Author Laurel Lindström

The Draftsman in brief

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Martin Cox left school at 16 with stellar grades. But too traumatised to progress any further academically, he instead took a low-paid, low-skilled job in a local drafting office.

Over the course of a couple of years Martin progresses in skill and appreciation of design and structure. He is an engineering genius and when he makes recommendations to change a patent application his life is turned around. He becomes very rich, but Martin Cox is a damaged man, a man whose past has left deep and abiding scars. He’s high-achieving, autistic, and craves routine and consistency in his life, yet he lives in chaos. He cannot relate to other people and is barely even aware of his own identity or his considerable limitations. Child abuse is not unusual in modern fiction, but a mother’s abuse of her son in the name of love is less common. Its legacy is rarely addressed.

When Martin Cox buys a house in the countryside, it is the first time ever he has spent any time out of London. He is slowly intrigued by the landscape and the history of the property. He starts to learn more about the original house, about the wartime hospital, about the school and about a young woman and her Canadian airman. As he becomes more fascinated, Martin starts to grow away from himself and towards others. He gradually comes to recognise the damage he has suffered at his mother’s hand, and even to care. His relationships become a source of healing, first the connection with his boss and later with his business minder. But these relationships are unclearly defined. The ambivalence with which the writer addresses Martin Cox’s sexuality is deliberate, a device to keep the reader guessing and a reflection of Martin’s own uncertainty and confusion.

Martin’s fascination with his house and its landscape, the local history, the wartime realities he learns more about as the book progresses, lead him to a mystery. As Martin’s sense of identity develops the reader sees his unacknowledged and unrecognised victimhood, mirror the solution of a mystery that only becomes apparent in the book’s climax.

The Draftsman is a compelling and highly original work of fiction. Readers come to understand Martin’s curious obsessions, contradictions and motivations through the course of the book. Martin’s logic, extreme orderliness and control are his default, but they mask his capacity to care or love. These limitations are a function of his mother’s unwelcome attentions.

© Laurel Lindström 2024

https://www.newyorker.com

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https://www.theatlantic.com/world

Unspoken or speechless?

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People with sore throats apparently have sore throats because they are not very good at expressing themselves. Difficulties we’re facing but can’t express, so we get a sore throat? Nah. People with sore throats may just have sore throats and be in need of gargling with a 1:5 solution of TCP. 

If you’ve trouble with self-expression, it’s much more effective to build a very high, very thick wall. Stay behind it as long as you need to and keep adding bricks when necessary. This is completely opposite to what the head doctors will tell you because it amounts to repression: oh no I’m repressed. And it’s doing me in. My mental health, oh dear. Except no, not expressing yourself isn’t doing you in at all, it’s providing you with a safe space behind walls that only you can occupy and this is not so bad.

Everyone has these walls to some extent or another because it’s how we protect ourselves, how we hide what’s important or the effects of trauma. It’s also where we can stay when times get tough, so that we can work out how to get through those gnarly times. We can wait and figure out what happened, how we feel about it and what we can do to deal with it, which is usually not much. Mostly the best thing is to be patient and be still, to lie in the dark and watch as the wiggles in your eyes weave unseen webs and rehearse their silent chorus. You know it all.

We can talk about stuff and share, or keep behind a wall. Either way anxieties and insecurities, fears, are absolutely who you are along with the rest of what makes you you. But owning such things can be hard sometimes, especially if they’re reflected in your conduct. Fear and insecurity drive behaviours and creativities: we can always do better. It takes a genius on the scales of Lennon and McCartney to have the confidence to say, actually that piece of work is not so bad. And then they could only make such judgements in later life, once the crazy Beatle years were over and they were further along on their respective journeys.

For people aspiring to write fiction, does it maybe ever happen in the same way? Do we ever look back and say, I hated that at the time but actually it isn’t so bad? Time maybe the magic ingredient no one can add at the point of creation. As with music, revisiting what you created ages ago can be instructive for what you are creating now: it shows you boundaries, different walls that you might want to extend or penetrate. For those walls, the limits to your creativity, the more creative work you do, the thinner and lower they might become. We can always do better. There are always more words. 

