Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2024‎ (132)

‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you

‘So what are you writing about, love, in your book?’ Edie said. ‘I’m writing about my early life mainly–teens and twenties. That and my mother, you know. It’s really since she died,’ I said, ‘and going through all her stuff . . .’ ‘Oh, that’s so touching,’ she said, ‘it must bring memories flooding back.’ ‘Yes and no,’ I said, not ready to go into it. ‘She sounds such a remarkable person.’ ‘She really was,’ I said. ‘I wonder how much you actually remember, from so long ago,’ Edie said. ‘David’s got an amazing memory,’ said Richard, ‘as you know.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about all this. The teenage stuff is more like writing a novel. I remember places, and experiences, very clearly, but they’re stills, you know, rather than clips. Or GIFs perhaps, sometimes–a head turns, a hand comes down, but you never see what comes next, it just does it again. Besides that, of course, there’s anecdotes, things I’ve been told, that I know I did, even if I can’t really remember them. And no one recalls more than a few words anyone actually said fifty years ago. You just have to make that up.’ ‘A bit of improv,’ said Ken. ‘Because you did write about your acting career, didn’t you, in your first book?’ Edie said, holding my eye to conceal her uncertainty. ‘Well, that was a more general book, about experimental theatre in the Seventies and Eighties–I don’t want to go there ever again. What I’m writing now is more about my personal life–things I really didn’t want to talk about before. I want to write about falling in love.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said Ken, and Richard gave us an interesting smile as he absorbed the idea. ‘And I want to write about being like I am, but never knowing much about where I came from.’

Richard knows of course that I’ve been writing another book – though not exactly what it is. I seem to need some secrecy, even from him; and no doubt I’m wary of his editorial eye. If I’m home in the day I climb up here under the Velux and close the door, but I’m aware on and off, when he crosses the room or takes a call from one of his authors, of Richard at work in the room below. He’s just started editing a book on the Burmese junta–a curious choice, it seems to me, and clearly very slow work for him. He has tried to involve me by asking if I’ll check the proper names, but I feel the author, who has actually spent twelve years in the country, is much more likely than me to know the right forms.

We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how

We are all citizens of the Earth: an ocean world. Whether we choose to acknowledge the blue machine or not, it dominates the planet, regulating how energy and atoms flow around the globe, and setting the scene for everything else. This great liquid engine is majestic and intricate, dynamic and interconnected, with a vast array of life rippling through its swirling innards is far larger than us, and the great rules of ocean physics do not bend to human will. We can pretend to live our lives in spite of the ocean, or we can choose to understand and work with it, and thereby benefit from the natural processes that are in any case out of our direct control. They bring richness and variety, as well a surprises and a degree of unpredictability. That is the beauty of the blue machine.

The eye was shocking.
It was really beautiful.
You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen toge

The eye was shocking.
It was really beautiful.
You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and – what?
Politeness? Indifference? Distance?
I won’t know the word for it till now, years after, right this minute, walking to wherever in the dark and permitting myself to think back to the moment I first ever saw, so close to my own eyes, any horse’s, this horse’s, eye.
The word is equanimity.

Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to

Phyl chewed on her pencil and thought about it. She couldn’t tell whether or not Rashida was being entirely serious. But she added a third item to the list in her notebook anyway, so that her options as a fledgling writer now consisted of:
1. COSY CRIME
2. DARK ACADEMIA
3. AUTOFICTION

Because of his exposure to the kerosene, at the outward periphery of each of his two eyes, Bruno’s vision periodically degraded in a vertical line. The line quavered as if a zipper had riven the seen world at this outer periphery, riven it and then sewn it back up, but unevenly, and the living parts of the riven world were vibrating, sutured badly, and leaking something from under the sutures—an unseen, untouched absolute. It was at the quavering edges of his vision, he told them, that the truth of the seen and unseen was attempting to break through, to communicate, to coalesce. A critical point, as a terminology of chemistry, he summarized, was that moment when gasses and solids had the same valence. Perhaps the two trembling seams at the edges of his vision were the destabilized place where two worlds were reaching equilibrium, attempting to find balance where each did not annihilate the other. He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality.

Something happens and people think, This was meant to be. The random nature of luck and of incident is too disturbing to acknowledge. I’m not the first to know this. It’s in the Bible. Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial. But either people skip that part of the Old Testament, or they never read the Bible at all, and instead they follow their instinct to mythify a sequence of random events and the stream of strangers they encounter in life: Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, justice

When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self ? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.  

… Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.

Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this way the bodies of the stars are formed by the forces of attraction between them, and the closer the relation, the higher the risk. If there cannot be equity, I wonder if it’s better to receive the greater proportion of love, or give it? I wish I knew. W. H. Auden, whose poem ‘The More Loving One’ considers the stars’ indifference to the love of men, wrote this: If equal affection cannot be Let the more loving one be me.

“And did I ever tell you about the laws of Kepler? The first describes how heavenly bodies orbit the sun, and that is the law of ellipses. The second law I’ve memorised as I used to memorise Bible verses when I was young: the semi-major axis sweeps out equal areas in equal time. This means that bodies in orbit move faster and faster as they near the heat of the sun, rushing like a man into his lover’s arms. Then they move past their perihelion, the embrace is done, and they become listless and slow in the dark. Lately it’s seemed to me that you became a kind of sun –  that since you’ve been gone I’ve moved through a world with no warmth in it. But my orbit is closed, and everything that passes will in its time return – so I imagine myself moving again towards some heat and light I can’t make out”

So I told her this: that it’s true that I’ve only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, loving, indifferent, ardent, diligent and careless; full of loathing and wanting, hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence – and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses its amplitude hour by hour. All the while she sat crying in her childish way. And I wanted to console the child I’d loved, and so I told her this: that in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand we are made in the image of God – because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. So if you go on loving when your love is unreturned it makes you just a little lower than the angels.

“He survived, as he put it to himself, by dividing his nature from his soul,, he left his nature in London on the station platform and picked up his soul in Aldleigh as if it were left luggage”

It was flanked by a mossy wall, and by a derelict patch of ground known to him as Potter’s Field; its iron gate was fastened with a chain. Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its bricks were pale, its proportions austere: it was a sealed container for God …… This was Bethesda Chapel, as fixed in time’s flow as a boulder in a river: Aldleigh ran past it, and round it, and could never change it. Above the door a narrow plaque read 1888, and beyond the bristled threshold mat, 1888 persisted. All the dreadful business of the modern world – its exchange rates, tournaments, profanities, publications, elections, music and changes of administration – washed up against the green door and fell back, dammed.

“My mother said that anything that had once been alive shoula go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meat and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and then buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. All that was needed was time, and nature. Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said.
I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the
earth itself.”

“I yanked at the sheet and the motion sent everything to the carpet. I lifted the sheet with two hands and it billowed slowly back down, and as it did I felt some otherworldly possibility open up inside myself … stood looking at the bed and breathing. It isn't something I ever told anyone - how could you say this? - but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted.
I knew it in that moment, but it took years to find it.

In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what's happening but I'm drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it's simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.

I do buy a plain sandalwood-scented candle, a plastic torch and a wooden cross. The cross has rounded edges and fits snugly in the hand. I am a bit ashamed of it. I don't know why I buy it, except maybe as a mark of respect to these people, and as a kind of talisman, to hold and feel. It is for the body, not the mind.

Visitant: a guest or visitor like Helen Parry, or a supernatural being, an apparition, like a saint. Like a delivery of bones, like a plague.

In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else - a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead.
I pass these two frames every day, but it happens sometimes here that one is suddenly struck anew by familiar things.
During Vigils I am filled with mourning for those butterflies, for all the extinctions and threats, flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well. And I know that inside these walls, Helen Parry is the only one who will face that truth

“This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s so, so much more impressive when a hopeful ending is made to feel true, like a real possibility. It’s harder than making a sad ending feel true and possible—that’s life. That’s more or less my relationship to hope, I think. It’s hard work, but God, isn’t it impressive when it works?”

“What certainty can you give me? What home”
“This home” she said “My Home”
Eva shook her head “No you can’t: she said “It’s not yours to give”

The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it. Isabel found the quote. For my house will be called, she read, finger next to the number seven, a house of devotion for all.

