True Value
Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea
Granta, 288pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781847086358
reviewed by Jake Elliott
Leaving The Sea is only the third offering of Ben Marcus’s fiction we have seen in the UK. 2012 saw the publication of his masterpiece The Flame Alphabet by Granta, who have also had the good sense to republish his earlier work The Age of Wire and String with beautiful illustrations by Catrin Morgan. Given the outstanding quality of his writing, I can only assume that plans are in place to bring Notable American Women to UK readers without forcing them onto the internet and the custom of ‘the baddies’.
Leaving The Sea gathers together 15 short stories published in various places across the past decade. Marcus is a rare practitioner of what is rather gnomically called ‘Literary Fiction’ – Marcus’s dissatisfaction with labels like this results in a prose style which seeks to redefine language as we know it. Often Marcus will nip in the odd phrase or word to throw the reader off. Odd being the operative word. This language makes you sit up, snap out of it and pay attention. These words aren’t chastisements, they are illuminating reminders not to relax. They make assumptions about you and your knowledge, you wonder if you’ve been trusted too much. At other times they are full frontal assaults on the norms of traditional story telling:
My Father’s costumes were gray and long and full of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see right through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man’s body… My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother’s kill hole out on the back platform.
Language verges towards nonsense, but provides enough plausibility for the reader to wonder if they have lost their own mind, if the disconnect is in them. This is the perfect way to start a short story, it obeys the creative writing course philosophy of opening with proper nouns with situation and action up front (‘James walked towards the station turnstiles. He hadn’t seen his brother in years. The train pulled in.’) before introducing wild terminology, words that you might know but in new, totally incongruous partnerships.
Marcus acknowledges the economy required for short story writing, but utilises it in a far more interesting way than most. Economy and restriction of space and words is viewed as an opportunity to twist and contort language itself: force it to perform beyond its ability and simultaneously force the reader to question their own practice. Marcus, slowly, and that is a standout skill in this collection, reveals that there is no problem, that you are witnessing a writer playing with the possibility of language and form.
This being said, Marcus’s experimentation is not exhibited fully until we reach part two of Leaving The Sea. Part one displays story telling of a far more generic style. There are crumbs of what the reader wants from Marcus scattered all through the first section of the book, in the disease induced inconveniences of ‘The Dark Arts’ and ‘Rollingwood:’ ‘He’d have to make a call, pour mouth into the phone’, ‘The boy is wedged under the machine when Mather goes in.’ There is the occasional joke, Julian ‘ate only green food until it ran down his legs’, Fleming describes a cruise pamphlet, ‘A welcome packet, the literary genre most likely to succeed in the new millennium’, but really this is piecemeal compared to what Marcus can do with a word or two.
Speaking recently to Malcolm Forbes in The Quarterly Conversation, Marcus stated that Leaving The Sea is organized thematically, less around narrative similarities than around style and voice:
When I looked at all of the stories in the collection, and thought about their emotional effect, and how that effect was achieved—what kind of language was used, dense and strange or open and light, familiar or foreign—it made a kind of sense to not begin with the hardest surfaces. Most of the stories seem emotionally difficult to me, but they have different ways of arriving at that. I thought that if someone made it through a more transparent story, at the level of language, then they might be slightly more available to a similar emotional territory if it was achieved with a different kind of language.
It is this level of consideration for the reader that sets Marcus apart from other writers of experimental fiction. Leaving The Sea begins as a gentle form of exposure to the Ben Marcus milieu. ‘What Have You Done’, the collection’s opener, certainly introduces the idea of the ‘looming unknown’ yet at the same time is not daunting or particularly challenging. ‘The Dark Arts’ is a stand-out in this section, seeming to combine the emotion of Marcus’s recent water fasting (published as a non-fiction article last year in GQ) with some of the sentiments of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, all in just 28 pages.
This structural organisation will leave readers familiar with Marcus’s practices feeling slightly impatient. Favouring the toe-dip for complete submersion, however, seems like a canny tactic. The following sections gently beg the question, must we accept the language we are given? Can we not put it to some, if not better, then certainly more intriguing use? In the latter half of Leaving The Sea, Marcus does just that. Language is redefined and as such there are many different explications, equations, explanations: relearning of the basics. The narrator of First Love states, ‘The five knives of her hand were once called fingers… The flag of sadness that concealed her arms was known as a sleeve…The shovels we use to cleave the air in two - and possibly reveal a person we might fail against - were once abbreviated as hands.’ This is slightly more than reimagining language, it is illustrating a time when the reimagining of language has already occurred as a result of necessity. The reasons behind this need for new words are always kept just outside of the frame and helps the reader focus on something beyond the immediate problem; simple peculiarity of each sentence.
My secret was my lucky bone, worn behind my face for good luck. It was an excellent protection against sorrow. Now seldom seen, at least in the daytime, this bone was worn as an amulet above the neck to ensure a human appearance… Some cultures call it a “head” and decorate it with paint and stones, or cover it with veils, gels, masks, and helmets.
Marcus has included two longer pieces among the shorter stories that make up Leaving The Sea. ‘The Father Costume’ and ‘The Moors’ make up part four and six of the book respectively and are the highlights of the collection. ‘The Father Costume’ was published as a novella in the US in 2002 and its inclusion here sees it reach a UK audience for the first time. Quite frankly, it is one the strangest and most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever seen. The story, as far as it is possible to tell, shows a father and his two sons fleeing their home across the sea. The language is some of the densest and most moving that Marcus has employed. The narrator, the son, begins in typical Marcus fashion, ‘I could not read fabric. I had a language problem.’
This story most closely resembles the style of writing Marcus was employing after The Age of Wire and String. There is plenty of new jargon: ‘Costume Smoother’, ‘Writing Hole’, ‘Bird Metronome’ and ‘Father Disappearing Goggles’ all make regular appearances without explanation, and ask of the reader that they try and use these words in their reading however they would like. The most thrilling thing about this style of writing is the freedom the reader is given to do what they want with the imagery presented.
It is impossible to relax while reading ‘The Father Costume’ or ‘The Moors’ or to drift off to somewhere outside of the narrative. This is true of most of Leaving The Sea – it is writing that demands your attention. There is a definite concept of exchange present in this work, a seemingly mad and incoherent language will reward you if you are prepared to invest your time and effort in it. In a contemporary political climate where investments are principally concerned with financial cost and dividends, it is essential and beautiful to have writing that reminds us of an alternative concept of investment and return, of true value.
Leaving The Sea gathers together 15 short stories published in various places across the past decade. Marcus is a rare practitioner of what is rather gnomically called ‘Literary Fiction’ – Marcus’s dissatisfaction with labels like this results in a prose style which seeks to redefine language as we know it. Often Marcus will nip in the odd phrase or word to throw the reader off. Odd being the operative word. This language makes you sit up, snap out of it and pay attention. These words aren’t chastisements, they are illuminating reminders not to relax. They make assumptions about you and your knowledge, you wonder if you’ve been trusted too much. At other times they are full frontal assaults on the norms of traditional story telling:
My Father’s costumes were gray and long and full of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see right through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man’s body… My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother’s kill hole out on the back platform.
Language verges towards nonsense, but provides enough plausibility for the reader to wonder if they have lost their own mind, if the disconnect is in them. This is the perfect way to start a short story, it obeys the creative writing course philosophy of opening with proper nouns with situation and action up front (‘James walked towards the station turnstiles. He hadn’t seen his brother in years. The train pulled in.’) before introducing wild terminology, words that you might know but in new, totally incongruous partnerships.
Marcus acknowledges the economy required for short story writing, but utilises it in a far more interesting way than most. Economy and restriction of space and words is viewed as an opportunity to twist and contort language itself: force it to perform beyond its ability and simultaneously force the reader to question their own practice. Marcus, slowly, and that is a standout skill in this collection, reveals that there is no problem, that you are witnessing a writer playing with the possibility of language and form.
