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If you wanted to write a story about the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy taking a journey to a new home on an ocean liner in the 1950s, one option would be to start at the beginning of the voyage and go straight through to the end, the docking, as it were. The story could be told in first person simple past tense, along the lines of “I embarked on the ship.” There would be a strong theme of coming of age and of migration, the experience of journeying to a new place to live. And there could be a story about a boy re-uniting with his absent mother. There could even be a story of erotic mingling with an older woman—as we studied last time. Because of the past tense, the implication would be that the story was being told from a vantage point in the future. Surely, there would be plenty of opportunity for a narrator entity to comment and explain. Don’t call me Shirley. “Kay. We have seen that this is not what Mr. Ondaatje does in The Cat’s Table. Oh no. He makes use of the above structure but augments it considerably. First, he creates a character narrator who looks back from a vantage point of fifty years to tell the story of the boy. In other words, he doesn’t just imply this, he shows it, and thereby a powerful story unfolds of an older person looking back affectionately at a younger self with all its vulnerabilities and mistakes. As we’ve noted, the story has the feel of being a memoir, however, Mr. Ondaatje strenuously denies that, insisting that it is a work of fiction. Mr. O. goes further in adding to the basics. The implied author dips into the consciousness of many of the other characters, Mr. Mazeppa, Miss Lasqueti, Ramadhin, Niemeyer, Assunta and her aunt. The other friend on the ship, Cassius, largely escapes this treatment because of his elusiveness. Plus, there is plenty of story about the older narrator, much about his emotional reaction to memory. We could say that Mr. Ondaatje wanted to create a story about the emotional distance between an old and young age, in contrast to a story about a voyage. Although, son of a gun, a voyage is a good way to describe one’s life course from childhood to old age. Ondaatje is one smart fellow. Here’s a passage from near the novel’s end: “I once had a friend whose heart “moved” after a traumatic incident that he refused to recognize. It was only a few years later while he was being checked out by his doctor for some minor ailment, that this physical shift was discovered. And I wondered then, when he told me this, how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimeter or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us. Emily, Myself. Perhaps even Cassius. How have our emotions glanced off rather than directly faced others ever since, resulting in simple unawareness or in some cases cold-blooded self-sufficiency that is damaging to us? Is this what has left us, still uncertain, at a Cat’s Table, looking back, looking back, searching out those we journeyed with, or were formed by, even now, at our age?” Heavy stuff, best B. There’s a sense of people waiting, sitting at a Cat’s Table and passively observing life, albeit with intense curiosity. Observing with a great hunger to learn how to be human. And Mr. O. uses the metaphor of a moved heart to show the kind of emotional avoidance humans are prone to. If a situation is too “heavy” emotionally, we turn away, we move our hearts to avoid the intensity. And he is saying the thing that holds us back, sitting and waiting for something that may not come, is this tendency to avoid emotion, to avoid each other. To shy away from the presence of others. It makes me think of another smart fellow, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and his theory of how the “Other” places a demand on us just by her/his presence. A demand to engage—or not, Ondaatje would say. A failure. It takes the older narrator a lifetime to learn that this avoidance is harmful. The stories that make up the book are about this avoidance and how it goes wrong. The young Michael and his friends observe the others on the Oronsay, Niemeyer the prisoner, Mr. Mazeppa, Henry da Silva, the Baron, and Miss Lasqueti. The card players and Emily. Miss Lasqueti in particular is studied from afar and theorized over. It is only much later that through the letter he discovers, the young Michael is confronted with her humanity. And Emily, of course. Michael seeks her out for comfort, but as time goes on, their lives are all about missed connection and emotional avoidance. At the end, Michael is re-united with his mother, but the significance of this is left open. The story ends at this point, and we the readers don’t know what happened to the relationship of mother and son. We know a lot about the older Michael and his thoughts about the past but not about what happened to he and his mother. Did they connect? Did they avoid each other? By the time the older Michael is writing about the events on the Oronsay and about the re-union, his mother is presumably long gone. Like so many wonderful stories, the ending is left open. It’s of note that the novel begins with the young Michael being driven to the Oronsay to begin the voyage and ends with his disembarking in England. The story does not end with the older narrator in the present reality but ends many years ago. Although you could say (and probably should) that the whole novel is occurring in the older narrator’s present as he looks back on memory. Thank you, Mr. Ondaatje for another great and moving experience. Next week, a new one. Till then. #TheCat'sTable #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

So in The Cat’s Table, is one of the memories that the narrator has about his younger self a memory of sexual awakening—the time when he got it on with his older cousin Emily? When he was eleven, and she was seventeen? Read on, you rascals. Emily de Saram was Michael’s distant cousin and confidante who lived next door to Michael’s family in Sri Lanka. She was also traveling on the Oronsay to England in order to finish school but has kept away from the boyish Michael and his cohort. “By the time Emily came on board the Oronsay, I had not seen her in two years…She was seventeen years old and school had, I thought, knocked some of the wildness out of her.” We’ll see about that. Michael the older fellow writes, very close to the younger Michael: “I woke the next morning without the usual desire to meet with my friends…I tried to remember the cabin number for Emily, who was never an early riser, and I went there…I knocked a couple of times before she opened the door, clad in a dressing gown. I stayed with her all morning. I do not know why I was confused about things. I was eleven. One doesn’t know much then…I was lying beside her on the bed, holding one of her unlit cigarettes, pretending to smoke, and she reached over and turned my head towards her. “Don’t,” she said. “I mean, don’t tell anyone about this—” “So began a tradition between us. That I would at certain moments of my life tell Emily things that I would not tell others. And later in our lives, much later, she would talk to me about what she had been going through. All through my life, Emily would be distinct from everyone I knew… “When the steward arrived, I met him at the door, and when he left I brought the tray over for her. She half sat up and then remembered the robe and reached for it. But what