Zachary Mason - Metamorphica

Mason Ball - The Thirty-Five Timely & Untimely Deaths of Cumberland County

Guillermo Saccomanno - 77

Tanguy Viel - Article 353: A novel

D.J. Taylor - ‘Rock and Roll is Life’: The True Story of the Helium Kids by one who was there: A Novel

The New Criterion, May 1, 2019

There’s a passage in Cold Calls (2005), the final volume in Christopher Logue’s magnificent and, fittingly, never-completed “account” of the Iliad, in which the British poet describes Ajax and Nestor calling on Achilles:

They find him, with guitar,
Singing of Gilgamesh.

Myth within myth.

Logue weaves in and out of the Iliad taking a bit of this, adding a bit of that—Stalingrad shows up, and so does the space program. In his debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007, revised 2010), Zachary Mason gives the kaleidoscope another shake. He rearranges elements of the Iliad’s sequel into fragments that can only be understood by reference to Homer’s original, even as he toys with, replaces, and subverts it. In one story, Odysseus discovers Agamemnon’s copy of “a book called the Iliad”: myth within myth. In this Iliad’s introduction, it is explained that the works

attributed to Homer were . . . written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history . . . . [T]here have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic . . . . each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.
The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly this has had no impact on the action or the outcome.

That said, we also learn that the trickster Odysseus “started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went . . . . [O]ne of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer.” Or do the origins of the Iliad lie in an Achaean chess primer, its instructions degenerated into mere literature? Maybe.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey could have ended up as little more than graffiti on an icon, but its combination of ingenuity, depth, and wit, not to speak of a cast—often composed of echoes or reworkings such as Achilles as a golem—of characters who have long shone in the Western imagination, makes it an enticing maze. Sometimes the understated beauty of Mason’s language is enchantment enough. Odysseus—an Odysseus—returns to Ithaca to an enthusiastic welcome from all but Penelope,

hardly aged and oddly quiet, lingering alone at the back of the crowd. He pushed his way through to her and reached out to touch her cheek but she evaded him and the crowd looked away, suddenly quiet, and Odysseus was aware that he had blundered. The next day they showed him her grave. . . . [N]othing is more disgraceful than to acknowledge the presence of the dead.

Mason followed this novel with Void Star (2017), a work set in the near future, which received mixed reviews. Last year, however, he returned to antiquity with Metamorphica, a novel that is a response, as its title implies, to Ovid’s sprawling narrative poem. In writing Metamorphoses, Ovid rummaged through the splendid chaos—no inquisitors there—of classical mythology to produce a wild, eccentric epic that runs from the mysterious before (ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum) to a happy present presided over by Augustus, “father,” “ruler,” and future god. (The flattery was not enough—the future god eventually exiled the poet to a backwater on the Black Sea.) In the introduction to Tales from Ovid, his own rummage through the fruits of Ovid’s rummaging, Ted Hughes notes how Ovid takes up

only those tales which catch his fancy, and engages with each one no further than it liberates his own creative zest. Of those he does take up . . . he gives his full attention to only a proportion, sketching the others more briefly in ornamental digressions or cramming them as clusters of foreshortened portraits into some eddy of his unfurling drift.

There’s something of that not only in Mason’s selection of stories from Metamorphoses, but also in his treatment of their content. The tale of Arachne—145 lines in Metamorphoses—is pared down to half a page. The task of making sense of Athena’s fury falls on a couple of sentences in which brevity, banality, and omission fight it out. Sole female protégé. A falling out. The tale only comes alive when Arachne looks up at the goddess who has spared her from suicide but condemned her and her descendants for eternity:

I looked up into her face and saw pity, but then the image fractured into elements without meaning, a fissure where her mouth had been, her eyes blue suns.

In his preface, Mason explains that he has written “the mythology I wish I’d found, much as Ovid did, moving lightly through the ancient sources, taking up what he liked and reinventing it.”

It’s easy to see why an author who rewired Homer would want to do the same to Ovid, a doubly alchemical poet who transformed stories about transformation. Even before that preface, Mason foreshadows what is to come with a quotation from Metamorphoses (“everything changes,/ nothing ends”) pointing to an unending process of reinvention. Those words come from a curious sequence in which Ovid is purportedly quoting Pythagoras on the transmigration of souls, possibly as a joke, possibly because he felt his confection needed some Greek philosophical heft. Citing them might be part of the game that the American is playing with the Roman. Then again, Mason may mean it.

