John Updike, "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959), "Rabbit, Run" (1960)

I've spent the last howevermany months reading lots, and I mean lots, of new Fantasy novels, on account of me being one of the World Fantasy Judges this year. But now that we're into the horse-trading part of the process I decided to change-is-as-good-as-a-rest things, and reread, and in some cases read, some Updike. To that end I treated myself to the new Library of America edition of Updike's first four.

I hadn't previously read Updike's debut novel The Poorhouse Fair (1959). I now have and ... golly but it's bad. It's actively bad. It's actually very bad. The thing is: going straight from that to rereading Rabbit, Run (1960), I was struck by how good the second novel is, even better than I remember. I'm not sure I can think of another writer with such a precipitous step-up from bad first to extraordinary second novel, really. Can you?

Poorhouse Fair is, in a thin sort of way, science-fiction, set as it is in a near-future (1970s-ish) socialist America. There are glancing asides referencing this, but nothing so substantial as worldbuilding, and the actual paraphernalia of the tale is all solidly 1950s: old people at a state-run retirement facility, moping about and kvetching at the officious young administrator who rules them, Stephen Conner. It looks like their fair, at which the poorhouse's inhabitants sell food, trinkets and quilts to people from the local town, might have to be called off because of the weather. In the end, though, it goes ahead. The oldsters moan about various things: food, chairs, modern society, a diseased cat, an escaped parrot, how Conner isn't as good as the previous administrator, Mendelssohn. A delivery driver, backing his truck in through the poorhouse's narrow gateway, knocks part of the wall down. Various petty grievances come to a head at this, and a number of the old folk pick up some of these stones and chuck them at Conner, but in a pretty desultory way, and he's not badly hurt.

The book opens with old people grumbling because Conner has added name-tags to their porch chairs, to prevent them bickering over who sits where, a development they dislike. It ends with a long passage comprised of the various unattributed voices of visitors at the fair talking, decontextualised and juxtaposed so as to provide a train of jaw-jaw nonsequiturs. The unelected leader, or at least voice of moral authority in the home, is nonagenerian Joe Hook.  Joe talks a lot about God and Conner talks a lot about atheistical materialist utilitarianism and somewhere in the middle, Updike implies, with a certain hoofing obviousness, is the possibility of something J + C Christlike, something that could finally leave the Jewishly-named Mendelssohn behind. It is a possibility of redemption and forgiveness on which the novel never quite delivers. The interpretive superstructure the novel invites us to erect upon its base is, I'm afraid, as schematic and arid as this.

In fact there are two levels of badness here. One is that Updike is not yet quite in charge of his instrument. The book, though short, is dull, stilted, not so much badly paced as not paced at all. The characters are sketched-in, unmemorable and in some cases indistinguishable. The dialogue (generally handled pretty well in Updike's maturer novels) is here mannered and awkward. Hook speaks in a creaky old-time preacher idiom, his diction hyphenated to notate its slowness (‘we must bide our time, for any size-able mo-tion on our part will make Conner that much more in-secure’ [8] etc) like TikTok the Clockwork Man from Oz. Conner himself speaks in excerpts from an ongoing university lecture on humanism. Worse of all, Updike's descriptive prose, the jewel in his fully-formed writer's crown, here feels strained:

The river's apparent whiteness was dissolved in its evident transparency; the contours of bars of silt and industrial waste could easily be read beneath the gliding robe of water. A submerged bottle reflected sunlight. Occasionally, among the opaque fans of corrugation spread by each strand of shore growth, the heavy oblong of a catfish could be spied drifting. [5]

This passage can't make up its mind as to whether the water is ‘white’ (‘opaque’) or an ‘evident transparency’. ‘Gliding robe’ seems to me unconvincing (in what sense do robes glide, after all?) and ‘heavy oblong’ isn't quite on the nose as a description of a catfish. Worst of all is that underlying rhythm, a sort of pastiche blank-verse, as it might be:

A submerged bottle reflected sunlight.
Occasionally, among the opaque fans
Of corrugation spread by each strand of
Shore growth, the heavy oblong of a catfish
Could be spied, drifting.

... and so on. The odour of weak poetry in little magazines, here. Not, I think, a good thing.

To turn from this to the opening few pages of Rabbit Run is to breathe fresh air and brilliance. Here Harry Angstrom stopping by on his way home from work to watch some kids playing the game he used to play, as a kid (and at which he excelled: the only thing in his life of which he can say that):

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up. ... There are six of them and one of him.

The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. ‘Hey!’ he shouts in pride. ‘Luck,’ one of the kids says.

This is much more immediate and kinetic writing, sharp and lovely. The continuous present tense helps (perhaps more striking and obviously experimental in 1960 than it is today, when every third novel employs it) but also Updike manages to nail his Joycean staccato sometimes-verbless sentences to relevant and on-the-bounce detail. The quasi-poetic estrangements work better too, are better chosen: the crotch of the basketball hoop, the ladylike whisper of its net. It's not over-obvious, but neither is it far-fetched or baffling.

This is another, larger sense in which Poorhouse Fair fails, I think. It's a novel about America (that's fair enough, of course). But the way it tropes that country is as a decrepitude: a nation declining into the vale of years, with nothing but dusty-souled materialists and socialists to inherit its promise. This is, I'd say, just wrong. I mean, wrong as a way of characterising 1950s in the USA, aesthetically as much as anything. Nabokov's Lolita (published four years earlier in Paris, although not in the States until 1967) tropes America as a luscious nymphet, but that's an outsider's, a European's perspective. Updike in Rabbit, Run lights on something cleverer: America is not a 90-something godfearing old geezer, but neither is it an alluring teenager. It's an adult, but one who hasn't properly grown-up. America is, in other words, a superannuated adolescent, inhabiting a big and powerful body, and with considerable charm and sex appeal, but lacking self-discipline and commitment to duty. America is religious, but its religion is window-dressing for a libidinal fixation, a facile eroticisation of the sublime. America has energy and passion but no capacity for endurance or self-sacrifice. America, when push meets shove, will do a runner.

Updike conceived this novel as a twofer: Harry, the Rabbit, was one half of the American yin-yang; the nervy, pop-eyed, randy, make-a-break-for-it type. The other half is the centre of The Centaur (1963), Updike's next novel: a book about a head-down, get-on-with-it, dutiful stayer and worker called George Caldwell (based on Updike's own father), the carthorse as opposed to the rabbit. But of the two it was Rabbit endured, engendering four sequels. The Caldwell type slides out of Updikean view.

One reason for that might be adventitious: Updike decided, it seems on a mere whim, to style The Centaur as a Ulysses-type emulsion of mundane realism and Greek mythology, swapping with ungainly brio between finely written mimesis and awkwardly gauche hey-prithee classicism of gods and monsters, and that's a gimmick tiresome enough the first time, and impossible to imagine extending into multiple sequels. But another, more pressing reason is presumably that Updike just figured: hey, my nation really is more Rabbit than Centaur, an apperception that reflected variously Vietnam-era travails, 1970s-inflation, Reaganite flight from reality into cinematic nationalist fantasy and then Clinton, a very Rabbit-like character, I'd say; and not just because of his sexual incontinence. No prizes for guessing which way Rabbit would have voted in 2016.

With Rabbit, Run, though, all this is ahead of us. Rabbit starts by going home, taking a look at his wife Janice, pregnant with their second child in their poky apartment, realising he can't stand any of it and just going. A bravura 25-page episode sees him get in his car and just driving away, looping round through small-town east-coast America. This running-away is unplanned and directionless, so Harry eventually makes his way back to his home, in Brewer, Pennsylvania (not, though, before imparting to the reader a sense of the scale of America, its topography of endless tiny town and vast intervening spaces). He doesn't return to his wife, though; instead he stays with his old basketball coach, through him meeting Ruth, a single woman and part-time prostitute with whom later Harry moves in. His pastor tries to broker a reconciliation with Janice, but for much of the novel Rabbit stays with Ruth. There's lots of ecstatic sex, which, even more so than their running, is of course what rabbits are famous for. Though 1950s publishing wasn't ready to put out a novel entitled Rabbit, Fuck I suppose.

