Nobody Move, This Is A Review: BRODECK’S REPORT by Philippe Claudel

“My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it.”
  The opening line of Philippe Claudel’s novel is as stark and affecting as that of any classic hard-boiled noir, but BRODECK'S REPORT is much more than a crime narrative, or even a narrative of crimes. Set in a remote village somewhere in the German-speaking part of France, in the wake of ‘the war’, it opens with Brodeck being commissioned by his fellow villagers to tell the truth of what happened to the ‘Anderer’, the ‘Other’, a mysterious outsider who arrived in the village with his horse and donkey, took up residence over the village inn, and was subsequently murdered by the villagers.
  Brodeck, who writes reports on the locality’s flora and fauna for the Administration, is one of the few educated men in the village capable of recording what happened. That Brodeck is himself an outsider, who arrived in the village as a child, a refugee in the wake of an earlier war, gives his tale an added poignancy. The story of the novel, however, runs parallel to the report he is compiling, and is in effect Brodeck’s autobiography. The murder of the Anderer is simply the wedge that cracks open a haunting tale of love and loss, of pogroms, death camps and war-time atrocities.
  A Professor of Literature at the University of Nancy, Philippe Claudel is a prize-winning author in his native France. He is best known outside of France for writing and directing the recent Kristin Scott Thomas movie, ‘I’ve Loved You So Long’. The narrative of BRODECK'S REPORT, however, is anything but linear. Instead Claudel favours an elliptical approach, drawing the reader into the horrific truth at the core of the story by utilising time-loops, segues and digressions, flashbacks within flashbacks, all the while building towards a climax with the weight of the accumulating narratives pushing the tale forward inexorably.
  The combination of circuitous narrative and allusive setting may prove problematic for some readers. The village’s locality is never pin-pointed, and nor is the historical period. ‘The war’ is frequently referred to, but never specified, and while there are modern references – to trains, say, or robots – the bucolic village setting, and its lack of machinery, could easily mean that the story is for the most part set in an earlier century. Brodeck, meanwhile, is deported to the death camp because he is a ‘Fremder’ – a ‘foreigner’ – rather than for any of the justifications the Nazis employed.
  But Claudel has bigger fish to fry than the uncovering of any one particular atrocity, or even Brodeck’s harrowing personal testimony. Man’s inhumanity to man may sound like a thesis worthy of a sixth-form school essay, but it is one worth repeating, especially when Claudel pins it to a timeless backdrop that allows parallels to be drawn with Srebrenica, say, or the Sudan, or any other conflict, past, present or future, where individuals can be characterised as less than human for the purpose of eradicating them and their kind from the face of the earth.
  The overarching theme may be epic, but what gives BRODECK'S REPORT its haunting quality is Claudel’s ability to make intimate the details of losses suffered, his skill at exposing the flesh-and-blood humanity of not only the victims, but also that of the killing machine. Beautifully written, in a terse yet lyrical prose that is a credit to the translator, John Cullen, it is a superb novel, equal parts Kafkaesque disorientation, Primo Levi’s devastating accounts of the killing camps, Italo Calvino’s post-modern playfulness, and Jean Genet’s unflinching eye for the sewers through which the blood of our histories flow. – Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

