Fiction: Terrorism is the new Black Death: bombers kill as mindlessly and as randomly as a plague, only far more viciously. As a character in Michael Cunningham's oddly beautiful new novel, Specimen Days, remarks - and with stark topicality in the wake of recent bombs in London - ". . . we all humped along unharmed because no one had decided to kill us that day . . . we could not know, as we hurried about our business, whether we were escaping the conflagration, or rushing into it."
War has long incited - and incensed - writers. This rage, active since the time of Homer, has inspired enduring literature. Bombs in a busy market place, cars exploding on the turn of the ignition key, landmines transforming a quiet pasture into a death trap - each is established daily reality across the Middle East. But for quite a while now, few countries have been really safe, yet somehow the US, collaborator in violence elsewhere in the world, never experienced mass terrorism at home.
Never, that is, until a September morning in 2001 when the world changed forever. The nation that invented freedom had also become a prisoner of fear. The literary response to that particular act of terrorist insanity, 9/11, has been surprisingly slow in coming. Earlier this year, US boy wonder Jonathan Safran Foer's much hyped and ultimately disappointing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published. Chaotic, laboured and repetitive, it lived up to neither its intentions nor its ambitions.
The wait for the novel that would express the new uncertainty, that of facing a silent enemy, appears to have ended with Cunningham's subtle and original new book. Author of A Home At the End of the World, a first novel which introduced him as a major talent, Cunningham consolidated his voice with a powerful study of 1950s American life, the domestic saga, Flesh and Blood, which was an exciting display of traditional storytelling.
His third novel, The Hours, revealed an emerging technical sophistication. It is a layered narrative of three interlinking, time-shifting stories; the unifying device is female consciousness as expressed in the life and work, and responses to that work, of Virginia Woolf. It is her literary presence which hovers throughout. It is a fine performance even if it did spawn the heavily contrived movie of the same name. Cunningham is a meticulous, careful writer of committed artistry, his sentences are crafted with a deliberation worthy of Flaubert. He is highly literary, almost mannered, the prose is choreographed around images of lyric beauty and he has a great deal to say, which is well served by an ability to avoid the polemical.
Specimen Days also draws on an iconic writer. Instead of the fey, troubled experimentalist Woolf, Cunningham this time calls upon the towering consciousness of visionary poet and wayward patriot Walt Whitman, part messiah, part madman. He is an interesting choice. Whitman also lived through troubling times, the Civil War period. It was Whitman who announced his plan "to loosen the mind of still-to-be-form'd (sic) America from the folds, the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling anti-democratic authorities of Asiatic and European past." Whitman was an original, eccentric yet practical. He was theatrical, yet his pronouncements usually made sense.
In common with Whitman, Cunningham is a New York writer. He has taken Whitman's vast sprawling manifesto, Leaves of Grass, his life's work, his America, and given lines from it to several of the characters in each of the three stories, each set in a time of crisis, that make up Specimen Days. It could be a disaster, particularly as Cunningham has prefaced it with an off-putting author's note, yet this novel of three stories succeeds because Cunningham is extraordinarily sure-footed.
He uses technique without becoming its slave. The sequences stand independently of each other, there is no scene shifting or interlinking which can often become irritating. Too many novelists have used this device of presenting independent stories and then offering them as a novel.
Cunningham has been more skilful. These narratives are linked by a bizarre coherence and subtle devices such as the variations of a name, the survival of a small white bowl, itself a remarkable symbol, references to horses, passing comments. Each of the narratives draw on the same set of dynamics and elements, but are presented slightly differently.
The opening narrative, In the Machine, is set in 19th century New York, the city Whitman knew. It could be a romance, but quickly settles into being a ghostly tale of deception, escape, death and retribution. It is almost classical and, as is typical of Cunningham, it has several literary layers.
A disfigured young boy, Lucas, loves Catherine, the woman who was to be the wife of his brother Simon. But Simon has been killed, a victim of the machine he had been working with in the factory. Instead of getting married, he has just been buried. Wedding guests become mourners, having eaten the ham meant for the wedding. "It was lucky, then, to have it for the wake instead." Lucas, almost 13, exists in a twilight zone of responses expressed through lines from Whitman. "I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end."
His love as much as his disfigurement has made him an outcast. His lyric utterances, admittedly the words of a poet, are brilliantly juxtaposed with the practical comments of world-weary Catherine, a woman who has lost far more than a lover, she has lost her saviour. It is a wonderful piece, elevated by the writing.
Cunningham's prose is formal yet versatile, as alert to speech as it is to lyric rhythms. Lucas wanders the streets of New York and in time encounters a fellow wanderer.
"He looked up and beheld Walt's face.
Here was his grey-white cascade of beard, here was his broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief knotted at his neck. He was utterly like his likeness. He smiled bemusedly at Lucas. His face was like brown paper that had been crushed and smoothed again. His eyes were bright as silver nails."
As expected the boy asks the famous question, "do the dead return in the grass?" The American bard replies: "They do, my boy. They are in the grass and trees." There is a ceremonial, surrealist quality to the piece. Cunningham's use of Whitman as a spokesman proves surprisingly effective. The theme is sacrifice in a time of flux.
Change becomes even more sinister in The Children's Crusade, the second sequence. The time is now. New York is a city living under siege, haunted by the memory of 9/11. Cat is a police woman, albeit one with a difference, a forensic psychologist who spends her working hours taking phone calls from the damaged, the deranged and the dangerous. It has become a new world in which a young boy will rush into a street and embrace a passing stranger, causing them both to explode.
Again, the writing dictates. Instead of 19th century formality, it is the language of now - terse, expressive. A gang of very young killers use the lines of Whitman as a form of street talk. Terror stalks the streets. In contrast with Don deLillo's staccato urgency, Cunningham evokes an everyday atmosphere of fear as experienced through the thoughts of a sympathetic, divorced 38-year-old woman who has lost her child, and merely wants an ordinary life.
In Like Beauty, set in the not so distant future, Cunningham has crafted one of the finest sci-fi fantasy stories yet written. Avoiding the gimmicky and the obvious, he controls the story by sustaining the perfect balance between the slightly normal and the slightly weird. His lizard woman, fleeing doom on her planet, becomes a tragic heroine denied her world, his machine-made man is a hero. Only the humans are hard. Again, idealism and cynicism walk together. It isa study in upheaval and displacement. There is also some humour. Unlike Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, Cunningham, ever the disciplined artist, keeps his irony in check. It is an offbeat and mesmeric performance.
We live in strange, terrible times. Specimen Days catches this strangeness and terror with a poet's eye and a seer's courage.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Specimen Days By Michael Cunningham. 4th Estate, 308pp. £14.99
