WORD Christchurch: Politics of Fiction and I and I and I

WORD Christchurch: Politics of Fiction
WORD Christchurch: I and I and I – Charlotte Grimshaw

As elsewhere this weekend the political is explored as the personal and the ways in which we make sense of the world and seek to make it better were explored by Julie Hill in conversation with Brannavan Gnanalingam, Pip Adam and Rajorshi Chakraborti.

I left the sessions on Alt America and The House of Islam with nagging questions about the ways that the politics of the world and the fictions of fascist and radical propaganda are impacting on individuals, and the way that personal fear is driving people towards destructive ideologies. I’ll not go so far as to say I found the answer to all those questions in this session, but the work of the authors here felt like a powerful example of the way that humanity can respond with empathy and thoughtful care, even in the face of terror and misinformation.

There was an echo of the discussion between Kate De Goldi and Charlotte Grimshaw in I and I and I here of the exploration of the ideas of truth and self in Grimshaw’s Mazarine, which looked at the microcosm of the family, truthfulness, communication and power, alongside the macrocosm of the world of “fake news” and a rising tide of facism.

Grimshaw discussed the experience of growing up with a father who wrote, and seeing the events of their lives fictionalised over and over again, and through her protagonist (an author herself) raises the question of where the self resides and whether and how we exist. Grimshaw discussed how her personal creative process is anything but introspective, that she writes almost as if the stories are being told to her by aliens, though De Goldi’s responses showed the degree to which her work does inspire introspection, investigation and reflection in the reader on the existential matters at hand.

Rajorshi Chakraborti spoke of his interest in writing stories of the ‘existentially incompetent’ – Grimshaw’s work seems to move towards further layers of abstraction in terms of existence, while Chakraborti, Gnanalingam and Adam all spoke in their own way of using their fiction and indeed the political act of living day-to-day to take people who suffer disenfranchisement and oppression from the abstract and into the consciousness of those who engage with them. If fascism and extremism arrive out of the dehumanisation of Others, there was a sense in The Politics of Fiction of the way that we can tell stories and live our lives in a way that reminds us of each individual’s humanity and how precious that is.

Reviewed by Brett Johansen

 

Book Review: Sodden Downstream, by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Available in bookshops nationwide.

Sodden Downstream has one of the best high concepts of any recent New Zealand novel; a major storm hits Wellington and all public transport has stopped, but Sita, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, has to get from the Hutt Valley to the city or risk losing her zero-hour cleaning job. Along the way, she’s helped by a varied cast of economically struggling characters also caught in the storm.

The novel’s a tonal departure for author Brannavan Gnanalingam, whose previous books have been more comic, and it’s a mixed success as a genre experiment. I liked the crisp prose style, but it’s often needlessly explicit, as if unconfident it’s getting the point across. There’s a good paragraph about excessive WINZ scrutiny spoiled by the blandly didactic sentence ‘Struggling people weren’t allowed to make mistakes’, a point the rest of the paragraph was making perfectly well.

Sodden Downstream’s narration is limited to Sita’s perspective, but the interior monologue we get doesn’t always gel with the actions of the character. Satirist Gnanalingam wants Sita insightful, while the plot needs her naïve; sometimes she’ll express confusion with New Zealand social norms, then a few sentences later make a wry, knowing observation about them. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with her being a smart, funny character, but her inconsistent cultural vocabulary leads to moments where you’re sharply aware you’re not listening to a barely-getting-by refugee but a middle-class Wellington intellectual. At one point she says her cooking wasn’t going to get a Michelin star, which I thought was one of those bits of cultural knowledge limited to people who had to wear ties to high school; I’d assumed a restaurant having one star meant it was rubbish and had to look it up.

Another voice issue is that we just don’t feel the urgency the plot needs. The mock-epic needs the same amount of tension as a straight quest narrative, especially when the tone’s as serious as it’s meant to be here, but Sodden Downstream feels almost casual when it’s meant to be pressing. There’s a very effective punctuationless chapter near the end where Sita flashes back to the civil war, but prior to this we don’t get that much of a sense of the strain she’s under.

This might be by design; what’s the trial she’s facing now compared to those she’s faced in the past? But it creates a major technical problem – if the novel’s about how bad things are now, and also how much worse they were before, it devalues the current struggle from a narrative perspective, which is the exact opposite of the book’s political intent.

Sita doesn’t set out on her quest until about 50 pages into the 180 page novel, a structural choice I can’t see the logic behind. This is a novel with a clean, stark premise, but it’s bogged down with a conventional expository first act instead of starting the story with the clock ticking. Because the details of Sita’s stressful home life are kept separate from the main action, we nearly forget about them once things are moving, and we don’t feel the connection between her life and her journey – we don’t have a strong enough sense of what she’s fighting for. If these details were spread throughout the story they’d cement that connection, and they’d be more interesting because we’re already identifying with her struggle. It’d help with the voice problems too – wouldn’t a woman in Sita’s situation be more likely to fret about the home life she might lose than strangers’ micro-aggressive questions about cricket?

The other characters are types, but generally well-drawn ones. Gnanalingam, a Lower Hutt native, has a great feeling for the area’s personalities and a precise ear for its idiom; a scene where Sita meets a just-released prisoner is especially good. The baddies are handled with less grace, though. They’re cheap targets, for one; cops, SUV drivers, WINZ. They’re painted a little more sympathetically than the monster in Alien, a little less sympathetically than Jew Süss. They’re moustache-twirling bastards, devoid of charisma, uninterested in even trying to conceal their essential bastardry. When Sita’s boss calls her, he uses the word ‘odium’ five times in two pages as a power move and calls her by a hated nickname every other sentence.

Would someone really act like this? I conceded they might, even that the specificity of ‘odium’ suggests it might be taken straight from a real-life anecdote. But realist fiction is a technical trick, a genre with a set of arbitrary conventions; it doesn’t matter if something is real, it has to feel real. Probably the rich are as awful as Gnanalingam makes out, but real life’s allowed to be cartoonish, while realist fiction readers demand complexity even when it’s phony. Especially bad is a scene where a red-faced, tight-uniformed cop bullies a troubled teenager, where he’s so blandly, typically wicked that I felt perversely compelled to take his side, if only to liven up the scene’s tired dynamic. Sure, it’s also a tired, familiar dynamic in real life, but we can at least ask fiction to inject a little specificity into everyday tyranny, right?

The flaws mean that this isn’t as strongly-worded a social critique as you might expect from the premise. Since only consensus villains are called out, readers are unlikely to feel their beliefs have been challenged. The non-villains are often casually, clumsily offensive, but are otherwise lovely, full of compassion and local colour and bonhomie, and there’s a slightly uncomfortable amount of praise of New Zealand from Sita. Chalk this up to cultural cringe, maybe – I was also pretty uneasy with the novel’s extensive use of the word ‘Kiwi’, which I associate mostly with advertisements – but it feels like calculated punch-pulling, as if Gnanalingam’s pre-empting an attack on his patriotic credentials from the Plunket-Hoskings-Garner editorial triangle.

Why can’t Sita be resentful? Why does she have to be the kind of noble, staunchly suffering refugee the Herald might write a fluff piece on? When you write a perfectly virtuous character who’s defined by their social type (and Sita certainly is), you’re playing into the idea that those people have to prove something, that the validity of their suffering is tied to them being better-than-average human beings. Since someone’s personal morality has nothing at all to do with the injustice of their social position, the really radical thing to do would be to write about a refugee who’s a total prick and demonstrate its complete irrelevance to the ethics of refugee policy. It might make for a better yarn, too.

Sodden Downstream is an alright novel with the components of a really good one, but they’ve been carelessly assembled. It could’ve been vastly improved with another serious edit, both for the narrative issues and technical ones – there’s a grammar error in the dedication, two sentences into the book, and more follow. Gnanalingam, a lawyer as well as a prolific essayist, critic and a five-time novelist in six years, feels like he writes as fast as he presumably must, and this work doesn’t seem to have gotten the attention it needed.

I like prolific writers because, as a rule, they’re weirder – more obsessive, less rigorously self-censored, closer to the lumpy, eerie source and further from good taste. But Sodden Downstream isn’t idiosyncratic enough to justify its very fixable issues; it’s not especially formally daring, or politically controversial, or boldly sentimental, or angry, or exuberant. It’s tasteful, and happy to exist in a familiar political conversation rather than push it anywhere. It’d be ideal for a year 11 English class; it’s got humanism and swearing.

Reviewed by Joseph Barbon

Sodden Downstream
by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Published by Lawrence & Gibson
ISBN 9780473410292

AWF17: Must Not Reads

This was another free session, and well attended with as many men as women, plus a wide age range. It had all the indicators of being a lively and humorous session with the panel consisting of the wonderful Stephanie Johnson; scriptwriter and film director Roseanne Liang; lawyer, reviewer and author Brannavan Gnanalingam; and Bill Manhire. The session was chaired by writer and editor Rosabel Tan, although I did feel that she was overshadowed by some of her panelists.

We are regularly inundated with lists of books to read before you die, lists to read on a longhaul flight, lists to read to your grandchildren, top 10 Dickens, top 10 authors you have never heard of, Reader’s Digest 14 books you really should have read by now. I feel the vast majority of these pretentious lists are generally designed to put us all on some sort of guilt trip as to how inadequate we are as intelligent readers. So, I was looking for a bit of light relief in the book lists department, especially in the closing hours of a Sunday afternoon at the end of a very stimulating and busy weekend.

