A strong thread in the episodic stream of threads in Primeval and Other Times concerns Squire Popielski and the Game. In mid-life, the Squire experiences a major emotional crisis after a painful love affair leaves him physically ill and bed ridden. Three questions occur to him as he struggles to recover: Where do I come from? What can a person actually know? How should a person live? His wife tells him there is a rabbi who is a healer and that she has asked the rabbi to come to see the Squire. (This is an example of the story showing the fortuitous mingling of Jewish and Christian people). When the rabbi arrives, the Squire asks him the three questions. The rabbi responds, “You collect questions. That’s good. I have one more final question for your collection: Where are we heading? What is the goal of time?” That’s two questions, actually. We should note that asking questions to spur insight and growth has a long rabbinical tradition, as well as a long philosophic tradition—our friend Plato as an example. Upon leaving, the rabbi, having answered questions with questions, adds, “I will give you something that should now become your property.” The Squire is puzzled but feels better. The next day, the rabbi’s assistant delivers a gift, a large wooden box. There are intriguing compartments within, and in one, an old book with a Latin title: Ignis fatuus, Or An Instructive Game For One Player. (Ignis fatuus translates to English as something deceptive or deluding). In another compartment, there is an octagonal die with a different number on each face, numbered from one to eight. The remaining compartments contain small brass figures of people, animals and objects. Underneath the compartments there is a piece of folded, frayed cloth. Unfolded, it covers “the entire empty space between his (the Squire’s) desk and the bookcases…It was a sort of game, a sort of ludo in the form of a huge, circular labyrinth.” (a ludo is a simple board game in which players advance counters by throwing dice). “Kay, this is mysterious as heck. Is this game supposed to be a metaphor of some kind, my dear? Does the Game tie the stories’ vignettes together? We shall see. “The labyrinth drawn on the cloth board consists of eight circles called Worlds. The closer to the middle, the denser the labyrinth seemed to be. The outer circles were more spacious and brighter. The circle in the middle, the darkest and most tangled, was called the first world. An arrow was drawn in a copyist’s pencil by the first circle and the word Primeval.” Why Primeval? The Squire wonders. Why indeed? “A complex system of little roads, intersections, forks and fields led to the second circle, called the Second World. Two exits led to the Third World. In each world, there were twice as many exits as in the previous one.” The Squire determines that there are 128 exits from the final circle of the labyrinth. The book is an instruction manual written in Polish and Latin, describing each possible result of throwing the die. (Kabballah, anyone?) The game itself is a map of escape. The player starts at the center of the labyrinth, and the aim is to pass through all the spheres and break free of the fetters of the Eight Worlds. “The player sees his journey like cracks in the ice—lines that split, turn, and change direction at a dizzy pace…The player who believes in God will say: divine judgement, the finger of God…But if he doesn’t believe in God, he will say coincidence, accident. Sometimes the player will use the words, my free choice, but he is sure to say this more quietly and without conviction.” So the Squire, a bored aristocrat, receives a game under mysterious circumstances. The game has the player begin at a point called Primeval and advance through a labyrinth by rolls of a die. Well, if this really happened, what would you do? I’d probably lock the doors. Of course, this being a work of fiction, the Squire begins to play—even though, he concludes that the Game is the work of a lunatic. What else does he have to do? He’s a Squire, after all. It’s of note that, at a time when the Squire is questioning his faith, he receives this enigmatic game from an enigmatic religious person. “God manifested himself to Squire Popielski through the Game the little rabbi had given him. The Squire tried over and over to start the Game, but he found it hard to understand all the bizarre instructions.” He plays the Game throughout WWII, during the period when German soldiers are billeted at his house. He keeps playing, moving to the different worlds, some of which have no God. His wife worries. What can we make of this? The story of the Game and Squire Popeilski’s playing of it is a significant thread, a recurring thread in a story made of recurring threads. The difference is that the other threads concern real people, the Game threads are more abstract. I’m going to say that, in the finest tradition of stories about games (Magister Ludi, Game of Thrones?) the Game that the Squire plays is an allegory for the lives shown in Primeval and Other Times. Whoa! The Game thread is the organizing theme in the book. “Games can symbolize winning and losing, life and death, secrecy and foolishness or strategy and randomness. The many lessons a character and, by association, the reader can learn from the many facets of these games make what might be a deep and complicated story more clear to the everyman reader.” The game is played by a player who moves by throws of a die (fate, coincidence) out of Primeval (the first place) into and through a maze of places, some of which have God, some no God. And this is what the book’s characters, Genowefa, Cornspike, Michal, Misia, do. Their lives pass through an extremely tumultuous and dangerous time in Poland, encompassing WWl, WWll and the Holocaust, and the establishment of the communist regime. And their lives as depicted provide answers to the questions posed by the Squire and the Rabbi. Wait, wait! Is the Game a mise en abyme? We should probably talk about that. In a sense—bear with me here—the game creates the world. This is a common theme in religion, that the world as we know it is an illusion, constructed randomly and/or by design. Heavy stuff. Till next time. #PrimevalAndOtherTimes #OlgaTokarchuk #AlanBray

The title—Primeval and Other Times—refers to a central concept in fiction, time, although the word can have more than one meaning. Each vignette in the book is entitled “The Time of (someone or something),” which seems to indicate time as a discrete period, not as a philosophical concept. These time periods follow a generally linear path in that they begin in the year 1914 and end around 1980—based on the ages of some of the characters, although, as we shall see, it is not a straight shot to the end. (actually the book begins in an imperfect tense time that could be any time, with its description of the village). How is the concept of time handled? Well, as a guide, I suppose we should look at verb tense. The first vignette is in the present tense, although as I have suggested, this is really “outside” of linear time. “Primeval is the place at the center of the universe.” The second vignette, shifts to simple past. “In the summer of 1914, two of the Tsar’s brightly uniformed soldiers came for Michal on horseback.” The third vignette gives us “The Time of Misia’s Angel,” Misia being the daughter of Genowefa, whose story is presented in the second vignette. Paying attention? Here, we have a shift to from simple past to simple present tense: “The angel saw Misia’s birth in a different way from Kumerka the midwife. An angel generally sees everything in a different way. Angels perceive the world not through the physical forms which it keeps producing and destroying, but through the meaning and soul of those forms.” ‘Kay. You could argue, how does Ms. Tokarchuk even know about angels? How can she write with so much authority about them? This is fiction, best beloved. She can write whatever she wants. What effect does this have? (this being, the use of different verb tenses). It marks a difference between the characters whom the storyteller is telling us about, and the storyteller itself who exists outside of time. Whoa! That’s the implication. Mortal and immortal beings vs. the narrator. Do angels make use of the simple past tense? I don’t know, my friend. I don’t know. Every time there is a shift to present tense in this book, we are cued that we are reading a commentary by the narrator. And the characters—including God—give no sign of being aware of the narrator. In “The Time of the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle,” we read, “Enclosed in the icon’s decorative frame, the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle had a limited view of the church.” Here, we’ve got a non-human entity presented in simple past. In “The Time of Misia’s Grinder,” which is a story about a treasured object that Misia has, we read: “People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things…Misia’s grinder came into being because of someone’s hands combining wood, china, and brass into a single object.” So, another verb tense shift in a story about a non-human object. Mr. Big Shot, so every time we read a passage in present tense, it’s the narrator’s voice? I supposes, best beloved. The narrator is making a comment about the characters who exist in time, and this comment is from a place out of time. Thanks, that’s really clear. Yes. Is the narrator an immortal being? For the purposes of this book, yes. “Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation…” Yup, present tense, narrator speaking. Our theory checks out. Your theory. In “The Time of Dipper the Drowned Man,” we have a story about a dead person’s soul that hangs out around Primeval. It begins in simple past tense. “Trapped in his drunken body, his intoxicated soul, a soul that hadn’t been absolved, with no map of the road onwards to God, remained like a dog by the body going cold in the bushes.” Then a shift: “Such a body is blind and helpless:” another shift: “So in its confusion Dipper’s soul thought that it was still Dipper.” Hold up. This blog is in present tense, right? Yes. Does that mean it’s the narrator’s voice? Um, yes. It is. But you’re misunderstanding things. Not everything written in present tense is in a narrator’s voice, just in Primeval. And this blog. ‘Kay? Here’s an interesting case. “The Time of God” begins, “It is strange that God, who is beyond the limits of time, manifests himself within time and its transformations.” Then a shift: “In the summer of 1939, God was in everything all around, so rare and unusual things happened.” Huh, so God, who is beyond time, must manifest himself in the simple past tense. At least in this book. Till next time, my dears. #PrimevalAndOtherTimes #OlgaTokarchuk #AlanBray

This week, a new story, Olga Tokarchuk’s 1996 Primeval and Other Times, originally written in Polish and translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2010. It is set in the fictitious Polish village of Prawiek—translated as Primeval. Primeval—of or resembling the earliest ages in the history of the world. The novel tells the story of the inhabitants of Primeval over eight decades, beginning in 1914. Ms. Tokarchuk has said that the story is based on tales her maternal grandmother told her when she was a child. Primeval has been described as a fragmentary novel in that it’s made up of some sixty vignettes that could be read as complete unto themselves or as parts of a bigger whole—a chronicle of a particular place—Primeval—during particular times. There are many notable fragmentary novels, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, to name two. Each vignette in Primeval is entitled The Time of (a character’s name), so the novel begins with The Time of Primeval. The first sentence is “Primeval is the place at the center of the universe.” This first section presents a geographical description of the town and its two rivers, along with a naming of the four archangels who guard the four directions of the town. Yes, you read that right. Archangels. Four of them. Rapheal, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. Archangels appear in most western religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and are generally regarded as the highest order of angels. It is perhaps significant that these fellows guard the borders of the town of Primeval. What is their purpose—to keep out evil? We shall see. Other vignettes in the book concern the Virgin Mary and God, both of whom appear as characters, so the archangels are in good company. But you say, does the presence of archangels mean that Ms. Tokarchuk has written a religious novel, that she wants us to accept literally that heavenly beings are guarding the town? Is she proselytizing? Uh, I don’t think so, best beloved. Well, then, you counter, are we talking allegory? An allegory is a “story, picture, or other piece of art that uses symbols to convey a hidden or ulterior meaning, typically a moral or political one.” In its most simple and concise definition, an allegory is when a piece of visual or narrative media uses one thing to “stand in for” another. Yeah but, you complain, then what’s the difference between allegory and metaphor? Sounds like a metaphor. ‘Kay. Metaphor is a rhetorical device, like simile…or metonymy. Allegory can be loosely defined as a sustained metaphor used in film, the visual arts, or literature. It is often used to give abstract ideals (Truth, Beauty, etc) a concrete form, sometimes by personifying these ideals as characters within a story. Allegories are systems of metaphors. In Primeval, one of the first metaphors the reader encounters concerns the confluence of the two rivers in the village, the White and the Black. They flow separately but join together at a point where the mill is located, an important site in the story. Two separate streams, joined. This is a nice expression of one of the book’s major themes, the intermingling of Jewish and Christian people. There is an unnamed narrator who tells the stories in Primeval. The characters are not aware of this entity, who knows a lot about them. Even our friends the archangels don’t know who the narrator is. An example, please. In a vignette entitled, “The Time of Cornspike,” we are presented with a tale of one of the major characters, Cornspike, who lives alone and is regarded by the other villagers as a wanton woman. “In the spring of 1927 a sprig of masterwort grew in front of Cornspike’s cottage. Cornspike observed it from the moment it put a thick, fat, stiff shoot out of the earth…What now, my fine fellow, Cornspike said to it ironically. You’ve pushed yourself so far, you’ve climbed so high into the sky that now your seeds are going to germinate in the thatch, not in the ground.” I know, I know, what’s masterwort? A genus of herbaceous