Monday 15 August 2011

Jill Dawson's 'Lucky Bunny'

Lucky Bunny is the toy rabbit her father gave her the day she was born –  a delicate, pretty, white soft toy  -  the first clue that better lives are lived, somewhere; safe orderly lives with biscuits for tea, ponies and window boxes full of pansies.
So what is it that makes us who we are? In tackling this mighty question through the viewpoint of the knowing Queenie, a child wise beyond her years who re-names herself at the first opportunity, the book takes a risk; but such is Dawson’s skill that she pulls it off in a breathtaking continuous panoramic sweep that takes in the blitz, Borstal and London in the swinging sixties.

 There are Dawson's usual deft moments of scene-setting
His favourite game was to go over to Vicky Park with his shilling knife with the bone handle – all the boys had knives in those days – and practise throwing it at trees, while the crows tottered on the grass like fat vicars, and the Jewish boys chased each other around Vicky Fountain, throwing their black caps in the air…:
And her inspired gift with metaphor means that we feel as if we are there too and not just in sharing the sights and smells of the environment but also inside the character, as for example when the six year-old Queenie, mad with hunger, about to steal milk off a doorstep notices that … the light is sticky, warm and making you feel like you’re a wasp in a jar of honey

From the filth and squalor of a home where her drunken young mother is descending into insanity to the safety of their Nan’s; to evacuation in the Fens, Queenie, the quicksilver child, tries to shield her little brother Bobbie. Always hungry and dirty, resourceful Queenie is drinking in every detail, learning every angle, cottoning on to every hint,  clocking every clue. “What’s a Brass?” she asks her Nan.
When tragedy leads to her mother’s removal and then she loses her Nan in the notorious Bethnal Green Tube disaster (breathtakingly described here) she becomes a skilful apprentice to the glamorous Green Bottle shoplifting gang while her black marketeer father, busy forging, stealing or rigging greyhounds, looks on in approval.

Queenie is a character you can’t help cheering for. At the approved school she is found to have an IQ of 180. ... “No doubt you got hold of your file and changed the figure,” says the nun in charge, “Recite some Shakespeare, can you? Explain Pythagoras’s Theorem? Thought not.” ...

... “They all say they have dreadful backgrounds,”...  sneers a Magistrate, who sees the fact that she has never known an example of a felon who transcended such circumstances as evidence that they must all be lying. Such attitudes inflame further the sense of injustice that gnaws Queenie’s soul.

Whether Dawson’s taut, lucid prose paints the suffocation in the blackness at the foot of the subway stairs, the silky ripple of a stolen mink coat billowing with Christian Dior perfume, a child on a train clutching a stolen bar of soap, teenage girls running away from an outraged john in their Anello and Davide ballet pumps or an ageing  good-time girl, …sinking n her yellow dress like a lemon soufflé, mascara blackening her cheeks…  the narrative, like a well-paced film, never falters.

And does Queenie make it? Well; through friendship, love and finally motherhood, her state of mind always compellingly portrayed, Queenie finally works out what she must do to escape and enable her little daughter to transcend her terrible origins. And the denouement is an absolute cracker which I will not spoil by any kind of hint. Suffice to say it is an audacious imaginative feat of the kind at which Dawson excels.

Saturday 13 August 2011

'Velázquez’s Riddle' by Lyn Moir

Lyn Moir, Velázquez’s Riddle Calderwood Press 2011 (http://www.calderwoodpress.co.uk/)

Take two artists (Velazquez and Picasso) and a subject, the painting Las Meninas by Velazquez. You now have two worlds; two histories heaving with seething characters and multiple landscapes (Picasso did over 50 of his variations). Pit them one against the other in the arena to explode like firework displays and you have Velázquez’s Riddle by Lyn Moir. Moir’s understanding of Spain and of art is pointed up by Penelope Shuttle in her review, quoted on the back cover… Seldom have poet and subject been so perfectly matched... she observes.                                           

Velázquez’s Riddle is the movies, it is theatre …note the solid dwarf whose open stare demands we join them on the crowded stage… (p.25 ‘Setting The Scene’). The ‘Cast of characters in Las Meninas’ on the opening page is Shakespearean, each character’s voice is clear. Moir is mistress of; creates indeed  a finely-wrought tapestry of dramatic  monologue…. (John Greening) quoted from the back cover) and as the poems unfold you see the scenes, the circumstances of the characters and the physical spaces they inhabit, both figuratively and, as you refer to the paintings, actually. I studied the paintings over and over, drawn by the irresistible pull that Moir builds, learning more and more.
Up to now, the things I had particularly noticed in Las Meninas by Velazquez were the dog and the Infanta. The female dwarf also demanded attention. Moir, the movie director strides in however and you see not only the luminous princess… (p.8 ‘Velázquez’s Las Meninas: an Inventory’),  …this gold and silver girl… (p.13 ‘Velázquez on the King and Queen)
but also that she … is a baby adult with a gaze of steel… who already understands her own worth … I’m being groomed, I know my studbook status… (p. 12 ‘When I am Queen’).

You are shown that the top half of the painting, which Velazquez draws your eyes away from, is in fact a space which: … not empty, balances the scene below   And you will either be made giddy by or understand that; …we have some effect upon the scene, that if we breathe too hard, too short, we might disturb the balance of the court.
Balance is key in this volume. The poems exhibits balance in the economy of their expression; the precision of the language. Moir achieves balance in her composition; half Velazquez, half Picasso; and the character of Velazquez balances in the book, a colossus foot in each half, a …looming figure, in whose hands the whole illusion rests… (p.9 'Velázquez on Velázquez'). He observes us, he observes Picasso working on his series of variations; he is the …  Ringmaster with the power to position unwitting performers at the point of maximum tension… he is described as both a hero and a star … the bill-topper …who makes us gasp at his audacity and skill in wire-walking… (p.9 'Velázquez on Velázquez').
                    
With the transition from one half of the book to the next the … world constructed on a symbol… where … stability and order are the key  (p.21 The Outsider)   becomes a world where we must … identify the structural geometry… ( p.24 ‘Picasso Lays Claim to Velázquez’s Las Meninas’).  It becomes ever more a world of trick and illusion, Picasso is a wizard who creates… A dialogue as permanent as words inscribed on water blown by wind… (p.25 ‘Setting the Scene’).  It sparkles with mischief and humour. Picasso vows to …transmogrify the dog The Princess wails: …I’ve turned into a royal dwarf – can this be me?... (p.27 ‘The Green Infanta’), and endures ‘Bad Hair Day' (p.37). Both Wonderland and Neverland appear, coming memorably together in ‘Neverland’ (p.39) where the Queen, a white dot in the slate grey mirror, wishes that she and the king could … leave behind the cares of state and palace, walk together, talk alone, fuck unencumbered by maids of honour, by the court

Geometry rules (‘Geometry’ p.38) and people get upset. … Válgame Dios! … exclaims Velázquez, …The princess is blurred, her dwarves Halloween nightmares… (p. 44 ‘First Viewing’).  But in a grim soliloquy he tells us in the next poem that Picasso is doomed; because he paints … knowing he can never escape the talons of my shadow… (p.45 ‘In the Shadow’).
I enjoyed the sensation of being part of the drama; of finding out where I, (the viewer - the reader?) was seen by the key players in the paintings. I enjoyed the feeling of skewed gravity - Velazquez as a planet around which we all, including Picasso, orbit; and I enjoyed the truly weird sensation of finding out that all this time I have been standing close to the king and queen.

Order the book from Calder Press (scroll down three books to reach it) read it and be transported.