. But it is useful to remember that Murakami still flies the flag for post-modernism and there are multiple interpretations of 1Q84 that could all be equally valid.

As much as I love Murakami’s writing I found 1Q84 to be a frustrating experience. The first book lures you in with Aomeme’s literal descent into an alternate reality in which two moons hang in the sky. Then there is the mystery of the Air Chrysalis book written by Fuka-Eri, a member of a cloistered mountain cult. Tengo and Aomame are trapped in the realm of the Little People, a place that Aomeme calls 1Q84.

The second book maintains a disturbing tension. We watch helplessly as Tengo’s life becomes compromised by unexplained events. Aomeme works towards fulfilling her destiny as a bringer of justice. New characters are introduced, such as Ushikawa, a sinister man with an ugly oversized bobble – like head. The mystery of the Little People deepens. The second book is vintage Murakami  - weird and strangely compelling despite the slow motion narrative.

The third book is left with the job of tying up all the loose ends leftover from the first two, but then does its best to leave mysteries unexplained and plotlines unresolved. The main problem with the third book is that the protagonists spend inordinate amounts of time holed up contemplating their situation. The normally glacial pace is slowed even further and finishing 1Q84 becomes a matter of tenacity on the part of the reader. Unfortunately the ending is, well, disappointing. For a book that demands such a huge investment in time it’s a pity that 1Q84’s endgame lacks tension and is almost unapologetically banal.

Normally I don’t draw attention to the rating system I use, but 1Q84 is essentially three books published as one. The first book borders on being excellent, but I’ll give it an admirable rating. The second book is excellent and I wish that Murakami had wrapped it up then and there. The third book is mediocre due to its slow pace, lack of tension and an unsatisfactory resolution. Murakami will shortly have a new novel published, so I’m hoping that it will be a return to form because despite my relative disappointment, he’s still worth reading.

Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner (1987)

Crossing to Safety became a literary hit of sorts in Australia in 2012 when the First Tuesday Book Club panel unanimously praised it. All of the initial 2012 edition copies sold out around Australia and this tale of the friendship between two couples became a talking point at book clubs everywhere. I'd never heard of Wallace Stegner and I suspect that he had not made much of an impact in Australia during his lifetime. Stegner was an ardent environmentalist and an academic, and he combined the two to make a lasting impact on the way America thought about its wilderness areas. Stegner is known for his writings set in the American West and he published novels, non-fiction and essays between 1937 and 1992 before his untimely death in a car accident.

Crossing to Safety was Stegner’s last novel published in his lifetime and it is fittingly written from the perspective of old age. The narrator, Larry Morgan, looks back over fifty years of friendship with the Lang’s – Sid and Charity. They meet whilst teaching at university in the 1930’s and from the vantage point of the early 1970’s Larry contemplates the vicissitudes of their shared lives.

Crossing to Safety is a classy novel. Stegner’s prose is subtle, poised and flows like a gentle stream over rounded rocks. Relationships and friendships are standard fare in literature, but Stegner manages to offer a fresh perspective. His characters are authentic and well drawn and over-all the narrative is refreshing straightforward. Larry’s wife, Sally, is perhaps underrepresented, however this is mainly because Charity is such a strong presence throughout, leaving Sally to be more of a counterpoint.

As the novel progresses Stegner focuses mainly on the lives of the four characters and only alludes to historical events in passing. The characters’ individual triumphs and struggles are not presented as a microcosm of the wider historical perspective; instead Stegner’s themes are far more existential. In perhaps the only nod to post-modernism in the novel, the good hearted yet controlling Charity suggests to Sid that he should attempt to write a novel about ordinary peoples’ lives, rather than one contrived to be dramatic. Crossing to Safety is, of course, that novel. However Stegner cleverly and subtly brings in the universal existential struggle of humanity during a segment set in Italy. As the couples take in the artistic wonders of Italy Sid notes a certain look in the eyes of the men portrayed in the paintings of the renaissance greats. Then soon after Sid notes that same look in a simple laborer who has damaged his hand in an accident. A man in pain and anguish, yet who is proud and defiant and all the more human for it. This is Stegner’s wider theme; something we all share that is not confined to the movements of history but is universal. Does this mean that the title is ironic? That there is no safety to cross to, only a constant struggle? Perhaps, but I’d rather believe that it is defiant.

It is tempting to see Crossing to Safety as highly autobiographical, however Stegner remarked in an interview that he took cues from his own life, added the lives of others and fragmented it amongst his own creative license. This is no doubt a technique shared among many writers and it works well. The great thing about Stegner’s writing is that you can’t see the joins – his style is seamless.

