Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Of course it's all just a hypothesis, Aomame told herself as she walked.  But it's the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment.  I'll have to act according to this one, I suppose, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along.  Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere.  If only for that reason, I'd better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself.  There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers.  Even cats and dogs need names.  A newly changed world must need one, too.

1Q84 – that's what I'll call this new world, Aomame decided.

Q is for "question mark."  A world that bears a question.

Aomame nodded to herself as she walked along.

Like it or not, I'm here now, in the year 1Q84.  The 1984 that I knew no longer exists.  It's 1Q84 now.  The air has changed, the scene has changed.  I have to adapt to this world-with-a-question-mark as soon as I can.  Like an animal released into a new forest.  In order to protect myself and survive, I have to learn the rules of this place and adapt myself to them. (pp. 158-159 e-book edition, Ch. 9)

I first read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 soon after its US release in late October 2011.  At the time, I found it difficult to summarize my thoughts on this sprawling book (it is nearly a thousand pages in hardcover and just over 1200 e-book pages on my iPad), as it covered so many things, some that I thought were done excellently, others that I thought were underdeveloped, and a few that just flat-out baffled me.  So I eschewed writing a formal review then, thinking that a re-read might provide a clearer picture of the story (stories?) being told.  Now that this novel is up for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, it was a good time to re-read the book and see if my initial impressions had changed.

1Q84 is the most "speculative" of the shortlisted books.  It transpires in 1984 Japan and then in a place, pointedly noted as being non-parallel, of two moons, Little People, and a story that seems to travel through a semi-permeable membrane that separates the two worlds.  It is the story of a former child member of a religious cult-turned-assassin of abusive men, Aomame, and her search after twenty years for a man, Tengo, who once shared a mysterious moment with her when they were ten.  There are events such as a mysterious pregnancy, an Exxon Tiger billboard, and an unusual murder-mystery that make 1Q84 one of the most visible weird fictions to be released in the past five years.

The novel is divided into three chronological sections that span roughly the Spring through Autumn of 1984.  There are alternating chapters presented in limited third-person PoV that focus on Aomame and Tengo's experiences in both the "real" world and in the world of 1Q84.  Murakami makes copious use of literary and cultural symbols to make symbolic and (mostly) literal connections between the worlds.  One particular reference that may be more obscure to Anglo-American reasons is the "town of cats."  Seen from Tengo's perspective, the alternate world is not Aomame's "1Q84" but instead a place that reminds him strongly of pre-World War II writer Hagiwara Sakutarō's "Town of Cats" (readers wanting to read this story can find it in the anthology The Weird, which incidentally lists Murakami as being influenced by his work.  That note coincidentally was written some months before the US publication of 1Q84).  For Tengo, this "cat town" world was a strange, alienating place in which the "Little People," who are mentioned in the novel Air Chrysalis that he has ghostwritten for a 17 year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, lurk behind a series of mysteries.  

There is certainly an aura of menace in the novel's last third, as Aomame and Tengo come closer to identifying the mysteries that have invaded their lives.  Murakami ambitiously attempts to meld a weird, metatextual setting with elements taken from thrillers and for most of the time, this unusual pairing succeeds.  The slower, more contemplative pace of the first two parts gives way to a quicker-tempo, more action-packed final section.  Although not all of the mysteries are explained (if anything, explanation in a story such as 1Q84 would serve to dampen its appeal), there certainly is a nice tying-together of several symbolic objects within the course of Aomame and Tengo's eventual reunion.  Yet it is almost too little, too late, as there are some lengthy longeurs in the middle chapters that almost derail the novel.

1Q84 is one of those "too much" novels, at least for sections lasting sometimes longer than a hundred pages.  There are too many interesting and quirky characters for each individual one to have the impact that similar characters had in some of Murakami's earlier work.  There are a plethora of mysterious objects whose symbolic purpose in regards to the plot remain to be deciphered, perhaps too many for the narrative to handle adequately.  The pasts of both Aomame and Tengo are intriguing, but sometimes too much backstory had to be introduced for it to be as effective as it otherwise could have been.

