Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

    Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is an odd duck of a book: it’s mainly a novel, but the influence of drama pervades the text alongside glints of poetry. The story’s central characters are Maurice and Charlie, two ex(?)-gangster Irishmen in search of an estranged daughter; which one of them is the actual father is a matter of some debate.

    This is another one of those novels that oscillates between present-day and years earlier. In the present, Maurice and Charlie are waiting in a Spanish port for the twenty three year-old Dilly, who fled from home three years earlier to join a kind of weird cult-like group of nomads with dreadlocks who take care of dogs. I’m a little fuzzy on how it all works, but basically it seems you can’t travel with dogs so there’s a network that trades off who takes care of dogs in different places. Anyway, Maurice and Charlie are trying to reconnect with her. The other half of the novel delves into the backstory of Maurice and Charlie and their involvement in drug trafficking, their tumultuous relationship with Cynthia, Dilly’s mother. 

    There is a dramatic difference between how much I enjoyed the two sections of the book. The present-day waiting room felt like a bottle episode of a TV show and I was absolutely for it. Beginning the book, I was prepared for 250 pages of waiting in the same location and the hijinx that would ensue. The flashbacks largely lost my interest and they lost even more steam towards the end of the book. There were two-point-five exceptions to the lacklustre flashbacks: 1) the moment Maurice contemplates a murder-suicide with his infant daughter, preparing to drive the car into the water 2) the moment Maurice slices his eye open with a razor — such a cringe-inducing visceral moment and 2.5) when Maurice and Cynthia have a bad land deal that makes them think their new build is haunted and that it will destroy their luck.

    It’s hard to place the two timelines into relationship with one another, but I will attempt to outline some differences:

    The present-day narrative is replete with snappy dialogue. It reads like a play, specifically Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sinister while being comical. As a result, it feels far more lively than the flashbacks, which are more narration-driven much of the time. The relationship between the characters feels more sincere, whereas in the past I’m a little unclear on why Maurice and Charlie both fell in love with Cynthia or why it really matters that they reunite with Dilly*.

    The present-day, before Barry reveals the past, is more infused with tension. At the outset of the novel, you’re not clear on why they’re waiting for Dilly or what they’ll do if they get a hold of her. In one scene they are interrogating a boy they suspect knows her and there’s an underlying tension to the conversation which escalates when they jab their thumbs into his eyes. It’s a shocking scene and the stakes are unclear, which makes it even better: are they going to hurt Dilly, despite their love for her? Is she part of a more sinister network, too? Given that there’s a line in the book about how drug trafficking isn’t profitable anymore (with the implication that human trafficking is more lucrative), there’s an underlying tension with what the backstory might have been.

    The heart of the story was in the present and the past felt lifeless by comparison, leading me to the conclusion that not every book needs to delve into backstory or parallel narratives. As more about the past gets revealed, there are some surprising moments that serve to enhance the relationship between Maurice and Charlie in the present. Most notably, and this is a spoiler, it is revealed that Charlie and Cynthia were caught in bed together and Maurice stabbed him in the leg. Their reunion in a mental hospital is an amusing coincidence. (Okay, as I write this, maybe there were more charming moments in the past than I’m giving credit for).

    I used an asterisk earlier noting a complaint that I had about how the stakes and importance of finding Dilly are unclear. I think I needed more moments of Maurice bonding with Dilly and/or more of Maurice and Charlie talking about their reasons for loving the ambiguously-fathered Dilly. I voice the criticism with reservation, though, because Barry does offer something for consideration that would mitigate such a criticism. In the backstory, Maurice’s father is presented as having mental illness, possibly dementia, and Maurice seems to have a fulfilled genetic predisposition where he ends up in the mental hospital later. When Charlie joins him they hang out all day watching Goodfellas. Their perceptions of themselves seem so grandiose, kept in check by Cynthia and her daughter. To circle back, if the two of them are committed to reuniting with Dilly as a vapid “blood is thicker than water” mob mentality (excuse the pun), it gives their characters a purposefully pathetic dimension.