I saw hit me at the base of my heart. There was a tremor within me, something that would be natural for me later but at that moment was a mixture of thrill and vertigo. Suddenly there was a wide gulf between Emily’s existence and mine, and I would never be able to cross it. If there was a desire of sorts in me, then where did it come from? Did it belong to another? Or was it part of me? It was as if a hand from the desert that surrounded us had reached in and touched me. For the rest of my life it would recur, but in Emily’s cabin it was the first brush with the long variety of it. Yet where had it come from? And was it a pleasure or a sadness, this life inside me? It was as if with its existence I was lacking something essential, like water. I put the tray down and climbed unto Emily’s high bed. I felt in that moment that I had been alone for years. I had existed too cautiously with my family, as though there had been shards of glass always around us.” Michael asks Emily if he will see her in England, and she says no, that he’ll be with his mother. He reflects on not having seen his mother for four years. “And now I was going to England where my mother had been living for three or four years. I don’t remember how long she had been there. Even now, all these years later, I have not remembered that quite significant detail, the period of separation, as if, as for an animal, there was a limited knowledge of the span of missing time.” He is emotionally overwhelmed and gets physical comfort from Emily. Physical comfort? “I knelt on that bed on my hands and knees and shook. Emily leaned forward and embraced me, in so soft a gesture I felt barely touched, an envelope of loose air between us. My hot tears that had come from my darkness rubbed on her cool upper arm…I must have fallen asleep for a moment and woke when Emily, not moving away from me reached her other hand over her shoulder in a backstroke gesture for the cup of coffee. And soon I heard the quick swallows, my ear against her neck. Her other hand was still gripping mine as no one had ever done, convincing me of a security that probably did not exist.” ‘Kay. As I construct this scene, it reads like Michael is lying on top of Emily, who is naked under her robe. His ear is pressed against her neck, and she is holding one of his hands. Tightly. That’s what I make of it, but of course, I have long since lost a child’s innocence. It seems in this passage, which will continue, Michael is looking back (imagining/creating) a significant emotional episode and possible sexual connection with Emily. But he can’t remember exactly what occurred, maybe only the emotions. Maybe he didn’t really (and still doesn’t) have words to describe what occurred. The situation is ambiguous to the reader though. Did the seventeen-year-old Emily have sex with the eleven-year-old Michael? Whoa! It’s possible. Call the authorities! The older Michael doesn’t remember well (?). However, Emily as seductress of youth doesn’t really fit with the way she’s presented in other parts of the book. She’s more of a mentor, a benevolent advisor. Perhaps the idea is that some meaningful intimacy did occur, almost accidently. It’s certainly significant to the older Michael. Years later, Emily seeks Michael out, and he attempts to talk with her about what happened on the Oronsay (not just concerning their morning together in her cabin). But she refuses to say much. She is mum! Stop it! The emotions Michael experiences with Emily are caught up with his feelings about his mother (as if things weren’t confusing enough!). As noted, when he departs from Sri Lanka, his relatives explain that his mother, whom he has not seen for four years, will meet him in England. “It was not the magic or the scale of the journey that was of concern to me, but that detail of how my mother could know when exactly I would arrive in that other country. And if she would be there.” So, this is pretty central. Michael has been separated from his mother for years, and the reason isn’t explained. He’s being sent to her, but he approaches it in a sort of magical thinking way. He seeks out his alluring older cousin, and she seems quite willing to comfort him, perhaps in the way a mother might soothe an upset infant. But was it more than that? It does seem that the older Michael is saying the situation and memory are marvelously erotic and have affected him throughout life. It’s significant that the end of the book includes Emily, a position of significance. Was she Michael’s first sexual memory/encounter, and is the memory thus imbued with magic but not that reliable? Yup. Till next time. Onward! #TheCat'sTable #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

Greetings. My short story, "Punched Out" was, as you know, short-listed for the Hammond House International Literary Prize. It is now available in their anthology at this link: https://www.hammondhousepublishing.com/online-store/CHANGES-Award-Winning-Short-Stories-and-Scripts-p528279946 Now, a warning. You have to pay money to these folks and only then they will mail you the anthology It will cost you 18.99 British pounds! And they will mail the anthology to you from England! No free rides this time, best beloved. Well worth, I'm sure. Here's what it looks like:

Last time, we talked about the omniscience of the narrator in Cat’s Table. The narrator, the older Canadian writer originally from Sri Lanka, tells the story of the young Michael’s voyage from Sri Lanka in the 1950s with two friends. As the story goes, it also shows more than just the voyage, it shows what happened afterward to the trio of characters, generally filtered through Michael’s perspective. We learn that Cassius becomes an important visual artist, that Ramadhin dies prematurely perhaps because of a broken heart. We learn that Michael falls in love with Ramadhin’s younger sister. Massi. As the Cat’s Table develops, there are episodes where the narrator is telling a story about a different character than the young Michael. The story of Ramadhin’s end is told about him by the narrator, although Michael is still involved as Ramadhin’s erstwhile love Heather is telling the story to an older Michael, so the story remains indirectly filtered through the older Michael’s perspective. “So Ramadhin went in search of the boy, to persuade him to come back to Heather. He entered the strip of the city—somewhere he would never have gone—walking there in his long black winter coat, scarf-less, against the English weather.” However, after a line break, the narrative shifts form. “He enters the Cox Bar on his knight’s mission…He pays the taxi driver. He presses the bell to her flat, waits, then turns and walks away. He passes the garden where they have had the tutorial once or twice when it was sunny. His heart still leaping, as if it cannot slow or pause. He unlatches the gate and goes into that green darkness.” Please notice the use of the simple present tense. Notice the sentence fragments and the simple present tense sentences—"He presses the bell, He passes the garden.” These things are key elements of Ondaatje’s style across all his writing. They create an immediacy. But these events are told from Ramadhin’s perspective. Whatever the complex subterfuge of Heather telling Michael what she knew (how could she know about Ramadhin’s interior perspective?), the effect is that the reader experiences a story told from inside Ramadhin, just before his death. This is, I