unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Whilst everyone else was seemingly getting themselves upset in some way over The Buried Giant, I finally got around to reading The Unconsoled. It's a novel which appears to have a somewhat contradictory reputation, it's dream logic and narrative dislocations appearing understandably jarring to some after his first three short, apparently realist texts. It was James Woods, was it not, who described it as 'inventing it's own category of badness'? Equally hyperbolic were all those words are quoted on my edition, proclaiming it some kind of masterpiece. And I've also seen it both described as overlooked in academic analyses of Ishiguro's fiction, and damned for being exactly the sort of anti-realist text that academics are going to like.

This latter judgement at least was not exactly my experience. I came to Ishiguro through my parents' bookshelves. He was a favourite of my Dad's, although I can't remember ever discussing with him what it was he liked so much about his work. I, on the other hand, with a degree in English Literature behind me and a return to academia in my future - had I but known - stumbled with this one. I'd devoured his first three books, but failed to get more than a few pages into this before giving up in exasperation. I didn't get far enough to make any judgement on it's quality. So much for any pretensions I might have to literary appreciation, over and above my dad's 'common reader' reaction!

Reading it all these years later, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards my younger self, although I do rather wish I could advise him to not be quite so impatient! The Unconsoled is a book which requires some patience I feel, although obviously everyone will have their own reactions. Not so much for it's length, although it is a long novel, but because it seems to take time to adjust to its skewed vision of the world. By his own acknowledgement, Ishiguro is far from the most stylish of writers. There's little metaphor or simile in his writing, but an earnest fastidiousness which appears to be reflected in narrators who are frequently attempting to maintain some measure of dignity amidst the chaos of lives caught in historical situations which frustrate such attempts.

Here, our narrator is Ryder, a world famous pianist, who arrives in an unnamed European city in the wake of some undefined catastrophe. His role is either to give a musical performance or possibly a lecture instead, which will provide some positive summing up of the city's recent past and current needs. That uncertainty is typical of a text which is constantly unsettling any stable sense of reality: locations are connected to each in an impossible, dream like manner. Taking place over a handful of days, each section of the novel begins with Ryder waking. Here, the normal order of things is reversed, with waking signalling a re-emersion into the dream.

Time stretches so that a conversation which could logically occupy only a few minutes instead fills multiple pages of lengthy exposition, exposition which often seems focussed on seemingly trivial matters, matters which are taken with utmost seriousness by everyone. Ryder himself is plagued by memories of his parents in England, who may or may not be about to arrive in the city themselves, and may or may not have his own family who live in the city. He repeatedly comes across people from his past, however impossible their presence might seem. Honestly, it's hard to think of any novel which manages to mimic the logic of dreams quite so effectively.

Published in 1995, it would be easy to peg the crisis the city has experienced in its recent past to the ending of communist rule in Eastern Europe just a few years before, but like so much in this novel, this is never explicitly confirmed. It speaks to a general ambivalence about memory found not only here, but in all of Ishiguro's work that I've read. Remembering is never simple for his characters; memory reveals all of the many compromises and failings which have occupied their lives. They are all, perhaps 'unconsoled' in some way.

The logic of dreams which structures the narrative also leads it inevitably towards the surreal. One of my favourite moments is from late in the book where Ryder witnesses the bizarre 'dance of the porters', narrated with a deadpan earnestness that is by turns comic in it's situation and chilling in it's consequences. In fact, that could work as a fair description for a lot of the way the narration of this novel works. There is comedy throughout but it's so well suppressed that it could be easy to miss. Equally there's also a real sadness here, mainly concerned with the expectations of others, whether that other is a lost love or disappointed parents.

Ironically, because I've read somewhere that part of Ishiguro's intention with this novel was to write an 'international novel', and moreover a novel which is set in Eastern Europe, but I find myself wanting to class it as an example of 'English surrealism'. Certainly there's little of the 'mocking stance' which Rhys Hughes identifies with the genre, but there is a concern with 'the Show', even if in this case, it is a Show which doesn't actually go on. If the narrative functions as a dream, then it is clearly an anxiety dream, in which Ryder is forever being interrupted and distracted from whatever purpose he is engaged upon - in one case even physically unable to speak. The performance which he is so intent on giving never actually occurs, except for a single practice session in a dilapidated, isolated cabin, where he is overheard by only a single person. I've seen this scene described as an example of a 'nihilistic aesthetics', and which mocks any attempt to impose a politics upon art. Which is certainly a persuasive reading, but it's also rather comic, isn't it? In some respects, it's only the elegance and poise of Ishiguro's style which ensures we can overlook the comedy of this novel, the sheer absurdity of most of it's action.

And it's incorrect perhaps to say that 'the Show' doesn't go on. There's a curious gaiety to the final scene on a tram in which, having been finally abandoned by Boris, the little boy who may be his son, Ryder finds himself unaccountably weeping. The sadness present throughout the novel has finally penetrated his restrained surface. But then it's pointed out by one of the other passengers that there is a sumptuous buffet present on the tram, and that however bad things are, he should eat and carry on with things. And so, as it does for all of us, no matter how awful things can get, 'the Show' ultimately carries on...

English literary surrealism

Since I've come back to the term in my last post, I should probably put this quote here as it's what got me thinking about the concept in the first place.

"Most definitely I say 'English' instead of 'British'. The British include the Scottish and Welsh, who have their own brand of surrealism. At least the Scottish do; the Welsh make do with simply being surreal. There's nothing remotely English about a Scottish surrealist writer such as Alasdair Gray, whose prose crackles, dances, does other tricks, in a member vehemently non-English. English surrealism is a distinctive brand. Rex Warner, J.B. Morton, W.E. Bowman, Vivian Stanshall, Kyril Bonfiglioli, a few others, adopt a mocking stance from the beginning. They just can't seem to take surrealism seriously: by which I mean that they tend to exploit the surreal for its comic inventiveness rather than for the light it sheds on the secret workings of the grim subconscious mind. 