Sadly, Mason’s reach exceeds his grasp. Metamorphica does not quite live up to the promise of either its concept or, for that matter, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. To be sure, it begins intriguingly enough. If the Iliad can, in Mason’s telling, become myth, a chronicler of mythology can encounter myth as reality. Dissatisfied with his early work, Ovid seeks out Athena’s help. The goddess shares the poet’s dim view of his talent, but she tells him “it would take exile” to put things right. He “would have to give up everything” but he would (ah ha!) “be transformed.” So he was, yet could not have been, and indeed was not: by the time of his exile, Ovid was already Rome’s preeminent poet, and Metamorphoses had almost certainly been finished. In Mason’s hands, history is as fluid as myth.

Mason’s version of Ovid’s stories is, despite the appeal of its wispy, almost hallucinatory prose, at its best when the dance with its counterparty is at its most intense. Pygmalion becomes a prisoner to unfulfilled, insatiable, gnawing desire. We meet Icarus after a first flight that ends in a crash, “but it’s nothing I can’t repair . . . and soon I’ll rise again, and this time touch the sun.” Ovid’s Hercules disappears almost entirely into the tale of the Nemean lion, something only referred to in passing in Metamorphoses. Mason concludes his take with a transformation that nods to the traditional account of the hero’s death before ending on a note of unsettling beauty. Then there’s the hunter Actaeon, who stumbles onto the sight of a naked Diana only to be turned into a deer and torn apart by his own hounds. He is transformed, yet again, by Mason, but this time from hapless victim to villain.

Scattered through Mason’s text are suggestions of something more ambitious still. Oedipus, who only merits a line or two in Metamorphoses, approaches the Sphinx. “At her feet lay worn plates of fractured granite, incised with minute writing” that, the Sphinx explains, foretell the future. What they show is that Oedipus will throw a spear through the Sphinx’s heart. But Oedipus reads those words and does not kill the Sphinx. “Your book is false,” he tells her.

The Sphinx agrees that Oedipus has not cast his spear:

“But the book is true. Therefore, we are not in the book.”
“But if the book is the world, where then are we?”
“Someplace else. In an undreamed dream, a tale unwritten.”

That hints at a very grand design, but in Metamorphica Mason offers up only sketches, gorgeous often, haunting sometimes, but only a fraction of what, I suspect, he was trying to achieve.

Mount Desert Island, Maine, July 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Exactly which myths are being drawn on by Mason Ball, the British author of The Thirty-Five Timely & Untimely Deaths of Cumberland County, an eerie and engrossing novel set in Depression-era Maine, is not altogether clear. There’s a stray, unexplained reference to the Second Coming, camouflaged in Greek, that merges into suggestions of the arrival of a different kind—or kinds (the darkening clouds over Europe are gradually coming into view)—of reckoning.

Its approach is signaled in the book’s opening paragraph. A narrator, a Mainer, observes how

we were influenza to the Indians. We were smallpox. We swept in, wiped them away. Chalk dust offa slate. The Abenaki have a name for it, call it The Great Dyin. Don’t suppose there’s much help to be had in wishin it weren’t so. One day no doubt our own influenza will march in and make us history; maybe it’s already here.

From the beginning, the supernatural seeps into a tale of a series of killings—murder seems like too mundane a word—that would be disturbing enough in themselves without the indications that something more sinister still is at work. A weird threesome is roaming through the forests of Maine. Its leader, a woman from the woods, “old for as long as she can remember,” has been joined by two followers. The first is seemingly a child, a ragamuffin girl, feral, who shows the old woman what may be a souvenir of some sort—an upper set of dentures, “their crude pink and white horseshoe polished and grinning in the bright air.”

“[W]hat in Hell’s name did you do?”
The girl leans forward, mischievous, as if imparting a secret.
“I think you know,” she whispers.

The second follower, or accomplice—call him what you will—is a thin man, far, far from William Powell. He “cuts a strange and fragile figure,” gaunt, kind-eyed, disheveled, feet wrapped in fabric, a blanket around his shoulders, what looks “like the rag remains of some kind of long underwear hanging about his waist, his narrow chest bare and greasy, ribs described in shades of dirt.” He has been walking, walking, walking through the woods, “[s]omewhere to go but not quite sure where that somewhere might be.” He can kill by just whispering a few words in an ear.

He is no ordinary vagrant, and it becomes increasingly evident that the little girl is no little girl. The old woman is no old woman either, but, whatever she may be, she is in charge, even if she doesn’t always say so. The three of them bicker their way through the charnel house they are making of a small corner of Maine, but it’s the old woman who isn’t an old woman who sets the pace and makes the rules. They are on a mission, even if only she knows what that mission is.

