[Though I wrote it myself, I advise all readers to treat this review with caution. I know not what I was saying (in at least one paragraph anyway...)].
Many a merry evening have I spent at The Crippled Bee pricking my pale fingers on the thorny issue of whether or not wizards and great literature will ever co-exist. No sooner has this debate died down (or been left to smoulder in a corner somewhere, along with yesterday’s headlines) another one starts up. What about elves? I don’t know what you think, but I’m not altogether keen on these forest-dwelling pioneers of freakish ears and bobble-crested headgear. The same applies to dwarves, fairies, talking trees and pixies. With only two exceptions, I would not shed a tear if all books containing these creatures were gathered together in a sack, taken on a tiresomely long journey and flung into a stream of lava at the centre of a dramatically volcanic mountain.
The first exception is, of course, Olav Blomquist’s Groaning Pixies. Nothing more need be said of this novel. The second is Ik Nunn’s From Under This Falls. Quite a lot more will be said about this one.
You may be interested to hear that I have spent a good portion of the last week mired in misery, accompanied by a fat bag of black liquorice laces and five famously dysphoric novels. What fun. In all sincerity, I enjoy nothing more than taking a trip down despondency lane. At my best, I could take on the most depressed of teenagers in my fondness for indulgently desolate literature. I will never designate a dog as my best friend, but there are plenty more ‘d’s standing patiently in line. Dolefulness, dejection and downheartedness: a definite tick in all those boxes. No doubt you have heard of my cottage outside Vladivostok? It used to be named after a Russian general who stayed there in 1878. I have since petitioned for a change of name. It shall soon be called ‘The Doldrums’.
What is it about the letter ‘d’? ‘M’ has its fair share also, though it doesn’t quite cut it. ‘Melancholy’ and ‘moping’ are mild. ‘misery’ and ‘mournfulness’ are better, though poor cousins of ‘anguish’, the weaker twin of ‘despair’. No, you’ve got to give it to ‘d’. Or have you? Dear me, how easy it is to spend a late spring afternoon bathing in the golden glow of words like an old donkey chewing in a grassy pasture. Good words pop up like daises. Cheerless and glum, gloomy and blue. There’s colour in them shadows.
Five novels, I said. I might have chosen fifty, but one must not bathe in pleasure for too long, even if that pleasure consists in feeling sad. There are, then, some omissions. No place for Ka Naurauch. She’s miserable, granted, but fiercely so. Emile Gofrank doesn’t make the cut either, for which I have no excuse, save that I’m not exactly sure where my copy is. First up, instead, is Turgidovsky’s The Lunatic. Turgidovsky, the mere sight of whom has pushed many a person over the edge of depression, has often claimed that his single literary aim was to ‘put utter desperation into words’. A worthy aim, but has he succeeded? As Heidi Kohlenberg has noted, for all his gutsy glumness, Turgidovsky is the master of faintly comic desperation. The fact is, he has no real staying power. In fact, I fear that he fears complete desperation. In fact, he clearly fears it as well, which probably explains his post-modern interjection in Chapter Fourteen, as well as his personal appearance (surely a self-conscious veil for his inability to be as truly wretched in prose as he would wish?) That’s not to say that there aren’t some winningly pathetic moments in his novel – the storyline with a man who falls in love with a woman based on her cough is a highlight – but in the end, Turgidovksy’s despondency is the type that gnaws. It’s the feather tickling one’s toes, the mouse nibbling at the Gorgonzola. Tortuous in its way, but not what would you call fatal.
Next up, Nate Laami’s glorious Flaws in the Plan. As many people know, this book is right up my street. Ah, the comfort of a good collection of suicide notes. And yet Laami’s novel ends on a disappointingly positive note. I’m being unfairly direct: in reality it’s an open ending – it could either be positive or negative. The very fact, however, that he allows readers to imagine a positive finale – regardless of whether or not this is what he imagined, which is, by the way, a pointless consideration – is very discouraging. I like inscrutability (I think) but sometimes a bit of unashamed custard-pie melodrama doesn’t go amiss either.
The third book, Victor Pawski’s Two Thousand Tractors, has plenty of that. How it is that no one has ever filmed this novel? There must be a large market for thousands-of-angry-farmers-go-on-a-killing-spree-with-their-tractors films. And yet I hear that he hasn’t even sold the rights. I should perhaps be gratified. Who wants to see Pawski’s prose slaughtered on the big screen? I see the point, though I hesitate in the face of a statement praising his prose. For all his qualities, Pawski paints in childishly broad strokes, which (on second thoughts) might be suited to the cinema, or to a novel slightly shorter than the five hundred pages plus that Two Thousand Tractors covers.
Number four: Koira Jupczek’s cosily chilling Death Charts. A fine work, certainly, but far from truly despondent. Humour is, once again, disarmingly present. That’s not a bad thing, but neither is it uncommon. Jupczek isn’t the first or last to realise that full-blown misery doth not an easy novel make. And who can blame her for shirking the task, especially when Death Charts is the result?
Who indeed. Nevertheless, four books through, I still hadn’t found what I was searching for. I was securely dispirited, looking to be roundly depressed. Following in Turgidovsky’s footsteps, I was faced by stories that pummelled my soul; that wormed into my skin; that gave off a faint, though discernible stink. The atmosphere was sad, but not yet shattered. The cymbals were singing, but where was the big bass drum? It was a rat without a tail, a storm without a lightning strike.
Thank God for Ik Nunn, whose From Under This Falls rounded things off nicely. Here, at last, was the deep despondency I had been waiting for. Oh what a wonderfully wretched book this is! Everything sentence is soaked, like a sponge, with the stagnant waters of desolation. This is high gothic melancholy at its very best. This is the height of the pits; the most glowing gloom.
Okay, so there are elves in it. Not only elves, but sprites as well. Forests deep as oceans, spectacular crags and tall, mean castles. Men in dresses riding dragons and horses. Women wearing dead flowers in their hair. Crepuscular creatures creeping through the sinister silence. Most of the old fantastical elements are there – and yet so few of the clichés. The archetypal silver-sword-wielding hero dies early on. The pretty heroine slips into an apathetic dullness. Even the perversely attractive villain is a sadly sordid failure. Nunn’s sense of sorrow is unremitting. It pervades everything. He floods his world with unforgiving melancholy. There are no half measures. From Under This Falls works on the basis that everything that seems bad is not bad – it’s dreadful. Ik Nunn doesn’t do global warming, he does global cooking. Nobody edges towards a sticky end: they plummet. He hasn’t even considered sympathy. Love has no redemptive powers. No time for all that.
Why the elvish fantasy? It’s hard to say. Nunn was born in Greenland, but grew up in Iceland. It’s not surprising, therefore, that there is more than a hint of the sagas about his story. The quality of despondency is, however, entirely his own. It’s unequalled in its depth and unrelenting in its breadth. Weirdly, he is not the slightest bit precious about his genre. He manages to make it look as though he never chose to write about fantastical things, that’s just what appeared. Oh look, an elf. What the hell. No need, however, to treat it as an elf. Indeed, Nunn doesn’t treat anything according to its nature. It’s all part of one great story: a deep, unending cry of despair. The bagpipe drone of pain.
What sweet music. All roads lead to gloom. And that’s not such a bad place to be, if you know how to enjoy it. No, indeed: I can spend a few days there without complaint, sipping a tall glass of agony, laced with angst. I can open From Under This Falls at any page and I am there. Not in the valley of gnawing despondency, but in the open fields of the straight-up in-your-face stuff: the kind of melancholy you can’t kick under the rug. What an afternoon I can spend in these fields! What pleasure, what bliss, what happiness!
Talking of happiness, it probably hasn’t eluded Nunn’s fans that he hasn’t been writing that much recently. From Under This Falls, his first novel, was preceded by some admirably cheerless short stories. Since then, nothing. I can now reveal the dark reason for his absence. Ik Nunn has found happiness.
I know, I know. I was as disappointed as the next man. A small and obsene light has crept into the dark place in which From Under This Falls blossomed. And, like an inverted flower, Nunn’s powers, nurtured by the shadows, have shrunk in the sun. No longer lonely, no longer depressed, he is nothing but a happy man. And a poor writer.
