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'One that kills, and one that loves'

Colony
by Hugo Wilcken

When Apocolypse Now Redux was released in 2001 the public had a chance to see many scenes which had been cut from the original film. In one of these Willard stumbled upon a French plantation, a hangover from Vietnam's colonial past, over dinner he and the family discuss the current conflict and the first Indochinese war, with most of them leaving angrily. Eventually Willard is left with Roxanne, a widow, who apologises for her family, shares some opium with him, before taking him to bed. At one point in her conversation she tells him "There are two of you, can't you see? One that kills, and one that loves". I mention this for a couple of reasons. The film's visual impact is such that I couldn't help but think of it when reading this book, particularly after Wilcken's mention of Heart of Darkness as an influence. But there is also something about the theme of identity and shifting states of reality that are part of both that film and this fascinating novel.

As has been mentioned it is difficult to say too much about the plot of this novel without spoiling its strengths as a book. It is set in 1928 in a penal colony in French Guiana where master criminals share time with those who have deserted or committed crimes of passion. Escape looks easy but is in fact almost impossible, even those who make it are only recaptured and returned at a later date. The settlement itself is incongruous, having 'the air of an unremarkable French village, miraculously transplanted to the South American jungle. Its little pink bungalows and spruce gardens look faintly ridiculous, cowed by this river and rainforest of unearthly proportions.' The Commandant has grand plans, beginning with the construction of his house, a replica of his home in France, the landscaping of its gardens by the convict Sabir who finds himself working there, extending into his wider plans for the settlement, which could be his own 'little kingdom', following the Australian model. This introduces one of the themes of the novel: the attempt to cultivate the land that surrounds them and the impossibility of that task in the face of a jungle which threatens to destroy and devour any attempt to civilise it. Fecundity combines with decay making the very fabric of the jungle terrifying. And this theme extends to the convicts in the camp of course, almost all of them armed, loosely guarded, the threat of exploding violence never far away.

For Sabir the strains of convict life come from within as well as without. We know that each of these men has a story and that none of them is innocent, the wish to escape the colony is the same as the wish to escape their past, a murky place indeed.

Memories. . . Stay still for long enough, deprive your brain of stimulation for long enough, and they'll always assault you. Faces from the past, people you haven't thought of in months or years, some still alive, but most dead. Men from the prisons, men from the trenches, they all crowd together in the theatre of Sabir's mind. Strange how you can forget names, forget almost everything about a person, but somehow the face remains.

That sense of limbo which permeates Apocalypse Now is what makes Colony such an atmospheric and unsettling read. After such a strong recommendation from John I'll be absolutely honest and say that for parts of the book I was disappointed, not so much by the book but by my own reaction to it; why wasn't I loving it? The writing is unshowy, the characters for the most part uncomplicated but slowly I found myself being caught up in that atmosphere, Wilcken's writing demands and rewards the efforts of the reader to wrestle with what's on the page. Like those first moments on waking from a dream, it can be a fight to grab hold of what's real. All of this has I think helped it to linger in my mind long after putting it down.

The past is dead, the future stolen away, the present an endless desert - so you retreat into a fantasy world, where finally you're in control. Among the lifers he's known, Sabir has seen the syndrome time and time again. You lose yourself in grandiose plans, unrealisable dreams, until life becomes a mirage. And escape can be the worst dream of all.

John is spot on to mention Damon Galgut whose The Impostor featured as one of my books of last year. The two share that sense of unreality but also give a single female character extraordinary power over the men. The wife of the property developer in the new South Africa, the wife of the Commandant in colonial South America or the widow and colonial relic in a dream-like pocket of time during war. Each has the power to use a man to effect change and to hold up a mirror to him and expose that duality reflected back. One that kills, and one that loves.

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Generation Kill

Suffering from box-set withdrawal and scrabbling around for something that didn't involve retarded members of the public being patronised by three mismatched and almost entirely unqualified arbiters of talent (although I did watch that too) it was time to sign up for the latest from David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire. If, as Ed Burns asserted, The Wire was a programme made for the cops and the pushers of Baltimore then Generation Kill is for the soldiers in Iraq or perhaps more accurately, the Marines. If like me you aren't exactly clear about the differences between a Marine and a Soldier then don't expect to have it explained so much as made very clear that there is a difference and that the Army are idiots and the Marines are cold, hard killing machines (at least according to them) especially The 1st Recon Marines.