believe, the narrator flitting about, in and out of the character’s heads. The overall narrational structure is that of the older narrator telling stories about the younger protagonist, some sixty years later. This creates a big distance between the narrator and the events. The distance consists of more than time. It’s a function of the narrator “looking back” and having his own emotional reaction to the past. We see this in the telling of the story of Michael’s affair with Ramadhin’s younger sister, Massi. “Massi existed in the public half of the world that Ramadhin rarely entered. There was never hesitation in her. She and I would come to share a deep slice of each other’s lives. And whatever became of our relationship, the ups and downs of its seas, we improved as well as damaged each other with the quickness I learned partially from her. Massi grabbed at decisions. She was probably more like Cassius than like her brother. Although I know now that the world is not divided that simply into two natures. But in our youth we think that.” ‘Kay. This is a fine example of the older narrator looking back on a significant love affair and expressing judgements of it. These are not opinions Michael would have been able to have during the time he was involved with Massi; they are products of hindsight. But that may be to trivialize them unfairly. They are profound judgments that are the result of much experience and reflection. Could they still be mistaken? Sure, but that assessment would be evidence of a pretty cynical reading of this beautiful story. Another, perhaps more innocent, example: “…most of the time, we had barely a fishhook’s evidence about Miss Lasqueti’s background or career. We considered ourselves good at vacuuming up clues as we coursed over the ship each day, but our certainty about what we discovered grew slowly…We were learning about adults simply by being in their midst…That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power…Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.” Here the narrator is showing how the young protagonists were unreliable and mistaken in their assessments of the other passengers. And then he includes a pronouncement about some wisdom he’s learned as an older adult. Of course, as noted above, the older narrator himself could be unreliable—we don’t know. However, I want to say I don’t think it’s that kind of book. There is nothing going on to make you think the narrator is “blowin’ smoke” or exaggerating to make himself look good. All right, maybe a little, but we want to read wise thoughts by people of experience, no? Till next time. #TheCat'sTable #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

The Cat’s Table, like other stories by Michael Ondaatje, is episodic in structure. The term episodic fiction refers to a set of episodes in a series (like a television show or serial) that have the same characters, setting, and plot conceit, but the story arc in each episode is self-contained, or mostly self-contained. 'Kay. This definition probably has more to do with film series like Star Wars and its various offshoots. Cat’s Table is different in that, first, it is a book, and second, it is not a serialized story that occurs in discrete installments, such as week-to-week. Although it could be said that all of Mr. Ondaatje’s books are linked, by style and often by recurring characters. (Intertextuality, my friends). Witness the way Hana appears in The Skin of a Lion and then again in The English Patient. I just discovered that the Oronsay, the ocean liner that is central in Cat’s Table, also appears in Anil’s Ghost as a rusting hulk in a Sri Lankan harbor. “Kay. So, Cat’s Table is episodic in the sense that it is constructed of discrete episodes that have connections in terms of characters and story and are all contained in the same book. Maestro, an example, please! The book is a fiction about an older man looking back on events that were similar to his own childhood—there’s an illusion of memory, and this begs for being presented in episodes. After all, our memories are episodic, no? The story begins with the young protagonist, Michael, being taken to the point of embarkation for his voyage on the Oronsay. It’s not clear who’s taking him, probably some family members, but it does emerge that he has not seen his mother for four years and is traveling to England to be re-united with her. At this point, Michael is somewhat vaguely defined. The older narrator writes: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there…” And this represents a jump in time from the early 1950s to the book’s present (2011?) when the narrator is writing. This lack of definition at the beginning is interesting as it conveys a tentative feel to the story. Later, as we read, Michael will be much more “filled-in,” as the distance between he and the narrator is adjusted. Then after a chapter break, a section entitled “Departure” begins: “What had there been before such a ship in my life?” Here the story-time continues in the 1950s, and the narrative dives solidly within the young Michael as the story shows his inner experience of preparing for the voyage. The next section, a chapter break, begins: “I heard a note being slipped under my door.” Here, we continue to go with Michael’s experience. But a period of time has passed, and the reader is asked to accept this gap. As young Michael travels in time, we too go from reading his experience of preparation to apparently, the next day. The ship has sailed; he is in his cabin and receives a communication informing him he will be seated at the “Cat’s Table” for meals. There is no showing of continuous time, of Michael boarding the Oronsay, the casting-off, maneuvering out of the harbor. Nothing about (as yet) Michael being escorted to his cabin and settling in. There is now a description of the others he encounters at the dining table, all of whom are significant characters in the story. However, this section is, I believe, presented not by Michael but by the narrator. You disagree, best B.? Am I supposed to disagree? It’s a trap! as Admiral Akbar said. Perhaps it’s not a terribly important distinction, but yes, I believe those expository passages are shown by the older narrator. “It was clear we were located far from the Captain’s Table, which was at the opposite end of the dining room. One of the two boys at our table was named Ramadhin, and the other was called Cassius. The first was quiet, and the other looked scornful, and we ignored one another…Most exciting of all, we had a pianist who cheerfully claimed to have “hit the skids.” What’s important here is that we have a separate older narrator (a character narrator) who is showing we the readers the long-ago scene. He does not use the language and worldview of an eleven-year-old but of a mature writer adept with the English language. There is the illusion of the narrator remembering the past—not in an objective but in a subjective way. This “looking-back” becomes more significant later on as the narrator develops the idea that we humans may look at our pasts with a fond but changed perspective. A sense of wonder and, at times, dismay. We’ll get into this, I promise you. At this delightful point, I want to highlight the discontinuous, episodic nature of the narrative, as well as the omniscient but subjective presence of the narrator’s voice. Till next time. #TheCat'sTable #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

This week, a new novel, Michael Ondaatje’s 2011 The Cat’s Table. It is the story of an adult narrator telling the story of a voyage taken from Sri Lanka to England by an eleven-year-old boy in the early 1950s. “The three weeks of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.” Since Michael Ondaatje himself was originally from Sri Lanka and journeyed to England as an eleven-year-old, it is no grand step to think The Cat’s Table is a memoir. However, Mr. Ondaatje does not agree. When one finishes the novel, one encounters an Author’s Note where he states: “Although the novel sometimes uses the coloring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional—from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator. And while there was a ship named the Oronsay (there were in fact several Oronsays), the ship in the novel is an imagined rendering.” We must take Mr. Ondaatje at his word here, but the coincidence is curious, no? (Incidentally, the ship the boy is traveling on, the Oronsay, is apparently named after a Scottish island and seems to have no meaningful reference to the story beyond being a possible reminder of colonialism. The title of the book, The Cat’s Table refers to the dining table the protagonist is placed at onboard and where he meets the story’s central characters, one of whom calls it the cat’s table, meaning the least desirable). The story begins: “He wasn’t talking. He was looking from the window of the car all the way. Two adults in the front seat spoke quietly under their breath.” (Here, the eleven-year-old, Michael, is en route to the Oronsay). So, this is clearly third-person narration, simple past tense. The narrative continues this way till midway into the fourth paragraph: “I do not know, even now, why he chose this solitude. Had whoever brought him onto the Oronsay already left? …I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk…as if he had been smuggled away accidently, with no knowledge of this act, into the future.” A careful reading reveals that the unnamed narrator in the future may or may not be referring to his child-self. It is possible that he is telling a story about a boy he imagines, rather than remembering his past. It is ambiguous. The implied author of the story, speaking through this adult narrator, would arguably know all about a character he created. Instead, the narrator is made to wonder. He is not omniscient. The next chapter is entitled Departure. It begins: “What had there been before such a ship in my life? …But now it had been arranged I would be traveling to England by ship and that I would be making the journey alone.” And this definitively establishes the narrational style for the bulk of the story, first person and simple past tense. I just want to remark on the way the story seems to be one thing but is another. And note that what we have here is a character narrator, and we know what that implies—unreliability. There is a narrator of the story—the guy in the future—who would seem to have an omniscient view of things in the past, but he calls all that into question by saying he doesn’t know key motivations. He claims that the voyage was no big deal to him till his children asked him to essentially tell a story about it. So is it fiction or memoir? Fiction, best B. I’m going to say fiction with an extra helping of mystery. After several chapters narrated by the eleven-year-old, “Michael,” we have a paragraph break, and: “The three weeks of the sea voyage, as I originally remembered it, were placid.” He shifts. “As night approached, I missed the chorus of insects, the howls of garden birds, gecko talk…Some mornings in Boralesgamuwa, I used to wake early, and make my way through the dark, spacious bungalow until I came to Narayan’s door…” This a description of this “I’s” life in Sri Lanka, apparently before the voyage on the Oronsay. “When I left the country at the age of eleven, I grieved most over losing them (the family’s servants). A thousand years later I came upon the novels of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan in a London bookstore. I bought everyone and imagined they were by my never forgotten friend Narayan.” Then another paragraph break, and: “And then, one day, I smelled burning hemp on the ship.” Here, the narrator is back on the Oronsay. So, the narrator has signaled that he will not only tell the story of the young Michael’s sea voyage, but will also dart about in time, going back to a younger time—either for himself or for Michael—and going forward to when either Michael or the narrator were older and living in London. More on this to come. It’s interesting that the adult narrator writes, “The three weeks of the sea voyage, as I originally remembered it…” Now, an innocent reading would be that he’s telling a story about his younger self—from memory. But this is not explicitly said. The narrator doesn’t write, “The three weeks of the sea voyage, when I was on the ship…” No, it’s possible the narrator is writing that he is creating the story, using the artifice of writing about past events. Is the story about Michael the eleven-year-old traveler or is it about the adult narrator tells us incidents from his childhood? Yes. Till next time. #TheCat'sTable #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

The Unconsoled begins with Ryder, a famous pianist, arriving in an unnamed European city to perform a concert. Through more than five hundred pages of prose, much of it quoted speech, the hapless Ryder meets with continual delay and frustration as he approaches the night of this concert. He encounters a number of at best eccentric people in the city, some of whom he has known long ago. He learns that a civic group has invited him to perform, hoping his presence will help the city solve a crisis. He himself has a weak grasp on what is expected of him. But at the end of the story, he has been unable to perform the concert or to make any remarks to the assembled citizens. We last read about him as he rides a train that travels in circles around the city. He is hungry and seeks food. “I filled my coffee cup, almost to the brim. Then, holding it carefully in one hand, my generously laden plate in the other, I began making my way back to my seat.” Finally, someone has “generously” given him something he wants. Indeed, is there transformation in Ryder, a significant change the reader can follow as she/he turns the pages? Ryder begins as an outwardly serious and formal person who soon reveals a curious inner-ness replete with painful memories, barely processed. What does this character need or desire? Consolation, best B. He needs to receive comfort and support for the hardships he’s endured in life. He desires to not have to help others but for them to help him. However, he has a hard time admitting it. Near the end, there is a kind of emotional climax when Ryder, seeking information about his parents, who were supposed to attend the concert, engages with Miss Stratmann. At his insistence, she tells him that his parents did in fact visit the city many years ago. In apparent reaction, Ryder says: “I am unhappy with everything, Miss Stratmann. I have not had important information when I’ve needed it. I have not been told of last-minute changes to my schedule. I haven’t been supported or assisted at crucial points. As a result, I have not been able to prepare myself for my tasks in the way I would have liked…” And Ryder thinks: “…suddenly I felt something inside me beginning to collapse.” “I collapsed into a nearby chair and started to sob. As I did, I remembered all at once just how tenuous had been the whole possibility of my parents’ coming to the town. I could not understand at all how I had ever been so confident about the matter.” To Ryder, his parents’ coming to the city to attend his concert was to be a supreme act of recognition of his self-sacrifice and achievement, a resonant “thank-you.” But here he learns this possibility will not occur. Miss Stratmann then “consoles” him by telling him about his parents’ pleasant visit to the city in the past, in particular, how his mother had a “nice” view from the hotel where they stayed. Then Ryder pursues Sophie and Boris, who may be his wife and son. When he catches up, Sophie rejects him, although Boris states they should all be “together.” “The little boy, hanging back in the throng, looked towards me once more. “Boris! That bus ride, you remember it?…Remember Boris, how good it was? How kind everyone was to us on the bus? The little presents they gave, the singing?” But Boris and his mother depart, and Ryder gets on the tram. “Then I became aware of him (the electrician who’s been encouraging him to have breakfast) leaning forward, pasting my shoulder, and I realized I was sobbing. “Listen, he was saying, everything always seems very bad at the time. But it all passes. Nothing’s ever as bad as it looks. Do cheer up…Look, why don’t you have some breakfast?” Ryder gets a plate of food from a hearty buffet set up on the tram. “…I could feel my spirits rising yet further. Things had not, after all, gone so badly. Whatever disappointments this city had brought, there was no doubting that my presence had been greatly appreciated—just as it had been everywhere else I had ever gone…The croissants looked particularly promising.” Ryder rides the train, imagining preparations for his next concert in Helsinki, Finland. And this occurs in the morning, after a long night spent at the concert hall, not giving a concert. Waking up after several days and nights of dreaming, perhaps? It’s easy to see why some readers of this novel have decided the whole thing is an elaborate joke. However, as readers of this blog know, I believe the events and characters of the story all reflect on Ryder, providing an opportunity for him to learn about himself—or at least for the reader. What emerges for me at the end is that Ryder’s time in the city, spent in wacky encounters and preparations for a performance he never has, is not unlike a childhood. His parents inflict pain—perhaps unintentionally because of their own problems. Yet he blames himself and dreams of pleasing them, showing them he has value, but never has an opportunity. They disappear. One of the people he encounters is a young boy who must take care of his mother much in the way Ryder apparently had to take care of his own mother. His parents and that boy are part of the climax of the story. Allegory, anyone? The city, in crisis, is his childhood. In going to the city, Ryder enters a theater of characters who show him his life thus far. Admittedly, his reaction is rather understated. Perhaps the author’s target is more the reader. Thanks, as always, Mr. Ishiguro. Next week, a new work, my friends. Till then. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

One of the features of Ishiguro’s Unconsoled is that it makes use of two forms of narration. The story begins with close first-person character narration with the protagonist, Ryder, describing things strictly from his perspective. Example, please. “The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one—not even a clerk behind the reception desk—waiting to welcome me.” However, near the end of the first chapter, as we’ve described before, Ryder becomes omniscient, in that he is able to see inside another character, Gustav. This is jarring and strange to the reader. It presents an enigma: How could Ryder know what has been preoccupying Gustav and be able to show it, going back over the course of Gustav’s day? There is no sense that Gustav has told Ryder about the events described—allegedly, they have just met. An explanation could be that Ishiguro has shifted narrational styles mid-paragraph. This is generally considered a big no-no for writers, so if so, why did Ishiguro do it? Robert Lemon has suggested that it’s because strictly close character narration would be too limiting, that in order to show the story, there had to be a way to get inside some of the other characters. ‘Kay. What is shown by this shift that could not be shown otherwise? That Gustav has been worried about his daughter Sophie since seeing her in an unguarded moment looking despondent. Are there other ways this could have been shown without switching the mode of narration? Yes. Gustav could tell Ryder in one of those extended speeches about his concerns. Actually, he does just this later on. However, if he had told Ryder about his worries as he showed Ryder his room, he would have been violating his own professional rules. Another solution would be for Ishiguro to use an omniscient approach throughout, the narrator inhabiting whichever character it wished to show the story. This would probably mean switching to third person—that is, the sections about Ryder would become “he” instead of “I.” But that solution is not used neither. Actually, the first-person narration has a quality of omniscience—if the “I” was changed to “third person,” it would work like an omniscient narrator entity. What? What I mean is, that first line could become, “The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one—not even a clerk behind the reception desk—waiting to welcome Mr. Ryder.” Another example occurs near the end of the book in Chapter 34. Ryder is at the concert hall, attempting to prepare for his performance. He comes upon a group of people clustering around a sort of cupboard; when they see him, they insist that he go into the cupboard, and he does so. Once inside, “…I discovered to my surprise that I was looking down into the auditorium from a vast height. The entire back of the cupboard was missing…Then as I watched, Stephen Hoffman came onto the stage from the wings…He walked briskly to the piano with an occupied air, not glancing at the audience.” Stephen Hoffman, the son of the hotel manager, Mr. Hoffman, has been preparing all week for his performance on piano at the concert (much like Ryder—who, it should be said, has been continually distracted from any sort of preparation outside of worrying). Up to this point, the narration has been close character; things are presented through the first-person perspective of Ryder. He goes into the cupboard and “sees” Stephen on stage. Ryder describes how he sees Stephen begin playing and then stops when he apparently notices his parents leaving the concert hall. He gets up to follow. Here’s the shift to omniscient third person: “Only when he had reached the wings did he give into the feeling of outrage now engulfing him. On the other hand, the notion that he had abandoned the stage after only a few bars had for the moment a sense of utter unreality about it, and he hardly gave it thought as he hurried down the wooden steps and through the series of backstage doors.” So what occurs is that the reader has been happily going along, reassured that she/he understands the story is being told by a character narrator, an “I.” Abruptly, the reader is thrown into third person omniscient narration. Oh no! Stephen catches up with his parents—at least his father—in a corridor—inaccessible to Ryder’s perspective up in his cupboard. Stephen has a heated conversation with his father and finally returns to stage to resume his performance. Here’s the shift back to Ryder: “As Stephen began the second movement, the technicians turned the house lights right down and I could no longer see the audience well.” The passage continues at length, maintaining Ryder’s perspective. What is going on? A clumsy error by a master writer? I don’t think so. No, this was intentional. What is shown is the anxiety and intensity of an artist (Stephen) hoping his art will redeem him in the eyes of important others. And then it shows the artist accepting the impossibility of this redemption and performing anyway, his performance a triumph of excellence that others notice. I believe what we have here (and elsewhere) is Ishiguro hitting upon a way to show different aspects of Ryder through the showing of other characters who may be seen as Ryder himself. Whoa! Yes, best beloved. We know that Ryder has had a painful relationship with his parents, that they are supposed to be at the concert to hear him. What we get is another character going through the same thing and feeling emotions in a way that Ryder seems incapable of. In a sense, his own (missing) emotions are reflected back at him by the others. Who are these characters that I believe are expressions of Ryder? Brodsky and Miss Collins, Hoffman and his wife and son. Gustav and Boris and Sophie. Fiona Roberts, Geoffrey Saunders, Mr. Christoff—they all seem to be characters showing different sides of being a virtuoso performer, self, parents, wife, son. There are others who are incidental, providing atmosphere, and include crowd members, people in the restaurant where Ryder goes to have lunch with Mr. Christoff, the musicians at the concert, the other porters, waiters. There are two classes of characters, ones that reflect Ryder and those that are more minor. The brief sections of omniscience (the narrator showing things) establish the ironic distance with the characters. It allows Ishiguro to comment in a way the close first person unreliable narration does not. Another wrinkle. If much of the story can be seen as dream-like, with its interruptions and delays, strange displacements of people, the omniscient sections represent something different. When we dream, we do not dream about the inner experience of others, only our own. (Try it, you’ll see). It is rather as if the bulk of the book that concerns Ryder’s experience is a dream, but the omniscient sections are like reality breaking in—perhaps to teach Ryder something about himself. Huh. Let’s consider this next time. Till then. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

When I began this blog almost three years ago, I set out to write about particular features of stories I enjoyed, their narrational structures, themes, the way they developed plot and character. I did not want to do a sort of book report or review, “This book was very…good. The story was …interesting.” I’m making fun, but I wanted to write about books I’d already read once so I could focus on less obvious features and get away from a strictly emotional reaction. Thus, what particular thing makes a book “good” or “compelling” or however you want to express your enjoyment? It’s easy (easier) to write about books in a simplistic manner. One can summarize the plot and describe the characters. One can make a judgement along the lines of, “I liked this book because it kept me guessing. It raised important issues. It made me think.” Are we only lost in solipsism in that we like books that seem to confirm our own reality? Or can we allow ourselves to be challenged by something different? In either case, what are the features of a book that attract us? What is it about The Unconsoled? I suppose to me personally, the story is about a musician and music (as are many of Ishiguro’s books), and this is interesting because I was once a musician and enjoy music very much. Oh, you old solipsist! One of the distinctive features of The Unconsoled that has nothing to do with me (I hope) is its use of long passages of quoted speech. Characters are often introduced and then launch into these passages, barely taking a breath. Gustav, the hotel porter is the first character to deliver one of these speeches. His initial effort weighs in at roughly seven hundred and fifty words, followed by a brief question from Ryder and then another five-hundred-word production. This feature of the narration represents a stylistic break for Ishiguro, who stated that in writing The Unconsoled, he wanted to try something new. What is it akin to? We know that Ishiguro was interested in Franz Kafka, and there is some stylistic connection with Unconsoled, certainly in terms of the paranoid and alienated mood but also that Unconsoled shares with Kafka’s writing long passages of quoted speech. W.G. Sebald’s writing features this as well, although he was writing during the time Ishiguro was writing Unconsoled, so I don’t think there was influence—Sebald himself was influenced by Kafka. (Kafka wrote about music, too). These long monologues are not a mimesis of human speech where there are frequent interruptions and a back and forth between those engaged in conversation. Perhaps one could detect a connection with Shakespeare’s plays where the characters make long speeches. However, a major difference is that in Unconsoled, it is not Ryder, the protagonist, who speaks long (a la Lear or Hamlet). No sir, it is the other characters who do this speechifying—at Ryder—and this feature suggests more the influence of Kafka. It creates more than a hint of aggression, hostility, and creepiness. ‘Kay. It should be said that these speeches are challenging for the reader and—one would think—for the character who’s listening, Ryder, although he remains polite and attentive. And perhaps that is the point; that Ryder is inundated with information the others tell him, so much so that he screens it out. They speak to him in a way that presumes he is interested. A fine example is when he encounters an old school friend, Fiona Roberts, who implausibly now lives in the city Ryder is visiting and works as a tram conductor. She berates Ryder for not seeing her the previous evening as he had promised—although he has no recollection of this. But she doesn’t just accuse him, she launches into a protracted and lengthy account of just how she waited for him, what her neighbors thought about it. It is a staggering amount of information she dumps on the hapless Ryder. There is a sense that the characters speak at length not so much because they want to communicate with Ryder (and the reader) but more that they don’t expect to be listened to. It’s similar to the way someone might go on and on about a topic, completely boring her/his audience. These long-winded efforts suggest alienation and a turning in on oneself. A sense that no one is listening, no one cares. But not narcissism where the speaker doesn’t care if others listen or not to one’s fine orations. The speakers in Unconsoled seem more melancholy, sad over their sense that no one is listening. Maybe if you felt desperate that no one was listening, you’d try to say everything you could to get attention. The monologues always have the same theme: the speaker has been disappointed and let down and apparently wishes to justify these feelings by defensively offering particular and lengthy detail. But Ryder rarely responds or apologizes, remaining steadfastly polite and formal despite his confusion. So, for the speakers, it is like shouting into the void. Till next time. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, just who are those who are unconsoled? The definition of the word “unconsoled” is a person or group who is not consoled, consoled meaning to comfort (someone) at a time of grief or disappointment. So who in the story has experienced a time of grief or disappointment? Ryder, the protagonist, is an obvious candidate. There are suggestions that he has indeed had a traumatic past, and they become more explicit as the book goes on. However, he generally presents a consistently formal and positive face to the reader. As he narrates the story, he does not begin by mentioning any grief or disappointment—directly. What we do know is that the city that Ryder has traveled to and its inhabitants are characterized as being in crisis, as having suffered from “the crisis.” It’s clearly said that Ryder has been invited to help the inhabitants recover. How are these things revealed by the narrative? In Chapter One, the desk clerk tells Ryder that the hotel manager, Mr. Hoffman, will be disappointed he didn’t meet him upon his arrival. Hoffman has been preoccupied with planning for “Thursday night.” What’s implied by the text is that Thursday night will be the night of Ryder’s concert—the reason for his visit to the city. Ryder reacts: “I simply nodded, unable to summon the energy to enquire into the precise nature of “Thursday night.” Doesn’t this seem odd? “Oh, and Mr. Brodsky’s been doing splendidly today,” the desk clerk said, brightening. This implies that the clerk believes Ryder knows both about Thursday night, and about Brodsky, including that Brodsky is at times not doing splendidly. Ryder states he remembers neither. He relates: “Brodsky—I thought about the name but it meant nothing to me.” Then as Ryder ascends to his room and hears Gustav’s long tale about the dignity of porters (the dignity of servants is a theme in all of Ishiguro’s works) Miss Strattman says: “…we arranged the meeting with the Citizens Mutual Support Group. The Support Group is made up of ordinary people from every walk of life brought together by their sense of having suffered from the present crisis. You’ll be able to hear first-hand accounts of what some people have had to go through. “…we’ve also respected your wish to meet with Mr. Christoff himself. Given the circumstances, we perfectly appreciate your reasons for requesting such a meeting…Naturally, he has his own reasons for wanting to meet you…he and his friends will do their utmost to get you to see things their way. Naturally, it’ll all be nonsense, but I’m sure you’ll find it very useful in drawing up a general picture of what’s been going on here.” “When I entered my room, I was still turning over the various implications of this exchange… Clearly the city was expecting more of me than a simple recital.” Ryder does not have the schedule that Miss Strattman keeps referring to. He does not remark in particular about the crisis, but the reader may. Remark on it and wonder: what is the crisis about? Why is Ryder shown as not reacting? In similar fashion, Ryder makes no comment regarding Mr. Christoff nor the mention made of his requesting a meeting with him. Of course this is odd. Ryder has traveled to an unfamiliar city and is immediately faced with people making demands on his attention and time. And he has no memory of what they’re talking about—only a vague recollection of a schedule written on a lost piece of paper. It’s odd but let’s remember—this is a novel, not a chronicle of Ryder’s travels. There is a point to this—dare I say? —madness. What we have learned is that the unnamed city is in a crisis, and that those who have organized Ryder’s visit believe he wishes to help with it by meeting with a committee and a Mr. Christoff. We know too that a major character, Gustav, feels the city has exhibited a lack of respect for those in his profession, that things used to be better. He has been disappointed. The hotel staff is disappointed that Ryder arrived late. Of course, we learn much more—shortly, about Gustav’s family problems, and then that as a boy, Ryder and his parents lived at his aunt’s house for a time. He played with toy soldiers as a distraction from “a furious row (that had) broken out downstairs. The ferocity of the voices had been such that, even as a child of six or seven, I had realized this to be no ordinary row.” And this is the point at which the young Ryder realizes that an imperfection in his play area could be incorporated into something useful. As the story continues, we learn that all the characters are disappointed in some way by their lives—Mr. Hoffman, his son Stephen, Brodsky, Boris, Sophie, Gustav. And they all look to Ryder for help. Farther on, we will see how Geoffrey Saunders, Fiona and Ryder’s elderly parents share in this sense of being let down—by Ryder himself. And the city is concerned that they are letting Ryder down by the poor quality of the preparations they’ve made for his performance. Is anyone eventually consoled? We shall see, my friends. Till next time. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

My friends, what of the narrational style of The Unconsoled? After all, that’s what I typically write about. Most simply put, Unconsoled is told in first person, simple past tense. In contrast, critics have pointed out how Ishiguro’s other novels employ different modes of narration—within the same—usually first person–story. Thus, Remains of the Day makes use of a sort of travel brochure narration—an imitation of the kind of prose used in travel books—as well as an “oratorical apologia” in which the narrator defends himself from perceived attack. And there is a confessional mode wherein the narrator confesses secrets to particular others. Unconsoled maintains one mode—the voice of the protagonist, Ryder. It is a formal and educated voice, often digressive. “…we soon found ourselves descending a steeply curving road. Christoff, who appeared to know the road well, took each sharp bend with assurance. As we came lower the road became less vertiginous and the chalets he had mentioned, often precariously perched, began appearing to either side of us.” Of course, we could say that there is subterfuge here. Ryder presents himself as eternally polite and composed—despite the most extraordinary occurrences. When he does reveal that he becomes angry—for instance at Sophie—he quickly recovers in an apologetic way. The Ryder of the book, as shown by Ryder, is a character who hides himself behind “niceness.”. There is considerable dialogue: “I’m sorry to come like this at such short notice.” “I’ve told you many times, Stephen,” the elderly woman said. “I’m always here whenever you need to talk things over.” “Well actually, Miss Collins, it wasn’t…Well, it’s not about the usual stuff. I wanted to talk to you about something else, a quite important matter.” As I’ve mentioned before, James Phelan describes a particular style of narration in contemporary fiction as character narration (essentially first-person narration), and I think that is the beastie we are seeing in Unconcoled. Phelan says: “Character narration…is an art of indirection: an author communicates to her audience by means of the character narrator’s communication to a narratee.” Thus, on one level, Ryder seems to be addressing an imagined “you” to whom he is telling the story. This “you” only knows what the narrator tells she/he. On another, his narration is addressing the authorial audience who may know more than the narrator. This phenomenon of a character telling a story brings up issues of underreporting, misinterpreting, and of the reader knowing more than the character narrator does (we saw this in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day). Ryder, the narrator, tells the story of his visit to the unnamed city in a straightforward manner in that, although at times confused, he does not seem to be “making things up” to make himself look better. However, he does seriously underreport, in the sense that there is much that he doesn’t reveal. Nonetheless, his mental state seems to convey that he is unaware of this underreporting. He just leaves out important material, “accidentally?” For instance, we will see that he addresses much of his life, including his painful childhood, by externalizing the memories and conflicts he has onto others. And by omitting details, only revealing part of the story. An example is when he experiences his hotel room as being the bedroom he lived in as a child “during the two years my parents and I had lived in my aunt’s house.” Why was this and was it traumatic? Was it due to some loss of the family home or expulsion from a birth country? No answer is provided, only a wistful memory of playing on a square of carpet and realizing an imperfection might be incorporated into a perfect whole. Hmmm. Is Ryder struggling to avoid something? We should keep in mind this is not a realist novel. It is not the story of a fictional “real” person, a concert pianist who is plunged into near madness during a visit to a central European city. It is a surreal novel of a person who claims to have experiences which echo events in his own life, events which he doesn’t directly reveal. The story lies in these surreal occurrences. If Ryder were more forthcoming about his past, there would be no story. What then? We are talking here about a different way of experiencing the world—not by Ryder, but by Mr. Ishiguro. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

This week, a new story, best beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel, The Unconsoled. It is, essentially, the story of a concert pianist, Ryder, who has come to an unnamed Central European city to perform a concert. I first read Unconsoled twenty years ago after enjoying Ishiguro’s other books and found it amazing and challenging. Some initial reviewers were rather negative—notably James Woods and Michiko Kakutani—but over time, the book’s strengths have become clear to most. It has been described as an extended shaggy-dog story, meaning an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. Others have noted how the story seems to be structured like a dream and that, as a result, there is a subtle internal cohesion. A not incompatible view calls the novel surrealist. I tend to go more with these latter opinions. I do not think the digressive stories in Unconsoled are irrelevant at all. To me, the book is under the influence of Franz Kafka, who did not write about shaggy dogs. Surrealism—yay! The phrase dream-like conjures images of your pet dog suddenly speaking to you in British English, and this is the sort of thing that occurs regularly in Unconsoled. (not literally). The book is also characterized by a particular and pervasive mood—puzzled irritation and shame. It begins: “The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one—not even a clerk behind the reception desk—waiting to welcome me.” This first line encapsulates a central idea in the book: we are unable to meet the expectations of others. Ryder (and the taxi driver) expects someone to welcome him to the hotel but has arrived late. His reception committee couldn’t wait any longer. Finally, Ryder is able to check in, and the porter, an elderly man named Gustav, seems on the point of collapse carrying Ryder’s luggage. When Ryder asks if this is so, Gustav tells him a long story about how he makes a point of carrying two suitcases at once and never putting them down. This is because Gustav believes others expect this of him because he is a professional porter. In other words, it is essential to meet others’ expectations—even if it is traumatizing. Poor Ryder must contend with a cast of characters who continually ask him for favors which he is not sure he’ll be able to satisfy as no one—including the concert promoters—will tell him what his schedule is or where he’s supposed to be. He is lost in a world where everyone has expectations that he help them. Meanwhile, his own expectations are not met. The story is told in a straightforward manner up to the point where Gustav is showing Ryder his room. Ryder thinks: “it occurred to me that for all his professionalism…a certain matter that had been preoccupying him throughout the day had again pushed its way to the front of his mind. He was, once more, worrying about his daughter and her little boy.” There follows a long story about how Gustav helps his daughter have time to herself by taking charge of her son for a few hours but that, recently, he had observed Sophie, his daughter, “sitting alone, a cup of coffee before her, wearing a look of utter despondency.” Ryder continues: “In fact, it was the recollection of this incident that had lent him (Gustav) such a preoccupied air down in the lobby, and which was now troubling him once more as he showed me around my room. “I had taken a liking to the old man and felt a wave of sympathy for him…I dismissed him with a generous tip.” Now, this may seem straightforward, however, the problem is that Ryder has no way of knowing about this family problem of Gustav. Gustav has at no point told him about his worries. So how does Ryder know? Well, perhaps, you say, this is the omniscient narrator chap speaking. Oh, if it were so simple! No, there’s a clear statement that Ryder himself realizes this about Gustav. A mystery, my friends. There’s more. Ryder, tired from his journeys, goes to bed. “The room I was now in, I realized, was the very room that had served as my bedroom during the two years that my parents and I had lived at my aunt’s house…I looked again around the room, then, lowering myself back down, stared once more at the ceiling.” Poetic license, you say? Evidence of severe psychological problems? Nah, it’s a novel. There’s a point to all this. Then, in what seems to be a key moment, Ryder recalls how as a boy, he used to play with toy soldiers on the carpet and how there was an imperfection on the carpet’s surface. He remembers a particular moment when “it had occurred to me for the first time that this tear could be used as a sort of bush terrain for my soldiers to cross. “This discovery—that the blemish that had always threatened to undermine my imaginary world could in fact be incorporated into it—had been one of some excitement for me, and that “bush” was to become a key factor in many of the battles I subsequently orchestrated.” This idea, my friends, that something bad may be recast as something good, is a clue to unlocking the mystery of the story. Ooh. ‘Kay, let’s leave things mysterious. Till next time. #TheUnconsoled #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray