Jupiter Magnified by Adam Roberts
Suddenly Jupiter appears above the Earth, "magnified so as to fill half the horizon." It hangs there, portentiously, triggering an existential crisis in those below it. Stina Ekman is one of the many people to live through this event, in a Swedish university town with her boyfriend, a man she passively dislikes. She is a washed-up poet who earns her living as a webcaster on the back of her reputation and Jupiter Magnified is her memoir.
The story is all very familiar: the once brilliant writer, for whom the words no longer come, adding spice to her staid relationship through infidelity, before sliding into depression and finally the blanket of medication. In fact it comes perilously close to being the stereotypical academic's novel, not something you can say of Roberts?s previous work. There is not much to recommend in terms of execution either: the memoir is austere and dull and fatally detached. There are flashes of interest, mostly when Ekman writes about her father, but that's it.
Though the majority of the novella is composed of this memoir it's actually a bit more complicated than that. Roberts is never content to let a text stand nude. His novels are cluttered with notes on translation, glossaries and appendices. Jupiter Magnified is no exception and states from the beginning that it was "translated into English by Adam Roberts". In fact the novella is composed of two halves: Ekman's memoir, translated by Roberts, and her collected poetry, translated by Francis Matthew and introduced by Tomas Sundsvall (the language that he writes in is left ambiguous). Sundsvall is a fellow poet who appears, in not very complimentary terms, in Ekman's memoir. All very meta.
When Iain Banks framed Use Of Weapons with poetry written by a character viewed as a great poet in the novel he made sure he classified them as "Juvenilia and Discarded Drafts". The poetry written by Roberts's persona, on the other hand, is considered to be the best to have appeared in Swedish in recent years. Of course this comes through the filter of Francis Matthew's translation. Matthew appears in a vacuum however and since we know nothing of him this means Roberts tells us nothing of the quality of the translation.
These meta-fictional aspects of his work have never been his most endearing. They reflect a self-consciousness that impacts negatively on his work. It's the critic's impulse, to render his text watertight, but it alienates the reader. Usually his obvious positive qualities outweigh this but here it may be a bridge too far.
I don't know if this is Roberts' first published poetry but several things he has said imply that it is. If it isn't it is definitely his most prominent. One thing is certain though, and that is that Roberts does have an academic background in poetry. I, on the other hand, have no more than a passing familiarity with it and I am certainly not equipped to review it. Obviously this is not an ideal situation but bear with me as I attempt to do just that.
There is much to admire in his poetry and he clearly possesses the two most important things he needs; an eye and an ear. Straight away in [1] we are told:My eyes have eaten all this light,
will hoard it in their plumpness.
My pupils' always-open mouths,
hungry for more:
This is excellent. His observations on the relationship between light and our bodies are always acute, such as the above quote or where he says that "light/catches on our teeth/packs itself into our open mouths" in [7]. There is much more like this. Equally good are his observations on the tactile nature of light; "this planet-wide brushstroke of a million bristles". Generally Roberts is at his best when interrogating a single image, when dealing with fragments. For this reason [16] is perhaps the single most successful poem, reading in its entirety:The sea nought-and-crossed with
a million ridged lines,
old scars
standing proud of the skin
marks left by the passing
razors of wind and light.
The counterpoint to this is seen in a sustained but unsuccessful examination of a butterfly in [6] and in the fact that whenever form becomes more adventurous the results are less satisfying.
So what are we to make of this as a whole? Do the early 'Poems About Light' give context to Ekman's memoir which in turn contextualises her final work, 'Jupiter'? Or rather, since of course they do, is it actually all about Jupiter? This seems too far to go for a lone poem, especially one that is not the strongest on display. In fact Sundsvall explicitly warns against this interpretation (not that we would trust him). At the same time he says "nobody understood the phenomenon on a deep, instinctual level like Stina; her poems function as the most eloquent examination of the phenomenon we have." His faith seems quite misplaced.
The novella is about light, yet Jupiter itself often seems to act in opposition to this. It is an opaque smudge that occludes rather than illuminates. For a symbol that should have mythic resonance it seems curiously lumpen. The novella was apparently inspired by a dream of Jupiter but you can?t help thinking the poems are the product of a Mediterranean holiday and that Jupiter Magnified is a vehicle for displaying them. This is not a criticism of his method of production: I don't expect Roberts to remain locked in a garret, I simply wonder whether a science fictione novella is the best location to house poems that are not - in content or inspiration - science fictional. It could simply be a rare case of too much context. This is a shame because while I cannot recommend Ekman's self-pitying autobiography, her poetry is an entirely different matter.
