'Seven Types of Ambiguity' by Elliot Perlman (Review)

April 2013 has been designated by Kim, over at Reading Matters, as Australian Literature Month, and as I've neglected books from my adopted home country over the past couple of years, I thought it was time to join in the fun :)  Rather than try out something new though, I decided to revisit one of my favourite Aussie writers - and his best book.  This is a modern classic, and it takes place right here in my home town...

*****
Elliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity is a 600-page novel set in 1990s Melbourne.  It's an ambitious work written in seven parts, each narrated by a different voice, and it centres on Simon Heywood, a depressed former primary school teacher.  Simon, a man of great intelligence, empathy and charisma, is unable to function normally after a child in his care disappeared, and his father employs psychologist Alex Klima to try to snap him out of it.

After initial misgivings, Alex becomes closer to Simon, treating him more like a friend than a patient.  With the help of Angelique, a prostitute who has also fallen for Simon's charms, he attempts to drag Simon up from the depths of his despair.  It's not quite that easy though - at the end of the first part, Simon snaps and does the unthinkable...

The problem is the object of Simon's obsession, his university girlfriend Anna.  He has never been able to get over their relationship, and she remains the idealised perfect woman.  There is an unhealthy obsession here, one he is unable to get rid of.  As he explains to Alex...

"Listen - all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won't or can't articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her - it is all unsupported by reason.  I know that.  But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason - it's something from which I haven't been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her."p.8 (Picador, 2004)

Unhappily married with a son, Anna is unaware of what is happening to Simon.  Until, that is, Simon kidnaps her son, Sam...

The set-up is probably good enough for a book as it is, but Seven Types of Ambiguity is far more than a simple story about a kidnapping.  As in another recent Australian novel (Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap), this one event provides the backdrop for a look at society.  It consists of a series of lengthy first-person narratives, moving backwards and forwards, examining events from other perspectives.  It's also brutally, painfully honest.

What's it all about?  Well, while it has  a lot to say about the nature of obsession, its main focus is on an uncaring society.  Perlman explores the stigma attached to mental health, contrasting the ideal of a caring ethos with the stark reality of the triumph of the 'free' market.  You see, 1990s Australia is a dog-eat-dog world - a cold wind's a blowin'...

"It's the times.  The times, they have changed.  Where once people were told that the answers were blowing in the wind, now it's they who are blown by the wind, the wind generated by the market.  The ruthless pursuit of the bottom line is the siren song of the times and the song is played over the public address system in banks, in stores and supermarkets.  It's played when you are downsized because your company can replace you with somebody in another country for two dollars a day.  And it's played whenever you call up anywhere needing assistance and they put you on hold because they've cut back on staff in order to increase their share price." (p.163)

Simon's rant about Neo-liberal philosophies are very a much a sign of their time - but somehow, it all sounds strangely familiar...

The old cry of 'turn on, tune out' is appropriate for a generation of apathy, a picture which is deftly painted over the course of the novel.  There is a media obsession with trivialities, witch-hunts and trial by soundbite.  By contrast, Alex's crusade against the introduction of US-style 'managed care' is seen as more Quixotic than realistic.  There's an overwhelming sense of a drive towards conformity: no divorce (no matter how bad the marriage), the childishness of the corporate retreat, even the look-the-other-way culture of the prison Simon finds himself in.  Freedom, though, is in short supply.  Simon and Alex rage against it all - and they're the mad ones?

As noted above, Seven Types of Ambiguity has a lot in common with The Slap, quite apart from its Melbourne setting.  Both use multiple points of view to give a wider perspective of a particular community, and both take one pivotal event and explore the repercussions of disturbing the status quo.  Where they differ is in the writing, and in the type of people the authors take as their guinea pigs.  Tsiolkas concentrates on a lower social group and is much more visceral in his writing, and some people have criticised Perlman for what they see as a more middle-class elitist story. I'd have to say that I prefer Perlman's style - and his story.

