An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

There’s an unfortunate phenomenon in which authors sometimes fall victim to their own success. For some, that means they stop pushing themselves and coast off of a formula that works. For Vikram Seth, it means he has slipped into Joseph Hellerism. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller purportedly was asked how he’d respond to critics who say he’s never written a book better than Catch 22 and he purportedly responded, “I’d respond by saying that no one has written a book better than Catch 22.” Seth’s epic romance A Suitable Boy, clocking in at 1474 pages, is hard to live up to—it has such a rich cast of characters and is beautifully woven with multiple storylines. An Equal Music is also a love story of sorts, and it’s fine but it is unable to reach the same heights as his previous work.

The novel is about a quartet of musicians and follows, in part, their career. I quite liked witnessing the dynamics between Piers, Helen, Billy, and Michael (our protagonist and narrator) as they are offered important performances and a recording contract for Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. I also appreciated their superfan that follows them around, their lush agent, Erica, and the bigwig Ysobel that offers them a record contract. Even more engaging to me is that, early in the text, Michael’s girlfriend (and violin student) Virginie puts him on to an obscure work that he didn’t realize existed—a recording of Beethoven’s string quartet in C. minor, Op. 104. I seem to love the idea of ‘lost media’ in books, and watching Michael track down this lost piece was engaging.

The symbolism of that record also serves a functional purpose for the book. Michael unearths something that he thought was lost. On the same day, he’s on one bus passing by another and sees a woman he hasn’t seen in ten years on the opposite side. Ten years prior, they had a romantic relationship, but their careers went in different directions and there’s clear tension and regret over not seeing that relationship through. So, Michael reaches out and tries to get in touch with her on the same day he has found that long lost record. The record disappears from the story for a time and later resurfaces (this word choice is perhaps in poor taste) at the climax when it is flung into a lake and sinks for all time.

The trouble of the novel is the love story at its core. Readers will all have different interpretations, I’m sure, but to me I found Michael profoundly unlikable as a romantic lead. First of all, the fact that he is sleeping with his younger pupil is distasteful in itself, but he also does not treat Virginie very well. On the phone, he’s terse; he’s evasive and belittles her, and he stops engaging with her intimately. The fact is, he’s not in love with her and tells her as much. Worse, he cheats on her. When he and Julia encounter one another, they resume a romance, and she too is unfaithful to her partner. I have a hard time getting behind their romance because Michael is pushy with her and doesn’t respect her boundaries. He repeatedly does not listen to her when Julia says no. Time and time again he insists on intruding in her life, and it felt more desperate than passionate.

Perhaps I could let the obsessiveness and infidelity slide if there were enough moments to show the light they bring out in each other, but there doesn’t feel to me enough tenderness to justify the relationship. The relationship is entirely clouded by a brooding tone; the situation seems impossible—not in an erotic or fun impossible, but in a depressing impossible. I interpret the situation as Michael wanting a fresh start while Julia is looking for the perfect ending. Michael wants to relive their time ten years prior and refuses to let go of the past. Meanwhile, Julia is at the end of her musical career and it appears to me like she’s trying to settle the score (!) before she retires from playing piano. The disconnect between them sets up for a disastrous bond.

Later in the book, there’s a great scene in which Julia’s husband invites Michael to a party at their home. The invitation and the party itself are riddled with potential innuendos. It creates an atmosphere of suspicion: does he know? I would have liked that scene to go on for longer, actually; lingering in that ambiguity creates a great tension for the story that has otherwise read as a bit repetitive. Michael sits in the discomfort, narrating in a series of questions about whether Julia’s husband has found them out and what the consequences might be. In my view, Seth pulls the ripcord a bit too soon and Julia reveals that yes, he knows, no she doesn’t know how, yes she can tell from his face. 

To Seth’s credit, as unlikable as Michael is, Julia remains a sympathetic character. The secret at the core of her character is that she is going deaf. (Note to self: finally get around to watching the movie Sound of Metal). She knows that things are ending for her, and so her connection with Michael is mournful. She plays music with him as a quintet knowing that it will be the last time she will perform with others, and Michael cannot accept it. There’s an awkwardness surrounding her deafness, a secret that Michael finds himself forced to share (he’s the worst!—how dare he betray her confidence like that? Revealing her secret could ruin her!).

In fact, most of the characters are fleshed out pretty beautifully. They feel distinct. Authentic. When I think about the classics of literary fiction, particularly in the British tradition, I think of novels populated with unique and memorable characters. Seth seems to capitalize on that approach. The members of the quartet all have their affectations and interests, but Michael also engages with a broad range of colourful characters. Mrs. Formby, for example, is a family friend and former teacher to Michael whose spirit really shines. Her generosity leads to her promoting his career and loaning him (essentially for life), his prized violin. Seth’s knack for populating his books with real people is one of the highlights of the text.

