Georgina Harding – Painter of Silence

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Book Review, Georgina Harding, Literary Fiction, Painter of Silence, Romania

Another kind of golden landscape

Georgina Harding has a wonderful gift for the evocation of time, place and the physical heft and weave of life. I read, with absorption, her previous 2 novels The Spy Game, and The Solitude of Thomas Cave, where her use of language, her quiet and rich ability to really inhabit another person’s truthful, unique inner landscape, was mesmerising.

With those earlier 2 books, I got so far, so very far, but could not go to the final 5th star, ‘ I love this’ as something, in each case, did not completely work

With her third book, 5 stars seem mean!

Set in Romania, before the second world war, and finishing some years later, when grim, Stalinist Communism had placed other changes upon that country, her central character is a young, deaf mute baby at the start, child of a servant in the great house, and the parallel life this child, and the daughter of the great house, inhabit. Childhood in the house for both of the infants, who are close in age and in friendship, is described in ways which evoke the much written about Edwardian landscape of pre first world war England – except that we have a much more unchanged, less modern world, in Romania. The children grow, and Tinu, the young boy, finds ways of seeing, interpreting and communicating the world through drawings.

It is a fascinating book. The central character is wordless, and those around him find a strange freedom to share their thoughts because he cannot hear or speak them.

Although a huge narration is happening in the book – the large historical events, much of it a dreadful history, Harding does not dwell on the narrative – changes are experienced by snapshot images – she is a real adept at show-not-tell – for example, the couple in the city, and the relationship of fear and control set up by the Party machinery. She does not describe the interior landscape of her characters in dramatic language, there are these quiet pictures, postures, details, which reveal everything.She is a cool, unjudgemental, compassionate writer, with no self-indulgence, and her descriptions of the very texture and presence of trees, cups, paper, dust and the matter of things is powerful. Tinu, as child and man, really experiences the physicality of the world in a totally present, almost meditative way – and Harding makes the reader do the same

Map and photo of Romania: Wikimedia commons
Painter of Silence Amazon UK
Painter of Silence Amazon USA

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John Wyndham – The Chrysalids

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Book Review, John Wyndham, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Chrysalids

Examining society through science fiction

I first read this years ago, and though I have thought that as a genre science fiction is not something I’m particularly interested in, of course, in the hands of a fine writer (Wyndham was) it provides a brilliant way of taking a more reflective look at our own society.

Written in the 50s, where the grim realities of the devastation of war, the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the use of propaganda and control were hugely in use – the Cold War creating bogeymen from both sides of the Iron Curtain – this dystopian view of a world destroyed by some long ago catastrophe (clearly the fall out from nuclear Armageddon) must have seemed particularly potent.

Society is once again primitive and there is total control exercised by fundamentalist Christianity – its like going back to the seventeenth century and the fear of witchcraft – except the society being pictured is clearly both the America of McCarthyism and the Russia of Stalin. Here, birth defects (caused, the reader quickly realises, through the effects of widespread deviation) are feared, seen as evidence of God’s punishment and disfavour. Such deviation from the norm – whether in humans, other animals or vegetables, must be destroyed.

But what about deviation which may not be visible – a deviation of thought – here is where the parallels between the McCarthy witchhunts and their terror of reds under the bed, and those reds’ own terror of deviation from received thinking – become clear.

Wyndham wraps this all together in an exciting plot-line, with the central characters, and the hopes for a better future, residing in the young.

He is far more than a polemicist – the philosophical considerations arise perfectly from within the characters themselves. He is that wonderful mixture – a superb storyteller, a creator of interesting and layered characters, and a writer with something to say.

This is enough to make me want to revisit all the other post war, on-the-edge-of-a-nuclear-apocalypse territory writing Wyndham created. I never particularly think of Wyndham as a science fiction writer (which he is) but purely as a writer. And a very fine one, at that

The jacket shown here is of a version available in the States with a foreword by another wonderful, thought provoking SF writer, Christopher Priest
The Chrysalids Amazon UK
The Chrysalids Amazon USA

Randy Taguchi – Fujisan

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Book Review, Fujisan, Japanese writer, Randy Taguchi, Short stories

Highly enjoyable, uncomfortable, alienation

Fujisan is a collection of 4 stories with the brooding, beautiful, symbolic and spiritually charged presence of Mount Fuji at its heart.

This is fine, precise writing, clear and often casually shocking. The central characters in each story – the manager of a convenience store, previously a member of a spiritual cult; a group of teenage boys obsessed with the dark side of the psyche – ghosts, the cult of suicide; a beautiful young man with an emptiness and violence at his heart; a nurse working in gynaecology alongside both birth and death, all have a certain similarity, of an almost shellac brittle exterior, through which surges all sorts of repressed and partially repressed violence and secrecy.

The characters are all loners, to some extent, but preserve acceptable veneers. The mountain speaks to each of them, or they use it, in some way, to project aspects of their own nature on to.
It is the casual weaving in of the fascination of suicide, the brutality and sadism of thought or action, the contrast between the delicacy, spareness and refinement of Japanese art, for example, and this expression of an almost matter of fact brutality of certain aspects of the culture – seppuku, for example, and how that has a cult value accorded. It is the difference between the spareness of the writing, and at times the violence and brutality which is being written about which is so alien and unsettling. The stories express loneliness, disengagement, have a nihilism about them – and yet have this strange purity. A fascinating, unsettling read – a bit like pulling on wet clothes, and finding discomfort at the edge of your skin, so that the clothes not quite settling right almost translates to an unsettling feeling in your own skin, so that your own, known, edges, are somehow suddenly revealed to you

Mount Fuji photos – Wikimedia commons
Fujisan Amazon UK
Fujisan Amazon UK