The wreckage was still smoldering when Christopher Allen reached the wheat fields where 298 people had fallen to their deaths. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had exploded in the air, scattering bodies and hunks of plastic and metal across miles of Ukrainian countryside.
Chris picked his way through the debris, trying to take in every detail. He was torn between recording everything and keeping his eyes firmly on the ground, trying not to step on body parts. Some bodies had lost skin or limbs. Others were still strapped into their seats. “They look as if they are manikins, twisted, turned and rearranged,” he scribbled in his notebook, “their limbs bent at impossible angles, their skin like dull yellow plastic.”
The history of Christmas is complicated and much of what we celebrate now seems to be a 19th-century invention – the trees and the birds, some of these traditions imported from Germany and some of them helped along by a certain famous writer. As the American satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer put it: “Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, / Mix the punch, Drag out the Dickens …” But the 20th and 21st centuries have added their own flavour, and novelists have learned to exploit its dramatic potential as the occasion for a particular kind of family misery. “Even though the prospect sickens,” Lehrer sings on, “Brother, here we go again.”
Take a walk through Toronto’s financial district and you probably won’t realise that you stand atop the largest underground shopping complex in the world. You might see the occasional doorway at street level bearing the words “Retail Concourse” in a nondescript font, but for the most part the more than 100 entrances to this labyrinth, known as the Path, are accessible only from within the office towers.
The stats certainly inspire awe, of a sort: 30km of networked passageways; 75 connected buildings; 1,200 stores, eateries, and services; 200,000 daily users; 4m sq ft feet of retail; C$1.7bn (£1bn) in annual sales. But the Path is a monolith that at no point feels monolithic. When I asked a financial district-employed friend of mine how he felt about it, he could not muster a single feeling.
I can appreciate that at the beginning of a country — and one as vast and empty as America was — the idea of pursuit, both chase and hunt, of happiness had an invigorating appeal to the founding fathers. (I’m not sure the founding mothers would have phrased it the same way.) But the truth is that the longer I have lived, and the shorter my future, the less pursuing I have done. Some of this may come from a peculiarly Irish positive pessimism — be happy, things will get worse — more of it from the history of disappointment all artists know and the rest from a remnant Catholic guilt that says you don’t deserve happiness anyway. The point is, in my case, happiness seemed a thing that could not be pursued, only realized and chosen.
A glimpse at the front cover of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life already shows that this is not what most of us think of as the typical 19th-century Russian novel. After all the thick tomes by Fyodors and Leos and Ivans, here we have a slim tale authored by a woman, and that alone should alert us that our old expectations may need to be altered. By the end of the first chapter, this possibility has been confirmed: little of our experience with various Raskolnikovs and Kareninas has prepared us for the forms and themes of this book, which was first published in 1848, about 20 years before the great flourishing of the Russian novel. And yet this is very much a familiar Russian novel in at least one substantial sense: it is a story of defeat whose principal interest lies not in realized aspirations but in its recuperation, for art, of the creative potentials of unsuccess.