Having lost his original employment Rabbit gets a job as a rich widow's gardener. This in turn enables some descriptive prose that is, really, Updikery at its best:

In Mrs Smith's acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpacked their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad-leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly made the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone-flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia grow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebud prunings that cling together like infuriating ankle-clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty-eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes. [242]

A leap from Poorhouse, this, with some lovely, spot-on word-choices (‘suds’!); and the novel is full of similar vividnesses. Playing golf, Harry's attention is taken by ‘the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.’ He goes to the hospital to attend the birth of his baby daughter: it's a Catholic hospital, as many are in the States: ‘The hospital light is bright and blue and shadowless. “Angstrom,” he tells the nun behind the typewriter. “I think my wife is here.” Her plump washerwoman's face is rimmed like a cupcake with scalloped linen.’ [290].

Here Rabbit, leaving church, walks down the street with the pastor's attractive young wife, whom, he thinks, might have a crush on him (she doesn't, I think; but it's Rabbit's consciousness we're inside): ‘Sunshine quivers through the trees ... along unshaded sections of the pavement it leans down with a broad dry weight. Lucy pulls off her hat and shakes her hair; in the broad gaps of sun her face, his shirt, feel white, white; the rush of motors, the squeak of a tricycle, the touch of a cup and saucer inside a house are sounds conveyed to him as if along a bright steel bar. As they walk along he trembles in light that seems her light’ [328]. What makes this kind of deliberately vivified style different from the technically similar, differently focused other kind of vivified style for which Updike is famous, or infamous—I mean his baroquely cod-Keatsian descriptions of fucking and vaginas, the ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’ stuff Patricia Lockwood has so brilliantly critiqued—is that this stuff is clearer, actually, on the way an individual like Rabbit can only conceptualise religious transcendence in quasi-erotic terms. It's the ecstasy of Saint Theresa, but mundanified to middle-class 1950s America: the light, and the fuckable woman, yes, but also the clink of teacups as you sit down for a civilised chat with your Episcopalian pastor, or the kid's trinity-wheeled ride that signifies the family that fucking eventually entails. I know Updike sometimes takes flak for his trademark stylistic richness, and it can't be denied that this sometimes trespasses into a sticky over-egging (in U and I Nicholson Baker parodies it without mercy: ‘the blank seemed, in its blankety blankness, and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk’). But when it works it really works, and most of it works gorgeously here. It is a mode of excess, stylistically speaking, it's true; and sometimes that excess slides into a kind of egregious excessiveness, an excessiveness for the sake of excessiveness. But it's also a mode designed to respond to a perception of the beauties of existence as themselves excessive, as the world itself loading its every rift with ore, and there's something marvellous about that.

It's not all good, Rabbit, Run, mind. Fluent and compelling though most of it is, parts of this novel are raggeder. Instead of sticking with the main character's p.o.v. Updike occasionally shifts focus to interiorised passages from Ruth's or Janice's perspective, or even from Jack Eccles's, the pastor's; these step-aways are jolting and more distracting than enriching. It's important to Updike's purposes that young Rabbit, for all his various delinquencies, be likeable, since young Rabbit is ‘America’, young and randy and not very forward-thinking but, you know: fun, nice, life, youth, beautiful. He's not, though. Likeable, I mean. He's a kind of monster of cock-prompted ego and thoughtlessness, which means Updike has to keep prodding the reader with passages like this:

“Oh all the world loves you,” Ruth says suddenly. “What I wonder if why?”

“I'm lovable,” he says.

“I mean why the hell you. What's so special about you?”

“I'm a saint,” he says. “I give people faith.” Eccles has told him this Once, with a laugh, probably meaning it sarcastically. Rabbit took it to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn't think that much about what he gives other people. [249]

This doesn't quite carry, though. We don't, I think, love Rabbit as much as Updike loves Rabbit; just as we're entitled to respond to Updike's famous description of his homeland as a conspiracy to make you happy with ... depends on the you, though, homeboy, don't you think?

There's something a bit blooey about the ending, too. The denouement is plotted around Rabbit leaving the woman he left his wife for, Ruth. He goes back to Janice because she's given birth to their daughter; and having gone back can't retrace his steps to Ruth. One reason for this is, knowing that (as a former prostitute) Ruth often performed oral sex on men, Rabbit insists he gets a blow-job too. This somehow ruins their relationship, and Updike, not normally coy about sexual matters, doesn't really explain why. The act sort-of floats around the latter portions of the novel as though it's somehow obviously a dreadful and appalling and humiliating thing. The other thing that happens in the last stretch of the novel is that Janice, always a bit of a boozer, gets drunk, decides to give her new baby a bath and accidentally drowns her. This is properly dreadful, a heart-sinking scene that does not stint on the ghastly, ghastly consequences: the intensity of the grief that follows, for both Janice and Rabbit. The book ends on the baby's funeral, which finally gets too much for Rabbit, such that (in a deliberate echo of the opening) he runs out. But powerfully written as this scene is, it seems to me to entail two problems. One is the bathos, edging ludicrousness, of pairing it with Harry's Improbably Consequential Blow-Job. The other is more enduring: Updike ends the book this way because it is the one thing from which we cannot run. Not our own mortality, which is what, we might intuit, sets all of us running in the first place, but the death of a loved-one, especially the death of your child. Rabbit's tear-blinded dash out of the cemetery at the end isn't going anywhere; he has finally encountered That Which Cannot Be Run From. Except ...

... except that I know, as someone who has read all the subsequent Rabbit books, that Updike decides by authorial fiat that ... he can. Janice suffers no legal sanction for what is, surely, culpable homicide (she's as guilty as, let's say, a drunk driver would be if they killed someone). She would surely go to jail for a term, she would likely be shunned by her neighbours. But more credulity-strenuous still, she and her husband suffer no longer-term emotional consequences. This death is mentioned only occasionally and in passing in the later novels; it's just something the two of them step past. Worse, Rabbit has resumed his lepus-mode. He's still evading responsibility, still running. It's a kind of novelistic infidelity to the emotional gravity of the last chapters of Rabbit, Run, and, actually, hard to forgive.

Then again, that's in the future: in Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), not to mention the 2001 novella Rabbit Remembered. Rabbit, Run's continuous present licenses us to ignore that looming futurity, and to enjoy this novel of fall, and the possibility of redemptive grace.

"Ad Astra" (dir James Gray, 2019)

I'm pretty thoroughly committed to the idea (you'd expect someone who writes science fiction to say so) that metaphor can be more eloquent than mimesis, fantastical extrapolation more penetrating than drab realist recitation. Still, there are times I wonder. So, to pick an example: let's say you want to tell a story about an emotionally-repressed adult man coming to terms with his distant and abscondant father. Is the best way to do that a story in which the father has removed himself to the planet Neptune from where he beams gigantic beams of mysterious destructive energy back at the Earth? Might that strategy run the risk of coming across as a bit ... silly?

So, yes, I'm honestly not sure what to make of Ad Astra. It's a very handsomely mounted piece of film-making, and contains a great many striking and even beautiful visual images. It's also daft raised to the power of daft. The increasingly muppet-faced Brad Pitt (‘Brad Astra’) falls off a Babel-tall tower and parachutes to Earth. It's unclear to me what this has to do with the rest of the movie. Brad had thought his father dead these thirty years, but now he discovers Dad is still alive, albeit alive, as Tim Curry might say .... in spa-a-a-ace! So Brad flies to the moon, aboard a conventional chemical rocket replete with various old-fashioned, Apollo-era stylings (‘Trad Astra’). He travels round to the dark-side of the moon in a swanky subterranean metro-tunnel (‘Mind-the-Gapstra’) but this tunnel, unaccountably, stops before it reaches the dark-side spaceport, which means Brad must essay a risky drive across the lunar surface for the last bit of his journey, which in turn tangles him in a vacuum-desert car-chase fleeing lunar pirates (‘Mad-Maxtra’). Surviving this, he rockets off towards Mars stopping on the way to battle some feral space-monkeys (I'm torn here between ‘Ad Astr-ape’ and ‘Ad Macaquestra’).

