Patrick Flanery – I Am No One

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Book Review, I Am No One, Patrick Flanery

Through the looking glass, and down the rabbit hole : the world of the watcher and the watched

Patrick Flanery’s third novel takes the reader almost immediately into a shifting sands world.

We are never quite sure, for example, where the narrator, a middle-aged History Professor, now teaching film studies, back in New York after 10 years in Oxford, is, in time. He appears to move between a something-has-happened future, a present where something-is-about-to-happen, and his earlier, settled Oxford past. Except that he begins to take the lid off that past, and there are further shifts, Not least of which is identity and origin. Jeremy O’ Keefe is not allowed to be American in America – influenced by his 10 years in England, his fellow Americans are convinced he is a Brit, but, despite his attempts to ‘acculturate’ himself in England, he was firmly not allowed to forget he was American.

At the start of this book, O’ Keefe’s voice is measured, precise, almost pedantic, a correct, dry, considered and intelligent academic voice. O’Keefe (in the voice which Flanery gives him) is very much the didact, donnish, instructing the reader at all times. It’s a little like sitting in on a lecture, with cultural references offered, and you, as reader, are expected to engage and get the references. But this voice begins, subtly, but inexorably to shift, becoming a little waspish, sharp, sarcastic, full of asides that indicate that all is not quite as we, the readers, might assume about Jeremy O’ Keefe. Is this a narrator to be trusted? Is he an unreliable narrator? Might he be disordered, even deranged?

I was very quickly floundering, anxious, confused – and Flanery was deliberately taking me to that place, because this uneasy, doubting world, so different below its surface, is the world the narrator inhabits. A world where nothing is quite as it seems. Jeremy O’ Keefe appears to be under surveillance. And may have been so, for quite some time.

This is the theme of the book : the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance society, particularly in democracies. Surveillance is not only something confined to totalitarian societies. Developed democracies, and advanced technology allowing advanced surveillance. coexist and feed each other. Watching, being watched.

Flanery is a wonderfully crafted writer who writes ‘about stuff – big stuff’, but, at least in his first two novels, without polemic. Character, place, narrative, relationship, authenticity in character, voice and action are the authentic containers for the philosophical ideas Flanery wishes to explore.

Unfortunately, with this, his third book, I began to feel, from about half way through the book, that the ‘about’ had become more central than the fictional framework.

Something Flanery has done brilliantly in his previous novels, is to offer complexity through having more than one narrator, more than one point of view, each of which is fully engaged in, so that a depth and range of arguments can be explored. In I Am No One, we really are only taken into Jeremy’s point of view. Initially, whilst O’ Keefe is unsure what it going on, and it seems as if he could be having some problems with his memory – at least, this is his initial, quite rational conclusion – the reader is satisfyingly presented with a few choices: Is Jeremy a reliable narrator? Are the things which are happening really happening? Is he suffering from paranoia? Does he have some neurological physiological or psychological trauma? Is he perhaps suffering from paranoia and yet right to be paranoid, because the things that are happening are real?

So far, so good. We learn, fairly early on, that Jeremy is writing the sequence of events which are happening, for some reason. There comes a point as he begins to reveal more of his past to the reader (and whoever, in the novel might be the recipient of his writing) where we see what the answers to all the above questions might be. And most importantly, some of the revelations the reader is given not only answer our questions about what is going on, but, surely (as Jeremy knows his own history) would have answered his own questions, too, at an earlier stage. Without plot spoilers, which I don’t want to indulge in, it is difficult to explain. But the result is the wonderful unsureness which the reader experienced before Jeremy comes clean about what is happening retrospectively, then has to seem authorial contrivance (Flanery’s). And as O’Keefe is a history professor with a particular interest in surveillance society – he specialised in the Stasi – he knows what might alarm States. I felt as if the ‘ambiguities’ about what was going on, as far as the reader is concerned, were being artificially maintained for us, by Flanery, and I couldn’t quite believe the narrator’s questioning of the ambiguity of what was going on, in terms of is-it-real-or-am-I-imagining-this?