On the topic of the violin, what I found disappointing in the story structure is its ending. Throughout the book, Michael and Julia’s relationship sits in the foreground and there are any number of moments that I think warrant a permanent dissolution of their affair. When it finally happens for real, it feels weirdly unearned—not a genuine climax, but simple period at the end of a sentence. Even throwing the record into the lake feels understated. The denouement goes in an entirely different direction; with about forty pages to go, the story is no longer primarily about Michael’s romantic endeavour. Instead, we see him quit the quartet and mill about purposelessly. We also find out that Mrs. Formby has died and has left Michael her violin. In life, she had told Michael that he would need to return it so that she could rearrange her assets and give funds to her nephew. Michael accepted that the time was coming, and is surprised to find out she had a change of heart before her death. Her nephew then reaches out, threatening a lawsuit. This bit of drama is short-lived and as a result gives the ending an unfocused quality. The conflict is an echo of the novel’s main theme: the pain of loss, the joy of recovery, the deepening pain of once again losing that which we thought was returned. The obscure record, Julia, the violin: they each follow a similar pattern. To that end, the violin lawsuit piece makes sense, but it feels like a whimper at the end of the movement rather than a crescendo. It feels like the characters don’t really learn anything, but get to enjoy their stasis. Michael, at the end of the novel, has not committed to returning to the quartet and goes back and forth on whether to go to Julia’s performance of The Art of the Fugue. He simply cannot stay away from the beautiful music—and music is a clear stand-in for Julia and vice versa.

As you’ve likely noted, there are clear parallels between the characters’ emotional states and the other elements of the text. The descriptions of the instrumentation, for example, often mimic the depressive streaks of the characters. The description of the violin and how it is touched mimics the way Michael feels, too. There are lush descriptions of both sound and visuals; partly, Seth seems to highlight the visuals when Julia is losing her hearing, which is a nice touch. There’s a clear craftsmanship to the work; the novel is quite proficient in that respect.

An Equal Music is generally good, but if you’re like me you’re going to have to accept that the main character is unlikable. It’s a love story that makes more sense as a cerebral exercise rather than one of the heart. The bond between the lovers seems to me more about their contexts and life circumstances than genuine affectionate moments, so it doesn’t quite land for me in that respect. I still like Vikram Seth’s writing and his ability to economically flesh out characters is a true talent. Now that I’ve read Seth’s three published novels, I’m going to have to convert to his poetry or wait for the encore: A Suitable Girl —a sequel thirty three years in the making (so far).

In the intermission, happy reading!

Stone Serpent by Tristan Dineen

  Before I start this review, I’ve got a few disclaimers I need to acknowledge. The author of the book and I are friends and I’ll primarily be focusing on my highlights for the text. Additionally, my review is based on a pre-publication manuscript that I was editing so the author, Tristan Dineen, may very well have adjusted the final copy. With those disclaimers done, we can begin on Dineen’s latest fantasy novel: Stone Serpent.

Not that I’m an expert, but I think that a few core elements that make fantasy novels successful are world-building and character development. On both fronts, I think Stone Serpent works. Right from the prologue, Dineen demonstrates a strength in setting the scene with effective imagery (a little later the “dull green hump of Weya-Nama wore a broken crown of ruins”), and the conflict between slavers and a supernatural snake-man sets up some expectations for the world’s magic. There’s a pretty gruesome moment that establishes the tone of the book—and the potential of the book’s evil forces—and serves as a compelling entrypoint to the conflict.

When the novel starts in earnest, we shift perspective to a young boy, Ta, on the occasion of a local ceremony. Once again, Dineen establishes our understanding of the world, their beliefs, their practices. I appreciated the focused scope in this section; it felt like a nice introduction to the world and the novel explores the broader scope of the world more gradually. It felt inviting and, in my opinion, the more immersive for it.

Ta stands out as one of text’s most memorable characters. He’s a brash young guy whose idealism drives his reckless actions. He longs to be a hero and, later, to claim (if a little preemptively) his destiny in the form of his ancestor’s sword. He reads somewhat like a Don Quixote figure, obsessed with stories of adventure and putting his friends at risk to live out the fantasy. Ta’s friend Lu possesses a similar affliction, but in the draft version he reads a little more one-dimensionally—an enthusiastic yes man for Ta’s misadventures. The two together serve as our initial duo that initiate us into the world and whose interest in stories of old parallels those of the reader.

In the gaming world, there’s a trope in a lot of JRPGs where a young boy goes on a seemingly innocuous adventure only to find himself the one remaining person to resist an unfathomable evil force. I like it and it feels nostalgic to me, so to see the pattern playing out in Stone Serpent has an odd satisfaction for me. Dineen transitions beautifully from a lighthearted call to adventure to an ominous and suspenseful register as Ta and Lu approach some ruins. Ta feels himself being called, drawn deeper into the ruins. I’ll avoid spoiling too much, but the dramatic irony where the audience knows that things aren’t right while Ta follows his intuition builds a great sense of dread. There’s a further double-down on the disaster, but again I won’t spoil too much.

The second phase of the book transitions to a group of other characters—Balkash, Naas, and Hong. Dineen again provides some compelling backstory for the characters and helps to establish their milieu. We see the contrasting philosophies of different people in the world and we see the ‘big city’ context and the exploitation of workers and the group quickly runs into trouble, being transported by boat to their execution. The chapter feels bleak and again there’s a great tension as they come to face-to-face with their cruel executioner.

