The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox

It isn't obvious to me why I don't like this book more. I read an earlier draft of it too, and I assumed that my somewhat disengaged response was largely based on my mood at the time, but no, I have the same response now -- while still seeing all the positives which originally made me track the problem to myself instead of the book. One of the book's characters lives under a spell which makes him impossible to fully perceive - people look at him and see not a memorable face, but an assemblage of features - and the book itself seems to me to rest under a spell like that. Out of the corner of my eye it seems like a book I should like more than I do, which, as with The Obelisk Gate, I find frustrating. It makes me want to spend more time thinking about it, and not posting this post until I'm more sure -- but in service of my intention to write up every book I read, and since I'm already two books behind:

The Absolute Book twines various stories together, but begins with the fact that Taryn Cornick's sister has been murdered, and Taryn has found a way to answer that murder with vengeance. But she, previously an atheist, is given reason to believe that she may have a real and damnable soul, and even though her own sin is subtler and more apparently just than the one she has punished, she may be disproportionately imperilled by her actions. Because she has recently written a book of popular history which has made her interesting to those who can exploit sin, a book about the disasters to which libraries are vulnerable, in which one particular artifact pops up again and again, surviving fires which should have destroyed it. An artifact whose trail had been lost, until she picked it out and put it on display.

Even this bit of plot summary feels like too much disturbance of the book's smooth surface -- the choice of when to make what obvious being so particular, when the protagonist begins in a state of ignorance about the rules of reality. But also, as plot summaries go, it doesn't begin to cover things. This is a thick book with a lot going on in it.

So what doesn't work for me? Things I have to invest effort in believing. I think that's what adds up cumulatively to my disengagement, even though in every instance, I can invest the effort. Characters who don't feel whole to me unless I give them a little extra twist: the one with the spell of vagueness on him, who spends the whole first chunk of the book not feeling vague to me at all. A spy who doesn't feel like a spy, who never has the kind of conversation which suggests specific professional competence. (In fact the whole response of the authorities to what's going on in the book feels insufficient to me. The book isn't really about those authorities, but they feel like a loose end, or rather like something which has been rendered a single loose end when it should have been something more complicated. I'm not sure if I use 'should' there to mean 'would in reality' or 'come on, you've put in spies! There has to be spy stuff when you've put in spies!')

This thing with characters is an extension of the quality which I remember making the characters in others of Elizabeth's books (especially The Vintner's Luck) complex and real to me: a quality of not being filled in from the start, not declaring themselves at once by action or self-description, but of slowly opening, to end up complete. I wonder if it's simply the much wider angle of The Absolute Book which makes the difference, withdrawing far enough that I start seeing unreality instead of unveiling coherence.

There is also the metaphysics, which are blended in a way that doesn't quite sit well with me.* And there's the pace of revelation and what I can hypothesize about what's going on. I don't have large enough expectations about what the story's central artifact is and who is hunting it and why to be left with them either satisfyingly fulfilled or satisfyingly undermined -- and this applies to the experience of rereading it, too -- even though I like the answers. This came clearer to me when I was trying to describe the story of those who are looking for the artifact, because I could describe them in a single neat sentence, but it's a sentence that takes you right from the start of the book's questions about them to the end of its revelations: a satisfying sentence, no smaller slice of which is as satisfying.

Among the many features of the book I like -- wonderful descriptions of beauty and ugliness and, especially, of fire, details of the blended metaphysics which tingle down my spine -- two set pieces stand out, extended scenes which do opposite involving and difficult things and in which everything I've described as not working does work: one of them an action scene based on close attention to what's physically possible and to the rhythms of suspense, and the other taking place on a plane of reality where where the physically possible is almost but not quite irrelevant, and something like dream-logic reigns. I'd take either scene as an exemplar of how to write that thing. One of them kept me up till one in the morning and I cried at the end of the other.





* Not the thing which doesn't sit well with me, but a side-question which has been occurring to me every so often: when did gods being shaped and fed by belief, instead of/as well as the other way around, become one of the standard options available to fantasy? I remember meeting it first in Small Gods, but is that when it was new?

The Matisse Stories, by A.S. Byatt

Since I got a smartphone I've been surprised to find that the ability to take photos no matter where I am is like an extra pair of eyes to see through. Early in my time at my current flat -- which was before the smartphone -- we thought one of the cats had got out, so I was wandering up and down the street in the cool misty evening scanning the pavement and the neighbors' gardens, and realising that I'd barely taken notice of the street I lived on before, and that it was a lot of fun having an excuse to stare into gardens, calling 'Here, kitty kitty kitty' not as a summons to the cat but as a reassurance to residents that this staring stranger meant no harm. (Of course the cat had been waiting just outside the back door, and was discovered almost at once by my flatmate Angelo, who followed me down the street calling "We found him!") The ability to photograph has heightened my attentiveness as though I'm constantly looking for someone's cat. I expect it will wear off with familiarity, but I'm enjoying it for now: seeing that a building's facade has a strip of sky blue along the top of it, with upward-pointing blue arrow designs below, and experiencing that as the building saying, "Be of good cheer!" under a sky of the same colour and brightness.*

The tangential relationship of all this to The Matisse Stories is that I have more in my experience to compare A.S. Byatt's painters to than before I developed the habit of looking at a particularly vivid contrast and thinking, "My camera can't catch that. I wonder what I'd have to know about cameras before I'd know what could?" Byatt is good at artists in general and painters specifically, painters who care very much about solving colour problems, sometimes in ways that make sense to almost no one else.

There are three stories in this book, all of which involve one or another Matisse painting. The second, Art Work, is my favourite, a portrait of a household which begins with the black-and-white reproduction of a colour painting and all the colours which can be imagined to fill its forms, and goes on to Debbie, design writer, income earner, chief parent of her children, and to Mrs Brown, who cleans the house and knits wild patchworks, without whom Debbie could not cope but whose life and concerns are partly mysterious to her, and then to Robin, Debbie's husband, who would probably have expected to be introduced first, certainly before Mrs Brown, in terms of household importance; who paints, whose painting is an attempt to capture the experience of really seeing something colourful, and whose ignorance of the house in which he lives is partly self-protective and has been corroding Debbie and himself slowly for a long time. The story feels Margaret Mahy-ish in its depiction of domestic work, in its liking for patchwork and for varied aspirations and art forms, and in its sympathy for everybody involved.

The first story in the book is Medusa's Ankles, which I liked fairly well but which does not leave me with anything to say about it -- hair, the ageing of beauty, a hairdresser who "resembles a balletic Hamlet" and whose virtues do not include reliability.

And the third story is The Chinese Lobster. Two academics meet in a Chinese restaurant to discuss an accusation of sexual harassment made against one of them by a student with mental illness, and what kind of work -- less what kind of product, than what length and depth of attention -- should be accepted as worth a thesis; they discuss, too, Matisse as incompletely though not wrongly interpreted as a painter of male eroticism, but also as the great painter of the sort of relaxed pleasure whose ultimate opposite is suicide, a discussion which is ultimately of personal significance to each of them. The story's shadow is the fact that the accusation of sexual harassment is dismissed, and the student who made it is viewed as partly though not unsympathetically culpable, on the accused professor's word that he did not harass her and wouldn't have wanted to. Perhaps her accusation was false. But convincing charm is a survival trait in professors who sexually assault their students, and I'm not sure the story wants the professor to be doubted. If I read it as doing so, it becomes sharply cruel, but I'm more inclined to take the professor as innocent as he seems and says, in which case my liking for the story also has a shadow. But I do find it interesting.



Did I see any Matisse when I was overseas? Unsure. He didn't stick with me, if so. The reproductions on the cover of this book are more interesting to me the more I look at them, having started by finding them nothing in particular, though for me they've not yet grown into the images the stories in this book are structured around -- despite being those images.









*I have just read a Grant Morrison comic called Happy! in which an ex-policeman made cynical by long exposure to the world's vileness is enlisted by a small talking blue horse with wings to save the young girl who imagined it. Descending into/ascending through The Invisibles seems to have increased my affection for Grant Morrison. This is a self-contented and well-formed mini-series in which someone spends a lot of time say "fuck you" to a small talking blue horse with wings; what more could one want? Also, while we're on colour, I like that the villain is called Mr Blue, because blue is emotionally contronymical.

(While I'm tracking comics, I may as well add volumes two and three of Saga, which I really liked).