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THE BIRD ROOM
Chris Killen Reviewed by John Holten |
(Canongate
Books 2009)
Doris
Lessing doesn’t know what a blogroll is. We can be certain of this: she just
doesn’t know. Chris Killen knows what a blogroll is. His blogroll contains such
names as Zachery German, Tao Lin or Jenn Ashworth. His blog is called Day of
Moustaches. It won an award: the 2007 Manchester Literary Festival's Blog
Award. Doris Lessing also won an award that year, but she doesn’t like blogs.
She wondered in her big speech if, ‘We
never thought to ask how will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the
internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even
quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to
cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging.’ Are
literary blogs inane we are left wondering? Are bloggers all addicted, anaemic
cabbages? Chris Killen’s debut novel, and very fine debut novel it is, called
‘The Bird Room’, is full of things Internet (it’s even got Internet
metaphors!). Blogrolls are the age’s literary salons, it’s that simple.
As a writer myself I have often been tempted to start a literary blog,
but haven’t to date (I do run a website but that’s a different beast somehow).
I have spent a lot of time reading the blogs belonging to Killen and those on
his blogroll. There may be some inanities, quite a lot of irony, and a general
break from what the latest English Nobel Laureate finds so important to
maintain. They all seem to be doing something new and irreverent – exactly like
they should. This is always the way of it: we're in the middle of a generation
gap with the rise of the Internet and social networking sites, print on demand
technology and immediate opportunities for publication allowing the younger
generation to quite literally re-invent publication. Knut Hamsun, one of
Killen’s influences, was advised by Björnstjerne Björnson – his elder – to give
it all up and become an actor: advice thankfully unheeded. Another Norwegian
Erlend Loe published in 1998 a novel entitled ‘Naïve Supa’ (it was translated
and published by Killen’s publisher Canongate in 2002) and introduced to
literature a generation that has nothing to fight against, has no worries,
‘glasur-generasjonen’ (the icing generation) who grew up in ‘the most
successful country in the world.’ What kind of
literature, we were forced to ask, does that produce? I think an answer can be
found in ‘The Bird Room’, a novel where the reader finds men full of doubt,
wrapped around the proverbial finger of their more strong-willed girlfriends,
where the dominant social, and even economic force, is the Internet. This is
not exactly going to be literature engagé à la Sartre.
The narrator of one narrative strand in ‘The Bird Room’ is a young man
called Will. He quits his job, but shortly afterwards finds a girlfriend,
Alice. It all goes wrong as he slowly fades from his world, from his
relationship, until he eventually asks Alice to ignore him. Which she does. He
wonders if he still exists. He rings Dixons and asks about widescreen TVs, just
to hear his own voice. He ‘works’ at home remember; he’s full of doubt. It
could be all a load of Coupland Generation X shenanigans, but it’s safe to say
that it is not.
There is a second narrative strand, that of Helen, who is an actress. It
is told in the third person (unfortunately there is very little difference in
this style than that of Will’s). Slowly, the two stands twirl together in a
neat, somewhat satisfactory double helix.
The super-naïvism that characterises the mood of this novel can be
summed up as that style which can comfortably represent all the irony,
disconnected youthfulness, smartalecky frankness and modern-day angst that is
unique to our own blog-laden day. Of course all these things are present in the
Oslo of Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’: it’s the delivery that matters, and in terms of
style, Killen is one of our own, a writer of our time and domain. Short
staccato sentences, an omniscient murmur that isn’t actually all that
interested in knowing everything, prose that smirks as its reader, holding its
owns self-conscious sprezzatura up to literary pretensions. I think it is safe
to say, and not as a means of veiled criticism, that reading Killen’s novel is
an equal experience of Hemingway’s limpidness, Hamsun’s wildness as well as the
seductions and influence of leaving comments on a blog or Facebook wall, text
messaging and emails and the art of thumbnail, online portraiture. In short,
it’s very familiar; it is seemingly effortless.
I have mentioned Google before in a short story, and it appears more and
more in literature, just as it does in people’s lives, and God knows will
continue to more and more as more writers use it for research. Killen goes a
step further than I have yet seen and uses it as a fully fledged metaphorical
device generator. We’re asked to picture in our heads: ‘A small
terraced house, like the first result on a Google image search for ‘English
suburbia.’’ (Doing so didn’t actually produce anything close to
the desired result for me, but it still functioned as a healthy simile).
As Will’s relationship with Alice threatens to topple into paranoia,
another Will, the narrator’s artist friend, enters the frame. Free of the
self-conscious neuroses of our narrator he only further threatens the
relationship. He is a curious character this Will, he would seem to represent
the one character free of inner distress. I read it wondering if a commentary
on the artist in society was going to surface. It does in a way; Killen’s
painting of the dopey art student transformed into a successful career artist
is amusing and accurate, and acts as telling contrast to the more conventional
aspirations of the other young people. (Killen talks of an ‘art preview’, one
of the few times reading the novel I was left wondering isn’t it in reality something
else: namely an ‘art opening’) The second strand of the novel concerns Helen,
who finds men on the Internet willing to pay to film her to do various weird
and lewd things. Porn, like the Internet, serves Killen well. The existential
chatter constantly going on in both narrative strands rarely plumb
psychological depths – but that’s okay. Like Adam Thwirlwell’s debut ‘Politics’
(Cape, 2003), which curiously mirrors ‘The Bird Room’ with its own complicated
ménage a trios of contemporary day love and ironic style of millennial
existentialism, the perspective applied by Killen fits comfortably with what he
tries to fit in the frame.
Reading a wonderful passage on staying at home all day, jacking off to
porn on the Internet that is conducted in the second person singular, one
intimates Killen’s ability to reverse the distancing effect of the Internet
Doris Lessing so abhors. Like George Perec so wonderfully showed in ‘Un homme
qui dort’, addressing the reader with an ambiguous ‘you’, results in an odd, unnerving
engagement, blurring the boundary between the addressee and narrator/central
character.
Toby Litt’s puff (and Toby Litt would often seem to be in many ways the
T. S. Eliot to a generation of Internet savvy young writers such as Killen)
describes ‘The Bird Room’ as ‘a beautiful Chinese puzzle
of a novel’, and that does it admirable justice beyond its
remit. Despite the brevity, this novel is an entertaining, enjoyable read, its
irony never really over-stepping the mark. This all goes some of the way in
proving that Killen can make the transition from a healthy web literary
presence to the rigour of print publication. It leaves me asking for more and
hoping that his next novel comes along soon and has a bit more girth, one or
two plump love handles.
© John
Holten
Reproduced with permission
Reproduced with permission
http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/birdroom.html
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