Niall Williams - History of the Rain

Niall Williams, History of the Rain (Bloomsbury)

Which to read of the several hundred new novels published each year is a very difficult question. It is narrowed down drastically to those one finds out about but it's still likely one will miss fine books.
Perhaps one can only go by the reviews one sees. Last year I was less than impressed after an enthusaistic recommendation for James Salter. But The Times featured a review of this, Niall Williams' eighth novel, recently and I'm glad to say the book lived up to its glowing report.
Ruth Swain is devoted to books and confined to bed by illness in rainswept West of Ireland near a river full of salmon. The book is a chronicle of her family history seen through the 3,958 books that belonged to her father, that surround her now. It is a story of marginalisation on the fringes, of falling short, of fish and water and of books. Already, by page 20, I had begun to wonder how soon I might tire of its cleverness and its literariness but in the end, I never did. It is beautifully clever, but impressively sustained in its constant cross referencing to Literature but also darkly comic in the voice of Ruth. It must always be a challenge for a fiction writer to create a brilliant character because they have to be brilliant enough to show us, but Niall Williams is apparently massively well-read and gifted enough to do just that. It is showy but not pyrotechnically so because it is downbeat, rain-lashed and in some ways about impoverishment. Dickens is a big favourite of Ruth's. The writing of the novel is a theme of the novel, too, but that doesn't get in its way.
When Ruth first wears glasses,
there were others who couldn't see well, others you saw squinting or looking into the copy next to them when there was something to be taken down from the board, but either they wouldn't allow their beauty compromised by the thick, brown-rimmed glasses the Mid -Western Health Board had decided was the best anti-boy device they could think of, or their parents didn't think seeing was so important for girls.
The prose flows like the river that runs through the book. Of the birth of her brother, Aeney, Ruth says,
He swam down the River Mam ahead of me and when he landed he landed in the amazed wet eyes of my father.
And, one night, trying to block out the noise in the river in spate, 'even J.S. Bach had to pause sometime' between movements,
and in the end I stood in my nightie and opened the skylight and screamed at it, which is neither great for your reputation or stopping river noise.
The writing is massively resourceful, densely-packed with evocative or well-judged perceptions, like the cat who spends all day on the hen house roof 'watching the Hens Channel', or how there will be a last time that you see any given person, how one wants to cling on to them but,
right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.
But the narrative, in its flashbacks, eventually arrives at Ruth's father, Virgil, who is a poet. Not only is this an unheard of, awe-inspiring thing in the outpost of Faha, but the typescript of his book, The History of the Rain, is posted to London to a publisher, unimaginably far away. From there, in a moving last few chapters, the novel moves into a sort of coda, a redemption of underwhelming lives through literature that even includes some redemption for Ruth's underwhelming suitor, Vincent Cunningham.
It is a hugely impressive book that one can readily admire and only fall short of loving if it sometimes seems just a bit too smart and knowing. And that's not the end of the world.

Today's Times Crossword

Considering the Set List

The first night of the Kate Bush residency met with rapturous reception, comment, reviews and a standing ovation for every song as far as I heard  And, yes, I would have thought so, too. And I'm glad. She is surely something quite special, not only because making yourself rare to a legion of devoted fans is not a bad idea even if it is only because you don't feel like it.
And, true to being a proper artist, she didn't do a Greatest Hits set. Whether your guitarists need to be dressed as ostriches is another matter and can be debated elsewhere.
It would be invidious for me to make any comparison between Kate's first gigs in 35 years and my forthcoming 5 minutes in the Portsmouth Poetry Society event on National Poetry Day, my first since Poetry Day either 3 or 4 years ago. But, there are similar questions for the artist to consider.
One could do a Greatest Hits set. 5 minutes would be plenty for me to do that. Or you promote the latest album and put in an old favourite or two. Or you could do something else entirely. New work, for instance. I was once told that it is only their latest work that poets are interested in reading but if you are one then you might think it safer to resd something you think is any good.
I thought I had it all sorted. A couple from the latest booklet, one from the new stuff we are promoting, the old classic (I like to think of The Cathedrals of Liverpool as my Maggie May) and then a cover version. But then I timed it in late night rehearsal and it went so far over time that I realized that wasn't going to be possible. I had to jettison the idea of reading Sometimes by Britney Spears as the finale and re-consider the options. So all I know now is the first two, and then what. Always do less than expected is about the only rule.
Get on, get off and don't mess it up is about the height of my ambition. And if I didn't have to do it for another 35 years then that would be fine by me. One of the main differences between me and Kate is that nobody would worry if I didn't.

What will survive of us

It is a few years now since the place to be on the internet for poetry was the forum on the Larkin Society website. It could be a very open and honest exchange of views and sometimes quite invigorating. There were one or two who thought the idea of it was to establish themselves as Larkin's greatest admirer but the argument that Larkin was so good that one doesn't need to read any other poet begged the question of how do you know he's the best, then.
Friendships developed between some contributors as well, it has to be said, some divisions but I hope that what will survive of us will not be acrimony. And some of the most crucial issues still come back to me from time to time, like this week, the debate on An Aurndel Tomb.
Some said that Larkin sincerely meant that 'what will survive of us is love' and that he had said outside of the poem that he believed that to be true. Having been brought up to concentrate on the text rather than any extraneous material, I couldn't entertain such a notion, and still can't. Of course, that is the last line of the poem but we need to read the whole poem rather than just quote the last line, with special reference to the last stanza.
Time has 'transfigured' the effigies on the tomb in Chichester Cathedral, 'into Untruth',
              The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

It is by all means a memorable line but being memorable doesn't in itself establish anything as fact. It is only an 'almost-instinct' that Larkin says we have and it has only been proven 'almost' true and something he perceives as 'hardly meant'. We shouldn't fall for the trick that time has played on us by the 'transfiguration' into untruth.
The attractive sentiment that we would perhaps like to believe in has been qualified and undercut  comprehensively by the phrases Larkin has inserted before it so that the poem looks as if it ends on this triumphant, quite emphatic note when actually, it is an apparition. It is magnificent but we have been carefully prepared not to accept it. It is a brilliant trick, so many-layered that I'm already re-reading it over and again, even now, to see if there aren't enough negatives to say that even the qualifications have been qualified. But that would be the point, too, if it is too ambivalent to be sure of its 'meaning' at all and in the best poetry, perhaps, we appreciate something more than only meaning. I described another Larkin poem elsewhere as 'tight-rope walking' and here is more of him doing a similar thing.
It is no more admissable for me to say that surely the Larkin that wrote such poems as Mr. Bleaney and Church Going would not have endorsed such a religiose idea than it is for others to say that he said elsewhere that he did believe it. If we are going to bring in evidence from outside of the poem then we are no longer really discussing the poem.
But I wondered if we might recast the argument of the final stanza, without bringing in new material, in the opposite direction and see if it sheds any light. It is no longer poetry and does not end on such a grand chord but we might find the sense of it without Larkin's artistry and disorienting effect.
What will survive of us is love,
Although that isn't completely true.
It is something like an instinct we have.
It is suggested by the effigies on this tomb
But it wasn't what they originally meant.
It's just that over hundreds of years,
it has come to look like that to us.

It would have been an underwhelming poem had he written it thus, but many would and do but that is why those poets aren't read, remembered and discussed while Larkin is. It is still a fine idea, it is just not exceptional poetry. The fact that it is more obvious what that re-write is saying is a small advantage that it has. The fact that it wouldn't have become such a memorable poem is, however, a much greater disadvantage.

But I'd still be interested to hear from anyone who sees it a different way. If we ever got to the bottom of such questions, though, poetry might not be worth pursuing any more and that would be awful.
 

Cliff Richard - Soulicious

Cliff Richard, Soulicious (EMI)

I ordered two copies of this album, one for my sister from who I long ago eventually took the point about the sheer greatness of Cliff, and also sent an e-mail of complaint to the BBC about the coverage of the police raid on his apartment.
What else can you do in a democracy. We will see what happens but at present Cliff is voluntarily talking to the police but the BBC and South Yorkshire Police are less voluntarily being asked questions, too.
This album came out in 2011, a set of duets with soul singers, and I was immediately very taken by Saving a Life with Freda Payne, some kind of middle of the road masterpiece of songwriting and performance, but I wasn't as convinced about the other songs I heard from it. All too often one sees reviews of some so-called back number, even if it is David Bowie, that this time they are really back to their good, old best. But it is rarely the case.
This is it, though, now that I hear it in its entirety, having already seen the DVD of the concert. Cliff is by no means the best singer on the album but then it does have Candi Staton twice, Percy Sledge, Freda and one of the greatest songwriting team in pop history, Lamont Dozier, among others and so he wouldn't expect to be. But, of course, he holds his own. They wouldn't give him anything to do that he wasn't capable of.
Saving a Life is a classic; we get a very credible re-work of Womack & Womack's Teardrops and then Candi is even more Staton on This Time with You, which would not be out of place on one of her own tremendous albums of recent years.
It could always have been done with some genuine songwriting and production, Cliff is a limited singer compared to some of his partners here but he is good at what he does and much cleverer than many of his critics. When they've written songs like Don't Talk to Him and Bachelor Boy then perhaps they would like to show me.
There is a bit of meandering hidden in the middle and it ends with some brave shots at 'funky' which we will see about but, not even considering that he was 70 years old at the time, this is a great album for me. It is no older fashioned than the re-invented rock posturings of the likes of the Arctic Monkeys. Oh, dear me, for how many decades have we seen the latest coolmongers try to sell yet more of that to a new generation of needy teenagers.
Soulicious is a fine album. Hope it all goes your way, Cliff. And then perhaps we can deal with the BBC and the police.
Don't they know there's a war on. Several of them. Just because the Sunday Sport closed, it is not the BBC's role to take their place as arbiters of tawdry allegations. They should cover the Proms, do Round Britain Quiz, The Danny Baker Show and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. Useful, meaningful, quality broadcasting.

Today's Times Crossword

I'm not completely convinced about Stay or Erin but they are the best I can do.

Michael Longley - The Stairwell

Michael Longley, The Stairwell (Cape)

The Stairwell, the first poem in Michael Longley's new collection, reminds me of Heaney's Personal Helicon. Where the Heaney poem was an early, 'manifesto' poem in which he investigated wells, and
                                          I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Longley's is a retrospective poem about sound in which he is taken out into a stairwell,
                                         to demonstrate
In the Hallowe'en-decorated lobby the perfect acoustic

but they both resonate, use a similar metaphor and meditate on sound, language and meaning.
Longley is by no means the heir to Heaney's pre-eminent position. There isn't going to be a true inheritor of that. This book does, however, have Longley in wonderful form, contemplating his brother's recent death, memories of his father, and is always rooted in home, family and his local natural world of birdsong and small animals. The poetry is disarmingly uncomplicated but repays closer looking. They grow in stature as their reflective music becomes more noticeable and, in fact, the more linguistically ambitious are perhaps the most successful.
Amelia's Poem is one sentence strtched over 14 lines with a rhyme scheme you might find if you look hard enough.
Amelia, your newborn name
Combines with the midwife's word
And, like smoke from driftwood fires,
Wafts over the lochside road
Past the wattle byre

and so on as Amelia mingles with the world, becoming part of it undramatically and understatedly but memorably.
In The Apparition, Longley has himself and his brother as Achilles and Patroclus in one of several Homeric themes here, and not for the first time,
'Even n the House of Death, something remains,
A ghost or image, but there's no real life in it.

'Like smoke, the hallucination slipped away' but there is a presence as well as an absence.
But Longley began by considering his own death before the poems about his father and brother come in the two sections of the book and so it is unexpected the way in which such a feeling of life comes out of the poems as a set. Although there is much reference to war- including notably a parallel with Helen Thomas helping Ivor Gurney 'when he was miles away from Gloucestershire/ And sanity', it is wood, birds and things gently celebrated as alive that leave the most lasting impression.
Longley's stairwell is a personal one, echoing yet but, as in words he uses himself, 'with a perfect acoustic'.

Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Harvill Secker)

I was relieved to see in the press other commentators admitting that nobody really knows what is going on in a Murakami novel. They are the sort of thing one knows is good without being able to say why. And it is a lot of people now, across the world, that queue to buy each new title so that it only needs to say Murakami on the cover and nobody thinks it is Ryu.
The novels fit into two distinct categories, the more talked about perhaps being those with parallel worlds, that cross boundaries of reality and make Murakami really a magic realist, such as the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or A Wild Sheep Chase but the likes of South of the Border, West of the Sun don't stretch the limits of our perception in anywhere near the same way. I wonder if in his most recent books, Murakami isn't bringing the two approaches closer together. In 1Q84, it was a vast epic but we felt a little surer of ourselves and this time although it is quite possible that we might be led off into some other reality, it is only really the possibility that dreams might overlap with life. But this is not a particularly strange book at all.
Tsukuru Tazaki is a member of a close-knit group of friends as a young man with two girls and two other boys but he suddenly finds himself cast out from the group for no explicablre reason and none he can find out. So far, we might be back in Donna Tartt's The Secret History because one of them is later murdered. Tsukuru is the only one of them whose name doesn't have a colour in it but he is not really 'colourless', it is only a joke, but he is damaged by the rejection and takes his colourless character to heart. The pilgrimage of the title is the story of how, after 16 years, he sets about finding out what happened.
Murakami has moments of brilliant psychological insight into self-doubt, the 'bliss' of close friendship and the hollowness of its loss. Tsukuru has become a designer of railway stations as per a teenage interest, but he doesn't travel far. As he tracks down his old friends he finds how successful they have become in their various lives but Murakami uses the opportunity to paint a picture of corporate soullessness, of business and the grim lives of the commuter (in a beautiful last chapter where Tsukuru contemplates the main Shinguku station) and he leaves us with him surely on the brink of redemption, not necessarily as colourless as he thought.
As in the novels of Banana Yoshimoto, the human condition is expressed somewhere between the transcendence of absorption and merging with others and the bleakness of isolation and if this sounds like this generation's remake of the cult of Catcher in the Rye, then maybe it is. Forced to confront his own perceived neutral nature, Tsukuru reflects,
Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic.
Liszt's piano piece Le mal du pays is a motif throughout the book, a piece that Shiro, the (inevitably beautiful) tragic girl of the group, had played. It suggests a sort of homesickness, redolent of displacement or not even having a home to go back to. Listening to it as the story of his estrangement becomes clear, Tsukuru understands that,
One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.
The reason why Tsukuru was cast out of the group so abruptly was perhaps in a way an unlikely tribute to him, callous though it certainly was in all its collateral damage. Murakami handles it superbly and we are in doubt throughout and still not even completely sure at the end. One can't be sure of the original text when reading a translation and this has been translated into American rather than English but one can see enough to estimate that this is a beautiful book in Japanese. Murakami, as translator of Raymond Carver and Chandler into English, is a stylist of a pared-down prose that is as careful and accurate as his observation of human behaviour. While resolving the pain into an ordinariness that befits Tsukuru's stoicism, having come through a period of death obsession and workmanlike routine, Murakami doesn't offer an ending back in the home key but leaves the piece on a chord that only anticipates resolution. No, it had never occured to him to travel to Matsumoto station and he never has to check his diary when his girlfriend suggests a date but where his contemporaries have found themselves superficially successful, Tsukuru's story has been more worthy of the telling.
I think at the time I said I suspected 1Q84, which was more or less a thriller, might have been Murakami's best book yet but I think this is better. He is not resting on previous achievements and delivering more of the same (which might be suspected of Banana), but he is refining and consolidating the elements of his art and I am genuinely a part of his worldwide cult of admirers. This book arrived on Friday, I began it early Saturday afternoon and finished it, on page 298, on Sunday night. They are not 298 densely printed pages but notwithstanding that, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
It is a few years now since I first heard him suggested as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. It might not be far away now.

Today's Times Crossword

Murakami Selfie

Heaven knows that I have some innate distaste for any word that didn't exist when I was at school. Not only the re-use of words like mouse for the computer component but new coinings, like those on the annual list of words admitted to the OED. Like 'onesie', 'selfie' and, a few years ago now, 'blogger'.
But I am wrong because I accept that language is a constantly developing thing and I have no objection to the vast list of words first attributed to Shakespeare. But I mean, if he made up so many of his own words then how did anybody know what he was on about.
But I had taken some 'selfies' before there was a word for it and how many things are there
one might have done before there were words for them.
And a few minutes ago, I took a series of photographs called the Murakami Selfies to celebrate the arrival of this soi-disant Great Publishing Event. This is the best of them, the one I look least gormless in. Honestly.
Colorless. I'm expecting to like him a lot. Review to follow in due course but please bear in mind that two other books arrived today. They come not single spies but in battalions.

Balzac and the Art World

The weekend delivered a hiatus in the supply of reading material. There is a list of orders in anticipation of Autumn release dates and the first is due soon, I hope, but in the meantime, it was an opportunity to make use of my collection of books. It is a good thing to look at some of them occasionally rather than live in a three bedroom house just for the privilege of accommodating them.
I picked a book of Balzac's short stories. Top bloke, Honore de Balzac, on the evidence of what I read of him many years ago and the picture of him here does nothing to suggest otherwise.
I was particularly taken with the story, Pierre Grassou, which in its first few pages delivered a number of observations on the industry of 'creative arts', Grassou being a painter although it all seems applicable to poetry and thus, I daresay, music and any other such enterprise.
Balzac's narrator begins by bemoaning the extension of 'the Exhibition' in the Louvre by which it has included more and more artists, the implication being that the Salon have abdicated responsibility for selecting the best and opened up to more painters than perhaps they might have,
Instead of a tournament, you have a riot; instead of a magnificent exhibition, you have a rowdy bazaar; instead of selected pictures, you have everything. What is the result? The great artist is the loser.
It reminded me of the way that so many recent poetry anthologies try to include as much as possible rather than take a view. It is difficult. To take a view would often mean an editor selecting their friends but a selection that is worthy of the name needs to be discriminating and perhaps some worthy work needs to be omitted at the same time as leaving out things that are unlikely to be regarded as more than passing fancies. I'm not convinced that Balzac's narrator here is right that the great artist is the loser because their reputation should be secure. It is the paying public who are potentially being shown things that might not have been quite the masterpieces they had hoped for.
Pierre Grassou becomes known as Fougeres because that is where he comes from, like Leonardo was from Vinci, Rembrandt was van Rijn and Doménikos Theotokópoulos was from Greece but worked in Spain and was thus known as El Greco. Painting seemed to do that at times in the past although Hockney isn't known as David Bradford. In Literature, it doesn't seem to happen quite so much. Shakespeare is not William Stratford; Larkin is not Philip Coventry and I find it is not even proven that William Dunbar was from Dunbar. But if you're ever asked in a quiz where Florence Nightingale was born then there is often a clue in the question.
Fougeres is talented but no genius. Of his living space we are told,
The whole place indicated the meticulous way of life of a small-minded man and the carefulness of a poor one.
He is a 'simple genre painter' and,
doesn't need those enormous appliances which ruin historical painters. He never thought himself gifted enough to tackle a large mural and restricted himself to work on an easel.
I couldn't help liking him at this stage. He is a mediocrity and there is no shame in that but he submits a picture to the Louvre Exhibition and it s rejected. He wouldn't be the first or last to get a rejection slip but he asks for advice on his work from an established artist and teacher and amends his work according to the advice he receives. You could think more, or less, of him for that, perhaps but the advice of Schinner, 'a man of enormous talent', is that,
you would do better to leave your paints at Brullon's shop and not make off with canvas that can be used by others. Go home early, put on a night-cap, go to bed at nine o'clock. In the morning, at ten o'clock go to an office and ask for a job, and leave the Arts.
which is very much what I would have said over and again in a job I imagined for myself a few years ago in a role assessing students for entry to Creative Writing degree courses. 'No, look, mate. By all means write poems if you enjoy it but, as far as education goes, have you noticed that there is good money to be made as a plumber'.
No disrespect to plumbers. I work in an office job myself. Balzac is showing, if only he knew, that not much has changed in between 1840 and 2014. Of course everybody wants to be a pop star, a footballer or a model but the fall out rate is alarming.
So, in brief, Fougeres manages to sell a painting to a dealer. The dealer sells it for no more than it cost to paint but then asks for three more which are then to be seen in the dealer's window,
as it were, covered with a fog; they looked like old pictures.
They are being sold as Old Masters. He gets an introduction to a bourgeois family to do three portraits, his name becomes known, he gets more commissions from the middle-class who flatter themselves that they know about art and he marries the daughter. He makes a good living doing portraits, the wily dealer has taken his cut and, really, you might think it has all worked out nicely. It has worked out as well as could be expected but,
this painter, who is a good father and a good husband, cannot rid himself of one distressing thought; the artists make fun of him, his name is a term of contempt in the studios, the journals ignore his work.
I don't know what Jack Vettriano would make of that. But, on the other hand, I have an idea what Picasso, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko might have thought.
Best of luck to all of them. I suspect that Balzac intended a satire on bourgeois taste but he has gone further into the difficult values of the art world, which remain the same, and produced a masterpiece himself.

