'Ack!'

Stitches

by David Small

Thanks to Trevor over at The Mookse And The Gripes for pointing this one out. David Small's graphic memoir tells a story so extraordinary it feels like something from the Twilight Zone and his filmic and slightly gothic style creates a suitably dreamlike or nightmarish atmosphere for it. Growing up in 1950's America, Small shows us his household and its occupants all living isolated lives. His father spends his evenings venting frustrations into a punchbag in the cellar, his mother communicates her own pent up frustrations through the percussion of slamming kitchen-cupboard doors and his brother uses the more traditional form of percussion that is a drum kit. David himself remains solitary in his love of drawing and artwork, but his childhood is defined by his constant illness, suffering from respiratory problems.

David and I share the fact that our fathers were doctors and like Davd's my father couldn't help but use our family as guinea-pigs occasionally for some of the new treatments that became available. Whilst my father was a Consultant dermatologist and the new treatments were restricted to the odd lotion or potion, David's was working at the vanguard of the new medical technology of x-rays. At a time when it was thought that radiation could be used to treat a multitude of ailments David's father subjected his son to massive doses in order to cure him of the chronic respiratory problems that had plagued his youth. It can never be certain that these singularly caused David's later problem but they cannot but have contributed to the lump in David's neck, first spotted by a family friend, that would turn out to be cancer.

Amazingly it is several years before this lump is actually treated, mistaken at first for a benign cyst, and it is here that the really shocking element to the story occurs. After the initial operation David's parents, not wanting to worry their son unnecessarily, don't tell him about the severity of the second operation. In a telling moment, the significance of which David will realise later, his mother goes to the hospital bookstore to buy him a copy of Lolita, a book of 'filth' she had previously confiscated from his room and burnt. Like the final request granted to a condemned man, David's mother is prepared to grant him possession of a book she doesn't expect him to have the chance to read. When he does awake it isn't the now missing book that shocks but the devastation of the surgery which has left him with only one vocal chord and a scar on his neck that resembles a hastily tied bootlace.

David's life as a virtual mute makes up the rest of the book, the struggles with his family, a group of misfits who have loomed large in the story so far, like characters in a gothic horror, often illuminated by shadowy light. An isolated figure, David's vivid dreams are brought to life well by the illustrations here, text is kept to a minimum, and the panels flick past to create something close to the feeling of a silent movie (Trevor appositely mentions The Invention Of Hugo Cabret as a similar experience - another filmic book which has actually been optioned by Martin Scorcese). You cannot help but be cheered as he makes his escape from this upbringing, a sensation which leads to a slight chastening when Small reveals some family secrets at the book's close. It has been published for the Young Adult market in America and part of me did feel that there was a simplification of the story. It may be 330 pages or so but they literally fly by and whilst there are some nice visual touches and a sensitivity running through the book that engages the emotions, I did wonder whether a book aimed at a slightly older audience might have been able to develop some of the themes and secrets only hinted at here.

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Up

I watched Finding Nemo with my 2 year old the other day and almost immediately remembered that within the first couple of minutes of the film they kill off Nemo's mother and all his potential siblings. He hasn't quite worked out the significance of that opening scene yet, but I'm not relishing his dawning realisation. It made me realise that if you think about it, a lot of Disney films for children don't tend to pull their punches. I believe those film classification types call it 'mild peril' or something like that. Kids that are too young to get it, don't, and so their films work on those different levels for the wide audience range and when kids make those connections as they grow up perhaps the medium of the film helps to soften the blow.

With the opening section of Disney and Pixar's latest however it's the adults who may need to have a hanky at hand. In another of those magical sequences with no word spoken we are presented with almost the entire life of Carl Frederickson with all of the love and loss that entails. If you can make it through that without a lip tremble then you're made of tougher stuff than me. After a trash compacting robot in Wall.E Carl is another unlikely hero for an animated family film. A 78 year old balloon salesman with hearing aid and walker, Carl is cantankerously voiced by Ed Asner. As housing developments and blocks of flats spring up around the home he has occupied for most of his adult life Carl makes an extraordinary escape, house and all, in order to purse one of his life's ambitions. Piloting a detached house (no pun intended) is presumably hard enough but when Carl finds a stowaway in the form of Wilderness Explorer Russell you know things can only get tougher. The double generation gap and Carl's general impatience create a nice tension, of which Russell is entirely ignorant, for their adventure in South America. The fauna they encounter, especially the non-indigineous variety, add further to Carl's obstacles in achieving that long-held ambition.