Unless you are, perhaps, a member of the Manson Family, or a Truman Capote fan, reading about a killing spree, even one orchestrated by who knows what for who knows what reason, might ultimately pall without either a victim on the run (and in this book the victims don’t last long enough for that) or a battle of wits with someone determined to put an end to the slaughter. In Thirty-Five Deaths, John Bischoffberger, a doctor “from away” (Pennsylvania) who has retreated to the boondocks in a failed attempt to escape wartime memories of the Meuse, takes that latter role.

Bischoffberger notices the old woman as he drives along a lonely road: “Trees nodded as far as the eye could see; an enormous quiet settled on the road, not another soul in sight. They stared at one another.” It’s almost possible to feel the summer heat—one of the characteristics of this often strikingly written book is its vivid description of the seasons, all the more impressive given that, from what I can discover online, the author does not appear to have visited Maine.

The doctor is uneasy. He assumes that she is another casualty of the Depression wandering the land, yet there is something else, something “elemental,” about her. These are the early stirrings of suspicions that are set to grow, and as they grow they lead to a conclusion that Bischoffberger finds more difficult than most people to accept. His belief in God had perished on the Western Front, but the doctor may now have to swap one impossibility for another. As Bischoffberger discusses the deaths he is recording (he is also the medical examiner) to his friend Joseph, he jokes about keeping two sets of books, “one true, one more than true.”

The words “more than true” bother Joseph, who reflects afterwards on the “acrobatics” that people go through to explain things:

but it aint no laughin matter. A belief is a shrill edict is what it is. A shoutin voice in your ear. And maybe it’s true, this belief, but if you can’t ask it a question, walk around it, I’d say look away, I’d say run a fuckin mile.

Later, Bischoffberger wonders whether “it was the wildness, the untamed nature about him that he feared.” By that point, this is wishful thinking. That he could still be considering it is another example of Ball’s feel for a state where the forest seems poised to engulf so much of what man has built. This notion of a place on the edge is reinforced by Ball’s description of a world knocked off-kilter, whether by the Depression—a shadow, deftly portrayed and forever in view—the mounting tensions in Europe, or the sense that something wicked is coming the doctor’s way.

“Perhaps he’s next. Is he next?” whispers the thin man to the little girl. She spits at him, mimics his voice in falsetto.
“Is he next?”
The old woman turns on them. They both halt.
“Of course he’s next,” she says, “everyone’s next. It’s just there’s an order is all.” . . . The thin man is agitated, insistent.
“But is he huntin us?”
“Maybe we’re huntin him,” answers the girl slyly.
“Which is it?” He’s confused. The old woman’s voice barks back at them: “I’ll guess we’ll know when it’s over. The one wins is the hunter. The other fella just thought he was.”

Thirty-Five Deaths was published in the United Kingdom using a crowdfunding model. It is easily obtainable over there. What it deserves now is a publisher over here.

There’s no mystery about the identity of the monsters in 77, a novel by the Argentinian writer Guillermo Saccomanno first published in 2008, but now available in an English translation by Andrea Labinger. Set both during Argentina’s “dirty war” (1974–83) and our own time and cluttered by several subplots too many, 77is above all about the experience—the dread, the clammy carefulness, and the grubby compromises—that came with living under a dictatorship that, despite the scale and baroque cruelty of its atrocities, in some ways anticipated today’s subtler authoritarianism. Rather than the unapologetic savagery—the show trials, hecatombs, and gulags—more usually associated with the Grand Guignol of twentieth-century politics, the defining horror of the “National Reorganization Process” (the euphemism is another giveaway) was the “disappearing” of tens of thousands into, as the Nazis put it, Nacht und Nebel, a silence from which there was often no return.

Man can get accustomed, more or less, to anything. As Gómez, a gay high school teacher, went cruising the streets of Buenos Aires, “there wasn’t a night” when he wasn’t spotted by the occupants of a green Ford Falcon—the cars favored by the regime’s enforcers—but he was old enough and well-dressed enough to pass for respectable, to be overlooked.

Other times . . . I saw a display of uniforms half a block away. They would yank a family out of a house, a building, and force them into a truck, hitting them with butts of their rifles. The city remained deaf to the sirens, the orders, the screams and the sobs of the children.

Saccomanno (who was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 and lived through the dirty war) has said that the degree of civilian complicity—the support of the middle class for the junta—is something that he wants to emphasize. He repeatedly stresses the way that terror coexisted with indifference and, a corollary of indifference, the routines of a more comfortable normality. A young girl is dragged down the stairs of a church, beaten, hooded, and bundled into a car. “No one interfered. Then the slamming of the Falcon’s doors. The screech of tires.” A youngster is gunned down outside a bakery. The next day, his body has gone: “There was no blood, either. The bakery was open now. People were coming out with pastries.”

