10 ★ FTWeekend 17 August/18 August 2019D
eborah Levy’s intelligent and
supple latest novel,The Man
Who Saw Everything, recently
longlisted for the Booker
Prize, opens in 1988 with
narrator Saul Adler planning to cross
London’s Abbey Road at the spot made
famous by The Beatles. His art-student
girlfriend Jennifer will come to photo-
graph him, and he’s bought a white suit
with flared trousers for the occasion.
Only, as Saul steps on to the crossing,
he is hit by a car. “Soorl” — as the driver
Wolfgang pronounces his name — may
be “the man who saw everything”(and
Wolfgang’spronunciation of his name
emphasises its echo with the “saw” of
the title), but right from the start we wit-
ness him getting knocked sideways by
something he fails to see coming.
This play between seeing and not see-
ing, seeing wrong and being seen, con-
tinues throughout the book. WhenSaul
asks Jennifer to marry him, she
responds by telling him “it’s over”. Saul
is mystified by her response but then
reveals it’s because Jennifer “followed
my gaze”and noticed that when Saul
proposed, he was in fact looking past
her, through the open bedroom door, at
her naked flatmate. Jennifer, in con-
trast, always looks intensely at Saul, her
“muse” for much of her photography.
One of Levy’sepigraphs is from Susan
Sontag’sOn PhotographyOn PhotographyOn Photography, which reminds, which reminds
us that: “To photograph people is to vio-
late them, by seeing them as they never
see themselves, by having knowledge of
them they can never have”.
After Jennifer’s rejection, Saul, a his-
torian specialising in communist east-
ern Europe, travels to East Berlin for his
research. He is assignedan interpreter,
Walter, whose “eyes were on me all the
time”. This is in part due to sexual desire
(“I trusted him because his hands were
all over me too”), and in part because
Walter is spying on Saul for the Stasi.
Their relationship is another instance of
Saul’s failing to see what’s coming, not-
ably the brutal consequences for Walter
of Saul’s careless actions.
Levy’s portrait of East Berlin in 1988 is
full of instances of people looking
askance, like the woman holding a box
of cauliflowers, who “looked into the
middle distance, somewhere just above
my head, but I knew she was looking at
me”. It is also a portrait in which the
Wall (which Saul, typically, “can’t see”)
is “everywhere”, preventing the inhabit-
ants of the GDR from leaving, or — as
Saul’s late socialist father saw it — keep-
ing people out.
This barrier to transit comes in a
novel where, like much of Levy’s work,
the action takes place away from home.
InHot Milk,ttthe setting is Spain; inhe setting is Spain; inSwim-
ming Home, France — and here we move
with Saul between East Berlin and Lon-
don, experiencing a freedom of travel
that the Wall denies to other characters.
This emphasis on borders and the
limiting of movement between coun-
tries resonates today, of course; the
Brexit vote is mentioned later in the
book. It also resounds in the potent met-
aphor of Saul’s struggle to cross Abbey
Road, an image to which the author
returns several times.Levy also explores other forms of
transit and their limits, such as trans-
lation, with its etymological root of “car-
rying across”. Walter, the professional
translator, talks about the need to
“hide” his personality in his trans-
lations, and notes a sentence by a Czech
artist that he deems “not possible to
translate”. When Levy shows us Walter’s
sister Luna singing a line of “Penny
Lane” in German, Saul reflects that “her
translation did not work that well”, mir-
roring Luna’s impossible desire to trans-
late herself out of the GDR to Liverpool.
In the novel’s second part, we return
to Saul crossing Abbey Road but, leap-
ing ahead, in 2016. History repeats itself
as Saul is hit by a car — but this time he
ends up in hospital, and the rest of the
book is played out from his hospital bed,
where Levy performs intricate mud-
dlings of time, character and place.
Saul confuses his doctor with a Stasi
informer; Saul’s dead father is now alive;
Wolfgang who was driving the car
(seemingly both times), was also
swimming in a lake with Saul in East
Berlin, which in turn is conflated with a
devastating swim in a lake in Cape Cod.
The effect is stunningly disorienting,fascinating, casting new light on every-
thing that’s gone before.
Levy describes the car wing mirror,
smashed in the Abbey Road accident, as
being “inside [Saul’s] head”: “I had
gazed at my reflection in the wing mirror
of his car and my reflection had fallen
into me.” So the splintered reflection of
his life comes together into a collage that
forms the uncanny reality he experi-
ences from his hospital bed. Saul, “the
man who saw everything”, becomes “a
man in pieces” (also the title of one of
Jennifer’s photographs of him).
In East Berlin, Saul saw a sculpture of
a cosmonaut entitled “Man Overcomes
Space and Time”, and reflected that
while he’d been in the GDR, he too had
been struggling with space and time:
“but no way have I conquered it. In fact,
it has conquered me.”
The struggle continues, however, and
the balance shifts through Levy’s skilful,
dizzying storytelling, so that at the
book’s close, as Saul crosses Abbey Road
for the last time, he is “walking across
deep time”, hearing the sounds of differ-
ent episodes of his life in symphony. In
the end, Saul becomes the man of the
sculpture too.A day in the life
Two moments on the Abbey Road crossing made famous by The Beatles
bookend a dizzying tale of a life across time and borders. ByEmily Rhodes
Cat O’NeilOff Season
by James Sturm
Drawn and Quarterly $24.95, 216 pagesAs Saul crosses
Abbey Road for
the last time, heis ‘walking across
deep time’Off SeasonNewly separated from his wife Lisa,
Mark lives cheque to cheque, juggling
joint custody of their two children with
his job as a builder for a shyster contrac-
tor who has “two kids in private school,
$200 Ray-Bans, and he still can’t pay on
time”. While Lisa’s “got the house, the
rich parents, and plenty of time to vol-
unteer for ol’ crooked Hillary”, Mark is
left with bitterness and anger.
His narration quickly becomes pep-
pered with swearing and negativity,
whether about his job (“not my prob-
lem”), his politically inquisitive young
daughter (“oh shit, here we go again”) or
his own parents (“always better to leave
too soon than stay too long”). Unable to
express himself otherwise, he explodes
in a physical outburst that feels terrify-
ingly inevitable.
Mark’s blue-collar dissatisfaction has
much to say about contemporary
America — but whereOff Seasonexcels
is in its representation of the achingly
sad breakdown of a couple and an
extended family. Sturm handles Mark’s
narration with painful precision; rarely
able to articulate feelings other than
anger, when he does, Mark’s spartan
thoughts are doubly effective: “Maybe
two people liking something for differ-
ent reasons is only a fight that hasn’t
happened yet.”
At times Sturm is less delicate — five
panels of Mark upturning his house in
search of his phone feel like a thin
excuse to illustrate the squalor of his
lifestyle. But the majority ofOff Season
rings true with natural (and depressing)
ease. How can any relationship be
repaired, any olive branch offered,
when, as Mark says, “something hard
inside prevents me from doing so”?
The unadorned style of Sturm’s draw-
ing contributes to the book’s emotional
tug, focusing our attention on the char-
acters rather than the world around
them. Perhaps the reason forOff Season’s
canine characters is a simple one. There
is, after all, nothing more upsetting than
a sad-looking pup.Dogged by the
fallout of 2016
Antonia Cundyon a graphic
novel that relives the fatefulUS presidential election — but
with only canine charactersI
n September 2016, Slate magazine
began publishingOff Season,a
comic series by James Sturm set
against the real-time events of the
US presidential election, or, as pro-
tagonist Mark calls it, the “shit show”.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world (literally —
the characters are all canine, albeit
canines that wear clothes and walk on
two hind legs) and Mark is sick of it. Still
reeling from Bernie Sanders’ loss in the
Democratic primary, he is disillusioned
with what’s left: Donald “sack of bulls-
hit” Trump or Hillary “more of the same
old crap” Clinton.
As readers in 2019, we know the out-
come of that one. Developed into a
graphic novel with seven additional
strips,Off Seasonis put to the test: will its
attempt to capture the atmosphere of
late 2016 still resonate three years later?
The short answer is yes, partly be-
cause Sturm is clever with the politics.
Across his simple illustrations, although
references are overt (Hillary placards
on a lawn, a “Make America Great
Again” baseball cap), political events do
not take centre stage. Instead they pro-
vide the tense backdrop to a study of a
lonely everyman, frustrated not only
with politics, but also with love and life.By James Lovegrove
GENRE
ROUND-UPSCIENCE
FICTIONand being replaced by something
else, what kind of shape can we
give to our self? How can a writer
embody a character’s dilemma
when it is so slippery?
Yet this focus on the difficulty
of making characters appear both
psychologically complex and
coherent keeps slipping, rather
like the unfocused characters
themselves. The authorinter-
rupts to let us know how hard
it has been for her to inhabit
a particular character, andsubse-
quently replaces him with
another. But we have only just
been introduced to this character
and don’t care whether he staysor goes: the metafictional gesture
feels exhausted.
“How can you continue to live
inside a thing that you no longer
believe in?” Barker asks herself
and the reader. She is referring to
“the novel”, and seems to be hop-
ing that this increasingly personal
confession to and dramatisation
of artistic despair is the answer:
that she can seize the wheel of the
novel and drive it off the road into
pastures new.
Such a risky manoeuvre might
also lead to a dead end. We will
have to wait for Barker’s next
work of fiction (if there is to be
one) to find out.The fourth wall
While Nicola Barker dazzles us with rich material, pirouetting sentences and
intellectualrestlessness, the novelist takes the gimmickry too far, saysLuke BrownN
icola Barker’sI Am
Sovereignbegins with
a comic scenario full
of potential: Charles,
a bespoke teddy-bear
maker and hoarder, refuses to sell
his wares and so is being forced to
sell his home. Avigail, an estate
agent on the run from her Hasidic
background, is conducting a
viewing of his place with a mother
and daughter called Wang Shu
and Ying Yue: a viewing that
Charles does his best to impair.
It’s a small encounter full of rich
material that a playful narrator
excavates by skipping between
characters’ thoughts. Charles’s
and Avigail’s minds are as clut-
tered as Charles’s flat, searching
for meaning in narratives of self-
improvement, YouTube influenc-
ers, consumer goods; endlessly
digressing from what it is they’re
seeking. Ying Yue is quieter:
alienated from Chinese and Eng-
lish, her personality is “loosely
tacked into some semblance of
coherence — of intelligibility — by
giant, scruffy stitches of sincerity,
simplicity and goodwill”.
Here we see Barker’s talent for
the striking phrase, the original
description; her great strength as
a writer is the verve of her per-
formance, the pirouetting sen-
tences, intellectual restlessness
and quick associations between
high and low culture. Yet she is
prone to overestimating how
charming the performance is;
reading her at her most excessive
is like talking to a hyperactive
stand-up comic who has forgotten
she is not on stage any more.The narrative ofI Am Sovereign
is increasingly interrupted by
gimmicky squeals of feedback.
Fonts change and shift size (large
for loud thoughts, small for quiet)
as phrases from internet gurus
bombard the text. Paragraphs
indent or don’t in what is either a
random or an arcane system that
I could not work out.
All of this is presumably to
dramatise our culture’s crisis of
concentration, but it is difficult
not to compare this basic, messy
method with thebreakthroughs
of Woolf and Joyce in depicting
fragmented consciousness. Too
often here it feels like the break-
ing of convention is being
employed for novelty rather than
as a means to an artistic goal.
Midway through the novella
Barker begins to lose focus on
what is interesting about each
character, as their digressions
spin them further and further
away from the specific conflicts
that a more traditional novel
might try to develop to resolution.
There is something philosophi-
cally interesting here: if what we
are trying to achieve is endlessly
sliding past us without us noticingT
he 33rd Arthur C
Clarke Award for best
science fiction novel
was announced last
month, with the prize
going to the very deservingRose-
water by Tade Thompson.
Another of the five titles on this
year’s strongand diverse shortlist
was a beautiful oddity: Simon
Stålenhag’sThe Electric State. The
tale of a woman and her robot
companion travelling across a
decaying retro-futuristic America
is told in subtly measured prose
accompanied by the author’s own
gorgeous, sombre paintings.
A similarly decaying US is the
setting for Rob Hart’sThe Ware-
house(Bantam Press, £12.99).
This dark satire depicts a
near-future US that’s succumbing
to environmental ruin even as its
economy skews ever more irre-
deemably in favour of the one per
cent. A retailer, Cloud, has risen to
prominence, crushing all rivals
beneath its low-overhead, high-
discount jackboot. The monopo-
listic colossus boasts “fulfilment
centres” where employees are
treated little better than beasts of
burden. Former prison guard
Paxton and corporate spy Zinnia
aretwo newly hired workers, each
with a secret reason for infiltrat-
ing the company. Both grapple
with the soul-deadening drudgery
of the jobwhile their investiga-
tions unearth unpalatable truths.
