What about Michael Knight's new book The Typist

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Prospero

New fiction

Beatifically sordid

Nov 8th 2010, 21:28 by More Intelligent Life, M.Y. | NEW YORK

GAMBLING, prostitutes, bomb craters and black-market transactions: these are the exigencies of a military occupation, or at least of America's occupation of Tokyo in the mid-1940s. Given the sin-rich atmosphere of “The Typist”, a short novel from Michael Knight, it may come as a surprise that the tone is more beatific than vulgar. But then Mr Knight has never shied away from taking the unexpected angle in his fiction.

“The Typist” begins with Francis Vancleave (“Van”), a young Alabama native who joins the army in 1944 and ships out a year and a half before America drops bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Van is relocated to Tokyo to work as a typist soon after the surrender, churning out directives issued by the brass as well as memos on dental hygiene and runaway inflation. While his roommate shacks up with a local girl and mingles with unsavoury types, Van takes orders, avoids trouble and types letters home to his young wife. He’s a decent person placed in circumstances that tend to rough up young men.
This decency provokes Van to send a birthday gift of tin soldiers to the son of his commander, General MacArthur. The General responds by unexpectedly inviting Van to play with the eight-year old Arthur, a pampered and marooned child. The two develop a brotherly relationship, playing wholesomely on an imaginary battlefield. (“You can’t do that—” Arthur says when Van arranges his soldiers in an ambush position. “The Romans always advance in a phalanx.”) The General, pleased that Van is socialising his son, arranges for the play dates to continue, generating both resentment and curiosity among the other enlisted men.

“I learned to type without reading at all," notes Van of his work, "to let information pass directly from my eyes to my fingers without registering in my conscious mind, and this did wonders for my speed and precision.” This is an apt metaphor for a soldier’s life during the occupation. Van’s modus operandi is not a denial of facts so much as a decision to let the facts pass unanalysed, as Tokyo “return[s] to the business of rising from the ashes” around him. Van’s wife notifies him that she has become pregnant by another man; a military tribunal puts the prime minister of Japan in the defendant’s box, and a tragedy occurs which implicates Van and terminates his relationship with the General’s son. Yet Van keeps typing.

“Beatific” is an unusual way to describe a novel whose plot turns on sordid events, but Mr Knight’s prose transforms even cheap booze and poor weather into lovely atmospheric touches. Liquor tastes “like fruit and kerosene” while snowflakes dart “like schools of fish outside the windows”. Even a brothel “didn’t feel as tawdry as it sounds. The windows were lit with paper lanterns and the girls all smelled like ginger.” Mr Knight’s elegant prose recalls the fiction of W.G. Sebald, another author who explored the melancholy postwar consciousness with subtle mastery.

“The Typist” by Michael Knight is published by Atlantic Monthly Press in America and is out now

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Named for the hero of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", an expert in the power of books and the arts, this blog features literary insight and cultural commentary from our correspondents, and includes our coverage of the art market.

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