Read It In Books:As I Lay Dying.

"BEFORE us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again" - Darl

"As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades" - Agamemnon to Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.

Seven years after first picking the book up in a wonderful antiquarian bookshop in Hay-on-Wye (during my epic Offa's Dyke Path walk) I finally set about reading, properly - I started once and never got far - things were on my mind, William Faulkner's 1930 Southern Gothic novel As I Lay Dying. 

In truth, I'd been put off a bit by the way the book is structured. Fifteen different narrators telling their own version of the story, some of them - no doubt - unreliable, felt as if it could be daunting to follow so I figured I'd have to pay attention pretty hard - and I am a very easily distracted person. Those Jetpunk online quizzes don't fill themselves in.

I wasn't wrong. It was, indeed, daunting in places. Narration and interior monologues blur into one, some of those narrators were unreliable as suspected, and characters struggle with their sanity - which is reflected in the way they relate the events of the story. But it wasn't difficult to read. I thought of it like a conversation. 

If you were to transcribe just one hour long phone call with a friend it would look like quite a lot, and it would jump all over the place, pulling in many disparate strands, but there would be some kind of overwhelming narrative at the core of it and there would be a sense of place, and a sense of time too. The German dadaist Kurt Schwitters made collages of found objects like sweet wrappers, stones, and magazine cuttings and somehow these, somewhat abstractly, told a story of where he came from and what it was like.

William Faulkner was operating at a similar time as, though in a very different place from, Schwitters but, in a way, As I Lay Dying takes a similar approach. It tells the tale of the ailing, and soon to die, Addie Bundren and the road journey (mule and cart) her family take across Mississippi in order to fulfil her wish to be buried in her home town of Jefferson.

Along the way there are fires, broken legs, and interactions with locals that often don't end particularly well but, beyond that, the dynamic of the family unit and their neighbours and friends is played out. Often you're not sure exactly what is happening. You don't know where you are as much as you feel where you.

Which made it, at times, tricky for me to get a handle on. But I came to realise that was less important than with some other books. Anse, Addie's husband (and, quite soon, widower), leads his five children across land and water in a quest to grant Addie's dying wish but does he have another agenda? Do the children?

Cash, the eldest, is a performatively "good carpenter" who has built his mother, herself being proud of a homely skill too - baking, a coffin that does little to prevent the smell of death from escaping. Darl, the second eldest son, narrates more chapters than anyone else and this seems to reflect his character - that of a boy that thinks too much for his own good. It is suggested nothing good can come of this.

Third son Jewel is the result of Addie's affair with a local reverend though this is hardly mentioned. Dewey Dell, Anse and Addie's solitary daughter, has been impregnated by a local farmer, Lafe, and though her sentences are very specific and sometimes quite poetic they are poorly constructed. Her language skills and knowledge of life are both so limited she can't articulate her demand for an abortion when visiting pharmacies en route.

Finally, there is Vardaman. The youngest of the five children who narrates in long, rambling, and nonsensical sentences. One of which, and this one constitutes a whole chapter in its entirety, simply reads "my mother is a fish". Even though Darl, elsewhere in the book disputes this, insisting Addie was, in fact, a horse.

This side order of surrealism only slightly skewers the Southern Gothic and, with the assistance of neighbours Vernon and Cora Tull (he a farmer, she overbearingly pious in her Christianity) a tale is told that feels very Southern (porches, buzzards, steers, buttermilk, cotton-houses, Sunday best, levees, mules, and frayed and broken straw hats) and also, of course, a little gothic.

At one point there's even a diagram of a coffin not so much as an illustration but almost as if part of the text. Which is occasionally peppered with what seem like quite Faulkner specific terms, pussel-gutted stood out, and a couple of very of their time, and certainly place, n bombs.

Problematic to some but almost definitely historically accurate. Elsewhere, the turns of phrase are easier to enjoy. Vernon Tull says, of Anse, "I never see him with a shirt on that looked like it was his in all my life", a set of eyes are "round and black in the middle like when you throw a light in a owl's face" and Anse, in a rare philosophical mood, decrees that trees and men were made, by the lord of course, "up-and-down ways" so shouldn't move like roads or wagons before later remarking that his elder sons are, now, "man-growed".

Grieving Anse's face, in which "a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement flowed" is described as if looking as if it's been "carved by a savage caricaturist" and, later on, Tull says he looks like an "uncurried horse". Tull's good for that sort of stuff. Jewel's eyes look like "pieces of a broken plate" and a horse looks like a "patchwork quilt hung on a line" while Addie also gets to exercise her power of creative expression, describing Anse "driving" his eyes at her like "two hounds in a strange yard".

When Addie finally tells us both her back story, how she met Anse, and her philosophy the book starts to come to life. Words are just shapes to fill holes in life, fear was invented by someone who had never experienced it, pride too, and the violation of her 'aloneness' was what had made her whole. She's a complicated character and this perhaps explains a section of the book in which Darl ponders the difference between his waking and sleeping selves before concluding, cryptically, that "I am is"

For Addie, names, like words, form shapes and it seem as if her intelligence and curiosity are in permanent conflict with her poverty, societal expectations of her duty to be a mother, and a crushing and all encompassing sense of religious duty. Addie tries to resolve this with her articulacy but struggles and Darl, again, is the child that has been burdened with a similar sense of trying to make sense of that which makes none.

Of death, of poverty, of duplicity, and of how one person can never truly know what another person is thinking. To use some slang from the book, at times you may think "what in the tarnation?" is happening here? This strange documentary in which various talking heads tell their own story in their own way.

It's not until the very end you become certain and, even then, there are questions left hanging. The sense of unease both in these poor rustic lifestyles and in the brains of creative, and human, people is never fully removed and that is one of the reasons why, I think, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is seen as a figurehead piece of literature in the Southern Renaissance. These folk that, at first glance, on the surface, appear simple - they contain multitudes. We all do.