Hart’s outrage at the inhumane
practices of big business and the
human cost of consumerism
glares off every page, not least in
the segments of the novel nar-
rated by Cloud founder Gibson
Wells, who justifies his accumula-
tion of insane levels of wealth
with smirking, quasi-messianichypocrisy.The Warehousefffires anires an
exhilaratingly unsubtle broadside
against a world where the wage
gap is becoming a yawning chasm
and the gig economy is bringing
misery, penury and even death to
those trapped in it.
In the further-flung future of
Kali Wallace’sSalvation Day
(Berkley, $26), Earth has become
a desolate wasteland and human-
kind is seeking refuge beyond its
bounds. Zahra belongs to a cult
that aims to commandeer an
abandoned spaceship and fly it to
pastures new. The House of Wis-
dom allegedly succumbed to an
airborne virus that wiped out all
but one of its crew. When the cult-
ists board the vessel, however,
they discover that this is a cover
story; something more horren-
dous lurks within its decks.
Wallace’s horror-story-in-space
(with zombie apocalypse over-
tones) is pacy if at times preachy.
The real villainsaren’t the alienentities causing death and may-
hem on House of Wisdom but a
corrupt planetary government
and the cult’s charismatic leader.
Ordinary people suffer when
those to whom they have surren-
dered sovereignty lie, obfuscate
and actout of self-interest.
The aftermath of a real-life con-
flict informsPalestine +100
(Comma Press, £9.99). The
anthology features 12 tales envi-
sioning life as it might be for Pal-
estinians a century after the
Nakba. The word translates as
“catastrophe” and refers to the
events of 1948 when an estimated
700,000 people were displaced
from their homes as a result of the
Arab-Israeli War and became per-
manent refugees and exiles.
Editor Basma Ghalayini, in her
dexterous introduction, suggests
that science fiction is not popular
among Palestinians because it
speaks of escape and progress.
“The cruel present (and the trau-
matic past),” she says, “have too
firm a grip on Palestinian writers’
imaginations for fanciful ventures
into possible futures.”
Nevertheless she has gathered a
fine array of authors who address
the issues that bedevil Palestine
using the multifarious tools in
SF’s Swiss Army Knife: allegory,
satire, a fascination with other-
ness, the uses and abuses of new
technologies, and more. Anwar
Hamed’s “The Key”, for instance,
explores the notion of invisible
walls offering the illusion of secu-
rity, to chilling effect. In Saleem
Haddad’s “Song of the Birds”, a
woman haunted by her brother’s
suicide gradually loses her grip on
reality and begins to wonder
whether she is living in a comfort-
ing but false virtual simulation.Themes of nostalgia, memory and
longing weave through this fasci-
nating and unusual collection.
A non-fiction anthology called
Lost Transmissions (Abrams
Image, $29.99) bills itself some-
what grandly as a “secret history
of science fiction and fantasy”.
What editor Desirina Boskovich
has actually assembled is a collec-
tion of brief, mostly well-written
essays on various byways and
backwaters of the genre. We learn
about unsung novels and authors
(this being an American publica-
tion, Mervyn Peake and Angela
Carter are included, at which a
fair few British readers will shake
their heads). We also learn about
the original, much darker version
ofE.T.that Spielberg nearly
filmed, the work of the concept
artists whose contributions to
Star Warshave often gone
overlooked, and how the 1980s
teen-hacker movieWarGamesled
to improvements in US cyber
security policy.
The cross-pollination between
SF and other cultural disciplines
such as architecture, fashion and
music is explored, and the power
of fandom is praised. The text
could have done with better edit-
ing, containing as it does several
egregious typos, the most unfor-
tunate of which is “concentration
cramp”. The handful of inter-
views that intersperse the essays
are an additional layer of pastry
on the pie rather than extra fill-
ing. Nonetheless,Lost Transmis-
sionsis an informative and won-
derfully illustrated guide for the
uninitiated seeking to venture off
SF’s brightly lit main streets into
its obscurer, more demanding
and potentially more hazardous
side-alleys.One woman and her robot
Books
It is like talking to a
hyperactive stand-up
comic who’s forgottenshe’s no longer on stage
The Man Who Saw
Everything
by Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton £14.99
208 pagesThe Man Who SawI Am
Sovereign
by Nicola
Barker
William
Heinemann
£12.99
224 pagesI Am
Sovereign
by Nicola
Barker
William
Heinemann
£12.99
224 pagesBiting satire: scenes from ‘Off Season’ with its canine characters— James SturmРЕ
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