books, page 92 of 137

Throughout his high school years, Tsukuru Tazaki was one of five extremely close-knit friends (three boys, two girls) in his hometown of Nagoya. Of the group, he was the only one not to have a colour in his name, so was nicknamed ‘Colourless’ Tsukuru Tazaki, something that subsequently coloured his own view of himself as being ‘An empty vessel. A colourless background. With no special defects, nothing outstanding.’ He was also the only one of the five to leave Nagoya after high school, going to Tokyo to study engineering. Returning briefly in the middle of his sophomore year, he phones his friends only to find they’ve cut off relations with him. ‘Think about it, and you’ll figure it out,’ is all he’s told. But Tsukuru can’t figure it out, and he’s plunged into near-suicidal despair:

‘The door was slammed in my face, and they wouldn’t let me back inside. And they wouldn’t tell me why. But if that’s what all of them wanted, I figured there was nothing I could do about it.’

The novel begins sixteen years later. Living an empty but ordinary (colourless) life, Tsukuru is prompted by his latest girlfriend — the first he feels serious about — to track down his former friends and solve the mystery. Tsukuru is none too keen: ‘I’ve managed to slowly close up the wound and, somehow, conquer the pain. It took a long time. Now the wound is closed, why gouge it open again?’ Sara says: ‘Maybe inside the wound, under the scab, the blood is still silently flowing.’ She does the initial work (with social media, something Tsukuru, of course, doesn’t use), and comes up with the first shock: Shiro, ‘Miss White’, was murdered several years ago. Another of the group, Eri, married and moved to Finland, but the remaining two, the men, are still in Nagoya. Keen not to lose Sara, Tsukuru agrees to visit each of the surviving three and learn the truth about what he’s been dealing with on his own all these years.

It’s just before halfway through the novel that Tsukuru meets with the first of his former friends, Ao, head of a Lexus car dealership in Nagoya, and perhaps because of the much slower pace of Murakami’s last novel, the triple-decker 1Q84, I was almost shocked when, instead of the usual Murakami-ish evasions and mysteries-around-mysteries, Tsukuru actually gets most of the answers he’s looking for! But Colourless Tsukuru is a much shorter book than 1Q84 — and, I’d say, a better one. It’s a pity that (perhaps because of the economics of publishing such a huge novel) 1Q84 got so much press attention at the time of its release, drawing in so many readers new to Murakami, many of whom were left somewhat overwhelmed by the size and typically Murakami-ish incomprehensibilities of the book. Colourless Tsukuru, though by no means as barnstorming or epic a novel, is much more effective at telling its low-key tale of a quiet man coming to terms with the loneliness and rejection he’s borne throughout his adult life. (It’s a novel that could, even, be shorter still. An early episode in Tsukuru’s college years, featuring the only fantasy-tinged sequence in the book, could be removed, I think, without unduly affecting the rest of the novel. Aside from offering up an interesting but mostly detachable story-within-a-story, it left me expecting a resolution that never comes.)

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage addresses themes Murakami has dealt with before — intense early-life relationships derailed by mental illness (Norwegian Wood), social ostracism (“The Silence”, one of the better stories in The Elephant Vanishes) — but to me it felt like he was taking those themes a bit further, adding a little more maturity and perspective to the brew. There’s a real feeling of mere human beings doing what they can to face up to the dark forces of life, an attempt to rescue something meaningful from an early, life-defining wrongness that has blighted all the years that followed:

‘Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role.’

By the end of the novel, mysteries remain, but these are just the tying up of plot threads; the central emotional core resolves, and it makes Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki a satisfying, if low-key offering from Murakami, and one that bolsters my faith in him after the frankly overlong 1Q84.

J G Ballard’s fourth novel, The Crystal World, seems to have grown like a crystal. Before the novel (published 1966), there was the novella “Equinox” (in two parts in New Worlds between June and August 1964), and before the novella there was the short story “The Illuminated Man” (in F&SF, May 1964), and at the very start of the short story — topping and tailing it, in fact, as it’s repeated at the end — is a brief, italicised paragraph that’s like the seed-crystal of all that follows, a description of a Surrealist painting that never was:

“By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forests, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…”

In the novel (where this paragraph appears in the final chapter), the alligators are now crocodiles, as the location has shifted from Florida to a more Heart of Darkness-ish “isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic”, but the main story is the same. The protagonist, Dr Sanders (a first-person narrator named James B—— in the story) finds himself at one of several points on the Earth which are being transformed by the “Hubble Effect”:

“…an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter. It’s as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light.”

The upshot is that everything is becoming encased in (or turned into) crystal, and the crystallisation is spreading in waves that pulse through the affected zones, turning rivers into roads of glass, and roads into pathways furred with foot-high crystal spurs. Everything, from the vegetation to the buildings to the water is becoming a prismatic version of itself, and that includes the animals and people. It’s when describing this effect — when painting it before our eyes in sparkling, rainbowed light — that Ballard’s writing is at its precise, vivid, hallucinogenic best:

“From the elbow to the finger-tips it was enclosed by — or more precisely had effloresced into — a mass of translucent crystals, through which the prismatic outlines of the hand and fingers could be seen in a dozen multi-coloured reflections. This huge jewelled gauntlet, like the coronation armour of a Spanish conquistador, was drying in the sun, its crystals beginning to emit a hard vivid light.”