Yet despite this sense that there is a surfeit of things that in moderation would made for great narrative elements, 1Q84 is a very good work.  Although at times it labors under the weight of its massive narrative, ultimately the reading experience belies that earlier sense that it is at times bloated and turgid.  Murakami manages to strike a precarious balance between exposition and leaving tantalizing mysteries for the readers to puzzle out at their leisure.  Although it is not quite at the level of his best-known works, 1Q84 is one of the better 2011 releases and its inclusion on the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize shortlist does not stick out like a sore thumb.  If this is damning with faint praise, there are a whole host of fictions that could wish to be so damned.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

One interesting trend that I've noticed when (re)reading the ten finalists for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize is the large number of non-standard narratives.  In the books already reviewed, one can see a first-person plural point of view (Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic), a multi-level literary forgery/fictional family tale (Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur), and a narrator who may or may not be suffering from dementia (Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I am the Smaller I Am).  Even the other work already reviewed, Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, utilizes character dialectic speech in a fashion not often seen in contemporary novels.  Therefore, it was little surprise to see that Icelandic novelist Sjón's novel, From the Mouth of the Whale, adds to the diversity of the shortlist's narrative styles with its mixture of the historical and the feverish, quasi-fantastical worldview of early 17th century Iceland.

From the Mouth of the Whale moves back and forth in time, from the exile of Jónas Pálmason to his recollections of his education, exorcism of a walking corpse, and the massacre of visiting Basque whalers.  Told in first-person point of view, From the Mouth of the Whale derives much of its narrative power from its deceptively unreliable narrator.  In using "unreliable" to describing Jónas, it is not to denote that he is being purposely deceptive, but rather that Sjón is exploring a worldview that would be remotely alien to us, as "science" and "magic" were not seen in the 1630s Iceland as being true/false opposing entities but rather as complementary disciplines between which Jónas maneuvers during his life.  Take for instance this scene about a quarter into the novel:

"That's the sort of nonsense that landed us here in the first place."

What she says is true, though she should know better than to call it nonsense; it would be more correct to say that it was my intellectual gifts that marooned us here.  Or rather, exiled me here; it was her decision to make them row her over to share my fate.  Poor woman.  But it is probably the lesser of two evils to be the wife of Jónas and share a barren rock with him than to live among strangers.  Or so I gathered form the way people spoke to her on the mainland.  The saddest thing for me is that her loyalty is misplaced.  I have done this woman nothing but harm.  She was opposed to my heeding the summons of Wizard-Láfi Thórdarson, alias the specialist and poet Thórólfur, when he asked me to go out west with him and exorcise the troublesome ghost.  For that was the beginning of my misfortunes.  That is how we came to lose everything.  How did our paths cross?  It was during the eclipse of the sun, if I remember right.  I do not dare ask her; women think men ought to remember that sort of thing.  Last time she was scolding me for my madcap ideas, I asked her why she had come back to me if not to take up the thread where we left off when I had to crawl alone into hiding due to the persecution by the Nightwolf and Sheriff Ari of myself Jónas the Learned and my son Reverend Pálmi.  Indeed, why was she here if not to assist me in my investigations into the workings of the universe?  For that is how it used to be.  Now it is as if my enemies have given her the task of "bringing me to my senses," as more than one, indeed several, of my tormentors call it.  Yet that is not fair, for when I hinted as much the other day, she responded:

"If anyone knows there's no chance of bringing you to your senses by now, Jónas Pálmason, it's me." (pp. 76-77)

For most of the novel, Sjón adroitly mixes this combination of science and superstition to create a vividly-drawn 17th century Iceland that is fascinating.  Of particular interest are the stories of Jónas's exorcism (in which it is difficult to discern if he is lucid or experiencing a hallucination) and of the tragedy of the Basque whalers who suffered a horrific fate at the hands of the locals.  Sjón manages to narrate these stories with aplomb, as Jónas's recollections of each smoothly transition from the literary present back to these events and then forward again in time without there being a noticeable change in tone.  It is a narration of an extraordinary life combined with a cultural history of a true BFE backwater, with each informing the other, ultimately leading to a tale that insidiously grabs the unsuspecting reader's attention until she is quickly reading the pages.

Yet there are some flaws here.  Jónas's character, fascinating as it is for much of the novel, sometimes disappears too much into the narration, particularly later in the novel.  The carefully-maintained balance between the real and irreal breaks down toward the end as well, making for a more difficult discernment of the narrator's lucid thoughts compared to what appear to be flights of fancy.  Normally this would not be a major criticism, but it does destroy the tone established for the majority of the novel.  From the Mouth of the Whale is not a bad novel; for the most part I did enjoy reading it.  But it is a flawed novel and compared to the other nine finalists for the 2013 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, it, along with two others, are noticeably weaker in terms of structure and execution.  It is a novel worth reading, but it is not as good as the majority of the ones on this strong shortlist.

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

It may sound trite, but language is the linchpin upon which all elements of a story depend for their structure.  Without appropriate language, even the most elegantly-plotted tales can end up as flat as a soda bottle left open for a week before anyone sips from it.  Language is intricately tied up in prose, yet it inhabits more media than just prose.  The musicality of the words, the lilt and tilt of phrases, these can make the reader think of music or poetry even when the words are printed and there is no discernible rhyme nor line pattern.  Great language makes even the most clichéd works enjoyable to read because there is something beautiful being told that entrances us.  Our oldest recorded stories depended heavily upon the spoken language and its tones and rhythms to aid the stories being told; many listeners knew the basics, but a skilled troubadour added nuances of voice and inflection to the tale that made all things new again.

The basic premise of Irish writer Kevin Barry's debut novel, City of Bohane, should be familiar to those who've read many (or any?) stories of love triangles and of the romances of gangsters.  The plot of a feared/respected gang leader and his quarter-century hold on the fictional western Irish city of Bohane seeming to slip due to the intrusion of a new rival gang, not to mention this "Fancy's" apprehensions regarding his beautiful wife, is a solidly-constructed tale but it is nothing special by itself.  These sorts of tales, whether you read (or watched) The Gangs of New York or other stories of its ilk, are commonplace in recent literature.

Yet City of Bohane mostly transcends these generic elements.  This is one of the most evocative, "beautiful" novels that have been published in recent years.  Barry has such an ear for dialogue that his reproduction of working-class Hibernian English feels alive, full of vitality and teeming with imminent violence.  Take for instance this passage from the beginning chapter:

Whatever's wrong with us is coming in off that river.  No argument:  the taint of badness on the city's air is a taint off that river.  This is the Bohane river we're talking about.  A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it:  city of Bohane.

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river.  It was past midnight on the Bohane front.  There was an evenness to his footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream.  The water's roar for Harnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front.  See the dogs:  their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid.  We could tell he coming by the howling of the dogs. (p. 9 e-book edition)

Barry does an excellent job establishing the decrepitude of Bohane.  Despite it being mentioned on a few occasions that the action transpires in the year 2053, there is no sense of the "future" in this setting:  no phones, no social media, nothing that would made the reader think of 21st century bourgeois society.  Instead, there is a focus on intimate human relations, from how people dress to conform to certain social types (at times, the gangs of Bohane come perilously close to being a bunch of dandies on the prowl, although this certainly is not a defect of the story) to how people walk and talk.  This last element in particular showcases Barry's talents as a writer, as his dialogues are simultaneously hilarious, threatening, and possess a verisimilitude that very few fiction writers ever manage to achieve.  Below is a sample taken from near the end of Ch. 6, as to secondary characters, Fucker and Wolfie, are gabbing in a pub:

Fucker sat on his hands and bit his bottom lip. Wolfie, more the diplomat of the pair, changed tack.

'You'd be a fella who'd take a turn 'round Smoketown the odd time, sir?'

'Now,' said the spud-ater, 'we are talkin' decen' cuts o' turkey.'

'An' what'd have an interest for you cross the footbridge, sir?'

The old-timer's eyes sparkled.

'I'd lick a dream off the belly of a skinny hoor as quick as you'd look at me.'

Wolfie nodded soberly, as though appreciative of the spud-ater's delicate tastes.

'Draw a bead and you'll have your pick o' the skinnies,' he said.  'Could have a season o' picks.'

'A season?'

'Cozy aul' winter for ya,' said Fucker.  'Buried to the maker's name in skinnies and far gone off the suck of a dream-pipe, y'check me?'

The old tout sighed as temptation hovered.

'Oh man an' boy I been a martyr to the poppy dream...'

'An' soon as you done with the dream-pipe,' Fucker teased some more, 'there'd be as much herb as you can lung an ' ale to folly.' (p. 46 e-book edition)

 The tone is that of two friends, or at least two friendly pub acquaintances, shooting the bull.  This feels very naturalistic, but this frequently is not an easy thing to accomplish in fiction.  Yet here and throughout the narrative the characters' voices are distinct yet they contribute greatly toward creating a vivid landscape upon which the action unfolds.  This quality cannot be overstated here as there are times where the plot is relatively weak and it is mostly due to the strongly-drawn characters and their distinctive points-of-views that the action is as memorable as it can be.

Unfortunately, the beautiful, lush language and the well-drawn characters can only carry a story so far.  While the concluding part of City of Bohane is not "weak" per se, it is not as strongly-developed as the other sections of the novel and the conclusion feels as though the narrative engine ran out of gas making the last turn, as it sputters and wheezes its way to a denouement that is merely adequate.  Perhaps this is the flipside to Barry's accomplishments with narrative and characters:  the reader may find herself wishing at the end that its power could have been sustained for just a couple scenes longer.  As it stands, City of Bohane is a very good novel with memorable prose that finds those elements ultimately betrayed by a plot that just cannot sustain the energy of its first three-quarters. 

Kjersti Skomsvold, The Faster I Walk the Smaller I Am

It's getting dark, I'm trying to concentrate on something useful, and the only thing that matters now is to figure out what my last words will be.  "The probability that we're going to die is smaller than ε, if ε equals a microscopically small quantity," I told Epsilon.  It wasn't like me to say something like that.  I wish I'd said something different.

I want to say something meaningul, make my last words rhyme, so I lay awake the whole night trying to think up something appropriate.  I know I'll never get out of bed again.  But then morning comes and I feel so hungry.

Epilson says that, statistically speaking, a given person will probably die in bed.

Maybe I should get up now. (p. 12)

Death is one of life's great mysteries.  We, even those who long for it, never quite can grasp it as being anything much more than the absence of life.  It is the exclamation point for some, for others it merely is a period or even a question mark to punctuate their lives.  It looms large for some of us, while for others, it is a distant cloud on the horizon, one that seems forever far from our daily routines.  But yet it still lurks out there, wherever "there" might be.  Will death find us content and happy with our lives, with children gathered around us, marking a life well-lived?  Or will it discover a broken, despairing soul, fretting over things not accomplished, achievements never done?  Who will find our corpses and what will be remembered about us?  Will there be a monument to our deeds or are we doomed to oblivion?  And when found, will the body be laid to rest quickly, or will it take days, weeks, or even years before our remains are encountered by others?

In Norwegian writer Kjersti A. Skomsvold's debut novel, The Faster I Walk the Smaller I Am, the elderly Mathea finds herself obsessing over these details.  She is lost to memory, it seems, as the past converges with the present so seamlessly that it is wonderfully difficult to decipher at first which is which.  She muses on her life with her statistician husband "Epilson," pondering the improbabilities that make up each life.  She is childless and nearly friendless and these developments disturb her, but her narrative is more than just the sum of her fears:

I can be a lot of fun.  I remember a joke I once made up:  "Have you heard about the man who was so thin his pajamas just had one stripe?"  I asked Epsilon.  "Yes," Epsilon said.  "Impossible," I said, "I just made him up."  "No, I'm sure I've heard of him before, Mathea," Epsilon said.  "Oh, yeah, you're right," I said.  "Come to think of it, I remember a whole article about him in that senior citizens' magazine Over Sixty."  Typical, you think up a good joke and it turns out you've heard it before.  But I laugh anyway, and I tell Epsilon that I'm the funniest person I know.  "You don't know anyone besides me," he says.  "But still," I say.

How sad it is for the world to have missed out on lively Mathea.  But it's sadder for me.  So I'm sad for a moment, but then I decide to bury a time capsule.  I push back the covers, haul my legs out of bed, and put my feet into Epsilon's worn felt slippers.  Then I walk into the kitchen and look under the sink.  Back behind the buckets and rags is an old cardboard box that used to hold bottles of detergent.  Epsilon always buys in bulk, I have no idea why.  The box says "Bulk," and I guess that'll have to be my legacy.  I plop it on the kitchen table and think about it a while.  Finally, though, I decide it won't work.  I need to bury something meaningful.  I know what I have to do. (pp. 32-33)

Skomsvold has created in Mathea a sympathetic character whose musings reflect so many of our own fears and reflections.  She has said in the past that the idea for The Faster I Walk the Smaller I Am was conceived when she was bedridden following an illness.  The thoughts that occurred to her as she laid in the bed was the genesis for Mathea's own cyclical thoughts on life, death, disappointment, and frustrated hope.  There is a quality to the prose that makes it difficult to tell when the author's experience leaves off and the character's fictional thoughts begins.  Mathea's struggle to make sense of her life in the midst of her impending death (or so it seems to her at the time) resonates with readers because she voices concerns that many of us have tried to bury underneath the minutiae of our quotidian lives.  William Faulkner once remarked in Requiem for a Nun that "the past is never dead.  It's not even past."  In Mathea, we see evidence for this, as she recollects little moments shared with her husband, as well as events from her childhood that still affect her in the present.  These recalled episodes are poignant, touching artifacts of a life that later had etched into it fear, loss, and anxiety.  They could be snippets from our parents' lives or from a neighbor down the street.  They feel "real" because Skomsvold never takes the reader out of Mathea's viewpoint.  We do not see if she is senile or sane, demented or brutally honest with her thoughts and actions.  One moment flows into another, the past swirling like an eddy in the current of time, occasionally spilling over into the present.  This is what Skomsvold apparently wanted to explore in her novel and if so, she did an outstanding job in capturing a narrative voice that is at once distinctive and yet universal in tone and rhetoric.  The Faster I Walk the Smaller I Am is a quiet, understated story at first but by novel's end it has become one of those rare works of fiction that move us to think of the ways in which we are akin to Mathea in her waning days.  That is the hallmark of a great novel and this debut certainly deserves to be read and re-read as we pass through our own Shakespearean "ages of man."

Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur

Meta-narratives are tricky beasts.  Author-as-pseudocharacter so easily can fail on a number of fronts:  lack of intrigue in the metacharacter; stilted, artificial prose that renders the narrative as only a technique and not one that "breathes"; plots that collapse under the weight of the levels of narrative and theme.  Yet when an author manages to pull it off, it is something to behold.  In his 2011 novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips has created a dual-level narrative that first entrances the reader before entrapping her within its web.

Desire lurks at the heart of The Tragedy of Arthur.  It is only fitting, considering how desire (for self-improvement, power, lust, love, zealous faith) occupies the center of so many tragic narrative webs.  It is a tale of Arthur, who shares many biographical details in common with the author, who has a long, complicated relationship with his father, a master forger.  It is a story of a reader's befuddlement regarding William Shakespeare and the enduring power that this playwright and poet has had for the past four centuries.  It is this and much more, as the story feels so brutally direct and "human" that it is easy to overlook in the beginning Phillips' narrative sleight-of-hand that makes the direction of this tale so fascinating to read even when the "tragedy" becomes apparent to readers.