plants in the family Apiaceae, endemic to Central, Eastern and Southern Europe and the Caucasus. There are several species, which have aromatic roots, palmate leaves, and decorative flowers. Mebbe you’re wondering but are too shy to say, is this masterwort plant a phallic symbol? Well, yeah. “And one night, when Cornspike had finally fallen asleep, a young man stood before her. He was tall and powerfully built. His arms and thighs looked as if they were made from polished wood. The glow of the moon illuminated him. “I’ve been watching you through the window,” he said. “I know. The smell of you disturbs the senses.” The young man came into the room and stretched out both hands to Cornspike. She snuggled in between them and pressed her face to the hard, powerful chest. He lifted her slightly so that their mouths could find each other. From under half closed eyelids, Cornspike saw his face—it was rough like the stem of a plant.” Adult readers can guess what occurs with Cornspike and the plant man. The point, my dears, is the role of the narrator. No, the point is they’re having sex. A narrator is telling this story, it is unnamed and Cornspike is unaware of it. (Not sure about the plant guy). The narrator sets the scene. It’s the spring of 1927, a sprig of masterwort grows in front of her cottage. Then a “young man” appears before her—after she falls asleep. Is this a dream? Some dream. My point is that the narrator is the storyteller. It shows what the characters said and did—a selection of course. The narrator slices and dices “reality,” picking out certain elements to show a story. What is the story in this case? Cornspike cultivates a robust flowering plant in her garden, then dreams (?) that the plant becomes a man who has sex with her. What happens? “…when the sky became gray and the birds began to sing. Then a shudder shook the masterwort, and his hard body froze still, like timber. The canopies began to rustle, and dry, prickly seeds showered down on Cornspike’s naked, exhausted body. Then the fair-haired youth went back outside, and Cornspike spent all day picking the aromatic grains from her hair.” If Primeval were a realist novel, maybe this vignette could be framed as a dream. A lonely woman thinks a flowering plant is very attractive. She dreams that the plant becomes a handsome man who makes love to her. She wakes and perhaps through her open window, aromatic grains from the plant have become entangled in her hair. But this is no realist novel. Cornspike turns up pregnant by the plant guy.. Till next time. #PrimevalAndOtherTimes @OlgaTokarchuk #AlanBray

Coincidence plays a significant role in Station Eleven. We’ve talked about coincidence before in regard to other novels—let’s plunge in again. A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection. The film Casablanca provides a great example. Rick, on the run from an unhappy love affair (and from the entire Third Reich) runs a bar in Casablanca, Morocco. Everything is just great till his partner in the unhappy love affair, Ilsa Lund, shows up (along with a bunch of Nazis and a husband). Rick delivers the immortal line: Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine. It’s a coincidence that creates the story. But it’s not unbelievable. Casablanca was the major transit point for people in Europe trying to escape the Nazis, and Ilsa and her husband are trying to escape the Nazis. And in Casablanca, everyone goes to Rick’s. So should Rick be shocked? He doesn’t seem to be. Of course, without this plot device, there’d be no story, and this is as true in Station Eleven. An interesting observation about coincidence is that “as a literary device, coincidence is the presence of the author in the novel acting like an ancient Greek god directing events.” Is this our eternal friend, the implied author? Yes, best beloved. Oh yes. There was a lot of coincidence in ancient Greek drama. Oedipus, for example. There’s no causal connection between there being a prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother and the fact that he does, without being aware of course. The audience makes meaning of this by concluding that the gods were the ones who arranged this fate. In Station Eleven, Ms. St. John Mandel is the god who arranges the characters’ fates. But—a big but—it is not the flesh and blood author who does this but her creature, the implied author. What are these coincidences in Station Eleven? In the first scene, three important characters are introduced and connected: Arthur, Kirsten, and Jeevan, who goes to try to help Arthur when he collapses on stage. Miranda is also introduced early on. She is not only the ex-wife of Arthur but also the creator of the Dr. Eleven graphic novel. Then we have the adult Kirsten and the members of the Traveling Symphony, and Kirsten’s fixation on the Dr. Eleven graphic novel, an artifact from twenty years before given to her by Arthur that I mentioned last week. We know at this point that Arthur and Miranda are dead; we don’t know about Jeevan. We learn about the otherwise unnamed Prophet, a mysterious and malevolent figure who menaces the Traveling Symphony and Kirsten. Going back to an earlier time period, we are shown Arthur’s life, how he met and married Miranda. We learn about the genesis of the Dr. Eleven comics. And we learn that Arthur will divorce Miranda and marry Elizabeth Colton and have a child with her, a child named Tyler. Another important character is introduced, Clark, a friend of Arthur’s who also meets Miranda. Clark knows Elizabeth and knows that Arthur has had a son. We learn that Miranda gives Arthur two copies of Dr. Eleven, one of which he presents to his son, Tyler, and one which he gives to Kirsten. Then Kirsten meets Arthur’s son, Tyler, who is of course now the Prophet. Clark takes a last plane away from the pandemic and finds that Elizabeth and Tyler are aboard. They wind up at the Severn City Airport together. Elizabeth eventually leaves the airport, and Tyler displays increasingly bizarre behavior. (Reading the Book of Revelations in the Bible—often a bad sign). Jeevan is the only main character who doesn’t die or encounter the others. He escapes Toronto after the death of his brother and heads south, where he eventually marries and has children. Charlie and Jeremy, the couple who left the Traveling Symphony and who Kirsten is searching for, are eventually re-united with her at the Severn City Airport. Clark—who has seen Kirsten before as a child (she doesn’t remember this) shows her a miraculous sight from the airport control tower: a far-off grid of electric lights. Electricity becomes hope. Someone has figured out how to generate and harness it again. Maybe civilization is coming back. So, a lot of coincidental connection, a web that is the story. Imagine how different it would be if the surviving characters just went off on their own (like Jeevan). It’s much more satisfying in this fine novel that most of the main characters are inevitably drawn together. It’s ironic too (homage to Jordan Catalano). Next week, a new story, very different. Olga Tokarchuk’s Primeval and Other Times. Till then. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

Narrative Magazine has agreed to publish my story "The Vaccination" as part of their story of the week series. It's a story set during the pandemic. I'm honored, thanks to Tom Jenks. I'm told it will appear sometime this fall. I will let everyone know.

Last time, I said that the Dr. Eleven graphic comic, created by Miranda, is so central to Station Eleven that it deserves its own post. So… Let’s review the meaning of mise en abime. We’ve talked about this concept before regarding other novels. The literal French translation is “put in the abyss,” and originally referred to heraldry where an image on a shield or pennant would appear again in a smaller version on the shield or pennant. So you could have, say, a picture of a squirrel with a smaller image of the same squirrel in one corner and on this smaller image, there’d be an even smaller image of a squirrel, and so on. Infinite regression. Another example is the original Quaker Oats logo which featured a man holding a Quaker Oats packet, and that showed a man holding a Quaker Oats packet, etc. Quaker Oats? The point is that mise en abymes are pretty common. A good activity for you would be to hunt them down. I’m sure. In narrative, it’s a little different from imagery in that you probably won’t have the exact same story repeated in a briefer version. But one can refer to mise en abyme if an embedded story shares plot elements, structural features or themes with the main story and this makes it possible to correlate plot and subplot. It gives a narrative a multi-dimensional feel, an abyss, if you will, of context. Help! I’ve fallen into an abyss of context! So, you say, what about in Station Eleven? Roughly nine years before the Collapse, the onset of the pandemic, Miranda created the Dr. Eleven graphic comics. She was lonely, in an unhappy relationship and working at a job where she had a lot of down time. All of this left an emptiness she filled with the creation of a magical pretend universe. Sort of like writing a novel, eh? The story is that, a thousand years in the future, a hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth’s population, but a few hundred rebels have managed to steal a space station and escape. It’s called Station Eleven and was designed to resemble a small planet. There are deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, an illusion of orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon. However, on the station, there are people who, after fifteen years of perpetual twilight, long only to go home, to return to Earth and beg for amnesty, to take their chances under alien rule. They live in the Undersea, an interlinked network of vast fallout shelters under Station Eleven’s oceans. Dr. Eleven is a physicist who lives on Station Eleven. He has a dog named Luli—and this is significant as the story develops. Miranda escapes her life by creating a fictional world. “You don’t have to understand it,” she says to her husband. “It’s mine.” Her inspiration was the Calvin and Hobbes comics, specifically Spaceman Spiff, a favorite of mine. “…she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven.” In a prophetic moment, the narrator comments that Station Eleven is all around them (Miranda and Elizabeth). Section 4 of the book is called The Starship—an obvious reference to Station Eleven. Obviously. The section is about Kirsten in the Symphony, how they get Alexandra and are hunted by the Prophet. Kristen and August become separated from the others and head for the Severn City Airport. I think it’s probably clear by now that Dr. Eleven is a smaller version of Station Eleven. A band of humans have survived a catastrophe and are trying to survive while being assailed by bad guys. The inclusion of this mise en abyme would be enough to deepen context, let’s say if we just had the story of Miranda creating the comic. The connections would be clear. However, Ms. St. John Mandel does more. Miranda sends her ex-husband, Arthur Leander, two copies of Dr. Eleven, which she has never published. She sends him Dr. Eleven, Vol 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr, Eleven, Vol 1, No. 2 The Pursuit. Just before the pandemic, Arthur gives one set to the young Kirsten Raymonde, and she keeps them throughout all the long years of her escape from the pandemic, years of violence and loss that lead twenty years later to her being part of the Traveling Symphony. She keeps the comics in a zip-lock bag and has them memorized, treating them with almost religious awe. At one point, she wishes she could live in a parallel universe “where my comics are real…where we boarded Station Eleven and escaped before the world ended.” However, she is not shown making a direct connection between the comics and the state of things post-pandemic. For her, as for Miranda, the comics fill an inner void, an abyss, best beloved. So our intrepid mise en abyme provides a link between life pre and post pandemic. Kirsten discovers this link when she learns that the Prophet’s dog is named Luli—which is the name of Dr. Eleven’s dog. This mystery is solved when the Prophet is killed, and Kirsten finds a fragment of the Dr. Eleven comic in the Prophet’s copy of the New Testament. The answer to this riddle—which I don’t believe Kirsten learns—is that the Prophet, the villain of the book, is actually Tyler, Arthur Leander’s son who received the other copy of Dr. Eleven from him. At the end of the book, we have the narrator telling us: “In Dr. Eleven, Vol 1 No. 1: The Pursuit, Dr. Eleven is visited by the ghost of his mentor, Captain Lonagan, recently killed by an Undersea assassin… Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream. This is after a scene showing Arthur’s death from his perspective, the event that begins the book but is first shown from Jeevan’s. Then Kirsten gives Clark, another important character, one of the Dr. Eleven comics, and he reads it later in privacy. He recognizes a scene showing a real dinner party he attended with Miranda and Arthur years ago. He thinks: “Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.” A beautiful ending to a story about hope amidst disaster, all connected by an earnest little mise en abyme. Till next time. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

Narratives are a balance of mimetic, thematic, and synthetic threads. Mimetic threads are those that present convincing characters and plots, life-like representations that help the reader to suspend the sense of reading a made-up story. Thematic threads are those that represent larger abstract ideas, such as good triumphing over evil or honesty being the best policy—those examples are kind of trite, but you get the idea. Synthetic threads in a novel are those that have to do with the author (implied author) manipulating the story to produce writerly affects. I think Station Eleven is weighted with these, and the second section of the book, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a fine example. Come to think of it, the previous chapter is also a good example. This chapter appears at the end of the first section and outlines all the things that have been lost since the pandemic: “An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights…” There is no attribution here, so I’m assuming it’s the narrator ‘splaining to the narratee. I suppose it could be one of the characters who survives the pandemic, Kirsten or Clark, but it doesn’t say this, so— It’s a strong reminder that you’re reading a book and that your experience of reading has been structured by—wait for it—the implied author. The mimetic illusion would be greater, I think, if the story stayed with one character’s experience of the events—at this point, it would have to be Kristen. But she cannot ”see” most of the events shown in the first section. She and Javeen intersect at the theater but not after he leaves. She has met Miranda before but is not with her in Asia. And she is with Arthur when he dies and of course knows him, but he dies on the second page. At the point in the book, just before this section outlining loss occurs, no character has the knowledge of the effects of the pandemic. It is only the narrator who can “step back” and list the lost things. In fact, the characters are unaware of the narrator’s existence. Then, in creating the second section, the implied author intervenes forcefully again by jumping ahead in time by twenty years. The time between is gradually filled in, particularly when the story gets to Clark’s experience of living in the Severn City Airport. But at this earlier point, we have an abrupt leap with the narrator showing the survivors’ experience of life twenty years after the pandemic, or “Collapse,” as they call it. A nice link connects the Traveling Symphony rehearsing Shakespeare’s King Lear with Arthur’s beginning performance of King Lear. In addition to the leaps in time and the narrator’s voice listing losses, there are other synthetic devices used in Station Eleven that create texture, as well as communicating to the reader that this is a creatively structured work, that a storyteller is telling you the story. What are they, please? Towards the middle of the book, the text produces letters written by a younger Arthur Leander to a childhood friend. Then there is an interview conducted by a journalist of the adult Kristen, wherein she is questioned about what she remembers of time before the Collapse, and about the Traveling Symphony. There is also considerable connection between the central characters—not always within the same time period. The motif of the Station Eleven graphic novel connects Kristen with its author Miranda, even though Kristen’s main involvement with the graphic novel occurs well after Miranda’s death. This graphic novel is so central to the story; it provides the title and is an excellent mis en abime, my friends. It deserves its own post, and that will be forthcoming. Certainly, mimetic and thematic threads are substantial, but I still maintain that synthetic elements are prominent in the book. And this manipulation of the text gives the book a somewhat cold, science-fiction feel. I don’t mean this as a negative. But I believe the characters are secondary to the way the story is told, and in some ways, the impersonal Georgian Flu is the book’s main character. A different story might concern an evil mad man who kills off most of humanity in a war—a sort of Hitler or Stalin. Or a disaster story could be about selfish humanity causing a catastrophe that eliminates most people (global warming, anyone?). But Station Eleven presents a third model, an impersonal plague being the villain. There is no one to blame, and this contributes strongly to the survivors’ shock and disarray. There is no one to be angry at, to struggle against. Because they have learned to rely so much on the internet and mass communication, its loss leads to a collapse of civilization. The characters wonder if there’s life on other continents but don’t really know. They turn in on themselves in a way that is opposite to our existence now with its expansion of science, communication, space exploration, etc. ‘Kay. Till next time. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

How is time handled in Station Eleven? I can say straight off that time is discontinuous and episodic, two terms we’ve looked at before. (You’re saying it’s “just like” something else?) Settle down. Discontinuous narrative, or nonlinear narrative, is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, where events are portrayed, for example, out of chronological order or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line. Most of the time it is used to mimic the structure and recall of a character but has been used for other reasons as well. Episodic storytelling is a genre of narrative that is divided into a fixed set of episodes. Multiple episodes are usually grouped together into a series through a unifying story arc, with the option to view immediately (rather than waiting for the release of each episode). Episodes may not always contain the same characters, but each episode draws from a broader group of characters, or cast, all of whom exist in the same story world. It is one of the most common forms of storytelling in tv film. Interesting, no? I think it’s fair to say that most modern writing is both discontinuous and episodic. The contrast would be a story that tried to show continuous time—pretty hard to do and not terribly interesting. Umberto Eco made the humorous observation that pornography is like this—if someone goes to the refrigerator for a beer, the story shows each step of the way—walking to the refrigerator, opening the door, etc. And of course, sex acts are traditionally presented in continuous fashion. (How do you know? Why do you keep bringing this up? You must like it.) Oh, stop. Let’s say Chapter One begins with Time 1. This is a threshold time just before the characters become aware of the pandemic. But the scene is about the death of a main character, Arthur Leander, which is a prescient touch in a book about a devastating plague. This Time 1 scene plays out in continuous time—not that each instant is shown, but time moves forward, anchored to a particular place and time—“a winter night at the Elgin Theater in Toronto.” Jeevan is introduced and tries unsuccessfully to revive Arthur. Kristen is introduced, as a child. The perspective remains Jeevan’s, albeit shown through the auspices of the narrator. There is minimal digression as far as Jeevan and/or the narrator bringing in memories or comments about the past or future. Then a paragraph break, and Jeevan leaves the theater—still on the same night. Let’s call this Time 2 as it’s a direct continuation of the initial scene. However, Jeevan’s memories begin to be shown. He encounters a group of paparazzi, and we learn that he had been a paparazzo himself. The guys know him, and question him about his new vocation—studying to be an EMT—and about Arthur Leander’s death (as they were gathered to try to photograph him). Jeevan breaks away from his old friends, walks on, ruminating over the events of Time 1 (Arthur’s death). We learn a bit more about him in terms of his feeling badly over not being able to save Arthur. Probably an hour or two have elapsed since page 1. The chapter closes with Jeevan heading for a park, not ready to go home. Chapter 2 continues in Time 2, but the characters and perspective have changed. “There are few people left in the Elgin Theater now,” it begins. There’s a paragraph of description about the aftermath of Arthur’s death, and then the scene goes to a bar off the theater lobby where several characters are discussing the death. In the context of talking about whom to notify, the characters present some background information about Arthur’s multiple marriages and family, and this will be significant later, although the reader doesn’t have a sense of it yet. The chapter ends with the first foreshadowing of the pandemic, the information that of all those in the bar, the bartender will survive the longest. The narrator shows all this without going “inside” any of the characters’ heads. It’s all dialogue, like a theatrical play. Chapter 3 returns to Jeevan walking in the park, a continuation of Time 2. He gets two phone calls from his friend Hua, a doctor in a city hospital, who warns him about the Georgian Flu. Jeevan realizes the seriousness of the threat and begins to gather supplies to take to his disabled brother’s apartment. Chapter 4 is short. It collapses a Time 2 night with the next morning. The narrator shows the executive producer of Arthur’s play thinking about and calling Arthur’s lawyer, who calls Arthur’s closest friend with the news. The next morning, the friend “began calling Arthur’s ex-wives.” This morning (in a different time zone) may be called Time 3. A famous literary example of collapsing time is in Flaubert’s Sentimental Journey. “He traveled…He came home…He went into society…Years passed and he came to terms with his mental stagnation and the numbness in his heart.” (Why’d you even bring that up? Pretentious bully!. Talk about mental stagnation.) Chapter 5 shows one of the ex-wives (and an increasingly significant character) getting the news of Arthur’s death. The chapter is showing the ex-wife, Miranda’s perspective but at the end, the narrator comments, “This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.” Chapter 6 is a different time altogether, let’s call it Time 4. The narrator is speaking, telling the reader about an “incomplete list” of all the things lost in the pandemic. This has been nicely foreshadowed, but it is not filtered through the consciousness of any of the characters. It is a different order because it’s not continuous time, it’s narrative time from a distance, the narrator who sees from the perspective of the whole story, the whole book. So, we have a story that jumps around in time, and is told through the perspective of more than one related character. The narrator is not bound to one time period but can flit about, commenting on the characters. However, there is a firm boundary between the narrator and the characters—the narrator is not an “I” who is some kind of buddy to the characters. They are unaware of it (the narrator). Get ready for a big leap next time, best beloved. Till then. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

One of the central questions Station Eleven asks its readers is: what would you do in a world without technology? No electricity, no Internet, no modern transportation; the world-wide pandemic called “the Collapse” by the survivors in the story, has reduced people to a nomadic, anarchic existence, one in which they are fascinated by the artifacts of the way things used to be. What do the characters in the book themselves do? Beyond basic human activities like eating and sleeping, they perform Shakespeare’s plays for others who attend these performances. They fight violently against those who would try to control them. They forage in abandoned houses for not just useful, but interesting objects. They have love and sexual relationships. Children. They search for lost companions, protect each other from harm. There’s an interesting message here. After such an apocalypse, some authors might (and have) shown humans lapsing into barbarism and despair. But Ms. Mandel does not do this. Not only do the survivors have children and love, they work together, they care for each other. And they spend considerable energy on the arts. Station Eleven has been called and promoted as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel. Also as speculative fiction. What does dystopian mean? The word comes from the ancient Greek word topos, meaning a traditional theme or formula in literature. Official definitions often begin with the idea of dystopian being the antonym of utopian, so there are utopian novels, where an ideal society is depicted, and there are dystopian novels, where society is oppressive and dehumanizing. George Orwell’s 1984 is a fine example. Characteristic themes of a dystopian novel include: Government control Environmental destruction Technological control Survival Loss of individualism For centuries, there have been cultural fears about technology, and dystopian literature often involves technology running amok and being used for evil purposes. Fahrenheit 451 is a good example, as are the Terminator films. Hasta la vista, baby. A recurrent theme in dystopian works is that a utopian society leads to the loss of individual freedom and control, a fear that the greater good always leads to tyranny. Brave New World, anyone? So, how about in Station Eleven? Certainly, the book depicts an apocalypse. Most of the world’s population has died in a pandemic of flu. However, instead of being controlled by machines, the survivors must cope with the loss of technology and the resulting impact on their lives. There is no internet, no gasoline, no electricity. The survivors cannot take survival for granted. Books and other written materials—like Kristen’s Station Eleven comic—are hidden and hoarded. Because of the devastation, there doesn’t seem to be any government, and the survivors must cope as best they can in a tribalized and violent society where strangers are sometimes malevolent. There is not the environmental destruction depicted in the Station Eleven comic, although it could be said that the environment, in the form of the flu pathogen, has turned on humans. Instead of a loss of individualism, the survivors actually express considerable humanity. The Traveling Symphony group is shown presenting Shakespeare’s plays, keeping that humanist tradition alive. I think it’s a disservice to confine Station Eleven in a genre like dystopian. As we can see above, it’s much more than this. It is speculative in the sense of showing the results of a possible but not real event. Of course, isn’t most fiction speculative in this way? Most fiction is based on a question. What if particular characters are placed into a situation in which they must react and adjust? What do they do? This is the center of Station Eleven. Next week, we’ll continue our discussion, focusing on the way the novel handles time. Ooh. Till then. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

This week, a new novel, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This acclaimed book was published in 2014 and has been adapted into a film version. Of course, the story is supremely timely as it deals with the impact of a flu pandemic that kills off most of the earth’s population, a foreshadowing of the real devastation caused by the Covid virus. Station Eleven also shows a global shipping crisis that leaves hundreds of ships at anchor unable to unload their cargo. Sound familiar? The title, Station Eleven, references a comic book owned by one of the main characters, Kirsten Raymonde. The comic is called Station Eleven and has to do with a physicist named Dr. Eleven who lives on a space station. In a favorite scene of Kirsten’s, Dr. Eleven is rendered looking out on a horizon and thinking, “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on earth.” This is a nice metaphor for the book which concerns survivors of the pandemic. There is a dedication: In Memory of Emilie Jacobsen. Emilie Jacobsen was Ms. Mandel’s literary agent. And there is an epigraph from Czelaw Milosz: The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then. it is too much. There is too much world. This too, seems to be an apt metaphor for the whole book and certainly suggests its theme. Station Eleven is structured in sections—the first one entitled The Theater—and chapters are embedded within each section. The story begins with a scene showing the staging of King Lear in Toronto. It is from the perspective of Jeevan, a young man who is initially sitting in the audience. The first line is “The King stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.” This is the sort of thing an audience member would plausibly see on stage and represents the narrator showing what Jeevan is seeing—arguably expressed in rather poetic, Shakespearian language, setting a tone for the whole novel. The second sentence is “This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theater in Toronto.” It’s possible an audience member would think such a thing but more likely, it’s the narrator speaking to provide context for the scene. Speaking to the reader—Jeevan is not speaking to the reader, he’s watching the play. He doesn’t know he’s in a story! An interesting thing occurs in paragraph 3. Arthur Leander, the actor playing Lear is speaking a line, “…distracted by the child version of Cordelia, and this is when it happened.” Here we’ve caught Mr. or Ms. Narrator red-handed, telling the reader that “this is when it happened.” Jeevan, observing things, wouldn’t know that “this” —Arthur is having a heart attack—happens right then. It’s not till a few moments later that he suspects something is wrong. No, this is the narrator telling the audience that, in this fiction, the reader has arrived at a significant point. Pay attention! the narrator is saying. The story continues, told generally through the perspective of Jeevan. Chapter 2 shows a scene occurring at the same time as the previous scene with Jeevan, but in this one, he does not appear. (Can’t be two places at once). It is in a bar where several characters are discussing Arthur Leander’s death. The narrator is showing this scene, and there is no reporting from an internal perspective. At the end, the narrator does a nice foreshadowing thing by saying: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.” This is the first hint at the catastrophe that’s about to come. After we learn something about this catastrophe when Jeevan’s doctor friend Hua calls him and describes the outbreak of the deadly Georgian flu, we get a brief chapter of the narrator showing other reactions to Arthur’s death. There’s the introduction of another major character, Miranda, who is Arthur’s ex-wife. Then, the narrator returns in Chapter 6 with “an incomplete list,” of things that are no longer possible after the flu has killed most of the Earth’s human population. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit from below…No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd…No more pharmaceuticals…No more Internet…No more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches…” This is the nameless narrator speaking. Some readers might assume that the narrator is Ms. Mandel herself, that she is telling the story. Readers of this blog will know by now to scoff at such an innocent idea. Let’s hear it for the over-educated! The narrator tells the story that the characters experience, and is a mouthpiece for the Implied Author, the entity that wrote the book, a creation of Ms. Mandel. Could we review who all these folks are? Sure. The author, Emily St. John Mandel, created the story. In the story, there is a narrator who tells the story—the storyteller. In some stories, the storyteller may have different opinions than the author—this doesn’t seem to be the case in Station Eleven. Another way to say this is that the narrator in Station Eleven seems to be reliable. The major characters, Jeevan, Miranda, and Kirsten, live the story. The narrator tells a portion of the story through each of their perspectives. The implied author is the image of the author evoked by the work and expressed through style, ideology and aesthetics. This is important—a person might meet Ms. St. John Mandel at the grocery store and form an impression of her; perhaps she is serious or silly, plays with the fruit or something. But this same person reading Station Eleven would form a different impression of the author—an image evoked by the book. This implied author image is important because it’s the image that the author herself is giving readers. But the image is not the flesh and blood human. ‘Kay, easy-peezy. Also, the reader infers particular ethical positions about the implied author from reading the text. One fairly explicit position in Station Eleven is that art is an essential part of humanity, no matter how challenged humanity becomes. The narrator is an entity whose presence is expressed in words, evoked in the text of the story, if you will. In some novels, this Narrator may be a character who is telling the story, an “I.” In others, like Station Eleven, the Narrator is nameless and separate from the characters. The Implied Author is an entity who is created by the real flesh and blood author to write the book. “It” makes choices about the structure of the story, including what to include in a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. It chooses which characters’ perspective will be used to show a scene; it chooses what is to be shown and what is left out—that is, how time is handled. Are there gaps in time? Is the story episodic or continuous? Take me to the station. Till next time. #StationEleven #EmilySt.JohnMandel #AlanBray

This week, I want to finish looking at Normal People, although this rich book could easily yield more discussion. However, certain audience members have a tendency to become…restless, shall we say. You know who you are. Last time, we looked at a key sequence in the book, beginning on page 229 of the 2020 Hogarth paperback edition, in a chapter entitled Four Months Later (July 2014), followed by Five Minutes Later (July 2014). The first chapter is from Marianne’s perspective, the second, Connell’s. During the course of an evening, Marianne and Connell are at his mother’s house watching the World Cup semi-finals. They have not been lovers for a long time, but—"Then he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him.” Those scamps. As I described last time, they have sex, during which Marianne asks Connell to hit her. He refuses, and she leaves for her mother’s house where she is attacked by her brother Alan. She calls Connell, who arrives and takes Marianne away, first threatening Alan with death. These are the broad actions of the two chapters, but a lot is shown about the characters’ thoughts and feelings. After Marianne leaves, Connell’s mother returns, and Connell is upset: “It is extremely irritating that his mother thinks he and Marianne are together, when the closest they have come in years to actually being together was earlier this evening and it ended with him crying alone in his room… “She (Marianne) asked him to hit her and when he said he didn’t want to, she wanted to stop having sex. So why, despite its factual accuracy, does this feel like a dishonest way of narrating what happened? What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? (this is the implied author communicating with the reader). It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colors, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing his hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.… What’s left for them, then? There doesn’t seem to be a half-way position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. So it’s over and there’s just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her…but the glance could not contain nothing…He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.” Some aspects of this passage are troubling in that Connell appears to be thinking of Marianne in a rather narcissistic way. This narcissism seems to drive his behavior. When Marianne calls him, he becomes very anxious—angrier. “A colored haze sweeps over the driveway…Connell, his sight even blurrier bow…His vision is swimming so severely that he notices he has to keep a hand on the door to stay upright. Connell’s face is wet with perspiration. Alan’s face is visible only as a pattern of colored dots… After he gets in the car with Marianne, he feels his power over her again. His vision settles…he can breathe.” Of course, following this dramatic chapter, we have a break of seven months and then land back in Dublin where Connell and Marianne are living together, I think. They are happy—it’s clear that Marianne—whose perspective the reader is shown—is content and “normal.” Does this mean she has given up abusive sex? Yes, but… “In bed, he would say lovingly: You’re going to do exactly what I say now, aren’t you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest possible level of her personality. But on what level did it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favor he was doing her? Did he feel it the way she did? Every day, in the ordinary activity of their lives, he showed patience and consideration for her feelings. He took care of her when she was sick, he read drafts of her college essays…” It would seem that Marianne and Connell have maintained the dynamic in their relationship where Marianne willingly submits to Connell, and he is dominant, but there is no physical violence. No violence at all, it’s loving. Just…kind of controlling. ‘Kay. In this final chapter, Marianne muses about their love and about life, and at times, it’s hard to determine who is speaking: the character Marianne or the implied author. Free indirect speech, best beloved. “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn’t wonder about that anymore.” The scenes of Connell refusing to hit Marianne during sex and then his “rescue” of her and his denouncement of Alan are very significant, especially for Marianne. It frees the couple to love each other; perhaps, Marianne is reassured by Connell’s standing up for her, and he is strengthened by the knowledge that he has really helped her. The ending of Normal People is open to the reader’s interpretation. Connell, who has apparently graduated from university, has applied for a MFA program in writing in NYC–without telling Marianne. He is accepted, and tells her, but presents this as something he wouldn’t want to do unless she accompanied him. She says she does not want to leave Dublin, but that he should go. Connell says: “…I’m not going to New York without you. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you.” “It’s true, she thinks, he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life. He would be different with women even, and his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? And what kind of happiness might it have been? All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same pot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, talking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that. … She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.” (And here, let’s be reminded of the epigram from George Eliot: “It is one of the secrets in that change in mental poise which has been fitfully named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”). Yup. Who is speaking in these passages? The Narrator, through Marianne? The implied author? Prraps. We see that Marianne transforms dramatically, going from being a sort of ugly duckling to someone capable of selfless love. Connell, I’m not so sure about. Over the course of the book, he transforms from being a naïve youth plagued by self-doubt and depression into a talented writer of fiction (?) who nevertheless maintains a benignly controlling relationship with Marianne. He’s not a bad sort, but he isn’t really so good either. He does have a new life and feels redeemed by Marianne’s love, but I’m not so sure he recovers from the depression. At the end, the reader wonders: will Connell go to NYC? Will they re-unite when he’s done? Or is this a further separation? Open and unanswered questions. You can answer them yourself. Thank you, Sally Rooney for writing such a meaningful and intelligent book. Next week, a new one. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Till then. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

Sex is an integral part of Normal People. Let’s get a definition. (Wait…what? A definition of sex?) Yes, we all “know” what sex is, but I like to begin with a definition of a concept I’m writing about so that everyone knows the basis of things. (So that we’re all on the same page?) ‘Kay. It’s hard to find a useful definition of sex, which is notable, I think. The English word “sex” comes from a Latin word meaning to divide. Most definitions tend to involve circularities like “Sex is engaging in sexual relations.” Here’s a rather legal definition of sexual relations: sexual relations are established when a person "knowingly engages in or causes . . . contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person". Contact is agreed to mean intentional touching, either directly or through clothing. ‘Kay. In an earlier post on Normal People, the old maestro cited a comment made by Anahid Nersessian, in the New York Review of Books: “…What sets Rooney apart is that she makes what ought to be the most ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational, as if consent and mutual gratification—however defined—were the summit and not the ground of erotic possibility.” Consent is a key concept here, just as it is in contemporary society. Is this “intentional touching” being conducted with mutual consent, or is it coercive, with one party having power over the other? Consent is always given in Normal People, although the motivations for sexual relations may be complex, and painful. In a compulsive manner, Marianne seeks out and promotes sexual relationships where she is abused by her partner(s), thereby acting out dynamics from her childhood and birth family. In a climactic scene, she tries to involve Connell in this pattern, but he refuses, and this is significant for them both in a positive manner. One of the ways Normal People diverges from traditional romances is that consent is a necessary part of the recipe for sexual intimacy. There are representations of traditional gender roles, particularly in the way Connell eventually protects Marianne from those who mean her ill (and do her ill), but this is not a story where the man pursues the reluctant woman, and finally wears down her hesitations to win the “prize.” Although come to think of it, I guess that involves consent too—but it’s a different beastie in Normal People. Initially, Connell is very aware of Marianne as a woman; he attends to the finer details of her attire and appearance. “…Marianne came downstairs in a bathrobe. It was just a plain white bathrobe, tied in the normal way. Her hair was wet, and her hair had that glistening look like she had just been applying face cream…He knew she was probably getting dressed in her room, and whatever clothes she was wearing when she came back down would be the clothes she had chosen to put on after she saw him in the hall.” And Marianne is equally interested in Connell’s physicality: “It occurred to Marianne how much she would like to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody. It would be beautiful just to watch him.” Well. After a first kiss, Connell “drops by” Marianne’s house where his mother is working. Marianne goes to her bedroom, and he follows her. They sit on her bed. “He touched her leg and she lay back down against the pillow. Boldly she asked if he was going to kiss her again. He said: What do you think? …he did start to kiss her…He put his hand under her school blouse. In his ear, she said: Can we take our clothes off?” After they have sex, Connell muses about Marianne and about other partners he’s had: “With Marianne it was different, because everything was between them only, even awkward or difficult things. He could do or say anything he wanted with her and no one would ever find out…That’s so good, she kept saying. That feels so good. Her body was all soft and white like flour dough. He wanted to fit perfectly inside her. Physically it just felt right, and he understood why people did insane things for sexual reasons then…His decision to drive to Marianne’s house that afternoon suddenly seemed…maybe the only intelligent thing he’d ever done in his life.” Well, sure. My point here is again, this is not a story of a guy winning over a gal to have sex—and then how he’s insensitive about it. No sir. Connell and Marianne seem to be equally enthusiastic in their pursuit and capture of one another. And Connell is quite sensitive after the deed is done. (It should be said he is not always so sensitive later). And Marianne experiences sex with Connell as healing. “Connell… leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never…You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I’m not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes well up with tears again and she closes them…She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment…” And consent? “She stands at his chair and, looking up at her, he undoes the sash of her bathrobe. It’s been nearly a year. He touches his lips to her skin and she feels holy, like a shrine. Come to bed, then, she says. He goes with her.” My view is that the story’s climax occurs when Marianne is attacked by her brother Alan, and calls Connell for help. He arrives at her house and threatens Alan and takes Marianne away. Prior to this, Marianne and Connell are having sex. She says: “You can do whatever you want with me. He makes a noise in his throat, leans into her a little harder. That’s nice, he says. Her voice sounds hoarse now. Do you like me saying that? she says. Yeah, a lot. Will you tell me I belong to you? What do you mean? he says. … “Will you hit me, she says?” … No, he says, I don’t think I want that. Sorry Marianne indicates she wants to stop having sex, and Connell gets off her. Are you okay? he says. I’m sorry I didn’t want to do that, I just think it would be weird. I mean, not weird but…I don’t know. I don’t think it would be a good idea. … You think I’m weird? she says. After this, Marianne goes home, is attacked by Alan, calls Connell for help. He arrives, tells Marianne to get in his car, and threatens to kill Alan. The chapter ends with Marianne saying thank you. The next chapter is entitled Seven Months Later. She and Connell are together at the university, and the perspective is the narrator reporting about her. “Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. She’s a normal person now. She walks by and no one looks up.” What’s going on here? A very complex exchange, my point in including it in this discussion is the sexual content. Marianne attempts to continue a pattern of sexual behavior that she has found compulsively meaningful—being hit during sex—with Connell, but he refuses to go along. He is confused and apologetic. She is embarrassed and leaves but when her brother assaults her, she turns to Connell for help. Although he doesn’t want to hit Marianne, he is moved to shove her brother against a wall and threaten to kill him. (This reader was happy about the whole thing). But after this, Marianne and Connell are finally at peace with each other. Marianne feels she’s a normal person, the implication is that she’s done with her abusive family and her desire for sex that reinforces her sense that she’s bad. Connell seems okay with the whole thing. Of course, soon, the couple will decide to separate but that’s another discussion. The point here is that consensual sex is powerful and healing. And that both men and women must give consent to mutual pleasure—not to conquest and domination. Sex is not the only factor in Marianne’s and Connell’s transformation, but it is integral. Next week, I think we’ll wrap up Normal People by looking more closely at the transformation and the end. Till then. (whiny voice—But I thought people in Ireland didn’t enjoy sex because they were too hung up). No. Obviously. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray