Snö

No more Thomas Hardy, I promise, but -- Victoriana update: I finally read The Tiger in the Well, (which Google would lead you to believe is about Tiger Woods' health or US high school wrestling, but is actually the third book in Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series, possibly the original fount of contemporary YA Victoriana (Ruby in the Smoke was first published in 1985). Seeing as the BBC was too lazy (or busy making everyone go WTF? about Doctor Who) to provide its annual Sally Lockhart adaptation, reader, I read it -- not without ghostly visions of Billie Piper and Matt Smith rather Who-ing up the whole thing. I suppose part of the pleasure of historical fiction is the sense of book as Tardis.

Likewise (or somehow connectedly -- my brain is still full of Xmas pudding so beware tenuous connections) the pleasure of catching up with characters as they grow up. Sally Lockhart, now a mother, a transformation that Pullman (one of those rare male authors who writes female subjectivities well -- better, I think, than male) carries off with aplomb. He even manages a short passage of third-person-slanted narration through Sally's toddler daughter Harriet. Hats off to him. Hats off, also, to Hilary McKay, who has returned to the beloved Casson family with what, fingers crossed, might be becoming a new Rose book. At the moment it's a years' worth of blog in Rose's inimitable voice. True to the theme of this post, it ends with a wonderful and seasonal post about snö (explanation for spelling forthcoming), and it's worth reading through the earlier posts (downloadable as PDFs) for Rose's frozen bedroom experience.

With the Victoriana pile dealt with (Tiger in the Well features little snow, sadly, but a hell of a lot of plot-relevant rain), the only literature snowy enough to meet the season is Scandinavian detective fiction which, legend has it, always begins with (or at least contains) the line: "There was snow." or "It was snowing." or "Snow had fallen." In Scandetectiviana, snow forms a major plot point as well as a mood message: there's always bodies stuck under the ice, or snow covering tracks (with Miss Smilla as the original, if not the best, case). So I was a little disappointed about the lack of snö (which is, of course, snow pronounced with a Muppet Show Swedish Chef accent) in the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (of course Hollywood has optioned a remake, which is about as necessary as a remake of Let the Right One In, a film that neatly combined vampires [very Victorian] with snö). Altogether too summery, frankly, despite the rather sparkly winter opening, a witty moment involving a wood stove/MacBook juxtaposition, and proof that you can jog in the snow. I suppose to Swedes, snow is a fact of life, not a cinematic attraction.

I think it's also part of author Stieg Larsson's lighter take on the thriller: not that the Millennium Trilogy isn't replete with (knuckle-)cracking action and gory murders, but the central characters, journalist Mikael Blomqvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander, don't come with the prerequisite long dark snowfall of the soul for which the external weather is pathetic fallacy, as in Wallander (which I mainly like for the TV series' theme tune, Nostalgia by the fantabulous Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo). In fact, there was a surprising amount of laughter during the press screening. Larsson had the enviable gift (brought out by director Niels Arden Oplev) of injecting ironic humour into the human relationships that form around the grimmest of situations.

This relentlessly thrillerish trailer (walking away from explosions, lots of chase sequences and fast editing) doesn't really convey the warm, human nature of the books or film, but it does include Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth Salander. Speculation that Kristen Stewart or Ellen Page could pull this role off seems ludicrous. What we need is Fairuza Balk!

More Wintry Victoriana

The first stanza of my childhood favourite (the sentimental animal portraits in stanzas 2 and 3 have aged less well ;) and some photos taken from my front door this afternoon.


Snow in the Suburbs
Thomas Hardy

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upwards, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

Scattering Largesse, or, On the Abundance of New Victorian YA Novels

It must be nearly Xmas, because my mind is full of words like gaslamp, orphanage and tippet, the Victoriana of a clammy, fogbound English winter evening offset by a roaring fire, oranges in stockings, reading aloud, white-nightdressed children saying their prayers to smiling maidservants, and -- oh wait, that's a BBC fantasy world. Dickens has a lot to answer for; or rather, the cosily familiar bewhiskered chap that we've made of him and his rosy-cheeked, cheery orphans. Which is unfathomable, given how grim the subject matter of his books really is. Somehow even grinding poverty and tuberculosis look glamorous on TV, and all the social campaigning becomes just a pebble in the story's shoe. Maybe that's "universal appeal" or maybe it's dumbing down, but what I remember most about reading Dickens as a kid (another example of UA/DD) is that his stories awakened a profound sense of injustice that no happy ending could set aright. So Oliver found a family, but what about all the other orphans?