This review originally appeared in The Alien Online May 2003.
The story is all very familiar: the once brilliant writer, for whom the words no longer come, adding spice to her staid relationship through infidelity, before sliding into depression and finally the blanket of medication. In fact it comes perilously close to being the stereotypical academic's novel, not something you can say of Roberts?s previous work. There is not much to recommend in terms of execution either: the memoir is austere and dull and fatally detached. There are flashes of interest, mostly when Ekman writes about her father, but that's it.
Though the majority of the novella is composed of this memoir it's actually a bit more complicated than that. Roberts is never content to let a text stand nude. His novels are cluttered with notes on translation, glossaries and appendices. Jupiter Magnified is no exception and states from the beginning that it was "translated into English by Adam Roberts". In fact the novella is composed of two halves: Ekman's memoir, translated by Roberts, and her collected poetry, translated by Francis Matthew and introduced by Tomas Sundsvall (the language that he writes in is left ambiguous). Sundsvall is a fellow poet who appears, in not very complimentary terms, in Ekman's memoir. All very meta.
When Iain Banks framed Use Of Weapons with poetry written by a character viewed as a great poet in the novel he made sure he classified them as "Juvenilia and Discarded Drafts". The poetry written by Roberts's persona, on the other hand, is considered to be the best to have appeared in Swedish in recent years. Of course this comes through the filter of Francis Matthew's translation. Matthew appears in a vacuum however and since we know nothing of him this means Roberts tells us nothing of the quality of the translation.
These meta-fictional aspects of his work have never been his most endearing. They reflect a self-consciousness that impacts negatively on his work. It's the critic's impulse, to render his text watertight, but it alienates the reader. Usually his obvious positive qualities outweigh this but here it may be a bridge too far.
I don't know if this is Roberts' first published poetry but several things he has said imply that it is. If it isn't it is definitely his most prominent. One thing is certain though, and that is that Roberts does have an academic background in poetry. I, on the other hand, have no more than a passing familiarity with it and I am certainly not equipped to review it. Obviously this is not an ideal situation but bear with me as I attempt to do just that.
There is much to admire in his poetry and he clearly possesses the two most important things he needs; an eye and an ear. Straight away in [1] we are told:My eyes have eaten all this light,
will hoard it in their plumpness.
My pupils' always-open mouths,
hungry for more:
This is excellent. His observations on the relationship between light and our bodies are always acute, such as the above quote or where he says that "light/catches on our teeth/packs itself into our open mouths" in [7]. There is much more like this. Equally good are his observations on the tactile nature of light; "this planet-wide brushstroke of a million bristles". Generally Roberts is at his best when interrogating a single image, when dealing with fragments. For this reason [16] is perhaps the single most successful poem, reading in its entirety:The sea nought-and-crossed with
a million ridged lines,
old scars
standing proud of the skin
marks left by the passing
razors of wind and light.
The counterpoint to this is seen in a sustained but unsuccessful examination of a butterfly in [6] and in the fact that whenever form becomes more adventurous the results are less satisfying.
So what are we to make of this as a whole? Do the early 'Poems About Light' give context to Ekman's memoir which in turn contextualises her final work, 'Jupiter'? Or rather, since of course they do, is it actually all about Jupiter? This seems too far to go for a lone poem, especially one that is not the strongest on display. In fact Sundsvall explicitly warns against this interpretation (not that we would trust him). At the same time he says "nobody understood the phenomenon on a deep, instinctual level like Stina; her poems function as the most eloquent examination of the phenomenon we have." His faith seems quite misplaced.
The novella is about light, yet Jupiter itself often seems to act in opposition to this. It is an opaque smudge that occludes rather than illuminates. For a symbol that should have mythic resonance it seems curiously lumpen. The novella was apparently inspired by a dream of Jupiter but you can?t help thinking the poems are the product of a Mediterranean holiday and that Jupiter Magnified is a vehicle for displaying them. This is not a criticism of his method of production: I don't expect Roberts to remain locked in a garret, I simply wonder whether a science fictione novella is the best location to house poems that are not - in content or inspiration - science fictional. It could simply be a rare case of too much context. This is a shame because while I cannot recommend Ekman's self-pitying autobiography, her poetry is an entirely different matter.
This review originally appeared in The Alien Online May 2003.