Goosebumps of the Literary Kind

Literature is a strange space. The arrangment of words on a page can leave you laughing, crying, gasping, breathless. The first words on a page can pour through your eyeballs and be scorched into your brain forever.

One of the most remarkable opening moments of a novel I've ever come across is Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces. My friend Julia held it out to me in the University library and whispered 'I've bought this as a birthday present for Ria. Do you think she'll like it?'

I glanced at the Prologue quickly: a suggestion that the novel is based on retrieved texts - 'memoirs, diaries, eyewitness accounts' or perhaps is one of those other lost stories 'concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken' - hidden during the Second World War. It sounded interesting.
I turned to the first chapter, read for less than five minutes then packed up my half-arsed essay and went down to the bookshop and bought the book and took it home and read and read and read.
Years later I use different sections of the opening pages of this novel when talking to my own students about literature and memory and questions of truth, literary criticism and literature itself as a kind of archaeology, the strange place of literature where we can tell the untellable, speak the unspeakable, examine our humanity, and the way in which the words on a page can burrow into your brain and seep into every pore of your being so that you carry that arrangement of words around inside you for the rest of your life.


Time is a blind guide.
Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.
No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of earth.
I saw a man kneeling in the acid-steeped ground. He was digging. My sudden appearance unnerved him. For a moment he thought I was one of Biskupin's lost souls, or perhaps the boy in the story, who digs a hole so deep he emerges on the other side of the world.



You can click on this link to read reviews of this novel on Amazon.

In this novel, Michael's uses poetic language to examine the profound impact of loss, the importance of remembering, and the redemptive power of human love. In part she does this by defamiliarising the murder committed in war in ways which lose none of the horror whilst at the same time foregrounding the enormity of what is lost - those unique and individual lives, the lives of the survivors, and humanity itself. Her use of language evokes similar layered depths of love, humanity and ethical truths as Michael Ondaatje, another writer who just about blows you away with the intense beauty of his language; both writers, for me, poetry in motion.

It's true to say that I'm one of the readers of Michael's novel who finds it in some senses a novel of two halves, preferring the first half, Jakob's half, to the second half of the book overall, although that isn't to say the second half isn't well worth reading because it is, and Anne Michaels' truly beautiful use of language permeates the whole book, but I guess what I'm saying is that the first half of the book has lodged itself in me - has "entered me through my pores and been carried through my bloodstream to my heart" to paraphrase Michaels.
~

Dragon

backyard bramble by http://www.paulsantoleri.com/

The ant ran across the palm of her hand, and Beth watched its tiny antennae wave in the air when it stopped at the end of her index finger. It ran on, and she turned her hand to keep it in sight as it ran over and over her hand in an endless loop, criss-crossing its own tracks but getting nowhere. She sighed and lowered her wrist to the mud below the grass so that the ant could find its track back to the rest of the colony. It wouldn’t get off, stupid thing, so she blew it and shifted over onto her back, sliding her hands behind her head to keep the ants out of her hair. The sky was forget-me-not blue, receding away forever. Small puffs of cloud swept occasionally into view from behind the tall sycamore trees and drifted steadily away. The birds were chirruping and singing in the trees, and darting across the eternal blue like stones, only the occasional blur of their wings disturbing their perfect streamlined bodies.

The small clouds puffed out across the treetops like the soft white exhalations of a dragon’s breath, and Beth drifted slowly across the sky with them, until a blackbird began a loud chack! chack! of alarm above her head. It was calling in agitation from the uppermost branches of the nearest tree, and her eyes searched around for the threat of a magpie but could see none. As the blackbird suddenly fled from the tree and shot away across the sky, its warning slicing through the air, the huge dragon rose silently but laboriously up from behind the trees. Beth could hear the leathery creak of its wings as it heaved itself over the canopy, and she found herself turning and scrambling for the thick island of brambles behind her before she had even become fully aware of what was coming, her body moving as though bound in glue as she fled.