Around this time, things start getting really interesting for my favourite character in the novel, if for no other reason than his philosophical potential. I may not get this description exactly right, but Polliss is a humanoid feline mage who, thanks to a crushable figurine, can teleport out of danger to a destination not entirely of his will. What I find most interesting about the character, though, is the transience of his identity. Polliss essentially serves as a host for the phoenix Baal, a judgmental companion that speaks directly into Polliss’ mind. There’s a lot of opportunity there to explore what it means to be an individual when constantly hosting another consciousness—this becomes even more complex when Polliss is embodied inside another man’s corpse. Essentially, it’s a body not his own, hosting a consciousness of his own, which itself hosts another consciousness not his own. It’s a rich concept that lands really nicely, especially when he’s considered in contrast to the animated statue villains, described as “soulless puppets of stone pulled by invisible strings.” It’s interesting to see the contrast of multiple consciousnesses crammed into one body in contrast to the animated stone, which seems to operate vaguely as one consciousness spread out between many bodies. There’s a lot to work with here in terms of identity, consciousness, and we could even draw parallels with discourses as diverse as psychoanalysis, trans identities, or computer networking.

The novel operates within an apocalyptic mode, where a godlike snake-man is unleashing unheard-of magic. At his introduction, people are transformed into stone and then reanimated as malicious statues hunting the survivors. Beyond that, much of the book actually presents the environment as the primary threat to survival: the natural world is warping and becoming overgrown. As the story progresses, the party expands and each character has a role to play in surviving and saving the world. I was actually hoping for a bit more of Ta throughout the main body of the text (and more episodes with the central villains to explore their motivations) but there’s enough variety and differentiation between the other sets of characters to keep the story moving. That approach is particularly true for chapter 36, where different storylines are woven together in short bursts, making the chapter feel lively and giving the story a satisfying cohesiveness.

The novel has a balance of action sequences and more meditative moments of connection between the characters. In the final act, there are some great developments with the characters’ relationships and that makes the ending of the book all the more devastating. I admit that I either forgot or didn’t realize that Stone Serpent is the opening of a new series, so as I saw the ending creeping closer I felt the dread of irresolution. Even so, the ending of the book is powerful—but not for the reasons I expected. The book’s early lightheartedness, by the end, has clearly transformed to a more somber tone. There are some painful losses and one character proves himself such a spineless bastard that I can’t wait for him to get his comeuppance in the sequel. The emotional investment I felt in that betrayal is an excellent payoff which, upon review, was clearly foreshadowed and all the more satisfying for it. There’s a lot of dread permeating the end of the book and it was both refreshing and frustrating that the ‘good guys’ failed to have the upper hand.

Dineen’s writing, as I’ve alluded to, is nicely structured around the novel’s key moments. There’s a good build-up to the key plot points and the payoffs generally feel earned (there was one early one with Polliss crushing a statue, but something later in the book justified the moment retroactively). Dineen’s use of strong phrases also gives the work its force. Sometimes, they are phrases embedded in paragraphs to build the moment, like “reality held its breath.” Sometimes, there are standalone lines that punctuate the moment by being their own paragraph. In a moment when characters are forced to keep their heads down and row, and then the following paragraph is simply: “the lash would do the rest.” I’ve alluded already to the imagery like a “dense canopy permitting only token seams of light.” There are lots of lines to like that help enrich the overall project.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Stone Serpent. There are more characters and more moments than I could possibly cover here—and I wouldn’t want to give away all the key surprises here, anyway.

After all, Tristan Dineen is hosting a launch for the book on June 25th at 7p.m. at Red Brick Cafe in Guelph. You could pick up your copy of Stone Serpent and hopefully take a few moments to engage with its author.

Happy reading!

Les pénitences par Alex Viens

     Before I even start this review, I need to give a shout out to the bookstore where I got it from. Un Livre à Soi is a francophone bookstore in Montreal that I had the luck of wandering into. While I was there, a woman asked if I needed any help and I asked for recommendations for Montrealian authors. She then handed me book after book, giving me summaries in French that I felt very proud of myself for understanding. After she handed me probably six books, she asked for another employee’s recommendations for novels by Montreal writers and that employee gave me several more. While she was giving me recommendations, yet another employee gave me some suggestions. In the end, I ended up with a stack of probably twelve books to sort through. When I made some decisions, I took them to the counter and the first woman said, “Oh, but these aren’t for you right?” and I replied (all of this in French), “Oh, no, they are. I’m trying to practice.” The man behind the counter then said, “Oh, well, since you’re practicing, I’ll give you 10% off.” It was a really beautiful experience so good on Un Livre à Soi for being so welcoming. Such was the genesis of me reading Les pénitences by Alex Viens. Again, I just have to say that I really enjoyed the experience of reading a novel in French and actually getting most of it. It was a refreshing change of pace. 

Alex Viens’ novel focuses on Jules, a young woman visiting her father, Denis, after over a decade of being no contact. A mystery opens the book: after much debate and delay, Jules has brought a box to Denis and we are not told what is in the box. We only know it is something that Jules’ mother, estranged from Denis, was reluctant to give over.

The early part of the book depicts its fair share of qualified tenderness. Denis’ estrangement from his ex and children is apparent and it’s clear that he’s not the healthiest father figure, living in a run-down apartment, alcoholic and foul-mouthed, listening to The Cure records on repeat and complaining about the world. He’s a miserable grump that insists on Jules staying for longer than she really has to. That said, there are some moments where the two connect in fraught gentleness.

At Denis’ insistence, they go to the store to buy booze, where Denis makes a racist comment to the cashier that the cashier passes off as ‘just how Denis is.’ When they get back to the apartment, they share a joint and get high in the washroom. Denis also prepares a meal for Jules—a kind of elevated poverty-pasta dish with lots of sauce. Between all the drinking, though, Jules doesn’t feel hungry and Denis becomes furious that his daughter won’t eat the meal he has so lovingly prepared. He starts to yell, demanding that she finish, making her eat until she vomits in her lap and he gets to swoop in and say how much he always loved taking care of his sick children.

Denis’ aggression comes across as a little bit too much, a cartoonish kind of evil, but it seems more plausible as the book goes on. With increasing frequency, the book flashes back and forth through time. We see how Denis interacted with his two children, Jules and Charlie. In short, it’s a long stream of abusive moments and pitting the family against itself. He is overprotective, refusing to let them out of the house, and demanding that one of them take fault when they misbehave. If they snuck out, Jules and Charlie knew that one of them had to fess up to being the ringleader and take the punishment for them both. It was a breeding ground for resentment, which got even worse when the parents split up and Jules ran away to live with her mom while Charlie remained behind to ‘take care of’ their dad, being subjected to, in Jules’ mind, his continual abuse.

Viens’ storytelling makes for some rich ethical debate. There are wrongs done in every direction. Charlie tries to escape to her mom’s, and Jules invites her to stay, but she goes home to Denis and is forced into a position of having to say that she was gathering information for what she could say in court. Denis is trying to get full custody and so Charlie furnishes him with info only for it to be spun in the other direction where Denis says that if she were to share any of that with the court it would only mean he’d have to increase his alimony payments. The family is continually in a no-win situation.

In the present of the book, Jules’ conflict with her father continues to escalate throughout their night together. As if it were a scene in a horror movie, Denis locks Jules into the apartment after his looming shadow follows her down the hall. He then takes the mysterious box and locks himself in the bathroom. In an attempt to get him out, Jules starts acting out by pouring out his beers, throwing a brick through the television set, and screaming to make him come out and give her the key.

It’s hard to talk about the book in a way that won’t ruin the surprise. Throughout the book, I had an idea of what might be in the box and Viens continues to turn the screw to make you feel the tension of what might happen to it. When, at the end of the book, it’s revealed what’s in the box and then what’s really in the box, it adds an engaging dynamic. It’s the kind of ‘twist’ that makes you rethink the entire family dynamic, which becomes even more violent in the closing pages of the text. It’s a family drama that could easily be transformed into a moody, brooding, complex horror. I am having a hard time resisting revealing the answer to Brad Pitt’s demand to know what’s in the box?

Viens’ depiction of poverty and its impacts is also really compelling. The initial depiction of Denis’ apartment is evocatively developed. Viens describes how everyone watches television really loudly. The passage elaborates on how the thin walls allow you to hear what everybody else is up to. There’s students climaxing together, a sad old man who cries and hits his head against the wall, an upstairs neighbour screaming at her boyfriend to stop. There’s a comment about how the walls offer such little intimacy but how everyone turns a blind eye to one another because police are worse than noise: <<Les murs offrent si peu d’intimité qu’ils font de ces logements les lieux les plus secrets au monde, dans l’indifférence du vivre et laisser vivre, où les gens se mêlent de leurs affaires pour obtenir pareille clémence de la part des autres. Ici, on n’appelle pas la police. On aime encore moins la police que le bruit>> (20). The image of squalor is finely established and sets the tone for the book pretty early on. In another early passage, Viens describes the contents of Denis’ fridge and freezer. Delissio pizzas, ice cream sandwiches, and so on. The passage describes how he takes out his Ziploc bag of pot and how it’s not just the regular Ziplocs, but the ones with the special slider: <<Le sac de Denis en est un avec une glissière en plastique. Ceux qui valent cher, ceux qui rendent jaloux les camarades de classe à l’heure du sandwich au baloney, ceux qu’on a envie de transmettre à ses descendants>> (26). It’s such a telling moment that this little detail on a Ziploc bag becomes a class marker. It reminds me of the opening passage of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, in which she talks about how you can tell who grew up poor by asking how many windows there were in their home. I appreciate the way the passage takes this little detail and elevates it to the status of an heirloom. 

I would say that the book has a generally accessible style and has these nice flourishes of description to elevate it. The flashbacks pace the book nicely and add tension to the ‘present’ moment of the text. While the main characters’ evils towards one another are sometimes over the top, there’s enough tenderness to avoid easy answers on the characters, and the final moments of the story offer a compelling reason to re-read the hundred and twenty preceding pages. Memory is hazy. Experiences are subject to revision—though none of the characters, Viens reminds us, have quite the capacity for self-reflection they would need to change their ways. It’s a downer ending, though not in the way you’d anticipate.

Happy reading!

Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

         Editors often give writers the advice to “kill your darlings”, meaning that all excess, no matter how much you like it, should be cut from the final version of the book. Privately, I’ve also always thought of it as being unsparing in your treatment of characters. You might love your characters, so you don’t want them to experience pain, but for the sake of the story, your characters need to experience conflict and suffer. Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic has a lot of positives, but stops short of sticking the landing, taking an otherwise very good book and ending on a “mid” note.

The premise of Sympathy is actually really compelling. Alice, an adopted Black girl with an absentee adoptive father, gets obsessed with a woman via social media: Mizuko Himuro, a woman about ten years her senior who is a successful writer and instructor at Columbia University. It’s one of those books where the characters are all frustrating and unlikable, though compelling. Alice is largely irredeemable, but Mizuko is also flawed, thoughtless, and self-serving with a kink for other peoples’ tears.

To focus on Alice first, she is far more outwardly egregious in her behaviour. She has some wonderful moments, like when she recounts a tutor that she loved and how the tutor told her “to ‘go have fun, go wild,’ and [she’d] burst out crying” (37). At the same time, she moves into her grandmother’s house and is meant to take care of her but is essentially useless. Meanwhile, she infiltrates Mizuko’s life, engineering situations for them to meet and spend time together. One night, Alice spends the evening with Mizuko while Mizuko is in conflict with her boyfriend, Rupert. Alice, also in a relationship, manipulates the situation to put distance between Mizuko and Rupert to insert herself and make Mizuko reliant on her. As she latches on, she is able to share a charged kiss with Mizuko and then share her bed—a high that she continues to strive for afterward. Meanwhile, she snoops through Mizuko’s phone, finding nude photographs and videos of her and Rupert and other partners, to which she self-satisfies. She lies about her intentions and lies about her life to keep Mizuko around, perpetually omitting the fact that she has stalked Mizuko on social media for ages.

The obsessiveness of the book is pretty compelling and there are a ton of wonderful features in the text. There are lots of great parallels and patterns. The motif of opposite atoms and the Higgs Boson speaks to Alice’s obsession. The aftereffects of a Japanese tsunami feature prominently, especially the detritus that remains afterward. The themes are developed with a great deal of clarity. 

One of the other layers to the text is the disruption of time. It’s a little bit difficult to follow the timeline of events; there were times that I was unclear which happens first, who is dating who when, and so forth. Alice reflects on this disruption to time a few times throughout the text. Mizuko writes a story about visiting Japan with her grandmother after the flood, which she also video recorded in full: “Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road” (217). Alice is that dark force from the future rewriting Mizuko’s history, which also makes sense given what happens to Mizuko a little later on…

Towards the end of the book, Alice becomes increasingly disassociated from herself. She describes writing as follows: “Writing in short bursts usually made me feel ordered and together, as if I had just taken a shower. If I did it for too long, it started to feel like I was having a nightmare. I would start to feel like it wasn’t even me writing it, like watching someone access your desktop remotely, or the drawing of the hands that are drawing each other” (405). Sudjic uses tech-based similes to explore the idea of not feeling in control of your own reality, but Alice also reflects on the idea of how actual experience becomes derealized through technological intermediaries. The passage continues as follows:

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her affect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her (405). 

The notion that time becomes totally derailed through her experience of this real-unreal person is a compelling way to reconceptualize the core of the story (and also justify why I found the timeline so confusing). While Alice is derealized and while Mizuko is derealized, Alice still seems to demonstrate some insight into her own ethical slippage: “I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place” (405). There’s a little echo of the earthquake and tsunami loom under the surface.

In the end, though, the book reads as a message to someone who might not even read it. The book opens with Alice “unfriending” Mizuko in a fraught moment of uncertainty and the ending of the book is somewhat about getting her back, or at least giving her back to herself: “The purpose is no longer just to possess Mizuko but to give back what I took from her. The law of opposites says don’t send a message to your intended recipient if you want her to read it. So I am making it public. This rule has also been at work on me while writing. At first I thought I was writing to her, for her, about her. It is still all those things on the surface, but now it is deeper, wider” (405). It’s an effective closing statement for the book. 

For me, the book grows reasonably organically and builds its tension only to get derailed three quarters of the way through. Alice, through a series of bizarre coincidences, ends up going to stay in the Hamptons with Robin and Ingrid and various other friends and family. Robin and Ingrid are an older couple (60 and 40?). After doing a DNA test, Alice learns that Robin is Mizuko’s biological father, who she has never known. But, because Alice is a weird creep, she keeps the knowledge to herself. Incidentally, one day she takes a nap by the pool and awakes to find Robin touching her between her legs and they never address that ever again. Meanwhile, Alice’s boyfriend Dwight is a tech developer and works on an app called TriMe, which is a Tinder-like app designed for people seeking threesomes. At one point, Alice brings Mizuko to a masquerade play with Robin and Ingrid. Following the play, they go to dinner. In the washroom, Mizuko shows Alice that she has just matched with Robin and Ingrid on the TriMe app. Remember: Robin is Mizuko’s father. From there, Mizuko and Alice get separated. Alice ends up on drugs at an orgy where she is aggressively raped while she’s insensible (and consequently loses a fetus she had intended to abort the following day). It’s a bit excessive there. You might be thinking: Jeff, you told us people should be harsher to their characters. Well, here’s what happens next.

Alice gets increasingly obsessed about Mizuko, trying to track her down. Fearing she’s been ghosted, Alice sends increasingly desperate texts: WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU I NEED YOU and so on. Then, Alice goes on an ADHD med bender and gets hyper-focused, writing a lengthy confession letter to Mizuko. She explains all the ways she infiltrated Mizuko’s life, the betrayals she has hidden, and the secret she has kept about Mizuko’s parentage. The whole letter is a scorched earth letter and the tension is high for when Mizuko receives it. After not hearing from Mizuko for some time, it turns out that she had a brain parasite that made her have a public seizure and then she needed surgery. Alice arrives at Mizuko’s apartment and has found the letter has been opened (!) by Mizuko’s estranged mother, who has come to nurse her back to health.

At this point, I had two different endings in mind that I thought would be excellent extensions of the tension. In my first idea, Mizuko’s mother is primed to expose Alice. I could easily see it being a direct conflict or something more like blackmailing her out of Mizuko’s life. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Alice catches a break where, following her surgery, Mizuko is essentially “soft reset” and does not remember anything (time collapses inward again). Alice once again is able to nurse her back to health and keep her isolated from the world. She prevents her from contacting her ex, using her cell phone, or any other contact with the outside world. Alice encourages Mizuko to write a book in isolation. The second ending I had in mind is that, knowing that Mizuko is self-serving, it would have been excellent to see that Mizuko is the one that has actually engineered the situation to see how far Alice would go and to write a book about her. How desperate is this younger woman to care for her Misery-style? How pathetic is she? Instead of Alice being the one manipulating Mizuko, having a reversal at the end would have been a beautiful touch.

But none of that happens.

Instead, after thirty days in isolation, Mizuko’s ex shows up at the door. He bangs on the door and Mizuko wants to see him, but has to get ready first. Alice then sneaks out the window and runs away. She keeps pausing, hoping that Mizuko will follow her, but she never does. So instead Alice runs away, finds that her grandmother has died (she was supposed to take care of her), and then goes back to England and cries to her no-longer-estranged mother, starting a gardening business and then still creeping a now no-longer-available online Mizuko. It just felt that there were so many opportunities for the conflict to come to a boil but we missed every one.

We do get a revelation at the end that adds a dark twist to the book. As it turns out, Alice found out that Mizuko’s estranged mother had left a letter. Himuro reveals that she had never wanted Mizuko because she was a child produced by rape. Himuro gives the story of how Robin raped her in university, how she got pregnant, and never wanted to find him again because she was never believed and he claimed it was consentual. After writing the letter, Himuro walked into the river and drowned herself, leaving also Mizuko’s grandmother to care for herself (and die alone and unfound for some time back in Japan). It’s unclear whether Mizuko knows this information. So, there is another turn at the end but the central conflict is not the one that is most effectively developed.

One other thing that I liked about the book is the characterization of New York. Alice moves to New York from the UK to be with her grandmother and Sudjic gives a great description of walking in New York:

You don’t have to have any idea where you are going; you can advance without being aware of anything but the vague progress into time stretching out before you. In this way I discovered moments of light-headedness, which led to a feeling that my body was somehow becoming less and less material. The exact opposite of what had happened to me at home in England, when everything had become gloopy and masklike. I felt, after a time, like I could float upwards, into the air, as well as down. At its most intense, I felt like I was only a heartbeat inside my brain.
You can also cope better with strange things when you are slightly tripping out like this. It is certainly easier to fall in love with a stranger. You can answer the question “How you doing today, senorita?” in a way you never would in England, if you were asked, which you wouldn’t be. You can get talking to a woman who is wearing a smart grey suit but sitting on the sidewalk, begging. There will likely be a snappy dachshund parked beside her in a pram when you realise you have no coins in your purse, only dollar bills. This will not embarrass you; you’ll just give the bills.

You can wonder with detached amusement what a Philly cheese steak is and make your mistaken judgment based on the smell of spicy sausage in the air, which in fact comes from an adjacent cart you should have gone to instead. People will make comments about how slowly you count the change. Doesn’t matter. It’s novelty. It might as well be another language. You can pass a man holding something strange and highly personal in the street and look away because it feels like he is doing it on purpose to make people look. You can sit in a cafe downtown whilst a family holds in prayer and gives thanks because somebody graduated today, and you can watch them unselfconsciously because they are so deep into it. On the Lower East Side, you can count the ornamental cockatoos within dusty windows. In midtown you can buy something for allergy season when you see a warning about it outside a juice shop. You can do whatever you like—you can go completely mental—and no one gives a shit. (50-51)

I include that passage just as a taste of the flare in Sudjic’s novel. There are some details that really linger and standout, connected to a larger thematic framework. On the topic of New York, there’s a tense moment where Alice has to take her grandmother to the hospital but there’s confusion of where is where. In the cab, her grandmother gives the name of the hospital she is meant to go to, and Alice thought it was a different one. Her grandmother “sweating, eyes bulging” asks if that’s where she’s supposed to go. Alice narrates, “I thought Griffin wanted us to go to a different place—a hospital—but I didn’t know where it was, so I hoped I’d misremembered the address of the surgery the previous night and we were going to the hospital, because after a while the numbers and avenues all blurred into one. I hoped that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault that Silvia was right, because otherwise it would be my fault for not intervening. I hadn’t because I didn’t want to be wrong. If I was wrong, I didn’t want to be culpable for what might happen to her as a result of wasting time” (145). This ambiguity and tension and her resistance to taking definitive action reads as so relatable but also raises the stakes for the scene.

I also appreciate how Sympathy is deeply rooted in reality but at the same time exists in unreality. In one part, Alice discusses a plastic storage box that used to house memorabilia of her lost father, which she then fills with artefacts of her time with Mizuko. She describes it as a “mini-museum” and the heaviest thing in it is Mizuko’s copy of The Golden Bowl. Alice describes how Mizulo “often said that novels were dead because we have the Internet everywhere we go now and we can find out anything we want to know straightaway, which tends to kill a plot. That was why she wrote just about real life. It feels true in some ways. In other ways, I reassured her, stories must be more like chess, a game of perfect information in which all the moves that can be made are right there in front of you, but the problem is knowing what your opponent knows and what she plans to do” (79). In that way, I appreciate that Sudjic is trying to write a novel that incorporates technology as a device while also retaining the uncertainty and dramatic tension at the core of human existence, especially when it comes to love and obsession.

Overall, I would say that Sudjic has a good book here. There was a lot to like and the thematic and psychological exploration in the book is really worth the experience. It’s only slightly marred by the fact that the ending falls flat after such a build-up. If only the climax paid off more powerfully, I think the book would be one of the best I’d read this year—and yes, I leave the verb tense ambiguity in place intentionally.

Happy reading!

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

  We’re a full week into September and consistent with my personal life but uncharacteristic of my reading habits, we’re into spooky season. In an effort to get me out of my reading routine, Harneet gifted me Home Before Dark by Riley Sager, a horror / mystery novel about a haunted house (which I admit, of the horror tropes, is one of my favourites). The core issues in the novel revolve around family, secrecy, and betrayal, and those themes are woven through the book and revealed through a series of twists. And there are twists galore.

Since the book is largely story-driven, it would be illogical not to give you the synopsis before giving commentary on it. Two stories are presented in alternating chapters throughout the book. In the present, Maggie Holt’s father has died, his final words an apology. In Ewan Holt’s will, though, is Maggie’s childhood home in which she lived for only about twenty days and which she thought was sold as soon as they moved out about twenty-five years earlier. Despite warnings from her parents, Maggie moves into the home and begins her renovations project and also her search for truth. The other chapters are in the past: they are chapters from a book Maggie’s father, Ewan, wrote. A journalist by trade, Ewan bought the haunted house, in part, for its sordid past: a history of murder-suicides, mysterious occurrences, and so on. He then novelized the hauntings that took place there, with a self-playing record player, snakes falling from the ceiling, and violent ghost attacks.

Back to the present: Maggie Holt is trying to parse the small-town politics surrounding Baneberry Hall and figure out why her father kept the house, what secrets were kept from her, and why she has been lied to for all these years. Meanwhile, the hauntings persist: items disappear spontaneously, shadowy figures abound, and the ceiling collapses once again, this time revealing a literal bag of bones instead of snakes.

Home Before Dark proves instructive about some elements of narrative structure. I’d also make an unlikely connection here to Lord of the Rings for a similar issue with the frame narrative. Long ago, I wrote about how when Gandalf comes back from the dead and tells the story of his survival, all of the implicit drama is deflated because you already know he survives. I think a similar issue is true for Home Before Dark, since the book about the haunted house involves characters that we know survived. Well, for the most part. As a result, the hauntings aren’t exactly scary, which should be the focus of a horror novel, no?

There’s also the issue of pacing. In the first two hundred pages or so, very little haunting happens. As I referenced above, there are moments of spookiness, but rather than incremental intensification (turning the screw), it reads as repetitive. How many times do we need to hear the record of The Sound of Music playing mysteriously? I recognize that horror needs to move slowly to build suspense, but the intensity needs to grow, as well, rather than relying on the cheap trick of some spooky foreshadowing at the end of every chapter of Ewan Holt’s book.

The final third of the novel ramps up the action and offers twists at every turn. Some of the twists were visible from a mile away. For instance, one character in the first hundred pages notes that he has never read Ewan’s book (though everyone has). About fifty pages later, a police officer says that anyone who claims not to have read it is a liar. Thus, it was clear that the character who said he had never read it was lying. I was right and it took a while to actually reveal what he was lying about. Other twists are completely unpredictable (e.g. the revelation of a secret passageway in a super obvious place—highlight convenient). Some of the twists seemed of no consequence; one character had dated a murder victim, is presented as the murder, revealed not to be, and then it never explains why he behaved so strangely.

I feel like I had some cognitive dissonance around the twists. I have some mixed feelings about that; on the one hand, things that were clearly implausible had me rolling my eyes. Then, once the twist was revealed, it justified that inconsistency with reality. On the one hand: it’s a great move for the thinking reader. On the other hand: it might just be a cheap trick. Here are two examples, which both involve spoilers—skip to the next paragraph if you’re invested. Spoiler #1: The rules of the ghostly world make no sense. It is eventually revealed in Ewan Holt’s book that the ghost forces men to murder their daughters. It’s unclear, though, why the father has to do it. In one scene, the ghost physically lifts Maggie off the floor and lifts her to the ceiling before dropping her when Ewan threatens self-harm. Why does the ghost need Ewan at all? The ghost could just lift Maggie up and drop her from the highest point in the house. Later, it’s revealed that the book is a lie to protect Maggie, so it makes sense to ham it up for the mass audience, but when you’re reading you think: wtf? Spoiler #2: Home Before Dark reveals the deep secret in one of the last chapters: Ewan’s book was written to protect Maggie because she is a murderer. Rather than let her be exposed as a murderer, it was better to write a book about a haunted house to explain why they had to run away the same time a young girl disappeared. But here’s the thing: first of all, she’s five years old. How could she not remember murdering someone? How could she have thrown a teenager down the stairs? Who in their right mind would prosecute a five year old? All of those circumstances seem absurd for the twist. Of course, there’s a second twist that answers some of these questions, but it’s a little unsatisfying.

What I like more about the book are the more human components of the text. For example, there are the literal hauntings in the book, but more compelling is the way that her father’s book haunts Maggie’s life. I like the fact that the book follows her throughout her life, that others judge her for the book, and that it has formed so much of her identity (a psychologist has to reveal to her that her interior design career might be a way to regain control over the childhood trauma of the haunted house; gee, really?). More than any supernatural element, the human form of haunting is more tangible and compelling.

There’s a great moment early on in the book that involves the secret and flips it. A deathbed revelation of a secret is compelling. When Maggie reveals to her mother that her father still owned the house and left it to her, Maggie’s mom offers to buy it, ostensibly to make Maggie’s life easier. Yet, the immediate suspicion that that arouses is a delightful hook. Why would she want to buy the house that she vows never to return to and tells Maggie never to go to? Despite professing to tell the truth, her mother withholds a secret behind a kind facade.

Something I struggled with throughout the book, though, is how the secrets are addressed. Maggie is constantly looking for clues as to whether her dad’s book was real. She is a complete sceptic that the house is haunted, but then the details from the book start adding up. Maggie vacillates between belief and disbelief all throughout the book. But there’s a flaw in her logic. She seems to believe that if some details are accurate, then the whole book is real, and if one detail is false, then the whole book is fake. It’s a naive take that the book has to be either entirely true or entirely false.

Beyond that, the cast of characters is reasonably well-developed. We’re dealing with a fair number of stock characters, but Sager does identify their specific motivations well in most cases. In the majority of cases, the motivations are plausible and help to explain the mysteries surrounding the house. I imagine that this book is “cozy” in that the stock characters are recognizable enough to be inviting to readers, especially readers of genre fiction. I do appreciate Sager’s restraint with respect to the romantic interest, which deviates from what I think most people will expect.

Ultimately, I think Home Before Dark is interesting for things it doesn’t do. (Cue the scene from The Simpsons where Lisa says jazz is about the notes they don’t play). It seems to be a trope in horror that the haunting starts small and gets incrementally bigger. From a narrative standpoint, that makes a lot of sense and is very satisfying. But, why is it that ghosts have a sense of narrative structure? How come we never get horror stories where the very first haunting is the walls bleeding and eyeballs melting and whatnot? The other thing I think is interesting and has been absent from horror is the epistemic consequences of ghosts. There is always a scene in horror fiction where people go find the truth of the haunting, often by browsing the archives of a library (or in this case the local newspaper). Somehow, history always explains our contemporary ghosts. Yet, why do we assume that ghosts, occupying a different ontological status than the living, occupy the same epistemological position as us? Being able to explain ghosts’ incentives takes away from the horror of a haunting—to me, the incomprehensibility of ghosts’ actions (and that their motives would be completely unknown to us, perhaps we are beneath their notice altogether…) makes for a more sophisticated horror than a facile ghost-wants-revenge. Those are the possibilities I’d want to explore if I ever write my own horror novel.

(Sidenote: it is pretty fun that the ghost rings bells in the house to communicate and that Ewan translates each bell to a letter of the alphabet; that’s a fun, clever idea).

In short, Home Before Dark is a horror-mystery hybrid that I would agree verges on detective fiction more thoroughly towards the end. If you want an entertaining plot-driven narrative, this is probably a good choice for you. There is twist-after-twist-after-twist-after-twist. Harneet wanted to push me out of my comfort zone with this book. In some ways, it has achieved its mission. I’ve read something very different from what I usually read, and, having recently read The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, I think I was engaging pretty thoughtfully with the narrative possibilities of the genre. I also watched horror movies all summer, so maybe horror literature is the next frontier.

Haunted reading!