Across the River and into the Trees [1950] by Ernest Hemingway

The 'Papa' Hemingway persona was well established by the time of the publication of Across the River and into the Trees in 1950. He has forged a bold new style, deeply American and symbolic; his adventures in Spain, the First World War, 20s Paris and the African safari were well documented; his hard living antics of heavy drinking, boxing and bull-fighting were well established. And the public were eager for more. It is not surprising then that the publication of ARIT - a pessimistic, maudlin love story of an ageing colonel and a young Italian aristocrat, empty of the expected scenes of tense action and heroism - was greeted with a mute, if not hostile response. The book still became a best seller: surely it was destined to, how could a novel by such a literary force fail to be? 

However, the critics mauled it. Here was, according to the majority of reviewers, Hemingway as a pastiche of himself. His repetitious conversations about true actions, his lovers opining that they loved each other in every other sentence, the 'silly' woman in thrall to the older man, the thinly veiled autobiography: it had all been done before and reviewers were starting to doubt the authenticity of Hemingway's studied prose. The novel was disregarded and forgotten, especially after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea two years later, a novel that seemed to encapsulate everything Hemingway had been striving for in roughly 100 pages.

ARIT has a reputation as a disappointment: a book for Hemingway enthusiasts and little more. It is a shame that this reputation still pervades because, with the exception of the dragging middle section, ARIT is perhaps Hemingway's most challenging novel, one that sees him writing in a very different perspective than before.

There is deep hurt in the novel. Colonel Cantwell - "half a century" old and visiting Venice after the end of the war - dwells upon the war and the mistakes that cost him the command and lives of his regiment. The desolation and scars of the war abound the book: figuratively in Caldwell's damaged hand and heart condition, metaphorically in the empty, wind swept shell of a wintry Venice.  Cantwell is bitter about how his fortunes were dictated not by his actions, which he cannot fault, but by the forces of power that swept the war along. The duck-shoot that bookends the novel is stunning analogy for the bombing raids and campaigns that ruined Cantwell and his regiment: a pre-planned mass movement of shooters, positioned for optimum impact, reliant on good fortune and vulnerable to the unknowable factors of nature and meddling outsiders.

Cantwell's dream are tied up in Renata, a beautiful 19 year old Venetian aristocrat . She is his, yet she is unattainable, as he knows from the outset that he is soon to die. His resignation to life and listlessness infects her:

"What is your greatest sorrow?"

"Other people's orders," he said. "What's yours?"

"You."

 The section of ARIT focusing on their affair can be tiresome. They are filled with endlessly vacuous conversations and strange in-jokes. It is here that most readers must give up or become exasperated. It is hard to get over the shallowness and ridiculousness of some of these scenes, hidden behind the laconic poetry of Hemingway's sentences, especially the excruciating sex scene that takes place in a gondola, the dirty talk replaced by the language of military maneuvers:

"My darling," he said, "My well beloved. Please"

"No. Just hold me very tight and hold the high ground, too."

The Colonel said nothing, because he was assisting, or had made an at of presence, at the only mystery that he believed in except the occasional bravery of man.

"Please don't move," the girl said. "Then move a great amount."

Hemingway is often criticised for his depiction of women. His women are often facilitators or conduits through which the heroes can reach their objectives. They seem to serve the men and dote on them. This says a lot about Hemingway's men that is not necessarily flattering. They are often sentimental and needy (Frederic Henry and his reliance on his nurse lover, Catherine) or wearying of maintaining their public shows of strength and honour, only able to admit their fears and hopes when in the warm embrace of a lover (Robert Jordan, whose cloying childlike love affair with the gypsy girl Maria contrasts with his no-nonsense guerrilla fighter image). Colonel Cantwell's relationship with Renata contains that similar neediness and reliance, but the relationship seems too far-fetched, too much the fantasy of an ageing author. Renata is rich, young, vibrant. She is intelligent and out-going, but it is hard to find a reason why she would be so besotted with Cantwell. There is a brief allusion to Renata's father and his recent death - is her relationship with Cantwell a replacement for her lost father? The suggestion is crass and Hemingway is capable of better. The relationships throughout his novels have never been as two-dimensional as they are sometimes portrayed, but here they are.