A further example of where I think Flanery ended up fumbling and dropping the balls he was juggling, is the often resurfacing dark hints which Jeremy drops about how, at an earlier stage in his academic life, before Oxford, he failed to get tenure in his previous post in American academia. The narrator returns to that, time and again, and I kept waiting for the revelation of what had happened. But it never comes.

It’s been a real struggle to review this. Patrick Flanery is a wonderful writer, and I Am No One is still a good and important book. Unlike his earlier books, however, I think this one is more of a cerebral book, challenging to the intellect alone. One of Flanery’s strengths as a writer is to take the reader into the mind, heart, gut of his central characters, to come inside their idea of the world, to understand and believe their authenticity. It was accepting O’Keefe’s authenticity which I began to struggle with after the ’I-won’t-reveal-the-spoiler’.

Part of the problem is that Jeremy, being the man he is, rather stands outside his own emotional and visceral experience. There is a kind of aloofness in his voice. He observes himself, and doesn’t quite come close inside himself. He is more of a watcher, and we don’t have anyone else presented from their ‘inside’ – we only have Jeremy’s view of how they are viewing him.

I suspect, had I never read any Patrick Flanery before, I may have liked this more warmly and enthusiastically than I do. I don’t think I would have surrendered to it, I don’t think I would have loved it, but I would have liked it more decisively – because I would not have those two extraordinary novels to make comparisons with, and would not have seen what I am missing, with this. That I believe it is worth reading is given that, until about half way through, even this early in the year, I thought this was going to be one of my books of the year, which both previous novels had easily been

Do read it – even in my disappointment I can see how good a writer Flanery always is, and this is still a pertinent and thought provoking novel.  And then, if you don’t know them already, do read Absolution, and do read Fallen Land.

I wait, eagerly, for Flanery’s next novel

I received this as an ARC from the publisher, Atlantic Books

Although the book is available in hardback and Kindle in the UK from February 4th, American readers will have to wait until July for a wood book copy, though the Kindle is available from 4th February

I Am No One Amazon UK
I Am No One Amazon USA

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Bret Easton Ellis as a launching pad for a Rant on the beauty of dapple!

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Bret Easton Ellis, Chaim Soutine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Flanery, Soapbox, Stephen Sondheim, William Blake

I have just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules Of Attraction, which will not appear as a review on this blog, as I only blog what I am recommending (for the interested, the Amazons do carry reviews of what I disliked as well as what I raved about)

And I cordially loathed ROA. The choice of adverb is crucial – I loathed it through the heart, because it has no heart. Yes, I see what Easton Ellis is doing, laying out the spoils of a wasted, superficial, whining, shallow, self-obsessed, privileged group of Fratters at an American campus university in the 80s, but the problem is that Easton Ellis exposes their puerile, meaningless, unlikeable mass persona through an endless and superficial sneer mask.

One thing my reading did do, however (so well done, Ellis, there) is that it gave me days of impassioned debate and self-reflection on many things, thus fulfilling one of the purposes of art – to awaken, to make the reader/listener/observer notice, to make them think, respond, debate, engage.

And sometimes, what is perceived as ‘not good’ by the consumer of the art-work challenges much more than what reinforces or deepens one’s existing philosophies

Rules of Attraction is an unending expose of superficiality. The unlikeable characters are unvarying in their endless progression of barfing, whining about getting meaningless leg-overs or not getting meaningless leg overs. Pretty loathsome, there is no sense of the writer engaging with them, going below their surface. I guess he dismisses his characters as being no more than their boring and self-indulgent self-obsessions. A couple of thoughts surfaced on this, Firstly, I have never met anyone who is unremittingly one-note.