On Mars Brad beams messages to his father from a subterranean Martian recording studio (‘Dad Astra’—why did he have to go all the way to Mars to do this? One of the exposition side-characters earlier said something about this being the only such facility left after the ravages of the Death Beams From Neptune, which strains credulity somewhat. What, every single set-up capable of beaming a radio signal had been destroyed on Earth? Even though it's further from the Magic Beams of Destruct-o than Mars? How do all the pilots on the various space-ships communicate with base etc?). Anyway: after recording this message the powers that be relieve him of all duties (‘Ad Sacked-stra’), but he decides to go visit his Dad in person anyway, which he can only do by stowing away on a spaceship that's headed that way, afterwards inadvertently killing its three-person crew (‘Ad Slaughta’). On arriving at Neptune he discovers his father has gone insane, Kurtz-in-Heart-of-Darkness-style, and slaughtered his crew (‘Mad Astra’). This discovery grieves Brad P., although the whole movie is so dominated by his dolorous mope it's a little hard to tell (‘Sad Astra’). All in all it is, I am sorry to say, Bad Astra.

Rather than lean into the pulp daftness of the plotting, Gray forces his movie in quite the opposite direction, with many Terence Malick-esque ponderous and grave voice-overs, long lingering pans and zooms, lots of smell-the-fart acting from Pitt in close-up and much mood-work with stark colour palates: yellow, grey, green, red and finally a deep cyan blue. It is, as I say, very often beautiful to look at, and the special effects are impressive throughout. But though it aims visually for the grace and profundity of 2001: a Space Opera crossed with Apocalypse Now, it is consistently undercut by a plot that is more Saturn 3 crossed with It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Per ardua ad astra, sure; but this movie is perhaps too much arduousness and too little asterism. Plus nobody in the movie actually reaches any stars, and the obsession that drove Dad mad, to find alien life, is revealed to have been fruitless all along. Subtract Astra.

Maybe I'll watch it again. Maybe it's better second time round.

"Frozen 2" (dir. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2019)

Frozen (2013) was fun, wasn't it? I mean, it was an oddly broken-backed piece of storytelling that sacrificed larger satisfactions of structure and narrative for a barely logical ‘aha!’ gotcha story-twist, and it was extraordinarily White—the Whitest Disney since Tangled, and that film's all-Aryan cast of Rapunzelly goodies, its fetishization of blonde hair and its witchy Jewess villain (all, I'm sure, both fine and dandy. It's not as if resurgent Nazi ideology or anti-Semitism are still real-life political issues nowadays, after all). Then again, the Nordic racial purity of Frozen was at least leavened by a Christina-Rossetti-y sisters-don't-need-men agendum it was easy to like. The movie also had some nicely-judged humour, and, most of all, it had a raft of absolutely sterling songs. People will be karaoke-ing ‘Let It Go’ for a very long time, no question. It cost Disney $150 million to make and it earned them $1.3 billion, which is a quantity of beans that guarantees a sequel.

So here's Frozen 2, whose makers have thought long if not hard about how to build on so financially-fecund a base. What they've opted for is, mostly, more-of-the-same: artfully-rendered Scandinavian landscapes, sisters doing it for themselves, ice-magic and Olaf goofing about. They've also decided, narratively speaking, to carry forward Frozen's daft aha! reveal, in which the man you thought was good turns out, in an undermotivated and arbitrary way, to be evil (in this case, it's the handsome grandfather rather than the handsome fiancé, but same difference).

The snow-Whiteness of the first film has been addressed by making the sequel a story of our Nordic heroines making friends with a kind-of Sámi population of folk trapped in a magical forest up north. So there's your ethnic diversity. Although, like flower-arrangers stepping back from what they've done and deciding it's not quite there yet, the film-makers have also added an extra, token character: Matthias, the heroic Captain of the Arendellean Guards and a man of African heritage. Happy now? To be fair, they've also made the through-line of the story about recovering the buried truth of colonial oppression. You see: back in the backstory, King Runeard of Arendelle, all smiles, brokered a treaty with the indigenous folk of Northuldra, building a mighty dam in their homeland as a goodwill gesture. But Runeard is actually evil. The point of the dam was to block the Northuldra's waters which would, in some manner that remained obscure to me, cause them harm, because Runeard hated them and wished to subject them to his rule.

The dam seems to me an awfully roundabout way of doing this, I must say. The more usual Colonisation strategy, surely, is: march your army in and kill lots of people. And, indeed, Runeard does then provoke a fight with the Northuldrans in order to justify his armed response, something which hardly needed a pretext. I suppose, actually, that the dam is there as a rebus not for colonisation as such so much as for the skein-thin justifications colonising nations bring forward: ‘yes we stole all your wealth and killed many of your people, but we did at least build some infrastructure, look.’

Nonetheless it's hard to see what the notional justification for a dam might be, in terms of the movie's worldbuilding. It's certainly not there to generate hydroelectric power, since the street- and houselights in Arendelle are powered not by electricity, nor even gas, but by elemental sprites of fire. We know this because, angered by the dam, the Four magical Elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air manifest their displeasure by withdrawing from the human world, respectively: turning off the city lights; trapping everyone in the Enchanted Forest with a wall of impenetrable mist; shaking the paving stones of Arendelle's streets such that everyone has to evacuate the city; and—eh—withdrawing all air? such that the resulting vacuum, uh, asphixiates the entire cast? Is it?

Not that last one, obviously.

The ‘four elements’ archaism of the Frozen universe is on a par with the trademark inverted-Phlogiston physics of Elsa's ice-magic; so it ought not to have surprised me that the story in Frozen 2 would be moved-along by naked homeopathy. But here we are: surprised I was. Water, we are told not once but several times, possesses a magical memory, and Elsa's ice-sculpture actualise the hidden history of her grandfather's badness. It's deemed the damn dam must be dismantled even though the resulting downwash will destroy dainty Arendelle. Which is to say, the historical realities of imperialism stifled by official narratives of spreading missionary civilisation, must be undammed in today's discourse, even though the resulting downwash will engulf narratives of White exceptionalism. That seems clear enough, commendable even, although the story's denouement actually pulls this punch, with Elsa riding a magic horse made of water down the downwash and magicking away the destructive consequences of Arendelle's historic actions. It's a kind of Black Lives Matter But Only Insofar As White Lives Avoid Karma kind of deal I suppose.

Otherwise the plotting is rather arbitrarily episodic and unsatisfying. Characters are killed off only to be brought back again by scriptwriter's fiat. The humour more often than not misfires, the new characters are wire-frames rather than fully-realised figures, and the songs aren't nearly so good as the first film's. The one exception to this is ‘Into The Unknown’, another Idina Menzel belter that attempts to catch ‘Let It Go’s lightning in a second bottle. It doesn't manage this, quite, hamstrung as it is by its belatedness. Still, I can't deny it's a pretty stirring piece of songwriting: Norwegian singer Aurora's minor-key oo-oo-ing works hauntingly in the background as Menzel slams out another full-throated paean to .. what? Well, looking at the lyrics you'd have to assume: the yearning of an only-outwardly-happy suburban housewife tempted by a thrilling extra-marital affair. I mean, the song kind-of fits the logic of Frozen 2's story, that Elsa is chafeing at the comfort of living in Arendelle and longs to explore the unexplored north. Kind of. But, really, its heart-thudding yearning makes more sense in a sexual context, I'd say.

Anyway, here we are: a movie that blends precisely calibrated quanta of sameitude, new-in-a-familiar-way and minimal self-criticism to produce, I thought, a dud.

Dud, did I say? Oh no. It seems I am very wrong. Like Frozen, Frozen 2 cost about $150 million to make, but it has already, despite the latter end of its cinema run being curtailed by Lockdown, earned more than its predecessor. People love it.  Ah well.

