Fire and Ice

After 120 minutes of action at the weekend in the Asian Cup Final, Australia's national team, the hapless Socceroos (after dominating play and chances), went down 1-0 to Japan's national selection, the Blue Samurai.  Some would say that this post presenting some literature from both countries is a timely homage to the event: others, more cynical, might argue that it was complete coincidence that I read an Australian book and a Japanese book around this time.  Whatever your thoughts, here it is :)

*****

We'll start with the Australian contender, and my second read for this year's Aussie Author Challenge is Tim Winton's debut novel An Open Swimmer.  Set in Perth and on the West Australian coast south of the capital, it focuses on Jerra, a young twenty-something who has recently dropped out of uni and is on a camping trip with his best mate Sean (note: using the word 'friend' in reviews of Australian books is frowned upon - 'mate' is the preferred expression).  A chance encounter with an old bloke living near the beach (note: as above, 'bloke' not 'man') has repercussions for Jerra, for whom the trip is less of a holiday than an attempt to run away from the past.

The story is divided into three parts: the first describes Jerra and Sean's short camping trip; the second follows Jerra's attempts to create a normal life for himself back in Perth; the third sees Jerra taking off again in the vain hope of finding some answers back where he started.  It's a short work, and if you were expecting all the answers to be set out for you by the end of it, you'll be sadly disappointed.

Winton is very adept at revealing his stories little by little, teasing the reader with half-sentences thrown away, hinting at a dark secret buried in the past (but liable to surface, rising up from the deep, at any minute).  We slowly find out that Jerra's drifting is connected with several events: a pearl found in the head of a large fish; his relationship with Sean; and a connection with Sean's mother, Jewel.

The prose, what little of it there is, switches between elegant, poetical descriptions of the sea and short, stark simple sentences, one per action, focusing the reader's attention in on Jerra. A lot of the text, however, is dialogue, real, spoken Australian, jumping around, using slang, something which contributes to the sometimes maddening feeling that there's something happening beneath the surface which the reader can't quite fathom.  Along with the constant fishing jargon, the use of local idiom makes this a book which non-natives would probably struggle a little with unless they are willing to go with the flow.  If this book ever made it into an American edition, I suspect that it was a fairly gutted, unrecognisable version of the original...

For a first novel (written at uni!), it's a stunning effort, but I suspect that it's not for everyone.  An Open Swimmer requires a lot of thought and concentration, and it's not the sort of book that gives up all its secrets in one reading.  If that sounds like your kind of read though (and especially if you've already tried - and liked - some of Winton's other works), I heartily recommend it.  Just get a dictionary of fish names handy first...

*****

Opaque as it is though, An Open Swimmer could have its themes written ten-feet high in purple crayon in comparison with my next book.  Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, one of the works cited by the Nobel Prize committee in bestowing that award, is a typically beautiful piece of Japanese writing, meaning (of course) that the majority of the sub-text went floating far over my head.  But I digress.

Shimamura, an idle Tokyoite, takes a train journey to the mountains in the north, returning to a small village where he met the intriguing Komako, a geisha in training, earlier in the year.  On the train, he sees another beautiful young woman, caring for an unwell fellow passenger, and when he arrives at his destination, he learns that the young woman (Yoko) lives in the same house as Komako.  Throughout the rest of the short novel, he crosses paths with Yoko, never quite spending time together, always on the periphery of genuine communication.

I'd talk more about the plot if there was one; the book consists merely of Shimamura's two visits to the mountains (his married life in Tokyo is largely ignored...) and the time he spends there with the irascible but charming Komako.  It's all about the pictures Kawabata paints with his words, the portraits of the vivacious Komako and the reserved Yoko, the images he puts in our mind of the stark, wintry landscape - effortless and enjoyable to read.

However, I feel that this one is a little too sub-textual for my liking.  I felt myself constantly sensing that there was something there, something I should be getting, grasping around for some little allusion, some point the writer is making (and concealing).  While part of the beauty of Japanese literature is this sense of the unstated (and understated), Snow Country was a little too much of a good thing in this regard.

