Many people can look back to their adolescence and remember a time when adults suddenly start to take them seriously.  They were interested in what you were thinking and began to feed new ideas into your mind which seemed so much at variance with your upbringing.  Different values have to be weighed and either rejected or assimilated.  Sometimes new directions are taken which drive you into a completely unpredictable course, leading you into a career or a lifelong interest which would never have happened if you had not met these people at a key time of your life.

In The Water Theatre, we meet war reporter Martin Crowther who has had a relationship with the Brigshaw family since school days.  As a bright but uncultured Yorkshire boy, he became friendly with Adam Brigshaw who invited him to the family home where he fell into a set of relationships which would last through the rest of his life.  Adam’s father Hal , an idealist politician with an eye for world development introduces Adam to the challenges of forming lasting governments in newly independent African nations and becomes a lifetime inspiration.  Adam’s sister Marina is a perplexing beauty who entrances Martin, but is far from ready to settle for one man despite Martin’s obvious interest.  And Adam’s mother Grace takes a motherly interest in Adam which seems to be mixed with a variety of emotions, not all of them maternal.

An Umbrian vista over Assisi

But the main story here does not take place in 1960s Yorkshire, but in a more recent Umbria, to which Martin (by now a hard-bitten and emotionally-hardened journalist) has travelled in order to persuade a much older Adam and Marina to come home to visit their dying father, who seeks a reconciliation with his alienated children whose lives he has blighted by years of callousness and betrayal.

Martin hasn’t met Marina or Adam for many years, and he doesn’t know what he is coming to in Umbria.  He finds an elegant estate run by a Countess, Gabriella, who seems to be running a mysterious retreat centre based on a resurgent classical Greek religion.  Marina and Adam are mysteriously unavailable and Martin gains the impression from Gabriella that Martin must prepare himself before he is allowed to meet them.  Are they members of a cult?   Gabriella seems to be a charming hostess but hints at mysteries which can only be revealed to those who have been through an initiation process.

At this point I must leave the story for fear of divulging too much.  The Umbrian adventure is interleaved with the story of Adam’s life, which seems to have been lived throughout in reference to the Brigshaws.  Some shattering events happened, leaving Martinwasted and emotionally crippled.  And misunderstandings have left a legacy of bitterness which colour the present broken friendships.  Martin is not even sure that he wants to try to repair them, but his loyalty to his mentor Hal compels him to try to at least reconcile Hal with his children.

The water theatre of the title is a remarkable creation.  I have done the usual Googling and Wikipedia-ing and apparently a water theatre is a landscaping feature in which water cascades down a flight of steps such as this one form the Villa Torlonia  in Frascati -

Villa Torlonia - Teatro delle acque.

The water theatre in Linsday Clarke’s book is an even grander affair with caverns and waterfalls which provide a marvellous setting for the emotional upheavals which Martin must undergo in order to cleanse and heal his past.

The background to the book is painted on a vast canvas, contrasting Adam’s dour youth  in the hills of Yorkshire with the exotic hand-crafted gardens of an Umbrian villa.  I found the images presented in the book to be vivid and long-lasting and I have to admire Lindsay Clarke’s almost architectural skill in describing the Umbrian locations with its old stone courtyard’s, its cascading fountains and hidden bowers.

As I read The Water Theatre I was reminded of Susan Howatch’s book Glittering Images in her Starbridge series which an out-of-control clergyman has to go through a painful process of unravelling in order to find the healing he so desperately needs. Martin Crowther goes through a similar process of unravelling and Linsday Clarke has the same ability as Susan Howatch to involve the reader in the process so that the fictional character’s journey becomes the reader’s journey.  The Water Theatre is a compelling read which deserves a success I strongly hope it achieves.

Images of Assisi and Frascati from Wikimedia Commons with links back to originals

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I’ve had a long period of reading a couple of books a week, but recently a few longer novels have been arriving on my doorstep and its not quite so easy to keep up the flow of articles here.  I’ll finish The Water Theatre in the next couple of days but then if I read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and perhaps another Balzac as I intend to then review posts to A Common Reader may dry up for a week or two.

A brave man . . .