77 won the 2008 Premio Hammett, an annual prize for the best crime novel in Spanish. Occasional longueurs are more than compensated for by a brisk, sometimes darkly amusing, style that, appropriately enough, contains within it echoes of the hard-boiled stories of another time and place. Gómez is an outsider—as the protagonist of such a book must be—in his case by class, sexuality, and ethnicity (Gómez is, he relates, using the disparaging porteño expression, a cabecita negra). Even while recalling a visit to commiserate with the upscale family of a student who has been “disappeared,” he notes how the father “maintained a cool distance . . . . The tragedy hadn’t altogether wiped away his arrogance” or, it appears, Gómez’s social resentment. He observes the paternal pride in a “courageous” son, an “idealist.” “There was a sense of lineage there. I wondered if being the father of a martyr was better than being the father of an office clerk.”

Later, the cops break up a fight between Gómez and one of his (many) lovers. “They were from the Federal Police. One of them—short hair, heavy black sweater, black leather jacket, black jeans and moccasins checked my ID. He was a Criollo Bruce Lee. Then he looked me in the eye. A feline gaze. Like a puma in the shadows . . . ” Afterwards, well . . .

At times Saccomanno’s allusions to Argentinian culture will pass some readers by. Others may struggle with shorthand references to events that helped propel the long slide into the dirty war, such as the 1955 air attacks on the Plaza de Mayo (a massacre directly relevant to 77’s storyline) or the splits within Peronism in the early 1970s. There are omissions, too, that the unwary may miss. The barbarism of those who ran the dirty war—and of many of their helpers—cannot be denied, but there is no suggestion here that there might also have been monsters, or monsters in waiting, lurking in some of the groups ranged against them. Instead, Gómez sighs that an encounter with two leftist insurgents had shaken his “foundations.” What were his “weak, well-meaning, middle-class schoolteacher arguments” when compared to, oh please, their willingness “to risk their lives for a better world,” words that have to be read alongside his earlier assent—admittedly in ambiguous circumstances—to the notion that a certain infamous Argentinian-born mass murderer, one Che Guevara, had been a hero?

The real monster in Article 353, the atmospheric new work, spare and sharp, by the Breton writer Tanguy Viel, translated by William Rodarmor, is Antoine Lazenec, not Martial Kermeur, the man who heaved him over the side of a boat and left him to drown. “Ideas of justice,” wrote the British philosopher John Gray, “are as timeless as fashion in hats,” and, if Article 353 is about anything other than a killing in a small town, it is that the definition of justice is again on the move. Lazenec is a sharply dressed swindler with a touch of Paris about him, “a guy with plans,” who breezes into a fading coastal community. But there are unmissable insinuations that a greater swindle has already taken place. This book was written a year or so before the gilets jaunes first made themselves felt, but globalization and its discontents hang heavily over a town never given a name, an anonymity that suggests, if not ubiquity, at least an absence of the unique.

“I can’t say it happened more here than other places,” concedes Kermeur, “but heaven’s been hard on us for a long time, on the harbor there, the trails along the coast, the village streets, and even in the town council meetings, you felt the weariness.” There had been layoffs at the local shipyard, “four-fifths of the workers.” More are coming: in ten years, predicts Kermeur, the yard will be gone. All that’ll be left will be “dusty machines, and missing workers.” With a passive resignation common enough in the neoliberal (a ludicrous adjective, but it’ll have to do) era that may now be passing, Kermeur does not claim that the upheaval was “good or bad, just that it hit . . . pretty fast.” The payoffs however, he admits, are not bad, enough to buy “a little house here in Finistère,” or a boat.

Lazenec, by contrast, purchases a large municipal property, a vacant house substantial enough to be known as a château without actually being one, as well as the surrounding land, and he buys it with a check and big promises: development, a resort, a real estate complex. Lazenec behaved, recalls Kermeur, “like a pioneer discovering a new land. We were like naïve, bewildered Indians, unsure whether to shoot a poisoned arrow or welcome him with open arms, but it certainly seemed we chose the second option.” That was a mistake.