She tried to plunge straight into the deepest part of the thicket, but the branching arms resisted her, holding her back, and she had to force her way in, the thorns tearing at her clothes and hair and ripping threads of blood across her arms and legs. She turned her head back towards the dragon as she pressed herself further and further away from it, and saw through her hair the glinting coppery sheen of its scales as it swooped down towards her and landed heavily on the grass. Beth forced herself backwards into the brambles, managing to put branches between her and the beast as it folded its brown leather wings down behind it and lunged forwards. Beth kept moving, further in, further away, but the dragon’s breath fouled the air in front of her face as her arms, legs and body struggled and pushed against the resisting arms of the thicket. Her hair was almost completely covering her eyes now, pulled over her face like a mask by the thorns which ripped and gouged at the back of her head and her body as she tried to press herself further away. Beth kept forcing her body back, brambles growing and thickening between herself and the dragon, until she lost sight of it altogether.

She stopped and tried to quieten her whimpering breath. She tried to turn her head from side to side but it was tightly bound, and her eyes strained to see around her as far as she could. Glimpses of leathery skin flickered between the branches, and she could hear a grunting breath which was not her own. She could smell the dragon’s odour, like sour dough and bitter almonds, and found its golden-brown eyes glinting at her through the thorns. Beth closed her eyes as its shadow loomed closer, knowing she was trapped, and the branches bent and swayed and creaked around her.

When she opened her eyes again, Beth pressed her head back to look up through the tangles of hair and branch to the sky. It was still blue, a glorious day, the sunlight dappling through the thicket all around her, but the birds had fallen silent. Listening. A breath. Whuu. Silence. Whuu. A long, drawn-out sigh. Whuu-uugh. The sky darkened suddenly and the grunting breath became a creak of leather and a swoosh of air. As the dragon passed over her head, Beth’s whimpered breath finally became a scream, but the dragon kept going, up and gone, sunlight and blue sky and silence streaming suddenly in through the thorny branches as the sound of her scream died away. After a moment, her breath drawing shakily back into her tensed and trembling body, Beth collapsed and wept into the thorns which still held her, a rag-doll of arms and legs and hair.

Beth stayed in the bramble thicket for a long time. After she had stopped crying she hung there, listening to the birds singing and chirruping in the trees around her once again. She heard her mother call. Beth looked down her body at her arms and legs, the bloodied scratches drying and crusty. She crawled and picked her way back out, adding new wounds. Weak and trembling, she got to her feet and ran back through the garden to the house as quickly and as quietly as she could.

As she stepped into the kitchen, her mother tutted at her appearance and told her to go and wash for lunch. In the bathroom, Beth washed the blood and dried sap from her arms and legs and looked at her face in the mirror. A pale, freckled face looked stonily back at her, hair tangled with leaves and thorny twigs and stuck down to the dirty forehead with dried sweat. Beth shakily pulled the twigs out of her hair and dropped them into the waste basket under the gleaming enamel sink. Washing her face straight under the cold tap, she wiped the grime onto the fluffy pink towel hanging by the side of the bath, then went into her bedroom to change. She screwed the soiled dress into a tight ball and pushed it into the furthest corner under her hearts and flowers bed, then went back downstairs.

Looking her up and down briefly, her mother nodded her head towards the dresser, and Beth opened the drawer to take out the cutlery and set the table for lunch. She set three places, two at one end of the dark, gleaming table and one at the other. Her mother moved the further set back up the table next to the other two and positioned the three place-mats then the steaming bowls of thick, fragrant soup. Beth dragged her chair to the table as her mother opened the back door and shouted “Lunch!”

Beth had already finished her soup by the time her father entered the kitchen, and she watched him at the sink, washing his soiled hands and his leathery arms, tanned to a copper sheen. She left the table quietly to find a new place to hide while her parents discussed the gathering clouds, and the potential for more gardening that afternoon, while they ate. When they had finished, Beth's mother leaned across her daughter's empty chair to clear away the remains of her husband’s meal.