The Silence of Gethsemane

…ecce homo…­ – John 19:5 (Latin Vulgate)

Basically there are three kinds of novels: novels where everything is made up (e.g. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), historical novels where the author aims to be as accurate as possible and often goes to great lengths to research the topic under discussion (e.g. Wolf Hall) and then there are the novels that are based on an historical event but play fast and loose with the facts (e.g. Stephen King’s 11/22/63). I mention this because on the cover of The Silence of Gethsemane is says, “A Novel” and I’m not sure what kind of novel it is. It’s based on the life of an (arguably) historical character and is a result of “thirty years of private research” and yet I found myself nitpicking my way through most every chapter. The problem is the author is writing about the gospels—we talk about the gospel truth, don’t we?—and yet just look at how people squabble over what’s written in those four short books. Some refuse to believe that a man called Jesus even walked the earth despite the Bible’s meticulous chronology, others are willing to accept his existence since there is some historical evidence that he existed in addition to the accounts in the Bible but they still think he was only a man, still others believe him to be the son of God and some even think he was God. They can’t all be right. As a work of fiction the Jesus in this book can be anything its author decides he ought to be and none of us can whinge about his decisions but as the author of a work of historical fiction he owes it to us to get his facts straight. There is nothing readers of historical fiction hate (or love depending on their persuasion) more than finding something that’s factually inaccurate like a character popping a Polo mint into their mouth in New York when it should be a Life Saver. The problem with ‘facts’ is that they aren’t always as factual as we might like them to be.

 

The ‘Facts’

In this account Jesus is an ordinary flesh and blood man; there’s nothing divine about him; his father is a local carpenter and his mother was no longer a virgin at the time of his birth. This is not the first time Jesus has been presented this way. I remember well—even though I was only nine when it was first broadcast—watching Dennis Potter’s Son of Man with my family and my father’s bitter criticisms of Potter’s play.

There are no miracles, no resurrection, no Mary Magdalene, no Last Supper and no thirty pieces of silver. In their place it offers an occasionally violent, frequently fascinating dramatisation, focusing on the psychological underpinnings of the characters. It opens with a powerful juxtaposition: Jesus in the wilderness, shivering in an agony of self-doubt, while religious agitators in the city are murdered by the Romans during a mass gathering. – Sergio Angelini, ‘Son of Man’, ScreenOnline

The entire play is currently available on YouTube here.

Benoît’s book presents a much calmer Jesus. We first meet him in the Garden of Gethsemane. His disciples are all asleep and Jesus is reviewing the events that have brought him there. In effect then this is a fifth gospel and it’s a first person narrative which is unusual as it’s the first I can remember ever reading. Even with Potter we have to stand on the outside and wonder just what’s going on in Christ’s head.

Let me digress for a moment. William McIlvanney wrote three novels featuring his detective Jack Laidlaw. The first two have third person narrative but the last book, Strange Loyalties, is written from Jack’s perspective and I didn’t take to it at all at first. I’d already formed my internal picture of who Jack Laidlaw was and it was like some other guy had come along and taken over the part. Well, that’s a bit how I felt reading this book. The Jesus in this book just didn’t gel with the Jesus I had been brought up with. The man in my head was physically and mentally perfect, was sure of himself and understood his life’s purpose even as a young boy. He wasn’t searching; he had no doubts; he was very much in charge of his own destiny. Benoît’s Jesus took some getting used to.

My biggest problem was with the ‘facts’. Let’s examine a few. First point: We’ll all have heard Jesus at one time or another referred to as “the Nazarene”

…and came and lived in a city called Nazareth. This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophets: "He shall be called a Nazarene." (Matthew 2:23)

but was he also a Nazirite as Benoît casts his Jesus? So, what’s a Nazirite? Simply put they were individuals who took special vows of service. The word means ‘dedicated one’ or ‘one singled out’. The vows were voluntary as was the duration during which they agreed to serve as a Nazirite although Jewish tradition eventually imposed a minimum time limit of thirty days on them. During that time they agreed not to drink alcohol, not to touch a dead body and not to cut their hair. I know of three individuals who were lifetime Nazirites: Samuel, Samson and John the Baptist, the latter two being designated as such by God. The Bible says nothing about Jesus being either a God-appointed Nazirite or him taking vows voluntarily and yet Benoît chooses to make him one. (See the article Nazirite or Nazarene if you’re interested.) Of course the Bible doesn’t say he wasn’t one either. Benoît concludes he was one because Jesus is so often portrayed with long hair but who said he had long hair? Not the Bible. Long hair was actually frowned upon.

Second point: Jesus does meet John the Baptist in Benoît’s book but he doesn’t know him. This puzzled me because as far as I was concerned they were second cousins. Everything hinges on a single verse:

And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. (Luke 1:36)

This is the angel talking to Mary and later on, of course, Mary visits Elizabeth. The question is: In what way were they related? The Catholic Encyclopaedia gives us as much of an answer as there is: “All our information concerning … the parents of Mary … is derived from apocryphal literature.” So maybe the two women weren’t cousins but if they weren’t fairly closely related why was Mary visiting Elizabeth? Seems reasonable. And yet Benoît’s Jesus is a complete stranger to John. That I found a bit harder to swallow but, again, it’s not impossible.

And so I stumbled on, nitpicking here, nitpicking there. The subject of prayer bothered me. Third point: We all know when asked by his disciples how they should pray—in fact they actually interrupted him praying—Jesus outlined what’s become known as the Lord’s Prayer and the book does cover that but it wasn’t until page 141 that we get to see Jesus say in so many words, “I decided to spend the night praying on my own.” Up until then he’s slipped off on his own to enjoy a moment’s peace and quiet and he talks often about how much he needs silence but he never discusses praying up until this point in the book. I found that very strange. Stranger yet in the Afterword Benoît talks about how he sees Jesus’s notion of prayer:

Meditation. I can think of no other word to describe his way of praying, which was unheard of in Judaism, and was met with surprise and a total lack of understanding by those closest to him. He never shared the secret of this private, inner world, although from what we are able to tell it was not dissimilar to the practice used in Hindu-Buddhism.

Why when his disciples approach him, when he “had gone off to be alone for a while as was [his] wont” doesn’t he teach them this form of prayer? Why provide them with a rote prayer which is what it’s become nowadays? And it’s wrong to say that meditation was unknown to the Jews: “Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.” (Joshua 1:8)

Fourth point: the miracles. These get split into three: the ones Benoît completely ignores (all the “miracles involving the natural world”), the ones he provides alternate solutions to (the turning of water into wine, the feeding of the multitudes) and the cures, including the various resurrections from the dead (which he accepts). I can see why he makes the distinction because Benoît places a great deal of emphasis on the faith of the person being healed—as Jesus says to the once blind man in Mark 10:52, “Go … your faith has healed you”—but dead people don’t have faith so that argument kind of falls flat.

That Benoît accepts supernatural healings and attributes these to God opens up some interesting issues like, Fifth point: Satan the Devil, a.k.a. “the Evil One.” Jesus does go off for a wander in the wilderness—albeit after his baptism by John:

Now when all the people were baptized, Jesus also was baptized (Luke 3:21)

Now Jesus, full of holy spirit, turned away from the Jordan, and he was led about by the spirit in the wilderness for forty days, while being tempted by the Devil. (Luke 4:1)

not before it as Benoît states—and there he is tempted by the Devil but rather than describe the Devil as an individual with whom he can interact this is how Benoît writes about Jesus’s temptation:

And then strange apparitions started surging up inside my head. Let loose by the lack of thoughts, a fearsome opponent was attacking me, harrying me until my inner life began to ebb away. I knew it was the Evil One, whom Israel traditionally portrays as Satan or the Devil, he who divides. He danced round and round inside me, as if mocking me in that ironic, fiendish way of his, knowing that I was in his clutches, that my attempt to escape was just the result of my pride.

So, a voice in his head, self-doubt perhaps, and yet later in the book there are instances where the Evil One possesses people in the crowd to stir them up. On occasions Jesus orders him to leave them. Now that’s demon possession and if the demons are real and can be exorcised then why after Jesus successfully resisted Satan in the wilderness did God’s angels not appear and minister to him?

Then the devil left Him; and behold, angels came and began to minister to Him. (Matthew 1:11)

If demons are real why not angels? Or were they the “Essenes from Qumran” who Jesus identified by their “brilliant white smock(s)” who, at the start of his wandering, provide some practical advice?

No one can survive on his own in the desert, he said. You seek the solitude that cleanses? This is where you will find it. Behind you lies utter destitution. Travel far into its depths, far enough to forget about us but not too far, so you can come and drink regularly from our springs. Sometimes you will find a few dates on this rock. They will help keep you alive without breaking your fast.

That’s believable. Remember when Lot encountered the angels at the gate to Sodom he thought they were just weary travellers (Genesis 19:1,2). Benoît might have done better though if he had simply presented the Evil One in human guise, as did George Stevens, when he cast Donald Pleasance as ‘The Dark Hermit’ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. That way the man could have continued to reappear as does the Dark Hermit throughout the film thus avoiding the whole issue of whether the Devil is a person or a force.

These few examples are just here to illustrate how open to interpretation the source material is. Don’t get me wrong Benoît gets an awful lot right but I doubt too many who pick up this book will be as well-read on the subject as I am. Those who are, especially those who accept Jesus as either a perfect man or as God incarnate, will have loads of problems with this book—Jesus, for example, had to be born in Bethlehem for prophecy to be fulfilled; you can’t just change that to Capernaum even though he did live there for a time.

Putting all that aside as best I can let’s consider the book as a work of fiction.

 

The Fiction

Benoît has the same problems here as Ron Howard had when he made Apollo 13: how do you make a story interesting when everyone knows exactly how it ends? Benoît handles the ending cleverly: he—wisely in my opinion—skips it completely. The book begins and ends with Jesus sitting waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane along with his sleeping disciples for his imminent capture. While he’s waiting Jesus reviews his time as a rabbi. So, as I’ve said already, what we really have here is a fifth gospel, The Gospel of Jesus. And his truth is nowhere near as assured as the four others are. You get a definite sense of a man finding his way.

Before a man finds his way he probably needs to realise that he’s lost his way and that’s what we see in the opening chapters, a Jesus who’s looking round at the religious leaders and the growing number of sects and realising that the entire Jewish nation has lost its way. Then he hears of a voice in the wilderness and goes to hear what this John the Baptist has to say for himself. He never looks back afterwards:

John the Baptist’s grim, ominous tone made a deep and lasting impression on me. Once I got home and reimmersed myself in the humdrum routine of the workshop, the voice I had heard by the Jordan kept on echoing in my mind incessantly. I knew that my life had changed forever. John had held up the blazing inferno of the apocalypse before my eyes; dazzled by it, everything about the life I had led up till then suddenly struck me as prosaic, occupations and people alike. On the shores of the lake nothing had changed, yet to me it was now flat and colourless. This world of ours was doomed, the end was upon us: the axe had already fallen on the tree of Israel.

He begins going to the synagogue outside of normal services and studying the scriptures. He realises that, if John is the man spoken of by the prophets, his role is to “[p]repare the way of the Lord.” He’s no clue at this point that he is the person whose arrival John is heralding. He returns to the Jordan and becomes a disciple of John. Later when John announces that one stands among you who you do not know Jesus suspects that he’s talking about him but he hasn’t connected all the dots yet. This is, however, where he encounters four other disciples of John: Andrew, his brother Simon, Philip and Nathanael—who are the first to accompany him on his wanderings—and a fifth character known only as “the Judaean” who I thought would turn out to be Judas Iscariot (as I knew he was from Judea) but as he turns up later it couldn’t be him; actually “the Judaean” is never named but he appears often throughout the book as do individuals like Lazarus and Nicodemus both having their roles expanded beyond what we know of them from the four Gospel accounts. I assume “the Judaean” is the “So-and-so” referred to by Matthew (26:18) since later on he is the one to offer up his house so that Jesus can celebrate what we now know as the Last Supper. He would also appear to be the mysterious “thirteen apostle” that Benoît discusses at length in his book The Thirteenth Apostle. (This wee list of a possible thirteen is interesting though and it doesn’t include either Matthias (who replaced Judas Iscariot) or Paul who became the “apostle to the Gentiles”.)

The first place this small group travel to is Cana where there was due to be a wedding. Here is where I would have expected the first miracle but here’s what happens in this account:

She [Jesus’s mother] had a quiet word with the servants who took me to an alcove where there were six large water jars that were being kept cool. Looking inside, I saw they contained that bitter and quite undrinkable syrup which in hot climates like ours is used for making wine. It had to be diluted in just the right proportions to turn it into a drink fit for the gods.

So no miracle. The only thing to come of it is that the Judaean witnesses everything and realises that there is more to this man: he “wasn’t just a country carpenter.”

And so the book progresses. The first healing occurs just two chapters on—the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law—and this is how Benoît describes it:

An elderly woman was lying on a bed, struck down by one of those fevers that can bring death in a matter of days. Unable to give voice to his fears, [Peter] leant over and wiped the sweat from her face, then stood up and looked at me. In his eyes burned a slightly wild look of expectation, a mute desire.

I straight away knew what he wanted. Unlike the simpleton in the synagogue [whom Jesus alone had encountered the day before], this prostrate woman didn’t appear to be possessed by Evil, She wasn’t screaming and shouting, she posed no threat—she was just going to die.

I took her by the wrist and helped her sit up. Startled, she got to her feet and just stood there, swaying slightly. Then without a word of thanks she walked out of the room. A moment later we heard her bustling round the fire, wielding kitchen implements and getting the menfolk’s supper ready.

Jesus never questions where this ability has come from or what his limits are and when shortly thereafter, word having spread from house to house, ailing people arrive at the door from every quarter he sets about healing “most of them” irrespective of what was wrong with them.

And on we go. It’s like we’re wandering through an alternate universe. Everything’s the same only not quite the same. Perhaps one thing Benoît does make a little clearer than the Gospel writers is just how Jesus could do what he did and be seen by so many and still end up being hated. Simply put everyone would’ve been quite happy for the Messiah to arrive as long as he did so on their terms. The religious leaders weren’t opposed to change but any changes were made at a painfully slow pace—there was no room for sweeping improvements—whereas the common people would’ve been more than happy to see the back of the Romans; they didn’t want to have to wait for the kingdom of God.

Where I think this account falls short is in Jesus’s voice. It would be easy to blame the translator here but I don’t think that’s the case. I just found him a bit dull. At the time of writing this review there’s not much online to see what others thought but two made comments worth mentioning: Kirsty on Goodreads said, “Benoît's interpretation of Jesus was one of the least likeable characters I’ve come across in a while,” whereas Rebecca over at newbooks says, “I wasn’t sure whether it was the voice of Jesus or that of the author which came through most strongly.” This is a man who is expecting to be arrested in a few hours and painfully executed within a couple of days most likely and yet there’s a wearisomeness to his storytelling. Grated there’s a lot to weary him—his bickering disciples would test the patience of a saint (and this Jesus certainly isn’t one of them)—and the religious leaders, the Scribes and the Pharisees, just drag him down at every opportunity plus there’s the Evil One’s constant efforts to undermine his work. At least Potter’s Jesus had a bit of life about him. There’s not enough man here for my tastes. Benoît’s intentions are commendable and it’s not a bad effort, I’ll be honest, but great literature this is not. It’s storytelling—or retelling if we’re being honest.

I’m not sure who this book is for. Those who have a faith already will probably enjoy picking holes in it as did I and I’ve no faith left, not even a smidgen. Those who are looking for some kind of spiritual connection probably won’t be able to relate to this guy because he’s too good. He’s never seriously tempted by anything, not even a woman who he admits he has little interest in. If you’re going to present the Jesus as the imperfect man then we need more of the imperfections for him to feel real to us.

You can read the first nineteen pages here.

***

Religious scholar and novelist Michel Benoît (which I believe is a pseudonym–see here) was born in Madagascar in 1940 (then a French colony). In 1962, having studied Biochemistry under Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod and obtained a PhD in Pharmacology, he entered the Benedictine order as an unordained monk at the abbey of Saint Benoît sur Loire, remaining there for twenty-two years. Because of his ideological non-conformity, he was eventually “discharged” by the Catholic Church and decided to devote himself to research and writing.

His first book, Prisoner of God, an autobiographical account of his life in the monastery, became an international bestseller when it was published in 1992. This was followed by two religious essays, a travel book based on a trip to India, and then the thriller The Thirteenth Apostle, “the story of an ancient sect detailed within papyrus sheaves hidden in the caves at Qumran”.

Niches

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit – Edmund White

When I think of niches I think of porn. As a kid growing up like most kids it was where I learned much about sex and the female anatomy along with words I couldn’t pronounce because I’d never heard them spoken aloud—honestly it was cun-i-ling-you-is for years. Not so much about males but we are talking Scotland in the sixties and seventies; I’d seen enough willies down the baths or the beach to realise which way my boat floated. My mate used to raid his dad’s Penthouse collection and share it with me. ‘Twas a sizeable collection, too, for none were missed or if their loss was ever noticed their disappearance was certainly never remarked upon.

Some years later the first sex shops started to appear north of the border and, unable to contain my curiosity, I scuttled into one in Kilmarnock and had my eyes well and truly opened. There were magazines and videos that catered for every conceivable quirk and fetish (at least it felt like that): women with big boobs, small boobs, long legs, dainty feet, pert bums, in all sorts of uniforms and outfits made of rubber or leather, big women, young women, wives, lesbians, mature women, hirsute women, hairless women, black and Asian women, tied-up women… It was a far cry from the Penthouses I’d thought were so wonderful only a few years earlier.

And I didn’t get it. You see I never talked to anyone bar my mate about sex and if you imagine a Scotiafied version of Steve and his mates from American Dad, well, that was us; all talk, nothing more. To my mind sexual preference meant you were gay or straight and that was it. Once I started to look around I realised that there wasn’t much even vaguely female that I wasn’t attracted to. The notion of only getting turned on only if my bird wore some sort of weird rubber get-up and had a ping pong ball stuffed in her gob didn’t register. Words like ‘kinky’ or ‘perverted’ were always swimming around in my head, although I didn’t like to judge. But the idea of only getting turned on by one thing—any one of those things I’ve listed above—didn’t gel. I liked just about everything, just not all the time.

And I’m the same with books. I knew a bloke once who read every western the library had to offer and only then did he make a start on the war novels. I have no idea if he read all of them—he wasn’t a youngster when I met him—or what, if anything, he moved onto next but that would have driven me mad. It’s like having chips every day for twenty years. Now I like chips—especially chippie chips—but every day? It would take a while but I would get fed up with them. And then rice for the next twenty and pasta for the twenty after that and couscous until I croaked. No thanks. It’s like the scene from the film version of Shirley Valentine:

Joe:	It’s Thursday. We have steak on Thursday. We always have steak on Thursday.
Shirley:	We’re having egg and chips for a change. You like egg and chips.
Joe:	On a Tuesday. I like egg and chips on a Tuesday. Today is Thursday.
Shirley:	Well pretend it’s a Tuesday.
Joe:	Where’s me steak?
Shirley:	I gi’e it the dog!

My dad was never like that although he could easily have been.

Preferences I do get. If you have a choice between a Pineapple Mivvi and a Strawberry Mivvi you make your choice. I would have preferred the pineapple one but, at a push, I wouldn’t eaten the strawberry rather than have nothing. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted a Pineapple Mivvi every time. That’s what I don’t get. The Mivvis were ice lollies made by Lyons; the original with the strawberry-flavoured coating came out in 1954 and the Pineapple Mivvi in 1973. I was looking down the list of their products and noticed this one from 1972: Angel—For teenage girls, a strawberry and vanilla kreem ice, half of it choc coated. What is there about that that screams: “teenage girl” I ask you? Probably nothing more than the wrapping. I don’t remember it but I bet I wouldn’t’ve bought it because it was for girls and I wouldn’t’ve wanted to be seen with a girls lolly unless a girl was holding said lolly in one hand and holding my hand with the other. Yeah, only in my dreams.

John Locke famously sold one million ebooks in five months. His secret? He wrote for a niche. A niche he’s identified, investigated, and delivered to over and over and over as fast as possible. And all credit to the guy. He worked the system. Did he sell his soul to do it? I don’t think so. I suspect he wrote what interested him and was in the right place at the right time with the right product and the right tools to promote said product.

Find a need and fill it. That’s good business practice. Seriously though does anyone need any more books?

But that’s the thing. After I saw my first pair of boobs I wanted to see another pair. Right away, please. And once I’d seen them and they weren’t that different to the first pair I wanted to see more just to make sure but after I’d seen several dozen—okay, hundred—and realising that there wasn’t that much difference between the first pair I’d seen and the last pair I’d seen I still found myself interested every time an opportunity arose where I could see someone else’s. Nothing ever seemed to satisfy my curiosity. And it wasn’t just boobs. I was the same with every other part of the female anatomy and was for a very long time; in fact only recently did I notice a change. I handed my wife my tablet the other day on which there was a photo of Dita von Teese and said to her, “You know, it’s a sad day when presented with a bosom like that that one notices the belt buckle she’s wearing.”

Books used to excite me like that. I visited one sex shop just assuage my curiosity but I’ve never grown tired of book shops. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a posh shop of some smelly second-hand place I like to be surrounded by books and, had I the funds, I would walk out every time with armfuls of the buggers. But I’ve never had those kinds of funds and so I’ve had to be selective and that’s hard because I don’t really go for a niche. Okay I prefer literary fiction but not all the time. Just look at the books I’ve reviewed over the years.

There are loads of articles online talking about niches, sub-niches and even micro-niches. It gets a bit silly after a while. This is how silly:

Kathleen Meyer found a niche market and wrote a small thin book that took the outdoors backpacking and camping world by storm. Her book, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, was released in 1989 and has become a year round best seller. At last count, it had sold over 1,500,000 copies and has been translated into several foreign languages. Kathleen's book is THE book on the subject of defecating in the woods. The lesson to be learned is not to dismiss any subject just because it is an off the wall topic. – John Vonhof, ‘Identifying Your Niche’, André Anthony’s Niche Market Know-How

It is a real book. Just click on the link if you doubt me. It’s 128 pages long and onto its 3rd edition. Whoda thunk there was that much to say about pooing?

But that’s nonfiction and it’s somewhat easier there to drill down to see where a need exists and fill it. It’s like chip shops, book shops and even, I dare day, sex shops. We don’t have a chip shop near where I live although a van comes round most nights and parks down the hill; the nearest one is a twenty minute walk which is about as far as the nearest one was to my parents’ house when I was a kid, only there wasn’t just the one there; there were two and there had been two for years and both were clearly turning a nice profit, but what if a third had opened across the street or a fourth round the corner? I took the bus down into Glasgow a couple of weeks back and passed PC World. Across the road a small, independent retailer had opened up Priceless Computing hoping, obviously, to skim off some of the passing trade; it’s been there for about fourteen years I would reckon. This time, though, I noticed that there were now at least another six small shops all bearing similar-sounding names along a stretch of road of maybe fifty yards. Seriously I know Glasgow can handle a pub on every corner but how many computer shops does Finnieston need?

The same goes for vampire romances and sagas about boy wizards.

What comes first, the niche or the product? Whatever the product is there will be a niche for it so that’s not a problem. There is someone out there for every book even if it’s just your mammy. I bet you that JK Rowling never thought to herself: Hmmm I haven’t read any good books about wizards. That means there’s a desperate need for a book about wizards. She’s more likely to have thought: Hmmm I haven’t read any good books about wizards. I guess no one’s interested in wizards any more but I’ll write one anyway. And it’s not just a time thing. Cowboys and Indians used to be a game that all kids played when they were wee but I don’t see a resurgence in interest in westerns coming soon. There have been efforts but none of them have sparked off any real passion with the public. That said, for some reason DC’s butt-ugly western anti-hero Jonah Hex keeps managing to stay in print even if he isn’t in his own title at the moment.

When I wrote Living with the Truth I never gave a second thought to niches or demographics. As it happens I found one. I’ve never seen a book or a film yet where Truth is a character. And by that I mean the personification of Truth. There’s a character called The Truth in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and one in the comic Enigma but that’s about it. Yay! I’ve found my niche. And there’s no competition. Surely I’ve hit the mother lode here.

Or maybe not.

The American Girl line of dolls debuted in 1986. The dolls depicted figures of various ethnicities and attributes that were instantly popular with children and collectors. A line of books was released, as well as a clothing line and various accessories, all to excellent sales.

One of the dolls produced was named Gwen Thompson, and her unique attribute was that she was homeless and lived with her mother in a car. It is hard to say who was the intended target audience for this doll, but it wasn’t on store shelves long enough for anyone to find out. Gwen Thompson disappeared from store shelves after just a few months. – 10 Toys that Failed, CNBC.com

Apparently one out of every 45 children – some 1.6 million – in the United States is now homeless, according to a report released in December by the National Centre on Family Homelessness. As far as niche markets go that’s a sizeable demographic if only they could afford the dolls which retailed at $95 when they were first produced in 2009.

And that’s the problem with niches. My niche needs to be literate, book buyers and financially well enough off to be able to waste money on fripperies like paperbacks. The first two are not so hard but with so much free and almost-free stuff out there, who is going to search for a product that’s a perfect fit when there are plenty that will do. The jeans I’m wearing just now cost about £10. They’re not a perfect fit, not quite the shade I’d prefer but they were ten quid and what do you expect for ten quid. These days more and more it seems.

Sex still sells. I expect sex will always sell. I don’t completely avoid sex in my books but if you’re looking for titillation then I suggest you fork out for Fifty Shades of Grey.

My problem is I read ‘niche’ and I hear ‘rut’. Yes, I wrote a sequel to Living with the Truth. I did it because it felt right and not to capitalise on the popularity of the first book because I’d not even tried to do anything with that first book and didn’t for about five years. I look at all that I’ve written over the past forty years and it is really hard to categorise. There will be people who’ll like my first two novels but won’t get the next two; there’s no guarantee that any of them will take to my short stories and my poems are something else entirely. And who knows who’ll like the plays if they ever, ever get staged. Oh, and there’s the children’s book and I’m really not sure where that fifth novel fits in with any of it. I’m not even sure I like it that much and I wrote the ruddy thing.

Can somebody please tell me who the hell should I be pitching to?

I’m finding it a real problem because I don’t think I’m a niche kinda guy. Yes, there will be a few people, a few dozen people, hell, I’m even willing to accept that there might be a few hundred people out there who will like any one thing that I’ve written or will someday write but the only person out there who will like everything that I’ve written—or at least just about everything to take account of my previous comment—is me.

And don’t get me started on brands.

The Humans

 

Mark Shermin: "Have people from your world been here before?"

Starman: "Before. Yes, we are interested in your species."

Mark Shermin: "You mean you're some kind of anthropologist? Is that what you're doing here? Just checking us out?"

Starman: "You are a strange species, not like any other... and you'd be surprised how many there are. Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you?"

—Starman

There’s nothing new under the sun. If you’re a writer and you really want to depress yourself spend an hour or so (as I’ve just done) clicking through the links on TVtropes.org. There you’ll find evidence to back up my opening statement. There’s nothing, nothing (Shultz, Hogan’s Heroes) that’s not been done before. So when I picked up Matt Haig’s new novel The Humans I expected to be treading some familiar ground. And I did. To list just a few tropes we come across in this book: Aliens Among Us, Voluntary Shapeshifting, The World Is Not Ready, These are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, They Look Like Us Now, Humans Through Aliens Eyes, Literal-Minded, Out Of Character Alert, Humanity Is Infectious, Pinocchio Syndrome, What Is This Thing You Call Love?, Curiosity Causes Conversion, Interspecies Romance, Spot The Imposter, Humans Are Special. In many respects this list just about summaries the whole book. It’s all been done before. And all I have to say to that is: Who cares?

I asked Matt if he felt a bit intimidated by all of this to which he replied:

[T]o answer your point, I take the view that there are no new stories. In fact there is only one story—the quest story. But my main aim with The Humans was to look at human life, and a non-human narrator was the simplest way of doing that.

Makes perfect sense to me. You see I loved Spock and Data and Seven of Nine, even Odo in his way, and Mork, and all the Solomons (from 3rd Rock from the Sun); I loved the Coneheads and ALF, Roswell, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and My Favourite Martian. I really loved The Strangerers and was sorely pissed I missed the last episode because the show ended on a cliffhanger and has never been released on DVD. I loved The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. And I’ll tell you why I loved all of them: Because I could relate to them. Because I’m an alien too.

Okay, I’m not an alien but I’ve often felt like one. I’m a writer and, despite what you might think, there really aren’t that many of us kicking around the planet. I was a grown man before I met another one in the flesh. I’d read about them and their peculiar writing habits but as far as I was concerned I was on my own trying to make sense of these strange non-writing creatures I was surrounded by.

Although there isn’t anything especially new in this book it does say a lot that bears repeating. Our nameless narrator—seriously the Vonnadorians don’t use names—states the blindingly obvious, the kind of things that scientists and economists and sociologists and psychologists and environmentalists and religious leaders have been shouting from the rooftops pretty much for years, and yet somehow humanity is still trundling along merrily towards its eventual (but hopefully not that immediate) collapse. Which makes this book kind of pointless, yes? Only it’s not.

At first it starts off very much in the vein of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist. For those that don’t know, a human is a real bipedal lifeform of mid-range intelligence, living a largely deluded existence on a small waterlogged planet in a very lonely corner of the universe.

For the rest of us, and those who sent me, humans are in many respects exactly as strange as you would expect them to be. Certainly it is true that on a first sighting you would be appalled by their physical appearance.

Their faces alone contain all manner of hideous curiosities. A protuberant central nose, thin-skinned lips, primitive external auditory organs known as ‘ears’, tiny eyes and unfathomable pointless eyebrows. All of which take a long time to mentally absorb and accept.

The manners and social customs too are a baffling enigma at first. Their conversation topics are rarely the things they want to be talking about, and I could write ninety-seven books on body shame and clothing etiquette before you would get even close to understanding them.

Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This in an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

Now if this sounds a bit like David Hyde Pierce’s narration to The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human then you’ve got the right idea. Our unnamed alien is assigned to earth, only not as an anthropologist because they’ve already pretty much made their minds up regarding the human race: they are violent, arrogant, greedy, untrustworthy, hypocritical and dangerous. The most dangerous of all was one Andrew Martin, a professor of mathematics living in Cambridge, England. I say ‘was’ because on Saturday, the seventeenth of April, he was abducted by these aliens who extracted what they needed from him, killed him and then assigned one of their own to replace him. So I should probably have included the Kill and Replace trope in my list at the start too. This alien’s brief is a simple enough one: Destroy all physical evidence that a solution exists to the Riemann hypothesis and eliminate all humans who are even aware that there is a solution.

According to Marcus du Sautoy, “Most mathematicians would trade their soul with Mephistopheles for proof of the Riemann hypothesis.” Apparently it’s “the most important unresolved problem in mathematics.” And it’s all to do with prime numbers and the search for a pattern to them. Because there doesn’t seem to be one. And humans—especially human mathematicians—get really narky when they can’t see a pattern to things. They’d solved Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Poincaré conjecture but the Riemann hypothesis had eluded them until Professor Andrew Martin worked it out. And that was a problem. The Vonnadorians don’t belong to Starfleet; they’ve no Alien Non-Interference Clause to adhere to. So when they realise that the humans have unlocked the key, drastic action is needed. Despite arriving on earth stark naked, getting knocked down (whilst still naked), arrested (for being naked), sent for psychological assessment (for not realising what the big deal was about wandering around Cambridge naked)—nice K-Pax moment there—the doppelgänger still manages to find his way to Andrew Martin’s office within hours of his arrival (clothed by the time he does), locate the man’s research and Destroy the Evidence:

‘There,’ I told myself, ‘you may have just managed to save the universe.’ But things are never that simple, not even on Earth.

No, they’re not. Because Andrew had sent a copy to a colleague, confided in a friend, boasted to his son and mentioned it to his wife. So, what trope are we onto now? Leave No Witnesses. And that takes time. And that’s the problem. Because the more time the alien spends with humans the more he has his preconceptions shaken. And animals too. There’s a lovely Androcles Lion moment between the alien and Andrew’s old, sick dog that he heals. Of course at first the dog growls at him knowing he’s not his master—so that would be the Animals Hate Him moment—but afterwards they become best buddies even if the alien does struggle with the dog’s language. Then follows music and poetry, peanut butter sandwiches, Australian wine and sex. Eventually he does a Heel Face Turn and he Becomes The Mask. This may sound like a bit of a spoiler but from the preface to the book it’s pretty obvious that the alien has come to empathise with the humans. Needless to say his bosses are not pleased. He’s been warned that if he fails in his mission another will be assigned and that’s exactly what happens.

I’ve made my point. In so many respects this book is derivative and even fairly predictable. I should be panning it rather than praising it but I loved it. From the first page to the last. The short chapters kept the action rolling along and it was so easy to say to myself: Just one more chapter. It began, as I’ve said, in a light-hearted manner and although the humour never disappears completely the book does become more serious as it progresses. It never quite ends up as The Man Who Fell to Earth but it does ask some hard-hitting questions. If you’re not much of a reader though I suggest you locate a copy of the book, open it up to page 271 and tear out the four leaves that comprise the chapter entitled ‘Advice to a human’, fold them up, tuck them inside your jacket pocket and read them whenever you have a spare moment, sitting on the bus or train or waiting to be seen by the doctor. There are ninety-seven aphoristic statements here. Let me share a few:

1. Shame is a shackle. Free yourself.
2. Don’t worry about your abilities. You have the ability to love. That is enough.
3. Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.
4. Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.

16. Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.

22. Don’t worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.

25. There is only one genre in fiction. The genre is called ‘book’.[*]
26. Never be too far away from a radio. A radio can save your life.
27. Dogs are geniuses of loyalty. And that is a good kind of genius to have.

31. Failure is a trick of the light.

It’s almost worth the price of admission for this one chapter I’ll tell you. You can read the full list here but here’s a wee video that covers forty of them:

I really enjoyed this book. I really enjoyed this book in the same way I could sit down today and watch any episode of Mork and Mindy and enjoy it. It doesn’t matter that I know what’s coming; that’s the pleasure. Although she only said it out loud the once, you know Mindy was thinking it in every episode: “Oh, Mork; what Earth concept have you misunderstood this week?” The Humans is reassuring in that way. It’s like when you’re a kid and you want the same book read over and over again. If I didn’t have so many other books to get through I could happily pick this one up again.

***

Matt Haig was born in Sheffield, England in1975. He writes books for both adults and children, often blending the worlds of domestic reality and outright fantasy, with a quirky twist. His bestselling novels are translated into 28 languages. The Guardian has described his writing as 'delightfully weird' and the New York Times has called him 'a novelist of great talent' whose writing is 'funny, riveting and heartbreaking'.

His novels for adults are The Last Family in England, narrated by a labrador and optioned for film by Brad Pitt; The Dead Father's Club (2006), an update of Hamlet featuring an 11-year-old boy; The Possession of Mr Cave (2008), about a man obsessed with his daughter's safety, and The Radleys (2010)—which I reviewed here—which won Channel 4's TV Book Club public vote and was shortlisted for a Galaxy National Book Award (UK). The film rights to all his adult novels have been sold.

His multi-award winning popular first novel for children, Shadow Forest, was published in 2007 and its sequel, The Runaway Troll, in 2009. His most recent children's novel is To Be A Cat.
 

NOTE

---

[*] For more on this read his blog entry Literary Fiction Must Go

A Tale for the Time Being

 

Inspiration is a happy convergence of random factors, which if you are lucky, you notice and then can use. And it helps if you have a husband who sends you interesting links! – Ruth Ozeki

This is a book about time and being, about cats—both real and figurative—and crows—both literal and mythological— about Japan and Canada and America too a little; it’s about life and death; about war and peace; about Buddhism, philosophy and quantum mechanics; about superheroes and living ghosts; about coming of age and dying with dignity; it’s about the interchangeable roles of readers and writers; about disasters both natural and manmade; it’s about family and duty, grief, honour and shame. It’s about 400 pages long but since it’s really two novels masquerading as one it’s no longer than it needs to be considering how much is packed into it; it has six appendixes and 165 footnotes and it kept me occupied and interested for a good week and despite the fact things got pretty complicated towards the end and she didn’t tie things up the way I would’ve liked (or would’ve done) I came away from the book with a sense of completeness even if every question wasn’t answered and wasn’t likely ever to be answered except in some parallel universe where all questions get answered. I mean, seriously, how did the French diary get from the pilot’s lunchbox to his remains box?

Naoko Yasutani is almost fifteen when she begins writing her story. She’s Japanese, born to Japanese parents, but has lived most of her life up in Sunnyvale, California:

[E]verything was great and we were just cruising along, except for the fact that we were living in a total dreamland called the Dot-Com Bubble, and when it burst, Dad’s company went bankrupt, and he got sacked, and we lost our visas and had to come back to Japan, which totally sucked because not only did Dad not have a job, but he’d also taken a big percentage of his big fat salary in stock options so suddenly we didn’t have any savings either, and Tokyo’s not cheap. It was a complete bust. Dad was sulking around like a jilted lover, and Mom was grim and tight and righteous, but at least they identified as Japanese and still spoke the language fluently. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked, because I identified as American, and even though we always spoke Japanese at home, my conversational skills were limited to basic, daily-life stuff like where’s my allowance, and pass the jam, and Oh please please please don’t make me leave Sunnyvale.

Nao (pronounced ‘now’) tells her story in the present tense but the present tense is a bit of a bugger. You feel as if I’m talking to you in real time just now, don’t you? The fact is that I’m writing this in a flat in Scotland on March 31st. We’re in completely separate time zones and probably in different countries. So when Ruth finds Nao’s book in a Hello Kitty lunchbox on a Canadian beach several years later it’s hard for her not read Nao’s story as if the girl is talking to her in real time especially as Nao has a habit of addressing her reader directly:

Here’s a thought: If I were a Christian, you would be my God.

Don’t you see? Because the way I talk to you is the way I think some Christian people talk to God. I don’t mean praying exactly, because when you pray you usually want something, or at least that’s what Kayla said. She used to pray for stuff and then tell her parents exactly what she’d prayed for, and usually she got what she wanted. They were probably trying to make her believe in God, but I happen to know it wasn’t working.

Anyway, I don’t really think you’re God or expect you to grant me wishes or anything. I just appreciate it that I can talk to you and you’re willing to listen. But I better hurry up or I’ll never catch up to where I’m supposed to be.

She’s nothing if not chatty as you might expect any fifteen-year-old Japanese girl to be and, yes, she witters on about a lot of the things you’d expect a fifteen-year-old to go on about (although, oddly enough, not so much about boys) but she’s got more pressing concerns: the first is her suicidal dad and the second is the fact she’s being bullied at school. The Japanese attitudes towards and approaches to suicide (a major social problem in Japan – see Japan: ending the culture of the 'honourable' suicide) and what I’ve called bullying (the Japanese word for what happens to Nao is ijime—see Ijime: A Social Illness of Japan) are fascinating. Quite, quite different to what happens in the west. By the time she sits down to write her story—in a French maid fetish café in Akiba Electricity Town of all places (see Maid Cafés – The Expanding Industry in Japan)—the second issue has pretty much resolved itself but only because she stops going to school; her father is still a concern since he can’t find a job (not that he’s tried very hard) and spends all his time at home moping around, reading manga comics or making origami insects from pages of his old philosophy books.

Salvation comes in odd packages sometimes. In Nao’s case hers comes in the diminutive shape of her great-grandmother, Jiko, a one-hundred-and-four-year-old (so she says) Zen Buddhist nun. After spending her summer holiday with Jiko in her temple in Miyagi, a prefecture located in the Tohoku region in the northeastern part of Japan, Nao begins to see life in a completely different way. The prefectural home to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is located just south of Miyagi, by the way, so you see where this might be going. And that’s what Ruth wonders. Was Nao there at the time of the tsunami? Is that how her lunchbox with its precious cargo started its travels? The problem is, the dates don’t quite add up.

Ruth takes her time reading Nao’s diary. She resists the urge to rush through it and tries to read it in real time as best she can.

Of course, the entries were undated, so there was no way of really knowing how slow or fast that might have been, but there were clues: the changing hues of ink, as well as shifts in the density or angle of the handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical intervals, and even assign numbers to them, and then pace her reading accordingly. If she sensed the girl was on a roll, she could allow herself to read further and more quickly, but if it felt like the pace of the writing was slowing down, then she would slow her reading down, too, or stop altogether. This way she wouldn’t end up with an overly compressed or accelerated sense of the girl’s life and its unfolding, nor would she run the risk of wasting too much time. She would be able to balance her reading of the diary with all the work she still needed to do on her own memoir.

The diary isn’t the only thing the lunchbox contains. There’s also a watch, some letters in Japanese and a diary-of-sorts in French. In the breaks from reading she ropes in some of her neighbours to help with the translations; she lives on a remote island in the middle of Desolation Sound, British Columbia where everyone knows everyone’s business. Benoit, who worked at the local dump, takes on the challenge of the French diary; Kimi, the wife of a restaurateur in the nearest town of any size to where Ruth and her husband live, says she’ll translate the letters. Everyone’s keen to know what’s going on and try as she might she simply can’t keep her discovery a secret. Her own writing is not going well, though. She’s been trying to work on a memoir but can’t make any progress especially now she has this distraction.

She trawls through the Internet for information but there is precious little. Nothing on Nao at all—surprising although a possible explanation is provided near the end of the book—and then an unexpected discovery:

The website belonged to a professor of psychology at Stanford University, a Dr. Rongstad Leistiko. Dr. Leistiko was doing research on first-person narratives of suicide and self-killing. He had posted an excerpt from a letter, written to him by one of his informants, a man by the name of “Harry.”

Nao’s father was named Haruki Yasutani. He’d been a Japanese computer engineer who once lived in Sunnyvale, California, and worked in Silicon Valley during the dot-com days. Could this be the same man? Suddenly she realises that there might be a way of getting in touch with Nao and she writes an urgent e-mail to the professor. Why urgent? Because Nao has been talking about killing herself and Ruth is so caught up in the present tense of Nao’s narrative that the slippage of time in the real world has quite bypassed her and it’s not until her husband points this out that she’s brought crashing down to reality with a thud. Perhaps both Nao and her father are long dead, if not by their own hands then as a result of the tsunami. Or maybe not. A bit like Schrödinger’s cat. If she reads on she’ll find out one way or the other. And you’d think a woman with a cat called Schrödinger would know that; that said the cat’s been referred to as ‘the Pest’ for so long (or ‘Pesto’ if they’re feeling affectionate) that she’s probably forgotten that. Then again how come there’s a Japanese Jungle Crow sitting outside her house? What’s he after?

The book is a work of metafiction. Saying that is enough to put people off reading your book—I know that from personal experience—but writers will love this book. In an interview in The Guardian Ruth Ozeki was asked:

Nao's diary is described as a "message in a bottle". Is the fictional author Ruth's discovery of the diary a metaphor for how a story is born?

That's exactly right. As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist. – Anita Sethi, ‘Ruth Ozeki: “This book is about the character creating a novelist”’, The Guardian, 7 March 2013

There are a lot of biographical elements in the book: like Ruth, Ruth Ozeki lives on an island in British Columbia; like Nao, she’s a Japanese-American writer who did experience a cultural shock when she went to Japan herself; like Jiko, she’s a Zen Buddhist priest and from the way she describes him in interview her husband (the artist Oliver Kellhammer) sounds not unlike Ruth’s Oliver. And they also have a cat. All of this kind of stuff is familiar ground if you’re a writer yourself. What probably you’ll find harder to relate to is the fact she’d already submitted her book to her editor after having rewritten it “four of five times,” she says, “with different readers in mind” since 2006 (although its origins date back to 1999)—this being her third novel—and then, after the Tōhoku tsunami hit in 2011, she withdrew it and rewrote it again:

“I just threw away half the book. … It felt like such a relief.” – Felicia R. Lee, ‘What the Tide Brought In’, The New York Times, 12 March 2013

I’ve only heard of John Irving doing that kind of thing but I suppose there must be others. Takes a certain kind of writer to be able to do that, I can tell you. I’ve no idea what the book was like before but her final solution was inspired, a literary novel that’s not only readable and relevant but is also a page-turner. (Small point: in this interview she says she says she was was about to submit it to her editor.)

It’s not without its issues though. In the book, for example, she talks about gyres. The word was new to me:

“There are eleven great planetary gyres,” he said. “Two of them flow directly toward us from Japan and diverge just off the BC coastline. The smaller one, the Aleut Gyre, goes north toward the Aleutian Islands. The larger one goes south. It’s sometimes called the Turtle Gyre, because the sea turtles ride it when they migrate from Japan to Baja.”

[…]

“Each gyre orbits at its own speed,” he continued. “And the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone. The Turtle Gyre has a half tone of six and a half years. The Aleut Gyre, a quarter tone of three. The flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift. Drift that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory. The rate of escape from the gyre determines the half-life of drift . . .”

He picked up the Hello Kitty lunchbox and turned it over in his hands. “All that stuff from people’s homes in Japan that the tsunami swept out to sea? They’ve been tracking it and predicting it will wash up on our coastline. I think it’s just happening sooner than anyone expected.”

Well this book, at times, feels a bit like that. There is just so much stuff thrown into the mix. Just look at my opening paragraph and that doesn’t cover it. I forgot to mention the hentai and the Proust and World War II and the kamikaze pilots and the suicide clubs and the fact that there’s a sudden lurch into magic realism territory near the end of the novel that might confuse a few readers. It’s a lot to take in at once but it’s not so bad when you’re on the shore and every day the tide washes in new and interesting stuff for you to pick through. And that’s how the book works. The tides come in (Nao’s sections) and they go out (in Ruth’s). Bit by bit you know what to hang onto and what to let you. All the stuff about the gyres and the Great Eastern and Great Western Garbage Patches is interesting but once you’ve had your question answered—How might the Hello Kitty lunchbox (and possibly the crow) have found their way from Japan to Canada?—you can move on. Nao is prone to digress too. She says, for example, that she’s going to tell us the story of her great-grandmother:

This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman of the Taisho era. She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty. And even though I may end up mentioning some of her love affairs, everything I write will be historically true and empowering to women, and not a lot of foolish geisha crap. So if kinky nasty things are your pleasure, please close this book and give it to your wife or co-worker and save yourself a lot of time and trouble.

Well, we do get to learn about Jiko but Nao takes her own sweet time getting round to it so one can feel a bit frustrated, as if you’ve been led on, but she’s like any other fifteen-year-old girl, full of good intentions. Besides, although she dilly-dallies along the way, it’s not as if she’s not talking about interesting stuff. As it happens we actually don’t learn that much about Jiko’s past—the paragraph above covers it nicely—besides, her present is quite enough to get on with; the book really did not need another hundred pages.

All the footnotes are a bit of a bind too but there weren’t many I felt able to skip over. I read this in ebook format and it definitely slowed me down waiting on the damn tablet deciding whether or not it was going to jump to the right page or interpret my stab at the screen as an instruction to turn the page back. These, and the detours Nao feels she needs to take to explain things to us (and Ruth and Oliver, too, to a lesser degree) do slow down the action but all the exposition is necessary. And helpful. About the only part I got lost in was the section on Schrödinger's cat which I’ve read about several times before and I just really don’t have the head for stuff like that.

Bottom line then: the reviews in the tabloids have all been on the positive side— “Bewitching, intelligent and heartbreaking” (Junot Díaz), “deeply moving and thought-provoking” (Madeline Miller), “[i]ngenious and touching” (Philip Pullman), “remarkable and ambitious” ( Jane Hamilton), “[f]unny, heartbreaking, moving and profound” (Doug Johnstone)… and they just go on and on and I’m not going to disagree with any of them. It was all these things. It wasn’t perfect but Zen Buddhists are not big on perfection: It's about connection, not perfection, and I was touched.

***

Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. She is the author of My Year of Meats (1998) which won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versaille and All Over Creation (2002) for which she was awarded a 2004 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as well as the Willa Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction.

She was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and travelled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University.

Ozeki, a frequent speaker on college and university campuses, currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she lives with her husband, artist, Oliver Kellhammer. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review and on the Creative Advisory Council of Hedgebrook. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a Sōtō Zen priest in June, 2010.

Me and You

A sibling may be the keeper of one's identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self. - Marian Sandmaier

I have mixed feelings about this book. When people say stuff like that I usually assume that what they mean is, “I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it as much as I might have.” That’s not really the case here. What I mean is that the book made me feel a lot of different things at the same time. It’s like one of those blended fruit drinks—5 Alive jumps to mind—that have too many flavours and confuse people like me with unrefined palettes who expect orange-coloured things to taste orangey. This is as much as I knew about this book before I sat down to read it:

Lorenzo Cuni is a fourteen-year-old loner. His wealthy parents think he is away on a school skiing trip, but, in fact, he has stowed away in a forgotten cellar. He plans to live in perfect isolation for a week, keeping the adult world at bay.

The blurb actually contains ten more words, albeit in their own paragraph, but I stopped reading after the above so when what that second paragraph promised did happen I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t pay too much attention to the cover either which might’ve also given me a clue. All I saw was a silhouette of a boy with something vaguely similar to an hourglass hollowed out which I took to be symbolic of the ‘true’ Lorenzo.

There’s a fourteen-year-old boy inside me right now. Okay, maybe not exactly fourteen-year-old but someone teetering between puberty and adolescence. I wouldn’t say he represents the ‘real’ me but he’s certainly an important part of me. Not sure who was on the inside when I was actually fourteen but by then, like Lorenzo, I’d realised that appearances invariably are deceptive so the following made total sense to me:

One morning I was at home with a fake headache and I saw a documentary on television about insects that mimic other insects.
        Somewhere, in the tropics, lives a fly that imitates wasps. He has four wings, just like the other flies, but he keeps them one on top of the other, so that they look like two. He has a black and yellow striped belly, antennae and bulbous eyes and even a fake stinger. He can’t hurt you, he’s a nice insect, but dressed up as a wasp, the birds, the lizards, even human beings fear him. He can mosey into a wasp nest, one of the most dangerous and well-protected places in the world, and go unrecognised.
        I had been going about it the wrong way.
        Here’s what I had to do.
        Imitate the dangerous ones.
        I wore the same things the others wore. Adidas trainers, jeans with holes in them, a black hoodie. I messed up the parting in my hair and let it grow long. I even wanted to get my ear pierced but my mother forbade me. To make up for it, for Christmas, my parents gave me a scooter. The most popular one.

[…]

        The fly had managed to trick them all, integrating perfectly with the waspian society. They thought I was one of them. That I was all right.

It doesn’t make him the most popular kid in school but it does take the pressure off both at school and at home because his parents worry about him not fitting in and greet any news that things might be improving for their son with whatever support they think he needs, be it a hug, a smile or a top-of-the line scooter; they’re rich, they can afford it.

Lorenzo’s not a stupid boy though. He realises that it’s all an act and the only time he can relax and be himself is when he’s on his own. The prospect of what he sees as a life of constant pretence looming in front of him fills him with dread. Acting like a ‘wasp’ doesn’t make you a wasp. He still hasn’t been assimilated into any of the cliques he pines to be a part of like the one comprising Alessia Roncato, Oscar Tommasi, Riccardo Dobosz and the Sumerian:

They were the Fantastic Four and I was the Silver Surfer.

Spider-Man would’ve been a better example (he tried to join the FF in The Amazing Spider-Man #1) but he’s young, what does he know? The thing about this particular circle at school is that Lorenzo’s realised that they’re just like him—flies pretending to be wasps—but he has no idea how to communicate to them that he’s a… what shall we call him?... kindred spirit. He discovers that they’re going on a skiing trip and on a whim when he gets home he announces to his mother that Alessia Roncato has invited him to go skiing with her and her friends in Cortina. This news reduced his mother to tears of joy and suddenly he finds himself unable to tell her the truth so he devises a cunning plan; he will spend the week in the basement. It’s not a perfect plan—hey, he’s only fourteen and doesn’t think everything through (how, for example, will he cope with his mother’s insistence on talking to Alessia’s mother?)—but it’s a plan. One thing at a time, okay?

Of course for there to be any story here something has to go wrong. And that’s what those ten words I forgot to read would’ve let me in on if only I hadn’t already made my mind up about the book:

Then a visit from his estranged half-sister, Olivia, changes everything.

Enter the antagonist only she’s not really an antagonist; she’s more of a foil, a thorn in his side. Olivia, we learn at the start of the book, is nine years older than him and he’s barely seen her throughout his life. Their father goes to visit his daughter but she’s kept (or chooses to keep herself) at a distance from his new family. So, when she phones Lorenzo once he’s settled in the basement, he’s naturally suspicious:

         ‘Well. Sorry if I’m interrupting you. I got your number from Aunt Roberta. Listen, I wanted to ask you something. Do you know if your mother and Dad are at home?’
        It’s a trap!
        I had to be careful. Maybe Mum had suspected something and was using Olivia to work out where I really was. But Olivia and Mum, as far as I knew, didn’t talk to each other. ‘I don’t know . . . I’m away for ski week.’
         ‘Oh . . .’ Her voice was disappointed. ‘Well, you must be having fun.’

He really need not be concerned. She only wants to know when his parents will be out so she can come over and rummage for a box of her stuff but she doesn’t share this with Lorenzo this over the phone. The first he learns about it is when she turns up at the basement door; it’s accessed from outside. That she does is convenient because she can pose as Alessia’s mum but skipping over that bit of lazy plotting the real meat of the story begins when, after doing Lorenzo this huge favour, she informs him that she’ll also be staying the week.

This could have gone a number of different ways. Especially since they’re nothing alike. Lorenzo’s awkward, a little immature, introverted, private and actually a bit of a mummy’s boy. Apart from a few times when he was too young to remember the two have only been in each other’s company once since, two years earlier and this was what he took away from that encounter:

I had expected Olivia to be ugly and with an unpleasant face like Cinderella’s stepsisters. Instead she was incredibly beautiful, one of those girls that as soon as you look at them your face burns red and everybody knows you think she is beautiful, and if she talks to you, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t even know how to sit down. She had lots of curly blonde hair that fell all the way down her back and grey eyes, and she was sprinkled with freckles, just like me. She was tall and had big, wide breasts. She could have been the queen of a medieval kingdom.

[…]

From what I could understand Olivia was crazy. She pretended to be a photographer but she just got into trouble. She’d failed her high-school exams and run away from home a couple of times, and then in Paris she’d had an affair with Faustini, my father’s accountant.

Naïve and inexperienced Lorenzo might be but he’s not stupid and very quickly he realises something else about his half-sister: she has a drug problem. And no drugs. And this was going to be a problem. Mitch Albom wrote, “Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.” Well these two are both family and strangers and Lorenzo’s got a lot of growing up to do. The Olivia he saw two years earlier is not the same woman he has to deal with now:

        Olivia was sitting on the edge of the settee, all sweaty, jiggling her legs anxiously and staring at the floor. She had taken her cardigan off. She was wearing a saggy, dark blue vest and you could see her boobs hanging down. She was so thin, all bones, with long narrow feet, a thin neck like a greyhound and wide shoulders, and her arms . . .
        What did she have in the middle of her arms?
        Purple spots studded with little red dots.

They don’t talk much. That doesn’t mean stuff isn’t said. Questions are asked, answered offered and that’s usually it. Neither is much of a conversationalist. If one doesn’t feel like explaining no one’s going to press them for information. She starts to go through withdrawal symptoms and her half-brother simply has to cope. Which he does and they do eventually have a moment and then it’s over. Flash forward ten years and Lorenzo’s in a café in Cividale del Friuli—the rest of the action takes place in Rome—and he’s about to see his sister for the first time since that eventful week.

Families are strange. I remember as a young boy of about ten a man knocking on our backdoor and asking to see my mum. Turns out he was my Uncle Harry—one of many uncles and aunts, I should say, but the first I’d ever met up until that point—but as far as I was concerned he was a complete and utter stranger. What was I supposed to feel for him? So I really got this book.

It has the feel of a YA novel but it’s not really. In the UK the book’s being published by Canongate. When they released The Radleys last year they also brought out a version under the Walker imprint aimed at a younger audience but I don’t see them doing that here. In the States the book came out under Grove/Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint which I thought might be aimed at young adults but not so apparently. The imprint’s been around for a while but only recently revived and the novels they’re publishing, according to Judy Hottenson, Grove vice-president of marketing and publicity, are going to be "in the Grove tradition of edgy, unusual fiction. They wouldn't sell as well in hardcover, but they're perfect in paperback for a younger, hipper audience. We think the market is calling out for something like this." Canongate’s already got a reputation for being a bit young and hip so the book’s a good-enough fit there but there’s nothing in the book that a real fourteen-year-old would be perturbed by. And there could’ve been. Probably should’ve been. In that respect Ammaniti pulls his punches as if he were writing for a younger audience. Just compare Renton going cold turkey in Trainspotting:

Relinquishing junk. Stage one, preparation. For this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium, which I've already procured from my mother, who is, in her own domestic and socially acceptable way also a drug addict. And now I'm ready. All I need is one final hit to soothe the pain while the Valium takes effect.

In this respect Lorenzo gets off easy. And so does Olivia. And us readers.

The book’s been generally well-received and rightly so. It’s a thought-provoking book with an engaging protagonist. The biggest gripe people have is its length. The book’s about 25,000 words long and Olivia doesn’t turn up until halfway through that so their story only takes about 13,000 words and that’s really not enough time to do their relationship justice. Still, this is no reason not to read the book and if, like me, you’re a fan of the novella this is definitely one to add to your collection.

***

Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He made his debut in 1994 with the novel Branchie. He is the author of three novels, as well as a collection of short stories. The three books which have been released in the English language and have been translated by Jonathan Hunt are I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura), Steal You Away (Ti prendo e ti porto via) and The Crossroads (Come Dio comanda). At thirty-four, he was the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize for I'm Not Scared which has been translated into twenty languages. All his books, including Me and You (directed by none other than Bernardo Bertolucci), have been adapted for the cinema.

I’ll leave you with the trailer for the film, worth watching if only to hear Bowie perform Space Oddity in Italian.