So, yet another engaging, charming, quirky, and original film from the Pixar lot. What this film manages like no other before it is to be heart-breakingly romantic without a touch of sentimentality. You can see the love of the filmmakers in every scene. Their successes from Toy Story onwards were allegedly all sketched out in a single meeting, what a meeting of creativity that must have been. One wonders what they might come up with next (after Toy Story 3 that is).

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'playing cards with the devil'

Invisible
by Paul Auster

After reading and reviewing Oracle Night recently I was surprised to see what a cool reception the book had received on publication. Indeed, many reviewers at the time felt as though Auster may well have performed his meta-fictional loop-the-loop so much as to disappear up his own backside. Perhaps it was the break from Auster that had come before my own reading that made it seem far more palatable than that at the time, but having now read his latest novel, Invisible, a book in which Auster delivers on his talent more completely than in any I have read since The Book Of Illusions, I can begin to see their point. Let's not dwell on that though but celebrate the achievements of this return to form.

The first section of the book, Spring, is presented as a standard first-person account by Adam Walker of a meeting whilst he was a student at Columbia in 1967. The enigmatic Rudolf Born, a visiting professor, and his partner Margot are like studies in European chic, he dressed in white, she in black, and their befriending of Walker at a party is just the beginning of a complex trinity. Whilst Margot remains almost silent Born enthusiastically encourages the young student predicting that he will write his biography, and it isn't long before Born is proposing a venture: a literary magazine that he will finance and Walker will edit. In every aspect of this partnership Born is in control and Walker passive; even when Walker and Margot begin an affair in Born's absence it is something he has almost pushed them into and we feel that it may be at Born's behest. This sexual awakening is a revelation for Walker, 'a beginner in the arms of a veteran',

...Margot was so comfortable with herself, so knowledgeable in the arts of nibbling, licking and kissing, so unreluctant to explore me with her hands and tongue, to attack, to swoon, to give herself without coyness or hesitation that it wasn't long before I let myself go. If it feels good, it's good. Margot said at one point, and that was the gift she gave me over the course of those five nights. She taught me not to be afraid of myself anymore.

On Born's return however the rules of the game change after an act of random violence, an event that blows apart Walker's world and sends Born fleeing to France. Then we come to the second section of the book where a college colleague of Walker's, Jim Freeman, a novelist, receives a parcel with a covering letter explaining that now, 40 years later, Walker is dying of leukaemia and trying to write a memoir, the first part of which we have just read. He is struggling with the next section, Summer, so disgusted with the story he needs to tell and it is on Jim's advice that he employs the unfashionable second-person narration. That distance allows him to return to the dysfunction within his family, the grief that followed the death of his infant brother and the night he spent in sexual experimentation with his sister when both were teens, a night deemed safe and harmless due to its isolation and the agreement that it would never be repeated. A regular feature of their relationship since has been to meet and reminisce on the anniversary of their brother's death and it is on this day in the summer of '67 that the two of them fall into 'an unholy matrimony' in the days leading up to Walker's journey to study in Paris. As in the first section this period of sexual adventure is by definition finite. Constrained by Born's impending return in the first case and Walker's approaching flight in the second, each encounter is heightened in its intensity, dangerous for different reasons.

Fall, is the third section in which Freeman fleshes out the notes left by Walker into a third-person narration of his sojourn in Paris. Sojourn is a rather cosy word for what is a tale of intrigue and revenge in which Walker attempts to outwit the man who eluded him back in New York, a dangerous game given the ruthlessness and connections which Born clearly possesses. Paris also sees a resumption of relations between Walker and Margot, for whom the importance of sex is not to be underestimated.

If she couldn't have sex she would probably kill herself to escape the boredom and monotony of being trapped inside her own skin.

Very French. The fillip in the final section is achieved by having Freeman in the present day follow up on the characters that have played the supporting roles in Walker's story. Through his conversations and another manuscript, which continues the story of Born we become party to new information that forces us to question the veracity of everything we have accepted as true. This is classic unreliable narrator territory, and Auster keeps it ambiguous. Some other reviewers have found this book too to be self-reverential in its literary playfulness and narrative shifts but it felt to me as though each shift in style was justified and the exploration of storytelling compelling. All of that cleverness is no good naturally if it gets in the way of the story or slows the pace too much but Auster keeps the pages turning by employing thriller like plotting, intrigue, revenge and revelation. I think the novel benefits, in a manner similar to The Book Of Illusions, from wider vistas. By moving beyond the closed world of Brooklyn, familiar from much of his writing, and including Paris and even a remote Caribbean island in his canvas there is some room to breathe.

There is still the matter of distance and connection. Comparing Auster to other writers can remind you what a safe distance he maintains from what he is writing about. One can only imagine what Roth for example would have made of a story involving adultery, murder and incest; how close one would have found oneself to the heat, the fear, the anger and the danger. But I'm not sure Auster has ever been that kind of writer so it may be unfair to accuse him of not connecting in that way. What he does, when he does it well, has its own merits, and in Invisible he seems to be doing it once again with confidence and, perhaps more importantly, with relish and enjoyment.

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'this wayward machine'

The Unnamed
by Joshua Ferris

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of this novel several months ago and have put off writing up my thoughts until the timing became more important. It isn't often that there's such a large gap in between reading and writing for me but I can say that my enthusiasm for this book hasn't dimmed in the interim; in fact because I started off feeling fairly ambivalent about it and gradually became caught up in its many strengths, it is a book that I am as enthusiastic about now as when I finished its final page.

I remember when Ferris' first novel And Then We Came To The End was published to some acclaim. I gathered vaguely from what I read that it was set in an office and was funny. I was working in an office at the time and it wasn't in any way funny so I gave the book a miss. Whether that was a mistake or not I don't know but his, by all accounts, very different follow-up shows him to be a writer unafraid of making some bold choices and producing some dazzling prose along the way. At first it seems as if the concept is all; Tim Farnsworth seems to have everything going for him: Successful career as partner in a law firm, beautiful wife, attentive daughter, large house in the suburbs. All of which makes his condition all the more baffling.

The night before, he had been wheeling the trash down the drive to the curb, one in the morning. It was the second of three bins. He knew halfway down that he would not be back for the third. He knew the sensation as an epileptic knows an aura. As an epileptic feels the dread of an uncoming seizure, he was crestfallen, broken-hearted, instantly depressed by what was now foretold. It's back.

What has returned after a four year absence is Tim's 'condition', something either physical or mental or both that sends him walking out of his own life, away from his home until his body collapses, exhausted, when it can go no further.

He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this wayward machine.

It is an action which Tim cannot control, irrational by any definition, a risk to himself and a strain on his family. Like a wayward teen he has often made a phone call home in the early hours, giving his location so that his loyal wife, Jane, can come and pick him up. But what can you do when your condition has no precedent, when medical and psychiatric authorities can provide you with no treatment, prognosis or even a name? Tim attempts to absorb this compulsion into his working life; when it sends him careening out of the office as he works to defend a client on a murder charge he invents a family crisis as cover, pretending that his wife has cancer. But as his walks continue and nature begins to wreak its impact on his body, the cold weather stealing a toe, then a finger to frostbite, his position becomes more and more untenable. His mental state is questioned too, what to make of his encounter with a shadowy figure bearing information and even a murder weapon for the case on which Tim is rapidly losing his grip? His locomotion doesn't allow him to pursue the lead and we wonder if such a meeting is even possible.

At home the returning crisis and its remission have the effect of momentarily bringing Tim closer to his daughter, Becka, whose social awkwardness and problems with weight have isolated her. With this newly dependent father the two are able to converse with a new openness. Tim begins to find pleasure and worth in small things, determined not to take his life for granted, but any progress is short-lived and before long he is on the move again. For his wife, the effect of all this anxiety and second parenthood is a descent into alcoholism, a condition that mirrors Tim's own addictive compulsion. What is extraordinary throughout the novel is the strength of the connection between Tim and Jane, even in their disconnectedness. In the face of huge obstacles they have moments where they remain as united as ever, an impressive, touching and ultimately sad predicament.

They stared into the essential mystery of each other, but felt passing between them in those rare moments of silence the recognition of that more impossible mystery - their togetherness, the agreement each had made that they could withstand the wayward directions they had taken and, despite their inviolable separateness, still remain. It had nothing to do with how age and custom had narrowed their circumstances or how sickness had shapes them outside their control. It was not a backward but a forward glance.

So what does this condition represent? What is Tim running from? What I feared initially was going to be another novel about early male crisis or rejection of modern progress or middle class convention has far grander ambitions. Tim's condition is open to many interpretations and opens up many social and philosophical ideas, even developing into a kind of dialogue of Cartesian dualism between the competing forces within Tim. As his condition worsens and he wanders alone, having rejected any help from his family, giving himself over to 'it', his mind and body separate; or perhaps more accurately, his reason and this other become discernible voices, battling it out for control.

