Tag Archives: 2000

Under the Skin by Michel Faber (2000)

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Under the Skin by Michel Faber (2000)From the cover and blurb of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin I was expecting some sort of psychosexual thriller about a murderous woman on the prowl for male suitors. This is not my usual tastes, but what the hell. At first, Under the Skin does appear to follow this formulaic path but quickly turns in to something much more complicated, much more compelling and deeply disturbing.

Isserley is a slightly odd woman who drives along highways in Scotland looking for physically fit male hitchhikers. Through what appear to be casual conversations she determines their drifter status and further assesses their physical suitability, and those that are found satisfactory she takes back to a secluded farm. And that, unfortunately, is as much as I am willing to reveal in this review and I apologize for the vagueness that is to follow. Under the Skin is a novel where the less you know about its premise, the greater the impact on the reader. I was, as mentioned, rather clueless and as a result was very much bewildered, frightened and intrigued by this story, carrying it with me beyond the pages.

Isserley switches the television off. More awake now, she’d remembered something she should have known from the beginning, which was that there was no point trying to orient yourself to reality with television. It only made things worse.

Isserley herself is compellingly strange, marked by an inability to understand simple concepts, unexplained debilitating aches and pains, odd turns of phrase and unfamiliar words, and a ambiguous moral attitude toward picking up the drifters that she begins to question and explore as the novel progresses. Her use of unfamiliar slang (that wordnerds may attempt to look up in a dictionary and become frustrated that it doesn’t appear there) purposely alienates the reader from immediately determining Isserley’s role. At the same time, the peculiarity of the words and images invokes the desire to uncover the truth.

Yet, as you think you’re beginning to understand something, however briefly, Faber turns those assumptions to dust. My original expectations of this book as “psychosexual thriller” in part shaped my reaction to it – everything that happened was much stranger and more disturbing than I could have anticipated. Under the Skin is an artful experience of suspense, as Faber provides just enough without seeming unclear or without direction.

That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

As well as exploring Isserley’s growing contempt for her employer and her own existence, Faber reveals Isserley’s drifters through brief glimpses of their interior monologues, and by contrasting the cruelty, callousness and sometimes kindness of these drifters with the grisly severity of their fate Faber points us towards our own humanity. The story itself suggests a larger moral implication which is readily applied to our own everyday choices without seeming didactic. However, it would be too simplistic to read Under the Skin as straight allegory, as it manages to be much more complicated than a simple folk tale.

Like a half-remembered nightmare, Under the Skin lingers long after it has ended, the gaps leaving open any number of horrific possibilities. Words like chilling, horrifying or harrowing, and vague reviews like this one, do not do this book justice.

Transmetropolitan: Volume Four, The New Scum by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (2000)

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Transmetropolitan: Volume Four, The New Scum by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (2000)This review contains major spoilers for Transmetropolitan as a series, so if you are in anyway inclinced to read about Spider Jerusalem’s misdeeds in The City you have been duly warned.

Feeling hung over and ill at ease on a Sunday afternoon made for the perfect setting for returning to the world of Transmetropolitan and conflicted antihero journalist Spider Jerusalem in Volume Four, The New Scum. After the revelations of the third volume of the series, which I raved about here, it would be difficult for anything to reach the emotional heights of the political corruption and unexpected assassinations of Year of the Bastard. While the New Scum doesn’t have the same impact as the previous volume, it is nonetheless a carefully crafted caustic take on political campaigning and journalism and even the less successful moments of Transmetropolitan are miles above the strongest of many other forms of fiction.

After the shocking televised execution of Vita Severn, “The Smiler” Callahan’s political director, we are introduced to the populace of the City becoming ever more desperate. Their only form of salvation comes in the truth-seeking, ball-breaking, foul-mouthed conundrum of a journalist, Spider Jerusalem. Through gifts and people speaking on the streets of the City, we can see how appreciative they are that he exists for them, that he is speaking for them, giving the helplessly voiceless a vehement and reactive voice. However, Spider himself has been moved to an even more protected apartment complete with germ filter, climate control and constant surveillance, in a way removing him physically from the people he is speaking on behalf of. The street is where he can meet, confront and learn from the people. All over the City, shrines to Vita Severn have appeared, lending her a certain martyrdom that is uneasily felt, and due to her death, The Smiler’s popularity is off the scale.

Just drifting through the City, wandering through its veins and arteries like an infection looking for a dodgy appendix to latch onto.

Spider isn’t all about greeting the people though, and he is given to acidic outbursts of rage at a seemingly willfully ignorant society. For all the gratitude he receives, he is still aware that their attention is directed toward other, less important, pursuits. Distraction as a means of control, of ignoring what is really happening. He is given a rare opportunity for a one on one interview with the reigning President, lovingly nicknamed “The Beast”, an interview in which the two of them thrash out their many political, cultural, idealistic differences. In the name of equal press, Senator Callahan also offers Spider an interview where his abhorrent motivations are revealed, the extent of his lunacy unveiled to a nullified Spider.

Some of the images in The New Scum are truly striking. A page view of the City’s riot police at their shift changeover, washing their riot gear of blood is shockingly visceral. The images aren’t all horrifying, a one issue storyline covers Spider’s compassion, hidden beneath a jaded journalistic façade though it may be, his actions speak a thousand times louder than his vitriolic columns. It is an unusually heartwarming event in what can be an exhaustingly depressing series, and is best left to be discovered by the unaware reader. The details in the artwork are, as always, rewarding and subtly revealing.

These are the new street sof this city, where the new scum try to live. You and me. And here in these streets are the things that we want: sex and birth, votes and traits. Money and guilt, television and teddy bears.

But all we’ve really got is each other.

You decide what that means.

The election – though neither result would have been ideal, knowing the candidates as we do – goes Callahan’s way, and Spider expresses his anger outwardly at the “scum”, but this time knowing that his lovely assistants Yelena and Channon are faithfully beside him no matter what happens next. And what follows is sure to be an explosive showdown between Callahan and Spider, as Spider works toward affirming his suspicions of Callahan’s involvement in Vita’s assassination. For all the political scandal, Transmetropolitan is also blackly funny and hugely enjoyable, which is too easily overlooked with the strong storylines and characters. This series is turning out to be one of my favourite accidental discoveries.

Previous Transmetropolitan reviews:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (2000)

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill (2000)In the first volume The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it is the late 1800s in England, and a group of characters from literature are pulled together to form something of a Victorian supergroup. Instructed by the mysterious Mr. M through his lackey Campion Bond, Mina Murray hunts out the various figures – each with their own issues, drug addiction, piracy, violent pasts, psychopathy, and personality disorders – in order to fight the criminal underworld in an alternate version of Victorian London. Mina, along with Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll (and his ape-like alter ego, Edward Hyde) and Hawley Griffin (The Invisible Man), face off against the criminal mastermind, The Doctor.

The style of the artwork is suitably dark, the palette dominated by browns, greens, deep blues. The moral ambiguity of their boss, and even of those among their ranks, suits the tumultuous and uncertain times the story is set in. The Invisible Man in particular is thoroughly despicable, but I really wanted to see more of his misdeeds. Mina Murray – whose marriage to one Jonathan Harker has recently ended badly – is a great character as their tough, unofficial leader. I just wish that her vulnerabilities weren’t so often linked with rape, which of course her male cohorts rescue her from.

Oh, how typical! Are you men, or little boys? You play your little games with your elephant guns and your submersible boats, but one raised voice and you hide like little children!

It constantly felt like just as the characters’ stories were on the verge of becoming more complicated, they had to move on to their next mission. Although these missions are daring, adventurous and you’re never quite sure how they’re going to end or what they’re going to discover, stronger characterization of these admittedly already iconic characters would have given The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen another level of engagement. In a fictional world where history and technology are being played with for dramatic effect, how much of our previous knowledge about these characters are we supposed to bring to the story? Is the impact of the story lessened when we’re not well acquainted with their previous incarnations?

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen works as a thoroughly engaging story but without the same strong, multifaceted characters it noticeably lacks the emotional and philosophical king hit of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. (I think that may be the graphic novel equivalent of comparing every single film to Citizen Kane.) That said, I’m still going to be tracking down the second volume of the series.

In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl by Rachel Trezise (2000)

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In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl by Rachel Trezise (2002)I take extensive notes while I am reading, sometimes in my reading notebook, or an index card that doubles as a bookmark; notes on characters, story, quotes, ideas, words I want to look up. This is my routine, this is how I read. However, when reading Rachel Trezise‘s In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl recently, I didn’t take any notes. I read it in one sitting, and I couldn’t even bear to put the book down long enough to take a note of the page numbers I wanted to return to, instead I resorted to dog-earring the pages with passages I fell in love with – anything to avoid interrupting the luscious flow of Trezise’s powerful and lyrical prose.

Hendrefadog is a village with a population of five thousand. It seems since Dare pit closed unknown years before I was born there, unemployment had become a fashion which takes too long to die out. Like ski pants, and tennis shirts, clothes which are made popular by fashionable sports, but continue to be worn when sport has become unpopular, worn by middle-aged women who have never been skiing, or given as hand-me-downs to children who have never watched a game of tennis. Like middle-class families who refuse to smash tradition and all become doctors one after the other, Hendrefadog teenagers followed their parents to the dole queue, making us a notch lower than working-class. My generation, the products of unemployed parents, of divorce and downright poverty, tried desperately to find satisfaction in joyriding and class B drugs (which were barely affordable), cider-drinking in lanes, and underage sex.

Rebecca Trigianni is growing up in Wales, she idealizes her glamourous, alcoholic mother and is brutally raped by her step-father at the age of eleven. She is mostly neglected by her mother, and runs away with an older boyfriend at the age of fourteen immersing herself in a life of excesses and danger, until she is dragged back home and returns to school. She falls in love, takes a lot of drugs, gets her heart broken. She sees her rapist walk free. She becomes involved with an emotionally abusive boyfriend, and once that relationship ends Rebecca moves back in with her mother and her new boyfriend. It is only when caring for her dying grandmother that Rebecca realizes that despite everything that has happened to her, she still has her strength and determination, and that will enable her to survive.

Her story is powerful because it is told in her own voice, with all the impassioned urgency and emotional turmoil that involves. In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl isn’t so much about the story, although obviously that plays a huge part in how Rebecca sees the world and herself, but it is Trezise’s ability to convey the feelings of helplessness, loss and strength in Rebecca’s voice. Finally, a literary voice that echoes the sometimes manic energy of my own inner voice, the less than ideal surroundings and circumstance, the unromantic and honest portrayal of pain and heartbreak as utterly devastating. The description of the cultural and social landscape of the working class Welsh valley towns echo my own experience and feelings about where I grew up and live, the regular predictability, the helplessness and the need and the struggle to escape it, the trappings such an environment sets for its inhabitants. And all of this captured in brutal and lively writing.

I began to look at the place of my birth, growth and youth with double vision, one which looked down from above and saw through everyone and everything because I knew I could be bigger; and another vision at eye level which accepted these common, common people because I was afraid it was all I would ever be.
I always felt kind of like Alan Bennett, worrying whether I should be speaking properly or being myself, knowing too well that the difference between metropolitcan and provincial still exists. As his mother’s chance meeting with T.S. Eliot made him conscious of his working-class upbringing, my short visists to Nottingham city and Birmingham Bullring would perpetually remind me what a handicap it could be to grow up in a place like the Rhondda.
Before you had time to worry about what outsiders would think of your accent or your Welsh mannerisms, or your memories of quaint houses stuck together with walls so thin you could hear your neighbours having boring Rhondda missionary-position sex, you would have to worry about what your neighbours thought of you trying to get away from it.
I wanted so desperately to shatter the dreams of hometown people who only find respect for you if you give up the fight for originality. But if you stand out like a sore thumb, looking like you’re doing better than the next one, then someone will knock you down. How can you be the one to make the change in a place where nothing ever changes but the shoes?

The blunt pursuit of emotional honesty to herself and her readers, if not always for those in her life, makes Rebecca’s confessional voice one of the most convincing I’ve read in literature in a while, a deafening scream that refuses to go unheard. If my ramblings about In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl seem a little more fragmented than usual, I’m going to blame the lack of coherent notes. After reading Sixteen Shades of Crazy I thought I would just be keeping a casual eye out for more of Rachel Trezise’s work, but In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl has made me a Trezise devotee.

Shopgirl by Steve Martin (2000)

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Shopgirl by Steve Martin (2000)I zipped through Steve Martin’s – yes, that very same Steve Martin you’re thinking of – novella Shopgirl over the quiet afternoons of a weekend in December. A melancholic story set in Los Angeles of a lonely shopgirl in her late twenties, Mirabelle, and the two men who enter her life as romantic partners; Ray Porter, an older millionaire, and Jeremy, a younger slacker. Mirabelle works the glove counter at department store Neiman Marcus, and spends her evenings alone, chatting to her two cats and working on her art. Martin manages to capture the absolute tedium that often comes with working in retail. The style of third person omniscient narration used here can come across as condescendingly smug and often that creeps into Martin’s technique. For the most part, however, through his sparse writing, lack of significant dialogue and focus on the contradictions of internal thought processes Martin creates realistically flawed characters.

Weeks later, Mirabelle doesn’t know if she is feeling better naturally or because the Celexa is working. It feels like a natural lift, and she wonders if she needs the pills at all. But she isn’t stupid, and she recalls hearing that this is a common feeling, so she keeps taking the pills daily.

Mirabelle’s attempts to cope with her initial emotional isolation and her repeated bouts of significant depressive episodes are never overly exaggerated or stylized. Abstaining from the usual wailing histrionics in the description of Mirabelle’s depression elicits as much sympathy for her plight. These characters make mistakes, are ignorant to the motivations of others and yet not condemned for it. Such errors and flaws, and the subsequent lessons learned, give the characters more complexity than the slight narrative should allow. An unexpectedly affecting novella.

I zipped through Steve Martin’s – yes, that very same Steve Martin you’re thinking of – novella Shopgirl over the quiet afternoons of a weekend in December. A melancholic story set in Los Angeles of a lonely shopgirl in her late twenties, Mirabelle Butterfield, and the two men who enter her life as romantic partners; Ray Porter, an older millionaire, and Jeremy, a younger slacker. Mirabelle works the glove counter at department store Neiman Marcus, and spends her evenings alone, chatting to her two cats and working on her art. I generally have an issue with third person omniscient narration, it tends to cast everything with a condescending shadow, and often that aspect creeps into Martin’s narrative technique; for the most part, however, through his sparse writing, lack of significant dialogue and focus on the contradictions of internal thought processes Martin creates realistically flawed characters.

Mirabelle’s attempts to cope with her initial emotional isolation and her repeated bouts of significant depressive episodes are never overly exaggerated or stylized. Abstaining from the usual wailing histrionics in the description of Mirabelle’s depression elicits as much sympathy for her plight. These characters make mistakes, are ignorant to the motivations of others and yet not condemned for it. Such mistakes and flaws give them more complexity than the slight narrative should allow. An affecting novella,

Taming the Black Dog: A Guide to Overcoming Depression by Bev Aisbett (2000)

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Taming the Black Dog: A Guide to Overcoming Depression by Bev Aisbett (2000)

Taming the Black Dog: A Guide to Overcoming Depression by Bev Aisbett (2000)

Unlike 90% of the online population, I’m not entirely comfortable with exposing all my intimate, personal details on the web. I still believe in private and public, and find lamebook equal parts horrifying and laughable because of what people think is acceptable to share with their close and not so close friends and family. Reviewing this book is difficult in that it challenges my ideas about how much to talk about myself and what I’ve been going through – which are revealed because of why and how I came across this book. Obviously, someone doesn’t just pick up a title like this to pass the time on the public transit system or as a lighthearted beach read. So yes, my psychotherapist recommended I read this book because I, like so many others, suffer from depression.

Working upon Winston Churchill’s famous characterization of his depression as the black dog, Aisbett personifies depression as a dog. Written in as an easy to understand outline of the symptoms of depressions, illustrated by the dog character, Aisbett offers an unusually humourous look at depression. While reading it I was laughing out loud, admittedly also with tears in my eyes, at recognition of my own behaviour in this somewhat slovenly dog, cutely named Blackie. She recognizes the vicious cycles at work in depression, and offers the first steps necessary toward a recovery while at the same time making the reader aware of the difficulty in changing behaviour and thought patterns. I would have liked more in the way of guidance but understand that would be almost impossible because it is such a personal process. It is a lot easier to read about a cartoon dog changing his behaviour than it is to actually put that change into action, but Taming the Black Dog has given me another perspective on the suffering/healing process.