Today's Times Crossword

Which did require the Word Finder.

View from the Boundary

Since this is the only medium in the world where you can get news of the sport of Bag Boggling, I have to announce that I am no longer World Champion of it, having lost 10-5 in the final of the 2014 event on Sunday to my nephew, Chris Chadwick, who also becomes Commonwealth Champion.
It was bound to happen. This was my first recorded defeat in competitive (non-handicap) Boggling but was on the cards. I had scored 12 consecutive hits in practice but it is in the red hot crucible of world class tournament play that one has to show it and Chris looked sharp throughout the early evening's play. He had slipped to a handicap mark of 3 and was always like a Luca Cumani horse, not quite delivering on a few occasions before taking full advantage of a rating that allowed him to take the handicap event with something to spare. But he then progressed to take the championship with similar panache and the champion was behind from the moment he lost the toss.
So, congratulations to Chris and it sets up a massive 2015 renewal.
And, while handing out tributes to people for things I'm supposed to be good at, Huge Congratulations to my songwriting partner, Tim Curtis, for not only finishing the Times crossword but being picked out of their hat as a prizewinner, too. The website simply isn't all about me at the moment.
--
Another feature of the time away was finishing Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean. As beautifully written as all of Hardy, of course, but surely this one takes his plotting device of coincidence meetings a little bit further than even the most suspended of disbelief can be expected to swallow.
By all means, he sets up the ardent lover, the coquettish object of his admiration, the flawed rival and the dastardly baddie. But, as a whole, the novel suffers from an overlong middle section in which the besotted architect, Somerset, traipses all over Europe in pursuit of a girl who, however entrancing she might be, just isn't worth it. I'm not a particularly violent man, I like to think, but I certainly wanted to punch most of the main characters in this story and only poor Charlotte deserved any sympathy in her role as prototype for Marty South in The Woodlanders.
And then I moved on to the holiday reading, which is Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. These are fine stories, and Free Radicals that I read on the train home this afternoon was especially well done.
--
The Portsmouth Poetry Society booklet, Calliope, is at the printers now and so it is actually too late to pray for it. If there are errors in it now then there will be errors in every copy. I'd like to say it won't be my fault if there are but as editor- I'd prefer to say 'producer', it will be.
It was not all easy but it will be a booklet to take some pleasure in, I sincerely hope, and if you can make it on National Poetry Day, Oct 2nd, to the reading and launch of it then we will all be glad to see you and take roughly the price of a drink off you for a copy.