i'm a very very complex person

I. Reading

I finished reading The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville last night. This was my book club's December selection, and until it was suggested at our last meeting, I had never heard of it. It was published in the UK in the late '90s and apparently made a bit of a splash over there when it came out, winning the Whitbread First Novel award in 1997 and being shortlisted for the Orange Prize (best English-language novel by a female writer) in 1998, yet somehow it never attracted my attention.

I haven't always been gung-ho about the books picked by my book club, so I was skeptical when they chose something I had never heard of, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be quite a decent book, one that is both fun and a worthwhile read. It is perhaps not the highest of high literature, but it's an engrossing and well-told story.

The book is structured like one of those Russian nesting dolls (there's a word for them, I know there is, but damned if I can think of it...). The outer layer is the prologue and epilogue; these are told in the voice of a larger-than-life, unnamed, semi-mystical narrator who is the ventriloquist of the title, and is present only at the beginning and end of the book. The next layer down is the story of Chofy McKinnon, a Wapisiana Indian from the savannahs of Guyana, and his relationship with an Englishwoman named Rosa Mendelson who comes to Guyana to research Evelyn Waugh's trip to the savannahs. The core of the novel, both structurally and emotionally, is the story of the incestuous affair between Beatrice and Danny McKinnon, Chofy's aunt and uncle. I liked the way this structure worked in the first half of the book--it felt like I was peeling away the years of silence and gradually getting closer to the secret at the heart of the book. It was less effective in the second half, once the secret had been revealed. I was less emotionally involved with the story of Chofy and Rosa, and found that I didn't much care about the end of their story after I had found out what happened to Beatrice and Danny.

The Ventriloquist's Tale is a bit like Rushdie, particularly in the over-the-top verbal outpourings of the prologue and epilogue, and a bit like Keri Hulme's The Bone People in its concern with the intersection of native cultures and colonial forces, although Melville cannot compare stylistically with either Rushdie or Hulme. Her writing is straightforward, sexually frank, and serviceable, but the moments of truly beautiful writing found in the book are the exception rather than the rule. The writing doesn't really need to be gorgeous though, because the narrative has such strong forward momentum that I just kept reading and reading--quite the opposite of the last book I read: Gilead had no momentum to speak of, and I kept reading it just to be able to savor each individual sentence.

II. Slides!



While I was in London for Thanksgiving, I had one of the most fun art experiences that I've ever had. German artist Carsten Höller has installed five giant slides, ranging in height from one to four stories, in Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The intertwining slides are visually stunning, but it's really the participatory nature of the exhibit that makes it so cool. Höller uses his slides to explore human behaviour, perception, and altered states of consciousness. He talks about the experience of simultaneous delight and panic that happens when people use slides (a description that strikes me as very accurate--moiethegreat and I were both experiencing nervous flutters before we went down, and then a state of nerves plus exhilaration as we were sliding), and he wonders why that experience is usually only limited to children on the playground. Slides transport people, both physically and emotionally; could they become a regular part the transportation systems in cities and public spaces? How would we be changed if sliding were a part of our daily routines? What do slides do to users and to watchers?

The neat thing about it is that all of those questions might have seemed foolish to me if I hadn't participated in the exhibit. But I did, and the presence of the slides made a palpable impact on the atmosphere of the museum. Adults and kids alike were lined up to ride the slides, and there were people clustered around the bottoms of the slides to watch as people came down, as well as people looking down from the galleries above to watch as people spiralled down through the transparent tubes. There was a great lack of self-consciousness in taking part in such a crazy spectacle. It was communal, it was fun, and it really did feel like slides could change our public life.

The slides will be up until April 9th. If any of you folks can get yourselves to London between now and then, I highly recommend you give it a try.