July: Germany, South Korea and England

Read: The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (Germany), The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher by Ahn Do-hyun (South Korea), Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (England)

‘A novel pullulating with a kind of anti-life’ - this is how the blurb advertises The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and this was my mum’s birthday present to me - a book, it goes on to say, filled with ‘horribly memorable images.’ And this from a woman so squeamish that she recently went to watch the latest Shaun the Sheep movie, Farmageddon, knowing that it would be a safe option with only ‘mild’ violence. Admittedly, IMDB records one moment of sex and nudity, one moment of violence and gore, one profanity and three frightening and intense scenes, but I’m not sure the comical moment when a farmer and some sheep push the hapless detectives off a cliff are quite in the same level as the grimness served by Grass, but my mum says that she can handle things in books that she could never handle on screen whereas I feel that it works the other way round, in the main, for me. I have to create the images told to me on a page - they live inside of me and when they disturb, they can do so in a more intense and unnerving way than a film that I can detach myself from is able to do. 

My mum gave me the book, telling me that she’d enjoyed it and she’d been chatting to a German man and he’d enjoyed it too. It had sounded like a recent conversation the way she relaid it to me the first time and on completion, I went back to my mum, wondering if I might make contact with this German gentleman and discuss it further, but it turned out that the conversation had taken place in the late 1970s in Israel and she couldn’t remember the name of the man or, as it turned out, a lot of the detail of the book. She’d remembered the impact it had on her when she read it though, being powerfully effected by this German voice articulating disgust at the Nazi Party as early as 1959. Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS in 1944 and coming to terms with what he had been fighting for is, for sure, part of this novel.

However, my mum had entirely forgotten how strange the book is and how it skirts between magic and realism in a chaotic way. The story is narrated by a man named Oskar Matzerath from the confines of a mental hospital. He is a dwarf, but this is out of choice - at three, he decides he doesn’t want to grow up to be a grocer and so decides not to grow at all. However, Oskar is not the most reliable or easy to follow of narrators so we have to take his explanations dubiously. I reminded my mum of some of the oddities in the book: that Oskar, who is obsessed with his tin drum, can break glass by screaming and that he perfects this ability to such a degree that he can scream perfectly circular holes into glass and uses this ability to assist people in shoplifting; that Oskar’s mother becomes so disgusted by the sight of eels thrashing about inside a horse’s head that she goes on a heavy fish diet, eventually killing herself because of excessive fish consumption; that Oskar spends part of the novel playing his drum in a  bar called the Onion Cellar where people go and put onions under their eyes to induce cathartic crying. Every detail I narrated had been forgotten by my mum; what had remained was a sense of the importance of this book and I get the power of the German voice, particularly the voice of someone who fought for what he later would consider to be evil, articulating a sense of guilt. 

However, the guilt was painfully hopeless. The magical-realism genre was used to confuse and create grim imagery and essentially rob life of meaning and perhaps this was the point that Grass was trying to make - that life had lost meaning and I can understand how he arrived at this point, but it was painful to feel the oppressive weight of the futility that felt imbued in the story. 

The second book I read was one that has caught my eye in the past: The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher - a short allegory about salmon taking their challenging journey down a river. In contrast to The Tin Drum, this book was full of hope. In The Tin Drum, the decision not to grow that Oskar makes and also, the humpback that he develops are presented in a depressing way whereas Ahn Do-hyun uses a salmon with a broken back as a symbol of beauty: ‘his pain is beautiful, his disability is beautiful.’ The story tells of a run of salmon trying to find meaning in their journey and as risks and dangers present themselves, they muse on why they must continue their journey and what the purpose is. The protagonist, Silver Salmon comes to this conclusion: ‘All the actions of our lives, the choices we make and the challenges we accept, will go to make the bones and flesh of our children, becoming the substance of those future lives. And that’s why we mustn’t take the easy way.’ The words Silver Salmon used don’t exactly reflect my hope - I believe there is a spiritual reality that offers a hope also - but his hope-suffused words were uplifting and I realise that The Tin Drum shows me a reality - certainly Grass’ reality - but that what I longed for was not fewer grim images, but hope to emerge and the lack of it depressed me whereas The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher showed me an adventurous journey that chimed more with my soul.

The next book I read brought me back to England. I’d thought that I was going to leave the nation of my birth until the close to the end of this adventure, but last month, I’d been provoked by the Black Lives Matter movement and conversations with my black and brown friends to consider alternative books to teach to students at my school that aren’t written by white authors and/or full of white characters, but I was limited to a small list of books on ‘the list’ and so the one that I chose was Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, a novel written by a white man but exploring the life and experiences of eleven-year-old Ghanaian immigrant, Harrison Opoku.

The book is told from Harri’s perspective and the beauty and also the bleakness of the book are the combination of his innocent naiveté and the harsh world he is exposed to. The novel opens with the stabbing of a young black boy, and Harri and his friend Dean decide to do some hapless detective work although chaotic and humorous investigation leads them dangerously towards the truth. My twin boys are just one year younger than Harri and they are about to start secondary school next month. I remember the simple naiveté with which I started secondary school myself twenty-nine years ago. I remember being so excited, absolutely desperate to get started. I drove my parents mad charging around the room, eager to start the first journey to school but having to wait until my less-feverish friend Sam arrived at my door to join me for the walk. I had no idea really what I was walking into: the harsh predator-prey grassland I was stepping upon with no bush to hide behind, no defence mechanisms developed to cope with attack, not really even aware that attack was a possibility. 

Soon enough, my innocence meant that I was targeted as easy prey and once people started taking chunks, they didn’t stop until I found ways of defending myself. I didn’t learn to be handy with my fists or anything - I just learnt to turn up later and later each day thus lessening the time spent at school; I found places to hide and avoided eye contact, knowing that to happen to catch the eyes of the wrong person meant instant and aggressive confrontation. I wasn’t entirely successful at evading the predators, but five years finally passed and I left, broken but not beyond fixing. I don’t fear for my boys. I feel like things are different, that schools are better at supporting their students and creating more nurturing environments than they were three decades ago and I also think my boys are better-prepared, know how life works far more than I did.

Harri is also very different to me. He was far more capable of coping than me, but he had a far harsher environment than I did and coping with the world he is launched into is surely beyond the ability of any child. His world is one of knife crime, gang culture and sexual assault and all this without his father who has yet to join the family from Ghana. Kelman does a superb job of creating a really authentic and important exploration of the experience of being a child immigrant. I don’t know if it will be a book I teach yet. The truth is that there moments that were so intense that I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the idea of reading them in a school setting, but I do want to commit to making sure that black lives matter by making sure that their voices are heard in the literature I teach.