The next time. The next time bricks get added to your walls is unavoidable. Bricks, mortar and the next brutal trowel are always close at hand, just waiting. But not because of the work. The next time the walls start going up doesn’t come with mean comments about the piece or with people laughing or mocking what you’re trying to do. The next time the walls start going up is because of stuff that traumatises and confuses you, undermining who you are, what you are. And if you are a writer or a musician those safety walls can have nothing to do with the work. The work’s apart from you and your walls; it’s more important. Walls that go up because someone doesn’t like your story or articles are flimsy and easily downed. They are trivial, false and fragile figments you can ignore: there is always more to say, more words, more stories; you can always do better. So when a piece gets criticised, instead of letting a wall go up let come a moment of joy, of elation. Comments and criticism confirm that someone has bothered to read your words and consider them. They’ve made the effort and taken the time to respond to what you’ve written. Creative output and you are intrinsicly bound yet separate, so your walls keep out the work as well as the rest of the world. Be content to toss words over the parapets and watch them fly away across the sky. And be happy if somebody finds them.

© Laurel Lindström 2023

https://www.newyorker.com

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English as she is spoke

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English has played quite a role in spreading culture, commerce and other things beginning with c across the globe. The language owes much of its success to its habit of agglomerating new words and meanings. And the fact that the English are too lazy to learn other languages. They believe that speaking English at volume will do the trick. It doesn’t. English speakers prefer to pinch words from other languages and make them work, often very effectively. Pyjamas from Hindi, zeitgest from German, ombudsman from Swedish, schmuck from Yiddish, divan from Arabic, croissant from French. You get the idea. English is a collection of words from other languages, pronounced wrong. Things are more complicated and far more creative with Cockney rhyming slang, but that’s for another day. 

The greediness for new words that makes English so dynamic isn’t matched by its ability to care for words; we let them get messed up and mangled without much of a fight. We allow bits of our language to fall into dereliction, and never think about why those bits have been relicted. We forget to use words even though they break no rules. Do you ever feel gruntled basking in the sun’s warmth instead of disgruntled because of the coolth?

Situations and people we don’t expect to run into can be very disarming but when we are expecting to see them we rarely feel a sense of arming. And if it’s hench people or environments we’d prefer to avoid, we can be pretty ruthless about getting ourselves elsewhere. If we change our minds we surely return with ruth. Except we don’t, even if we have decided that the hench people are couth rather than uncouth and that places are lapidated rather than dilapidated. Actually that one’s a bit of a cheat. To lapidate means to stone to death. But onwards.

First impressions can be accurate or deceptive and what you think is an accurate first impression might actually have misled you into some sort of false confidence. It might not take much to misle you; a person’s demeanour (they might have meanour, but we don’t mention that) and manner depends on the impression they want to give. How devastated we feel when we discover they’re a crashing bore depends on the circs. There’s only so much chat about the best place to get an MOT in Ireland one can take (Belfast apparently). Once you’ve regained consciousness walk away. The sense of devastation gone and feeling fully vastated, you’ll be ready to share alternative hospitality. Unless, or is that less, the encounter has left you hospitalised.

Unlike structured languages like German or Swedish, or even French, the English language is unruly and wayward. The collective linguistic naughtiness of some two billion speakers makes of English a perpetual chaos. Few people are aware of inventing words, yet still English vocabulary blossoms with no trammel whatsoever. Unruly but consistently inventive, it’s got some 170,000 words in usage. Most people work with 20,000 to 30,000. Unlike the rule driven Swedes and Germans, English speakers are not ruly, they are rule breakers. From the messy growth of English vocabulary we can infer that English is a bonkers language. Or is that a verb usage too fer?

https://www.newyorker.com

Three years on

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

It’s that laugh. It’s that laugh still echoing three years on from when it stopped. And a random unexpected picture. He’s sweaty and hot, a pint to hand, drumsticks sitting on the tom. And beaming at the people shyly coming to say how much they enjoyed it, saying his name, telling him where they’ve come from, how often they’ve heard him play and do you know such and such who came with me the last time, that time in Ghent, or Hastings or wherever. Always he is smiling back, nodding, buoying them up with his kindness, his generosity. He might have remembered, but he’s distracted thinking about the beats and patterns. So he laughs with them and they go home happy and excited.