M. John Harrison, "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" (2020)

It's not every novel that has a metrically flawless iambic pentameter for its title. Indeed it's not, we can be honest, every writer who could carry-off that kind of thing, without (that is) tripping our pretentiousness alarms. But Harrison is not every writer. Harrison is a law unto himself, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel so good all the usual reviewerish superlatives barely seem superlative enough.

Half of the novel is set in a run-down bit of West London (down near the river, Teddington-way: East Sheen, Barnes Bridge, that neck of the woods. I lived for a time in Wandsworth, then Putney, and then moved to Staines; I know the area in-between pretty well, and MJH gets it absolutely spot-on). The other half is set in west England, near the Welsh border overlooking the Severn. In the former location lives one of the novel’s deuteragonists: Shaw, a fiftysomething single man, recovering, or not really recovering, from some kind of mid-life breakdown. He rents a scuzzy little room in a house ‘south and west of Hammersmith bridge’ and works for a strange fellow called Tim he met in a pub one time. Tim runs a odd mini-company out of a run-down barge on the river, from where he sends Shaw off on various puzzling errands, sometimes delivering peculiar packages of things or collecting other things, visiting and filming a medium (who turns out to be Tim’s sister) or attending the trial of an old man who caused a breach of the peace after, he claims, seeing strange green aquatic creatures germinating in toilet bowls.

Shaw has an on-off relationship with Victoria, who sometimes stays over in his shonky rented room but spends most of the novel in the west country where her mother had gone to live, and where she died. This is Bristol [or maybe not; see comments below], although Harrison never names the town. Victoria has inherited her Mum’s house and she spends many weeks doing it up, mending the roof, replacing the electrics and so on. During this time she befriends (although friendship in the usual sense of the word is really not the currency of their relationship) a waitress at a nearby café called Pearl. Renovating her mum’s house also introduces her to various elderly local workmen, odd, rheumy old geezers to a man. Pearl claims to have been close to Victoria’s mother—the two went swimming together, she says, in local pools and rivers—but the woman Pearl describes sounds nothing at all like the mother Victoria knew. Various things, baffling, menacing, are hinted at without quite being spelled-out.

All this depends upon, works or doesn't, according to how effectively the novel is able to maintain its particular mood: an eeriness or uncanniness that persists without collapsing into either sheer bafflement or else into the crassness of formulaic weird or oddball gubbins. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again manages this balancing act perfectly. The dialogue is full of non-sequiturs, people talking apparently at cross-purpose. With a different writer this could become a gimmick, and irksome, but Harrison manages it flawlessly. The characters are opaque only after the manner that real people in the real word are opaque. Sentence after perfectly-pitched sentence describes urban decay, the kipple of early 21st-century life, strange non-spaces and, always, water: it’s always raining, or flooding, the land is always sodden, something is always bubbling up from underneath.

Victoria crossed the river and walked further than she had expected. She had packed no lunch. Later, half a mile down the hillside in fine blowing rain she thought she saw a woman walking ahead of her, making her way quickly between dark, glossy rhododendrons towards a house at the edge of fields. She was wearing a flower print and high heels. White gloves. By the time Victoria got there she had vanished inside, if she had ever been there at all. The grey four-square walls were home to yellow lichens. Coughing could be heard from an upper room. The small, sodden garden featured: one child’s swing, an empty pond, a fire pit full of charred beer cans and M&S prosecco bottles. Over in one corner rotting apples were strewn beneath a well-grown holly. [113]

This is just out-of-kilter enough (high heels worn to walk across the fields; a holly tree apparently shedding apples) to add bite to its phantasmic air of incompleteness.

It’s quite the trick, technically, to balance so much closely observed, almost hyper-realist specificity of description against such a sustained atmosphere of haunting uncertainty. Real places, realistically-evoked people, a bedrock of unnerving unreality. There’s a Sebaldian vibe to much of this (more Sebald than Ballard, I think) although of course MJH was doing this kind of thing before WGS ever put out a book.

