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| 'The Battle for Normandy' storms the beaches anew Antony Beevor's Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege sold more than a million copies. His absorbing D-Day: The Battle for Normandy could ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Tony Williams debut poetry collection | Book review Frances Leviston is charmed by a vision of northern England in a debut collection"O collapser of delicate moods and arch lyrical poignancies! / damper of youthful enthusiasms! / user of out-of-date prophylactic sheaths!" The target of this vatic homage is the mostly fictitious Julian Metcalfe, a "lecherous old time-travelling scoundrel", object of equal parts disgust and fascination, and presiding spirit of Tony Williams's first collection, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Metcalfe's portrait ransacks history for all the trappings of the quintessential English rogue, from misadventures in the far east to open defiance of PC protocol: "putter of brown glass / into green bottle banks!" This sort of avid collection and juxtaposition of ideas continues throughout the book, presenting us with a vision of northern England, Derbyshire and Sheffield in particular, that feels totally contemporary, but not reductively so. By layering cultural references and registers like sediment, a deep, imaginative landscape appears, industrial and feudal, suburban and gone to seed, where doggers and spliffs and curates and cribbage-games meet. Indeed, when we read of "The Corrugated Soul" that "it isn't so much a gestalt / as a mere aggregate – / specifically, a pile of aggregate / turning moss-green under an oily rag", it might just as well refer to the notions of Englishness the book sets out to explore.Williams writes mostly free verse, but shaped with impressive formal dexterity, the kind that can turn bitchy Pope-ish couplets without sounding stiff, and a strong, studied feeling for the rhythmic integrity of the line. The authoritative poems that result from this are often expressly put to the task of undermining or dismantling their own power: Williams is both the serious poet and the drunken heckler in the crowd. At its most crude, this makes for a couplet such as, "Remember when we watched the sun go down in the Gulf of Tunis? / That was before my conviction for sexual assault." Clearly, this plays the punctured "moment" for laughs, but Williams's fooling of our lyric expectations has a more serious agenda, too. Slipping in and out of the bloodier parts of English history – as when a strawberry conjures a stream of violent images from the reign of Henry VIII, or a parkland lime "hides the idea of Charles I in its huge bole" – his poems insist that conflicts of state are embedded in the country itself, and in the memories of its people; thus, a row of golden-leaved trees become "bursts of lost stars or gunfire / lighting up a frontier sides still care about".This keen awareness of civic power marks Williams out as a decidedly public poet and perhaps explains his interest in revitalising pastoral and country-house poems, as well as his sense of humour. "Great Edwardian", a portrait of an English gent taken just before the wind changed, captures with brilliant economy the sordid little demesne:A cock-pheasant on the steamingmuckheap:Prospero admiring all. Those deepinks,the bludgeoned, sexual midnightand a pope'svermillion, are his interiors. Hestands,coat-tails trembling in the breeze,and smokesand gazes out across the woodedsea.The comparison with Prospero is perfect, showing the cultural arrogance of the man while also acknowledging his power. In this context, the ability to laugh at yourself, to undermine your own authority, begins to seem like a safeguard against corruption.Just as Williams's poems resist the usual lyric formulae, so they resist our attempts to understand them by the usual means. In "The Carp", his cousin appears at his bedside with two fish on a plate, one of them a trout and the other "more medieval but less good to eat . . . something unspeakable for us to share". The exact nature of this gift or the bond it implies remains obscure, but the sense of distaste and complicity is palpable enough. Similarly, in "The Vile Organ", a disturbing poem set in tsarist Russia, boastful Rebrakov comes to a society party with a human eye in a box. The eye fascinates everyone who sees it, but it won't be made to stand for anything other than itself. The significance we give to it belongs to us, just as the blow that separated eye from owner belongs to Rebrakov and the world from which he comes.Poised on the edge of revolution, "The Vile Organ" marks one of many calms before the storm. Williams is ever alert to the wildness and decay that are waiting to rush back in and reclaim what is rightfully theirs, as in the excellent title poem, which ends with a vision of "Nowhere breaking loose". For middle-class paranoids in search of what Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion", this is terrifying. But alongside that something-in-the-woodshed feeling comes a strange contentment. Compared to a politicised mansion house, the humble garden shed is a place of safety, a retreat from the demands of the all-singing, all-dancing world, where gentle, amateur pursuits such as knocking together a table or brewing your own beer happily serve no purpose. Williams is giving us a glimpse of a different kind of Prospero, on a different kind of island. As "In Praise of Tinkering" puts it, "true alchemy's the will to make / a stilled self and a plume of smoke". Likewise, from all our cultural loam and junk, Williams has made real magic.Frances Leviston's Public Dream is published by Picador.Poetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant Multiple perspectives too often unmoor the reader in Mavis Gallant's early stories, says Adam Mars Jones. But when she sticks to one, it really pays off This collection of stories bears witness to a strong but not settled talent, and to a writer who seems to fight her chosen form at least as much as she blossoms under its restrictions. The short story is a brutal mechanism that punishes above all the loss of focus. Point of view in a story is the armature, the core, and no excellence of description and evocation, no sparkling dialogue or piercing insight into character, can compensate for the collapse of that core. By taking this hard line I'm setting myself up against the superb and august William Maxwell, renowned New Yorker editor, who shepherded most of these stories into print, but I can't help that.At the beginning of a story or near it, the reader needs to know whether the main character is being viewed from the inside or the outside. It's as basic as a time signature in music. If an early sentence goes, "In imagination, Lily became a punishing statue and raised a heavy marble arm" ("Acceptance of Their Ways") then we're inside. If the next page contains the assertion that Lily's eyes, "which were a washy blue, were tolerably kind when she was plotting mischief", then we're somewhere else, and to be in two places at once is really to be nowhere at all.Same pattern in another story: "What Stefan had never known and wondered now…" on the first page; "Rain darkened Stefan's fair hair" on the second. So there's a prevailing instability within a point of view – but there's also a lot of drifting between consciousnesses. It's not that the viewpoint needs to be fixed – changing it can be one of the most telling effects available to the writer of stories – but this isn't a neutral matter and needs to be tactically managed. When the perspectival shift becomes a mannerism or a reflex, as it does in many stories here, the result isn't enrichment but a sense of untethering. The writer may think that the house of fiction is being dazzlingly extended by this procedure, but the reader has a different feeling, of being trapped in a dream where every room opens into another one and there's no sense of home.In the story "Travelers Must Be Content" we enter in turn the minds of all the main characters: an American woman in Cannes, her daughter, the boyfriend who might be suitable or might not, and the fraudulently genteel hanger-on. When we know so much more about the game than any of the players, a story becomes the equivalent of poker on television, where the cards are plonked down on a glass table for our benefit. If one of your themes is the essential unknowability of human beings to one another, isn't it a bit of a cheat to flit from brain to brain while you prove your point?As with televised poker, there's some residual interest in seeing how things turn out, but reading has been reduced to a spectator sport, with no possible urgency. Emotional involvement slackens off. The titles of Gallant's stories are so non-committal as to be positively Japanese, but presumably she hasn't spent her creative life actively trying to avoid intensity. Even the story's quadruple perspective can't accommodate everything the author wants to say, and so there are moments of interpolated commentary, perceptions that have no possible source but her: "He saw everything about her except that she was attractive, and here their difference of age was in the way."The simplest way of tethering the point of view is to write in the first person. Gallant does this in "Autumn Day", and the change is remarkable, the focus greatly sharpened. It's easy to imagine her as feeling exhilarated by this, as if she'd been given the right prescription by an optician and was seeing the world entirely new. This volume offers only a partial narrative of Mavis Gallant's career, but the next piece here, "Thieves and Rascals", applies the same discipline to a story told in the third person, and again the results are impressive. The main character is a New York businessman whose daughter, assumed to be sensible and not unduly attractive to men, surprises everyone by going off the rails at college. His relationship to his wife, though, a successful model, changes at least as dramatically in the aftermath. When he comes across her doing a photo shoot at a museum, he sees the strain in the pose of perfection: "The shadow under her cheekbone, which photographed as a clean curve, seemed, under the hard winter sun, the concavity of illness. The eye framed by her fingers looked vampish and absurd, the over-darkened eye of silent films." This concise portrait of a marriage is all the more powerful for showing only one side of it. Then the author is free to move into the wife's side of things for the last sentence, its power much enhanced by the delay.Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922, though she moved to Europe in 1950 and has long lived in Paris. Her native country is the setting for one flawed but astonishing story, "Bernadette", which mixes a desultory satirical tone for the right-thinking liberal employers with a disorientingly deep understanding of the reality of their pregnant maid's existence. This destabilisingly fierce attunement to a relatively remote life here makes the fault of mixed perspectives almost enviable.The experience of the traveller offers classic material for a writer of stories, with the disadvantage that it's hard to stage an equal encounter between the rooted and the transient. Gallant finds a way round this in the title story, by having the narrator, an Australian living in Paris, be joined by her elder sister. There's a balance of forces between these women and the two French residents in their shabby hotel with whom they become involved.This is another first-person story, though the point of view is much freer. "It would be presumptuous for me to say what she was thinking," the narrator says of her sister, before splendidly going on to say, "but I can guess: she was more than likely converting the price of oranges, face powder and Marie-biscuits from French francs to Australian shillings and pence. She was, and is, exceptionally prudent." Soon the point of view is spreading to every crevice of the hotel, but that "was, and is" is a masterstroke, its authority silencing all doubts. You can get away with the most amazing things in the short story, as long as you play your cards right, and don't show them when you don't have to.FictionAdam Mars-Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
J. M. Coetzee, a Disembodied Man In the third volume of his genre-bending autobiography, the Nobel-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee imagines himself as already dead and invents his own biographer. feeds.nytimes.com |
Trilogy | Theatre review In London after its Edinburgh success, this joyous work boldly investigates what it means to be a womanNothing's perfect and neither is Trilogy, Nic Green's three-part interactive arts project investigating what it means to be a woman. Watching it again in London after its stupendous Edinburgh run, it is easy to see the flaws – the overextension, the simplifications, the lack of analysis. Does it matter? Not a jot.This is not a dry academic feminist treatise: it is a joyous piece of accessible, experimental theatre so disarmingly direct and passionate it makes you want to join the dance. Trilogy is confident in its belief that through both personal and direct action it is possible to change the world. From the blazing opening sequence, during which a group of women reclaim their bodies just as my generation reclaimed the night, to its final reclamation of Jerusalem, once a suffragette anthem, Trilogy is a series of connections, juxtapositions, fragments and questions passing up and down the generations.Laura Bradshaw has a live telephone call with her mother; another woman remembers her gran; and in the piece's extraordinary central section the company create an intricate chessboard of movement set to extracts from the film Town Bloody Hall, the 1971 New York debate about women's lib chaired by Norman Mailer.Germaine Greer's "Mozart's sister" speech about the ego of the male artist is physically answered in this collective act of art created collaboratively. Is it enough? Of course not. Is it a start? Absolutely, and one that sends you out of the theatre inspired and optimistic that our daughters are on track.Rating: 4/5TheatreGermaine GreerLyn Gardnerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |