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The final book of a sequence is scary. Will it fulfil everything you've wanted, and pull all those threads together? Or will it be a damp fizzle? There's been a long weight for this book - and I confess I didn't get down to reading it straight away for fear it might let me down. In fact it turns out to be copyrighted 2005, so I clearly bought it the Christmas before last. (On the other hand I'm now reading a copy of Midnight's Children I bought in about 1991, so that's pretty speedy by those standards.)
Aidan Chambers, This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn London: Random House
I was too young for volume one of the series when it first came out - Aidan Chambers's Breaktime was published in 1978 - and theoretically too old for the previous volume, Postcards from No Man's Land (2002). These volumes vary in intensity but with sex, drugs, sexuality, suicide, crushes, mental illness, genocide, adultery and so on, the reader probably ought to be in their teens.
Fortunately it's not a sequence that demands to be read in order - it's a thematic series which, until the final volume - is essentially about male teen life in contemporary Britain. This Is All is predominately - but not all - told from the point of view of a nineteen year old female, the first female viewpoint in the books. (Note that qualifier of "predominately"; I won't explain this here though.)
Cordelia Kenn is nineteen, pregnant and unmarried. As she waits for the birth of her child, she puts together what she sees as a Pillow Book. In intimations of mortality, she recalls her life up to - her seduction of Will - her child-to-be's father, a musician and lover of tress - her affair with an older man and a more than bruising encounter with a stalker. She also records her relationship with her own father and her aunt, her memories of the death of her mother, her friendship with a Japanese girl and her strong friendship with a teacher which borders on the erotic. In between and alongside we get mottos, maxims and other pieces of wisdom.
Chambers's use of viewpoint character is cunning - we know what is to come, but not how - and Cordelia is in turns smart and stupid. Her name invokes Shakespeare, a writer Cordelia loves - and if this is not necessarily entirely convincing, it does make sense of what would drive a teenagers to write at such length (the book is eight hundred pages long). We have Cordelia on her breasts, on her farts, on her loss of virginity, and I fell hook link and sinker for her story.
The second part seems calculated to throw the reader off guard. In the past Chambers's used multiple columns on the same page, intercut different viewpoints, even used unreliable narrators. Here we have two narratives, taking part at more or less the same time but on odd and even pages. I wasn't careful enough to spot points of congruences on this reading - indeed I think they would only be there by happenstance. It only having read the whole novel that the narrative tactic makes sense. Similarly later sections provide cross references to other sequences.
This book is thus also about the writing of it - and ultimately if not necessarily entirely knowingly about male control of female writing. There was a raft of sf novels in the 1980s and 1990s when female leads had tampons and periods, and whilst it was heartening to see their existence acknowledged, it was at best heavy-handed, at worst male fantasy. As a male, I can't speak to how convincing Chambers's portrait of the artist as a young woman is, but it is a brave try at that rare beast, the female Bildungsroman. At points I did feel that Chambers winked at the audience too much, and let the book's status as final novel act as permission to offer thoughts on writing.
But there comes a point when the novelist pulls the rug, and after the melodrama of the kidnapping, the novel takes an unexpected left turn. The ending is not cosy, is not comfortable. It isn't the novel you thought it was. I confess to being moved and shocked by it all, if not entirely convinced that it is the right ending. But my guess is that Chambers is more interested in persuading his readers to think than in providing pat endings.
No one else out there writes like Aidan Chambers has - but maybe someone else which reach for his ambition.
Aidan Chambers, This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn London: Random House
I was too young for volume one of the series when it first came out - Aidan Chambers's Breaktime was published in 1978 - and theoretically too old for the previous volume, Postcards from No Man's Land (2002). These volumes vary in intensity but with sex, drugs, sexuality, suicide, crushes, mental illness, genocide, adultery and so on, the reader probably ought to be in their teens.
Fortunately it's not a sequence that demands to be read in order - it's a thematic series which, until the final volume - is essentially about male teen life in contemporary Britain. This Is All is predominately - but not all - told from the point of view of a nineteen year old female, the first female viewpoint in the books. (Note that qualifier of "predominately"; I won't explain this here though.)
Cordelia Kenn is nineteen, pregnant and unmarried. As she waits for the birth of her child, she puts together what she sees as a Pillow Book. In intimations of mortality, she recalls her life up to - her seduction of Will - her child-to-be's father, a musician and lover of tress - her affair with an older man and a more than bruising encounter with a stalker. She also records her relationship with her own father and her aunt, her memories of the death of her mother, her friendship with a Japanese girl and her strong friendship with a teacher which borders on the erotic. In between and alongside we get mottos, maxims and other pieces of wisdom.
Chambers's use of viewpoint character is cunning - we know what is to come, but not how - and Cordelia is in turns smart and stupid. Her name invokes Shakespeare, a writer Cordelia loves - and if this is not necessarily entirely convincing, it does make sense of what would drive a teenagers to write at such length (the book is eight hundred pages long). We have Cordelia on her breasts, on her farts, on her loss of virginity, and I fell hook link and sinker for her story.
The second part seems calculated to throw the reader off guard. In the past Chambers's used multiple columns on the same page, intercut different viewpoints, even used unreliable narrators. Here we have two narratives, taking part at more or less the same time but on odd and even pages. I wasn't careful enough to spot points of congruences on this reading - indeed I think they would only be there by happenstance. It only having read the whole novel that the narrative tactic makes sense. Similarly later sections provide cross references to other sequences.
This book is thus also about the writing of it - and ultimately if not necessarily entirely knowingly about male control of female writing. There was a raft of sf novels in the 1980s and 1990s when female leads had tampons and periods, and whilst it was heartening to see their existence acknowledged, it was at best heavy-handed, at worst male fantasy. As a male, I can't speak to how convincing Chambers's portrait of the artist as a young woman is, but it is a brave try at that rare beast, the female Bildungsroman. At points I did feel that Chambers winked at the audience too much, and let the book's status as final novel act as permission to offer thoughts on writing.
But there comes a point when the novelist pulls the rug, and after the melodrama of the kidnapping, the novel takes an unexpected left turn. The ending is not cosy, is not comfortable. It isn't the novel you thought it was. I confess to being moved and shocked by it all, if not entirely convinced that it is the right ending. But my guess is that Chambers is more interested in persuading his readers to think than in providing pat endings.
No one else out there writes like Aidan Chambers has - but maybe someone else which reach for his ambition.
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