A Visit fron the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan. Review by Charlotte Penny

Much has been made of the structure that author Jennifer Egan employs in her Pulitzer- Prizewinning and Orange-nominated novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is true that the narrative is presented in an unique style, Egan mixes first person and third person with a non linear time line and some experimental devices such as a chapter presented in ‘Power Point’ and another in the guise of a journalistic article. This variety served to keep the read fresh for me; some things naturally worked better than others and will appeal to different people in different ways. But it is not, in my opinion, challenging in its format and I found it an effortless, cohesive and fluid read with the structure actually enhancing the content rather than detracting or distracting from it. It allows a deeper, more probing access to the group of characters we meet during the book. We are allowed far into the psyche of some of them, can cross reference their shared experiences and trip back in to their pasts to understand their motivations and attitudes.

During Chapter 4, a third person narrative, we are directly addressed, ‘But we are getting off the subject’. From this point on I was hooked and increasingly aware that getting off the subject we were not. Every detail forms part of a spider’s web of interaction which spreads out from two focal characters, Bennie and Sasha, to include a myriad of equally important characters over a span of some 50 years.

This allows us to journey not only into characters’ past experiences but also into their futures. Some lives are played out over many chapters but what was most appealing, distinctive and brilliant, were the snapshots Egan instantly develops for others. Paragraphs disarm by swift, unexpected movement from the present into the future fate of one or more characters. Not all are happy ever afters but the overwhelming sense this zoom-button device gives is that of the big picture where each of us stands. Not that we are small in the grand scheme. But that we are huge. And that we are in constant motion, even when we cannot see it. Whatever our current situtuation, will it be more than a line in the paragraph of our lives?

The future Egan leaves us with is wholly unappealing but sadly believable. Technology is terrifying, childhood distorted, communication almost soundless and the planet’s ecology in ruins. But in this grand scheme her characters are still living their lives, feeling love, confusion, fear and joy. The spirit of human nature seems unbreakable, within whatever structure you place it.

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Watch this space... three upcoming editor blogs on Seals, Saints & Bardsey as Urban Centre; Indian Poets & Wales; Psychogeography: Latest Novels and Nonfiction by Iain Sinclair, Jim Perrin, Tristan Hughes and Richard Collins

Book of the Year winner proves illusion will nourish, even if it won't feed us

‘Don Quixote,’ John Harrison says in his Book of the Year winner Cloud Road, A Journey Through the Inca Heartland, ‘is usually portrayed as an old man who… leaves his home and steps into the world of his delusions…. I discovered in the first few pages that the old fool was close to fifty: same as me.’ DQ accompanied Harrison along a five-month hike on the 1500-mile Inca Camino Real running through the Andes between Quito in Ecuador to Cuzco in Peru.

Considering the weight of Harrison’s pack (carried mostly by donkey Dapple to save his crumbling spine) Don Quixote does well to evade being among the items jettisoned (toiletries), stolen (fleece, at the altitude of the Matterhorn) or lost (his partner Elaine’s patience). But the Don earns his place: as the A-Z of Menopausal Man.

It may consider be ill advised to spend nights in an icy tent watching your breastbone emerge from underfed flesh. And suffer diversions caused by mistranslation or malicious misdirection, rabid dogs, and a recalcitrant donkey with the top speed of a tortoise.

But Harrison’s philosophy, borrowed from Cervantes and Gabriel García Marquez, that ‘while illusion won’t feed us, it will nourish us’, won over this sceptic of the epic. First up at village dances; game, when teenage girls lead Dapple across a packed football stadium at kick-off, his exuberance is catching. Reflections on poverty, charity and political treachery, are compassionate. And Cloud Road is a saddleful of laughs. The ass is the butt of many jokes, not least because, despite being cojone-less, ‘she [suddenly] use[s] a large grey penis to pee’ upstream from where the couple are washing. Surely Harrison’s humour must have given Elaine pause before she exiled him to the spare room on his return?

And yet this is not just a comic author. He guides us elegantly through the politics of the Inca, Moche and Cañari peoples, enlivening figures such as the great Inca king Atahualpa and his nemesis, Spaniard Franciso Pizarro.

Harrison knows his genre and lifts above it, for instance in his hilarious riff on the Travel Books with Animals niche, which ends, ‘I want to say that I shall hate that little bastard [Dapple] until the end of time.’

Arresting imagery gives us inroads into an alien landscape and culture. Rainy puddles have ‘surfaces like cloth drawn up by rising needles’; a prisoner is skinned and stuffed to beat his own belly’s drum. And an Incan oracle to out-humbug the Wizard of Oz: the Lanzón Chamber at Chavín, Peru, pierced by a fifteen-foot granite lance carved with a fanged deity which once wept blood and roared in stereo. Cloud Road reveals how it was done, circa 1500 BC.


