A book that caught my eye: Helen Rickerby
It isn’t until you hold the book in your hands and begin to read that you’ll really get just how disorienting the cover design of I’m Working on a Building by Pip Adam is.
We all know how book covers work: there’s a back and a front and a spine. The spine is on the left of the front cover, and the right of the back cover. We know how novels work: characters move through time chronologically (even if there are flashbacks); there’s a beginning, a middle and an end – in that order. But let go of what you think you know…
The intriguing full cover of I’m Working on a Building by Pip Adam
The front cover of I’m Working on a Building (designed by Philip Kelly) is simple enough: a photographic image in shades of blue of a tall building and a coast, and a line of words – the title, a dash and, in case we might be confused and think this is a DIY manual or some such, the words ‘a novel by Pip Adam’.
The tower does look a little out of place and, despite the reflection in the water, you can tell it’s been Photoshopped in (this is confirmed when you look at the back cover, which has the same picture minus the tower), but that isn’t what is strange about it.
What’s strange is that the picture is upside down. Or are the words upside down? The traditional mechanics of books (spine on the left) suggests it is indeed the picture that’s upside down. But when you turn the book over, the back cover is now upside down, with words at that less familiar angle, and Pip standing somehow on her head. Turn it right side up, and it’s almost another front cover (with the spine on the left).
It’s all a bit dizzying, and appropriately so, because I’m Working on a Building is a beautifully disorienting novel. It throws you in the deep end, opening with a chapter on the building of the tower depicted on the cover: a replica of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (the tallest building in the world). This recreation is being constructed on the South Island’s West Coast, and when we first meet our protagonist Catherine, a building engineer, she is working on this building project. Each chapter is about – and usually takes its name from – a different building, some local and some international. Each chapter throws you into a different place, often with new characters, a different narrator or focus character, and with a different style and tone.
Adam has said that in most fiction featuring architecture it is a symbolic representation of the characters, whereas she has made the characters representations of the buildings. What a daring and fantastic idea! But it’s not just the characters – the very writing – the tone and style of each chapter – is influenced by and reflects that chapter’s building.
Similarly, the book’s somewhat unusual physical design is representative of the novel within. While it quickly became apparent that this novel wasn’t chronological, it did take me a few chapters to realise that it was actually running backwards, spiralling me back into the past to see not what will happen, exactly, but to see what has happened and how it all ended up as it began. And, fittingly for a book with two front covers, you can read the novel again (as I did, and as apparently others have also felt compelled to do) chapter by chapter, from the end to the beginning – which is the end, if you follow me.
And it certainly is a novel that bears re-reading. It isn’t just a structural exercise without merit – all this experimentation and imagination, combined with very subtly drawn and slowly revealed characters, has created a book unlike any I have read before and which was both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. And somehow, for such a comparatively slim novel, it carries surprising weight, depth and density. There are metaphorical concrete blocks hidden somehow beneath the words.
While I was reading, I kept on picking up the book the wrong way, trying to open it from the back, or upside down, and I thought how cool it was that a novel concerned with the structure of buildings, and the structure of stories, made me think so much about the structure of a physical book. As much as I appreciate the possibility of ebooks, this physical experience isn’t something you’re going to get from your ereader.
Helen Rickerby has published two-and-a-half books of poetry, and her new collection, Cinema, will be published by Mākaro Press in early 2014. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books, and she is co-managing editor of JAAM literary journal. She blogs irregularly at wingedink.blogspot.com and has a day job as a web editor.
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