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There is no mystery regarding the fate of the main character in Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies. Skippy (Daniel Juster to his parents), is a 14 year-old dreamer, MMRPG addict and boarder at Seabrook College for Boys, a private Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Inside the first 5 pages of the book, Skippy, er, dies.

Having first described (in lurid, technicolor detail) the death scene of the young teenager, the rest of Skippy Dies is structured around the back-story and consequences of Skippy’s spectacular demise.

For a 600+ page post-modern comic novel, which leaps between multiple narrators and encompasses multiverse theory, early 20th century esotericism, video games, the Decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland, teenage love, the 2008 financial crisis and the poetry of Robert Graves, Skippy Dies hangs together remarkably well.

I found it, by moments, deeply funny, and despite the disjointed narrative, you grow to deeply care for the characters.

Ruprecht van Doren, for example, is a true 21st Century original: Skippy’s obese room-mate and Seabrook’s resident genius, he spends his days munching through doughnuts, building devices in the school basement for multi-dimensional travel and dreaming of the day when he will be taken up unto Stanford to work alongside the World-Famous Physicist Hideo Tamashi.

Father Green, the school’s French teacher, is in search of some kind of redemption for past sins – despite his formidable classroom reputation – while Howard, (the principal adult voice in the novel), is a failed stockbroker who tries to teach history to uninterested adolescents while struggling with his own twentysomething mid-life crisis.

Paul Murray deserves particular respect for finding authentic voices for his teenage characters. He manages to illustrate their worldview – distracted, hormonal and video-and-internet-infused – without ever slipping up. The dialogue is never overwritten. His teenagers are by turns cruel, confused and cocksure, and never sound fake.

Likewise, the occasional transition into second-person narrative – a risky device at the best of times – feels natural and unforced, and works well to expresses that certain self-centredness that is perhaps a necessary part of adolescence.

Skippy Dies is Irish, ironic, immensely good fun, and contains the Best High School Halloween Disco Scene in the History of Literature. A novel on this scale could have easily choked on its own pink frosting, but this book works well. Really, really well.

Highly recommended are Edward Champion’s two podcast interviews with Paul Murray on the Bat Segundo Show:

Paul Murray Part I

Paul Murray Part II

Quand on arrive en Nouvelle-Zélande, on se sent forcément loin de chez soi.
“Arriving in New Zealand, you inevitably feel a long way from home.”

Charles Juliet – Auckland, août 2003

On the recommendation of a Twitter buddy, I’ve been reading Charles Juliet‘s Au pays du long nuage blanc: his journal of six months in New Zealand in 2003 while on a writer’s fellowship in Wellington.

Like all New Zealanders who are by nature slightly insecure about their nation’s reputation abroad, I was initially interested to see what an eminent French author thought of our country. Indeed, Juliet picks up on many of the usual kiwi tropes: the friendliness and informality of people, the centrality of rugby to the national narrative and the lack of insulation and heating in our houses.

The journal oscillates between observations of some of the remarkable aspects of life in New Zealand and reflections on Juliet’s own craft as a writer and poet. Descriptions of the weather constantly intervene, as one might expect given that Juliet spent a winter in Wellington!

Wellington, NZ – May 2008

Juliet spends much of his time exchanging with some of New Zealand’s notable intellectuals: Vincent O’Sullivan, Dame Fiona Kidman and Gordon Stewart among others. In particular he describes long lunchtime conversations with Chris Laidlaw, (broadcaster, diplomat, politician, academic and former All Black). Juliet also devotes many pages reflecting on his long-time admiration for Katherine Mansfield.

Juliet’s journal provided a personal connection too: when Juliet visits Auckland, it is at the invitation Professor Raylene Ramsay at Auckland University, who supervised my Honours dissertation! It was a curious experience to have the name of a personal acquaintance dropped into the middle of a book bought at FNAC Montparnasse.

Charles Juliet (Image: Léa Crespi, Télérama)

Despite the obvious pleasure Charles Juliet derives from his time in New Zealand, the journal is haunted by his awareness of the great distance that separates him from his homeland, France. And when Juliet finally leaves New Zealand in January 2004, he acknowledges that he will never return to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Au pays du long nuage blanc is an easy read (I finished it in just 2 days), and would be of interest to anyone who wants to explore strands of the relationship between France and New Zealand. It’s published by Gallimard in Folio for EUR5.60.

Finies ces longues errances
sous des ciels éteints
Finis ces combats truqués
Où j’étais toujours vaincu
Fini ce temps installé
Dans la misère du non
J’ai déposé le poids mort
qui obscurcissait ma vie
Long a été le chemin
qui m’a permis
de quitter mon enfance

Charles Juliet – Wellington, décembre 2003

Wyuna Bay, Coromandel Peninsula, NZ – June 2008

In Oxford last week, I spent time browsing second-hand books on the third floor of Blackwells. The rest of the store is slick and modern, but the top level of Blackwells, with views onto the quads of Trinity College, has a creaky wooden floor and that hint of dust and mildew that makes it somehow an isolated eyrie of an older Oxonian age.