The key to it all is Perlman's portrayal of Simon, and the two pictures of Anna (the ideal and the flawed).  If Simon doesn't come across as someone worth empathising with (and, lest we forget, he did kidnap a child), then the whole novel will fall apart - the story relies on the reader understanding and forgiving Simon.  Fortunately, for me at least, Simon is a sympathetic figure, a man who understands and feels too much.  There's even a temptation to see him as a kind of Christ figure, humane and sympathetic amongst the madness and greed of the modern world.  Oh - and he has a lot of suffering in store...

The title of the novel comes from linguist and literary critic William Empson's work of the same name.  Empson's book explains how the beauty of poetry stems from seven types of linguistic ambiguity, and naturally it is a book the erudite Simon adores (he even named his dog Empson).  Like Simon, Empson was a bit of a Wunderkind, having written his landmark work in early twenties.  Also like Simon, he was destined to be taken down by societal prejudices; after a servant found a condom in his university rooms, he was banished from the city.  Unlike Simon though, Empson was encouraged in his pursuits, enabling him to achieve his work.  Simon's parents are not quite so supportive of their poetry-loving son.

As important as the linguistic ambiguities are though, Alex stresses another type of ambiguity.  In his eyes, it is the ambiguity of human relationships which is more important, the cause of most of the problems in the novel:

"As far as I was concerned, there were more important ambiguities than the ambiguities of poetic language that Empson talked about.  There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance.  A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations.  And if two people do have different views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives." (p.12)

Perlman goes on to demonstrate this throughout Seven Types of Ambiguity, when the same event is shown through two, or sometimes three, pairs of eyes, allowing the reader to see why events occur as they do.  Relationship can indeed be ambiguous - but so can stories...

Anyone who has made it this far in my tortured review will long have come to the conclusion that I'm a bit of a fan of Perlman's work, and this is easily the novel I like most.  It's very much a story of a certain time and place, yet it's one which is also relevant today.  In fact, while reading this novel, a raft of welfare 'reforms' were passed in the UK, among them plans which would effectively end the National Health Service in its present form.  In that context, Perlman's description of the move to managed care is a scarily eery one...

A (Far-From) Brief History Lesson

It's been, as we say here in Australia, a long time between drinks for Mr. Elliot Perlman.  One of my favourite Australian writers, his last novel (Seven Types of Ambiguity) came out back in 2003.  After such a long gap between outings, we were all expecting something substantial for his next book, and in this sense nobody could be disappointed.  The Street Sweeper, an epic tale of history, chance and heroism, runs to almost 550 pages, and (as you can see in my photo) weighs as much as a book of this gravity ought to...

The Street Sweeper takes us away from Melbourne, the setting for Perlman's earlier fiction, instead introducing us to an Australian historian, Adam Zignelik, working in New York.  Failing in his career (and his personal life), Zignelik is thrown a professional lifeline when an old friend suggests a research topic for him to pursue - the role of African-American soldiers in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of the Second World War.

Meanwhile, in another part of New York, newly-released convict Lamont Williams, having spent years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, is taking the first steps towards rebuilding his life, working on probation in maintenance in a large cancer hospital.  One morning, he meets an elderly Jewish man, Henryk Mandelbrot, outside the entrance to the hospital - an encounter which will have unforeseen ramifications for Lamont, Adam and many other people we will get to know.

If this little taster makes the book sound daunting, well, the truth is that it is a little, especially the start.  After the first hundred pages, filled with the exhaustive (and, at times, exhausting) backstories of Adam and Lamont, I still wasn't quite sure where the book was going, or whether I was enjoying it.  As Adam began to lecture to a class of history students at Columbia University, I started to feel that Perlman was actually lecturing to the reader...

Slowly though the narrative began to mutate, branch out, and as Adam sets out on his quest to uncover the truth behind the claims and suspicions, and the story splits into multiple narratives (in time and space!), the reader is sucked into the book, sitting behind Adam's shoulder, urging him on to the next vital discovery, the next link in the chain.  We are bombarded with information, some of it repetitive, some showing previously-known information in a slightly different light.  In effect, the writer is putting us in the shoes of a historian, forcing us to sift through the narratives and draw our own conclusions.

The more we read, the more interested we become.  We begin to see the links between the seemingly unconnected stories, and we also form attachments to the characters whose lives we are following, whether they are in the infamous death camps,  run-down Chicago tenements or chic New York bars.  From the initial, information-laden account, Perlman gradually develops a fascinating, intriguing story - one which ultimately rests on the people behind the history.

The subject matter, like the setting, is a slight departure from Perlman's usual fare.  Although he has touched on Jewish war experiences before (particularly in some of the stories from The Reasons I Won't Be Coming), The Street Sweeper addresses this topic more boldly, intertwining it with a second racial struggle, the advancement of civil rights for African-Americans.  In addition to highlighting the hsitory of Jewish lawyers working for the Black cause, the writer constantly throws up parallels between the two struggles.

One example is the insistence of a struggle for equality through the US legal system, a quest for equality echoed in one of the Jewish characters' attempts to educate Poles about Jewish history and culture in the mid-1930s.  Another centres around stars: while most people will know of the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in the Third Reich, fewer will know of the way African-American workers were identified in factories - by the use of pencilled black stars on their time cards...

This sense of solidarity between two oppressed minorities is shown in a scene where a white woman refuses to serve a Black worker in her café.  When her father, an older Jewish man, comes out, he apologises and says:

"Don't make trouble for the girl.  She was born here so..."  The old man seemed unsure how to finish the sentence.
"So what?" asked Tommy Parks
"So she thinks she's white."   p.376 (Vintage, 2011)

While the move towards racial equality in America is an important theme, it is the Holocaust which eventually takes over the narrative.  Step by step, we are gradually introduced to the horrors of the death camps, until Henryk (and the reader) can no longer avoid the stark reality of what is happening: 

"So it was true, and here he was, face-to-face with the truth.  He has seen people die in the ghetto but he had never seen anything like this.  So many bodies, inert, stacked hurriedly one on top of the other, a vast hill of them, a small mountain, so recently people.  Here, Mandelbrot thought, was the end of every slur, racial or religious, every joke, every sneer directed against the Jews."   p.349

There are many, many things which could be said about this book, but I'm not going to attempt to discuss all of them - I am aware of the irony of criticising a book's lengthy opening in a review which itself outstays its welcome...  This is a book which requires, almost demands, rereading, both for an understanding of its dense subject matter and to fully understand the intricate plotting of a novel which is almost Victorian in scope.  To finish, apart from urging you to read The Street Sweeper, I'll leave you with a quotation on the overarching theme of the book, racism:

"The enemy", Jake Zignelik explained, "is racism.  But see, racism isn't a person.  It's a virus that infects people.  It can infect whole towns and cities, even whole countries.  Sometimes you can see it in people's faces when they're sick with it.  It can paralyse even good people.  It can paralyse government.  We have to fight that wherever we find it.  that's what good people do."   p.29

Now, if that doesn't make you think, nothing will...

More from Marvellous Melbourne

You may have noticed a lot of Aussie books in my reading list this year, and the responsibility for that can be placed firmly on the shoulders of two places: firstly, Joanne of Booklover Book Reviews, whose Aussie Author Challenge has got me hooked on local literature; and secondly, the fine people of the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation, whose excellent system enables me to read these wonderful books without having to actually buy them at the extortionate prices charged Down Under.

This post will have mini-reviews of three wonderful books by three great writers, all of them from my adopted home town of Melbourne, and it was actually going to be a celebratory finishing post for the Aussie Author Challenge.  Today's offerings brought me up to thirteen for the year to date (!), but just as I was getting ready to pop the (metaphorical) champagne cork, I noticed the small print.  You see, the twelve required books had to be by a minimum of nine different authors, and my thirteen were the work of just eight...  Back to the drawing board, or, as I like to call it, the library web-site.  In the meantime, enjoy these short reviews anyway :)

*****
The Reasons I Won't Be Coming is a collection of short stories by Elliot Perlman, the author of the wonderful Three Dollars and Seven Types of Ambiguity.  It's an interesting collection of short stories (mostly) set in Melbourne, with a fascinating use of voice and perspective to hook you in to the stories.  They often start very abruptly, some with the protagonist talking to the reader as if in a monologue in a play, eventually widening the scope of events to reveal the full story.

Not all the stories are a total success (a point Perlman probably knows already, but which I'd like to point out anyway, is that readers are not prone to sympathising with lawyers who have been dumped by their married mistress after getting her pregnant...), and some do take a while to get going.  However, on the whole, they do eventually suck you in and make you think - which is always good in a short story.

One of the most interesting stories is Manslaughter, the story of a trial from start to finish, told through the voices of just about everyone involved - judge, jurors, accused, bailiff, lawyer, widow.  In a matter of a few dozen pages, the writer successfully conveys the complexities of a seemingly open-and-shut case, letting the reader in on what really happens in a high-profile court case and leaving them to make their own judgement as to how fair it all is.

The news on the grapevine is that Mr. Perlman has a new book coming out later this year, and all I can say is that it's about time.  While you're waiting though, why not give this little collection a go?  It's not as if there's any hurry...

*****
A slightly more prolific writer (although not by much) is Helen Garner, author of the notorious Monkey Grip, and The Children's Bach is another tale from a slightly-left-of-centre (in many ways) Melbourne family.  Dexter and Athena's comfortable life is disrupted by a chance encounter at Melbourne airport, where Dexter spots an old friend, the rather icy Elizabeth.  While Elizabeth herself causes few problems, it is the people she brings with her - little sister Vicki and Elizabeth's occasional lover Phillip - who turn the married couple's life upside down.

The Children's Bach is a very slender book, but it is beautifully written, and the central question of casual sex versus comfortable monogamy works well.  Athena is jolted out of a rut by her new acquaintances, and the question is whether this is a welcome break or a wake-up call.  Meanwhile, Dexter has to decide how he will handle Athena's behaviour and balance her (and his) behaviour against his principles.

The book is short, elegant and witty, but while it's a nice read, it's hard to avoid thinking that it's a little underwritten.  I found it hard to engage with the characters over such a short journey, with a lot of gaps where the narrative jumps to the next crisis.  I found myself wondering whether another writer could (and would) have made a longer, more detailed book from this...

*****

...a writer, for example, like the extremely talented Steven Carroll.  Having read, and loved, his wonderful Melbourne Trilogy books earlier this year, I picked up his most recent novel The Lost Life from the library shelves with great anticipation.  It's a very different book in some ways, set in England in 1934 and based around a chance encounter with the famous poet T.S. Eliot.  However, once past the initial set up, The Lost Life slips into the mesmerising style that made Carroll's other novels such successes.

The central figure of the novel is Catherine, a young woman in the centre of the golden summer of her youth, enjoying the first flushes of love with Daniel, a recently graduated university student.  When they accidentally spy on Eliot and his 'special friend' Emily Hale during a walk around the parks of a local stately home, they become unwillingly mixed up in his tangled relationships.  As Catherine gets to know Emily better, she realises that there are parallels between their situations, which the older woman, an accomplished actress who seems to be playing roles rather than acting naturally, is determined to exploit for her own purposes.

Although the phrase Carpe Diem isn't actually mentioned in the book, it's one that instantly springs to mind.  Catherine gradually becomes aware that her love, an awkward affair devoid of any real privacy, may be more fleeting than she imagined.  Unless she takes her opportunity for a brief moment of intimacy, she may end up regretting it for the rest of her life.  Just as Emily Hale has her own, lingering regrets...

Carroll's usual time-jumping style lets us know in advance a lot of information while concealing the important, emotional events.  He also gets inside the characters' heads, describing matters from several viewpoints, emphasising both the similarities and the subtle differences between opinions on the same event.  As you can tell, I think he's great :)

All in all, another well-crafted story from my big discovery of 2011.  And the best bit?  He's also got a new novel due out later this year.  Marvellous Melbourne indeed ;)