This was first published in Gwen's Saturday books column, The Insider, in the Western Mail, 16 July 2011


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The Kindle Single and Masters of Ecstasy

‘The Great Master of Ecstasy’ was the story that ‘sent’ me most out of those in Glenda Beagan’s book of the same title. ‘Muscles Came Easy’ is easily the best from Aled Islwyn’s collection Out With It. Both are novella-length magnets, drawing you into the world of a novel, so that you treat the tales at the end like you would the secret track on a CD. As a reader, I enjoy the unspooling of character motivation that can only happen over thirty plus pages. My hunch is that a reader needs a set number of pages or a minimum timespan, book stuffed in bag, in order to bond with its characters. Maybe such bonding is a factor making many of us avoid short stories? Wily publishers and authors therefore cannot be blamed for trying to make story collections more palatable with a very long lead-story or the interweaving of characters across a book.

Novellas per se sell even worse than story collections. But just as capitalism abhors a vacuum, so Amazon created the Single Kindle: a marketplace for digital texts (including nonfiction and essays) of between 10,000 and 30,000 words. Parthian, ever quick off the mark, have brought out SK versions of the lead novellas from longer print editions: Aled Islwyn’s Muscles Came Easy (42 pages, £2.39) and Susie Willd’s Arrivals as well as highlights from classic Library of Wales authors Hilda Vaughan and Arthur Macken's 'The Great God Pan'. Hopefully Seren will give Glenda Beagan's similarly titled ‘The Great Master of Ecstasy’ the same e-treatment.

As for the proper single shortie of 2-3000 words, when will the App-knight ride to her rescue? This damsel’s still tied to the tree in terms of book publishing deals. However, the single story is scooting merrily to grab the living-wage prizes offered by the Sunday Times, BBC and Frank O’Connor International Short Story competitions. The latest BBC winner, David Constantine (who has family near Aberystwyth), collected £15,000. The Sunday Times award, meanwhile, shortlisted Roshi Fernando, brand new Swansea PhD graduate, whose interlinked collectionHomesick will be published by Bloomsbury next autumn.

There was concern for the genre in Welsh last year when the Allen Raine Short Story Competition failed to award first prize in the language (though why on earth refuse to honour runner up Jon Gower, and why aren’t they working with our literary magazines?). But solutions are more readily found in creative enterprise than committee. Gower has created a story-chain or collaborative work of fiction (inspired by 1997’s Finbar’s Hotel) where readers must guess, among authors such as Fflur Dafydd, Siân Melangell and Gower himself, who wrote which chapter-story. Short in stature some stories may be. But that didn’t stop Napoleon!

This was first published in Gwen's Saturday books column, The Insider, in theWestern Mail, 9 July 2011

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Forget the Heels

‘Those shoes will send you straight to hell!’ Gee told me on Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. Four-inch heels and straps coiling up the leg like a pair of pervy pythons. The kind men love and women can walk in only as far as their love of male attention holds out. Mine were in my handbag.

It was the 2008 Edinburgh International Bookfair and we were celebrating Gee Williams’ nomination to the UK’s oldest literary prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, for Salvage.

Salvage’s subject – what would you risk to keep a piece of priceless beached contraband – is exactly that of Cynan Jones’ Everything I Found on the Beach, I realized, as the books bobbed into Aberaeron quay at their recent launch within a launch. It goes to show that whatever disunites the writers of Wales - identity politics, language, chips on shoulders – the landscape, and inevitably our coastline, will winkle its way into their work.

Jones’ novel, bookended by two dead bodies saddled with cocaine, is, like Salvage, a literary crime thriller. But Everything I Found… could only have been written by a man. Its two main characters (the drug-dealer doesn’t figure much), Hold and Grzegorz, are men with young families of a sort, who cannot think beyond providing and deciding on their behalf. Their failure to communicate any of these admirable feelings leads to tragic self-sacrifice. Whether skinning a rabbit, gutting fish, queuing to pee at the Polish hostel, or communing with a knife in the shed of a dead best friend, Jones’ writing takes you there. His emotional perception has all the more impact for its base within a philosophy of maleness akin to Hemingway’s in The Old Man and the Sea.

On 19 August, Charlotte Square will again play host to a Welsh writer, when Michael Nath, who grew up in Swansea and Pembrokeshire, hears whether his James Tait Black shortlisted novel La Rochelle won the big prize. This is an author keen to brew up Nietzsche, neurology, war films and quotes from Goethe on Napoleon. Riskily, his protagonist, Dr Mark Chopra, is a misogynous pain. Older than his years and erudite to the point of constipation, he has an opinion on everything and a blind spot on his own dysfunctional love triangle with his best (only) friend’s wife. Nath’s writing is eccentric and very witty: akin to that of Lloyd Jones in Mr Cassini. Just go with the flow of La Rochelle, a place where McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers meets Jules et Jim in the dog-days of Diana’s death. But if you happen on Edinburgh that night and are une femme d’un certain age: forget the heels. Dr Chopra wouldn’t give you a second look.