Lapwings Over Merton Field – Chiang Yee

One book immediately caught my eye – a 1946 edition of The Silent Traveller in Oxford. It was written by the Chinese artist and author Chiang Yee in 1942 while he was living in Oxford, after his flat in the East End of London was destroyed in the Blitz. As a registered “alien”, Chiang Yee couldn’t leave Britain in wartime, and so took rooms in Southmoor Road in Jericho.

First published in 1944, Chiang Yee’s account of 1940s Oxford is particularly interesting for me. My father was born in Oxford during the war: my grandparents worked for the Food Ministry, and had their London offices relocated to Oxford, out of harms way. So thanks to Goering’s bombers, Dad was born an Oxonian.

(Oxford was not targeted by the Luftwaffe during WW2 for a number of possibly apocryphal reasons. The one I like best recounts that many high-ranking Luftwaffe officers were German aristocrats who had studied at Oxford and could not bear the idea of bombs raining down on the Turf Tavern.)

From a Railway Bridge Near Lake Street – Chiang Yee

Chiang Yee was (a little like me) an accidental expatriate in Oxford. The “foreign-ness” of his eye is reflected in his colour plates and ink sketches that accompany the text. The landmarks and characters are all in place, but somehow Chiang’s Chinese art transforms familiar views of the city into something more ancient and timeless.

The blackout curtains and ration-books are gone, but today’s Oxford seems little different to the city described by Chiang Yee 65 years ago . In the 21st Century, peacocks still strut on the roof of the Trout Inn, crowds still line Magdalen Bridge on May Morning, and the 8.05 “down train” to Paddington is still full of be-suited commuters and the occasional tweedy academic departing for an errand in London.

Despite the hardship and tension of the period, Chiang’s Oxford is a harbour of peace and reflection. The war is barely mentioned – the undergraduate population is depleted by conscription, a bomber wheels lazily over Port Meadow, and the Cockney accents of Blitz evacuees mix with shopkeepers’ Oxfordshire burr on Cornmarket. But Chiang’s attention is drawn more to the landscape, nature and cityscape.

Chiang’s eye for detail and contemplation is quite disarming. His writing captures perfectly the shift of seasons against the colleges’ grey stone. Several paragraphs are spent describing the facial expressions of a duck and the delicate dance of crocuses in the wind. Verses from Li P’o, Longfellow and Shelley enter his consciousness while wandering up the banks of the Isis towards The Perch.

Peacocks at Trout Inn – Chiang Yee

I have read many excellent books about Oxford (Jan Morris’ Oxford is still the essential primer). But Chiang Yee’s is definitely the most charming: it’s available in a 2003 reprint, but I think the 1940s Methuen  editions (“printed in complete confirmity with the authorized economy standards” as stated the frontispiece) are quite hard to come by now. This was a lucky find!

The Bay

On the road to the bay was a lake of rushes

Where we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos.

Now it is rather to stand and say

How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,

The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss:

Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names

And a hut on the shore by the Maori ovens.

We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek

Or swam in those autumnal shallows

Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs

Upstream, and waiting for the taniwha.

So now I remember the bay and the little spiders

On driftwood, so poisonous and quick.

The carved cliffs and the great outcrying surf

With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.

A thousand times an hour is torn across

And burned for the sake of going on living.

But I remember the bay that never was

And stand like stone and cannot turn away.

-James K. Baxter (1926-1972)

Image: Ben Harris-Roxas (Creative Commons)

On a recommendation, I recently ploughed through Robert McCammon‘s Boy’s Life. McCammon is not normally the sort of author that appeals to me, (not being a big fan of horror/fantasy). However Boy’s Life really worked. I loved its uncomplicated melding of magic and mundanity, its vivid descriptive tone and unforced evocation of life in smalltown Alabama in the 1960s.

Ostensibly a murder mystery, Boy’s Life is really a collection of episodes in the life of Cory, a 12 year-old kid who is discovering his calling as a storyteller. The book never loses this sense of wonder, slipping with ease between tales of summer days on the baseball diamond and back-yard conversations with ghosts. Cory’s Zephyr is a Harper Lee-style smalltown, refracted through a funhouse mirror: ineffectual sheriffs, snarling Klansmen and shotgun-wielding junk collectors share the stage with a ferocious river monster, flying dogs, an ancient voodoo witch and (of course) a dinosaur.

The suspense is occasionally stunning: some events in the novel are so completely unexpected that they strike with near-physical force.   Sometimes it seems that McCammon can’t resolve or propel the narrative forward without summoning hideous dei ex machina at the last minute. But this is barely a failing: it is in these moments of crisis that McCammon’s writing is strongest.