Anyway, to get back to our river trip, we were moored up at the end of the day when a boat came towards us carrying a rather unusual passenger on the prow.  Fortunately my camera was suffering from what is known in photography circles as “blown highlights” otherwise I may have had to be more careful about posting the photograph here.   The boat was coming into the outskirts of Reading so we were wondering whether the man would continue his voyage in the same state of undress.

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It has long been understood that eye-witnesses to an event can record very different accounts of what happened.   In a complex event like an apparent suicide, people will come up with a variety of descriptions of the event, even going to the extent of asking “was he pushed?” when it is clear that the subject jumped voluntarily.  But not only do witnesses observe things differently, when you add in the desire to cover-up, for reasons of self-interest, getting to the bottom of what really happened can be an almost impossible task.

In All Men Are Liars, a journalist, Terradillos, is investigating the life of the Argentinian writer, Alejandro Bevilacqua who seems to have jumped off the balcony of his apartment in Madrid.  Terradillos interviews four people, their accounts of the events leading up to Bevilacqua’s death being compiled into this book with its bluntly stated premise in the title – all men are liars.  But are they?  Is one account true, or more true than the others?  Or are they all incorrect, but in different ways?  It is up to the reader to find out, for even Terradillos, who has his say in the last chapter may or may not be able to finally solve this conundrum.

The four accounts build up to make a fascinating picture in themselves.  The author himself is the first interviewee – I quite enjoy the concept of authors appearing in their own books!  After all, Manguel is a noted Argintinian writer so he would have known  Bevilacqua well.  Manguel speaks of Bevilacqua’s sincerity – “if he gave you his word, you felt obliged to take it, and it would never occur to you that this might be an empty gesture”.  Manguel explains that after Bevilacqua’s death he could no longer live in Madrid and moved to Poitiers to get away from the ghost of Alejandro Bevilacqua.

Manguel tells the life story of Bevilacqua in some detail.  We read of life in Argentina at the time when the background to living a literary life was the torture chamber.  But after a time of interrogation Bevilacqua relocated to Madrid where he hitched up with his girlfriend Andrea.  While going through one of Bevilacqua’s bags looking for dirty washing, Andrea stumbles upon a manuscript, In Praise of Lying.  Assuming it to be an original work by her lover, she decides to get it secretly published, this decision sparking off a chain of circumstances which forms the core of the book.

It all sounds so plausible.  Manguel’s account has a ring of truth, and the reader easily falls into believing it to be accurate.  But the second interviewee casts a heavy weight of doubt on Manguel’s story – “Whatever he told you about Alejandro Bevilacqua, I’ll bet my right arm it’s wrong”.  At this stage I began writing down page references which contradicted Manguel’s story.  This book is a puzzle and you need to keep cross checking to find the flaws in the four accounts of Bevilacqua’s life and death.  By the end we get a marvellous picture of the literary circle in Madrid of which Bevilacqua was a part, but not one of its members is wholly reliable and perhaps they all have reasons for wanting to twist things their way in their interviews with Terradillos – even to the extent of casting doubt on whether he actually wrote the manuscript which Andrea found in his bag.

Manguel’s love of words is revealed throughout the book and I found myself stumbling on passages that need unpacking at a slower speed than others:

Anyone who has set words down on a page never loses the habit of writing, even when not writing.  The calligraphy persists, like an army of ants that can’t be stopped.  Behind closed eyelids, the words gather, call one another, pair off.  An anthill of letters bursts forth and pursues me, black and red battalions which attack one another, get mixed up in the sand . . a dictionary has launched itself into the inconceivable space in which I am walking.

By the end of the book I think I had drawn my own conclusions about how and why Bevilacqua met his death.  But certainty is a difficult thing in a case like this – what would a jury member decide – perhaps we are confronted with the age-old question, “What is Truth?”.  Terradillos, the journalist draws an interesting thought from his investigation – even self-perception may be an impossible task for, “how can one know, among all the various faces reflected back to us by mirrors, which one represents us most faithfully and which one deceives us?  From our tiny point in the world, how can we observe even ourselves without false perceptions?

I enjoyed this book greatly and wish that many other people would read it and publish their thoughts on it.  I think I read it carefully, watching out for inconsistencies and downright lies.  But did I miss something?  I think I’ll just go over that second interview again and check those references to what Bevilacqua did when he first came to Madrid.

A word about the translation – Miranda France has done a fine job in translating this book from Spanish to English.  I don’t know enough Spanish to be able to comment on the accuracy of the translation, but the voice is totally convincing, using the sort of elegant prose which you would expect a lover of words like Manguel to write.

As always with Alma Books, the production values are high, from cover design to type-face and paper-quality.  All Men are Liars feels like the substantial read that it turned out to be.

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We are on undramatic ground with The Perfect Nazi.  Martin Davidson’s maternal grandfather, Bruno Langbehn was an SS officer but did not rise to great prominence, his only significance perhaps being that he was committed to the Nazi party from its inception.  ”Bruno”, as the author refers to him throughout the book, was far from being a glamorous figure, being an artisan dentist by profession, and fairly clueless about his work for the SS.  Indeed, the final chapters of the book quote an official document which, the author tells us, provides little more than “a damning portrait of Bruno’s incompetence, his manifest self-importance and his blindness to the futility of the work itself”. It is therefore obvious from the start that this book is not going to provide any great new insights into the operation of the SS or the inner workings of the Nazi Party.

This book is not without its problems, the main one being the paucity of the source material. Davidson has some teenage memories of his grandfather. His grandmother and her sister seemed to be reluctant to talk about the war and events leading up to it, and it was only Bruno’s second wife who seemed able to provide useful personal reminiscences. The documentation of Bruno’s life seems very scant, consisting of a list of names from an SS directory containing a one line entry for Bruno, and also a set of twenty-five pages of personnel records, most of it badly burned and virtually illegible. The most significant find was a bundle of documents connected to Bruno’s application to join the SS, including Bruno’s lebenslauf (a hand-written CV), which sought to persuade the SS to take him on.

With so little original material to go on, Davidson is forced to make much of very little.  For example, when his cousin gives him a 1942 Berlin telephone directory, containing a one-line entry for Bruno, he writes,

The documents sheer ordinariness made it oddly compelling.  By their very nature phone books are as utilitarian as it is possible for a book to be. And yet how much information they contain.  Bruno’s entry shares the same elements as all the others – name, job title, area he lived in, address and phone numbers. What is so striking reading the page is how pristine, modern and untouched by war Berlin seems to be. A crisp list of names, addresses and telephone numbers depicts a city completely at odds with the burned out husk destroyed by three years of bombing and Russian artillery shells.

This “meditation on a phone book” may be significant for Martin Davidson but it makes for dull reading and is perhaps symptomatic of the smallness of this story.

With such a small amount of material to go on, Davidson falls back on recounting the rise of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler and making assumptions that Bruno took a full part in the many events that supported it.  For example, when dealing with the suppression of political opposition in the years 1933-37, Davidson goes to great lengths to describe the street-fighting and brawling that took place, but writes, “There are no records to tell us what role Bruno specifically played in all this . . . but as horrible as it was for me to picture Bruno in one of those cellars, holding somebody down or wielding a truncheon, it was entirely consistent with what I now knew about SA activities in Berlin”.

The bulk of this book could be summarised as a German history during the 20th century.  This is well-trodden ground and Davidson works hard to place his grandfather at its centre -

• “Shortly after Goebbels arrival in November 1926, Bruno, alongside Berlin’s few hundred other Nazis, found themselves summoned to Party headquarters to be harangued by their new city boss”.
• “Bruno was part of a drunken, seething crowd that had been worked up to a frenzy before Goebbels took to the stage”
• “For Bruno, the Great Depression was the miracle that the Nazis had been looking for”
• “.  . . in spring 1931 it erupted in the single biggest rebellion Hitler ever faced, and Bruno was caught up in the middle of it”
• “(Heinrich Kuhr) had a prickly and agressive streak that made him deeply unpopular with his men, Bruno included”
• “Bruno the political Nazi was busy as Bruno the storm-trooper, elaborating strategy, attending meetings, distributing leaflets and tirelessly hectoring potential voters.”