This was first published in The Western Mail, Saturday Insider column, 2 July 2011

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Un Ddinas Dau Fyd, Llwyd Owen. Review by Dafydd Saer

As a confirmed Llwyd Owen addict, I was gagging for this latest offering, Un Ddinas Dau Fyd. His fifth Welsh language novel in as many years, this fast-paced thriller revolves around Emlyn, the middle class boss of a TV company, and Rod, who works in the Spar on Ely’s oxymoronically-named Grand Avenue. Both are literally in shit street: Rod is desperate to get away from his chronically alcoholic father and drug-dealing brother, who is under police surveillance. Rod’s only hope for salvation is his obsession with his video camera: he secretly films all aspects of Ely’s rich cultural heritage – especially the vicious gang fights between the Ely Boyz and the Caerau Crew. But with no way to edit his material, he repeatedly applies for jobs with TV companies in Cardiff. But his face doesn’t fit, and he gets nowhere fast.

Meanwhile in the putrid underbelly of middle-class Llandaf suburbia, Emlyn’s wife is up the duff while he’s trying to wriggle out of an affair with Beca, a psychotic self-harming nymphomaniac who is inconveniently married to Steffan Grey, the S4C drama boss whom Emlyn has to brown-nose to get any work. To confound things, Beca tells Emlyn that she’s carrying his baby. Awkwardly, Emlyn’s spectacularly naff new film needs the thumbs-up from Steffan before it can be aired.

By some curious twists of fate, shadowy double-dealing, and blackmail – not to mention the odd burst of violence – Rod and Emlyn’s paths cross, conspiring eventually to lift both out of their respective hells – and in Rod’s case, into some particularly steamy sexual encounters with a pretty young lady from Ceredigion.

Set against Owen’s trademark Kaaaardiff-Caerdydd backdrop, readers will delight in finding themselves immersed once again in an edgy world of Welsh middle class hypocrisy, working-class squalor, heroin, soapbar and cider. A heady mix of 21^st century urban ingredients, it vividly brings to life a Cardiff that the city fathers would prefer to brush under the Cardiff Bay Barrage.

Shrewdly-observed, Owen writes with sympathy for the underdog: underpinning the main plot, there is a subtle social commentary, sometimes satirical, sometimes poignant. He has a clear understanding of the frustration faced by the underprivileged, and also of the self-righteous arrogance of those who believe that Wales belongs exclusively to the Welsh-speaker.

The relaxed familiarity with which Owen describes Cardiff suggests that he knows the city – warts and all – like the back of his hand. He portrays Kaaaadiff’s working-class nouveau-Welsh-speakers with ease, and the action shifts effortlessly between that world and the parallel world of Welsh language television, its self-important minor intrigues (which could have been culled straight out of the pages of Lol, the Welsh-language equivalent of Private Eye) emphasising its irrelevance to the bleak lives of some Ely residents.

Owen’s sparse style is easy to miss – it never gets in the way, the narrative moving hard and fast. He wastes little time on description, trusting the reader to use their imagination and make the reading experience more personal. Occasionally he does get carried away though, and uses rather obscure words – what the hell is ‘cywestach’, ‘dychlamu’, ‘cafl-ledu’ and ‘ceuled’? Owen apparently likes to learn new words daily in his other life as a translator and has a dictionary to hand, but few of his readers will bother to consult their University of Wales Dictionary app as they get swept along by the action.

I must confess that I didn’t understand the ending – I found myself leafing through the end, looking for missing pages. But the publisher assures me that there is nothing missing. Owen is known to make cross-references to events and characters in his previous novels, so maybe that’s what’s going on here. I have read all his novels, but can’t recall their contents sufficiently to make a connection. Nevertheless, I wasn’t that bothered, and I could happily read Un Ddinas Dau Fyd again, so much did I enjoy living on the edge in Llwyd Owen’s Cardiff.

DEATH AND THE BREAD VAN

Biographers, dealing as they are with lives passing, face time and death head on. Michael Holroyd, author of Augustus John’s life, among others, told his Hay audience that his privilege was to write a new book for a dead author. Animal Magic: A Brother’s Story, reviewed in NWR, does just that. Andrew Barrow’s brother Jonathan was killed in a car crash, alongside his fiancée, days before Jonathan’s wedding. Andrew took the dead man’s surreal, prophetic unpublished novel The Queue (in which the bride gets run over by a bread van), and reworked it into a highly original biography which reveals how in awe of his brother Andrew is, forty years after his bereavement.

In his memoir Ten Pound Pom, Niall Griffiths also looks back, to when his family briefly emigrated to Australia. But he struggles more to face 2007 – recounting all the pies that were eat and Ozzie killjoys met – than the wildlife-loving boy he was in 1976. With its alternating ‘then’ and ‘now’ sections and setting of the boy’s story in third person, as though he were someone other than the author, the book suggests that childhood is a long way off. But the way Griffiths uses the present tense throughout makes the whole life accessible as a contemporary story. Still, though, we guess that Niall would rather be eleven than past forty. And know for sure he’d rather be home than Down Under. And how much did he fork out on excess baggage to wing that pastry-lined belly Waleswards?

Richard Gwyn is also skilled at splicing past and present in his memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, which was one of a pair with Horatio Clare’s Truant at this year’s NWR Hay event. In our major online interview of both authors, ‘Plus Gainsbourg que Gainsbourg’, Gwyn describes how his experience of acute insomnia, caused by hepatitis C while waiting for a liver transplant, helped him dodge a traditional chronology. So the book’s structure lets him slip in and out of the past, conveying the ambivalence of being in a present while waiting for a life-saving operation: the only thing which would give him any future.

The Vagabond’s Breakfast mentions Montaigne’s account of a gravestone inscribed: Here lies so-and-so, who was dead when time was passing through the year twelve hundred,’ and riffs on the personification of time. In NWR, Gwyn explains how the philosopher is considered ‘the father of the essay’ and specifically ‘self-reflexive prose in which the thoughts and actions of an individual constitute the subject matter’. Could a sixteenth-century aristocrat, then, be blamed for the current glut of misery memoirs, sick lit, confessional and celebrity memoirs, not to mention blogging, FB and Twitter?

GWEN DAVIES

This was first published in the Western Mail’s Saturday Insider column, 25 June 2011.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. Review by K Blade

There are three easy steps to falling into the psychopath trap: first discover the Hare checklist for scoring psychopathic qualities, second apply the test to everyone, third realise that anyone you've had doubts about – including yourself if you are the anxious kind – is in fact a psychopath.

The Psychopath Test opens in the vein of a conspiracy thriller, with Ronson investigating mysterious deliveries of books to a worldwide selection of neuroscientists. This anecdote tenuously links in with the premise of the book, by reminding Ronson that there are some odd people out there.

The narrative fidgets back and forth through time, picking a path through assorted interviews, assignments and oddments of research, pulling them together to suggest there was a plan in place from the outset. There is a broad cast, Ronson draws in Douglas Hofstadter, David Shayler, Scientology, Broadmoor prisoners, Haitian paramilitary leaders – even Sean Connery makes a fleeting appearance. The Sunday magazine style of writing makes for easy reading, but suffers from heavy-handed pointers to the date by reference to world events and blatant product placement. Although why a coffee shop chain would want to be linked to psychopaths is never made clear.

Ultimately the story told is of the limitations and abuses of psychiatry, through electrotherapy, induced comas and mass LSD dosing to flawed psychological profiling and unwarranted imprisonment. Along the way we learn of mental disorders of times past that reveal much of society at the time and raise questions about the value judgements behind current categorisations. In the 19^th century the disorder drapetomania, only ever seen in slaves, had one symptom namely the desire to run away from slavery. It was about 1980 before homosexuality was removed from the definitive text of mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Ronson's self-portrayal has a mocking tone, making it clear that conclusions he draws at certain stages are soon to be over-turned. He grabs the Hare checklist with glee, revelling in the power it gives him to unlock the secret signs of a psychopath in body language and nuances of sentence construction. Then, having diagnosed psychopath potential in himself he wonders how to act sane if he ever had to convince somebody – perhaps he would try too hard, how do you cross your legs in a sane manner?

In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the Voigt-Kampff test, applied by an expert, can be used to detect androids. Tell-tale signs are lack of autonomic responses to emotionally provocative questions. In the real world, the Hare checklist is used in much the same manner. Psychopaths are not believed to feel emotions, so they do not show normal emotional responses. On being shown a picture of a frightened face and asked to describe the emotion, one psychopath said he didn't know but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. The consequence in Philip K Dick's story is death at the hands of a bounty hunter, here life imprisonment is more likely. Unfortunately, the test is often applied by people who spent the course twiddling their thumbs and doodling.

The spotlight turns at times from criminals to executives – suspicious because of their clinical lack of empathy – to journalists, cold-heartedly exploiting vulnerable members of the public to produce entertainment that reassures the rest of the public that there are others out there madder than them. Not just journalists, but also their interviewees score highly on the psychopath test – grandiose sense of self-worth, failure to consider consequences and a need for stimulation to alleviate boredom being likely reasons many agree to be interviewed.

Survival tips for psychopaths and non-psychopaths
Avoid London (psychopaths gravitate to bright lights)
To avoid your quest for world domination being uncovered be boring (journalists will never write about you).