    When it comes to the writing quality, I’ve mentioned the dialogue, which is great. The other component that I quite liked were phrases of surprising poetry within the text. The whole book is written in short sections—whether one sentence or half-page paragraphs—that gives it an aphoristic quality. In turn, there are brief moments of poetry describing images. There are also poetic semi-philosophical claims, my favourite of which being “we are in the suburbs of hysteria” (7).

    Ultimately, though, the book ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. In the interest of seeing how my thoughts compare to those of other readers, I went to the Wikipedia page and found that Johanna Thomas-Corr “panned the novel and called its story ‘flimsy.’” The word that had come to mind for me was “thin.” Thomas-Corr says “A novel needs interiority, an intimacy between characters and reader [...] Barry does the bare minimum.” I feel like that’s a fair critique, if a bit harsh. There is much stated, I’m sure, in the subtext but I am not an adept enough reader to appreciate it. The idea of the book ending on a missed connection is fine, but I needed something. Some sort of transformation to make the book feel worth it (though the fact that the central characters never change is pretty crucial to some of their misadventures). I often get excited for Booker Prize winners and nominees, which is why I picked this up (it was longlisted), but overall it was just alright.

    Happy reading!

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

    I pride myself on being widely read, both in terms of classics and contemporary works. In that pursuit, there are always gaps to be remedied and a surprising amount of Victorian works have escaped my notice (or is it that they just wrote tons of books?). A few years ago, someone who has since disappeared from social media recommended The Moonstone to me as a strange novel and then last semester when I was teaching Studies in Literature it came up in conversation and I decided I should probably tackle this behemoth of a mystery novel, especially because my only other experience with Wilkie Collins is Heart and Science, arguably one of his more obscure works.

    Set in the late 1840s, The Moonstone is about a glorious yellow diamond that was stolen in the fog of war from India by an Englishman in 1799. The man who stole it, you can probably already imagine, was a bit of jerk and, in what may be considered a passive aggressive curse, upon his death he leaves the Moonstone to his niece. The novel is too complex to explain the ins and outs of each character, but essentially the man’s niece, Rachel Verinder, is set to inherit the Moonstone on her birthday and in the days leading up a trio of mysterious Indian men show up at her mother’s estate whispering strange prophecies. Then, her cousin delivers the Moonstone and, after a series of events, the very night of Rachel’s birthday, the Moonstone disappears from her drawer.

    The novel is an early and emblematic entry in the detective fiction genre and its influence can easily be read in later Victorian mysteries, like those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What I found surprising and exciting about the novel is that it rotates through various narrators with their distinct voices and purposes. The marks of The Moonstone’s serialization show themselves in the fact that the prologue is a sort of news report, then the novel starts with servant Gabriel Betteredge’s account of the events leading up to the party and the ultimate theft of the diamond. His account is likely the longest, but then we get a cavalcade of narrators writing their accounts of the theft and its ramifications. (Take an eye-breath: long sentence incoming). Among the more memorable of the narrators are, of course, Gabriel Betteredge, who is charmingly fastidious and has an endearing obsession with reading Robinson Crusoe, Mrs. Clack, another servant who is irritating beyond all hope, most particularly because she is a pedantic, proselytizing zealot who hides her unwanted religious tracts in every corner of the house, Franklin Blake, who is memorable mainly because so much of the action centres around him, and Ezra Jennings, a surprisingly ostracised medical assistant. I have to admit, the characters each had their own charm. 

    Overall, I’d have to say that Wilkie Collins’ characters are endearing, even when not fully fleshed out. Each had their own charm, pathos, and humour about them in their quirks. For a novel that centres around an object that inspires such obsession, the motif is carried through in the affectations of particular characters, whether it be through their strange periapts, addictions, or tightly-clung devotions to others. Being a mystery, character motivations are slowly revealed throughout the interlocking and staggered timelines of the narrative, which is a nice revelation each time since it allows you to reconsider the behaviours characters demonstrated earlier in the novel. That really gets highlighted by the tumultuous love story between Franklin Blake and Rachel Verinder to satisfying effect.

    In my view, Collins does a great job of presenting characters sympathetically, especially in his most tragic figures: Rosanna Spearman and Ezra Jennings. Rosanna is a former reformatory resident with a history of theft and supposedly a girl of less-than-desirable appearance. Working as a servant to the Verinder house, she experiences a great deal of illness and social ostracism. One day while avoiding her duties, Betteredge tries to make her feel better. She delivers a beautifully sad monologue while staring out at the quicksand, talking about her uneasy mind and how the place has set a spell on her. She offers a haunting imagining of bodies under the quicksand, reaching up and trying to resurface. When she ultimately commits suicide at that location (oddly parallel to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), mourning her impossible love, it is tragic (and mysterious—did she walk into the water with the diamond?). Ezra Jennings is the other character I found most likeable and most unfortunate. The reasons for his exclusion from society seems to rely on the fact that he is mixed race, so all kinds of things have become unavailable to him—his love, his physician ambitions, and so on. He comes across as having such a great heart with depth of feeling, tortured by his opium addiction. Towards the end, he, too, passes away and it’s surprisingly touching, given how selfless he has been throughout the story.

    The alternating narratives give wonderful insight into the characters, and the narrational style offers some charming direct appeals to the reader. I don’t why I find that so endearing, but I do. It’s also interesting to me how in Betteredge’s narrative in particular (and maybe elsewhere, but I didn’t notice) there is a mix of past and present narration. At the same moment, a character -asked- a question to which someone -responds-. The simultaneity of the timeline is a peculiar affectation but it perhaps evokes the timelessness of the Moonstone’s hold on people.

    The temptation with the review for a mystery novel is to unravel each of the steps of the mystery, the misdirections and red herrings, the big reveals, and so on. I will resist such a temptation here and limit myself to a few cursory comments. First, I appreciated the segments of the book that provide an deductive (or inductive, I suppose) account of events. It’s nice that there are plausible explanations where everything feels complete, only for Collins to subvert the narrative with an alternative account (and another, and another). At times, the narrative seemed to drag in its build up to the next big reveal. Generally, it was able to subsist on its more ‘human’ elements (like the love between Rachel and Franklin), but at other times there were ‘when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory’ stretches. At around the halfway point, I was ready to find out who stole the Moonstone and how it happened, and then the narrator changed and my interest was once more piqued.

    The story is narratively pretty satisfying; despite the number of misdirections throughout the text, details take on retroactive significance in a way that feels meaningful and authentic. I can’t deny that the lead-up to the climax was exhilarating, even if it was a little silly. The climax relies a little too heavily on opium for my liking, and then the denouement didn’t feel as satisfying as some of the other false-endings throughout.

    I don’t want to over-spoil the book, but there was a burning question on my mind throughout and I was pleasantly surprised to see how it turned out. Especially in our modern climate, to have a whole novel centred around English people reclaiming a stolen artefact that was itself stolen from one of its colonies. It becomes hard to root for the colonizers who stand to profit from reclaiming the stolen diamond. But Wilkie Collins does something interesting: the last section of the book is titled “The Finding of the Diamond.” The previous section unravelled the mystery and gave an account of the Moonstone’s movement. Knowing that the third section was titled “The Finding of the Diamond” from early on in my reading process, I admit that I wanted to know who, actually, would find it. It’s an interesting political statement, I think, that the Moonstone ends up back in India, presumably never to be reclaimed. It was again a surprising subversion from what I’d expect in a Victorian novel—and I’m curious to know which tone is meant to be achieved. Collins delivers some humorous tone throughout the book, and I’m curious whether the ending is meant to be ironic in a dark-funny way or whether it’s meant to be read as sincere and uplifting. It’s hard to determine, particularly because the Indian trio is presented as villainous throughout and we deal with the standard racism of the type and Orientalism, where anything East of England is presented as mysterious, uncivilized, and opium-obsessed.

    Part of me wonders how Collins’ depictions of colonialism square with his scientific leanings and other political interests. Heart and Science is an anti-vivisectionist novel, and I’m given to understand he was an advocate for animals. Here, the novel’s climax does involve science, though it’s an unlikely experiment—ultimately, it does fail, which gives a somewhat convoluted sense of his priorities. The sympathetic character who is meant to be a scientifically-minded doctor fails at enacting science, but those who treat science more flippantly are successful, despite being more sinister in their actions (that said, when Franklin Blake finds out he was secretly drugged for trash-talking science his response is basically “haha those little rapscallions, they really got me!”). A tenth of the way through the novel, there’s a lengthy diatribe against scientific inquiry, presented here below to illuminate a parallel with Heart and Science and the antivivisectionist movement:

“Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life – the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see–especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort–-how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something—and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they are only making a mess in the house. I have seen them [....] go out, day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins through the miserable wretches, or cut them up, without a pang of remorse, into little pieces. You see my young mater, or my young mistress, poring over one of their spiders’ insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet one of their frogs walking down-stairs without his head—and when you wonder what the cruel nastiness means, you are told that it means a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history” (50-51).

Passages like that intrigue me as representatives of the discourse that was happening around science in 1850s England. It seems to have a moral impulse that gives me hope that the novel is potentially a (gentle) criticism of colonial England, given the problems associated with the theft of the Moonstone, the depiction of its initial thief as a degenerate, and the ending that suggests the Moonstone is back in its proper home. These are not to say that animal rights and anticolonialism are connected, but Collins seems progressive on those issues (as well as in terms of religion, where people are religious but ridiculed for being zealots). I can’t offer an unreserved ahistorical approval of everything in the book, but I do feel like Collins may have some merit as a social advocate [although one disabled character is routinely referred to as Limping Lucy, so that’s pretty awkward…].

    Anyway, The Moonstone, while it had some sloggy bits, was overall a more enjoyable read than I expected. I’m glad I’ve been able to add this seminal crime novel into my repertoire of reads—I certainly enjoyed it more than my brief foray into Sherlock Holmes, actually, which is humourless and drab by comparison. The balance of story and character is achieved reasonably effective here in a way that seems particularly consistent for Victorians.

    To the people that recommended this book to me that are extraordinarily unlikely to read this review, thanks for the recommendation. It was a good one!

    Happy reading!

sincerely, by F. S. Yousaf

    The poems in F. S. Yousaf’s collection sincerely, are quite short and I will strive to keep my review similar in nature. I won’t re-tread the well-worn paths of my commentary for Instagram poetry, except to point out a few differences that seem to differentiate Yousaf’s work from other poetry collections of the same kind.

    In brief, sincerely, is a collection of love poems that were written as a gift that culminates with a marriage proposal to Yousaf’s partner. I have to say, this collection seems more outward-focused and less solipsistic than many of the other Instagram poets. That is not to say that Yousaf’s speaker is not often praising the beloved for her effect on him, but I do want to give credit to Yousaf because this seems less a vanity project than a true gift for someone else (which Anne Lamott fruitfully suggests as an impetus for writing in Bird by Bird).

    The poems are what I’d describe as ‘whatever’. They are not particularly compelling except that once in a while they touch a nerve due to their relatability—not really in the quality of their imagery or metaphor, but just in the general applicability of their content. Sometimes, the poems are cringy in their generalities: “You enlightened my mind and softened my heart. Your laugh was the kind that brightened up a gloomy day. You were caring, and I envied that you beat my love for you tenfold. You were exactly what people looked for, and just what I needed” (“Journal Entry: One Year Later” 52). Overall, the tone of the book is one that is uplifting and encouraging. They inspire the feel-good vibes of young romance and, previous example notwithstanding, it actually feels sincere. In “Former Stories / Better Conclusions”, Yousaf writes, “You were the girl / I wanted to charm with my writing. / For I knew that average words would not work / With you, / You were remarkable, / And craved the spontaneous kind of love / That ill-fated writers had, / The ones that only reside / In history books and novels. // I pray our story does not end like theirs. / I only desire a tale of stability and peaceful mornings” (12). Setting out with a central premise of wooing someone with words is a great starting place for the book and in a few lines this poem establishes the central characters effectively. The characters have flashes of personality and character development, particularly in some of the page-length poems: “You pick your flowers in handfuls, / Without giving a thought / To the stems that land / Between the creases of your palms. / You make sure of their crisp petals, / And stern stem, / Hoping they will last you a lifetime” (“Affable” 31). There’s not a ton of depth to the characters, but there’s a little more than just the tracings to be filled that other Instapoets cynically offer for you to colour in with your own experiences.

    The poems have that saccharine sentimentality common to Instapoetry, which emerges in poems like “Present”. Yousaf writes, “I ended up loving the moment / More than the memories. / I would rather be with you, / And see you blossom day by day, / Than remember how we used to be” (26). The poem itself, as I said, is ‘whatever’ but what gives this a little bit of an edge over its multitude of competitors is that it is not an entirely untroubled kind of love story. The idea that emerges here of getting bound up in the past rather than continuing to grow, the kind of stagnation that occurs when idealizing a relationship gets a subtle nod that, in my view, adds somewhat to the sincerity of sincerely,.

    There’s actually a somewhat refreshing trajectory of the book. It goes from love poems into some darkness poems and then towards a not untroubled future and culminating in the ultimate marriage of the central characters. What I like about the middle is similar to the above: the character experiences darkness but does not make their partner the sole solution to all of their problems. Consider the poem “Buoyant” which frames the beloved as a help, but not a complete solution to pain:

There is a deep fog in my mind,

One which surrounds me every day

As I take aimless steps towards escaping.

Even when I think of you

The fog does not dissipate.

My body remains the same:

Trapped in a boundless cloud.

But what the thought of you does

Is give me some sense of direction–

A purpose for me to keep pushing forward

And never give up.

No matter the days that have passed

Or how many steps I may have to retrace.

For who knows,

Perhaps one day

I may be able to see the sky again. (71)

It seems pretty clear that the fog is or is something similar to depression. It would be easy to say that love cures all, but Yousaf smartly does not take that direction: “Even when I think of you / The fog does not dissipate” — and we even get the nice image of a “boundless cloud.” The rest of the poem succumbs to the lack of imagery and metaphor endemic to the genre, but at least the ethical-relational impulses are there. 

    A few pages later, “Caretaker” reiterates the same ideas. Yousaf writes, “I asked if the ill feelings / That lodged themselves between / The slim openings of my ribs were / Normal to feel, / And you disagreed with me / With every ounce of air / That could fill your lungs” (73). He continues, “You helped in unleashing / The best parts of me / And aided in combatting my faults / Instead of discarding them” (73). It’s not that the beloved cures the illness creeping in, but it does “aid.”

    I’m sure that there will be an audience for this book who will, in turn, find themselves aided by the uplifting energy of the text. I’d like to imagine these poems will bring people together and that loved ones will share words with one another to find themselves closer together, even in hard times.

    As an esthete, I’m going to have to class this book as of minimal interest. As a human, I’ll class it as cute. As someone who has read far more Instagram poetry than he ever thought he would, I’d probably put sincerely, as one of the better entries into the genre. It’s still doesn’t enrich me nearly as much as a single more dense or challenging poem from a better collection might. It was an okay way to spend an hour and a half or so.

    Anyway…whatever!