Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

If you click that ‘Cunningham’ tag above, you’ll see how much I love his writing. He is one of my favourite living writers, and I am getting unsettlingly close to having read everything he has published so far – one of the ones I hadn’t raced towards is 2005’s Specimen Days, and the reason is that it takes me very out of my comfort zones.

It’s a novel of three periods – much like Cunningham’s best-known book, The Hours, though in Specimen Days the periods do not interweave. Rather, there are about a hundred pages devoted to each – New York in the nineteenth-century, in a contemporary world still rocked by 9/11, and in a sci-fi future that I don’t remember the exact dates of. In each period are Simon, Catherine, and Lucas (or close variations on those names). They have different relationships in each section and, indeed, only two of them are alive in the first and second sections. It’s an intriguing and inventive premise – but did it work?

In the first period, Lucas is a young teenager starting work at a metalworks – taking over from his brother, Simon, who was killed in an accident with one of the machines. He has to go to earn money for his parents, but also wants to give some of it to Catherine – the woman who was going to marry Simon, and with whom Lucas has an uncertain relationship. Lucas is devoted; Catherine is a little unnerved, affectionate, troubled. It doesn’t help that Lucas can only communicate in Walt Whitman quotes, most of the time.

Walt Whitman is one of the most prominent connections between the sections. He actually appears as a character, briefly, in the first section – but, in each, there is a character who speaks chiefly in quotes from his poetry. In the first it is Lucas; in the second it is a child phoning in warnings about bombings (more on that soon); in the third it’s a robot. I was expecting more links and overlaps between the sections, but Cunningham doesn’t play overly with this conceit – so it’s Whitman’s words that form the threads between the worlds. Which would probably mean more to someone who had read some Whitman, which I have never done… I believe Leaves of Grass is still a text most high schoolers study in America, but Whitman is much less read here in the UK and I suspect I lost some of the significance that was intended.

Anyway, back to the 19th century. Historical fiction is a tricky genre for me, but I loved how Cunningham took us into Lucas’s world – with an accurate range of expression from an uneducated teenager in the midst of shocking grief. His job in the factory is simply putting metal plates into a machine to be stamped, and Cunningham manages to convey the almost dehumanising monotony of this in, paradoxically, a way that is captivating to read.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

Man, Cunningham is good.

My favourite of the three sections, unsurprisingly, was the central, contemporary section. Catherine is now Cat, who works as the receiver of calls to the police that might pose plausible threats. Most of the calls she gets are from mentally unwell people who pose no real threat – who think their TV is spying on them, or that they are psychic, and so forth.

If the caller suggests that somebody is making them do something, then she has to ‘red tag’ the call, and elevate it to a different team – because if somebody else is instructing them, whether that person is real or not, then the threat becomes much more credible. In the call she receives from a young boy, she doesn’t red-tag when he says ‘I wasn’t supposed to call’.

It may or may not have made a difference – but not long afterwards, a politician is murdered when a boy hugs him and detonates a bomb. They spend some time trying to work out a connection, but it may be more unsettling: random attacks. Then Cat begins to get mysterious phonecalls from another boy who claims to be ‘in the family’ with the first caller.

In this period, Simon is Cat’s rich, obnoxious boyfriend. I shan’t spoil who Lucas is, but it’s a great twist. Cunningham is so good at the dynamics among a group of people, and I was totally absorbed in this contemporary world. He doesn’t need high stakes to make a narrative compelling, but they added something a little unusual here – and the final words of this section will stay with me for a long time.

And then the third section… Reader, I tried. I really did. But I simply have a brain block when it comes to a world of robots and invading aliens and whatnot. I never really knew what was going on, who was human and who was programmed or what the aliens were up to, and I ended up skim-reading it. I don’t really have anything to say, except I’m sure the problem was with me rather than Cunningham.

So it was definitely a curate’s egg for me. I will try anything Cunningham writes, but even a prose stylist as beguilingly good as him couldn’t get me past my own prejudices – or, rather, my own stumbling blocks. If you share mine, then I still recommend you read the first two thirds of this novel. And if you don’t share mine, then you’ll doubtless find a lot to love right to the final page.

Cunningham hasn’t published a novel for seven years, so I feel like one MUST be around the corner somewhere. His most recent is the brilliant The Snow Queen, and I would love him to do another like that, using a smaller conceit and keeping things in the real, contemporary world. And hopefully soon?