Time has crystallised my own view of The Crystal World. On a first reading I found it to have passages of beautiful, precise poetry punctuating (after a nicely-paced moody beginning) an otherwise dull story. A recent re-read has only confirmed me in this opinion. The moments that stand out are like shards of the original short story — they’re all in “The Illuminated Man”, often in the same words: the helicopter that slews then crashes as it tries to fly when the Hubble Effect has taken hold of its rotor blades, the half-vitrified crocodile suddenly whipping into life from its bed in a solidified river. But these intensely imagined, visually shocking moments speckle a story of mostly rather unconvincing, lacklustre characters who seem to be standing around in the presence of all this cathedral-like jewelled wonder waiting for the Ballardian spark to wake their inner worlds. Only, it never happens. Ballard provides us with a pair of love triangles — the protagonist Sanders, Suzanne Clair & Max Clair, and Ventress, Thorensen & Serena — both centred around a male rivalry for a dying woman, though this doubling only waters the effect of the same single-triangle situation in the original short story, which itself only seemed to be pointing out how meaningless such human motives as love and revenge are in contrast to the time-defying crystallisation process. Why, then, go to the bother of actually duplicating this meaningless situation, particularly when neither, ultimately, resolves in any interesting way?

The protagonist Sanders is much less inwardly connected to the catastrophe when compared to, say, Kerans of (my favourite Ballard novel) The Drowned World. I can’t help feeling that in writing The Crystal World, Ballard was perhaps stuck in the formula of his previous two books, and while his inventiveness as it related to the transformed landscape had blossomed — even, effloresced — he had less to say about the human side of the equation. He even, at one point, has his main character discuss the possible themes of the very novel he’s in, as Sanders starts going on about the profusion of doubles in a plot Ballard seems to be struggling to get some meaning out of. It results in some very un-Ballardian psychological truisms (“Of course there’s a dark side to the psyche, and I suppose all one can do is find the other face and try to reconcile the two — it’s happening out there in the forest”, and “Each of us has something we can’t bear to be reminded of.”). But the sheer audacity, strangeness, and poetry of the fantastic idea at the heart of the novel conquers, in the end, and those few scattered jewels of Ballardian poetry that break through the tedium of the novel’s unconvincing characters make it all worthwhile. (Though I can’t help feeling that, apart from the moody equinoctial darkness of the opening chapter, which I love, you’d be better off reading “The Illuminated Man”.)

The feeling that Ballard was tiring of his initial formula and on the verge of an artistic breakthrough is perhaps confirmed by what came next: as well as his almost continuous outpouring of short stories at the time, there was, a few years later, a quantum leap to a very different type of fiction with the “condensed novels” of The Atrocity Exhibition, and then Crash. (A novel very much like The Crystal World, in that it comes to life entirely through its intense, rather inhuman poetry, rather than its short story’s worth of story.)

The novel does, though, at least touch on a human meaning behind the Hubble Effect:

“The beauty of the spectacle had turned the keys of memory, and a thousand images of childhood, forgotten for nearly forty years, filled his mind, recalling the paradisal world when everything seemed illuminated by that prismatic light…”

And:

“…this illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower.”

Which makes me realise how much the catastrophes in catastrophe novels are all about a need to halt time, to end the forward rush of modernity and pause, perhaps regress, to something a little more humanly manageable. Perhaps, in this, Ballard’s Crystal World is the ultimate expression of the SF catastrophe.

The Crystal World also, perhaps, contains a hint of autobiography:

“It seems to me, Max, that the whole profession of medicine may have been superseded — I don’t think the simple distinction between life and death has much meaning now.”

Ballard spent a year studying as a doctor (his descriptions, in Miracles of Life, of his time dissecting cadavers in anatomy classes easily equals the poetry of The Crystal World’s more jewelled moments), but gave up, perhaps because of a very similar realisation: that it all meant nothing compared to the immensities to be explored in his own imagination — visions like the life-and-death-annulling crystallisation of the world — which were themselves attempts to resolve the very intense plunge into catastrophe, violence and upheaval of his teen years in WWII China. Like Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out Of Space” — a very similar story in some ways — The Crystal World could well be the purest expression of what its author was aiming at:

“…the response to light is a response to all the possibilities of life itself.”

Whatever its faults, The Crystal World is still an amazing piece of fiction for the sheer strangeness of its vision alone.

