Clear: A Transparent Novel (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I don't really care for David Blaine. I don't really like his kind of dopey stoner like way of talking and most of his stunts I've always thought while kind of impressive physically I've always felt were kind of just clamoring for attention. What is wrong with that though, he is an entertainer, and he is in the entertainment business, so that kind of goes with the territory--do something big and get lots of people to watch you. Can you hold this against the man? Well sure, I can and lots of people do, surprisingly people do who probably wouldn't damn someone like Angelina Jolie for appearing on "The Tonight Show", which is also clamoring for attention but instead it's called promotion. I'd like to say that I can dislike them both equally for what they do, but I don't. I'm a hypocrite who isn't bothered by the entertainment industry in general, I think most of it's garbage, but I don't get upset over all the self promotion, so why should I get annoyed at someone like David Blaine when he makes a spectacle of himself and gets millions of people to watch, discuss, enjoy or hate what he's doing? In all honesty it's more impressive that he can sit in a box suspended over London for forty four days fasting than just about anything that anyone who shows up to be honored at the Oscars has done in the past year. But still something about Blaine annoys me, and it's not just him on TV, I can say that the man has annoyed me in my two near personal encounters with the man, once when I came within a breath of telling his posse they couldn't use cameras in our store (in that breath I realized that the dopey looking guy standing with them was the illusionist himself, and they were doing an event at the store), and the second time while I stood and listened to him talking to Karen about books he was looking for. I can't put my finger on what it is though. At one point in Clear one of the characters says that Blaine is mirror, he's devoid of content and that he brings out the best in people who see the world brightly and attracts the negativity from those of us like myself who don't. I don't know if this is true.Clear is a novel set in London during the last 35 days of Blaine's 44 day fasting stunt. The novel never really has Blaine do anything, he just sits there in his clear plastic box while the actions of the characters happen around him. He's there as a constant and his presence seems to change the way that the two main characters deal with their lives, one who had never even heard of Blaine before he started the stunt, and the other an opportunistic young man who initially sees the hoopla surrounding the event, and the extreme emotions it brings out in people, especially women, as a way to get laid more often by turning himself into a mirror of sorts that projects back and agrees with whatever a woman thinks about the Blaine stunt. I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what was really good about Clear. Barker's writing style was great, and it made me want to read more of her; and I think it's the style of the book that really drew me in. I don't really like Blaine (see paragraph 1), none of the characters are especially likable, most of the pop-culture references had to do with some kind of British Hip-Hop or Garage music that I know nothing about and in a way the story is kind of like others that you've heard before about guys and gals and all that lust kind of stuff, but still something in the book transcended all of that and made for a really tight novel, which in itself is kind of surprising if you make a cursory look at the text, it's written in a kind of blotchy style that usually makes for dreadful reading, but here it just works perfectly. I'm looking forward to reading more of her books. If I liked a book this much that I didn't have much interest in the subject matter, I can imagine that she'll do wonders with something I'm more interested in.
My 2000th 'read' book catalogued on Goodreads.2004: The Books sections of the papers are full of this. It's about David Blaine *yawn*. And it sounds both boring and gimmicky. What could be a worse combination? I wish they'd move on to something more interesting so I can forget about it and hear about stuff I might actually read.2013: Nope, one day the author will be one of your favourite writers. Only three years later, not recognising her name, you'll find a gigantic historical-looking tome called Darkmans just below hip-level on a bookshop display and it'll be pretty much everything you wanted in a book. A few years later again and you'll be devouring her earlier works as you devoured almost any book in your teens, and Pratchett et al shortly after you graduated. Can't blame you - what you never would have guessed about Clear from the cover or the reviews is how deliberately bloody ridiculous it is. (You still find stage magic and illusionists fairly boring to watch, but that doesn't seem to stop you from enjoying films and novels about them.)The last Barker book I read was Small Holdings (1995) and WOW has her style come on in leaps and bounds here: just before Darkmans, a writer fully confident in her powers: freewheeling, silly, erudite, trivial and expansive. Narrator Adair Graham MacKenney is possibly the most conventional Barker character I've encountered yet. Handily, this jack-the-lad is an English & Media graduate of UCL so he provides the perfect combination of 'typical' young male attitude alongside the plausibility of his making the references the author wants to slip in. It's those around him who are spectacular Barkerian eccentrics and who draw him into their weirdness. Especially Aphra - whom he encounters whilst watching Blaine - a sort of White Rabbit/ manic pixie dream girl (who's nonetheless non-tropish enough to remind me of an old friend ... but one who is rather elusive and magical). There's a lot of satire of public intellectuals here - interesting timing; having by now won the IMPAC award, Barker is making fun of a class she's probably being perceived as part of, more and more. That sort of contrarian, playful kicking is something I very much like and can understand.Am I comfortable with a white writer satirising black intellectuals? It's a great piece of writing about opinionated people generally and excellent use of intelligent characters to transmit the author's research in a way that doesn't jar, but... Perhaps if my social circle had been as diverse as the one I've recently been reading about in NW (or the sort of circle I tend to imagine Barker has) it would more just be a case of hearing about people a bit like some of those I knew... But still not sure. What do highly educated black people think of these characters?Regardless of quibbles I really like Jalisa, Adair's pundit housemate's girlfriend who never shuts up - I'm not sure how much you're meant to like her but I found all her conversations very interesting. And admire the way that without being obnoxious, she really cares far more about her own opinions - which generally are right - than about what anyone else, including Solomon, thinks of them.Not sure Clear will age well given that it's stuffed with ephemeral references - if you weren't consuming a lot of British news and entertainment media in 2003 you might be a bit lost. (Or unless you are an early-2000's vintage nut... Do they exist yet?) But on the whole this is the sort of fun silly book I never thought it would be.
What do You think about Clear: A Transparent Novel (2005)?
A few weeks ago, I was feeling really crap and was looking for a novel to make it all better; a literary comfort blanket to wrap me up; a book-equivalent of Zero 7's album When it Falls. I picked up Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus in Sainsburys, which looked as though it would fit the bill. A couple of days later, things improved for me (or, rather, they became a different sort of crap...) and I began to crave something different, something unusual, something spicy, and decided to crack into the Barkers I'd been saving on my Kindle (first time I checked, she had nothing on Kindle; last time there were loads, many of them under £3 - yay!). Although I had (inadvertently) substituted The Night Circus for another book about an illusionist, they couldn't have been more different: yes, Barker pulls you in and wraps you up in her books, but you quickly realise that the cosy-looking cradle is made of barbed wire.There's so much about this that I should hate, that I don't know where to begin: obstinately bizarre characters, including the wholly unlikeable narrator, who spill their loud opinions onto page upon page of pointless dogma; a rant-y, parenthesis-laden, blog-y style; a slew of contemporary pop-culture references. But I didn't hate it; I loved it. Nicola Barker, I salute you. Erin Morgenstern, you are still languishing (beautifully, I may add) on the arm of the couch.
—Karen
The question this book raises for me is: what is wrong with writing that simply tries to be as sharp as it can be, recording every microsecond of thought, every slight nuance, every nearly imperceptible shift in intonation, every second guess, doubt, and revision, every shade of introspection, self-reflexivity, and self-awareness? What can go wrong with writing that tries to keep up with manic consciousness?Reviews in the Guardian and the Observer say that it's not clear whether Barker should have written an entire novel about a magic trick performed by David Blaine. The assumption is that it's too thin a subject for a novel. But the novel is about thinness. One reviewer is closer to the mark in complaining that Barker's voice is cold, that she doesn't take emotional risks, that she controls her characters so much that there's nothing to engage the reader. Again, that's true, but it's also an expressive value. What bothers me about this book isn't its supposedly overly trivial subject matter (what could that possibly mean, after "Madame Bovary") or its supposedly unemotional, disengaged characters (what could that possibly mean after Oulipo, after Beckett, after Stein). What bothers me is that the supposedly scintillating, mercurial dialogue (which all the reviewers praise) isn't interesting.The book opens and closes with praise of the novel "Shane." Here's the end of the book:"And it ends:"'He was the man who rose into our little valley out of the heart of our great glowing west and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.'"Observe the total lack of punctuation."(Jesus H. How'd he ever get away with that stuff?)"Not even a comma after 'whence he had come'? Or a dash?"Man."Is Jack Schaefer some fuck-you, balls-out writer or what?"I'm omitting the italics, which are everywhere in the book. This kind of rapid-fire, apparently spontaneous, apparently stream of consciousness narrative is fairly continuous throughout the book. Each successive brief paragraph is like an apostrophe, directed not at the reader so much as at an immediately previous version of the narrator himself, as he compulsively comments on his own previous thoughts, and revises and sharpens his own ideas.This kind of writing is intended to be clever, sharp, witty, unexpected, fast, and entertaining, and I think it is also intended to ring true to something like inner monologue of a dissatisfied, twitchy young urban male in London. For me it isn't any of those things except twitchy. There are many other versions of continuously self-doubting, cross-cutting inner monologues. Among contemporary authors, for example, there is Mark Leyner. But Leyner is more linguistically versatile, faster, and sharper. The twitching voice in "Clear" is ticcy, like Tourette's. Leyner is more genuinely driven and often believably hysterical -- it's hard to imagine him stopping, which isn't necessarily a virtue, but it does make the act of writing compulsively about compulsive thinking itself a more persuasive.*Incidentally -- although nothing in a novel is incidental -- there are moments of the deeper purpose and belief reviewers found missing. At the end, Blaine's magic performance (it's the one where he was suspended in a glass cube for a month) becomes compelling for the narrator:"...he's holding it together. In fact he's finding himself again. Little by little that necessary transition is taking place--from sitting-duck to superstar, from total access to none."And later:"He changed (I need to believe it)."These are brief glimpses into something "deeper," even if it is only vacuous superstardom. It seems, at moments like these, that the narrator -- and the author -- can only permit themselves the very briefest moments in which they speak unguardedly about things they really care about.
—Jim Elkins
Adair Graham MacKenny and all his fellow Brits try to make sense of their lives against the backdrop of London and David Blaine's 44 day fast "event". Among the topics explored, enjoyed, and despised are the American western, films, literature, religion, sex, food, philosophy, and magic itself. Adair brings his roommate, his roommate's current girlfriend, his coworker, his love/lust interest and her current husband along for the ride as they all struggle with the magic or illusion that defines life and death. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
—Booker
