Contrasting and complementary perspectives on social issues

I’ve just had a fascinating couple of days, parallel-reading two completely different fictions with, coincidentally, curious commonalities: Splinters of sunshine, by Patrice Lawrence, and The singularity, by Balsam Karam. What I gained was a concentrated experience showing how very different writing, intended for different categories of reader, can reveal insights into significant common themes: mainly family (especially parenthood and grandparenthood), racism, education, loss, searching for someone, children at play, inclusion, belonging and rootedness.

It’s many years since I read anything from the Young Adult section, but I wanted to read some of Lawrence’s work as soon as I learned of her recent appointment as the new children’s laureate. Having had personal involvement in one of her key themes – children looked-after – as a foster carer in the past, and having published a bibliography of transracial adoption (way back in 1985), I have an interest in, and understanding of, one of her central themes.

Splinters of sunshine is an absorbing read with blended action and reflection, revolving around a range of social exclusion issues, as two young people converge to resolve some of the threats of a real world of drugs, exploitation and violence. Meanwhile, Karam’s second work, The singularity (which I began reading on the same train journey, finishing both on the return) is a piece of crafted literary fiction which, as the late Shahrnush Parsipur put it in a blurb note, deals with ‘loss and longing – a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land’.

The parallel reading provoked reflection on different writing styles for different genres. Each author has a consummate grasp of what they’re doing. But both works are written almost entirely in the present tense, an unfortunate dominant characteristic of contemporary literature. In the last section of The singularity I found the use of the second person singular, combined with present tense, was overdone, and began to feel laboured and slightly inauthentic.

I was struck by the consistency of the rhythm of Lawrence’s narrative, with the reader’s interest held by short passages as narrators change. Karam’s text has two contrasting styles: roughly the first half has a sustained, unhurried rhythm reminiscent, for me, of the music of Górecki — exuding a sense of undemanding patience. The remainder begins with plenty of staccato and then numerous, occasionally lyrical, vignettes with white space on the page that encourages the reader to dwell. She has some memorable lines, like this:

‘Grief draws in and widens the distances without the children knowing how or why’ (p34).

And one or two mistakes: someone should have picked up and disallowed the phrase ‘increasingly endless searches’ (p70) for instance. If something’s endless, it can’t increase. Authors sometimes overlook things, so I ask again, what are editors for?

Incidentally, Lawrence also has a curious mistake: at one point (p277) the protagonist is walking from Brighton pier towards Kemp Town. Lawrence, who lives in Brighton, must know that this means he's walking eastwards, but she writes that he's 'heading west'. Again I'm wondering quite what editors get paid for.

Publications

I have two poems recently published in the Romanian journal EgoPHobia: 'Fragments (homage à György Kurtág)'; and 'Afghan blades'. I liked the idea of their publishing the Kurtág homage, as Romania was the country of his birth. I must admit I'm slightly disappointed in what's happened to the formatting, but it's often a challenge, with poetry especially.

In what way is literature 'superior'?

I came across this quote: ‘Literature is the greatest of artistic forms because it is capable of incredible subtlety’. There’s so much wrong with that, where do you start? The misuse of the word ‘incredible’ is a bit of a giveaway – lacking subtlety, one might say. And is it being suggested that the masses of Palestrina, say, or Beethoven’s last quartets or a Rembrandt drawing, lack subtelty?

Here are some other quotes that are, similarly, just as likely to be conversation-stoppers as conversation-starters:

• ‘Words are often so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to music’ – Felix Mendelssohn.

• ‘All the arts live by words’ (‘Tous les arts vivent de paroles’) – Paul Valéry.

• ‘Painting is the most artificial of the arts’ – Francis Bacon.

There are flaws in all of these, illustrating how inadequate language is (what is meant by ‘misunderstood’ here, or ‘vivent’, or ‘artificial’…?). The inadequacy of language in ennabling humans to communicate effectively with one another – for example in attempts to arrest the decline we have brought to the planet – reflects the muddle of our partial evolution, and I fear the contribution of literature is relatively trivial.

I think there is great value in reflecting on any art in relation to any other art; but no value whatsoever in claiming one to be superior to others.