'There is plenty of blame to go around'

Rupture
by Simon Lelic

The school shooting is a worryingly familiar social phenomenon and has already inspired films like Gus Van Sant's Elephant and countless novels including Booker winner Vernon God Little and bestseller We Need To Talk About Kevin. With his first novel Lelic looks at a shooting in a school from a different angle, the perpetrator here not a pupil but a member of staff, an idea inspired by a real life shooting in the US where a college professor shot a colleague. With a police detective as a central character it would be tempting to put this in the crime-fiction box but it doesn't really read like that, focusing instead on the spectre of bullying in all its forms amongst pupils, staff and the police force itself. The novel begins breathlessly as a truant recounts her version of events, hers the only voice, the interviewing detective's own utterances left out. Much of the book is presented in this way, like evidence, with just the words of the interviewee, leaving it for us to fill in any blanks and slowly, piece by piece, get a clearer understanding of the events leading up to the shooting. When it reverts to third-person narration following DI Lucia May we witness the systematic bullying and harassment she receives in her male-dominated workplace, part of the reason of course why she is compelled to find out more about the real motive involved in the shooting (not even her case by the way), convinced always that this was more complicated than just a lone nut with a gun.

Lucia May begins with the aftermath, walking the route taken by the gunman, trying to imagine what had been going through his mind, but before long she is caught up in the story of panic told by the scene of devastation left behind.

From the rear wall to the podium, chairs lay on their backs, on their sides, any way but the right way up. Many were still laced together so that where one chair had fallen the rest had fallen too, transforming the row into a barrier, the legs of the chairs into barbs. Lucia was reminded of an image of Verdun, of the land and the barricades between the trenches. She imagined children, their eyes bleeding fear, tripping and becoming entangled and then trampled by those behind. She imagined the impact of one of the upended chair legs against a stomach, a cheek, a temple.

In order to really understand what had been going through his mind of course she needs to know the full story, to pursue her hunch that this apparently random shooting was an almost logical conclusion to what came before it. Samuel Szajkowski (shy-kov-skee) was just an ordinary, if reserved, teacher but from the moment he first entered the classroom and told the class his name he was never given a chance to keep his head above water. That name is all that class bully Donovan Stanley needs to begin a campaign of sustained and eventually devastating abuse. 'Shitewhatsir?..Shitecoughski?', and that cough in the middle is the one we all know that really means 'fuck off'. Despite his attempts to calmly explain his Polish ancestry and engage with the mounting unrest in the class room it isn't long before he finds it impossible to control and leaves the room. That it turns out is a big mistake.

Through the direct address of those many voices of evidence Lelic is able to drop the relevant pieces of information at just the right points of the book, much like the clues in a conventional crime novel. His ear for character voices is impressive in the early stages, only later does he occasionally fall for the writerly pitfall of putting something far too clever into someone's mouth. That phrase 'institutional' springs to mind when describing the culture of bullying within a school. Only through the complicity of other staff members could a teacher like Szajkovski be subjected to such consistent and damaging abuse and May's task in the book is to see whether it's possible to hold the school itself accountable for the actions of the gunman. Another case of bullying in the school has lead to one boy being hospitalised, with no witnesses forthcoming, yet another example of the culture of fear and reprisal.

This also recalls Alan Moore's assertion, when creating his graphic novel From Hell, that the murders of Jack the Ripper weren't simply the work of one man (or even of many if it was more than one responsible) but created and made possible by the society around them. The introspection that accompanied the cases of Mary Bell or Jamie Bulger, the question asked by those communities as to how this had been allowed to happen are all relevant here.

That institutional element is also present in May's workplace of course, the traditionally male dominated world of policing. Here she is forced to deal with the kind of sexual harassment which is leading to court cases and compensation today. Jokes, emails, close physical contact, a suggestive word here, a blatant insult there; her position as a detective and her approach to her work is also questioned by her superiors who like the simplicity of the seemingly open-and-shut case and see the emotional response to it by their female colleague as a weakness and a nuisance. Lelic is skillful in creating the everyday threat for May, an atmosphere that heightens the senses especially when the situation becomes genuinely dangerous.

She could smell him. She could smell his hair, like hotel pillows beneath their cases; his breath, sour and needing water. She could smell oranges. His fingers across her mouth, they smelt of oranges, as though he had been peeling one while he had been waiting.

May's journey towards a closer understanding of events within the school mirrors her own personal journey. It is the bandaged body of the boy in hospital that forces her to look at her own life.

She tried to decide what she would have done in his place. She tried to decide but she realised that in fact she had already decided. Like Elliot, she had chosen to trust in denial, to confide only in herself, to try to cope with what others inflicted upon her without help of any kind.

There are plenty of adults out there who are frightened of other adults. There seem increasingly to be adults scared of the children that live around them or are in their care. Lelic's book does nothing to dispel any of that, it is terrifying in places, especially when you consider the damage we are all capable of, and just one of its many achievements is to create sympathy and understanding for the man wielding the smoking gun.

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Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

The Americana music scene has rather dominated the folk/rock end of the musical spectrum so it has been pleasing to see acts like Noah And The Whale reclaim something for the Brits and to develop our folk traditions away from the kind of bearded, folksy strumming that certainly turns me off from the more traditional folk sound. Mumford & Sons are fronted by Marcus Mumford and completed by Winston Marshall, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane (needless to say, they are not his sons!). Their robust sound and Mumford's gravelly tones mean that if you found Fleet Foxes lacked cojones or NATW a bit fey then this album might be far more to your taste.

The opening title track has all the harmonised voices you might expect from Fleet Foxes but is soon bolstered by a heavy sounding drum, organ and even a banjo. The first line, 'Serve God love me and mend,' is a quotation from Much Ado About Nothing and it isn't the last time that the lyrics have a slightly portentous air. In fact I only have a couple of tiny quibbles about this album so lets get those out of the way. Those lyrics can sometimes be highlighted by the rigid way that Mumford often sticks to rhyme and meter. What this means is that sometimes that places the stress on the wrong parts of words which can sound a little clumsy. You could also say that a few of tracks on the album follow a similar structure so that despite the varied tunes and arrangements there is something a bit samey about it. These really are tiny things though; the lyrical journey on the album is bold and poetic and the music ranges from the rousing to the reflective.

The festive period and current cold snap make Winter Winds an apposite track and its joyful combination of ukelele and brass section make it one of the standouts. There are foot stompers like Roll Away Your Stone (one of many religious references amongst the lyrics) and Little Lion Man, quieter moments like the male harmony driven Timshel and album closer After The Storm, and some tracks that do both like I Gave You All or personal favourite Thistle And Weeds. Musically the band's love of country, folk and bluegrass provides the dominant sounds with just enough edge to keep folk-sceptics interested. Any album that manages to make a banjo sound cool must be doing something right. The live performance below will give you the idea as well as hinting at the power that the band have in the flesh.

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Vampire Weekend - Contra

It was at a similarly chilly time of year back in 2008 that Vampire Weekend released their eponymous debut album. Unseasonably warm, afro-infused pop had my toes tapping for the rest of the year and it remains an album to get all hips wriggling chez nous. The naysayers accused the Ivy League graduates of being too clever with their lyrics about obscure punctuation and architectural features and even of cultural tourism with the African musical influences (let's be honest - if you removed the African musical influences from pop music you'd be left with...well, Chas 'n' Dave. And they've just split up). Personally, I grew up listening to Paul Simon's Graceland so I have no problem bouncing about the room to that kind of thing and I have been looking forward to the release of their sophomore effort.

Opening track Horchata will be grist to the mill of the doubters with its subject (a Mexican rice drink) and rhyming - balaclava and aranciata to name but two. For the converted, along with tracks like White Sky, Holiday and the guitar driven Cousins, it is a track that could have come from their previous album, providing more of the same if that's what you're after. Where they depart there are some huge hits and perhaps the odd miss. Some of the tracks that had me worried on my first listen have already become amongst my favourites. One still remains at the risk of being skipped each time though. One day some kind of judicial process will bring Auto-tune to trial for crimes against music but until that time we will have to endure more experiments with it like California English. It is followed however by the beautiful Taxi Cab in which frontman Koenig employs those beautiful, effortless, Paul Simon tones, backed by strings and later harpsichord. How's that for Ivy League! The electronic experimentation is far more successful on Run, a tale of escape that bursts with energy and light. It is an example of a track where the Afro influences are absorbed rather dominant, a good indication of where Vampire Weekend will continue to triumph. Giving Up The Gun is a good example of a track that has really grown on me, sounding first like something from an 80's brat-pack-flick-soundtrack but revealing something lovely with each new listen. The only drawback at the moment is that if M79 had a whiff of Ski-Sunday about it, then the repeated refrain of 'Go on, go on, go on' on this track might just remind you of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that because it certainly will now (if you know what I'm talking about that is). Diplomat's Son is the longest track on a short album, almost two in one, its reggae like rhythm breaking down in places so that piano and strings can plonk and twirl away. There is something haunting and disorienting about closer I Think Ur A Contra which I'm loving. It's often the quieter moments that herald something exciting on this album, although I can't stop jumping around to Cousins either. In spite of those accusations from those against you can't help but admire the ways in which Vampire Weekend are clever and make the most of those influences, combining them with genuine creativity to make something entirely their own. It's early days but this already the first must-have album of the year. What better way to beat the cold-snap than put this on, mix up some horchata, and enjoy.

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'learning how to vanish'

Waking Up In Toytown

by John Burnside

In his first memoir, A Lie About My Father, Burnside focused on his foundling father, a hard-drinking, tough-love kind of man, but also charted his own drink and drug fuelled descent into the abyss and the painful realisation that he couldn't help but see that man he hated so much at times staring back at him when he looked in the mirror. His second memoir puts himself at the centre of the picture but once again he chooses to filter his revelations through portraits of those around him, in this case the many misfits and failed relationships that peppered the past that was 'Not so long ago when I was still mad'. This is no misery-memoir though, fear not, Burnside not only has little sympathy for himself but is able to employ the dark humour of his fiction and an unflinching honesty to illuminate what he admits is a fairly tawdry and shameful period in his life. The madness in this case is the result of a condition called apophenia, described by the schizophrenia specialist Klaus Conrad as 'the unmotivated seeing of connections' coupled with the 'specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.' Or as Burnside more pithily puts it 'seeing things that weren't there.' But let's not go too deep, too soon.

Readers of the LRB may have come across one chapter of this book already, entitled Losing Helen (If you're a subscriber and missed it you can view it here, if you're not a subscriber you can buy it!) . Burnside uses the sudden death of a work colleague to achieve many things simultaneously. Firstly a vivid portrait of a working community, but most importantly he provides an honest account of losing somebody he wasn't really that close to, a death that still looms large in his memory, assuming its own importance. It teaches him something about memory which is crucial to the book.

She is a story, nothing more - but then maybe this is why we tell ourselves stories, in order to work out why we remember some things more than others, why some events live on in the mind, why some faces and voices persist for decades, to be resurrected in the dark by an insomniac who wakes knowing he has certainly lost something on the way, but has no idea what it is. Which means, of course, that the story I am telling is not about this dead girl after all: it isn't about her, it's about me. It's not about her life or her death: it's about what I lost and how, whatever that lost thing might be, it resembles her in some way.

In a way the book as a whole is an attempt to piece together or reclaim what was lost. As in his first memoir he examines the veracity of memory and experience, the fictionalisation of remembrance, describing it at one point thus:

My memory of that time is more than a little confused, and I can't fully account for how I got clear. What I do recall is a room that I can picture so precisely, it doesn't feel like a memory at all. It's more like the film I saw last night, or a photograph from a magazine where the central figure is strangely familiar, even if he isn't quite the person whose name first comes to mind. This central character - the one vague spot in a memory that is otherwise extremely vivid - is familiar in the way that an actor in an old black-and-white film noir would be familiar if I saw him out of context, crossing the road in my home town, maybe, or paying his bill at the cafe on the high street...Now that this is a story I am telling - and it's me telling it, not him - I can accept that the central figure in this scene is a version of myself, or at least someone I used to be; but when I say as much, it seems wrong, because what I recall is so obviously an actor or an impostor playing a role, and even that role, even the character he is pretending to be, is not the person I think of now when I try to summon up the image of myself then.

He is on his bed surrounded by bottles filled with a sweet smelling dark gold liquid, 'a mixture of blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine'. On the top of each open bottle is a feather 'balanced precariously...If one feather falls, then the spell fails.' The spell is to protect the naked man on the bed, pinned there for two days after witnessing a terrifying incident (in all probability only in his mind) that he cannot begin to recall today.

This is the nadir from which he is lifted, seeking solace and making an attempt towards normality by moving to his version of Surbiton - 'Shorthand for a place that almost existed' - in his case, the suburbs outside Guildford. Anyone who has lived in suburbia will know that the veil of normality can hide some pretty strange goings on and Burnside finds many other routes to dysfunction. As he says, 'all craziness is kin.' It isn't just the intake of alcohol and drugs that drives that journey but the faltering connections between people.

Friendship, or at least drinking companionship, is soured when his buddy attempts to enlist him in the murder of his wife, inspired by Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. A relationship turns out to be based on love for the woman's children rather than her herself (Burnside describes brilliantly the way that the daughter 'chooses' him, her love and attention impossible to resist). When love really does come along it is in a form that makes it unacceptable. Each chapter describes another instance in which he attempted to be normal, to disappear into the everyday world and was found wanting. I always wondered where he got the ability to make the mundane into something beautiful in his fiction. Now having read more about his own battles to silence voices and find rest, his search for what the Japanese call 'wabi-sabi: the state of quotidian grace in which everyday objects and events become sacraments', I've come a little closer to understanding.

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'We're already us'

Generosity

by Richard Powers

Powers has featured on this blog a couple of times and is a writer I am always interested in as his background in physics means that his novels are always likely to test the grey cells. The flip side to a combination of literature and science is that he can sometimes test your patience too, the literature sometimes suffers at the expense of the science, but when it works (most notably for me in The Gold Bug Variations), there is something genuinely invigorating about being pulled in lots of directions at the same time. His last novel The Echo Maker may have won him the National Book Award but I found that examination of identity through Oliver Sacks-like neuroscience a slightly slow and depressing read. His latest seems a far cheerier proposition: What if there was a gene for happiness?

In America his latest novel is not subtitled as such but instead ": An Enhancement" which relates I think not only to the contents but also the style in which they are presented. The authorial voice is hard to pin down at first, breaking directly through the text to address us and speaking of the central character, Russel Stone, as if he were not the very person writing the book, which he is.

'I can't see him well, at first. But that's my fault, not his. I'm years away, in another country...'

Stone becomes a teacher in Chicago, tutoring in creative non-fiction and it is amongst his class that he encounters Thassa Amzwar a Berber refugee from Algeria, who seems to radiate a happiness not in keeping with her troubled family history and flight from death and danger.

She's shorter than Stone thought. She's wearing a kind of needle-work, coral-colored shift. She could be from southern Italy. But her round face shines with precisely the light he remembers, the flushed look announcing that the most remarkable thing has happened to her, just now, down this hall, outside this building, on the streets of this improbable city. A thing that redeems everyone, for years to come.

Could there be some genetic cause to this seemingly unbreakable optimism? At first Stone assumes that she is on some kind of new medication (the world we are in is one where mood enhancers come in pill-form, where it is assumed everything will one day be treatable) or perhaps giddy from her trauma. The first hurdle for Powers is how to create a believable character from such a set-up but he does well, not only in describing her attitude but in showing the impact on it from what happens when others discover her gift. In such a society she could be a seriously valuable commodity and one man looking for just such a person is Thomas Kurton, a geneticist who has been working on the genetic basis of happiness and only needs the perfect subject to prove his hypothesis. This develops effectively into a struggle between the two men for what Thassa offers, although of course this isn't something that she actively offers, aware of its value, just simply who she is and that she chooses not to withhold.

Powers does a brilliant job of commenting on his society, a slightly enhanced version you might say of our own. For Stone, who has learnt to his cost the power of his own words once they're in the public domain, the current fascination for transparent social lives and a total loss of privacy leaves him feeling protective.

But even as he shrinks from it, the world graduates to runaway first person. Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafes, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even warzone journalism all turn confessional. Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.

In such a society you can imagine the media circus that kicks into action once they get a hold of Thassa. A medical marvel, a living prophecy, a foreign danger; there are many ways she can be interpreted and her appearance on America's largest talk show, Oona (think of an Irish-American Oprah and you have the idea), provides the moment that creates her myth and allows Powers again to critique the speed of modern communication. Her moment of near meltdown and recovery becomes a much copied and parodied YouTube sensation.

"Oona, listen," a pretty Vancouver Eurasian lip-synchs, in her own shot-perfect recreation of the segment. "I promise you: This is easy. Nothing is more obvious."
A stocky blond high school junior wearing a Berber blouse in her Orlando bedroom recites for the lens, "People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful."
Atlanta: "Even a minute is more than we deserve." Spokane, Allentown: "No one should be anything but dead." San Diego, Concord, Moline: "Instead, we get honey out of rocks. Miracles from nothing."
"It's easy," all the Thass Amzwars across the globe swear to anyone who'll listen. "We don't need to get better. We're already us. And everything that is, is ours."

Getting back to style, that strange authorial voice is the result of Stone's rehabilitation as a writer. His romantic relationship with a counsellor encourages him to put pen to paper again and we are ostensibly reading his own creative non-fiction, his rendering of events. Some sections begin 'So there's this scene...' for example and at other times the interjections are more blatant, stressing all the time his failure to make the most of his material.

I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can't quite make out what I'm to do with them.

Quite a frank admission from an author and one that the uncharitable might use against Powers rather than Stone at times (Buridan's ass if you didn't already know (I have my own hand in the air here) is an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. So now you know). There are also still those moments where scientific language is used to describe the scientific thinking of his scientific characters and you wonder whether scientists really think like that (Goose bumps run up Kurton's neck - piloerection, puffing up against danger - archaic reflex pirated by that spin-off of no known survival value: awe). As I've said before, Powers isn't to all tastes, but there's no doubting his willingness to tackle not only big science but also the big themes that spin off from that. The dryness of facts and reason are often counter-balanced by the very human mistakes people make trying to find love or companionship. Order runs alongside disorder and with Generosity he has written a book which dares to take a look at some of the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human and even where that very idea comes from.

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