*All* the other orphans. All that Victorian and Edwardian improving kids' lit was full of Oliver Twists and Jane Eyres: Tom the chimney sweep and Huck Finn the runaway; Rebecca and Anne, the feisty adoptees; Frances Hodgson Burnett's Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox, orphaned by India. Each of them offers the same fantasy for young readers, I think: of escaping one's family to have adventures (boarding school novels offer this in miniature) and being reunited with them at the end. A version of Freud's fort-da game. It is pretty strange, though, that children would love books about being bereft or abandoned: think of Peter Pan. Families, particularly the Victorian-Edwardian middle-class family, come across as stultifying and oppressive places from which one must fly, often in order to form an alternative family, first of friends (the Artful Dodger's gang, the girls at school) and then with more generous parental figures. That's why the end of Huck Finn is so disquieting: there's no sense that Huck's lot in life has been improved, no learning and growing.

And that disquiet also marks the end of Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell, a hauntingly strange book that sticks in the corners of my memory. Mary Hoffman points out that Rosoff's fourth novel "has been widely compared with Hardy," whose grimness exceeds even Dickens', especially when it comes to the oppressive, hypocritical and fissive nature of the nuclear family. Pell, the main character, is an elective orphan: she runs away from what, in any other cod-Victorian novel, would be the blissful conclusion, "Reader, I married him." Not Pell. She leaves behind the dim but persistent farm boy who has pressured her into a practical marriage that will keep her bound to her chaotic family, and takes her slightly supernatural awareness of horses and her lean strength on the road to look for work. Like many heroines of recent historical YA novels (as I've discussed elsewhere), Pell dresses as a boy for protection, although Rosoff -- who created Finn, a brilliant trans character, in What I Was -- plays hintingly with the eroticism and politics of transvestism, whereas in other novels it's an ornamentation that proves the heroine's un-girly bravery.

Bookwitch has said that she feels that Rosoff's female protagonists are more convincing than her male protagonists. I wonder if that's because bold girls are more plausible and welcome today than dreamy, passive boys. What Rosoff's protagonists have in common, across gender, is that they often verge on disappearance through disguise: Daisy, in How I Live Now, is starving herself into absence, while the narrator of What I Was slips out of school as often as possible to avoid bullying, and becomes almost invisible. Pell is no different, losing herself first in the myth of her anonymous boyhood and then almost in the earth itself as she searches for her lost brother. Pell is an awesome creation, and her coming to self is a genuine unfolding, even though as readers we spend most of the book in her perspective. There are choices that Pell makes -- and turns the story takes -- that I find mysterious, even after a few reads. Pell is what Tove Jansson might call a "true deceiver," honest and straightforward to the point that she tumbles headlong into depths.

Pell's headstrong faith in herself forms, Rosoff suggests, in response to her appalling, loveless and oppressive family (her father is a drunken itinerant preacher, her mother little more than a wetnurse and servant). Hetty Feather, another neo-Victorian protagonist, shares Pell's determination, but her outspoken confidence seems to arise, in Jacqueline Wilson's hands, from her brief time in a foster family -- as large, poor and chaotic as Pell's, but full of care, if not love. Wilson is, of course, the modern mistress of the orphan: her Tracy Beaker novels have made millions of readers aware of what it's like to go through the care system in contemporary Britain. Hetty, inspired by Wilson's tenure as a Fellow of the Foundling Museum, is of a piece with Dickens' resilient and resourceful children, and the adults who variously try to silence her and encourage her also have a Dickensian charm.

Especially, for me, the wonderful Miss Smith, a children's rights campaigner, an early feminist, one of the many courageous women who fought to end the workhouse system. She appears as a dea ex machina in the final chapters to rescue Hetty from life as a child flower seller -- nowhere near as glamorous as Eliza Doolittle would have us believe -- with its explicit overtones of prostitution. Like Rosoff, Wilson pulls no punches concerning the additional dangers faced by female adventurers: Hetty is, albeit briefly, a runaway from the workhouse, and meets both kindness and extreme creepiness on London's streets. Unlike Pell, though, Hetty not only defends herself and others, but finds her way to a happy ending that plays with, without indulging, the sentimentality of Victorian literature (there's also a tremendous scene in which Hetty is locked in the attic by the matron; unlike Jane Eyre, Hetty gets through the night with comfort from her vivid imagination and a kindly kitchen girl, Ida).

Wilson's ending works because the novel neither caricatures cruel figures as Dickens does, nor creates an unwarranted chain of co-incidences: in fact, Hetty's first hope of maternal love, with the brilliantly-realised circus performer Madame Adeline, is a complete and scarring failure. Wilson's generosity and abounding love for her feisty heroine is balanced by a pragmatic assessment of human nature that Hetty shares, witness her understanding about her foster brother Jem's piecrust promises. There's something charming in the balance, and in the provisional and open ending of the novel, which answers that "what about the other orphans?" question through the work of Miss Smith. Hetty, you feel, will grow up to become a campaigning novelist, too. It's less certain what will happen to the girls at the end of Wishing for Tomorrow, Hilary McKay's sequel to A Little Princess (my favourite childhood read), but like Wilson, McKay offers a suggestive open ending that's much larger than the fate of any one girl -- which is the drive of the whole book. Rather than follow Sara Crewe into her new life of luxury, McKay takes up the perspective of one of A Little Princess' losers.

Perhaps it goes without saying that YA writers take the side of the underdog -- the universal experience of the child, for whom the playground is the world of danger, threat, prohibition, bullying, incomprehensible social interactions and powerlessness writ small. But McKay is a particular champion of the different and the dreamers. None of the Casson family are exactly normal (whatever that is, and in their own estimation, I should add), but Permanent Rose -- an force of nature unstoppable by even dyslexia, tigers, New York or divorce -- is one of my favourite voices around. Things just seem to happen around Rose, crazy things that she has accidentally set in motion through her desire to see everyone around her happy. McKay imports some of Rose's unintentional crazy-making and sharp observational skills to Wishing for Tomorrow, where they are divided between the two girls Sara deserted when she moved next door to the Indian gentleman's: the academically-hopeless Ermengarde, who narrates the book, and Lottie, who has grown up from a fit-pitcher to a thoroughly bossy and brilliant girl.

McKay's generous eye for the source of character's bad behaviour even takes in Burnett's two bullies: Lavinia and Miss Minchin. Lavinia, who is actually a wonderful chorus in A Little Princess, constantly commenting on Sara in order to preserve the status quo, is here set free from her mother's voice and revealed as a scholar frustrated by the lack of opportunity for women. It's an utterly believable portrayal of a girl pulling up her bluestocking, one of many historically accurate touches that McKay brings to the fantastical London of Burnett's imagination. As in Hetty Feather, the hierarchies and lines of power are much less rigid than Victorian novels suggest, nodding forward to the great social justice movements of the twentieth century (which, of course, were prompted by campaigning writers like Dickens and Hardy). No-nonsense Epping girl Alice, who replaces Becky as the maid of all work, is a particularly fine character: hard-headed and extremely capable, she more or less runs the school and the girls love her for her kindness.

Even Lavinia, as her thirst for knowledge is satisfied, discovers generosity, an emotional tenor that is the hallmark of McKay's good characters: not a simpering kindness to small animals, but a version of what Sara Crewe has in abundance, the act of being able to imagine the needs and feelings of others, and respond to them rather than be lost in her own misery. Pell, who has the most miserable experience of all these new young Victorians, wrestles with generosity: it's the inclination of her heart over her head that leads to her take her brother with her when she runs away, and even her instinctual suspicion is not enough to deal with an ungenerous world. Like all orphans, though, she finds her alternative family, however provisional and unconventional. It's in her care for horses and the natural world, a reciprocal nurturing, that Pell expresses her kindness, and it's that quality that draws her to the poacher, and guides us into and through her story.

Freewheelin' Emily Dickinson

I went to Liverpool this weekend to see PRIMITIVE, a multi-screen installation by the fantastic filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Somehow, in the surreal and poetic logic of Apichatpong's films, it makes perfect sense that I returned with an album of Emily Dickinson's poems. While Joei, as he is known, is a contemporary Thai filmmaker with a strong interest in were-tigers, beautiful young men and diptych structures, Emily was a nineteenth-century American, daughter of a one-term Congressman, with a passion for bees, God and handmade books... but there's something that resonates in their work: an oblique quality of attention to the details that others miss (and an attendant attention to the process of making and presenting a work), an intention to work at tangents from national and globalised arts cultures while engaging with them critically, and an unfoldingness that the reader/viewer encounters in their work, which is often deceptively simple or slow in its image-making.