I was also comparing it in my mind with another Japanese book I read not long ago, Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura, and, unfortunately, Kawabata's book by no means came off best.  Kusamakura could be a summer version of Snow Country (without geishas), and it's a book I enjoyed more, combining the elegance of style with a disarming humour and frequent quotable bon-mots.

Before you all get the wrong impression, I did enjoy Snow Country, but I think (and hope) that his later work will impress me more (this was his debut novel, if you can stretch these pages out to a novel).  Of the two Japanese Nobel Laureates, Oe has impressed me more - so far: there's a lot more to read before that decision is final though ;)

*****

This was my final review for Belezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 4.  I managed to read twelve Japanese books in the time allotted, well more than the single required work!  My collection of Japanese literature, which has become a bit of a hobby, now almost stretches across one whole three-foot shelf, and before long, it will have colonised the whole space for itself.  This challenge saw me read numerous works by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki, and I have just scraped the surface with Kenzaburo Oe and Yasunari Kawabata.  Thanks again to Belezza for hosting this wonderful challenge, and I'll definitely be joining in the next one, whenever that may be :)

35 - 'Breath' by Tim Winton

Are you breathing comfortably? Then let's begin...

It's not something you think much about, breathing, unless you're having major issues with it, but in Tim Winton's latest novel, breathing is integral to the story. The Australian author returns to his West Australian stomping ground to tell the tale of paramedic Bruce 'Pikelet' Pike, reminiscing about a period of his adolesence after coming back from an incident at work. The tale of the young Pikelet, living in a small, isolated town close to the West Australian coast, takes us through his development from a scared young boy into a teenager throwing himself into the ocean surf.

From the moment we meet him, he is starting to yearn to break away from the sleepy town which is 'suffocating' him, and everything which happens afterwards is an attempt to take risks and be something out of the ordinary. The question raised by the book is how far you should go to raise yourself above the crowd, to be something more than ordinary, without losing control of who you really are. Although Pikelet survives his youthful tribulations, he does not get through without scars, both physical and mental, as can be seen from the very start of the tale.

The title is well chosen: the allusions to breathing (or a lack thereof) are scattered throughout the book. Whether trying to escape from the claustrophobic environment of his hometown, listening to his father's sleep apnoea, or staying at the bottom of the freezing local river for as long as possible, Pikelet constantly experiences the extraordinary feelings associated with a lack of what most people take for granted. This theme of oxygen-starvation culminates in scenes which would seem startling in isolation yet appear to be a natural end to the progression of preceding events.

Winton is very good at taking readers' breath away (as you'd know if you had read my review of 'The Riders'), and this is another great piece of work. The only criticism I have is that it is a fairly short novel; it's 265-pages long, but there's plenty of white space around (and between) the actual words. It only took me just over two hours to get through the whole thing, and I always feel a little cheated when that happens. Of course, when you've just finished 'Middlemarch', anything under 500 pages is going to leave you feeling short-changed...

This is a 'Bildungsroman' for the surfing generation, but, unlike many books of this genre, the hero does not come through the testing fires of his formative years without a scratch. We are left pondering the dangers of growing up and thanking our lucky stars that we got through our teenage period in one piece. Anybody looking back on their childhood can probably remember turning points where things could have gone badly wrong (whether they involve surfing or not). Luckily, for most of us, after a short airless period, our lungs resumed sucking in oxygen and life went on with no real consequences. Winton shows us that it's not always that simple.

21 - 'The Riders' by Tim Winton

Australia is a big country. But you knew that already.

Not that many people. You probably knew that too.

It's a fairly new country. Common knowledge.

All those things together, however, contribute to a unique psyche; a mixture of strength and confidence blended with a sense of respect for nature and wide spaces and a mistrust of the ancient; a sense of belonging but a certainty that things are different from the way they are in the north.

No wonder they drink lots of beer.

This unique perspective can also be artistically productive though, and Australian authors can produce great novels, whether they are set in the vast expanses of the Outback, the sun-kissed coastal cities of the east or west, or far away in Asia or Europe, detailing the troubles of Australians abroad. Tim Winton, a native of far-flung Western Australia, is well known for his tales of life and troubles in and around Perth, but 'The Riders' takes its protagonists on a rollercoaster ride around Europe, a continent that is both familiar and exotic, accommodating the visitors in good times and spitting them out when things get tough.

This book is brilliant.

Scully, an Australian labourer, is in Ireland, fixing up an old house which his wife, Jennifer, decided to buy on a whim after the family's wanderings throughout Europe. While Jennifer and their daughter, Billie, fly back to Perth to tie up the loose ends in their old life back in Australia, Scully prepares for his new life. However, on arriving at the airport to greet his girls, he is shattered to find that only his daughter gets off the plane...

This event is the catalyst for a mad dash all over Europe in search of a woman who seems to have disappeared without a trace (and who obviously does not want to be found). Scully drags his poor daughter, cold, sleep-deprived, wounded and traumatised (initially unable to speak from the shock of what has happened) from Ireland to Greece to Italy to France to Holland, desperately chasing the faint trail his absent wife may, or may not, have left behind. In the process of this Odyssean journey, the father and daughter begin to change roles; the strong labourer clutching his frail daughter to his chest becomes confused, injured and drunk while his daughter, physically resembling her father but with the intelligence and adaptability of her mother, gradually comes out of her protective shell and begins to take over responsibility as Scully sinks deeper and deeper into desperation. By the end of the novel, she is the adult of the two, taking control of the finances and making decisions for the both of them.

From the start of the book, the omens are not good. Back in Ireland, Scully sees a crowd of ghostly horsemen in the night, the 'Riders' of the title. These harbingers of ill fortune give us the first clue of what is in store for the Australians, and when Billie sees some young boys racing beside the train during their travels in Italy, Scully reacts as if they were the same spectral riders as he saw before. In Mythology, the tradition of the Wild Hunt, known throughout Europe, was thought to warn of doom, destruction, war and also inclement weather. This latter theme is a constant throughout the novel; the constantly moving family seem to be plagued by bad weather, from the treacherous boat trip in the Greek Islands to the wintry weather (and watery floors...) of Amsterdam. In addition, there is a theme of highs and lows which appears in most of the locations. Scully looks for truth and happiness in the Greek mountains and the bell towers of Notre Dame (Billie, with her comic version of Hugo's famous story, constantly compares her father to the famous, misunderstood Hunchback), but the realities of life continue to drag him down to the underpasses and metro stations of Paris, and the police station basement and submarine resting place in Amsterdam. By the end, he really has hit rock bottom.

The front cover of my edition contains a quote from the New Yorker magazine saying 'The curse of this haunting book is that you read it too fast', which is incredibly apt; the first time I read 'The Riders', probably about five years ago now, I read and read and read until I had got to the last page. Winton sets up the story in Ireland and then sucks you in with his writing until you experience the frantic pace of Scully's desperate flight; his mad dash becomes your own personal race to the end of the book, and when you finish, Billie and her father are not the only ones left feeling drained and in need of recovery! This time, I was able to take it a bit more slowly, but only a little; the story still pulled at me, requiring me to keep going for just a little longer, just as Scully is pulled from city to city in the need to chase what may be just ahead, but also to escape the mess he has just left behind.

I need a drink just from writing about it.

At the end of it all, when the chasing is over, and we are back in Scully's old new house, it is difficult to reflect and understand the reasons for it all. There is a deliberate ambiguity in the rationale for what occurred, and it is this which is the scariest part of the story. Through Scully, as he searches his memories, trying to find something which would explain his wife's disappearance, the reader is given various glimpses of the family's past life and possible reasons for Jennifer's decision, but nothing becomes clear, and the haunting truth of the matter is that this is something that could happen to anyone at any time. Is it possible to know anyone well enough to be sure that they will always be there and that they won't vanish into the night? Something to think about while you fail to sleep at night...

Australia. Lots of Kangaroos. Kylie Minogue. Incredible writing.

Yes, OK, and lots of beer.