And we got off to a great start with Stephanie’s blast from the past – Harold Robbins. Ooooh yes, this was something most attendees could relate to. Her father was a great HR fan, and Stephanie being the voracious reader she was, first picked up HR at the tender age of ten. I trust her father didn’t know. She then proceeded to read out a seduction scene from one of the novels, which had us all falling about ourselves with laughter, in all its illustrative glory. He was a master with words that Harold Robbins, and in less sophisticated times it made him millions.

Roseanne continued the theme with 50 Shades of Grey – oh dear. Truly awful. She asked how many in the audience had read this, a brave few put up their hands. I can say, hand on heart, I haven’t read any or seen the movies. The subject matter put me off, as well as having teenage daughters at the time it was up to me to set the good example. I felt vindicated when I later found out how truly badly written they were. These were Roseanne’s points too, stressing how atrocious the writing is, the awful story, and her disbelief that is this what woman really want to be reading about. She made some great points, and then asked Bill to read aloud a seduction scene in his best seduction voice. Awful in every possible way, but made the point.

Brannavan, bless him, had never heard of Harold Robbins. But then I would say most of us had never heard of his choice of book – A Bend in the River by VS Naipul. I am not entirely sure why he chose this book, other than his comment that a white writer would never have got away with writing a book such as this. Naipul won a Nobel Prize for this book, which in Brannavan’s opinion treats Africa as a pathological place where violence is always present. He made a comparison later in the session to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Bill wanted to ‘dredge up old grievances’ as stated in the Festival programme, with specific mention of old high school teachers and their dubious expertise in adequately teaching poetry. A recently received newsletter from his local garden centre really got up his nose. Time to plant spring bulbs and ‘Daffodils’ by Wordsworth the perfect device. But shock horror, oh no, someone had centered all the lines, rather than printing it in its original format. Bill hates line centred text. And to add insult to the already injured, the whole poem was in italic font. In Bill’s opinion, graphic designers and italic typographers are the true enemies of poetry, more so than high school teachers.

Stephanie introduced her second offering – Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, a previous Writers’ Festival guest. This sounded a bit heavy, all about Jesus the man, rather than the pivotal religious figure he became after his death. Stephanie explained that this book, although extremely well written, researched, very powerful and heartfelt, did negatively impact on her own Christian faith.

Bill also had a book in the Jesus theme, and this sounded very bizarre. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study by Milton Rokeach. Bill read this when he was a young man, and I am not at all surprised it has stayed with him over the years. Rokeach was a social psychologist, and took three paranoid schizophrenics who each believed he was Jesus Christ. He put them in a room together and observed what happened. Bill said that something like this would not get past an ethics committee today – it was 1959 – but it did leave a great impression.

Roseanne stayed with the young women theme in her choice of Lena Dunham’s memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Many in the audience would not have known who Lena Dunham is, so that took a bit of explaining. Roseanne had been a great fan of Dunham, seeing her as an excellent role model for young women with her TV show Girls, but the book fell completely flat because she simply had absolutely nothing to say. Dining out on the fact that she is Lena Dunham and that is it.

There was some discussion on how it is to read books enjoyed as a young person, and reread them some years later. Brannavan mentioned Jack Kerouac’s On the Road which he enjoyed immensely when he was a younger man, and now not so much. Which led Bill to mention Enid Blyton. If there was ever an author that grown-ups found all sorts of things wrong with, and conversely, whose books children absolutely adored – talk about polarising – then Enid Blyton is it. Yes, there was so much wrong with what this woman wanted to say, but oh did she write some great stories! Bill mentioned The Magic Faraway Tree, chock full of imagery and the tree climbing to heaven. But children don’t see the heavy messaging, they simply see a fantasy magical story, and isn’t that what reading for pleasure is all about – taking us someplace else.

This was an interesting session, and always good to get others’ views on books they have read, especially such a well-read and articulate group of writers as this one. The dominant themes were sex and religion, and some politics would have completed the trifecta. For me, I would have liked perhaps that the chosen books were a little more well known, which would have made the audience feel more involved in the discussion taking place, rather than as observers watching an impromptu show.

Attended and reviewed by Felicity Murray

AWF17: Must Not Reads featured Brannavan Gnanalingam, Stephanie Johnson, Roseanne Liang and Bill Manhire. The session was chaired by Rosabel Tan
Sunday, 21 MAY 2017, 4:30pm – 5:30pm

 

Book review: Credit in the Straight World, by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Available at selected bookstores nationwide.

This novel starts promisingly. Written in first person, its narrator George Tolland describes himself as “born deaf, partially blind, and I suppose mute, all of which was due to plain bad luck if you believe in luck, and syphilis if you don’t”. The voice is sassy, engaging, skeptical, and clear, what’s more — none of this ‘every character sounds the same’ business that you might find in another novel. Soon, we are introduced to George’s brother, Frank Tolland, and their town, a make-believe (and yet all too believable) Canterbury community called Manchester. All sketched out in quick, wry strokes, Gnanalingam’s characterization of the history and character of Manchester is absorbing, and the satirical tone of the novel is set as we enter the  the Tollands’ worlds and indeed, town.