The album, Graphic as a Star (Fire Records, 2009), as purchased at Probe Records on Slater Street (around the corner from FACT, where the exhibition takes place), is a transhistorical collaboration with Born Heller vocalist Josephine Heller (you can hear sample tracks on her MySpace page). Heller describes her music as "religious/blues" and comments on Fire Records' site that

her craft is strongly shaped by "Tin Pan Alley on my maternal side, rock and roll on my paternal side, Western folk music by birth, art-song and classical music via my adolescent passions".

The settings for the poems certainly show all of these influences, falling into three rough groups -- swooping a capella settings reminiscent of the songs sung by the old woman in Terence Davies' film Distant Voices, Still Lives: a little bit hymn, a little bit singalong-around-the-piano, a little bit music hall, a little bit trad. ballad but more delicate than that sounds; folky, Shirley Collins or Vashti Bunyan-like numbers that whisper into your soul, with gentle guitar; and rollicking harmonica numbers that pair E.D. and Bob D. to startling effect.

You'd think that the lineage of American folk poetry would run Whitman >> Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music >> Bob Dylan. But Foster brings out both the subversive hymn-singer and the land-lover in Dickinson's poetry, especially in a hauntingly tremulous and swooning (considering the violence of the lyrics) rendition of "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -," the very poem that Susan Howe makes central to her argument about Dickinson's deep roots in American pioneer and Puritan culture in her transcendent study My Emily Dickinson. Howe reminds us, in her reading, that poethics, poetry's role in social and political change, can be exercised in ways tender and small as well as strident and self-aggrandizing.

In his recent acceptance speech for the PEN/Pinter prize, Tony Harrison lauded the muscular poetic tradition that sees poets honoured with statues and political status. All the poets he cites are (of course?) male. Howe and Foster are attuned to what eludes Harrison: that radical freedom is to be observed in the spider as much as the soldier. Dickinson's tapestry has traditionally been regarded as one of loneliness, isolation and limited opportunities. But she is no lady of Shallot, that damning Victorian figure of artistic ambition in women. As Graphic as a Star reveals, Dickinson is as attuned to the modern as the traditional, pursuing the wilful and gorgeously different in both, always going out towards the world.

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea
Past the houses - past the headland -
Into deep Eternity -

Novelist plans blogsplash: get involved!

I discovered this innovative litblog plan on Michelle McGrane's excellent peony moon. Like pm, DL will be hosting page 1 on March 1. Join us!

Fiona Robyn is going to blog her next novel, Thaw, starting on 1st March next year. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth's diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.

To help spread the word she's organising a Blogsplash, where blogs will publish the first page of Ruth's diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).

She's aiming to get 1000 blogs involved (880 to go!) - if you'd be interested in joining in, email her at fiona [at] fionarobyn.com or go to her blogsplash page for more information.

Alison Croggon, Theatre

This is a classic DL strategy: a re-reading prompted by a fresh encounter. I heard Alison read last week in London at the Poetry Society and was overwhelmed by both the familiarity and utter strangeness of her poetry. I've known Alison for ten (Ancient Mariner moment... OK, it's over) years, across oceans and ether and pages and conversations. The question of "knowing" a person in their work as/because you know them in real life is for another post, though: what struck me in the sunny Studio was the way that I *felt* her work.

I remember seeing Alison read at Pembroke in February 2000, when she was the Australia Council fellow at Cambridge: she wore a leopard-print dress and high-heeled black sandals and surveyed a crowd (myself included) of ratty/dumpy/boho students and faculty dressed as much for the soul-creeping dread of the late winter fens as for the cold. But, as we came to realise, Alison's strategy against the soul-cold was to burn brighter, to be fiercer -- and in her fierceness was a lack of critical distance (irony, intellectualism, equivocation, revocation, self-denial, incomprehensible density as cover for deep feeling) that marks a lot of contemporary experimental poetry. Her reading was full of voices, like Prospero's isle, but also blushingly full of bodies, with a directness and cutting-to-the-quick that is poetry's essence -- and which I think is neglected.

Writing about apostrophe (poems that address a listener within the text via the exclamation O! or the use of the second person), critic Jonathan Culler describes it as symptomatic of "all that is most radical, embarrassing, pretentious, and mystificatory" about poetry. I love that strange combination of words (and they definitely came to mind while I was watching Jane Campion's new film Bright Star today). Poetry *is* embarrassing, not just naked but skinless, not just skinless but the act of pointing and saying: "Look, no skin! Look, blood -- meat -- pulse!" It's in that radical strategy of drawing attention to that which we do not look regard that Alison's poetry excels. "I am concerned," remarks the titular garment in "What the Glove Said," "with the skin of nearness."

The glove's exactly the object (intimate, inside-out, human-shaped) to speak metonymically for the poet. As the title of her most recent collection Theatre suggests, she brings a playwright's (and theatre critic's) eye to the drama of revelation and the honing of address. The book begins with a plangent and seemingly transparent poem about her inability to write the poem that she writes, which sets the stage for the fiercely doubting, elusive yet ever-present "I" that will declare and undercut itself throughout the book. Of the self's relation to poetry, and the writer's relation to the reader, the poem "Theatre" asks

and is this really my own damage
or a wound torn in others
that they must diagnose
through my skin?

There's no deflection here, no deferral of meaning. It's reminiscent of John Berger's Pages of the Wound, and some of the prose poems in the collection have the dense, earned slippage between allegory and political reality of Berger's novels.

Even so, the "I" struggles to come to terms with its incarnation, its necessity for the production of poetry. In "Flames," the speaker extinguishes the poem with the lines

I am ash for a beloved voice
whose irony rebukes me

, while the poem "after Arseny Tarkovsky" (which is a version or ventriloquism of the Arseny Tarkovsky poem used by his son Andrey in the film Stalker) ends with an accounting that cannot add up: "My life… My love… my soul… my thoughts… but it isn't enough." Even when the act of writing appears to offer sufficiency and expression, it's not enough:

She writes her body with the tips of her fingers but it is no longer her body. The words are not her they belong to nobody. She writes to slough off her name. She speaks to become invisible. She desires to become what she is.

No wonder Alison's first collection for Salt was called Attempts at Being.

Paranoia in Translation, or Lisbeth Salander in the Land of Green Plums

Actually, this post could equally be called Schizophrenia in Translation: the sensation that derives from reading two (very different) books concurrently to the point that they seem, if not to merge, then to be deeply intertwined (litzophrenia?). Not that I'm looking to make light of mental illness by using terms like paranoia and schizophrenia out of context, but sometimes an encounter with a book will remind me what a weird process reading actually is -- that sitting silently over some marks on woodpulp, muttering and laughing to oneself while entering into a fantastical world and often into the persona of an invented person, is a pretty wacky thing to do.

It's hard to stand outside reading as an activity: I've been doing it since literally before I can remember anything else. One of my first and only toddler memories is of putting together the blobs on a flashcard into a word. Après ça, there was no stopping me: by the time I was in infant school, I was teaching the other kids to read. I think my mindbrain has probably been so shaped by reading that it's what I am in the same way that Usain Bolt's musculature and neurons have been sculpted by running. Culturally, reading has pretty much set in for the long haul. We all (84% of UK 16-65 year olds in the UK have literacy at GCSE grade G or above) do it inadvertently from the cereal box to the end credits every day, and many of us do it advertently (a word? And if not, why not?) most days as well.

Maybe it's because I've been hitting the poetry like a poetaholic (with events at PoetryFilm and at Keats House for Brittle Star, and reviews due to Staple) that I contracted reading-dissociation when I switched back to novels -- and a big fat novel at that, purchased especially for a weekend of train journeys and a solo hotel stay. I'm hardly the first person to be bowled over by Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (an established fact, since half the people at PEN have been telling me to read it for at least a year), but I might be one of the least likely. After (because of? despite?) a brief (and disturbing) devotion to the work of Andrew Vacchs when I was about sixteen, and an obsessive interest in Twin Peaks and The X Files, I have never been much for thrillers, either in codex or on celluloid.

Both my parents were big with the mysteries, 'tec series and all things investigative, but my love of noir begins and mostly ends with Laura (a major influence on Twin Peaks). That's right: I don't have the hots for Hitchcock, and I've no remorse for yawning at Morse. It's a failing, I think, as a reader, to exclude a genre from your library, but Delirium's mystery/thriller shelf is entirely reserved for the splendid Sherlock Holmes, a detective I encountered almost as early as I began reading (those shadowy semi-memories of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes still give me nightmares). I've tried Rebus and Whimsy and Wallander and Dirk Gently, and no-one has ever come close to the idiosyncracy and intellect, the conviction and addiction, of Holmes (especially Jeremy Brett in the role).

But I have to confess: Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous "girl with the dragon tattoo" comes close. Despite Larsson's info-dumping, despite the financial shenanigans that make as much sense to me as Ikea self-assembly diagrams, even despite the relentless snö (and equally persistent mosquitös) that falls on all Scandi detectives, I found myself hooked until 3 am, reading with the covers drawn up to my chin -- except when I leapt out of bed to check the door was locked. I couldn't sleep until I finished the book, and then I couldn't sleep some more. If my bag hadn't been full with a print-out of my own novel (which I'd promised myself I'd edit on the train home, come hell or inconveniently located rabbis), I would have bought The Girl Who Played With Fire in WH Smith's in Manchester Piccadilly station that very morning (possibly even before breakfast at the excellent Koffee Pot).

Because here's the thing: I don't read thrillers because they *get* me. Rewatching The X Files (series 1-3 1/2) recently, I found myself almost choking on my fingernails even in episodes that I'd seen half-a-dozen times before. I suffer from what's known in my household as "narrative tension." Hell, I couldn't even watch Sense and Sensibility at the cinema without getting fahrklempt about whether Marianne would see that Alan Rickman, I mean Colonel Brandon, was infinitely superior to stupid-haired Willoughby. And I'd read the book only six months previously (I also clearly have an appallingly lax narrative memory). I'm like the goldfish in Ani Difranco's song for whom the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time. Or a terrifying shock.

It's not so much about guessing whodunit as worrying in every fibre of my being about who's going to be next and what horrible defilement will be described. Worrying, I suppose, that I'll be next. Larsson's thrillers fit very much in grim miserablist realism tradition of writers like Ian Rankin where a city like this harbours people like you living next door to psychos like him. Not so much plausible deniability as undeniable plausibility. Larsson's obsession with Ikea furniture may be a running footnote on the commercialisation of Scandi design, but it's also an arrow pointing at our own living rooms (and particularly at the Swedish airport minimalism of the hotel room where I was holed up). What with financial crashes, banker bonuses and inter-generational sexual abuse, Dragon Tattoo felt like reportage as much as fiction -- and who doesn't feel tense thinking about how the house of cards (economic, political, environmental) is about to crash down on us?

Despite the expertly-generated tension, the novel lacked two aspects that mar most thrillers for me: punitive manipulation of reader expectations (and of vulnerable female characters), and stupidity dressed up as fearlessness (goading the reader to follow the investigative character into the darkness). It also lacked any sympathy for, or glamorisation of, the killer(s), and in a way any curiosity about them. They were dead space, plausibly drawn characters exerting zero narrative fascination rather than the devilish figure who haunts so many contemporary thrillers. Coupled to that lack of interest is an abiding, energising fascination with -- and fury about -- the systems of fear that make possible sexual abuse and murder, and the silence surrounding them. Industry, politics, the law, the family, the state: these are the real abusers in Larsson's books, the facilitators who empower the bit-part players who carry out the social will, whom Salander fights against with every sinewy ounce of her 4"11 being (Kate Mosse made the point well in a Guardian review entitled (although it's lost its title online) The Man Who Liked Women). I've never encountered a mainstream fictional work that lays out as clearly the effects of state power, in particular its impact on those considered less than full agents of the state: women, children, those with (perceived or actual) disabilities, those who dissent.

OK, Larsson was no Herta Müller and contemporary Sweden is not Communist Romania, but I can't help feeling that their books have something in common -- and not just because I've been reading The Land of Green Plums this weekend as well (props to Haringey Libraries, incidentally, for having a copy of the Nobel prize-winner's book, which is incidentally out of print). It's a book so powerful that I had to return it to the library the minute I finished reading it: not just because I wanted other people to have the chance to read it, but because it felt dangerous to be carrying it, as if it were one of the banned books that the characters hide in the summer house. Or even as if it might infect me with the green plum-death or cancerous nut or the dream of the sack that variously afflict characters. It's an extremely calm nightmare of a book, where the narrative tension happens on a word-by-word level, as if the novel is in code. There's no secret who the bad guy is (the state and its agents) even as the protagonist investigates every detail of her life exhaustively to find it/him out, but almost any character could be a spy, even Elsa the white cat, creating an extraordinary atmosphere of anxiety, as in the novels of Ismail Kadare (although unlike Kadare, Müller does not see women's genitalia as both the salvation and betrayal of every man).

In both books (both of which are, of course, in translation, by Reg Keeland and Michael Hofmann repectively), the tense mood of the thriller and the anxiety of the reader act as political critiques, engendering the desire for relief through change. In both, the female protagonist is almost unbearably unknowable, courageously unpredictable, and hyper-alert to the tentacular enemy with which she battles. Or maybe I'm just hyper-alert to their similarities after my weekend of sleepless paranoia, and hyper-alert too to the possibilities of thrillers to challenge my thinking, and experimental novels to have me on the edge of my seat.