the book group read: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, by D.G. Compton

9781590179710
NYRB Classics, 2016
253 pp
paperback


I would normally post about a novel like this one at the oddlyweirdfiction page of my reading journal, but reading The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe solely as science fiction is just not accurate. It is a novel that, as Jeff VanderMeer notes in his introduction to this edition, offers its readers a

 "portrait of an intelligent, middle-aged woman grappling with the ultimate existential crisis: How does one conduct oneself while dying?" 

This book was my real-world book group's read at the end of June; it is also one of the most thought-provoking novels I've read in a long while.  Written in 1974, and alternatively titled The Unsleeping Eye, it is almost prescient, as it deals with issues that are at the center of much debate forty-plus years later.  It's also one I can highly recommend.

In a society where disease and serious illness exist no more, forty-four year-old Katherine Mortenhoe is facing her last four weeks of life.  Terminal illness is rare in this version of the future, but Katherine is suffering from "an affliction of the brain cells," and for the short remainder of life she will be slowly deteriorating.  But NTV has an idea: Katherine's final weeks and her death will be televised for the "pain-starved public" on Vince Ferriman's "Human Destiny" show.  The company has invested fifty-thousand pounds in Roddie, their star reporter, surgically replacing his eyes with cameras, and has offered him a three-year contract that would as he puts it, "keep me in luxury the rest of my life."  As he also notes, with his new eyes, he now had the "most staggering tool for reportage the world had ever known."  Katherine Mortenhoe's death is something he has to get right.  The more immediate the coverage, the more empathy will be garnered from the public, and the higher the ratings will climb:

"The point of suffering in the Human Destiny shows was that it could continue to excite horror and compassion because it was never trivialized - it was always real. And because there was time for study in depth, the participants could be shown as individuals, not merely as newsreel symbols - the legless soldiers, the starving baby, the shredded bomb victim. They were real people, with real mothers-in law, and real dinners burning on the stove unheeded. It was details like this that kept the show alive, kept alive the capacity to involve."

 There's only one problem: Katherine wants nothing to do with any of it.  For her, death is not a commodity to be bought and sold; her only option, it seems, is to disappear.   To work around that problem, Roddie follows her until he finds himself in a position of trust, but soon he begins to have qualms about what he's doing, even as the cameras are "rolling."

As VanderMeer says, the world in which Ferriman and Roddie do their work  is

"an uncanny mirror of our own, of an age in which everyone really is a camera eye, or at least carries one around in his pocket." 

Aside from the focus on the overreach of technology and reality television, which caused no end of discussion with the ladies in my book group, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a very human novel at its core.  It unravels slowly to eventually become a story of not just death and dying, but also of relationships in a society where everything is driven by technology.  Each of the people in Katherine's life sees her differently; it is only through Compton's careful writing that we can begin to put her together as a whole.  My group also noticed that when Compton is writing about Katherine, he does so using a third-person point of view, whereas Roddie narrates his own sections, which I think is appropriate given that we're seeing her then through his eyes, aka, the camera, broadcasting to us, the readers, if you will.

There is so much more to this novel than I can ever throw into a few words for this post, but it is a deeply-moving story that kept me reading almost without stopping.  It is also most pertinent to our own time of  intense media saturation into private lives, or as Roddie's ex-wife puts it, "Peeping Toms. Voyeurism. Selling misery."  It's also not hard to imagine while reading that yesterday's fiction has become today's reality, which for me at least in this instance is a rather disturbing thought.



Just fyi: there is also a film based on this novel which I'll be watching this week before the spouse gets home  --  Death Watch (1980). I'm a bit nervous since I'm not sure a film could actually do justice to this book.

A Summer of Drowning, by John Burnside

9780224061780
Jonathan Cape, 2011 (UK)
328 pp
(hardcover ed.)

"To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame  -- that is the highest form of art."

The small, remote Arctic island of Kvaløya, located in the middle of a "string of islands running from Tromsø in the east to Hillesøy in the west,"  is the setting for this disturbing and atmospheric novel, which is narrated from the perspective of Liv, daughter of the celebrated and reclusive painter Angelika Rossdale, looking back ten years later at the summer of her eighteenth year.

Angelika had "turned her back on the big wide world," leaving Oslo when Liv was very small, to focus on her work. She had a "gift for refusal," especially for refusing herself -- removing herself from the world, and applying the "discipline" required in this effort to every facet of her life.  According to Liv, she and her mother

"...  had the house, we had the whole island, in fact.  We had enough quiet and space to live our own lives as we wanted, not somebody else's version of how life should be, and we were more or less self-sufficient.  We were perfectly able to look after ourselves and we didn't need a thing from anyone." 

Living in the space her mother marked out, Liv is free to define her life as she chooses, but much of Liv's upbringing is based precisely on Angelika's ideas of not being a part of the world.  Angelika's removal from the frame was by choice; Liv's isolation is imposed upon her and she eventually becomes much more of a recluse than her mother.   From the outset the reader wonders about Liv, who at age 28 is still living on the island, where she has "become invisible," and has done

"nothing at all; or nothing other than to choose the life I am living now, a life someone else would think of as close to non-existent. No career, no husband, no lover, no friends, no children... I am a witness, pure and simple, and unaffiliated, lifelong spy."

Liv's spying career actually began as a game at the age of 18 when she started watching people, realizing she wasn't like them, and she wanted to understand "why she didn't want anything at all," thinking that there was something wrong with her.  Her only real friend on the island at that time is an old man named Kyrre Opdahl, who rented out his summer cottage periodically and also told Liv tales of the huldra, a mythological, siren-like creature who lured men "to some far, lonely place, where chaos lurks: dark rocks, wild beasts, a cold, quick undertow." The huldra begins to take shape in Liv's mind in the form of Maia, a strange young girl who was seen with two brothers shortly before their individual but identical deaths by drowning.  After another drowning occurs, one where Liv is the only witness to Maia's presence,  Liv's  account verges into the eerie and horrific, leading the reader to wonder if there really are supernatural forces at play on this remote island.  As more tragedies occur, and as things become more disquieting, Liv takes a moment to muse about "before," a time with

"the seas empty of ships, the land of houses and roads, the shore from here to Africa one long, uninterrupted flock of feeding birds, sandpipers and terns and oystercatchers, curlew, godwit, ibis, vast herds of reindeer and elk wandering from feeding ground to feeding ground, all the way to Siberia, the birch woods bright and articulate with song, wolverines and wolf packs calling to one another over the high snow,"

a time Liv can't really imagine but regrets the loss of. It is also a moment where things begin to come into clear focus. There are clues all along that point toward the truth about that summer; it's up to the reader to put everything together.  As the knowledge of what really happened begins to dawn, it melds into an uneasy, disturbing truth that will send up shiver up your spine.

Maddeningly, this is one of those novels that to say any more would really kill it for anyone who may be interested.  It is extremely disarming; at the same time the writing is superb, producing a sense of great unease in the reader until the very last second.

Very highly recommended if you don't mind not having things absolutely spelled out for you; readers of literary fiction should really like it.