These statements, and countless others may well be true, but one would expect them to be backed up by a diary entry or other documentation rather than “because he could have, he probably did”.  This simply isn’t good enough for a work that purports to be history.

Sometimes, Davidson quotes a real source and places it so close to Bruno’s name that it at first you almost think that he is quoting his grandfather.  There are many examples of this, even in the footnotes. For example, we read on page 281, note 46:

The SA were, needless to say, in the thick of it, as described by one driven to a state of elated exhaustion, outlining what for Bruno must have become a regular experience: “prior to the elections we did not get to see our beds for two weeks.  Every night we put up posters and guarded them and tore off those of the enemies . . .

It is only a dozen or so lines later that we read “Quoted by Merkl, Political Violence” and realise that once more, these are not actually the words of Bruno but of an anonymous other.

This tactic which is used to beef up a very thin account of his grandfather’s part in the Nazi party becomes quite wearing.  Davidson so often quotes genuine sources in juxtaposition to references to Bruno that I kept having to remind myself that this is NOT Bruno at all, but someone else.

Davidson sometimes takes off into greater flights of fancy, such as imagining his grandfather attending the premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Now -

As Bruno was a senior party member and had actually attended the rally, it is safe to assume there was little chance he missed seeing the film.  As the lights dimmed he knew he was about to savour the greatest cinema experience of his Nazi life . . . I can only imagine with what kind of exultant swagger Bruno left the cinema.  Of course, as exhilarating as he found the film , it merely symbolised all he already knew.

There is so much of this stuff -

“Bruno had been a vociferous and energetic participant in the Nazi struggle for eight long years. His every effort had been directed towards this outcome and he had never flinched from the agresson and sacrifices it had demanded”.

When I read about Bruno’s part in Kristallnacht I wanted to call out to the author, MAYBE, but you don’t KNOW this.  Its all surmise and assumption.  This is not history unless you can document it!  Its really not good enough to say:

It is hard to suppose that Bruno, now an SS officer, hadn’t been drinking with his Kameraden in the familiar Sturmlokal, the Zur Aldstadt, or that he later consciously boycotted the night’s actions, when so many of those had had known, and fought with for over a decade, poured out of the pubs, armed with sledgehammers and cans of petrol.  I will never know whether he chose this of all nights to stay at home and break the habit of a lifetime by refraining from participating in the largest outbreak of anti-Semitism.

Really, this isn’t history at all.  Its mere surmise and I wonder what the point is of writing it, when there are so many first hand accounts of the events of the night which do not rely on assuming that someone participated in it.  Heck, for all we know Bruno was out of action on Kristallnacht attending an SS officer’s dental emergency.  It may be a good exercise in creative writing to imagine what Bruno got up to on that night but it doesn’t shed any new light on the real events that took place.

I am going to have to draw this review to a close.  I see very little merit is rehashing the history of Nazism in Germany and inserting the name of a relative at all the key points. No doubt this is fascinating history for Martin Davidson and his relatives but I can’t see that it would have much interest beyond the confines of his family.  I agree with Martin Davidson that his grandfather probably took part in many of the events described but I would prefer to read the many genuine, first hand accounts. And for a history of the times, there are so many better books its hard to see what the point is in this one.

Note:  In the same month, Penguin also published Bomber County by Daniel Swift, another book about the wartime experiences of a grandfather.  I highly recommended this book in my review.  For a completely different take on Nazi experiences I would recommend My Friend the Enemy by Paul Briscoe, about an English boy who was stranded in German on the outbreak of war and was adopted by a German family.  Now, that’s a real story to tell.

Other reviews

The Herald (Scotland)

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The first two have been reviewed on A Common Reader before – Pygmy by Chuck Pahlaniuk, and Metropole by Ferenc Kerenthy, both of which make for challenging reads – the first being written entirely in a pidgin English as spoken by a North Korean exchange student visting America, and the second being the story of a linguist mistakenly getting off a plane in a country where no recognisable language is spoken.  I should also mention Russel Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker which is written entirely in a  dialect which evolved over the course of 200 years after a nuclear holocaust.