As the narrative sweeps through the twentieth century, and the Tollands’ family history in Manchester – heading towards its final culmination in Frank Tolland’s immense, Allan-Hubbard-like success and his similarly Hubbard-like downfall, – we are treated to the same clear-cut characterization, satirical humour and descriptions of small town, close-minded life that we encountered in the Prologue. Pauline, Frank’s wife, was a character who always piqued my interest whenever she appeared, given her particular brand of potty-mouthed, passive-aggressive subversion of her husband. And George himself proved to be good company—he’s a brilliant person, well read, sarcastic and relatable.

As I said, this novel starts promisingly, and it certainly has a lot of the elements that make up a good novel. Why then did it not quite hit the spot? Ultimately, I think it’s a question of variety. The abiding impression I got from this book was one of a river streaming past with very little change in speed or pace, direction or intensity. This feeling was probably compounded by Gnanalingam’s extremely long sentences. Though it’s clear that this is an expression of George’s character (George explicitly says, “I would much rather have people read me writing free and flowing sentences”), the preponderance of these kinds of sentences definitely contributed to the feeling of sameness, and the sheer length of some of the sentences made these sentences sometimes hard to follow.

In terms of pace, however, this does change as we near the climax, and I began to engage with the characters in a different way—for example, I began to wonder how George had been so incapable of seeing Frank’s foibles, and this injected a nice note of doubt into the narrative. But overall the stream of this novel stayed too much the same. Nevertheless, this novel still deserves to be read and bought, for its wonderful characterisation and sly tone.

Reviewed by Feby Idrus

Credit in the Straight World
by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Published by Lawrence and Gibson Publishing Collective

Book Review: You should have come when you were not here, by Brannavan Gnanalingam

Available now in some bookstores

For those of us like myself and Brannavan Gnanalingam, who adore the nooks and crannies of history and have found Paris too lacklustre, instead hosting a city of loneliness, You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here will be a story to relate to and sympathise with. It tells the lonely tale of Veronica, a thirty-something asexual female journalist from New Zealand who travels to Paris late as a freelance journalist only to find the city indifferent to and from her.

Veronica is a lonesome (although not lonely) and apathetic character whose disdain for adhering to mainstream activities takes the story to obtuse and more interesting experiences of the lovers’ city. Veronica’s story depicts some of Paris’ least commendable areas, people, and tendencies, and is studded with historical footnotes, often expertly woven as mysterious characters drawn from Paris’ long and intricate history, moonlighting almost as figments of Veronica’s unconventional imagination. Gnanalingam has his own unique flair, and it is his creative storytelling – raw and economical, painting beautifully truthful pictures – that most draws the reader in. Though I would not recommend it to the rose-tinted Paris-virgin (for fear of killing romantic enthusiasm), those who have experienced Paris enough to both love and lament the elegant city will find the writing sufficiently quirky and entertaining, and the tale best left to permeate.

Gnanalingam set out to write a more austere account of Paris, to balance out the city’s excessive amorous embellishments in popular culture. Sometimes I think people say they loved Paris simply because it is pas acceptable to say one didn’t find it to his liking. You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here dares to defy the rose-tinted glasses and reveals the reality of Paris: sometimes this is glamorous and elegant, but more often it depicts exactly what Gnanalingam aimed for: “a segregated, austere, and above all, disorientating place.”   

Despite the intelligent charm of Gnanalingam’s writing and his honest depictions of Paris, one cannot help but feel frustrated by the absolute inaction and apathy of Veronica, who, having spent ten years managing to get to Europe, now spends months in Paris without making any proper friends or money or accomplishments. Veronica actively avoids the main sites of Paris with a sort of hipster high-brow, while managing to achieve little else anyway. Veronica is clearly most comfortable on her own, but her lack of revered relationships with anybody in the city – even family and friends from home – is difficult to swallow, especially given the lack of anything else of substance in her Parisian life. If Veronica is surprised at Paris’ indifference to her, she does little to demonstrate that shock, and nor does she adapt or try to change it.

The finale of a quaint and delicately-woven story either mars or saves it: the twist is stomach churning and dégoûtable, but essentially shock lifts the story and leaves the reader turning the tale over on your tongue and in your mind. You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here is a lonely tale but Gnanalingam’s artistic writing will keep you turning pages and the book will transpire a heavy sense of contemplativeness. In a good way.

Review by Abbie Treloar

You should have come when you were not here
by Brannavan Gnanalingam
Published by Lawrence & Gibson Publishing collective
ISBN Unknown