Kermeur recounts (in unusually literary terms: he must be one of the most eloquent former shipyard workers in history) the seduction of his community, the petty grandeur of the ceremony at which the model of the proposed development is unveiled: “as the glasses of white wine started going around, the very word ‘developer’ seemed to sparkle like sunlight.” He conjures up dreams of pocket Xanadus—“five-story buildings all glass and exotic woods with solariums, glass elevators, and heated swimming pools”—and plays to the perennial provincial hope “that something more urban” is coming their way. Kermeur comes to understand the cleverness of Lazenec’s deception, the ways, beyond the usual—money, secrets, sex—that he kept the scheme going by “[feeding] the flame.” But he realizes this too late, after he has also succumbed to the swindler’s sweet talk.

After opening with an account of Lazenec’s murder, Article 353 continues with Kermeur’s arrest and his appearance before a juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate who decides whether there is enough evidence of guilt to justify a trial. “This judge,” notes Kermeur, “seemed like he wanted to hear me out.”

And so the story begins.

With the exception, possibly, of some bad business involving a mysterious death in a swimming pool, the monsters—and gods of a moment—who shamble, stagger, and (overdoses have consequences) wheel their way through the British writer D. J. Taylor’s picaresque Rock and Roll Is Life are too ridiculous to take seriously. “A throne carved out of imitation wooden skulls [and] an autographed copy of Mein Kampf”—really? Purportedly the reminiscences of “One Who Was There,” this unillusioned yet cheerfully nostalgic novel revolves around the inflation and deflation of the Helium Kids, one of the many British bands that found themselves in the right place at the right time to jump onto the rocket that the Beatles had sent into orbit. Skimpily talented (with one ill-fated exception) serial plagiarists with an eye for a bandwagon, this former beat group careens through pop, psychedelic, and prog pastiche before peaking and eventually crashing amid the pomp and circuses of stadium rock.

Taylor is at his best here when describing what he knows. The weakest sections in a delightful and often very funny book are set in Goldwater’s Arizona. His evocation of Norwich, his hometown, and the county over which it presides, is, however, superb. Reader, I was there. Eating “Sky Ray lollies” in Cromer. Did that.

Crucially, Taylor’s perceptive description of an era so undemanding that the Helium Kids could become stars is pitch perfect, in fact almost too perfect. “If you remember the ’60s, you really weren’t there”; yet any forgetfulness on the part of Nick Du Pont, the Helium Kids’ publicist, the One Who Was There (and Taylor’s supposed narrator), is swept away by all the references to people, places, fashions, and, well, everything from that time, that tumble through the text. These are sometimes of such exuberant obscurity (“Gandalf’s Garden”!) that they give every sign of being the spoor of a research project run amok. This does nothing to detract from the book’s pleasures (on the contrary, with the right audience it will generate almost philatelic levels of joy), but, if only slightly, this surplus of accuracy comes at the expense of authenticity. It acts as a reminder that the author was One Who Was Not There. This is hardly his fault. Taylor was born in 1960 and raised in Norwich, too late for swinging London and too far, and, I would guess, not that much closer to the not-always-glorious excess of the pre-punk 1970s.

Inevitably, there are moments in the book that evoke the 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap, a more obviously absurdist take on a not entirely dissimilar band. Too meta, perhaps, but Taylor missed a trick by not including Nigel, Derek, and at least one of their drummers among the wickedly chosen herd of celebrities and fifteen-minuters who wander through his narrative. Making up for this loss, Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw, “four members of the Dave Clark Five, half of Procul Harum,” and, in a relationship with the Kids scarred “by a prolonged bout of juvenile name-calling,” the Rolling Stones, are among those who make appearances. A glimpse of the Duke of Windsor—“a spruce old gentleman with what had once been butter-colored hair and wrinkles running in odd, chevron, grooves down the side of his face”—is a surprise; that the Queen Mother turns up, less so. As with This Is Spinal Tap, this book’s main interest lies in the depiction of a time and a place rather than the arc of its narrative. Rock and Roll Is Life may be held together, however loosely, by Du Pont’s own story, but his rise and safe landing are eclipsed by Taylor’s pointillist depiction of the Helium heyday. The exquisitely chosen period detail is buttressed by sly facsimiles of real events (such as an Altamont in a Louisiana swamp) and backed by an impressively convincing collage of meticulous fakery: works of po-faced rock scholarship, a clutch of media interviews, reviews of varying degrees of kindness, and press releases of varying degrees of dishonesty. The trouble Taylor has taken extends even to the titles in the band’s oeuvre, whether for their prog album, Glorfindel (looted from Tolkien, naturally), or for individual songs, from “Mohair Suit” to “Agamemnon’s Mighty Sword”:

Rising from the turbid deeps
The Mermaid-haunted waters
Agamemnon’s mighty sword . . .

And that is where we came in. Sort of.

Myths, legends & monsters