Andy Owen’s “Invective”

One of the best-known opening lines in an American novel is “Call me Ishamel.” (At least I think it’s one of the best-known opening lines.) The opening line of Andy Owen’s short novel Invective is something similar, and meant to imply something of the same meaning: “You can call me Ishmael.”

Ishmael, of course, was the son of Abraham by Hagar, the servant of his wife Sarah. It is through Ishmael whom many of the Arab peoples are descended, while the Jewish people descended from Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah. One son received Abraham’s blessing; one did not. In fact, Ishamel was banished with his mother, and nearly died in the desert.

The Ishmael of Invective is in something of a similar situation; he is seriously injured and possibly dying in the desert as well, but it’s a different time and a different desert. As he lies there with death and destruction around him, his mind moves back to how he came to be in this position in the first place.

Raised by parents in Birmingham, England, who are of Indian ancestry, Ishmael is studying to be a doctor. He comes to learn that he is adopted and the son of a Muslim suicide bomber. And he begins to investigate who his father was, which brings him into two shadowy worlds – that of radical Islam and that of Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Owen has also written East of Coker, another story of war and its aftermath, using elements of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to structure and develop the story. With Invective, that arresting opening ties this story to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with “the great white whale” being terrorism and its counterpart.

Invective is s a story right off the front pages of todays newspapers.

Related:

Using T.S. Eliot to Explain PTSD – my review of Owen’s East of Coker at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Using T.S. Eliot to Explain PTSD

East Coker is a village in Somersetshire. In 1667, Andrew Eliot emigrated from the village to the New World, and specifically the American colonies. A little more than two centuries later, one of Andrew’s direct descendants was born in St. Louis, and would grow up to write poetry. He would name one of his poems “East Coker,” for the village of his ancestors. The poem was one of four “quartets,” originally published individually as pamphlets in England during World War II. The four would eventually be published together in America under the title of Four Quartets.

The poet, of course, is T.S. Eliot, who is more associated with what we describe as “modernism” than virtually any other poet. (Other modernist poets include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens.) Modernism has much to do with the changes that racked Western society and culture following the Industrial Revolution, the population shift from rural to urban areas, the scientific revolution, and World War I. Context had changed; culture had changed. Society was disjointed, a kind of “waste land,” to use Eliot’s phrase, collectively suffering what we call today “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” People had become “hollow men.”

It is these modernist images from Eliot that we find embedded in East of Coker, a novella-length work by U.K. writer Andy Owen.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: T.S. Eliot in the 1920s, when he wrote The Waste Land.