horror, page 61 of 64

I was prompted to buy In Search of a Distant Voice because Amazon recommended it to me and, for once, they seemed to have actually found the sort of thing I might like. The recommendation came because of the Haruki Murakami books I’d bought from them, and I thought Yamada’s novel sounded a bit Murakami-ish, so gave it a go.

I was wrong about that “a bit”. It feels totally Murakami-ish, right from the start:

“Tsuneo got up at four-thirty in the morning. He was in the Otemachi Multi-Office Government Complex in Tokyo, in the rest station on the third floor of Building One. Four-thirty was pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes.” (p. 1)

The studied casualness of that “pretty early, it’s true, but that’s how it goes” sounds almost like a parody of the sort of stylistic tic Murakami employs, like a doctor’s bedside manner, to set his readers at ease, as if he’s trying to let you know that he’s just this, you know, normal kind of guy who somehow had this plain weird thing happen to him. In his homeland, Murakami is known for his casual tone. Though not the first to do so, he’s noted for using the most informal Japanese word boku, rather than the traditional, and more literary, watashi, as his narrator’s word for “I”. (I can’t speak Japanese; this comes from Jay Rubin’s book, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words). I don’t know how much of an impact Murakami has had on the culture of his homeland, aside from being very popular, so it’s difficult to tell if Yamada, in writing like this, is simply adopting a commercial style. Of the few other contemporary Japanese writers I’ve read, Banana Yoshimoto (yes, that’s a name, not a fruit drink) is another one who sounds very Murakami-ish. (Funnily enough, the only other contemporary Japanese author I’ve read, and the only one who doesn’t sound like Haruki Murakami, is the unrelated Ryu Murakami.) But aside from the style, one thing that links Haruki Murakami with these two is the dreamy strangeness of their plots, which was what I was after anyway, so I’m not going to complain about Yamada’s Murakami-ness. (The translator, Michael Emmerich, has also translated the aforementioned Banana, so maybe that has something to do with it.)

In Search of a Distant Voice is about Kasama Tsuneo, a young man working for Japanese immigration, who one day starts to hear a woman’s voice in his head. Tsuneo has a bit of a mystery in his past — something happened eight years before, in Portland, Oregon, which sent him running back to Japan desperately determined “to be normal”. Once he’s got over the shock of hearing this voice, and once he’s decided he’s not mad, he tries talking to it.

There are a few moments in the book which tread that wonderful line between dark and comic, moments both excruciating and disturbing, as Tsuneo tries to work out if the woman’s voice belongs to a real person (and not a dead or hallucinated one), but this dangerous tone isn’t kept up, and for most of the time the book doesn’t quite know (or let the reader know) what sort of story it’s telling. For instance, there’s an obvious mystery about Tsuneo — just what happened to him in Portland? — as well as about the woman — who is she? — and as, at the end, all is revealed about Tsuneo’s past, I expected to have the other mystery resolved, too. I don’t want to give the ending away by saying this, but I think I’d have enjoyed the book more if I had been prepared for the way it leaves some things unresolved. Now, I don’t mind unresolved. It can create quite a subtle and emotional depth to a story. But if you get unresolved when you’ve been led to expect resolved, that emotion tends to be frustration, which isn’t either subtle or enjoyable.

Having said that, I liked the book enough (after mentally readjusting my view of what it was, having finished it). At worst, it suffers from being a short novel with only the depth of a short story — though in that it could have been worse: too many books nowadays are much longer and don’t even have that depth (grumble, grumble, where’s my cardigan…) Read for atmosphere alone, as a sort of mood piece, or as a sort of Kafka-esque portrait of modern man in search of a soul, it has nevertheless intrigued me enough to give Yamada’s other novel, Strangers, a go.

I really liked M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. It was a genuinely spooky film that managed to be more than just spooky. Unbreakable seemed a bit too much like a short film idea spun out to feature film length. Signs was downright contrived, a major disappointment. The Village was good, but mainly because it worked as a drama, not because of the twist at the end which was surely obvious to anyone who’s read even a handful of science fiction stories. The Lady in the Water is his latest effort and, well, I was determined to give it a good go. I knew it had taken a critical mauling, but most of what I heard was, it seemed to me, simply down to embarrassment at the rather childish nomenclature the film uses — it’s about a man who discovers a narf (a sort of inspirational water nymph) living in the pool of the apartment block he caretakes. Narf is a naff word, as is scrunt, the monster out to get the narf, which seems to be a cross between a jackal and a patch of turf. But I thought I could overlook these rather clunky words — they were supposed to be from a child’s bedtime story, after all — because The Lady in the Water isn’t just about narfs and scrunts, it’s about the adults who find themselves caught up in this child’s bedtime story, and I thought that provided an opportunity for Shyamalan to say something interesting about the shape life takes.

Only, (to kill the suspense), he didn’t.

The film had its good points — mostly thanks to the acting, with Paul Giamatti (playing the caretaker Cleveland Heep), managing to bring his personal story to a genuinely emotional climax, and Bob Balaban, as the film critic, whose deadpan humourlessness was absolutely hilarious. Things started to go wrong for me near the start, though, when Bryce Dallas Howard’s tendency to deliver all her lines by in-breath alone meant I had to turn on the subtitles to understand what she was saying. (Thankfully, she later resorted to sign language, though only for reasons of convoluting an already over-complicated plot.)