I’ll be whipped into a meringue for this. It’s an old line, they’ll say. Great art comes out of great suffering. Find a new tune. This (and more besides) is my expected response. But I’ll stand firm. Not because I believe in the old cliché – but because, in the circumstances, I can see no reason to distrust it. Nunn himself has confirmed it. He hasn’t gone so far as to deny the possibility of a happy man writing a great book – and nor shall I. He has, however, confessed that – as things stand – he is far too contented to write.
There are two ways of approaching this. Before delving into either of these, it might be worth explaining the source of his happiness. Again, I will let Nunn be our guide. There were, he claims, two breakthroughs. The first was, he says, a slightly false one. Shortly after completing From Under This Falls, Nunn’s next door neighbour died. In his will, he stipulated that Diego, his pet tortoise, should be given to (and I quote) ‘the miserable Icelandic writer who lives next door, whose incessant sobbing, heard through thin walls, has often driven me to distraction’. A strange way in which to receive a gift – and an equally strange gift. Nunn was tempted to turn it down. Something stopped him.
It was the start of a beautiful relationship. Not Nunn and Diego – though that wasn’t exactly a failure. The tortoise did make the writer a little happier than he had been, though it must be said that he wasn’t an especially joyful tortoise. Almost eighty years old, and mildly asthmatic, it is safe to say that the animal was on its last legs. Indeed, barely two months after Nunn took it in, the tortoise had a particularly testing ‘attack’. Nunn, growing increasingly attached to this curious reptile, took it to his local vet. The vet was out. His daughter, Freya Guminsdottir, part-time cabaret singer and trainee vetenarian, was in.
As I said, it was the start of a beautiful relationship. Not Nunn and Freya – though that wasn’t exactly a failure. But it so happened that Freya shared her cabaret act with Hildur, a rather beautiful woman, who had always had a bit of a thing for self-indulgently miserable writers. It was the start of a…. Well, indeed.
Since his marriage everything has gone right for Ik Nunn. And wrong for his fans. Not a word has he written. The angst that fuelled his debut novel has – for now, I stress – run dry. And – quite rightly, I think – he is keen not to force the issue. As much as I would love to see Ik Nunn write again, we must be patient. We don’t want to push him into writing a study of domestic bliss. No, that would never do. No. Either we wait for Hildur to (god forbid) die in a weird accident with a tin-opener, or for Nunn to train his imagination to harken back to his days of desolation without losing grip of his present contentment. If neither of these happen, we must settle for what we have. What more can we ask for?
Ah, but readers can be passionate beings. Not everyone has as steady a head as I. Many of you out there believe that an audience ‘owes’ his or her audience. Owes them what, pray? For them, nevertheless, this is the end of a beautiful relationship (between writer and reader) – and they aren’t willing to go out quietly. ‘The greater good’ I hear some of them murmur: ‘the greater good’. What might they mean? They mean, clearly, that it is better for Nunn to suffer to give them pleasure, than for them to suffer whilst he is happy. After all, there’s only one of him – and hundreds of them. What kind of an artist submits to happiness so easily? It’s sickening.
Of course, one doesn’t want to peel the happiness from Ik Nunn, as one peels paper from a wall, or shake it out of him like loose change from a stingy friend. No, of course not. I’m tempted, sometimes, but I’ll stand back. From Under This Falls is enough for me. If Nunn ever finds himself capable of writing another novel, fine by me, but – like I said – there’s no good exerting any pressure. If I say that his happiness won’t last, it’s not because I’m willing or wanting it to end, but because I have found that, on the whole, happiness doesn’t last. Maybe his will. If so, good for them. Maybe it won’t be the end of him as a writer. Probably it will. Sad as that is, we mustn’t take it so bad. We still have From Under This Falls, which should (and in my opinion, does) contain enough despondency to keep all of us happy. There’s no way he can take that back – that’s the wonder of writing. The old mood is caught and will never fade away. The words are fresher than the wordsmith. This way both author and reader can be happy at the same time. Smiles on every face. Giggles and grins. Pleasure, pleasure everywhere.
Urgh. How depressing.
Georgy Riecke
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