Dan Vyleta – Smoke

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Book Review, Dan Vyleta, Dystopia, Smoke, Young Adult Fiction

Reservations about beginning section and how it careers towards ‘action wrap’ : the ‘filling’ in the sandwich hooked me completely

Reading Dan Vyleta’s Smoke has been a sometimes absorbing, sometimes slightly frustrating experience

The dust-jacket blurb, which I feel is somewhat misleading, would have made me pass on by – it suggests this is a YA book, it suggests there will be magic. There is a kind of truth to the former. Though the central characters in the book are certainly mid-teens, privileged, and attending schools where the offspring of the privileged and wealthy are sent, this is no school for fledgling magicians (the ’if you liked’ Rowling hook) . I can see certain similarities – the literary, gothic imagination – with Pullman, though other than the original concept – the presence of sin and more sinisterly – sinful thoughts – made visible, almost everything else comes from science and politics, albeit in an altered world.

The hook of the book for me was Vyleta as author. I admired The Quiet Twin, his dark, rather Kafkaesque, look at life in a Viennese tenement square of apartments, circa 1939. It was mordant, real, and grotesque.

To some extent Smoke, set in a kind of alternative, steam-punkish late nineteenth century Victorian universe, has many of the wonderful, eccentric, imaginative strengths of his earlier writing. Vyleta’s dark, rich imagination, and the adventure, problem solving, ‘detection’ narrative drive of the book, to uncover a mystery about how this society is organised, serves as a terrific vehicle to examine aspects of our own, as well as an earlier society’s politics of privilege structure, and heading-towards-dystopia-and-control science

In Vyleta’s book, the central characters engaged in the quest are two friends, both at a privileged school in Oxford. Charlie is a genuinely ‘good’ boy, kindly, loyal, intelligent, compassionate. He comes from one of the very privileged and wealthy families in this world who make up (some things never change!) the ruling class. Most of the politicians and movers and shakers have come from this privileged educational background. Educated at the best private schools they will go on to the best Universities. Privilege and wealth will also give them access to all sorts of darker advantages. Thomas is his friend, a damaged boy, also privileged, but the whiff of dangerous subversion hangs around him. I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If ‘ on one level. Set against Thomas is the gooder-than-gold Head Boy. Unlike the truly laudable Charlie, Julius is absolutely not as he seems.

In very Victorian fashion, the underclass are despised and feared (has this quite passed, in our current society?)

The conceit that structures the book links sinfulness (which becomes visible as the thoughts of sin are revealed by the sinner emitting smoke) as very much something which that underclass inhabit – their sins and degradations are highly visible. The whole purpose of the elite’s schooling is to force sublimation of sin and sinful thinking. The aristocracy hardly emit smoke, so the lower classes are presented with daily reminders of their own inferiority.

However, as in ‘If’ resistance and revolution, and its possibilities can arise from everywhere. There are some mysteries to be uncovered, as Thomas too is not quite as he seems. Two friends, an enemy – and a girl. Livia is the daughter of an extremely privileged woman, Lady Naylor, who is also a radical, highly intelligent, highly influential, and a scientist. Livia has an utter compulsion to ‘goodness’ and is quite priggish. In a neat twist the mother is more ambivalent, and wishes her daughter were less rigidly sublimating and repressing – certain parallels to eating disorders suggest themselves.

                                     Crystal Palace

I was fascinated by the way Vyleta weaves politics, class, religion, social control, rebellion, science together, and his skilful using both of what is real, and of what might arise from reality with a slightly altered science behind it.

What did not work for me as an adult reader were the more luridly dramatic inevitable battles between good and evil, which became a little cartoonish for my adult tastes.

The beginning of the book, the setting out of the world is a little slow and ponderous, and might even mean that its perhaps intended audience does not stick with the book, once past the opening, and once I had accepted the premise, I found the central section becoming engaging, but did find myself disengaged (as is usual for me) by the inevitable battles, fights, and all the rest – the kind of event in Hollywood movies where with more than physically possible mortal wounds the heroes, anti-heroes and villains are able to miraculously somehow continue their deadly fisticuffs over and over, streaming blood etc etc.

I guess also the ‘love triangle’ at times felt a little predictable, but Vyleta did have a very interesting take on it.

Does it/ will it fall between the stools of YA and adult audience, or will it also satisfy both? This is what I can’t quite decide. The ‘filling’ as in a sandwich, I found fed me well as a reader, I had reservations about the two quite different kinds of bread, beginning and end!

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK. Curiously, it will be released Kindle only in the UK on 24th May, and not available, wood, till July, whilst that May date sees publication wood book in the States, but no digital release pending.

AND an earlier request for this on NetGalley was also granted later. Thanks NG, thanks Vine!

Smoke Amazon UK
Smoke Amazon USA

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Dan Vyleta – The Quiet Twin

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1939, Anschluss, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dan Vyleta, Expressionism, The Quiet Twin, Vienna

Enter the world of sordid, savage, scary and seductively vibrant Vienna, 1939.