For us the laughter was a soundtrack, along with the jazz, weaving its way into and around our early lives. Laughter and silliness touching all the days, a comfort and a place of safety, reassuring and always telling us that things would be fine. Loose tooth, cat scratch, falling down the stairs, something horrid on the plate in front of us. Laughter fixed all of it; it was his remedy for us and perhaps for himself.

As those few short years passed slowly from laughter to sorrow, the laughter shifted to sighs and patient smiles, glancing looks and long hugs. Tight hard cuddles instead of giggles and then everything changed so fast and he was not there like he used to be. No more late night jam sessions or squeaking stairs in the darkness. No more jokes or teases, just a sullen scowl as the path once lit with joyous gold turned dark and scary. Uncertain, we were stepping through thorns and murky holes, trying to bypass the unexpected decay of wonder. But it didn’t work. Instead were many years of distant and disparate unshared lives, peppered with outreach and lonely calls back into the past. Eventually the future reclaimed all of us and just as unexpectedly what came next brought back the laughter.

Time took all of us along, and we followed in the noisy wake of him, following but never quite catching his riotousness. And still he’s always there in my head, in silence or in the music. Thank you for that and for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness, the patience and the love. The time. Through all the complications and confusion, the absences and losses, the distractions, the otherliness of life, through everything, he has always been with me even if the plan went its own way. So thank you Daddy for holding us still and for your constancy living on in loving memory.

Trial

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And error. The journey wasn’t improving and her map-reading skills were clearly nonexistent. The blind date had been fine, but what could go wrong in a Mexican restaurant where they served margueritas in glasses so big you could barely lift them. But this, finding a party somewhere in Santa Monica, was different and here they were on the 10 looking for the exit by trial and error. “I know exactly how we get there,” she’d said when she suggested this Santa Monica excursion as a second date. They’d met downtown, driving their cars on the 110 to the 10 stopping for coffee and leaving her car at a Denny’s somewhere off La Brea. He was driving and she was reading the map on her ’phone. He should’ve known this wasn’t going to work. She’d been a bit confused getting them back onto the freeway, so they’d ended up taking Apple Street running parallel to the 10. Slowly. 

He knew the way to Santa Monica, but chose to support her agency. It seemed only fair. On the surface street he took advantage of the dawdling pace to glance at her. He was wondering what had made that first date so great. Was it the voice, slightly drawling, peppered with pauses as she stared at the ceiling in search of the next words. Or was it the soft gleam of such very pale skin, almost translucent and unworldly in this dessicated Californian climate. Or was it that endearing vulnerability that made him want to wrap her up in his arms and just hold her forever. Or was it just tequila and lust. Libidinous joys had been sparse of late.

That voice, still gentle and sympathetic, was getting annoying. It never got out of second gear; he was trying to confirm that her friend’s baby shower was down on Second Street in Santa Monica. But the drawl was almost tidal in its relentlessness, so he tried hard not to show his exasperation and to be conversational in an eh-huh, ok, uhmmhmm, sort of way. And now they’re facing another navigational challenge, cruising within spitting distance of the 7B on ramp at Washington Boulevard, but her directions take them not onto the 10 but to Venice Boulevard running parallel to the freeway. Again. Her concentration on her ’phone meant momentary suspension of her droning voice; he could finally tell her, “listen, I haven’t been quite on it with you. I told you I’m not from LA. True. But I have lived here over 10 years. I can tell you we need to get on the 10, so I’ll take it from here. Okay?”. Those big baby blues turned on him as she slowly twisted in her seat and lowered her sunglasses from the top of her head to the well-sculpted bridge of her nose. She said nothing as he took the Culver Junction and got them back onto the 10 heading finally at a decent clip in the direction of Santa Monica and the now questionable joys of her friend’s party. A baby shower? Really? What was he thinking?