"...The English surrealists were consequently far more theatrical than their continental counterparts - they had a liking for large casts and elaborate props, the complex and ineffable interconnections of clubs, galas, events, expeditions. Its all about the Show; and the Show must go on, far beyond the ridiculousness that once was the sublime. Rex Warner's bicycle race in pursuit of the proverbial and real Wild Goose; J.B. Morton's boomerang-shaped aeroplanes that save on the fuel for a return flight; W.E. Bowman's cruise in search of talking fish: these form a different order of surrealism from the one Breton originally envisaged, and conceivably he wouldn't even recognise the representative works of these authors as being 'surreal'." 

Rhys Hughes, Englebrecht Again!

'[A] few others' for Rhys would at the very least include Maurice Richardson (whose work Englebrecht Again! tributes), Michael Moorcock (Dancers at the End of Time), and the 'semi-surrealist' William Sansom. There must be others?

I confess, Moorcock, Richardson and Stanshall aside, to date I've read none of these gentlemen. This needs investigating further I feel.

Drumming badgers

Goodness, has it really been ten years? Longer in fact, if I consider that Sweet England, the album on which this arrangement originally appeared actually came out the previous year. I remember the praise and the excitement it received. This was the 'future of folk', or some such similar nonsense. And consequently hated by those who feel affronted by a difference to their fixed ideas of how folk music should be performed. It was certainly innovative, in his melding of traditional songs and tunes with ambient electronic soundscapes. Only it falls apart at the end for me with the one rather plaintive original, backed only with the piano.

I actually prefer the live performance here to the original that's on the record. It preserves most of the icy chill of the arrangement (that opening solo violin) with an added forcefulness when the drums come in, provided here by two static drummers, both rooted to the spot behind the main performer. What really lived in my memory though, was the eccentric backdrop playing behind the musicians.

Here, memory has clearly betrayed me somewhat, as the camera focuses on it for relatively little of the performance. Instead, we get rather more of Jim Moray's rockstar posturing than I remembered. Which is understandable: the performer is what we want to see after all. Still, we see enough to get a clear sense of what was shown, and it's not as though it's anything particularly complex.

The backdrop is, as I said, the element that's really stayed in my mind from when I first saw it:

An autumnal forest, much like that which appeared on the album cover and inside sleeve. In fact, I imagine it's the same image. On the cover, Jim Moray appears asleep, lying next to an electric guitar and several books. One of them looks like an old fashioned kind of exercise book, while the other is a cloth bound hardback, missing a dust jacket. In the background, gazing at him, there's a black dog. The dog reappears on the inside sleeve, as part of a digitally manipulated series of images of the musician. Behind his pensive looking self he appears holding a crow on his left hand; two versions of him are investigating his - sleeping? - self; he gazes at an open book whilst the back of his head bursts into flame; he holds a rose, while his head spins so fast that it's become a blur; he stands proudly next to himself, bound to a tree, whilst another self takes a photograph of the two of them; finally, a tear falls slowly down his cheek.

We don't need to read anything specific into the symbolism here - I imagine that nothing specific is meant - but images of crows, roses, black dogs, of repetitive doubling of the self, have their own resonant meanings, if only ones taken from popular culture. It conjures up a vague sense of the occult: occultness if you like. The combination of a very modern looking guitar and camera means that the images enact a melding of the past and the present which the music also works to self-consciously create: very old songs treated in a most up to date manner.

The performance backdrop achieves something else. Whilst the musicians play, the initially empty forest scene is slowly populated by their doubles, only in the backdrop they are wearing costumed animal heads. This is achieved by what looks like a very cheap effect, akin to the blue screen of an earlier era, as though their human figures have been pasted onto the image. The final figure to appear, and here I'm grateful that my memory hasn't completely betrayed me, is of a drummer wearing a badger's head. Or so it looks to me.

How to define, how to place this image? The album cover and sleeve are trading very obviously in a form of romanticism, laying it on a bit thick almost. The intense seriousness carries over into the musical performances on the album. Live, that seriousness is preserved. It's only in the backdrop, in the simulated or actual cheapness of the backdrop, that any humour creeps in. It's very oddness lends it that somewhat comic air. The reason that it's the badger which has lodged in my mind all these years is probably an unconscious echo of The Wind in the Willows. Taken as a whole, matched with the seriousness of the performance, what I think I saw all those years ago was an image of what I would now wish to define as English surrealism. No wonder it lodged itself in my mind in the way that it did.

"...suggested an English surrealism..."

The light fittings all suggested an English surrealism; cast iron bouquets of garden flowers, enamelled to pale and powdery colours, the whole construction appearing to float from the powder blue ceiling.

Michael Bracewell, The Crypto-Amnesia Club 

a find at work

And what a wonderful find!

I currently work part time for a bookseller, sometimes packing books, and sometimes cataloguing them. On Wednesday I was mostly working on the category of rural homes and country houses. Most of them are coffee table books really. Stuffed full of pictures of luxury homes you'll never be able to afford. Aspiration-porn. Interiors art-directed to within an inch of their life.

But this? This is a coffee table book with pretensions. It's a tour of the English country house, including the former homes of famous people from history such as Jane Austen. It's littered with literary quotations, many assigned pride of place on their own page.

And the cover? Whoever art-designed this is some kind of genius. The animals sitting down to enjoy their wine and food amid aristocratic squalor. Clutter. It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as Lewis Carroll. The Goons. The Beatles when they went psychedelic. The Bonzos. Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht. English Surrealism.