As a semi-autobiographical novel of a child growing into the world and confronting the gift and necessity of writing, Boy’s Life bears some comparison to David Mitchell‘s Black Swan Green.   Mitchell’s story of a year in the life of Worcestershire lad Jason Taylor is darker and more tightly-woven. But in both novels the boys’ imaginative universe is a small town, populated by near-mythical characters, presented against a backdrop of real-world outside events (in Zephyr it’s the civil rights movement and Vietnam; in Black Swan Green it’s 1980s Thatcherism and the Falklands War).

In an endearingly English way, Black Swan Green thrives on loose ends, ambiguity and Jason’s unease with his role in the world. The novel orbits around a dissolving marriage and inevitable divorce.

By contrast, Cory rides roughshod into danger and mystery, calls things as he sees them and seems implausibly unperturbed by frequent physical injuries. Boy’s Life possesses an almost conservative concern for family unity, culminating in a clunky epilogue in which the narrator returns to Zephyr 25 years later and we discover what’s happened to the main characters in the interim (basically: college, wedlock and socially respectable jobs).

Black Swan Green is, as a piece of art, more far subtle and definitely more interesting (I own an autographed hardback copy, ’nuff said). But Boy’s Life is immediately satisfying: a heartfelt romp through boyhood. In its best moments it’s dizzyingly good. Just watch out for dinosaurs.

Image: whateverthing (Creative Commons)

Charles Trénet – Swing, Troubadour
Charles Trénet – Que Reste-t-il de nos amours?
From The Very Best of Charles Trenet: PLATCD 488 [Buy]

Irène Némirovsky

The Second World War was an occasion for immense trauma in many countries around the world. But the case of France, for a number of reasons, has always particularly fascinated me. One of the books I’ve been reading recently is Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. It was published this year in English (US edition is by Knopf, UK edition by Chatto and Windus), and first published in France in 2004.

Suite Française is remarkable because it is a work of fiction set in the Second World War actually written during the first two years of the German occupation of France. It is quite possibly the first recorded reaction by any novelist to the events of that conflict. After escaping from Paris with her husband and young daughters following the German invasion of France in June 1940, Némirovsky set out to write a fictional account of the events she saw around her. Her plan was to write the story in a series (”suite”) of 5 novellas that charted the course of the war.

Only the first two novellas were completed, because on July 13th 1942, French police arrested Némirovsky. She was of Russian Jewish descent. A series of trains took her to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus barely a month later. Her husband was similarly arrested a few months later and perished in the gas chambers. The two Némirovsky children survived the war, passed between a series of families and safehouses around France. Némirovsky’s last written work remained in the possession of her daughters after the war, largely unread for 50 years until her daughter Denise decided to transcribe the two novellas and get them published.

When Suite Française finally appeared in France in 2004, it caused a sensation. It won the Prix Renaudot that year, the first time the prize had been awarded for a posthumous work. Not only were the circumstances of its writing remarkable and poignant, but the book itself is fantastic. The communities described are disrupted, scattered. They are trying to gain back something like normality. Suite Française reveals a full spectrum of human behaviour and emotion in the midst of chaos and dislocation – cowardice, pride, kindness, betrayal, courage.

Which sort of (I hope) brings us to the songs of Charles Trénet, a singer and songwriter who didn’t quite emerge from the war with his reputation intact. Like most professional entertainers in occupied France, he was obliged to make certain accomodations with the German authorities in order to ensure he continued to find work… he performed in French P.O.W. camps in Germany, as well as for German officers and officials in Paris. And as a gay man at risk of denunciation, imprisonment or deportation himself, he was barely in a position to be defiant.

Just as Irène Némirovsky found a way to confront the reality of her world at war through piercing prose fiction, Trénet’s wartime recordings sometimes sound like attempt to describe his own situation, within the confines of the censors.

Trénet’s stock and trade were songs that often leant heavily on nostalgia or on an image of the imagined Douce France, but Que reste-t-il de nos amours? (”What Remains of our Loves?”), from 1943, seems especially heavy with regret for a past that seemed so much happier.

In Swing, Troubadour, (1941), Trénet’s self-reference is perhaps even more obvious: the portrait of a brokenhearted musician who sings love songs even though his own spirit is no longer in it…

Swing Troubadour,
Rien pour toi n’peut effacer
Les beaux jours du passé même si dans ta voix y a d’la joie.
Quand tu souris,
Tout comm’ toi, je pleure en secret
Un rêv’ chérie,
Un amour timide et discret.
Moi j’n’ai plus rien
Mais, comm’ toi j’chant’ pour mon bien
La plus belle des chansons d’amour,
Swing Troubadour.

Swing Troubadour
Nothing can erase for you
Those beautiful days past, even if your voice is full of joy
When you smile
Just like you I cry secretly for
A sweet dream
A timid, discreet love
I have nothing left
But like you I sing for my own good
The most beautiful songs of love
Swing Troubadour