What is fascinating about living creatures, and the more complex those creatures are, the more they become fascinating in this way – and a self-aware being most of all – is the ‘dappleness’ of them. For what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘Pied Beauty’

All things counter, original, spare, strange

No one is either/or; all are and, and, and then more and. Take the time to explore any individual, and this leads to constant surprise, and anyone and everyone will yield they are more, much more, than the sum of their perceived parts – whether you have placed them on the side of the angels or the devil-with-all-the-best-tunes.

Where I say my loathing of Easton Ellis’s book is ‘cordial’ it is precisely through its shallow, superficial view. I really don’t like or have much time for those anguished over-privileged souls who are going through that stage where they are living in a constant in your face scream of over-indulgent self-mutilation. But Tell me, or better still, show me something NEW about them Mr Ellis – dismissing the ‘other’ is so very easy to do, smugly judging from my own superior sensibility is effortless. What I want from art is to shock me out of complacent dismissal of other – and make me see and feel them, make me walk some distance in their shoes. Take me to that uncomfortable, challenging place, rather than the easy, superior dismissal.

Great writing, in my book, humanises the subjects being written about – however base or noble they may appear, they need fleshing with the complexity of us all. We all know that we are not ‘just’ whatever facets of ourselves are visible, even to ourselves. Complex living creatures are full of surprise, and self-surprise

One of the facets I most valued in a sadly underrated, under-hyped book I read earlier this year, Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land, is that he was able to take an extremely unlikeable central character, and without in any way condoning him, wrote him (indeed, possesses the gift to write all his characters) from within their experience, rather than the lordly creator god in judgement. Flanery writes ‘dapple’ – inhabiting a character both from outside (through the eyes of other) and from inside.

Ellis is writing, I think, from a sensibility of ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short’ – and moreover, sometimes ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short-but-feels-as-if-it-endures-painfully-for-an-aeon’

And, of course, this is  A truth – this is indeed (the awareness of our mortality, existential despair and unease, sometimes overwhelming) part of what drives the nasty, and the brutish (the endless barf, the endless meaningless leg over as an attempt to deny that awareness, or escape it), but is only a very partial truth. The Hollywood bows and happy wrap ending is, sure, superficial and childish, immature – BUT so is the unremitting savagery and wastedness. The all dark and the all happy clappy equally missing – by miles, the infinitely more complex and difficult, challenging and confusing, nature of reality

I am more interested in art which makes me see within the surface of ugliness to find the surprise of beauty. The French painter Soutine, endlessly painting decaying meat, performed this  feat, rendering the response of disgust into seeing  something new, some vibrant life in death

Sometimes it seems as if our tastes have become so very jaded that all we are able to respond to is the shock of being relentlessly beaten over the head with a hammer. Shock is relatively easy to achieve – just shout  ‘Boo’ in the ear of the unwary – surprise is something rather more subtle.

Sometimes it seems as if being edgy, in your face and shouting a lot gets mistaken for the voice of authenticity; reality seen as only the nasty.

Show me the maggot at the heart of the Rose, the invisible worm, fine. But do at least show me the Rose as well.

Life affirming art is neither the chocolate boxy saccharine nor the unremitting display of meaningless degradation. Rather, life affirmation connects with reality (whether in that affirmation as lived, or created in art to show us the affirmation) precisely because it accepts the all-that-is – the deep despair that lies beneath the curiously unquenchable joy, the sweet intensity of an incandescent moment which is incandescent precisely because ‘this too will pass’ We are all on borrowed time.

kuddlyteddybear’s 2004 photostream, Flicr, Commons

What is it that is so compelling to us, about sunsets but the sense of blaze and despair combined, at the dying of the light – something primeval gets touched. I believe in oppositions, rather than the easy way of this OR that, as I see the oppositions and the reconciliations which they contain, all around.

I think of the wonderful, life affirming musical by Stephen Sondheim, Sunday In The Park with George, which captures so beautifully what it is that is important – the embracing of the fullness of the moment, finding a way to touch, with meaning, the little space and time allotted to us. The song ‘Children and Art‘ illustrating this perfectly

And (how wonderful) – someone has uploaded the TV version of the production, starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, in its entirety on You Tube! What i appreciate about Sondheim is the edge between the pain and the joy of the moment, and the acceptance that both ARE.
(the music does not start till after the titles and scrolling introduction)

However, it took the ire I felt at the dead inhumanity (as i see it) of Ellis’ vision to bludgeon me into a meaningful (for myself, at least) reflection on reality, and creative vision. So, if not quite respeck, at least thanks.

Patrick Flanery – Fallen Land. It’s publication day!

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Book Review, Fallen Land, Patrick Flanery

It’s release day in the UK – and finally I’ll be able to have a discussion about it with more than the one person I know who also had an advance copy. Well in a few days anyway. A preview copy, with a book this good, is a mixed blessing as of course you want to be sharing the experience ! Here is my original review

Patrick Flanery – Fallen Land

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Book Review, Dystopia, Fallen Land, Literary Fiction, Novels about America, Patrick Flanery

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water”
T.S. Eliot The Wasteland

Patrick Flanery begins his second novel, Fallen Land, with an immediate account of brutal, planned violence, recounted in cool, restrained, ungratuitous language. The year is 1919, and the violence is in America, in a wave of race riots. Flanery’s refusal to linger or indulge in overblown language to describe the events which start this novel, adds to the immediate shock and horror felt by the reader. His cool, dispassionate writing serves to underline a theme which runs through the novel – there is a quotidian violence at the heart of America, underneath its golden dreams of itself, there is always a darker history of blood, fear and hatred.

Jump forward to the post 9/11 world, the legacy of that violence still forms part of the breast milk of America’s dreams of itself, the land of the free, of opportunity – but its riches are built on the backs of the unfree, on land taken away, on land worked by others who were stolen from their own lands to work as slave labour for those who stole the land from the indigenous people

But this is no easy polemic, no easy bleeding heart liberal piece of writing, designed to make the reader feel good about themselves because THEY do not inhabit that world of casual racism and exploitation. As in his previous book, Absolution, Flanery is adept at working into the rounded, complex nature of a human being, forcing us to realise we cannot easily take the simplistic view of ‘me good, you bad’ – he constantly worms his way into the rot at the heart of the golden apple, and conversely the seam of gold inside the epitome of rank destruction.

One of his central characters, the architect and proto psychopath Paul Krovik, is himself part of that immigrant heritage that came to America in pursuit of that golden dream of the land of the free. Brutal, misguided, deranged he may be – but we are forced to inhabit the noble golden dreams which led to Krovik’s dark choices and downfall. The reader knows, from the start, this man is evil – but Flanery makes us look further and more deeply.

Set against the dysfunction of a society turning its back on the past, turning its back on its own evolutionary history, its connection to life and the land, is the keeper of connection the first person narrator of her story, and of what is human, humane, humanity, Louise Washington, descendant of those slaves.

Louise allows Flanery another voice – that of beauty, imagination, the power and magic of words, often taken for granted in the way the land itself has been taken for granted. Only Louise represents a thin hope for the future, holding a respect for the raped and fallen land, its trees, our ancestors, a living connection to the past, the fecund earth, before the American dream which was built on an idea of ‘the land’ but, without respect for the reality of ‘Gaia’, tarmacs over that complex, textured earth.

Flanery is, I fear, also writing the world we are busily creating, where the greedy maw of global corporate culture grinds up and destroys our unique, individual, messy, unconformist living human animal expression, leaving us robotic and without soul. Louise, and the two ‘dysfunctional’ children (read: real) Copley and Joslyn, may not be enough to stop us walking voluntarily into the machine

This is an EXTRAORDINARY book, about so many things, with so many layers, impossible to do justice to without spoiling and inhibiting the journey of discovery each reader will make. It has an absorbing story, a narrative, it has complex, interesting and well-drawn characters, it has language which is appropriate to character, subtle, textured and poetic when needed, plain and pared back when needed, it has complex and rich ideas, content and form. To read it, is to make a journey where you believe you are travelling in one way, to one destination, and suddenly you reach a view above the trees and realise there is a whole new vista and the view you have come from is not, after all, all there is. Layers upon layers unfold – but here is the magic – the book is all of a piece with itself.

Sometimes, superlatives cannot even begin to scratch the surface of how good a book is, or why.

Straddling and defying genres impeccably – thriller/crime, science fiction,  literary fiction, my only reservation – and it is a big one – is – what on earth can I now read, that will not seem thin, pale, and not worth the time spent on it?. I do hope Patrick Flanery is working very diligently indeed on book number 3 – perhaps I should just slowly re-read Absolution again while I wait……………….

I am very grateful indeed to have received this review copy
And even more grateful to a fellow friend and Amazon reviewer Fiction Fan, who initially alerted me to Flanery in the first place – her review had me desperate to get this!

Fallen Land Amazon UK
Fallen Land Amazon USA

Patrick Flanery – Absolution.

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Absolution, Book Review, Literary Fiction, Patrick Flanery, South African writing or setting

Where reality and narrative meet, interweave, tangle and entwine

Absolution was one of the best novels I had read in a while, and it continued to haunt me after finishing it. What is particularly remarkable is that this is the author’s first novel. How did Flanery manage something this complex and assured, and written so sparely and without self-indulgence – the writing itself has clarity which reminds me of Damon Galgut, a writer FROM South Africa. Flanery, writing ABOUT South Africa, has a similar voice, but is American born and bred, now UK resident, but he `feels’ like a Southern Africa writer, in intensity, political engagement, and sense of space and isolation: Galgut, Paton, and most particularly `Rhodesian’ born Doris Lessing.

Lessing is the writer this book most reminds me of, not just because the central character, Clare Wald, is a writer, writing a layered Lessing like book, Absolution, about the interface between personal and political history, but also because of certain structural similarities to Lessing’s hugely groundbreaking 70’s novel, The Golden Notebook, which contained many interweaving separate stories, written by the central character, so that the book was as much about writing, and the interface between reality, what is and what is not `objectively’ real, and how we all interpret out-there reality to form a subjective reality.

Absolution’s meta-story is a biography of the writer Wald, which is being written by a South African currently resident in America, Sam Leroux. Wald is mysterious, complex, layered, with a dark personal history, a political engagement against apartheid, which spans her parent’s and her children’s generations. She is writing a novel, Absolution, which may or may not be fiction, and includes, or may not include, autobiography. In order to write her book, she uses notebooks left by her mysteriously vanished politically activist daughter. The biographer Leroux also has his own troubled history with South Africa, and with Wald. So, like The Golden Notebook, we have several stories, and read each of them interwoven, Sam’s voice, recounting his past, his present, his dark secrets, his connection with Wald, Clare Wald’s account of her present, her past, and her secrets, the novel culled from some autobiographical events which may or may not have been used fictionally, Absolution, and various dated accounts which represent versions of reality and may have come from Wald’s daughter’s notebooks, but are also various representations of Sam’s reality. Who is of course also a writer.

Lest this sound impossibly convoluted, Flanery’s skill is to understand that the complex subject matter needs clear telling, to keep the reader able to let the various strands and versions of reality interweave and knot. In a sense, the point is not to try and work out which reality is real and which is the fiction of the writers, it is to accept that we all work and rework our personal history, our motivations for our actions, and the place we take in our own time and place, and how that intersects with the `objective reality’ of the time and place we live in. `Truth’ – the what happened, why did it happen is not linear, it is approached from perspectives.

A fabulous book, written by someone who does not appear to be in the process of becoming a wonderful writer, but has sprung into being fully formed

Absolution