Something is going on, although I won’t spoil what, here. The workman renovating Victoria’s house keep offering her copies of Kingsley’s Water Babies. The novel’s title is taken from Kingsley’s Thoughts in a Gravel Pit (prose, despite the title’s metrical regularity). Lewis Carroll hovers behind much of the unheimlich-ness too: the pond where Pearl likes to swim is called ‘the pool of tears’, and Victoria’s queenly name speaks to some incomprehensible game of existential-chess game going on somewhere, outwith the ken of the two main characters. The Kingsley and Carroll intertexts were both catnip to me, I must say; cleverly and unobtrusively woven throughout, delightful to a specialist in Victorian literature. Though of course you'd expect what Harrison does with Water Babies’s Darwinian allegory of Christian redemption to be rather more Quatermassian than it is Kingsleyan. Soon after arriving in Bristol, Victoria is wandering about, looking for Marks and Sparks. She climbs the old packhorse stair off the main street, where ‘the rock was poisoned with oxides, thick with cobwebs’, to where ‘she could see the backs of the houses and shops on the high street’:

Suddenly warm soapy water poured down the stairs, around her feet and away, only three inches deep but strong and turbulent, with foam … It had a smell she couldn’t account for, faint and chemical, perhaps some kind of cleaning fluid. The object that washed down with it, slithering then sticking to the cobbles, then slithering again, was translucent and tinged faintly with green; otherwise it looked like a still-born kitten.

Victoria put her hand over her mouth.

‘Well I don’t know!’ she heard someone shout from a window high in the backs of the buildings. [55]

This object with its ‘foetal look’ (‘it wasn’t a mammal, perhaps not even a fish’) makes her shudder. ‘“How horrible,” she said aloud, looking up at the sky again.’ When she returns later in the day it has gone.

***

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a Brexit novel, I think; an oblique state-of-the-nation book, and extremely penetrating as such. The Severn is described as a river flowing towards the sea with a counterflow running through its depth. Late in the novel the café has been changed into ‘Shropshire Fish Supplies’ and filled with aquaria. Peering through the glass, Victoria sees how each tank contains a model drowned village or landscape. One includes a miniature waterfall. ‘Victoria pointed. “That waterfall?” she said. “It’s made of plastic. Doesn’t it give you such an uncomfortable feeling? Water flowing under water?” She felt herself shiver.’ What was it David Byrne sang, contorting himself in his cheap revivalist-preacher suit and tie?

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water …

... going on to hoot echoingly on the next word of the song's lyric ‘remove’. And you may find yourself. Like I said: it’s catnip to me, all this.

It’s also a novel about writing, although not in any self-regarding way. None of the characters are writers, although Tim runs a Fortean-style blog called The Water House reporting unusual events all around the country. But from Shropshire Victoria writes regular emails back to Shaw, who only reads them intermittently, and who never replies. This sense of the writerly disconnection, of putting words out there and having no idea whether anyone is connecting with them, understanding them, even registering that they exist—that’s, certainly not catnip, but intensely relatable to me, as a writer. Shaw is sent to Wolverhampton by Tim on yet another puzzling errand. On the train he can’t help but hear ‘a couple talking in the seat behind his.’

With a little inadvertent sigh of pleasure the woman said, “There must be some meaning to these clouds.”

They were complex, layered, torn about by winds, bathed in a dull metallic light; but the man next to her wasn’t interested. “Where’s Michael? Where’s Michael?” he kept saying into his phone, his voice too quiet and too close to Shaw’s ear to be comfortable. “Don’t forget now. Don’t forget!” All with a kind of hidden urgency, as if fearing surveillance—“Where’s Michael?” [162]

Where, indeed, is Michael? A treacherous business, the attempt to locate the author in his own book, not any less treacherous if undertaken by the author himself. Those potentially meaningful, Hamletian clouds lead us, I think deliberately, back to the life aquatic. You see, don’t you, yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? By the mass, and it is like a camel, indeed. I think it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale? Very like a whale. Something watery in the idiom and medium. Something watery in existence, when you hit a certain age, and life has eroded the solider sureties. Something big and far below the surface, something oceanic, rising up. Deep waters, here.