These Dreams of You – Steve Erickson

"It's a country that does things in lurches.  Born in radicalism, then reluctant for years, decades, the better part of centuries, to do anything crazy, until it does the craziest thing of all.  But it's also a country - inherent in its genes - capable of imagining what cannot be imagined and then, once it's imagined, doing it.
Six years before, another president, a white privileged Texan, swaggered across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a pilot's jacket, a banner unfurled behind him proclaiming the end of a war that, in fact, was only beginning.  It was an image that the country embraced almost as much as it believed it.  Now a black Hawaiian with a Swahili name?  It's science fiction, Zan thinks.  Or at least the sort of history that puts novelists out of business." 

Plot:  A Los Angeles family reeling under the weight of the recession seek temporary respite.  A trip to find the mother of their young adopted daughter results in the family physically split apart and their attempts to get back together take them all over Europe.  And a lot more too hard to explain.

Why read it?: While more conventionally plotted than a lot of Erickson's work, it still retains some fantastical elements.  Time travel, Ulysses, Robert Kennedy in a state of doubt, Bowie and Iggy in Berlin, there's a lot to like here.

This book affected me personally as few other books have, particularly in the first few pages.  For a book taking its title from a Van Morrison song (at least tangentially about Ray Charles, if a Van Morrison song can actually be about something), includes a lengthy section with a conscience stricken Robert Kennedy on his way from opportunistic son a American royalty to the political soul of late 60's America, another lengthy bit involving David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin, a bit of a time travel problem involving a copy of Ulysses, and even stops for a short time in a hotel in Ethiopia, it’s a very intimate novel that begins the night of the 2008 election.  Despite his family’s life being in financial disarray as a casualty of the financial meltdown of the time, Zan is brought to tears via TV as he watches what is happening in Grant Park.  For me, it had been a few months earlier, August 28, watching what had seemed impossible not too much earlier in my life.  The idea of possibility seemed infinite at that moment, and an America that could deliver on it’s promises was real.

What happened after was not surprising in hindsight.  Erickson’s novel wanders through the wasteland of 2008-09.  Zan and Viv have adopted Sheba, now 4, from an Ethiopian orphanage.  Sheba is precocious, with a vocabulary of words and sayings beyond her years, and transmitting music through her body. While Zan and Viv are not your typical white middle aged couple (Viv has turquoise colored hair and is an out of work artist) they are at times baffled by their daughter.  Much is made of the perplexities in even beginning to understand the meaning of race.  Yet this is, along with their 12 year old son Parker, a family.  It isn’t long before they are leaving Los Angeles and their increasingly creaky existence there, for London (Zan, Parker and Sheba) and Addis Ababa (Viv, in search of Sheba’s mother).  The novel will eventually also reach Paris and Berlin, people appear and disappear, and the novel redirects for awhile to a sublplot involving Robert Kennedy who may possibly envision a 2008 America 40 years earlier.  There’s also a 2^nd subplot imagining Ulysses suddenly showing up in history before it’s actually written (not surprisingly a Molly shows up in the 08 story).  And what you might do about that, if you were so lucky to find it.  Also, which seems to be pretty much a ritual for Erickson, there's a brief entry of a character from his previous novel Arc d'X. And then there’s Berlin Bowie and Iggy.  They somehow become integral to the plot in a roundabout way.

Ercikson can write some indecipherable sentences, but I’m fine with a few misses sprinkled in with many more hits.  His novel Zeroville is a brilliant piece of movie fandom built around a story of 1970’s Hollywood).  Again, history is important here.  Erickson doesn’t see it as fixed as most of us do; as some of the other writers I have read, he sees the importance of point of view, but more than that he seems to see it as something we can mold and use today to better ourselves.  We are a country of assembled parts that have had to be repaired again and again to make something more unique and better.  What happened in 2008 was a culmination of events going back more than 2 centuries.  A belief in the magic of America doesn't have to be blind faith in exceptionalism - we can also see it as a long experiment that has succeeded more often than not, sometimes in spite of itself.

The Orphan Masters Son - Adam Johnson

“When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”


Plot:  Jun Do, a North Korean, learns early in life how to survive in a difficult place to live.  Through perseverance, smarts, and luck, he rises up through the spy ranks, only to be thrown into a hellish prison under murky circumstances.  Miraculously he emerges from the prison a new man and manages to befriend and become a rival to, Kim Jong-Il.


Why read it?:  Fiction about North Korea is rare, especially good fiction.  You can spend hours reading between the lines, as there will be many instances in which you find yourself scratching your head about what just transpired in a world of doublespeak.  Also, the love story between Jun Do and Ga makes the book worth reading on its own.

 

I certainly have no idea what life is actually like in North Korea, but Adam Johnson presents it here in a way that at least seems possible, while running his protagonist, Jun Do, through a series of incredible adventures(?) nightmares(?).  The idea of identity runs throughout this book, which makes sense when it is set in a country where all individual identity has been essentially used by its leader Kim Jon Il.  It’s a place where in order to do anything beyond merely survive, one must prove themselves indispensable, but by becoming indispensable, one then becomes a target, because only the leader is truly indispensable.  Identity is more a matter of who you want or need to be, as opposed to who you may really be.  Jun Do manages to figure this out, and thus becomes Kim’s rival.

Jun Do, unlike most North Koreans, actually gets to travel a bit, but it’s not your everyday travel.  Early on, he participates in kidnapping raids to Japan, later finds work as a spy on a rickety North Korean fishing/spy ship that has an odd encounter with a US Navy vessel, and then gets to be a part of a quixotic diplomatic trip to Texas.  As a reward, he ends up in a prison that one assumes people rarely come out of.  But Jun Do does, but that entails assuming the identity of someone else; he still has his most audacious adventure ahead of him, including face time with Kim.

Adventure, romance, humor, political satire, it’s all here in an absolutely compelling story.  Part of the novel is narrated by a state interrogator, who provides insight in how North Koreans may think, or at least justify why they live like they do. He’s an eminently sad character, but in his own odd way, has the ability to be a humanitarian in a system where there are none.

The story moves pretty quick – it’s easy at times to get lost in some of the conversations, as often the characters are speaking in coded language of one form or another, as few things in the North Korea portrayed here are as they seem, and even a simple conversation can prove deadly.  Even the conversations with Americans and Japanese Jun meets are never quite what they seem on the surface.

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan

“And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?”  


Plot:  The story of William Buelow Gould, from his point of view, which is not what the history books tell.  Petty thief, liar, painter, he ends up on a Tasmanian penal colony where things getter stranger than fiction.  Despite his many flaws, Gould is able to ascertain the beauty of life, and how we squander it without a second thought.


Why read it?:  Flanagan is a brilliant writer, and basically invents a shaggy dog story out of a relic of history.  Gould's forays into the heart of darkness is at times tremendously humorous, while simultaneously being sad and angry, as we witness, much like in English Passengers, the destruction of an entire culture, for no reason other than greed and thoughtlessness,


This would fall into the category of speculative, or maybe better, reimagined historical fiction.  There was a William Buelow Gould, who was banished to Van Diemen's Land in the nineteenth century and did make a name for himself as an artist, including his book of fish.  Tasmanian Richard Flanagan's novel uses that as a starting point in creating a weird, funny, and engrossing story of identity, racial relations, and the sad extermination of an entire group of people.


Flanagan uses a framing story to introduce to Gould - an aimless con artist comes across Gould's unknown diary, written on scraps of paper, or any other available flat material, using a variety of liquids, including blood, as ink.  No one believes the diary to be real - it just doesn't agree with history.  This is one of the main ideas of the book - what we know of as history depends on who gets to write it, and its not always the most reliable sources that get to do so.


The Gould we get to know is not a noble character; he is a criminal and a lackluster one at that.  He picks up some artistic skills as a young man, but painting is mainly a way of survival for him, not a passion.  He eventually ends up on Sarah Island, the worst of the worst penal colonies.  By Gould's account, the man in charge of the island is in fact an escaped convict, who by being the lone survivor of a shipwreck, is able to pass himself off a British naval officer.  Through more luck, he ends up in charge of the penal colony.  Unfortunately, the trauma of the shipwreck and his survival have robbed him of his sanity.  He soon takes to wearing a gold mask and a coat made of bird feathers.  And creating the world's strangest penal colony.  Starved for funds from the British, he soon establishes a shipbuilding enterprise using prison labor, a timber business that deforests much of the island, and a variety of trade deals with the Japanese and others.  Through a series of letters with his supposed sister (he is impersonating a real officer after all) he hears of all that is happening in Europe.  When trains become the newest thing, he wants his own and buys the equipment.  Soon Sarah Island has its own railway, but due to the small size of the island, it only goes around in a small loop (the hope that it will magically link to the great railways of Europe, alas, never come to fruition). 




Gould, due to his painting abilities, is spared from hard labor, and gets a job as a gofer for the chief doctor and science officer, Lempriere,  a large, strange man who seems to be straight out of a Dicken's novel.  Hoping to achieve membership into the Royal Society, he tasks Gould with making drawing of the fish of Macquarie Harbour.  Gould's resulting fish provide the motif's for each of the book's chapters.  The story becomes darker;  Lempriere, having lost out on the fish project, turns to a study of the aborigine's brain size, which of course requires samples that can be sent back to England.  Lempriere ends up himself as a meal (of a large hungry pig).  Gould is convicted of his murder and awaits execution in a prison cell that floods twice daily with the tide. It is here that Gould creates his diary, often writing with his own blood, or the ink from captured sea urchins.


The novel is full of blood and other bodily fluids, death and mindless destruction.  Gould though, learns to see the beauty in the world, both natural and that created by man.  The juxtaposition of the two paths is what Gould can not reconcile. 


Flanagan is a wonderful writer; this book always has a sense of humor throughout what is a horribly tragic story.  Much like The English Passengers, another book that details the demise of the aborigines of Tasmania by white men, the senselessness of the wholesale destruction of a people, repeated so often, and which affects all of our lives to this day, is brought into great focus

The Shadow Catcher Marianne Wiggins

 

“You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.”

Plot:  A young woman training to be a nurse in late 19th century Minnesota is forced to relocate, with her younger brother, to Seattle after the death of their parents.  Once in Seattle, she marries Edward Curtis, who becomes a controversial ethnographer of native Americans.  A parallel story emerges of Wiggins' investigation into a man claiming to be her long deceased father. 


Why read it?:  The odd setup allows Wiggins to muse on various topics about family history, authenticity, art, and whatever else crosses her mind.  Her mind is interesting.


This is the 3^rd book by Wiggins that I have read; all 3 are completely different and all 3 are exceptional.  Like the other novels I have read by her, this takes place in the late 19^th/early 20^th century.  On a basic level, this is about the early 20^th century photographer/ethnographer Edward Curtis, but that wouldn’t be particularly accurate.  He is the character of the title, but the book rarely includes him.  Much like the people he tried to document, Curtis in this novel is mostly on its edges.  He appears briefly and even then, you never know much more of him other than he keeps to himself, and is not particularly liked by anyone, including his long suffering wife Clara.  Clara is much more the focus of the first half or so of the novel.  The loss of her parents and her life in Minnesota and her life near Seattle in the late 1800’s is greatly detailed up to the point where she becomes involved with the very odd Mr Curtis.

The book is also the story of a writer named Marianne Wiggins who has written a book about Curtis.  It seemed a bit strained at first, as you try to process exactly what is going on, but I bought into it pretty quickly.  Eventually Wiggins ends up in Las Vegas trying to identify a man who has apparently appropriated her long deceased father’s identity.  This gives Wiggins some space to muse on her ancestors and what she knows (or assumes to know) of them based on photos and other documents she has.  Much like Curtis staged and edited his photographs to drive his own version of Native Americans, Wiggins sees much the same progress going on in trying to understand her own ancestors (and Curtis himself, who, based on one photo of himself, is incredibly appealing to a Hollywood film maker). 

Eventually the stories all intersect into one, which I assume is speculative on the author’s part, but is quite unexpected.  But to give her credit, it worked (for me); if you can grant her one or two rather large coincidences, the story comes to a conclusion that is satisfying and makes sense of what we have seen so far.  The veracity of history, and what we can and can not make of it, is a subject of interest to me, explored in Gould’s Book of Fish, and several other works.  Here, Wiggins isn’t exactly critical of the manipulations Curtis made in his photos.  Rather, she sees someone who wasn’t comfortable sharing the details of  his life with anyone, preferring to have his life seen as an ideal.  Perhaps that is what he thought of his subjects.