Did everyone have a pleasant journey of 253?

253 added another layer to the experience of Writing the City. It may have been the most London novel read so far in the London Reading Club.

Unlike the condensed index of 253 characters written in 253 words, the work of 253 was proven to be saturated with full of complexity. As the author says, ‘however unlikely, numbers are always there for a reason. ‘ (p.1)

More than half of the group read 253 as a book in a conventional linear style starting from Passenger 1, leaving the end of line until later. The hypertext readers tended to jump from one place to another like hopping on and off of the Tube.

The unorthodox style of 253 reminded some of flash fiction for its brief and crisp writing. Regardless of the sum of the characters, the author Geoff Ryman seems to have succeeded in characterisation.  The well observed details offered a variety and enabled the characters to be believable and more true to life.

It is interesting to note that the author is an advocate of Mundane Science Fiction Movement setting stories on the Earth with a believable use of technology and science.

Although there is not much futuristic element to label 253 as Science Fiction, the hypertext employing the burgeoning technology of computers and World Wide Web was certainly an innovative experiment which could have been regarded futuristic at the time.

Notable characters:

Mr Tony Colley (Passenger 18), a magician carrying a live rabbit in his bag who works on a cross-Chanel ferry and can hardly see his daughter. He wants to leave the job but he can’t afford to do so.

Mrs Eva Simmonds (Passenger 53) who married to her cousin. She does not realise how ugly he was when she married. He does not allow her to work. Now she is becoming herself as well.

Mr Leon De Marcho (Passenger 134) who lives on the street where William Blake used to live.

Mrs Margaret Thatcher (Passenger 186) who is a thatcher working on the roof of the Globe Theatre.

Miss Anne Frank (Passenger 253) who is now an elder woman, thinking that she is still on the train to Auschwitz.

Those vividly depicted characters are sometimes poignant and seem to induce an essence of satirical social realism to the story.

As 253 is also known as Tube Theatre, the story is like a play performed by the passengers of the Tube involving the dramas that occur on the stage of life.

Being a writer may be sometimes like being an observant passenger on the ride of life. After all, ‘the world is full of coincidence as 253.’ (p.257)

Stories may unfold themselves before us.

a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash

Oh, one last thing; for all of the negative coverage that Bangladesh may get, an LSE survey in 2009 put the country first in its Gross National Happiness Index!

(Next up on February 17^th, Koari will be taking us on the Geoff Ryman’s journey, 253 – the book can be accessed free at http://www.ryman-novel.com/)

Quotes from Brick Lane

Chanu to Nazneen (P45): “Why should you go out? ‘If you go out, ten people will say, “I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look a fool. Personally, I don’t mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?

(P65): “A man cannot live without water…but he can bear the thought of no water. A man can live without sex…but he cannot bear the thought of no sex.”

Razia to Nazneenm (P71) “She’s asking for a divorce. I heard it from Nazma, who heard it from Sorupa. Hanufa told her about it, and she got it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Nazia reflecting on home (P96): “In Gouripur a sweetmaker was a sweetmaker, a shoemaker was a shoemaker, and a carpenter was a carpenter. They did not want to be teachers or librarians. They were not waiting for promotions. They did not make themselves unhappy.”

Razia’s view of women immigrants’ experience (P114). “Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I’m just one of them…Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in their kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English.”

Chanu on white working class (P254). “Because our own culture is so strong. And what is their culture? Television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball. That is the white working class culture.”

Nazneen’s reaction to Karim’s reading, Hadith of the Day on adultery (P347) “After the first few lines Nazneen heard only the blood in her ears. She watched Karim as a mouse watches a cat; when he turned she would be ready…”It is time for you to go,” she said.

I also mentioned that in the absence of other volunteers, I’ll introduce the third session on Fri 16 March at 2:00pm.    I’d like to base it on Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes.; it’s a bit different from the books we’ve read to date.

Imagine your fate has been decided for you from day one.

A teenage Nazneen comes to London from Bangladesh as part of an arranged marriage. Her husband Chanu, who is twice her age as well as twice her weight, is burdened by a thirst for knowledge he can put to no practical use other than impose it on his family. They both try to maintain this arrangement through the early death of a son, the later birth of daughters, the debt owed to the usurer Mrs Islam, the diverting cynicism of neighbour Razia, and of course the charisma of the radical Karim.

Like many first novels Brick Lane is drawn from Monica Ali’s own background (if not direct experience) where intergenerational tensions in immigrant communities prevailed (Ali says the book ‘chose her’). There is no doubting its ambition; it covers issues of race, gender, age, and religion, and there is much to admire in its scale, ironically in a claustrophobic setting – a small flat in a small part of London. In the microcosmic portrayal of a small community you can really sense the changes facing them; from the leaflets of local racists to the perceived threat facing the global ummah, a tension that divides those in the ‘Bengal Tigers’.

Brick Lane was met with great critical acclaim when first published in 2003. In fact Ali was included in Granta’s list of best Young British Novelists before the book (her first) had even come out. Most literary critics lauded the book for many of the reasons I have outlined (its scope, ambition, subject). But Ali has said she suspects it also came from their belief that this was a hidden world, whereas in reality it was a world very close to them, it just hadn’t been popularised in such a way before (or allowed to be). Hari Kunzru wryly said that Ali was that year’s ‘ethnic novelist’, “You are allowed one a year in Britain. I was last year’s! Zadie Smith a year or two before” (http://tinyurl.com/729ncuy). Authors were divided, most notably Germaine Greer and Salman Rushdie, but oddly not until the film came out (http://tinyurl.com/8yqeqnz). It was then she was criticised for the portrayal of the Bengali community; that it wasn’t drawn from her own direct personal experience. However, this of itself is not a reason to criticise a novelist, after all it is meant to be fiction. Ali says she didn’t set out to make an overt political message, and much of the book’s success was very much based on its explication of a changing London and a changing world.

But for all its radicalism of topic and later of response, this is not a radical book. In format it reads as a traditional piece of social realism, on a topic not widely read by western readers before. And for me that is its weakness; like many social realist books it is bleak, there is not a great deal to be uplifted by as you go through it. The portrayal of the working classes is a horror story of unremitting struggle, against authorities and more problematically amongst themselves. Class is the one thing not facing change in Brick Lane; shifting ethnic, gender and intergenerational tensions pervade the book, but class is often the elephant in the room. And it is here where much of the criticism for Ali comes from. Protesters of the book claimed that Ali was influenced by her father, a non-Sylheti from Dhaka, and the characters depict Sylhetis as “dirty little monkeys” who are: “Uneducated. Illiterate. Close-minded.” (http://tinyurl.com/7xbdq2p).

When asked what the book was about, Monica Ali said* it is “a meditation on fate and free will,” and undoubtedly this is the book’s main strength. Nazneen is constrained by the certainty of her own fate (‘it is Gods will’) and belief that she doesn’t have the ‘power to choose’, which is only disrupted when she begins sewing garments to pay off Chanu’s debt to Mrs Islam. Ali was inspired by the work of Naila Kabeer on Bangladeshi garment workers, who through self-employment were given a certain amount of self-determination, sometimes more than their counterparts in London (http://tinyurl.com/6sp9d9q). But it is not only Nazneen; Chanu, Karim, Hasina and to some extent Razia, all also struggle with fate and free will.

So like many books of ambition and scale, expectations are raised and opinions divided. Please offer your own opinion of Brick Lane, but keep in mind your personal struggle with fate  and free will, and let’s see where it leads us.

(*the references to Monica Ali’s discussion of the book are taken from a University of Warwick discussion in 1994 – before the controversy from the making of the film, http://tinyurl.com/7fzmquu).

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

…’the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’… Roland Barthes (1977)

London Fields is not in west London as Amis suggests, it is a real place in Hackney, east London.  Unlike Mrs Dalloway’s London, where you can still accurately follow in her footsteps today, Amis wrong-foots us so that we have to work out where we are and what is really happening.  This is not a simple tale of an urban Arcadia despite the title’s implication that this might be the case.

Having entered into an across-the-pond flat swap, Samson Young finds himself in Mark Asprey’s London home, ready to finally overcome his writer’s block, as the world rushes towards an uncertain new Millennium and he faces death from terminal illness.  His two previous titles, ‘Memoirs of a Listener’ and ‘On The Grapevine’ appear to support his assertion that he ‘just can’t make anything up.’  He counts himself fortunate, therefore, when a perfect cast of characters enters his life to provide the dialogue, almost all the action, and the locations required to complete his murder story.  The self-appointed Murderee, Nicola Six, has selected her thirty-fifth birthday as the day of her death because she cannot face the ageing process.

As Guy Clinch walks down the Portobello Road, he sees it as a ‘whole trench scuffed and frayed, falling apart, and full of rats.’  Amis’s London is one where family life is disintegrating, and unspecified threats of nuclear war and climate change hang over everyone.  The Black Cross has become a haven for Keith, Guy, Sam and Nicola Six and a space for dirty jokes and hatching plots.  ‘If London’s a pub and you want the whole story, then where do you go?  You go to a London pub.’  Keith Talent’s only talent is for playing darts and we can almost smell the stale air as his arrows fly across the smoke and gloom to thwack into the board.

There is a good deal of black humour in London Fields.  For example, when Keith is daydreaming about forthcoming riches and fame, he toys with the idea of himself as Keithcliff after reading a few pages of Wuthering Heights, but then they do share some character traits so perhaps it’s not so funny after all.

The impossibly cramped flat where Keith and Kath live – although ‘live’ is rather too expansive a word for a space that produces such disproportionate violence –  seems to crush any potential humanity.  But it is out of this same space that the Angel of the tower block, baby Kim, emerges full of hope, truth and innocence.  So, there is light at the end of the tunnel?  Perhaps, but then there is the counterbalance in monstrous Marmaduke who, even at a very tender age, you would not like to meet down a dark alley.  The product of a luxurious home with two of everything – except Marmaduke thankfully – we are forced to consider the question of nature versus nurture, and poverty versus plenty – or are we?

Written in 1989 but set in 1999, Simon Schama has described London Fields as ‘one of the all-time great London novels’.  However, this book does appear to be about the craft of writing as much as the story itself and could equally be described as exploring the postmodern zeitgeist.  All this, of course, is open to debate…

We discussed the characters that were the most poignant and most agreed that Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were most effective. This was partially because of their plausibility in real life, and their undeniable ability to unsettle the reader. The group commented on how their professionalism helped the characters seem more real. Betsy noted that they always address each other properly as mister. Are there any other devices Gaiman uses with his characters that not only make them real but push the boundaries of the fantastic that you find particularly effective?

Finally, as can be seen in Pete’s comment, there is wonderful commentary that describes the relationship between London Above and Below. My favorite city commentary occurs on page 249 when Richard endures the ordeal ” London Transport would like to apologize for the delay. This is due to an incident at Blackfriars Station. ‘To do that.’ said Gary, incline his head. ‘Become an incident at Blackfriars station. To end it all.”  It’s another jolting quote like the one Pete brought up. It takes something we take for granted, London sewers, train delays, and brings them to the forefront. Noone here thinks about the sewers and their health, and most people hear ‘Person Under Train’ and get annoyed that their stop is down. Are these views from London Below effective social commentary? Does this joining of the two and comparing them help make London Below more believable to you as the reader? Or does it push you away a bit?

Just some food for thought and remarking on some of the things that were said at the meeting. I hope you all enjoyed your trip to a different London and now it’s time to introduce the next book which Anne will be presenting. Next up, London Fields.

“There are hundreds of people in this other London. Thousands maybe. People who come from here, or people who have fallen through the cracks. I’m wandering around with a girl called Door, her bodyguard, and her psychotic grand vizier.”

Welcome to London below, a semi medieval dystopian world situated conveniently alongside our own. No one appears to notice it though, not unless they slip through the cracks of our London, London above. It’s filled with magic in its stranger forms – bounty hunters who eat ancient Chinese artwork, people who speak to rats, a wild ancient beast, evil angels, and much more.

Artwork by Fossfor

First of all, my apologies for the rather late appearance of the post on this weeks novel, A Week In December by Sebastian Faulks. Better late than never eh?

A commendably ambitious novel, A Week In December attempts to capture the whole cornucopia of modern London within seven different characters over seven days in the city. It is often compared unfavourably with Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, as an effort to do for London in the first decade of the 21st century what Wolfe did for New York in the 80′s. That is, to capture the essence of London in that moment in time and the state of the nation as a whole. But a great deal has changed in thirty years and they are two very different novels. The 21st century has brought with it a deluge of information, stimuli, materialism and immaterialism. The sheer amount of which the human psyche has never had to contend with before. As a result A Week In December is considerably less focused than Wolfe’s great work but endeavors to be much more all-encompassing. Stereotype and even caricature are perhaps unavoidable consequences of this aim; from the greedy investment banker, and the lonely tube-driver, to the disaffected young British Muslim and embittered literary critic. These characters are convincing to varying degrees but what unifies them and the whole novel is the sense of alienation and disconnect from the real world, the real London around them. The urban space is a common setting for depictions of alienation, with its high density of people leading busy lives it is a paradoxical yet familiar feature of human nature that we can feel at our most alone when surrounded by others. What is remarkable about A Week In December is the sheer number of ways in which it shows us individuals can feel alienated from modern society. Hassan, striving for an adult identity, begins to loathe the ‘kafir‘ world around him that he cannot relate to. Tranter, socially ill at ease, rejects everything modern and admits to having “a particularly sympathetic feeling, even at the age of eighteen, for the Victorians.” Finn, neglected by his parents, escapes to a world of fantasy football, the unreality of reality tv and drug altered states. Jenni, with some allusion to a painful past, escapes in her work, her books and most obviously to a completely virtual world in the online game Parallax every evening. Gabriel, one of the the more astute and reflective characters, observes of Jenni and himself,

“And what if she was hiding from something underground? Wasn’t he, really, doing the same with his crossword puzzle and his French novels?”

Peripheral characters also play a role in this theme of alienation. Roger, given the rousing monologue against the modern financial system towards the end of the novel, has long taken to drink as he feels so out of touch and tired with the modern world. Nasim also, reflects touchingly on an age-old sense of alienation from her son,

“She felt saddened by her inability to reach the heart of Hassan’s problems and bruised by his coldness […] when once, when he was young, they had had this majestic intimacy.”

John Veals is alienated from the world around him in a starkly different way. With hints of Patrick Bateman about him, he is frighteningly disconnected from his wife, son, and the real world around him, exhibiting a chilling amorality in bringing about the suffering of thousands, maybe even millions, for his own personal gain. Veal’s world is the absurd, abstract and inequitable world of modern finance which he observes almost proudly:

“was no longer related to growth or increase, but became self-sustaining; and in this semi-virtual world, the amount of money to be made by financiers also became unhitched from normal logic.”

Karl Marx posited alienation was a systemic consequence of capitalism, and the city, particularly London, is always the epitomised vanguard of capitalism. A Week in December arguably suggests the same, centred so inescapably around money and materialism as it is. Sophie Topping, towards the end of the novel, reflects on the unreal level of accumulated wealth of her dinner guests which highlights the contradiction and irony between this obsession with the material in a vacuously immaterial world:

“It was a funny thing, Sophie thought, how everyone you met these days seemed not just to be wealthy but insanely, ineffably, immeasurably rich. Hundreds of millions of useless pounds slopping out of their accounts and into hedge funds and private-equity companies who could no longer find anything worth buying with it. […] But apart from Farooq al-Rashid, who’d shifted tons of limes from the groves of Mexico and Iran via the steaming vats of Renfrew down the gullets of the masses and thence into the sewers underground, none of them had engaged with anything that actually existed.”

Faulks portrays a modern London profoundly disconnected from the real world in innumerable ways, and much of the novel is a darkly satirical indictment of the state of the nation. But there is the hint of salvation for several characters. Finn’s mother is roused from her stupor of midday snoozes and societal lunches by his slip in to psychosis. Hassan’s brush with death (real or imagined) at the hands of an unseen cyclist is the only human contact he unwittingly achieves on the bridge, which awakens him to the absurdity of his actions, and directs him to the one person he trusts enough to reveal his true self to. And Gabriel and Jenni’s burgeoning relationship offers a human connection both of them so clearly yearn for.

Finally, Gabriel, in reflecting on a past love, perhaps most eloquently sums up this feeling of disconnect with London and wider society that persists throughout the novel:

“In any event, he thought, perhaps his problem was not so much the loss of Catalina as a failure of engagement – or rather an incongruity. Here was this world –London, the park and trees and the people in his chambers and the precedents he studied, the case law, paperwork; there was the culture it threw at him in cinemas, in galleries, and in the self-devouring press and television with all its horrifying ‘reality’ programmes; and then the weather, chance of travel, other people, going out. That was what was on offer, out there. And then on the other hand there was him – the sum of random mutations among his ancestors, one outlying bud of an unstable species. Why would you expect b to like or enjoy a? What, really, were the chances of an overlap, a rough fit, let alone a congruence? The odd thing wasn’t that his spirit – if that was what it was, the flickering of electrical charge and spill of chemicals through a synapse – failed to lift to meet this world; the more remarkable thing was how many people did seem to like it, slotted into it and felt right at home there. Lucky them.”