GET LOST IN A BOOK
AFTER JAMES, FINALIST FOR THE ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE, IS CONFUSING IN THE BEST OF WAYS
Intellectually, this might be a great age of Gnosticism – the belief that the creation of the world is evil or illusory. It certainly feels illusory when we’re tied to a global web of technology that can transport us anywhere, any time.
Whether Michael Helm’s novel, After James, fits into this outlook requires some careful reading. A hint lies in the novel’s description of a fictional Berlin art show: possessing an “elusive narrative, meaningful patterns, and the mystery of the subject.” That fits. In After James we definitely have an elusive narrative – it is often uncertain to the reader what exactly is going on, particularly in the minds of the characters. Sometimes we must be assured, for example, that a given character is a given character by the fact she wears white pajama bottoms and a red T- shirt at the beginning of the narrative, and white pajama bottoms and a red T-shirt at the end.
There are other linkages that might qualify as “meaningful patterns.” A dog is a potent symbol throughout. A flash flood in the beginning echoes a hailstorm at the end, both meteorological disturbances with biblical overtones.
An abundance of such patterns is due to the complex structure of the novel – within the narrative there are stories within stories. There is the story of a scientist named Alice and her fashioning of a “creativity drug” – or, to put it more technically, a “narcotic- free neuro enhancer of generative and lateral thought.” As a fellow scientist explains, “There’s nothing that can’t be imagined, nothing imagined that can’t now be made real. What we’re designing is an engine to accelerate the real.”
There is a story of a would- be poet hired as a “literary detective” to track down a possibly murderous “Internet Poet;” a conflict between a scientist and his virologist daughter appalled at her father’s sudden embrace of the mystic; the story of whether a certain woman’s visions are real, and she sees correct- ly that a neighbourhood sculptor of antlers and bones is deranged instead of being what he seems to be – a true artist.
As for the “mystery of the subject,” all subjects are mysterious in Gnosticism. “What a mystery that a human should stand up from the very mud of creation,” Helm writes. “Maybe we’re seeking out other matter as if to find the home from which we’ve been made lost by creation itself.”
After James contains richness capable of fuelling 10 other novels, but two episodes in particular com- pel attention. One is the quarrel between Alice and her father, which begins with Alice’s employment by a drug company, which he views as a sellout. What brings matters to a head is Alice’s creativity pill, with its common benefits – and, of course, its fatal results.
Alice’s next appearance is confusing: she seems to be a new/old character named Celia, also with a domineering scientist father, and also with a career in drugs as a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. “Her training was in genetic science,” Helm writes, “her thing now was the brain.” The clash between Celia and her father is metaphysical — his new-found mysticism versus her materialist rationalism.
The conflict is dramatized by an expedition they take to a cave in the rugged countryside of rural France. The cave seems to have some deep significance to the father – it may have been the home of Europe’s first humans. After a harrowing struggle they manage to penetrate the recesses of the cave, and indeed the effect is extraordinary – the cave resembles those subterranean spaces where the Eleusinian rites were conducted in the ancient world. Certainly Celia is affected by the episode, though exactly how Helm does not tell us, and does not need to tell us. One clue is provided by the poet detective in another context, and again with a Gnostic flavour: “Language belongs to a lapsed world,” the poet detective comments. “It can’t quite reach what it grasps for.”
Indeed, words are always an issue in the novel. At one point Celia wonders if her father’s embrace of the mystical might be linguistic at heart. “Maybe he’d just grown tired of the terms and metaphors of science.”
Corruption of words, what the poet detective calls “bluntspeak” – that is to say, language without “nuance, shade, a more precise kind of perception” – features naturally in the episode of the poet detective. The episode begins as an outgrowth of warring poetry web sites. “Debates among poets are comically vicious, the stakes being so low,” he comments. The debates swirling around the real or imagined Internet Poet “were being conducted almost entirely by people with no feeling whatsoever for poetry, mostly academics and bad poets.” So we have a comic note introduced among events soaked with violence and brutality.
The poet detective and the Internet Poet eventually meet, but it is characteristic of Helm’s art that nothing comes of that meeting. It is a Kafkaesque, dreamlike encounter.
After James is a complicated set of stories, always a half step away from clarity. Yet the work resonates so strongly it is impossible to dismiss. A resonance with which no cliché, no banality, interferes.
‘WHAT A MYSTERY THAT A HUMAN SHOULD STAND UP FROM THE VERY MUD OF CREATION’