"You go on and on about how cold and hungry you are," he said. "The night is long, you say. Good shoes are not just a luxury. But then you're off and thee's no appeal. There's no explanation for your behaviour and no memory of your complaints. Are you not still cold? Are you not hungry? What is your purpose, your aim, but to hurl us both into suffering and darkness? Speak to me! You destroy my life, you rob me of my will, you troll me through the streets like meat on a hook. You have laid plain all my limitations and my total illusion of freedom. To what end? What do you gain from this?"
The other limped along steadily, saying nothing

Ferris also maintains the ambition for his tale by keeping the scale grand. The time covered, the landscape traversed, the cost exacted; Ferris really makes Tim suffer, those lost digits are just part of the toll paid during his odyssey. You cannot help but admire a book this brutal, a book prepared to make its central character suffer so much in the examination of fundamental ideas about human freedom, purpose and ability. It is a bold statement to take on the literary heritage of someone like Beckett, some of the fans of Ferris's début may well get the shock of their lives, but that ambition should be rewarded. It isn't a perfect book, the wandering of its hero leads to the odd moment of wandering on the page, but it is a brutal look at Man in the modern world, and heralds Ferris as a writer to take very seriously indeed.

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Antichrist

If it hadn't been for the vociferous praise from a friend, wild horses couldn't have dragged me to watch Lars Von Trier's latest controversy. Not only did it seem to be thoroughly unpleasant but having recently been joined by our second son the timing couldn't have been any worse for a film which follows the tortured path of a couple grieving after the death of their toddler. It doesn't matter who you are though, or what your familial setup might be, Antichrist is always going to be an uncomfortable and uncompromising watch. Deeply troubling, controversial in the truest sense of the word and as admirable as it is repulsive, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel but after a week or two I am at least ready to get something out there.

It is an uncompromising start, Von Trier seems keen to set out his stall early. The first few minutes of the film, shot in beautiful slow motion black-and-white, show Willem Defoe as 'He' and Charlotte Gainsbourg as 'She' making love, including a close-up shot of a thrusting, erect penis so that you can accuse him of pornography and the simultaneous, slow, almost balletic sequence events that leads to the couple's son falling from their apartment window onto the snowy street below. We are then into Grief, the name of this first section, which has hospitalised and medicated her and left him, who is a therapist, with the cold detachment of a professional, searching for the best way to help her through her grief. At first we feel huge sympathy for Gainsbourg, crippled by her grief, lashing out for some kind of purchase on her emotions, whilst at the same time being repelled by Defoe's clinical and arrogant treatment of his partner. You sense that there can only be danger once the barrier between lover and therapist has been broken down and this feeling only intensifies when the couple leave the oppression of their apartment for the rural retreat they call Eden.

After Grief come sections entitled Pain (Chaos Reigns) and Despair (Gynocide) where rural retreat becomes a place of frightening isolation, Eden becomes Hell, and the couple embark on a course of tortured treatment, recrimination and confrontation. Von Trier's landscape is dark hued and frightening, populated by totemic animals like a doe with a stillborn fawn hanging behind it, and a rank fox which even speaks to Him ("Chaos reigns!") a horrible visual representation of Her assertion that Nature is Satan's Church. The increasingly nightmarish feel to the film continues as the violence escalates and all is enhanced by Anthony Dod Mantle's amazing cinematography; Eden is fecund and rotting, a harsh light cuts through the night and the black and white sections are deep and textured.

The torturous violence meted out wouldn't look out of place in the rash of horror flicks from the Saw stable but it isn't that or the explicit sex that worry me. It is of course the sexual politics and the inevitable accusations of misogyny. I've already mentioned our differing sympathies for He and She and these shift through the film with Von Trier providing revelations that alter our perception particularly of her. She had been working on a thesis of historical violence against women (Gynocide) but her endeavour stalled in the face of her unacceptable conclusion. Human nature is evil and therefore women are evil, a conclusion dangerously close to 'she asked for it' and one rejected emphatically by He. But those revelations about her would seem to support her thesis and the last of these is such a paradigm shift that it risks alienating part of the audience entirely. This is what I'm still struggling with. Von Trier can't really be suggesting that women are evil, their sexual desires perverse and murderous, and their relationship to their offspring ambivalently abusive; so what is he trying to say exactly? The final scene in which a crowd of faceless women surge over the hill on which He now stands alone, baffled, is perhaps an indicator of Von Trier's own bafflement and certainly a neat symbol of mine. What I can say for sure is that the film is a work of art rather than pornography of sex or violence. It is uncomfortable and difficult, challenging and unique. There is no right time to watch it but it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand.

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