What I really didn’t like about the film, though, was that Shyamalan failed to say that interesting thing I was expecting him to say. The possibility was there, I thought, that by bringing adult characters into a child’s bedtime story, he might say something about the gap between the meaningful form we expect life to take (as embodied by children’s stories) and the actual result we find ourselves living as adults — something of a mess, with hints of meaningfulness every now and then, but so much superfluity and inconsequentiality that we quickly realise life isn’t anything so simplistic as a bedtime story. But instead of raising the idea of story to the level of his adult characters, Shyamalan instead lowered his supposedly adult characters to the level of a child’s bedtime story by imposing on them a tremendously naive idea of what it means to have “a purpose” in life. Rather as in Signs, Shyamalan seems to think that having “a purpose” means that, at some point in your life, all your personal peculiarities and foibles will come together to make you play some perfect (though most probably minor) role in a story. But this, to me, is a horrible idea — that all your life is a preparation for some tiny part in someone else’s story, after which — what, you retire to the coast and take up gardening? Surely human life is more meaningful than that!

All the way through the film I was hoping its characters would wake up to how simplistic (and imprisoning, even dehumanising) their idea of “purpose” was. Instead, whenever anything went wrong they’d reshuffle their roles like a pack of cards, then try the same approach till it worked. In other words, they learned nothing.

I’ll probably still go and see Shyamalan’s next film. He’s at least creatively individual enough to be interesting, even if he doesn’t always succeed. It at least feels as though he’s trying, which is something Hollywood rarely seems to do.

I read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho without being aware of any of the controversy surrounding its release. My reaction to it was similar to how I felt about J G Ballard’s Crash: an incredible writerly achievement, but not a book I was ever likely to re-read, not just because of the extreme subject matter, but because neither book had enough story to justify its length. (I think Ballard happily admits Crash was a short story extended to novel length, as a sort of balance to the novel-squashed-into-a-short-story approach of his “condensed novels” from The Atrocity Exhibition.) Of the two, I enjoyed American Psycho slightly more, as there were brief hints of real human despair in the isolation of its protagonist, despite the fact he was a monstrous serial killer. It also had its funny moments, which can’t exactly be said of Crash.

Having said this, I’ve read most of what Ballard has written, and am slowly filling in the gaps, but I wasn’t tempted by any of Ellis’s other novels till his latest, Lunar Park, which returns to horror territory. Lunar Park reads very much like a Stephen King novel. The main difference is that instead of (as with King) the narrator being an “average Joe” family man who just happens to be a writer and who gets mixed up with supernatural events, Ellis’s protagonist is more the rock-star type of celebrity author whose lifestyle few of his readers, I suspect, will be able to identify with. In fact I found the narrator’s pampered lifestyle something of a put-off near the start of the book, and it was only because the narrator was so personable, so open about his many failings, that kept me going. He was often quite funny, too.

In a neat link with Crash, where the protagonist was called Ballard, Ellis’s protagonist in Lunar Park is called Bret Easton Ellis, and seems to have lived a life similar to that of his creator. He has, for instance, written a much talked-about book called American Psycho. The opening chapter, summarising his life so far, could well be a satirised version of Ellis’s own rise to fame — I’ve no idea of the details of Ellis’s life. It certainly acts as a good start to the novel, with enough of a whiff of metafiction to pacify the genrephobic among its readers.

In the novel, Ellis (the narrator) has just been shocked into acknowledging the total emptiness of his drug-addled life by the lonely death of his estranged father. Trying to quickly patch in some stability and meaning, he marries an ex-girlfriend Hollywood actress with whom he fathered (or didn’t) a son he previously refused to acknowledge. Fatherhood, however, is not a role he’s prepared for. Three months into the marriage, he has barely connected with his son, is in serious “couples counselling” with his wife, and the family dog thinks — knows — he’s a fraud. Odd things start to happen. He’s been receiving a series of blank, anonymous emails from the bank where his father’s ashes are locked away in a deposit box (against his father’s wishes). The house where he lives seems to be spontaneously changing colour, and the furniture is rearranging itself. Worst of all, he meets several people who seem overly reminiscent of characters from his own fiction, one of whom may be Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from American Psycho. Kids have been disappearing in the neighbourhood.

This first half of the novel is entertaining, mainly because of the dry comedy in the narrator’s estrangement from his family, and the sheer weirdness of the over-medicated, sterilised & psychoanalysed lives of the wealthy suburbanites and their unfortunate children. It’s as the novel starts to descend more firmly into genre territory, as the genuinely weird events become more and more obviously supernatural, that the book loses its charm. The easy flow of humour gives way and Ellis (the author) loses his style. At moments of horror the flow breaks down completely and we get nothing but single-sentence paragraphs for pages at a time:

It was tall and had a vaguely human form, and though it was skeletal it had eyes.

Rapidly my father’s face was illuminated in the skull.

And then another replaced it.

Clayton’s.

I was stunned into rigidity. (p 401)

The simple statement of fact can be quite chilling when applied to moments of supernatural horror — Sheridan LeFanu uses it brilliantly in some of his fiction (“his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed” from Ghost Stories of the Tiled House) — but when it’s the only device, when we get no dynamics or contrast with passages of greater length, the constant thud of short sentences becomes a rhythmic jolt breaking you out of the dream-state the book ought to be working to keep you in. On top of this, the actual details of the novel’s various hauntings are so varied that there isn’t any focal point, nothing the reader can build their own expectations and anxieties on. You don’t feel, as you do with Lovecraft, that there’s a unifying idea behind it all (even though it turns out there is).

It’s a shame, because the start of the book was really enjoyable, and the ending managed to achieve a satisfying emotional resolution — but this was largely thanks to the story of what happens to the narrator’s son, which, although it is only a subplot compared to the main supernatural events, is far more affecting and interesting, and would have made a better book on its own. (Something akin to a reverse of Ballard’s novella Running Wild, perhaps.)