Ex-detective Bill Hodges spends his afternoons slouched in front of the TV, watching the sort of trashy daytime show where trashy people get goaded by a trashy studio audience into slanging matches and fist-fights. As he watches, he toys with his father’s service revolver, occasionally pointing it into his mouth. Recently retired, he’s dwelling on the failure he’s made of his life: the failure of his marriage, his failure to sustain a relationship with his daughter, the purposelessness of it all now he’s retired. A part of that failure is that he didn’t get to finish some of his bigger cases; among them, the man who ploughed a stolen Mercedes into a queue of unemployed people outside a job-seekers’ fair. Then, amidst a litter of advertising mail (more trash in his already trash-filled life), there’s a letter. Signed “THE MERCEDES KILLER”, it’s both a confession and a challenge. It’s also the killer’s attempt to add one more to his tally: Mr Mercedes is goading Bill Hodges into killing himself. But instead, it galvanises him. Fed up of wallowing in his own fallibility, Hodges decides to use his retirement to track down this monster.

Meanwhile, there’s Brady Hartsfield, a man in his mid twenties living at home with his alcoholic mother. He holds down two low-paid jobs, one as a call-out computer-fixer for people whose inability to understand their computers he despises, and the other as an ice-cream man, feeding kids whose greed for sweet things he also despises. In fact, Brady Hartsfield despises everyone. He’s like the walking embodiment of those TV shows Hodges is getting too used to watching: Brady is a free-floating racist, sexist, everything-ist despiser of all that’s not himself. Brady also has a weird, frankly incestuous relationship with his mother. And in the basement — his Control Centre — he has a row of laptops, from which he plans his next move. His first move was stealing a Mercedes and driving it into a crowd of human trash; his next, to goad the owner of the Mercedes — a rich, mentally fragile widow — into ending her life. Now, he’s working on Bill Hodges.

I thought I’d give Stephen King another go because I was in need of a dose of old-fashioned storytelling — the sort that keeps you sticking with it for one more chapter, just one more chapter, and King’s good at that. This time, though, I went with one of his non-supernatural novels, so he couldn’t go over the top with shocks and gloop at the expense of story logic. And, in terms of storytelling momentum, Mr Mercedes certainly delivers. Alternating between the lives of the newly-galvanised Bill Hodges, and the walking sump of resentment that is Brady Hartsfield, King keeps the story ticking along. But as the book approached the end, I realised that, though I do love a really gripping story, I also need a bit more. I need the story to mean something, to add up to more than just x-hours of reading. And add up to what? I think I want some sort of statement about what it means to be human. That, as well as an absorbing read, is what I go to stories for.

The parallel storylines in Mr Mercedes of course invite a comparison between the two main characters (as do those initials, though I’ve only just noticed it — BH and BH — though Hodges’ actual first name is Kermit). Bill Hodges is very human, in both his failures, and the way he stirs himself from that post-retirement apathy to find some meaning in his life again. Human beings, however low they go, can always find a way up again. Brady Hartsfield, on the other hand, is simply evil, a monster, something other — he’s crossed the line. King does give us one passage, a sort of sub-Nietzschean amalgam of second-hand nihilisms that attempt to get us into his way of thinking:

“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”

But really what it comes down to is this:

‘He’s broken,’ Hodges says simply. ‘And evil. Like an apple that looks okay on the outside, but when you cut it open, it’s black and full of worms.’

‘Evil,’ she says, almost sighing the word. Then, to herself rather than him: ‘Of course he is. He battened on my sister like a vampire.’

Now I’ve finished the book, and had a chance to stand back and think about it, I think what Mr Mercedes is about is the baser parts of human nature, and how we deal with them. Those trashy tabloid-style afternoon TV shows that wallow in depravity, prurience, and the mess other people make of their lives is at the heart of it. As the book starts, Hodges is teetering on the brink of falling into that particular abyss, and of viewing his own life in those terms. Brady Hartsfield, on the other hand, is already in so deep he can’t see anything but — and it’s not just the worthless unemployed he kills and maims at the start of the book, but the kids hungry for the worthless sweetness of ice-creams he serves from his ice-cream van (“Everybody likes the ice cream man.” — King’s good at a catch-phrase), and in the mess people make of their computers, leaving icons and half-downloaded trash everywhere. Everything that makes people human is what he despises. And for him, the only logical response is to make some grand statement about how worthless all human life is: by killing himself and taking as many of them with him as possible. But something bugs him:

“The fat ex-cop bugs Brady Hartsfield. Bugs him bad. Hodges retired with full honors, they even threw him a party, and how was that right when he had failed to catch the most notorious criminal this city had ever seen?”

What bugs him is that other people can see beyond the failure, the worthlessness, and still find something to celebrate and reward in their fellow humans.

Hartsfield decides to make one final big statement. There’s an upcoming concert of the sort of trashy boy-band that pre-teen girls go mad for. For Hartsfield, this is the perfect expression of the worthlessness of human lives and ambitions. But to the girls at the show, however trashy the rest of us might think this boy-band is, it’s the most meaningful day of their lives — genuinely meaningful, in a way Hartsfield could never comprehend. The most meaningful day of his life was the day he ploughed into that queue in a stolen Mercedes.

King has spent a career dwelling on the trash-line — his own novels are thought by some to be trash, by others to be “proper literature”, but perhaps this is the point, that he’s writing both at once, because being human isn’t about one or the other; it’s about both.

Mr Mercedes was as good a read as I was hoping for, but not a great read. Still, not to be able to appreciate it for this reason would seem a little, I don’t know… Hartsfield-esque…