The core narrative deals with Arthur's decades-long relationship with his father, his sister, and their lionizing of Shakespeare.  Shakespeare's themes, quotes, and literary approaches are thrust at Arthur at a young age.  He wants to rebel against this overwhelming project of first his father and then later his sister, but he is weak, easily succumbing to these two stronger-willed individuals, with some self-loathing resulting from it.  As Arthur develops his love-hate relationship with Shakespeare after his father's lengthy absences due to his prison terms for forgery, a complex portrait emerges of the father:

"I will not try to excuse my father's acts.  His acts were his own.  His mistakes, crimes, defeats:  these were his own.  As Shakespeare wrote, I would not have it any other wise, and that is surely how my father felt.  But I will say this of his life:  he believed that the world could be transformed completely, if only occasionally, if only for one person at a time, but that was something, and that was worth it.  There are times when I consider some of his greatest creations, his most selfless creations, and I feel cowardly in comparison when I think of what he hoped to achieve in his work.

"A novelist tries to capture a person in a phrase (a walk-on character), or a paragraph (a minor character), or a page (a major character), or a whole book (for the protagonist), but how to describe an entire life of a real person?  Not in snatches of action or frame-frozen descriptions, but over a whole life?  My father eludes my abilities.  I can write a paragraph about him for you, but it seems to miss everything, even though it's all true:

***

"As far as an accurate portrait of my father, I don't know if that paragraph is him or not.  This writerly method fictionalizes him, cuts off so much of him – so many contradictions, extenuations, annexes, chapters – that what remains is only a shadow of him, a shadow of his hopes, and a shadow of his griefs.  It seems impossible to descend through all the layers of him at even a single moment or at a single decision.  I consider even one of his pedestrian crimes, and I ask myself, What motivated him?  His worst moments can be explained by:  his wonder-lust philosophy, bitterness, pride in his craftsmanship, mere habit, inevitability, simple greed and thoughtlessness, genetic selfishness bordering on criminality, love.  I can hardly pull the burrs away to find the man underneath..." (pp. 218-219 e-book edition, Ch. 37)

Arthur's father certainly looms large over this complex narrative.  He has not only shaped, willy-nilly, both Arthur and his sister, but he has willed to Arthur something that is either the find of the century or his greatest forgery ever:  a weathered, battered copy of a "lost" play of Shakespeare's, The Tragedy of Arthur.  It is within this play, which is reproduced in whole as the second half of the book, that Phillips explores so many issues:  the influence of Shakespeare's diction on our own; the ways in which readers idolize writers and raise them above the level of mere mortals in the case of Shakespeare and a rare few others; human desires for things to be good even when they are not "true" or "just"; the power that myths have even in today's more secular age on motivating us; and the binds that tie us together may chafe us to the point of distraction.  It is almost surprising that Phillips manages to weave these weighty and sometimes disparate elements into a cohesive whole; by every right, this novel should have collapsed under the weight of its pretensions.

Yet it succeeds and it does so in spectacular fashion.  In Arthur and his sister we see not just the parallels with Shakespeare's characters, but also of our own lives.  In the father is a mirror of not just Iago but also every storyteller.  The details of Arthur and his family's lives are well-drawn and the foibles and ruinous relationships resound with readers because they echo, without full replication, themes explored by other talented writers such as Shakespeare.  Yet Shakespeare himself is not the origin nor the terminus of these recastings of human dramas in written form, a point that Phillips-as-Arthur makes several times in the narrative.  Shakespeare is but an embodiment of our own steaming mess of emotions and actions; the English-speaking nations needed a figurehead for these and Shakespeare fit the bill admirably.  In the play itself, so many narrative quirks of Shakespeare are used to create a version of the Camelot tale; it feels "authentic" because of the weight of accumulated cultural inheritances despite our knowledge that it must be "fake."  This dissonance itself recasts the narrative in a new way, one that makes the details of Arthur's family and their lives all the more meaningful, because even artifice can serve nature despite itself.  The Tragedy of Arthur ultimately is one of those rare novels where the layers of deceit and metacommentary feel "authentic" and "real" and that even in the (belated) realization that our culturally-trained reader preconceptions have been turned against us the story still possesses a gravitas to it that makes it a memorable reading experience.