However, once the final day arrives the novel comes into it's own. If only Hemingway had started here and cut the first 100 or so pages the novel could be considered a masterpiece in miniature, a terse and compact ode to the aftermath of war. The latter half of the novel sees the lovers together, but this time Cantwell, egged on by Renata, recounts his memories of the war. Several chapters pass as he relates events back to her, explaining his colloquial English, the two of them staring at the patterns of the canal reflected onto the ceiling of their room by the sinking sun. Here are several chapters of sustained brilliance. Time stands still and peace settles on the lovers, as Cantwell remembers:

He looked up at the light on the ceiling and he was completely desperate at the remembrance of his loss of his battalions, and of individual people. He could never hope to have such a regiment, ever. He had not built it. He had inherited it. But, for a time, it had been his great joy. Now every second man in it was dead and the others nearly all were wounded. In the belly, the head, the feet or the hands, the neck, the back, the lucky buttocks, the unfortunate chest and the other places. Tree burst wounds hit men where they would never be wounded in open country. And all the wounded were wounded for life.

It is this second half that is so different to Hemingway's other works. Never before has he created a character so enveloped in the past and the results of his actions. He blames them on others, on the military bureaucracy, on ambitious men with power. His constant assertions that others caused him to lose his regiment suggest a reluctance to address a hidden truth - does he harbour guilt? Does he blame himself for the loss of so many lives? Is he sickened by the part he played? Hemingway's previous novels famously examined men's attempts at 'grace under fire' but here he shows us the depressing aftermath. It is a telling novel, one worthy of reconsideration, written by a man confronting old age and a fight with depression that would eventually consume him.

The Sunset Limited [2006] by Cormac McCarthy

Released in the same year as The Road, an immediate 21st century masterpiece, it's no wonder that The Sunset Limited slipped by unnoticed. Lazily compared to Beckett on the sleeve (not every dramatic conversation about death has to be "redolent of Beckett") the play concerns a conversation between 'Black' and 'White'; the former an evangelical ex-con and ex-addict, the latter a cynical, suicidal professor. You quickly learn that Black saved White from leaping in front of a train earlier on and has brought him back to his flat in an attempt at persuading him that life is worth living. Failure means that White takes a walk back to the station to face the oncoming rush of The Sunset Limited.

As befits a work described as a "novel in dramatic form" the play doesn't contain much in the shape of actual drama. Instead McCarthy presents an open, often one-sided, conversation that explores the dichotomy inherent in McCarthy's work. White an unflinching, and world weary nihilist, believes he has seen everything that humanity is capable of and is appalled; Black holds an unswerving faith in God and redemption, his belief in God is mystical and focused on perceptions of right and wrong. Black tries to instill his passion in White, realising that without this White will succumb to suicide.

McCarthy manages to keep this doom-laden conceit compelling enough, with Black's humanism and folksy charm just about keeping the narrative from spilling over into a mordant abyss. Yet, as with most of McCarthy's work, the conceptualising of death is often beautiful in its starkness. There are moments of nihilism that are shocking in their logic. White's closing statements, delivered after hearing all the evidence Black can muster, comes as a complete rebuttal of religion and brotherhood:

"I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter."

The Road had a relatively simple narrative, one that allowed McCarthy to focus more on the father-son relationship at the novels heart, which in turn allowed him to discuss themes of death, despair, renewal and hope. The Sunset Limited follows this pattern and in its reductive plot and setting allows many ideas and emotions to come to the fore without distraction. McCarthy's next novel is reported to concern a young man's coming to terms with his sister's suicide, another simple yet rich scenario. It will be interesting to see how much further McCarthy can refine his beautiful and affecting style.

Travels in the Scriptorium [2006] by Paul Auster

Having finally finished War and Peace I've decided to read lots of short books in quick succession to get my yearly quota up. I'm a newcomer to Auster and decided now is as good a time as any to break into his ever growing bibliography with Travels in the Scriptorium, a compact post-modern experiment running to 130 pages.

I'm a sucker for tricksy novels and self reflexive narratives and, as much as it is a cliché, I do enjoy authors writing themselves into their own novels, with Kurt Vonnegut's repeated personal appearances being a particular favourite. However, what I didn't realise when I started the novel is that all of the characters in the book are drawn from previous Auster novels, apart from the protagonist Mr Blank. This put me at somewhat of a unusual position whilst reading the book as I began to ask myself who are these minor fleeting characters with their mysterious vaguely alluded to histories and backstories. In such an allegorical book I started to read in to each character, trying to pin some sort of emotion or association on to them. This proved to be something of a dead end, as after finishing the book I found out that they were old Auster characters, and then everything fell in to place...

Mr Blank, an old man, finds himself in a bare room, apparently locked in, with no idea of how he got there or where he is. In the room there is a bed, desk, some paper and several manuscripts of half written stories. He is visited intermittently by people who obviously know him personally and have been had their lives seriously affected by Mr Blank's actions. Mr Blank guesses that he sends these people on 'missions' much like a spy master, often to unsafe or dangerous locations. He spends the day thinking about his position in the room, promising to himself that he will work at unlocking its secret, but never managing it due to a number of distractions.

A great deal of the novel takes the form of Mr Blank reading through one of the manuscripts which takes the form of an unfinished alternative history novel written by John Trause. Apparently John Trause (and anagram for Auster...) was a character in the New York Trilogy, Auster's breakthrough collection - again something I missed in my ignorance. Mr Blank is tasked to complete the manuscript himself, to come up with a middle and an end to the story, a feat of 'imaginative reasoning' designed to test his 'emotional reflexes'. Auster uses this subplot to toy with the concepts of clichés and literary forms in which the reader is comforted by a familiar plot structure (much in the same way that I'm constantly compelled by Westerns and film noir, even though they all roughly follow the same trajectory). At one point, the labels on all of the items in the room are switched somehow, and Mr blank has to re-order them so that everything makes sense. I'll admit, this section of the novel lost me, as I'm not too sure of the symbolism behind the labels and their sudden randomisation.

The novel then is a (obvious?) metaphor for the process of writing and creation. Do we have a duty of care towards are creations? Are their stories ever finished? Do their fictional lives give the author a legacy, a kind of life on the page that will continue after the author dies, one that endless repeats itself each time it is read anew? And if so, how much thought, how much life, should the author instill in his characters?

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Written entirely in a post-apocalyptic, reverted vernacular Riddley Walker proves to be a slow read for a book of just over 200 pages, but such close reading of the text, slowed down as you are by the bizaare slang and allusions peppered throughout, only heightens the impact of the novel. A cliche, but true: you get lost in this book.

Here's a taster of Riddley Speak for the uninitated - the first line:

"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen."

Obvious first impressions will remind you of A Clockwork Orange, but the language of Riddley Walker is not that of a refined and stylised language, but rather a language of loss and forgotten civilisation. A catastrophe in the past, most probably a nuclear war, has left the world thinly populated and in a state of almost stone age ignorance. Superstition is rife and whatever society there is left interprets their surrounding via the creation/destruction myth of 'Eusa'. This quasi religious legend forms the backbone of a kind of local government, who maintain power and influence by travelling between villages and performing 'Eusa shows'. These shows take the form of a call and response puppet show, where various episodes from Eusa's story is performed and interpreted to fit in with local event, thus allowing the 'Prime Minister' (pry mincer) to spin his events to suit his purpose.

This is the background in which Riddley's tale unfolds, and as I already mentioned, you do get lost in the dirty magnificence of the book. Folk tales, religious philosophising, dirty jokes and a bizaare geography all collide to create a very real world and a rather frightening one at that. Its easy to see the laughable, almso qauint side of distopian fiction, at the bad mindedness and pessimism of the endevour to create a world gone bad. But I could see Riddley Walker happening - humanity would likely survive in some form or other after a major calamity and mankind would need rules and stories to make sense of the world, just as it does today.

Looking at it realistically one must come to the conclusion that Riddley is obviously deluded, that his visions and his personification of Punch are just the imagination of a simple, restricted mind. However, Hoban never lets you take such an objective view of his protagonist - as you read the novel you are overwhelmingly part of Riddley. As such his 'connexions' and 'tels', his inspired Punch rants - seemingly unearthed from a cultural unconsciousness - are real, almost magic or spiritual. Hoban is showing us how a religion is formed in an ignorant world where any answer is better than the unknown. An inspired passage in the middle of the book has the Goodparley character explaining how the unknown word "Saviour" actually refers to salt, as salt is "savery". Such strained associations seem perfectly reasonable in Riddley Walker, where great mythic importance is given to innocuous events or items, simply because some kind of connection can be made between them.

Riddley Walker is a wonderful book, still fresh and vivid, exciting and inspired. Hoban's afterwords and explanation of the genesis of the story (The Legend of St Eustace in Canterbury Cathedral) and his formation of Riddley Speak (the book took 5 years to write, and Hoban claims to have forgotten how to spell after finishing it) are fascinating - try and get hold of the anniversary or expanded editions to read these sections. This is my 3rd Russell Hoban book - I highly recommend the equally lonely, searching Fremder for nother excellent read - but Riddley Walker blows most books out of the water for imagination and audacity.