A Pinteresque Pause

Jason Pinter is running a terrific series over at his blog about the future of publishing, inviting contributions from anyone involved in the publishing industry in answer to this question: “What is one thing you would you do to change book publishing for the better?”
  Jason’s received some interesting and even provocative responses, although I have one caveat – most of the answers are critical of the publishers and the way they go about their business. Silly advances for silly books; anachronistic marketing; a failure to adapt to the latest technology; in short, most people complain that publishing companies are clinging to an outmoded business model.
  This may all be true, and the Good Lord knows that I’ve had my fair share of disappointing experiences with publishers, as most writers tend to have; but is there an element of mote-and-beam going on here? In other words, no one writer has said that the one thing they’d do to change book publishing for the better is write better books. For all the hand-wringing about publishers’ inability to incorporate the interweb into their marketing model, how many writers have incorporated the interweb into their writing? How many writers have thought to themselves, for example, about the sea-change in other forms of popular art – movies, TV and music – and audience appetite for a blend of reality and fiction?
  There’s a generation of potential readers coming through for whom the Fourth Wall doesn’t exist. Last night, for example, I watched the ‘Family Guy’ episode in which Peter ‘outs’ Luke Perry, with the character of Luke Perry voiced by Luke Perry – although Lois refers to the character as ‘Dylan’, his character in Beverly Hills 90120.
  On Wednesday I watched the documentary ‘Anvil!’, the story of how an aging metal band from Canada are still trying to make it in their fifties. As a movie, or even a mockumentary, it would have been very funny in the ‘Spinal Tap’ mode; as a documentary, a real take on the rock ‘n’ roll dream, it was simultaneously soul-destroying and inspirational.
  Next Thursday, I’ll be getting along to see ‘Notorious’, a biopic of the Notorious B.I.G., who – regardless of your opinion of gangsta rap – made art of his life, of experiences that are possibly fictionalised but certainly rooted in an authentic, relevant reality.
  I can’t remember the last time I read a book that left me hollowed out and yet bursting to make something new, the way ‘Anvil!’ did. Or, for that matter, a book that makes me laugh like ‘Family Guy’ does because – bonkers as it is, and with no respect for the boundary between truth or fiction – it taps into the experience of our utterly confused cultural narrative.
  This morning, on the web, in the space of an hour, I read a short story, took on board the responses to Jason Pinter’s question, checked last night’s football scores, watched a book trailer and two music videos, downloaded the latest Anthony and the Johnsons album, and watched an extended trailer for the ‘Notorious’ movie.
  Can, or should, that kind of disjointed cultural mish-mash influence my own writing later on, when I grab a quiet couple of hours? Not the specific elements; but the jump-around nature of it, and the blend of reality and fiction?
  Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of movies, reviewing them for a living, and read a lot of books, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to suspend my disbelief when confronted with a story I know is pure fiction, regardless of how good it is. For that matter, just look at the Oscar noms for ‘Best Picture’ – Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire are all, to a greater or lesser extent, examples of the collision between fiction and reality.
  I’m currently working on a story in which the name of one of the main characters, Billy, is a nod to Kurt Vonnegut and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, which is the last book I read, when I re-read it last May, to really suck out my guts and make me think about life, the universe and writing (I subsequently read ARMAGEDDON, but it’s not Vonnegut’s finest moment). Billy, my Billy, is actually a character from a novel I’d written about five years ago, who last May turned up in my back garden wanting to know why he’d been forgotten, and condemned to the limbo of the unpublished ghosts. The result was a book called A GONZO NOIR, which is currently under consideration with a U.S. publisher, although I’m not optimistic about its chances; nonetheless, I’ve started a new story, in which Billy returns, telling me about this guy he’s met on Crete, Sebastian, who claims to have been involved in a Nazi war crime, but who has been left in the limbo of an unfinished manuscript after the untimely death of the author, who may or may not have been writing a novel based on a true story. Can I help Sebastian finish the story and get him out of limbo?
  Whether anyone will want to read that story is a moot point. And I’m not claiming that the notion of meta-fiction is so new and fresh that, to come back to Jason Pinter’s question, it’s going to change the industry – Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Flann O’Brien, Italo Calvino and, going a long way back, Laurence Sterne, are all favourites of mine.
  I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that if there’s problems with the publishing industry, it extends to all elements of the industry, and that includes, vitally, the writers. Maybe, just maybe, a central issue for the future is that the audience, and certainly the generations coming through, won’t be content with straightforward fiction, in the way that even the best animated movies from Pixar, Dreamworks and Disney will, for adults, always be just kids’ movies.
  For what it’s worth, the latest kids’ movie from Disney is ‘Bolt’, and it’s about a dog with super-powers who realises that his super-powers only exist on TV, because he’s an actor. When Disney are throwing ‘The Truman Show’ loops at kids, you just know the conventional novel is finished.
  Roll it there, Collette ...

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE by Salman Rushdie

The early reviews of THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE have suggested, with no little glee, that Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is the worst he has ever written. This, of course, is akin to saying that Diana’s Temple at Ephesus was the least of the Seven Wonders of the World. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is a tour-de-force in storytelling, and if there is a more enjoyable novel published this year, then it will have been a very good year indeed.
  Niccolo Vespucci, aka Mogor dell’Amore and sundry other aliases, arrives at the court of the Akbar the Great, ‘the Great Great One’, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and emperor of the Mughal empire that encompasses vast swathes of 15th century India. Vespucci, a Florentine, has a story to tell that only the emperor can hear, as it concerns the fate of his relative, the Princess Angelica of legendary beauty, and the adventures that befell her when she abandoned the subcontinent for the western world of the Near East and Europe, all for the love of the indomitable warrior Argalia. And so begins a series of inter-linked narratives that trace the histories of the Mughal court, the political and religious intrigues of the Italian – and particularly the Florentine – renaissance, and all historical, geographical and quasi-mythical points in between.
  Rushdie includes a six-page bibliography, citing a host of historical references he consulted in creating his story, but this novel is the antithesis of the conventional historical tome. It is, first and foremost, an exercise in imagination, an artful and irrepressibly playful cornucopia of tales, myths, digressions and narrative non sequiturs. The sheer delight Rushdie takes in spinning yarns provides the subtext to every page:

“In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.”

  Rushdie has always been fascinated by the notion of migration and cross-cultural pollination, and here he blends the tales of the Arabian Nights (a sultan’s palace has 1,001 gardeners), Marco Polo’s travels, the fabulous constructions of Italo Calvino’s INVISIBLE CITIES and Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE (Machiavelli being one of the historical figures who makes a fleeting appearance). Even the peripheries of the story teem with vibrant, larger-than-life characters straight from myth: Venetian buccaneer-princes; perfidious Turks; Jodha, the imaginary queen dreamed into life by the Emperor Akbar; a quartet of warriors akin to the Three Musketeers; artists who paint themselves into their canvases and disappear. The prose, as befits a post-modern fairytale, is simple and direct: “His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood …” […] “When life got too complicated for the men of the Mughal court they turned to the old women for answers.”
  It’s a sumptuous read, fabulous in both senses of the word, with Rushdie tossing off mini-biographies that most other writers would be happy to write an entire novel around. Embracing mythology and history, legend and fact, fictional characters and historical figures, magic, illusion and self-delusion, the novel fully deserves the accolade of tapestry, so finely woven and dazzling are its constituent parts. The prose, of course, is beautifully detailed, but Rushdie leavens the erudition with coarse dialogue that is at times hilariously profane and blasphemous.
  “Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough,” declares Niccolo Vespucci early in the tale, and while that is certainly true of poetry, it is not enough to fully satisfy in a novel. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is a page-turner, a deliciously light and flowing read, but it lacks the profundity of MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (the ‘Booker’s Booker) or SHALIMAR THE CLOWN, instead substituting playful craft for heft and depth. Perhaps the issue is preconceived notions, or that Rushdie’s every novel arrives with increasingly weighty expectations. Either way, by the time the final page turns, there is a faint sense of disappointment, of dissipation and evaporation, although that might simply be an echo of the feeling that comes with awakening from a dream into the reality of day.
  Nonetheless, Salman Rushdie has long ago earned the privilege of writing the novel he wishes to write. The deceptively simple art of storytelling may have fallen out of favour among self-consciously literary writers, but Rushdie is determined that we should not forget its pure joys entirely. As the Great Great One, Akbar the Great, declares, whilst riding through his city amidst his cowed and subservient subjects: “Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be a time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.” – Declan Burke

This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post