Dan Vyleta’s brilliant, darkly comic, horribly menacing The Quiet Twin, for sure shows his Slavic roots. Vyleta is the child of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He now lives in Canada – but his writing, its menace, its unexplained weirdness, its mixture of brutal savagery and unexpected tenderness, reminds me of Kafka – and also of Gogol.

The Quiet Twin is set in Vienna, in 1939. And the setting is in a place of menace, through historical time and place, although there is the whisper of Vienna’s more cultured, classier history overlaid. However the arts have now turned bawdier, edgier, and primal desires have sprung free from refinement.

The room was much like Speckstein’s living room, furnished in the tasteful pomp of an empire now defunct. There were more bookshelves here, a long-case clock, and a gynaecological chair of the type that had been popular in the 1890s: green upholstery leather and ebony leg-rests to assist the parting of the knees; the headrest shiny from long years of use. The desk was strewn with notebooks and clothbound files, the bronze head of Mozart weighing down a sheaf of notes. There was also a Chinese vase, chipped at the rim, and a tasteful charcoal nude; Speckstein’s portrait, arm in arm with his mama. Behind them, from the hook on the half-closed door, hung his uniform, like the shadow of another man

As I read, I could clearly visualise the paintings of German expressionist Georg Grosz, and also hear the songs of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, in their collaborations with Bertholt Brecht. The paintings, the songs, and this novel are all full of savagery, discordance and a brutal vitality as well

       Heldenplatz, 1938 Anschluss declaration. Wiki Commons

Set largely in a tenement square of flats, the story starts when Doctor Beer, a kindly and well-meaning, (generally) man (though one with some secrets), whose wife has recently left him – we will discover why, later – is asked to investigate the murder of a dog, by a former professional mentor, Professor Speckstein. Speckstein, in this watchful, paranoid society, is a Nazi Party member. Beer is striving to avoid allegiance, in an atmosphere of growing totalitarianism. Speckstein also has things to hide. Everyone does. There have been, and continue to be, addictional, random seeming murders, mainly by knifing, and there seems to be a connection which suggests that the victims are Party members – or might that be one of the many red herrings?

Here is a wonderful collage of Grosz’s artworks, and suitably music-of-time-and-place acompaniment

Other central characters drawn into this horribly sticky, sordid world-web are Speckstein’s febrile neurasthenic niece, Zuzka, his grim and watchful housekeeper, Frau Versalius, a curiously trustful crippled girl, Anneliese, whom everyone seems to appreciate, despite the fact that various directives of Fascism are looming, inspired by eugenic theories of Aryan perfection. There is also a man whom Zuzka obsessively observed across the tenement. A man who strips, who has a white masked face, and also a knife.

Actually – almost everyone has a knife, and pretty soon, the reader, like Beer, and like all the characters will be in a frenzy of suspicion, this way and that. Almost anyone might be a murderer, almost anyone might have a motive – or might have no motive, but a predilection for murder.

Beer has an interest and a skill in psychology, and has studied and become something of a specialist in serial killers, and sociopathy. Interspersed in the story are accounts of some of the real killers of the time, culled from Beer’s study books. His investigative skills into pathopsychology and profiling will be called on, not only by Speckstein, wanting to find who knifed his dog, but by the police, trying to either solve the crimes, or at least, find someone to pin the crimes on. Everyone is at least a little dirty, at least a little soiled, either in motive, or in action.

As this IS a totalitarian society, everyone is suspicious of everyone, everyone seems to have secrets which somebody else might exploit. And no one is ever quite whom they seem – the ‘good’ may be not quite so good, and even those we might be quite sure are ‘bad’ might be redeemable or even lovable, in someone else’s eyes. To add further strange noirish eccentricity into the mix, there is also a Japanese trumpeter. Of course.

To my mind, this extract from a young Lotte Lenya in the original 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera, is more chilling by far than other versions – it is the contrast between her sweet, girlish voice and light, soubrette style, passionless delivery, and the lyrics. Not to mention the atmospheric cinematography

I can’t do justice enough to this wonderful, sombre, scary, quirky literary ‘crime’ thriller. There is so much life, so much atmosphere, such a wonderfully convoluted plot, and a sense of real menace, as well as very, very black humour. The characters are strange (very) and yet believable, as well as stylised. There is even a hedgehog, Prince Yussuf, not to mention Kaiser San, a battered teddy bear. This is NOT magic realism, not at all (I know some hate the genre) – but it is expressionistic (hence, the connection to the horrid, beguiling, hard-hitting, messy world of Georg Grosz artworks.

I will be exploring Vyleta’s back and subsequent works, for sure. And listening to a lot of Brecht Weill and Brecht Eisler songs! Recommended. Absolutely.

The Quiet Twin Amazon UK
The Quiet Twin Amazon UK