This being said, Marcus’s experimentation is not exhibited fully until we reach part two of Leaving The Sea. Part one displays story telling of a far more generic style. There are crumbs of what the reader wants from Marcus scattered all through the first section of the book, in the disease induced inconveniences of ‘The Dark Arts’ and ‘Rollingwood:’ ‘He’d have to make a call, pour mouth into the phone’, ‘The boy is wedged under the machine when Mather goes in.’ There is the occasional joke, Julian ‘ate only green food until it ran down his legs’, Fleming describes a cruise pamphlet, ‘A welcome packet, the literary genre most likely to succeed in the new millennium’, but really this is piecemeal compared to what Marcus can do with a word or two.
Speaking recently to Malcolm Forbes in The Quarterly Conversation, Marcus stated that Leaving The Sea is organized thematically, less around narrative similarities than around style and voice:
When I looked at all of the stories in the collection, and thought about their emotional effect, and how that effect was achieved—what kind of language was used, dense and strange or open and light, familiar or foreign—it made a kind of sense to not begin with the hardest surfaces. Most of the stories seem emotionally difficult to me, but they have different ways of arriving at that. I thought that if someone made it through a more transparent story, at the level of language, then they might be slightly more available to a similar emotional territory if it was achieved with a different kind of language.
It is this level of consideration for the reader that sets Marcus apart from other writers of experimental fiction. Leaving The Sea begins as a gentle form of exposure to the Ben Marcus milieu. ‘What Have You Done’, the collection’s opener, certainly introduces the idea of the ‘looming unknown’ yet at the same time is not daunting or particularly challenging. ‘The Dark Arts’ is a stand-out in this section, seeming to combine the emotion of Marcus’s recent water fasting (published as a non-fiction article last year in GQ) with some of the sentiments of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, all in just 28 pages.
This structural organisation will leave readers familiar with Marcus’s practices feeling slightly impatient. Favouring the toe-dip for complete submersion, however, seems like a canny tactic. The following sections gently beg the question, must we accept the language we are given? Can we not put it to some, if not better, then certainly more intriguing use? In the latter half of Leaving The Sea, Marcus does just that. Language is redefined and as such there are many different explications, equations, explanations: relearning of the basics. The narrator of First Love states, ‘The five knives of her hand were once called fingers… The flag of sadness that concealed her arms was known as a sleeve…The shovels we use to cleave the air in two - and possibly reveal a person we might fail against - were once abbreviated as hands.’ This is slightly more than reimagining language, it is illustrating a time when the reimagining of language has already occurred as a result of necessity. The reasons behind this need for new words are always kept just outside of the frame and helps the reader focus on something beyond the immediate problem; simple peculiarity of each sentence.
My secret was my lucky bone, worn behind my face for good luck. It was an excellent protection against sorrow. Now seldom seen, at least in the daytime, this bone was worn as an amulet above the neck to ensure a human appearance… Some cultures call it a “head” and decorate it with paint and stones, or cover it with veils, gels, masks, and helmets.
Marcus has included two longer pieces among the shorter stories that make up Leaving The Sea. ‘The Father Costume’ and ‘The Moors’ make up part four and six of the book respectively and are the highlights of the collection. ‘The Father Costume’ was published as a novella in the US in 2002 and its inclusion here sees it reach a UK audience for the first time. Quite frankly, it is one the strangest and most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever seen. The story, as far as it is possible to tell, shows a father and his two sons fleeing their home across the sea. The language is some of the densest and most moving that Marcus has employed. The narrator, the son, begins in typical Marcus fashion, ‘I could not read fabric. I had a language problem.’
This story most closely resembles the style of writing Marcus was employing after The Age of Wire and String. There is plenty of new jargon: ‘Costume Smoother’, ‘Writing Hole’, ‘Bird Metronome’ and ‘Father Disappearing Goggles’ all make regular appearances without explanation, and ask of the reader that they try and use these words in their reading however they would like. The most thrilling thing about this style of writing is the freedom the reader is given to do what they want with the imagery presented.
It is impossible to relax while reading ‘The Father Costume’ or ‘The Moors’ or to drift off to somewhere outside of the narrative. This is true of most of Leaving The Sea – it is writing that demands your attention. There is a definite concept of exchange present in this work, a seemingly mad and incoherent language will reward you if you are prepared to invest your time and effort in it. In a contemporary political climate where investments are principally concerned with financial cost and dividends, it is essential and beautiful to have writing that reminds us of an alternative concept of investment and return, of true value.