What the novel does share with ‘real life’ is some of the mundanety of day-to-day living. Whilst I wouldn’t go as far as suggesting that the novel has mundane sections, it does sag a bit in the middle. The narrator mentions that there would be no bed hopping in this book, as if all effort must be made to avoid it from becoming a John Updike novel. But there can be a price to pay for this stance and Crossing to Safety skirts close for a while. Fortunately there is the payoff of the emotionally intense ending that is both psychologically revealing and extremely moving. The novel is worth reading for this alone, but there are many highlights throughout, all of which leads me to conclude that Stegner’s wider body of work would be well worth investigating in the future

Iain [M] Banks

Today one of my colleagues at work told me that Iain Banks has terminal cancer and only has a matter of months to live. I was incredulous and deeply saddened by the news. A writer of rare ability, Banks has had two careers side by side. As Iain M. Banks he has been one of the greatest science fiction writers of the last twenty-five years or so. His Culture novels revealed Banks to be one of the most imaginative and playful writers in the genre.

As Iain Banks he has published literature, with a string of quality releases beginning with the left of centre classic The Wasp Factory in 1984. This was my first introduction to the brilliance of his writing and I still talk to people about that book today. However I’m more familiar with the Iain M Banks side of the story, with Use of Weapons (1990), Against a Dark Background (1993) and Look to Windward (2000) standing out as favorites.

Banks will be greatly missed, but he’s leaving behind an impressive body of work and for that he should feel satisfied. Thanks Iain, I’ve loved your books and I wish you a good end to this part of your story.

You can read Iain’s post about his illness and leave a message if you wish on his website here.

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)

The ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club was televised, funnily enough, last Tuesday, and they ended by revealing that they would read and talk about Infinite Jest in next month’s show. I inwardly groaned because so far this book has defeated me. I bought it a few years back and initially I enjoyed both the style and the premise, but then I became bogged down and finally halted completely. I’m languishing on page 420, half way through 30 April / 1 May Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (this will make sense if you try and read it).

The late David Foster Wallace was an adherent of the so-called hysterical realism style, which basically involves over the top prose that is all encompassing in its attention to detail regarding plot, characters and the minutia of the everyday and the not so everyday. Basically you are up for pages and pages of detail spent on one issue or subject, during which any number of tangents is not nearly enough. Well, this is my interpretation anyway.

The premise is suitably intriguing, complex and amazing. Infinite Jest is party focused on teenage tennis players at a sport-focused American college and partly on the patients at a drug rehab centre. It also involves a video that is so entertaining that the people watching it will starve to death and defecate where they sit rather than stop watching. Oh and it also seems to be set either in the near future or in an alternative present, I can’t quite work out which.

So the question is - should I attempt to finish this book that is sometimes tedious and sometimes brilliant? Has anyone else had the same problem? Or is Infinite Jest a work of genius and I’m simply not up to its challenges? I know from briefly researching the book online that it undoubtedly has its admirers and that it is perhaps the ultimate cult book of our times. This is all very well, but I still can’t get enthused about finishing it. Perhaps I should just get on with it; after all, I kind of want to know what’s on that videotape.

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (1980)

Umberto Eco is a true Italian renaissance man, a semiotician, novelist, children’s author, critic, philosopher and author of non-fiction and essays. He also collects books and apparently has some 50,000 in his collection, including 1200 rare editions. Now that’s what I call a passionate bibliophile! The Name of Rose is definitely his most well known book, having sold some 26 million copies since its publication in 1980. Eco is an academic who has caught the imagination of the reading public the world over.

With The Name of the Rose Eco has created a highly credible medieval world in which fiction and fact are interwoven. This can be heavy going and there are on occasions long sections that deal with papal politics, heretical sects and monkish philosophy, all of which tests the reader’s resolve. Despite this the novel also has political and philosophical themes that have strong relevance today. You could even argue that the book has an uncanny prescient quality thirty-three years on, with its examination of the nature of truth, freedom, intolerance and the sometimes-uneasy relationship between church and state.

The central protagonists are William of Baskerville, a monk who values rationality rather than faith, and his novice assistant Adso of Melk, who also acts as the narrator. William and Adso appear to be playful allusions to Holmes and Watson, that other famous sleuthing pair. William and Adso are finely drawn protagonists who are both humane and complex. But as a murder mystery the book was unfortunately lost for me, due to viewing the movie version many years ago. This, at least, allowed me to enjoy how Eco manipulates the reader, spinning a web of diversions and blind alleys to obscure the truth, which is in any case very well hidden in more ways than one. As a murder mystery the novel is certainly compelling, however your average murder mystery fan will find it hard going.

The Name of the Rose is five hundred pages of dense narrative that will challenge even the most determined fan of literature. I did struggle despite having studied medieval history, but ultimately I enjoyed the novel. Eco is certainly a fine writer. The complex plot and the characterizations are his great strengths, although the pacing is sluggish on occasions, suffering from the burden of medieval detail. The descriptions of the monastery and the labyrinthine library are detailed and genuinely atmospheric. One of the best passages involves Adso becoming lost in reverie as he describes the carvings on the doors of the church, leading me to the conclusion that medieval art attempted to do what cinema does so readily in the modern age – to take people elsewhere and nourish the imagination.

Ostensibly a medieval murder mystery, the novel also examines the meta relationship between narratives, how they feed into each other and also how they blend with the ‘real life’ narratives of the humans who read them, in this case scared apocalyptic fourteenth century monks. About half way through the novel, after William and Adso have already ventured through the library labyrinth (a highlight of the novel), they ruminate on the nature of books, how “Often books speak of other books.” In The Name of the Rose Eco does indeed speak of other books, with many references to ancient books, real, lost and perhaps even fabricated by Eco himself. Books and the stories they tell are the key to understanding this complex murder mystery. Keep that in mind when reading and you’ll have a chance of solving the mystery yourself.

Blending medieval history with a murder mystery has certainly worked for Eco in terms of capturing readers’ imaginations, but I wonder just how many people have actually finished the book? I know of at least two people who have had up to four attempts at completing it. If you are interested, but can’t face up to the long medieval interludes, perhaps try the movie, or even the board game. But that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Shirley Hazzard is one of those writers who can skirt the borders of literary pretension and get away with it due to her beautiful writing style and her subtle skill with narrative form. Hazzard also has a splendid way of making an obtuse plot inviting, making The Transit of Venus a master class of highly literate writing that even those who feel most comfortable with so called genre novels can easily read and enjoy.

Hazzard is an Australian ex-pat who left the country in 1947 at the age of sixteen and as far as I can ascertain has never returned. She began the life of a writer in the early 1960’s when she submitted a short story that she’d written for her own enjoyment to The New Yorker and it was published. Since then there has been short story collections, non-fiction and four novels. Although Hazzard is not prolific, there was a gap of twenty-three years between Transit and The Great Fire (2003); she makes up for it with her sheer class.

The Transit of Venus is, on the surface, a story about two orphaned Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who end up living in 1950’s England. The narrative takes place over four decades and follows their lives and, most significantly, their relationships. Love, with all its triumphs and tragedies, is central to the novel. Caroline has many suitors but it is her unrequited relationship with the long-suffering Astronomer Edmund Tice that gives the novel romantic tension. Using the actual transit of Venus as an analogy for the vagaries of romance, Hazzard milks it for all it’s worth. She suggests that like trying to observe the transit of Venus, you need to be in the right place at the right time to succeed romantically.

Thematically The Transit of Venus tackles not just the nature of love, but also gender politics, class, wartime morality and personal duplicity. One of the strengths of the novel is Hazzard’s skill in bringing the time period of the 1950’s to the 1980’s alive. The narrative is a superb blend of the personal and the historical, each complimenting the other. There’s a great sequence in which she describes a multitude of women across 1950’s London waking up and preparing them-selves for a day’s work. These women represent the vanguard of working women who weren’t going to waste the gender gains of WWII.

Hazzard’s pose is dazzling, sophisticated and beautiful, allowing a special kind of engagement between the reader and the narrative to develop. At times I felt enraptured by her writing and as the novel unfolded the strength and subtlety of the plot became readily apparent. Hazzard also drops a few strong hints about how the novel ends early on and if you pay attention you will understand the ending, otherwise you may be in for a re-read.

Hazzard’s characters have a certain cold complexity, particularly Caroline, who maneuvers through her relationships with a subtle cold detachment. Caroline’s sister, Grace, mostly serves to underline the gender trap of domesticity, although she does take the lead in a section filled with frustrated romantic yearnings. Her husband, Christian Thrale, represents middle-class public servant small-mindedness, something Hazzard herself was familiar with having worked for the United Nations.

I first read this novel way back in 1994 for a university unit on Australian literature and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of highly literate fiction. My prior reading habits mainly included cult novels and science fiction. Hazzard, with one novel, inspired me to move outside my comfort zone and for that I’m grateful. Recently I read an interview with Hazzard in the Guardian from 2006 and I realized that my conversion was no coincidence. She has this to say about literature:

"The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. I feel that people are more unhappy, in an unrealised way, for not having these things in their lives: not being able to express something, or to profit from somebody else having expressed it. It can be anything but it's always, if it's supreme, an exaltation."

To me this perfectly sums up just why fiction is just as important, if not more so, than non-fiction when it comes to guiding us through this weird universe we find ourselves in. Read The Transit of Venus and you’ll find out just why.

No Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and the Church – Robert Dean Lurie (2009)

No Certainty Attached is written by long time fan musician and writer Robert Dean Lurie, who in 1990 at the tender age of 16 saw The Church live on a tour of the U.S. Thirteen years later Lurie contacted Kilbey to ask if he’d be involved with this biography and to Lurie’s surprise he said yes. Fittingly the biography begins with some words from Steve Kilbey himself:

Lurie attempts to come to some kinda understanding of my paradox. That is, I can be so nice, or I can be not so nice and hardly anything in the middle. And it’s funny that Lurie puts the boot in at the end and he reckons that the fambly manne (sic) thing is an act, and my everyman pose is faux, and really I’m the same old prick, and Rob, you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually…

As a long time fan of both The Church and Kilbey’s solo music, the question of whether Steve Kilbey is the same old prick is something I do not particularly care about (as interesting as that is). For me the music is the main consideration and I consider The Church to be one of greatest Australian bands of any era. What the above quote reveals is that No Certainty Attached is not one of those sycophantic and superficial biographies. The fact that Kilbey’s ego is not pandered to and that Lurie himself is part of the story makes No Certainty Attached one of the most enjoyable music biographies I’ve read for a long time.

It’s easy to warm to Lurie, his writing style is unpretentiously affable and over the course of the book his relationship with Kilbey and The Church progresses to the level of friendship. Lurie’s life is very much tied up with Kilbey in terms of being a source of inspiration and ongoing fascination. Lurie recounts his first meeting with Kilbey in 1998 as a support for a solo gig, a meeting that provided him both disillusionment and a certain level of fulfillment. The book contains several interludes in which Lurie ponders the ambiguous boundaries between fandom and his burgeoning relationship with Kilbey. Bravely Lurie recounts how during one of their interviews for the book Kilbey openly tests him for evidence of sycophancy; a test that Lurie fails, much to Kilbey’s displeasure. But Lurie later admits that it taught him a valuable lesson.

Although Lurie’s presence in the book is welcome, it’s Kilbey’s story and the history of the band that makes the book an essential read for Kilbey/Church fans. There’s the usual childhood background, with Kilbey emigrating with his parents from the UK in 1957, eventually settling in Canberra. Steve Kilbey the child was a Doctor Who fan and as Lurie notes was, for better or worse, a smaller version of his adult self. Kilbey became a reluctant teenager, recalling that he was disappointed when he realized that his childhood had ended. Lurie notes that as a teenager Kilbey dated a girl that he was attracted to because she looked like Roger Waters circa the 1971 Meddle album. Hilariously he couldn’t understand why this didn’t go down well. Recollections like these give the biography a welcome level of charm and warmth.

Steve Kilbey's girlfriend in high school

The tale of how The Church came together as a band is a fascinating one. Lurie does a fine job recounting the history of The Church, but one of the best things about the book was that I found out about Kilbey’s many obscure side projects that ran parallel with both the Church and his solo career. It’s possible I could be spending a lot of money online searching out these records. Kilbey’s career is like a labyrinth with many rooms containing obscure treasures.

No Certainty Attached also contains a few revelations; including that incredulously the first lineup of the band included a guy who bullied Kilbey in high school – Nick Ward. Lurie’s interviews with Ward reveal that twenty or so years later he probably would still be bullying Kilbey had he stayed in the band. What is it about drummers? I was also amazed to learn that Kilbey endured a ten-year heroin addiction, which began post Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) - naughty Steve, but I’m glad he survived to tell the tale.

Lurie’s serpentine tale of strife, inspiration, failure and musical brilliance ends in 2006, where again he meets with Kilbey on tour. The meeting is friendly and you can detect that fambly man vibe between them. At the end of the book Kilbey has the final word in a hilarious stream of consciousness via his blog in which he refers to Lurie as having been “…some seriously uptight fanboy” and how he divested himself of that and wrote “a good book”. Kilbey is correct and Lurie should update it soon as The Church released one of their best albums in 2009 (Untitled #23) and are still touring to this day. I advise Church fans to read this book, but no doubt many have already. Also check out Kilbey's interesting blog...