But perhaps the best in my category of “books which mess about with language”, is Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. First published in 2001 and reprinted many times,  this remarkable book consists of a series of letters written by Ella Minnow Pea,  addressed to her cousin and other relatives and friends from her home on the small island of Nollop, which is located in the Atlantic, 21 miles southeast of Charleston, South Carolina.   The island is fictional of course, and is independent of the United States and governed by an autocratic Island Council.  At the centre of the town, stands a cenotaph built in honour of Nevin Nollop, and bearing the inscription “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog“.  Apparently Nevin Nollop invented this pangram (a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet) and it seems to be the town’s only claim to fame.

One day, a tile containing the letter “Z” falls from the tower and smashes on the ground – after all, the tiles have been affixed to the tower for 100 years and the adhesive must be wearing thin.  Far from taking the obvious step of sticking the tile back on the tower, the Council meets and after two days deliberation decided that the descent of the letter Z is a sign from the long-deceased Nevin Nollop that the letter Z must be utterly excised from the town’s communal vocabulary.  These events are described in Ella’s first letter to her cousin Tassie and readers will notice that it contains not a single letter Z (by the way, I learned from Wikipedia that the term for this type of writing, where letters are dropped from the alphabet, is lipogram).

As Ella continues her correspondence we learn more about this strange island and its ways.  It seems to be stuck in a time warp, and while mainland USA, a mere 21 miles away has developed into a thrusting modern economy, the leaders of Nollop have decided to avoid modern technology as much as possible and to devote the island to the persuit liberal arts and education.

Within a few days, the deficiencies in the tile adhesive manifest themselves again and this time the letter Q falls from the cenotaph.  The Council are now committed to their less than obvious explanation for this fall and meet again with the inevitable result:  Q is to be excised from the alphabet.  Poor Ella writes again to her cousin.  We also read various other letters, many covering the controversial decisions to cull the alphabet, and even the new penalties for using non-Nollopian letters. At this stage the letters read fairly normally, but I don’t need to explain that before long more letters are fall to the ground.

By the time the “quick brown fox” pangram reads “Th* **i** *r*wn *ox **mps o**r the la*y **g we are in some trouble!  One of the letters in this chapter reads -

My mother’s sister – the one thee wants – is gone.  She went with her she-heir Tassie to the States.  Tassie was in prison.  The reason:  She sent threats to the High Priests.  They arrest her.  She is happily no longer there.  Alas, neither is the one thee wants.  This is, permit me to relate, why it was important that she exit they hamlet so hastily.  Not the one she imagines.   We eat together tonight, yes?  Two lonely amigas.  I await thee.  Ella

I won’t quote subsequent letters – I think my readers will get the drift.

This book is not as simple as it may seem.  The letters reveal a complex and fascinating society, English-speaking but very different to any other country in the world, due to its isolation.  Mark Dunn has written a book which is interesting on many levels – the way language operates, how a society may develop when cut off from the mainstream, the way in which power can end up in the hands of those who are most unqualified.

Eventually a resolution is found to the conundrum – a test is set for the citizens and if they solve it their alphabet may be restored.  Will they crack the code, or be forever condemned to write incomprehensible notes to each other in signs and symbols?

While this is one of the most intriguing books I have read, Ella Minnow Pea is above all very funny.  I’ve read it several times now and it never ceases to amuse.  I’m pleased to be writing about it and I think this book should be on the shelves of any one interested in language.  I am certain that they will find it an unusual and fascinating read.

Incidentally, for those who haven’t noticed (and it took me some time to), the name Ella Minnow Pea comes form the alphabetic sequence L M N O P.

Wikipedia entry on Ella Minnow Pea

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The style of writing reminds me very much of British crime writer Martina Cole, who’s work contains an equal number of unpleasant characters who also spend their time abusing each other.  At least Martina sets out to shock: her readers know what they are getting, but with its Booker long-listing, surely The Slap is supposed to be something rather better?

Its a long book (483 pages).  Round about page 250 I found myself getting cross with myself for choosing to read a book solely because of its Booker status, but I persevered to the end through further episodes in the lives of this miserable crew.  The Slap is not particularly well written – while it held my interest, it didn’t make me feel good about myself for carrying on with it – this is not an uplifting reading experience!  There are no surprises in it, no character development, nothing to make you feel that the author has any fresh insight into the human condition.  For me, a “good book” will make me feel sorry when it ends and sad to let its characters go – with The Slap I heaved a sigh of relief that I would never have to think of any of these people again.

The story is very simple.  A barbecue is being held, and when two children are fighting, the father of one of them slaps the other child.  The parents of the slapped child are outraged and report the matter to the police.  Each subsequent chapter follows one of the various characters during the period leading up to and immediately after the trial.  Most of the characters are unpleasant in a wide variety of ways, the only exception being an indigenous Australian who has converted to Islam (but even he seems to have no desire to contribute to the resolution of the grievance but only to protect his family from its effects).

What does The Slap say about the human condition?  That humans have no capability for self-awareness, that we act entirely to suit ourselves with no thought for others, that we are bound by our upbringing and our native culture and cannot conceive of ways of thinking other than our own, that we are dominated by our physicality, defined by our need for gratification whether through sex or drugs.

There is no culture in Christos Tsiolkas’ world.  It is a place of  binge-drinking, illicit and often violent sex, the quest for revenge for even the mildest slight.  Its an entertainment culture of mindless existence with no thought for anything beyond parties and pubs.  All the characters are like spoilt children, wanting to get their own way and having no thought about the effect their actions may have on others.  Its nihilism would work if the writer had the skills to present some sort of comment on the lifestyle depicted, but it seems to be nihilism for its own sake, an unremitting stream of negative actions and emotions revealing the hell of human existence with none of the literary style which would make the reader feel there was any point in reading about it.

The author seems to hate his characters and has created a set of stereotypes on whom he can vent his spleen – the self-made businessman who goes home and beats up his wife, the drug-taking teenagers, the earth-mother aging hippy who breast-feeds her three-year old, the conference attenders who screw around while high on speed, the drunk neer-do-well with pretensions to be an artist.  Its a world populated by cardboard characters who all act so totally predictably.

There are innumerable sex scenes in this book, but the sex is usually brutalising, and in typically porno style, the women apparently enjoy it – after one particularly exploitative session the man apologises to his wife and she replies, “but I like making love to you” – thanks Christos, but some of your readers didn’t exactly enjoy reading about it!  On another occasion an adulterous wife invites her husband to treat her like a whore because she feels she “deserves” it.  I don’t think Christos has a high view of women, and the concept of tenderness or consensuality seems alien to him (and why on earth does he have to go into the details of condoms discarded on hotel room floors or the shape of semen stains on soiled pants? – too much detail!).

Most of the writing is straightforward narrative and when he occasionally launches into descriptive passages he find something unpleasant to write about -

His liver’s fucked, Gary had warned her, but she would have known that at once.  His skin was corpse-grey; raw red and purple sores marked his arms.  He wheezed when he spoke and every few minutes his body would double over in racked, tortured coughing,  resulting in thick, globby phlegm he would spit onto the ground or into a tissue.

Even the landscape is somewhere you’d never want to visit -

The unrelenting flat suburban grid of the northern suburbs surrounded them.  The further they drove, the more Rosie thought the world around them was getting uglier, the heavy grey of the sky weighing down on the landscape, crushing down on them.  The lawns and nature strips they passed were yellowing, grim, parched.  The natural world seemed leached of colour.  She thought it was because this world was so far from the breath of the ocean, that it was starved of air.

When he moves on to the older characters I hoped for some insight, some critique of the younger generation which seems to be bent on tearing themselves apart, but I found no respite from the unpleasantness.  When 68 year old Maonlis is confronted by a daughter in law who speaks her mind, we read -

He straigthened his back.  He must have looked fierce because instantly she perceived her mistake and recoiled from him.  He wanted to grab her hair, pull her face to the table, beat her as if she was a little girl.

I’ve written enough about The Slap.  Its a nasty and unpleasant book, with no redeeming features in my view.  Everyone else seems to think its wonderful – good luck to them, but for me its my “worst read so far” of 2010.

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