 Hogg’s characters, or most of them anyway, must wrestle with a sense of themselves that can no longer be maintained, or honestly presented to the world, and that impels flight, escape and evasion. And it is about transformation and liberation too, about how one becomes what one is.
Reviewed by Paul Kane
Show Me the Sky
by Nicholas Hogg
Canongate Books
June 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1847671578
Show Me the Sky has a complex, sophisticated structure, especially for a first novel. It is in four parts, with several sections – both titled and untitled - in each. There are a handful of parallel narratives and we follow the fate of a number of different characters at once. They include Jim Dent, a copper on the trail of a missing rock star (and elsewhere we also follow Dent as a runaway teenager); Cal, a motorcyclist lost in the wild; Naqarase Baba (or Nelson Babbage), a nineteenth-century translator and missionary returning to his native land of Fiji; and finally there is Billy K himself, singer and guitarist with the rock band the Notorious. These myriad narrative strands gradually refract back upon each other, so that the cumulative effect is to make the novel a window that looks into many rooms at once.
The experience of reading the novel is quite challenging at first, since it takes a while for everything to click into place, but one soon becomes immersed in it. Two things help to sugar the pill: the quest/ PI trope (Dent’s search for Billy) and the sheer quality of the “Show Me the Sky” section, Naqarase Baba’s journal. This offers a virtuoso pastiche of nineteenth century prose, albeit by a church-educated Fijian for whom English is a second language. Set in 1834, the journal records a mission to bring the Christian Gospel to Fiji, and tells (in part) a Conradian tale of colonial excesses. And for the reader it is an assurance that any demands that the novel makes will be rewarded.
This is a novel centred on issues of identity and integrity. Hogg’s characters, or most of them anyway, must wrestle with a sense of themselves that can no longer be maintained, or honestly presented to the world, and that impels flight, escape and evasion. And it is about transformation and liberation too, about how one becomes what one is. Naqarase Baba’s story in particular – concerned as it is with unstable loyalties and competing beliefs that do battle to define the self - stands out as being especially resonant for our multicultural age.
Show Me the Sky is a superb novel that needs to be read more than once to be fully appreciated, which was Ford’s working definition of literature. It is an ambitious and accomplished work and a harbinger of further riches to come.
About the reviewer:Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com
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