This is what the story is about. It’s about displacement, and it’s about the way that we think about ownership. Loving a place does not make us the owners of it. What I’m really afraid of is that people will read this and be like, “Naive Yael, thinking that we can all live in one house and only love could save us at the end of the day.” I know it’s not that simple. I know it’s not that, but it is what I wanted for these characters. Also because that’s the history of me. That’s the history of where I come from. And these are the two histories of displacement that I’ve, sort of, both lived through and had in my history. The story is about Isabel herself having to deal with complicity. I embody those two ends of the spectrum: both complicity on the one hand and, on the other hand, also a history of victimhood. Both of them are within me and that’s not even counting my Dutch grandmother, who was born in Indonesia and was part of a colonial system.
Within me, there’s all of that and all of that is also in this book.

“As the referees begin this fourth bout, the last bout of the day, in this darkened warehouse where only nine onlookers remain, there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.”

“I wrote this book l because I wanted to remember how I felt when I was a young woman and obsessively competed in every sport I could find. I would often drive, or have my parents drive me, to tournaments that felt very similar to the tournament in this book. My hope is that boxers, and lovers of boxing, will find authenticity in this book, but that also anyone who has ever been gripped by an obsessive drive to accomplish something, and to be seen at a time when they felt otherwise invisible, will find themselves in these pages.”

Like a boxing match, the backwards and forwards movements of how girl fighters spring up over time is not linear. Rose Mueller does not immediately get reborn as another girl fighter. Rather, each girl born has the ability to be activated into a boxer. When Artemis Victor and Andi Taylor and Iggy Lang and Izzy Lang and Rachel Doricko and Kate Heffer and Tanya Maw all age out of the Daughters of America tournament they will immediately be replaced by new fighters.

I think the [tournament bracket] structure’s closest literary relative is a map, which is often included at the beginning of books, especially science fiction and fantasy books. It’s a visual to ground the reader in an unreal world. The space of the tournament has always felt very unreal to me. I think I needed a tether to earth, and with the tether of the tournament map I could take the narrative really far out in deep time and future space.

I think of the third person narrator of the finished book as a Greek chorus of all the girl fighters that have come before, and the girl fighters that will come after the moment of the book and these eight young women boxers

In fiction you can fold time on itself, layer it, make it longer or shorter both experientially and narratively. It’s one of the most affecting things about the medium, and certainly what affects me the greatest as a reader, so I knew I wanted to write a book that deployed the gooey, weird stuff that time can do in literature. My approach to time in this novel had to do with seeing if I could make the reader feel like they were inside the space of a boxing match, which can feel fast and slow at the same time. In general, I find exercise has a way of making time wiggly. I wanted to see I could write a book with wiggly time, too.

He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal

He’d asked his mother before leaving, small questions without raising suspicion, about Sree, about Vijaya. He walked to the red postbox. The metal was warm from the day. He had written the letter on the train, he had written without pausing. He did not strike things out, he did not re-write. He wrote recklessly. Now, in this moment, he grew aware of the fact that this letter leaving his hands would breach the boundaries he had set up around himself, and perhaps ones she had too. Time had built those boundaries. Regret had built those boundaries. Guilt had built those boundaries. And the transgression he was committing now would destroy them, raze them, and he knew that it was a transgression he would never be able to stop himself from committing again, that it may fate him to yearn for her as long as he lived.

I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient ch

I had trusted my own lies in the early days with my husband. By the time I met him, Clove had become a real and full person to me, the resilient child of parents who had died together tragically, the ever-growing, self-improving adult. Substance-free, with an early bedtime, a morning run and evening yoga routine, meditation, the cleanest of eating. Grueling shifts at grocery stores, no room for nightmares of my father and me in the middle of the ocean, only room for item codes. Fennel bulb 10223, head of radicchio 10557. Then, when I married and left grocery, I filled my head with the consumerism of impending motherhood, researching things to buy, NoseFrida, DockATot, balm for everything from nips to lips, preparing the way for the arrival of a new person who would be a glimmer of myself, but so much better: they would never know you or my father. But then Nova arrived, and along with her, my father cruising around my block in his Jimmy.

