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Uh oh, we’ve got a problem. Halfway through Vanilla Bright Like Eminem,
and here I go thinking of starting a new book. Here come the tired old fibs: “Just want to take a break; I’ll get right back to it tomorrow night.”
Lies. Lies! Start playing that game and that second half never gets read. But I’m committed, see — I promised Real Change I’d review the thing. Trouble is, the farther I plunge, the worse it gets. What began as a breathless ramble has devolved into a tedious trudge. Luckily
no hills — they’re fast reads, these schematic short stories. Once I crack the scheme, I can cut myself a little speed-reading slack, pausing now and again for spot checks to make sure nothing unexpected has occurred.
I don’t get it though. Michel Faber’s previous book, the trio of novellas bound together as The Courage Consort, still haunts me with its finely drawn, deeply peculiar characters and situations. Faber achieved fame in 2002 with the publication
of The Crimson Petal and the White, a weighty and literary page-turner that became an international bestseller. Any writer who follows up a blockbuster with novellas and short stories surely deserves praise — but the stories in Vanilla
Bright do not shimmer like gold: they shine like plastic.
Oh, the ideas are clever enough. A disoriented,
homeless man finds his way to a shelter where all the residents (including
him) wear their life stories on their t-shirts. A gamer nerd entranced with his on-screen heroine suddenly finds himself called to action by a real-life beauty. A sad-sack store detective is seduced into letting his guard down. A violent lout fulfills his destiny.
Each one of these brisk tales began its course as a clever idea or a glimpse of a clever idea and then Faber fills them out with easy writing and cheap effects, like science-fiction without the science.
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Just because his name’s in the title of Michel Faber’s
Vanilla Bright
Like Eminem doesn’t mean the rapper
will like it.
Photo courtesy of http://www.lyriceminem.com |
In “A Hole with Two Ends,” a stylish, self-absorbed couple suddenly confronts something wild and primal, both outside their car and inside themselves. It’s a decent enough idea, but the well-done final paragraph —
“I see its eyes!” she kept screaming, hoarse with feral longing as the whole countryside was falling into blackness around her and all the tiny stars came out of Heaven to bear witness. “I see its eyes!”
— fails to redeem the hackneyed set-up.
I want to be fair here. Faber is tackling
a set of subjects and characters that rarely get a nod from good writers. These are ordinary people — not artists, intellectuals, or serial killers — and hats off to anyone who strives to cover the whole wide territory. But the tone is mean and the writing lazy. Here is the beginning of “Explaining Coconuts,” a story about a motivational speaker in a Jakarta hotel:
“The blood-red double doors swing open, sending a false breeze through the recycled tropical air, and yet another sweaty foreigner walks in.”
The tale describes a weird motivational
speaker who focuses on the technical aspects of — spoiler alert — coconuts, and the rapturous reactions
of the wealthy businessmen who’ve traveled thousands of miles to see and hear her.
It must’ve sounded good in the moment
— that glimpse of a clever idea. I can see Faber riding the train from London back to his home in the Scottish
Highlands, sketching it out in a notebook. Night-time, his reflection in the thick green windows. His pen poised above the page: COCONUTS! That notebook: spiral-bound? Maybe a moleskin, like Bruce Chatwin used. Now there was a real writer, Chatwin. No bullshit; no plastic. None that he published, anyway. |