As you might expect if you've seen any of The Wire there is no concession made to the viewer who doesn't understand military jargon, procedure or politics. You'll need to keep that finger near the pause button for a breather every now and then or revel in the barrage which ranges from profanity to poetry. The credits roll to a soundtrack of radio communication, a familiar crackle of static and codewords for those Wire viewers. This is also another programme whose strength is in its ensemble, and whose storylines are legion. Based on the book written by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright we ride with him, embedded with the Marines spearheading the invasion of the most recent Iraq war. Before the action we see the troops sparring with each other both physically and vocally, this is a tight knit group who revel in mocking each other, and Wright is immediately targeted as a Left-wing hippie faggot until they learn that he wrote Beaver Hunt for a pornographic magazine. Kudos!

A documentary about the making of the series shows the actors involved attending a boot camp where they were drilled by Rudy Reyes and Eric Kocher, both Marines and both acting in the series. Reyes is particularly extraordinary, built like some kind of Greek god/movie star, a highly trained killing machine and yet filled to the brim with zen-like calm at all times. What the training has clearly helped the actors to do is bond as a unit and get as close as possible to portraying the reality of men in conflict. These are men of a generation interested in pop music and video games and yet also interested in reading Chomsky and debating race relations. The big mistake would be to assume that they're stupid. Even at their most profane they manage to extend they insults to Shakespearean levels of intricacy. James Ransone as the driver Person is particularly hilarious; fuelled by uppers his riffs on everything from patriotism to global instability are worth the price of admission on their own.

Humour plays such an important part in the daily lives of these men so that moments after being engaged in firefights they are cracking jokes. There are longer running gags too like the reporter's photo of his girlfriend which he is constantly trying to relocate as it passed around by the men. The officer class come in for some stick too with 'Encino Man' taking stupidity to alarming levels and the perfectly dubbed 'Captain America', with his hysterical and alarmist responses to just about any situation, becoming a danger to his own men. That is how the programme develops it serious themes, not through the po-faced seriousness typical of TV drama in this country but by making the audience complicit; laughing one moment at the antics of an officer who later will become a liability, perhaps even a war criminal.

The skill to take a subject like the Iraq war and make a programme which remains un-judgemental and impartial is the really impressive thing. Because the programme isn't about the Iraq war, it's about the Marines, it's about these men and through them, through the presentation of the reality of their situation you are exposed to ideas and opinions which you then have to make your own judgement on. We see the fatal results of what seems at first to be a comical episode involving a young recruit shooting at a camel in a desperate bid to fire his weapon in anger. We see the results of nervy men at a checkpoint without a clear strategy for stopping vehicles. We watch with the Marines as they observe a village, contenting themselves that it contains only civilians before a decision taken by their superiors somewhere else takes the mater out of their hands. But no judgement. In one scene, when inspecting the body of someone they have shot, they discover his passport and the fact that this is a jihadist from Syria, someone who crucially came into the country to fight the Americans only after they had invaded; a shock to all the Marines. Knowing now the extended horror following the end of 'combat operations' it is interesting to see the first hints that America was not prepared in any way for what they found when the crossed the line into Iraq.

Comparisons to The Wire are pointless for many reasons and unimportant for just one. David Simon and Ed Burns are committed to giving you the chance to see something you haven't seen before (unless you happen to be a Marine or drug cop). It's then up to you to decide what to do with that. It makes for fascinating TV which also happens to be provocative, funny, well made, impeccably acted and well worth seven hours of your time.

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'the empty page between the sky and the earth'

Watch Me Disappear
by Jill Dawson

I was so impressed by Jill Dawson's The Great Lover that I wanted to read more of hers and lighted upon this novel not only because it had received favourable reviews but because it afforded me the opportunity to read the classic Lolita as a form of preparatory work. The parallels between the two books are clear, perhaps even blatant when you consider the surname of its main character (Humber), and Dawson has mentioned that she actually placed some direct phrases from Nabokov amongst her text. But these connections aren't so much plot related, what we have here is not a female response to Lolita, but it does go some way to filling in the gaps I mentioned in that book, to sensitively look at the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl whilst simultaneously examining the effect of a society that places that pressure on youngsters sooner and sooner.


Tina Humber is a marine biologist specialising in dwarf seahorses who like her subjects has 'bobbed through my life, floating rather than swimming'. The parallels between her and those creatures don't stop there, Tina also suffers from a kind of waking blackout, later diagnosed as a form of epilepsy, affecting the part of the brain named for its resemblance to the seahorse: hippocampus. Now I'm being a bit heavy handed in my explanation of it, Dawson is far more clever at finding linking themes and ideas in her fiction and developing them. Here, it allows her to create a character for whom memory, reality and fantasy are far harder to differentiate between than the rest of us.

I've always had a poor memory in some ways; my memory for pictures, scenes from my childhood, that kind of thing, were just. . . patchy. Sometimes vivid; mostly nothing at all. Now that's shifting. The odd word has hightailed it and instead, pictures are hurtling back.

Whilst she now works in the Caribbean she grew up on the flat Fens, an area she hasn't returned to, even for her father's funeral. The wedding of her brother brings her back to that exposed landscape and brings back into focus the disappearance of her friend Mandy Baker at the age of ten. It is said of many men that they had an eye for the girls but in the case of her father it may have been far more specific, especially given that he left the family for a much younger woman. Is it possible that he was involved in some way with Mandy's disappearance, that that was why he felt the need to take his own life? But this isn't a whodunit, the plot takes a back seat to the journey undertaken by Tina into her memory and like the best journeys the destination isn't the important thing, it's about what we learn along the way. Much of this is in Tina's sexual awakening into adolescence, scenes that combine the tender and brutal aspects of growing up, but there are also the confusions of a closer examination of one's own family, that part of life that seems so set and protected from enquiry.

As well as the unreliability of memory, the waters are further muddied by Tina's guilt. After a petulant fallout she failed to ask Mandy to join the trip from which they returned to find her missing. The diary she bought as a birthday present for her is unwrapped and there is a moment of shocking reality as Tina, convinced that Mandy will not be found, writes her own name in the front page. But there is also the guilt that comes from not having been honest with yourself. Has Tina always known more than she cared to admit about that disappearance? Her struggle is against her own ability to remember and the resistance she encounters when she gets home.

Occasionally Dawson falls into the trap of signposting the era with easily recognised markers. Whether it's Love Thy Neighbour, Dairylea triangles, or the 'I Love Donny' sticker on Mandy's bike, the sheer volume of them means that at times it's like watching one of those 'I Love The 1970's' programmes rather than picking up on well observed detail. There are however a couple of occasions when these assume more significance. A Sindy hairbrush assumes almost totemic value and Tina's Girl's World toy (a life size mannequin head containing female grooming products, lipstick etc) manages to serve as a symbol of that pressure on young girls to grow up too soon, and also as a great example of sibling bickering when her brother insists on calling it Girl's Head and festoons its hair with grenades from his Action Man (see, I'm doing it now).


Other writers have made much of the Fens as a locale and Dawson is no exception. The rich dark earth, the constant threat from the water; exposure and a sense of oppression are somehow combined. The always visible horizon provides a scale which accentuates how much the human inhabitants are at the mercy of the forces that act on them. What Dawson does so well is to combine those with the powerful forces that come from within us, particularly that which unites her with Nabokov: desire.

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'I shall not exist if you do not imagine me'

Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Are there three more provocative syllables? Just typing the word Lolita is enough to set off the decency filters on most search engines and give you a bit of a shock if they're turned off. Nabokov struggled to find an American publisher for his taboo breaking novel until the European sensibilities of Olympia Press in Paris brought it to the public's attention in 1955. Since then it has never failed to be controversial, spawning two film adaptations, several spin-off books and ideas and a unique memoir a few years ago, Reading Lolita in Tehran, where the book formed a central role in the social and cultural awakening fo a group of femal students living under Ayatollah Khomeini's regime.

For the reader today, fifty years after its publication (and indeed nearer the time when its narrator expected it to be read - 'In its literary form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of A.D. 2000' - after the death of its subject) it is questionable whether it still has the same shock value. We live in a society filled with media stories about paedophiles and it was only a few years ago that the News of The World's 'name and shame' campaign led to angry mobs marching the streets and one poor paediatrician coming home to find 'paedo' spray-painted on her front door (no one has yet suggested that far from being ignorant the graffittist had read Lolita, where Humbert calls himself a paediatrician, and simply failed to note the ironic tone). The hysteria which attends the reporting of these stories might lead you to believe that paedophilia has spread through the internet with the virulence of a computer virus, all of which allowed Chris Morris to make such an impact with his Brass Eye special (Paedogeddon!). The power of a work of art of course is to cut through all the nonce-sense (thank you Chris) and provide an insight into forbidden desire.

Writing anything in response has been far from easy though, I've stumbled over it for days, for what can one possibly bring to the discussion of a book so well known, so notorious, its strengths so well known and written about and its weaknesses far better analysed by others I'm sure? Well, we'll see.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as 'nymphets'.

And so another word is coined and the cool explanations of Humbert begin; uncomfortable to read for so many reasons. Having questioned the shock value I think it's fair to say that Humbert remains one of the most extraordinary narrators in literature. Not only expressing abhorrent views but completely unapologetic with them, he is also one of the smartest, wittiest men you could hope to meet, causing a small moral dilemma. Or perhaps not, because whatever he may be, I never found Humbert likeable for a single moment. In fact the witticisms, the puns, the plays with words in many languages became increasingly annoying, especially when combined with his wicked scheming.

When Humbert goes to the home of Charlotte Haze as a potential lodger he has his first encounter with her daughter Dolores. Spotting her as she reads magazines in the garden he is struck by her image (well captured on the front of the film tie-in cover above), bringing back his memories of Annabel, the girl he loved passionately as a child before she died prematurely of Typhus (this unfulfilled love and trauma providing the psychological explanation for his growing fascination with nymphets). He is plotting almost immediately, imagining how to capitalise on the attentions of Charlotte to get access to the real object of his desire. Very quickly he is fantasising of marriage and drugging both of them to enjoy nights of fondling 'with perfect impunity'. Later he addresses the gentlewomen of the jury to defend his reasoning, his policy of stealth is there to spare 'her purity'. Even worse is when he considers the possibility of having a child with Lolita so that when she grows out of her nymphet stage he will have something of that preserved for his future as a pederast, even going as far as to imagine a granddaughter too. And a cold shiver works its way down your spine.



We do get to understand the driving forces in their relationship, or at least from Humbert's point of view. Frank about his mental instability, his stays in mental institutions, we can observe his slow breakdown as the pressures of jealousy ('Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically indistinguishable from a madman's fancy') and the fear of losing her or being caught take their toll ('I often felt that we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that at any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the moset jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch'). What we don't get enough of for me is a real insight into the title character. This may be a book about Lolita but she is treated so much as the object rather than the subject of the book that Humbert himself realises later how little he really knows about her.

... I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

But it's all about the language. In his afterword Nabokov corrects the suggestion that Lolita is a record of his 'love affair with the romantic novel' to one with the 'English language'. Every sentence is a joyful expression of that love, each word well chosen and expressive, each image replete with colour and meaning even if it is to show how Humbert through his actions is sullying the great country that he travels through with Dolores. Part two in particular begins with florid descriptions of the American countryside, long sentences filled with commas so that they extend like the mountain terrain he describes, which by the end of their journey they 'had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime'. He is not interested in moral instruction or metaphor or of explaining why he had to write this particular book. It stands as it is, our reaction to it the interesting thing and there is something intriguing about going somewhere uncomfortable, like playing with a scab. If you've read it and want to push yourself a bit further then A.M Homes caused a similar stir with her novel The End of Alice which details the correspondence between a woman fascinated by a young boy and a convicted paedophile in prison. How's that for taboo?

My reason for reading this book was as preparation for another novel, which I hope will fill in those spaces. To give an idea of how it feels to be an adolescent girl dimly aware of her growing power to allure, to tantalise, to provoke.

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