A line had formed behind me, and in it stood a father from Nova’s class who was a real writer. Last I’d heard he was penning a long, important pastoral American novel that might actually be one of a trilogy. But what did he know about America? A profile I’d read of him mentioned his wife brought him tea to his study. America was my mother trying to take a community college class and my father beating her up before she could get out the door. This writer reminded me of the thing I’d learned at college that nearly broke me, nearly derailed my plan of forward success and normalcy: no matter what I did, I would never catch up to the very apparent generational wealth all around me. I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood. The students around me had parents who called every other day, who beckoned them home for the holidays, where their childhood bedrooms were still intact, like shrines. They had not had to bloody their hands to get a seat at the table. And this man in line, this real writer. I could only imagine how much he’d been encouraged, nurtured, connected, and exposed early in life to the arts and sciences. Above all, given access. He gave me a small wave. He’d probably win a Pulitzer Prize.

Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they

Gillis tried to explain. How the ancient elm tree in the manse garden had been leaning toward the kirk, and the spire had started to crack. So they had to pull the tree out. And Gillis had fallen into the hole they’d left and found this hand. Which was strange enough, but the hand could actually move and it drew pictures as if it was trying to tell us all something, though it was anyone’s guess what the images were meant to represent. ‘Here, wait here,’ he said, and grabbed the papers from the kitchen table, then brandished them at his father. He told him how recently, only last week, there had been a miracle. The flash of light, the angel, the insects and the fish.

A loose spiral of seagulls ascended to heaven and returned with no message save an incoherent screech. On the horizon, blurred between cloud and sea, no drones and no missile strikes. The established powers seemed to suspect nothing. Why would the light of God’s grace and truth have fallen here? Rain and cloud and roof tile, moss and bird shit, he pushed himself to climb further. To the very peak of the spire and the upright cross. A golden door might open? Something might be passed to him. Or he might be asked to return the hand to its original owner. The Archangel Michael, or the Pale Rider who announces the end of this world. Or maybe he would be welcomed inside, into the hallways of heaven. The waiting rooms. The conference centre. Might meet one of those terrible beings, the ones with eyes all over its wings and wings all over its eyes. Wheels spinning above and below. A sword for a tongue. He wished he had his Bible with him. Gillis could slip in and out of these ideas, believing, then not believing, toggling between third and first person, staring down at the crown of his own head, embarrassed and selfconscious. Then back behind his own eyes, staring down at the shortbread tin held in front of him like a weapon.

Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would

Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane? Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.

My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture. The professor looked wizened beyond age and seemed perpetually troubled by the world, which made me inclined to take her teachings seriously. She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class. Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life. From time to time, the professor would ask us to imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routines with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless, one which gave an illusory sense of harmony and permanence. The first time she brought up the imaginary anthropologist, I visualized a tiny Martian in a safari outfit, taking notes on a flip chart. But even with the absurd image, the point was clear. The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives.

I recall the night Gelon told me he wanted to do this. He sang a song from Medea's chorus ……… when the kids are dead

I recall the night Gelon told me he wanted to do this. He sang a song from Medea's chorus ……… when the kids are dead, and it gives a weird sense of time merging, and for a moment, I have the feeling that the future and the past aren't separate at all, just different snatches of single song, always sung, given consequence when heard.

And like that, we're flush. It hits me, sudden, how foolish we've been. Directors without a producer are like a ship without a sail, the medium of wind to endeavours nautical being equivalent to coin in all theatrical, and till now we've had _ all of that. Tuireann, for that's the queer-sounding name of our producer, thinks staging a play with the Athenians is genius. See, he's always been fascinated by the theatre but felt there was something too safe about the surface level of its pageantry that put him off investing. Now, at last, with us, he's found his kind of show. In fairness, I have my reservations about Tuireann, and his talk is most peculiar, but he's minted and understands talent, and that will do for now.

"The Trojan Women? The finest I've ever seen..' He hesitates. 'Once, something very much like that happened:
War, sure it happens all the time.' He smiles sadly and nods.
Yes, it does. It truly does. But this happened in another world entirely. Not the dusty plains of Ilium, nor Syracuse. No, it was in a land of rain and woods, a green-growing world, but yet it happened in almost exactly the same way. The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.'