They crossed the 405 in silence and when he asked if she was sure about Olympic she said nothing. He took the exit and made a U turn at 14th to pull up in front of Tacos Por Favor. He knew Mexican was a fave food and he knew he’d gotten them back on track. He knew too that her calculations for how long the journey would take were wildly inaccurate. From where they were on Olympic would take them about fifteen minutes max to get to the party. They had almost an hour to spare. “We’ll be there way early. I need to eat. I think you’ll like this place.” She said nothing, wrestling instead with Google and its confusing maps. “So are we staying on Olympic,” she ventured, not moving. He was standing in the sharp sunshine, doing his best to keep focused on why he was bothering with this vague and annoying woman. But there was something in her winsomeness, her trial and error approach to getting somewhere. The Santa Ana wind was starting to pick up and he fancied he could already smell the hint of smokey air from distant fires. She was out of the car and looking at him with an equivocating expression; sunglasses up, brow slightly wrinkled, eyebrows raised, the mouth a quizzical pout. He melted a little. “Let’s go inside, let’s order; and I can explain.”

Writer’s block and how to solve it

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There’s been lots of chat online recently about overcoming writer’s block. Writer’s block is defined by some site Google thinks knows, as the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing. And that’s a load of old toe. I can state with complete confidence that never in a career spanning 40+ years have I suffered from this terrible condition. And the reason for this is simple: I can’t afford it, not just because without the article there can be no invoice. I can’t afford it, because without getting on and writing something, my head implodes.

It’s not just me. Writer’s block is a problem no jobbing writer, say a journalist or a copy writer can allow. Hilary Mantel was asked at some event if she ever go it and how she resolved it. I can’t remember the exact words but in essence she said no, and that writing is something that cannot be blocked. You sit down and write something, anything and see what happens. Try it, try writing out your nine times tables in numbers and words and see where it takes you. If it only takes you to the ten times table, go backwards. See what clever things you notice about the nine times table.

A way more serious problem is a lack of ideas to turn into stories and here too Hilary had a solution: read a newspaper. You’ll find a host of stories presents itself, especially if you’re looking at smaller local titles. The point is that ideas spring from your observations of what is all around you. Wherever you can find scenes or communications about life and people, you can have something to say: the discovery of a long lost relative; a pony who can speak English with a Welsh accent; vegetables that double in size in the fridge overnight; a mysterious visitor you thought was just the new postman and who turns out to be your first lover in disguise. And so it goes on.

Writer’s block is not a problem, it’s an excuse, an indulgence that puts the complainant first and centre, and overlooks the writing. More interesting is why someone thinks they cannot write, have no ideas, no stories to tell. It might be reasonable to say that individual trauma justifies shelving the pencil or pen or keyboard for a while. If you’re distracted by some family worry, your spreading midriff or how to pay the electricity bill, writing is not going to be top of the list of what to do with your time. In the case of the electricity bill, there’s motivation right there to get on with it. In the case of other dramas though, perhaps a writer is so sensitive that any kind of practical or emotional disruption is sufficient to knock them off course.

For me, it’s the opposite. The worse things are the more buried I get. The hardest part about writing a weekly blog isn’t overcoming a fictitious block or coming up with ideas. The hardest part is the same as it has always been, it’s that contact problem. Not people or networking mind, it’s just getting the backside into contact with the chair and the fingers with the keyboard. It’s the old problem of finding a round tuit. I have to get one every week to make sure the noise in my head reaches the page. I suffer not at all from writer’s block, but massively from the maelstrom that’s constantly raging in my head. Perhaps now its a little quieter, but I know the noise will be back soon. Like writer’s block it’s all in the mind. 

I can’t…

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

I can remember George Lewis and how the room smelled of smoke and beer and sweat. Breathing deep I can remember being up so very high and seeing the top of my Dad’s head. I can’t remember why I was on George Lewis’s shoulders when I was two years old, only the persistent rumbling noise; shapes, shadows dancing random across my eyes. Maybe the pictures were real, maybe not.

I can remember later in the street feeding the rag and bone man’s piebald horse. The horse couldn’t see me unless I stood front of him and my mother wouldn’t let me do that. She didn’t understand that the blinkers blocked the view or how the scent and heat of his shining black and white coat embraced me. I stared up not down, breathing deep. I never saw what Dad helped the toothless rag and bone man load up onto his cart. I can remember too the meandering echoes of Billie Holiday and New Orleans jazz. 

I can remember much later standing on the corner of Cambridge Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue waiting for you. Looking. Would I know you now that you are old, would you know me now that I am nineteen? And then there you were, I saw you. I watched you looking furtive and anxious and guilty. But for whom the guilt? Maybe for all of us. Then we sat awkward and afraid of each other, no mention of sitting on a man’s shoulders or wanting to look a piebald horse in the eye. It was just uncomfortable words passing as conversation between a lonely daughter and her estranged father. The girl was unacknowledged. The man was unknown. They were anonymous, cloaked a hidden shared yearning, wanted none of this to be true, wanted that none of it had happened.

But it had; it could only keep on happening unless the pattern changed. She wanted it but he didn’t. “It was a long time ago.” Denial, hiding, blocking, rejection. Rejection again, but that wasn’t true either, just the thing he knew he had to do. There were other considerations, other truths, other hearts he must not let break.  

The sounds and chaos of emotions grown and slowly settled over many years, over many sad walks around Cambridge Circus, over many times in the 100 Club and the Pizza Express in Soho. The tears in the dark, the heaving gulping sobs, the weeping and slow tears for what was so long gone, were ceased. The laughter came back, the joy of hearing him play, of seeing faces smiling from the past. “It should never have happened” Monty said. And then Dad died. And no it never should have happened but it did and out of destruction he had build much more. He had given something to share, something of love remembered.

A new CD with tracks from 1959. Dad on drums and George Lewis on clarinet. Listen to it? Absolutely. But not just yet. I can’t …

The Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival 2024

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The Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival is coming up. It’s only the third year running for this event, but #twLitFest has some impressive headliners: Michael Ball, Michael Palin and others not called Michael. The programme is organised by genre with sessions at various venues in Tunbridge Wells, from the 9th to the 12th May, 2024. Organisers expect to welcome more than the 5,000 visitors who came last year.

Literary festivals are supposed to be a bookish version of a musical festival, but they are not quite the same. There’s much less mud involved and at a music festival it’s more likely that most people have already shelled out for the work of the performers. A music festival is more like a two way thank you: thanks for buying my records, thanks for making those records. It’s a celebration of an intimate and shared relationship, whereas a literary festival is primarily about promoting books and networking. A literary festival puts authors in front of readers in the hope that they will buy, so the focus is squarely on the authors. But a literary festival should be as much about readers, because readers are the market and they are increasingly oversupplied.

Let’s not forget that everything to do with publishing, music or books, is a business. Whether it’s books, magazines, newspapers or albums, the bottom line is money: money funds production, marketing and distribution. With books the route to the money can be especially slow and meandering; the connecting lines are convoluted and often quite entangled. There are many interests involved and many slow processes from the authors and writing, to agents and editors, proof readers and publishers, designers, production, marketing people and publicists. All these interests should get as involved in literary festivals as they possibly can, because this is where readers rove about and the readers are the ones who part with their cash for the books they want.

Authors take part in a literary festival to get exposure, to entertain and to sell. Exposure helps sales of current titles and smooths the route into the charts for upcoming titles. This is part of what the celeb lit culture is all about. Each showcase is an investment for the next book, reducing risks associated with the author and their work. In this context, a famous children’s author can do a completely irrelevant and random stand-up routine, knowing it will give a boost to sales of an upcoming, as yet unwritten, memoir or gothic novel. 

The literary festival model could be about more than celeb profiles, like taking risks with new writing, like engaging readers more actively. Why not throw in moderated panel discussions about things readers care about: new authors, reviews, book lengths, demographics. Live debates would be a good addition, with big names getting involved rather than just passing through. A celebration of story telling, imagination and points of view from the ordinary to the outrageous, encourages readers to get involved. All of this involves risk.

Risk is fundamental to any business investment but the book business is pretty risk averse, whether it is into new authors or even coming to events like the Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival. The days when publishers took risks are long gone. Most of them sit behind layers of corporate interests far from the places where readers roam. Getting up close and personal with readers at a regional literary festival might make an interesting change for them. And a little more risk from publishers might make for a more interesting book business for everyone else. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket – a review

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The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel. When its initial version came out as a story in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890, the critics were not kind. It was declared an immoral book to which Wilde responded in the preface to the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray that, “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

In its presentation at the Theatre Royal Haymarket The Picture of Dorian Gray has a curious morality, an honesty resonant for our times. Sarah Snook stars in a one woman presentation of a novel that has never previously transferred well to the stage. There’s not much of a plot or structure and the brilliance of The Picture of Dorian Gray is in its intermingling of the witty dialogue for which Wilde is so justly famous, and the inner contortions we all suffer as we try to live the lives expected of us, while dealing with inner secrets and our quotidien moral dilemmas.

The basic story of Dorian Gray is not lost in this stage version: artist Basil Hallward paints the portrait of an exceptionally beautiful 20 year old man. His friend, the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton, admires the painting and is keen to meet the sitter. Gorgeous Dorian arrives at the studio dripping innocence and very soon is fascinated by Henry Wotton’s talk of youth and beauty and the tragedy that is aging, amongst much else. Dorian’s first sin, vanity, comes on quickly and enthralled by Lord Henry’s quips and chat Dorian promises his soul, if he could remain ever youthful. In return for Dorian’s soul his aging will only be evident in the portrait which no one will ever see. Basil doesn’t ever want to exhibit the picture because “I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” The portrait ends up in Dorian’s attic where its beauty soon starts to deteriorate.

Wilde put much of himself and his philosophy for life into The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s his personal manifesto of sorts and this added layer of intimacy makes it even harder to present the story on stage. But at the Theatre Royal director Kip Williams, artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, has managed it in spades. He does so by using unconventional methods: videography and what I suppose are film or television cameras and a single actor, Sarah Snook. Five cameras buzz about the stage throughout the two hour performance. The picture of Dorian Gray is a giant screen in portrait orientation hanging centre stage with constantly changing images of the book’s characters, according to who’s doing what. We never see the deteriorating painting. Snook plays all 26 characters, with the less central ones prerecorded. The main characters are filmed live on stage as Snook changes wigs, facial hair and clothes with the assistance of the people doing the filming, to shift from one character to another and talking all the while. It’s an extraordinarily powerful and demanding performance.

The Picture of Dorian Gray connects ideas about influence and individualism to Dorian’s vulnerable innocence, with pretty sorry results. On stage the drawing of this link is all a little chaotic and unsettling. This is precisely the point: identity and sense of self is fluid, a little chaotic and unsettling. Numerous screens convey the characters as Snook narrates the story, sometimes in competition with herself, as more than one character overlaps to tell the tale. Oscar’s gorgeous words dominate throughout; so much of the presentation is him that Oscar’s almost there, an unseen adjunct to the cast. It’s wonderful.

As Snook narrates the story she works with the cameramen and works with her own image on a mobile phone. As she describes what’s going on, she uses image filters to share different versions of her face as Dorian, projected onto the larger screens. It’s a brilliant mimicry of the ridiculous online clichés of beauty, with the huge pouty lips, the superhigh cheekbones and the perfectly arched brows drawn on skin as taut as a drum. And there are the hideous distortions when things go very wrong. Very funny, but also very disturbing.

Wilde’s awareness of the nature of influence, obsession with youth, constant reinvention of oneself and the need to be seen, is just so current, so contemporary. For Wilde all influence is immoral. He says in the novel (and Snook as Lord Henry says on stage) that to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul, instead of letting a person be themselves. Influencing is immoral because the aim of life is self-development, not allowing others to tell you who to be. In an age where influencers are recognised as a sort of profession, Wilde’s reminder is profoundly reassuring. Only about 1% of influencers are self-supporting, so maybe enough people understand that they should be their own person and that the whole influencer thing is an invention to drive advertising and product sales.

Dorian soon falls in love with actress Sybil Vane, but Sybil is too distracted by her love for Dorian to perform well when Lord Henry and Basil are in the audience. In the Theatre Royal production, Sybil’s performance takes place on a tiny model of a stage filled by some filmic wizardry, with Snook’s head and a mass of golden curls covering the tiny stage. Sybil gurns and squints, alternatively mumbling or rattling off her lines whilst constantly glancing at Dorian, almost blowing kisses. Dorian is horrified at her poor performance and, declaring that he is no longer in love with her, ends the relationship. Days later Dorian’s feeling lonely and plans a reconciliation with Sybil, but Lord Henry arrives to tell Dorian that Sybil is dead. She has taken her own life. In taking solace in his own image Dorian notices the first changes in the portrait: “cruel lines around the mouth”. It all goes downhill from there with Dorian committing murder and living a life of inimitable corruption and yet never aging a day. His face belies no sign of the dreadful life he leads. Read the book if you want to know the rest of the story.

Oscar Wilde’s life, philosophy, his defiance of convention, his platforming, it’s all there in the book and miraculously on the Theatre Royal’s stage. Sometimes it’s a bit lost in a surfeit of production cleverness, which can leave the audience slightly numb and disengaged. But maybe that excess is deliberate: just like Dorian as he progresses to ever deeper depths of depravity and all around nastiness we the audience start to feel slightly deadened, alienated.

What happens in this amazing stage version is an extraordinary exposition of modern individualised egocentricity. Murderous stabbing with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons loud in the background. Donna Summer’s I Feel Love booming out in an opium den with Dorian and his gross friends. In every screen on the stage we see different aspects of Dorian’s corruption, his selfishness, vanity, greed, envy, all of it relentlessly engorged in vicious dissolution. Individual expression is taken to horrible extremes in this production, and there are reminders that much of what is in The Picture of Dorian Gray foretells the life and tragic downfall of Oscar Wilde himself. In Dorian’s ultimate demise we have an early whisper for The Ballad of Reading Gaol: each man kills the thing he loves. And Basil reminds us that we “shall suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly”. Somewhere in the book and somewhere in the chaos of screens and rapid fire narration on stage Wilde tells us that genius lasts longer than beauty. This astonishing production and Snook’s fantastic performance are proof that whatever beauty Oscar crammed into his life, his genius is what endures.

The Last Chairlift by John Irving – a review

Laurel Lindström 4 Comments

John Irving is about as lofty as it gets when we think of modern American novelists. Lauded for The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire, Irving has penned 15 novels and scads of other writings including screenplays during a career that spans over five decades. Not all of his work has been celebrated and some of it is borderline impenetrable. A Son of the Circus anyone? That novel goes well with tea and chocolate and was the most recent Irving I had read before tackling The Last Chairlift. I say tea and chocolate because A Son of the Circus is such a mess of a novel, that a reader requires sustenance throughout. Chocolate necessity. There is much the same sensation with The Last Chairlift although there is far less excitement in this latest (2022) work.

The Last Chairlift is the story of Adam Brewster who’s mother is a ski instructor. Little Ray lives away from her son for six months of the year, while she’s working and living at a ski resort with her partner, Molly. Adam’s grandmother, who reads him Moby-Dick (all of it), takes care of him when Little Ray’s not around. Adam grows up missing his mother when she’s away and being doted on by her whenever she’s around. They are in love from the start. Adam’s close to his cousin Nora and her girlfriend Em who are some six years older than Adam. When Adam is around 14, Little Ray marries an English teacher, Elliot Barlow. A snowshoeing enthusiast and cross dresser Adam has met and introduced Mr Barlow to his mother. At their wedding in Little Ray’s and Adam’s childhood home Adam’s grandfather standing naked in the rain is killed by a lightening strike. He haunts the house. There are other ghosts, mostly from the Hotel Jerome in Aspen Colorado where Adam was conceived, but this isn’t a proper ghost story. The ghosts might be metaphorical ones. Little Ray doesn’t share Adam’s paternity details with him or anyone else. The boy’s got a mildly obsessive interest in his father’s identity; it gets more persistent as Adam gets older. All the other loving and supportive members of his family want to know too, but no one really sweats it. The truth comes out eventually and doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is that Adam is deeply loved by a collection of wonderful people who enrich his life story and sense of personal affirmation.

Over the course of 889 densely typeset pages we share in the evolving relationships of these closely bonded characters, plus a mass of other mostly uninteresting ones. There are just too many people in The Last Chairlift to keep caring about, or to try to keep in mind in case they pop up again around about page 765 or wherever. Popping up again is what you expect but what often doesn’t happen. This is why chocolate has to be close to hand. Consolation or distraction. Most of the extra characters are props for a lazy rather than meticulous plotline, or they’re convenient devices to drive the plot along. Most never reappear. It’s in part why this novel feels so baggy, unedited, random. Add in the fitness, obsessions with smallness, the mock screenplays, the ghosts with so much volition and personality, the wrestling and Moby-Dickreferences; it’s an exhausting mess.

Or it’s a life that we’re participating in; the unsketched reader’s just another of the outcasts Irving celebrates in these and other pages. The Last Chairlift celebrates its outcasts as sexual variables, yet we get no insight as to what makes people want to do what they want to do to each other. Nor do we learn more about how they decide who it is that turns them on, or who they would like to turn on. Is any of it a decision? So far so normal. For bog standard heterosexuals this is a constant conundrum within and beyond their own tribe. It’s probably the same for the nonbogstandard ones too, as well as the rest. Independent of tribe, what’s the intangible we all miss? Why isn’t it enough that to love is enough? What conflates peoples’ sexuality and sense of identity? The Last Chairlift offers no hints or revelations, apart from the love thing. “There are more ways of loving.” It’s fine to parade a cohort of alternatives, but is it fine for an author to offer no interiority for his or her characters? In 350,000 words, there surely should be room for more nuance and expression of persona.

It’s safe to say that if this book had landed on a publisher’s desk without the John Irving moniker it would have been unceremoniously rejected. At over 350,000 words there are far too many of them used to tell the basic story of Little Ray and Adam and their loved ones. The text is well bogged down with repetitions, reminders, cop-outs and the use of screenplay formatting, a complex clutter of what is essentially a lazy and unfocused narrative. But maybe that’s deliberate. One of the repetitions throughout this novel is that fiction is tidy, but that life’s storylines are messy. Irving’s way of presenting this may be more dumpling than soufflé but the point is clear. One way to consider this novel is as roughly autobiographical; it includes all the usual Irving tropes: an abundance of semicolons, writing chat, politics, wrestling, personal alienation, relationship overdosing, films and movie stars, New Hampshire and New York City, sexual awakening, sexual minority, sexual expression, sexual dysfunction and überfunctioning, sex in whatever manner you fancy. As the novel grinds interminably on, sex as Irving’s obsession dribbles ever slower, ever more passively. Perhaps this is what happens to men, or this man, slipping into a ninth decade. Other things become more important, like how we care for each other and all the other ways there are to love. And where I left my slippers. 

This book is easy to judge based on its plot (check) and characters (too many, but check), but less easy to consider based on what it is about. It isn’t really about what it says on the back cover: those two paragraphs cover incidences in the book, But those incidents are among many and although they might be triggers for wider themes, those events aren’t important. There’s just so much going on in this novel, but mostly it’s about John Irving. If you’re a John Irving fan get stuck in and wallow with him a (long) while. If not read Moby-Dick instead.