Mars: old favourites, and a new society?

I have been enjoying all the recent press stories about missions to Mars, which have contained a curious mixture of harsh reality and pure fantasy. The European Mars expedition was a partial failure because the explorer vehicle, Beagle 2, failed to make contact after landing. However, the NASA probe has just made contact again after an anxious few hours of silence. And the European orbital ship has confirmed NASA's observations last year that there is water at the South pole of Mars. So the (much cheaper) European mission was not a complete failure.

So much for the reality: getting to Mars is expensive and tough. These are unmanned missions: imagine if it had been a ship full of European astronauts that had lost contact with Earth! The recent fantasy stories about Mars have been those of George Bush Jr., who is apparently planning a Mars landing by 2018, along with a permanent presence on the moon. We all laughed when we heard this as it was 'blatant electioneering' (the BBC's phrase I think). But I'm sure that people laughed at Kennedy when he announced the manned missions to the moon.

All these Mars stories have made me start re-reading the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I first read Red Mars in about 1996 and have returned to the books every couple of years since then. It is quite rare for me to re-read books - although I did go through all A.S. Byatt's ‘Frederica Potter’ novels again recently. What really made me want to read the Mars books again was a Bush comment: he was talking about travelling to Mars ‘to build an entirely new society’ or some such waffle. The KSR books are about (amongst other things) the difficulty of building a society from scratch, and the near-impossibility of doing this when the new society is completely dependent on the old for resources and cash. The original Mars expedition is hugely expensive and elitist, because only a chosen few scientists and engineers and astronauts (the ‘first hundred’) make the first journey. The balance of power in the Martian population gradually changes as the big corporations begin to send parties of their own to exploit Mars’ natural mineral resources. Many of the first hundred would like to create a new egalitarian society where land is held in common and people receive ‘payment’ for the resources that they contribute to Martian society. They find this difficult because their seemingly ideal society, which allows them to pursue whatever research takes their fancy, is paid for by Earth. And then they discover how to reverse the ageing process and the trouble really starts…..

This is the best sort of science fiction, the sort that asks questions about what sort of a society would be likely to form if we started to populate the blankness of space. Somehow I doubt that anything we build on Mars would be an entirely new heaven and earth, whatever Bush says. The irony of it is that if Bush sends men to Mars, then whatever happens on Mars will follow the American agenda, and will not be new at all.

A.S. Byatt

I have been re-reading A.S. Byatt's four Frederica Potter books non-stop for the past few days. I needed some pure escapism and I find that the combination of Byatt's prose, which is absorbing because of its sheer physicality and sensuality, and her quirky characters, keeps me deep in the books for hours on end.

The reason I started reading/re-reading was that I finally managed to buy a copy of the Virgin in the Garden, the first in the series. For some reason I had never managed to find this in a bookshop - maybe it was out of print for a while. I think I actually read the books in the order 3-2-4-1 which is not exactly logical. I bought Babel Tower in hardback at a remnants sale in 1996-97, then Still Life in paperback shortly afterwards. I then bought A Whistling Woman in hardback when it was published in 2002 (by this time I had almost everything else of Byatt's except Virgin and wanted to read more) and then finally this year I bought the first book.

It's been interesting to read them one after another - apart from anything else; it answers a few basic questions about the plot (I was never quite sure where the mysterious Ottakar brothers had appeared from). But it also gives each event its correct dramatic weight. Almost didn't notice the death of Stephanie in the second book, because my focus was so much on the dominant personality of Frederica. Virgin, however, made me realise the importance of Stephanie (and lack of Stephanie in books three and four of the quartet) because she is emphatically not a subsidiary character in the first book. She is the foil to Frederica, she goes before her in everything (including, crucially, marriage), she may be a more submissive personality but we can see the roots of so much of Frederica's character in her.

I don't think I had realised quite how much Frederica's life follows Byatt's life. I wouldn't want to say that the novels are entirely auto-biographical, because quite frankly, no-one's life is that interesting, but there are endless similarities: the two sisters born into a literary family; the young woman at Newnham; the struggles of a young writer; teaching at an Art College. I wonder what Margaret Drabble makes of Byatt's decision to kill off the elder sister in the novels?

I haven't quite finished The Whistling Woman yet, so I may have more to write later.

Reading list roundup: Whitbread prize, Forster, American and French novels

I'm still working my way through EM Forster - I started with A room with a view and have read The longest journey and most of Where angels fear to tread so far. I'll write something properly about Forster when I've read them all, though writing a piece on Forster seems like a rather daunting task because he is such a giant of British literature. At most, I can expect to give a few personal reactions.

In the meantime, I'm window shopping, planning my next literary excursion. The Whitbread Prize list was published this week, and provides a few more interesting-looking British novels. An excellent article in the Guardian Review this Saturday on American literature has reminded me that I have to read some Pynchon and DeLillo. The Guardian article reminds me that I have been viewing contemporary American literature slightly through the wrong end of the telescope: I have read a lot that has been published in the last ten years (Frantzen, Updike, Irving, Roth, etc.) but I haven't read any of the books that were being published fifty years ago. I need to go back slightly further in time. So I can't really comment in an educated way on the view proposed in the article that American literature is 'stale and wearisome', except to say that I found The Corrections to be an engaging and intelligent novel. But then I like list-making and pedagogical novels, and have similar tastes in theatre - Tom Stoppard Coast of Utopia trilogy was a recent example of art that is both emotionally true, and also a factual learning experience. I would never have learned, and retained, so much information about mid-19th century European politics and philosophy through a formal teaching course.

And what about the French literature I was going to write about? I have slightly run out of steam (and books, I need to place an order with amazon.fr again). I read Antechrista by Amelie Northom, which was no more than a piece of teenage fiction, and kept me occupied (more or less) on a plane journey recently. I got really stuck with Luc Lang's book on 11 September. It is just too abstract for my grasp of the French language. It has been sat on my bedside table, at the bottom of the pile, for the last month, so I think it's time to admit defeat and take it off the reading list. Similarly with Rousseau's Confessions: it's just slightly too hard-going, and I don't have the patience to sit there with a dictionary by my side. I want to read more Beigbeder, and I'll see what else I can find.

EM Forster

I've started an EM Forster expedition. The book shelf was looking a little empty, and as I've spent far too much money on books recently, I decided to raid the 'classics' shelf. I was inspired by Zadie Smith's article in the Guardian Review on Sunday. Two novels to her name, and I think she's now working on a non-fiction book on the morality of the novel (according to the Harvard University Gazette in April). And she's younger than I am! Impressive.
Anyway, I've started with A Room with a View.

Vernon God Little - DBP Pierre

A worthy winner of the Booker Prize?
I think so - 'though it didn't give me the greatest pleasure of any of the shortlisted books (that honour goes to Astonishing Splashes of Colour). I found the language a little difficult to start with - the Texan idiom took a bit of getting used to - but by 50 pages into the book I was not noticing it any more. If someone had interrupted me I probably would have started talking like a Texan (an unlikely scenario).
What an excellent extrapolation and satire of the flawed 'trial by media' culture in the United States. It is particularly scary in Texas, where the dealth penalty is still applied. Americans who feel that their human rights record is better than the Iraqis should read this book.......

The Crimson Petal and the White - Michael Faber

I had been saving this for a rainy day, so I took the book with me on a trip to France. I always take too many books with me when I go away - paranoid that I will run out of reading material when stuck in a tiny airport with no bookshop - so I'm not very good at travelling light. This monster weighed in at over 800 pages so it counted for two or three normal length books.

It was a very good read. Good story, intriguing characters, and a totally new perspective on Victorian London Society. It was one of those books that it's easy to lose yourself in - perfect for a travelling companion.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what to say. The book isn't particularly inventive in construction or content - it's a fairly straightforward start-to-finish story of a prostitute with heart and brains who makes good. The only feature - 'though not exactly original - is the overpresent narrator. The reader is introduced to the main characters, entreated to stay with them even when they are dull or self-pitying, and generally guided through the novel in a very self-conscious fashion. Very Jane Austen. But not very consistent - the narrator fades around the middle of the novel, only to return on the last page as an apology for the inconclusive ending. But even this feature doesn't add anything profound - it's just a bit annoying.

I would recommend this as a good holiday read.

Man Booker Prize winner

So the dirty rotten scoundrel DBC Pierre has won the 2003 Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little. The story behind the book (drugs, cheating of friends, debts of reportedly three times the prize of £50,000) is very intriguing - I must read it!
Since I haven't read it yet, I can't comment on whether this was an appropriate winner. All I can say is that I'm glad that Monica Ali did not win with Brick Lane, as I thought this book was the most overrated of 2003. I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, but thought it covered a lot of the same ground as The Handmaid's Tale (and numerous other sci-fi books influenced by this fantastic book) and therefore didn't deserve a prize.

The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

I've just finished reading The Little Friend. It was a bit of a struggle to finish it - this is a very long and rambling novel. The plot twists and turns and left me feeling disorientated at several points, and some sentences seem to take on a life of their own and span lines and lines of text.

First of all I should confess that I am not a huge Donna Tartt fan, so I wasn't eagerly anticipating her second novel - hence I waited for it to be published in paperback here in the UK before I read it. I did read The Secret History, and found it gripping and weird enough that I could understand the Tartt 'cult' that grew up around it, without wanting to participate in the hype myself. So any Tartt fans might find my response a bit luke-warm.

I'm not going to attempt a full analysis of the novel - there are plenty of resources available for those who are interested, from fan site purple glitter to a book group reading guide provided by Bloomsbury (clever marketing).

A few thoughts:
Tartt writes from one main and several subsidiary view-points. The book revolves around Harriet, a twelve year-old girl who is looking to revenge the death of her brother Robin, and Harriet's viewpoint is the main one in the novel. I'm not sure that these different viewpoints work - Harriet is a very odd little girl, and the parts of the novel that are written through her eyes (although in the third person) do present a satisfyingly warped view of what is going on. But the mixture of Harriet's viewpoint with that of the adults in the book is a strange one, all the more so because the adults are a very strange lot themselves.

This can be described as a Southern novel, since the events are centred on the town of Alexandria, Mississippi. I think that the novel creates a real sense of place, and I loved the action centred on the white trash family, who are so hopeless and beyond the law that even when they are behaving very badly, we can't help but feel sorry for them.

In fact after putting the novel down, I am left with a sense of pity for all the characters. They are all damaged by a lack of care: Harriet's parents do not care for her; the white trash family are not cared for by society or by the system of welfare; even the hospital does not care effectively for the characters who are admitted to it. Just surviving is difficult for all of them, but I'm not sure whether their battle is against the South, or against the author: they are constantly struggling against the many black and twisted plot devices Tartt throws at them.

Nothing is resolved in the book. Tartt appears to have an unresolved ending in mind right from the start, as discussed in this interview with Robert Birnbaum. I would not have been surprised by the number of threads left hanging loose (characters leave town after an argument and are never heard of again; we don't know what happens to Harriet's parents or whether they start to take better care of her; we don't know whether there are any consequences from the happenings towards the end of the book; we don't know whether Harriet's mother discovers that her husband is living with another woman), except for the big set-piece ending involving guns, cars and near-drownings, which seems to predict some great resolution. Yet it never comes. Was I a frustrated reader? Slightly - but having travelled nearly 600 pages with Harriet and her strange friends and relatives, I was quite content to leave her company. You can't help thinking that she would grow up into a very screwed up woman - maybe she will write a novel about her experiences?

Frederic Beigbeder - Windows on the World

This is the first of what I suspect will be several postings about contemporary French literature. I recently discovered amazon.fr, the French amazon website. Not very difficult to discover, it has to be said - but it had never occurred to me to look there before. I was struggling to get hold of new material to read in French - I was a bit bored with the 'classics' which is all most British bookshops stock by way of French language books - and wanted to try something more contemporary. I think this was also a reaction to the French/American stand-off earlier in the year over Iraq. Anyway, I was looking for a Michel Houellebecq book, and finally found it on amazon.fr - and they ship to the UK. So I am now officially an amazonaute! And I am enjoying some contemporary literature - it's a good antidote to the american lit that I read a lot of.

Windows on the World

The first Beigbeder novel I have read - I saw a brief mention in the Guardian Review last month. I have also ordered Luc Lang's book but not read it yet.

There are two first-person narrators in the novel - one is FB himself, the other is an invented Texan called Carthew Yorston, who is visiting Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, with his two young sons. We are presented with alternating chapters from each narrator - the Carthew Yorston timeline is linear and takes place within two hours on the morning of September 11 2001, whereas the FB narrator covers more than one day during the period that the author is writing the book.

FB is a hyperrealist like Houellebecq. This comes through most clearly in the chapters written in the quasi-factual author's voice: the fictionality of the Carthew Yorston character is made explicit in these sections, and we are even told how the author invented the character's name by slightly changing his American grandmother's name. When describing places and events, FB uses some similar hyperrealistic techniques to Houellebecq: he gives the price of the food he is eating, even the telephone number of the restaurant he is sitting in as he is writing, giving the reader the illusion that he could step into FB's world just by picking up the phone. In fact the FB chapters come very close to a blog written by the author, discussing his divorce, his young daughter, and his relationship with his girlfriend, and his last novel.

The effect of the hyperrealist FB chapters is to consciously fictionalise the chapters written in the voice of CY. This is a very useful technique for tackling the book's controversial subject: the last two hours of the lives of the people who died at the top of the WTC, unable to exit the building because the plane had crashed into it several floors below them. As FB says early on in the novel (and is quoted on the dust-jacket of the book): "The only way to know what happened in the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Centre on September 11 between 8.30AM and 10.29am, is to invent it". To my mind, by admitting to the reader that he has invented a father and two sons, rather than leaving us to wonder whether these people really lived and died, he is cleverly sidestepping potential criticism from the relatives and friends of those who died, who might understandably not be happy to find a fictional acount of their last two hours.

The account of the last two hours in the Windows on the World restaurant is incredibly vivid and populated by cartoon-like characters, for example, the Texan narrator himself, who is a real-estate agent (what could be more American?); his two young sons, who constantly bicker with each other, but who poignantly believe for most of the novel that the whole experience is a tourist attraction like Jurassic Park; the two traders sitting at the next table in restaurant who are in the middle of a passionate affair but still avidly discussing the latest hot stocks; and later on, the black waitress who looks after the little boys. By dealing with these stereotypes, FB creates a super-fictional world at the top of the WTC that contrasts sharply with the super-real world described in the author's chapters. This is most clear in the final pages of the book: as Carthew Yorston's last moments alive are described, in the first person, the reader canot help but question "who is writing this?" because we know that the author did not survive. But then he does say, at 8.31am, "Dans deux heures je serai mort, mais peut-etre suis-je deja mort".

I found this book very moving without being overly sentimental - indeed, one of its strong points is that it is describes the world mourning that took place after 11/9/2001 in a critical way, but deals sensitively with the personal grief of those people who were touched directly by the tragedy.

I also find it very interesting that the first authors to dare to tackle 9/11 as a subject are French, not American.

I look forward to reading more of FB, and to reading Luc Lang's book, which should be an interesting comparison.