THE BIG BLIND BY LAVIE TIDHAR

the big blind by Lavie Tidhar

20/4/2021

Do you remember those old nun comedies like Sister Act and Nuns On The Run? Those packs of feral nuns, some scary, some jolly, some meek, all rubbing along together in the name of the Lord and engaging in whimsically incongruous behaviour like drinking in bars and gambling…This book is all that, and more,

Lavie Tidhar is a writer famous for the variety of his output: sci-fi, thrillers, fantasy…the man has done it all, with a reputation for quality the common factor across this variegated body of work. I have to say “reputation”, because this actually the first time I’ve read a Tidhar book myself. In terms of length, his latest offering, The Big Blind, is an ideal place to start, since it’s a novella that can be easily finished in two or three sittings. Thanks to the efforts of book designer Pedro Marques this slim hardback is also possibly the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen from PS – just seeing a photo of the cover doesn’t prepare you for the experience of handling it. The potential for pleasing contrast inherent to the plot (a trainee nun enters the world of professional poker to drum up funds for her nunnery) is fully exploited by Marques’ blend of traditional playing card art and ecclesiastical richness of colour.

The same can’t be said for the words. If there is one thing this novella lacks, it’s colour. This is a surprise given the value placed by card game fans on the aesthetic side of things, with poker being particularly associated with a certain kind of dirty glamour. While the book is filled with long blocks of poker jargon - I would say about a quarter of it is raw poker terminology - the cards in the players’ hands could be checkout receipts for all the mystique that comes off them.

There is almost no sense of place, either. The settings – ordinary houses, soup kitchens, lamplit streets, poker dens great and small – are lacking in geographical identity to an unusual degree and the dialogue is the same. The city in this novella is pure Someplace, USA, and I was startled to realize that it’s actually meant to be Dublin. Yes, that Dublin, in Ireland, here recognizable only by outbursts of bad cuisine and a larger-than-usual headcount of nuns.

I initially thought that this lack of identity might be an attempt by Tidhar to avoid the usual barrage of try-hard hip clichés associated with both poker and Irish culture. But in fact clichés are the backbone of this book. Do you remember those old nun comedies like Sister Act and Nuns On The Run? Those packs of feral nuns, some scary, some jolly, some meek, all rubbing along together in the name of the Lord and engaging in whimsically incongruous behaviour like drinking in bars and gambling…This book is all that, and more, because the soup is further thickened with a huge dollop of hokey old tournament comedy (think films like Kingpin or Baseketball.)

I personally found it hard to swallow. Although an agnostic, I am interested in the spiritual paroxysms of religious folk (as explored in Phil Rickman’s early Merrily Watkins novels, for instance) and don’t find the desire to join holy orders intrinsically risible or wicked. But a lot has happened in the Irish Catholic landscape since those 80s and 90s feelgood comedies, and for me the horrors of Bon Secours and the Magdalene laundries are just too recent to allow me to go along with Tidhar’s light-hearted comedy, which deliberately exists in a total social vacuum. I think this has a knock-on effect on Claire’s character development, too: perhaps constrained by the short format, Tidhar fails to provide a compelling evocation of the reasons why a bright and talented young woman would want to devote her entire life to the Church.

But then, Claire as a whole is a character oddly lacking in agency, considering that the novella is all about the dilemmas she faces. She seems doomed to a choice between serving the memory of her late father (yes, a wastrel poker player) and old Nobodaddy, and much like her mother (who we learn devoted her life to cleaning up her fathers’ messes) Claire eventually dissolves into a sea of typically female abnegation without ever really asserting a sense of self. Although she does make the choices the plot requires of her, she drifts around the poker tournament with reactions that seem muted and second-hand, to an extent far beyond the requirements of the “poker face”. Even her attraction to handsome competitor Mikey is weirdly asexual (in Hollywood terms he’s very much a pre-Brando heart-throb, all nice clean smiles and hair.) It could all be a study in high-functioning depression, though the cheesy comic framework seems to refute this. Intentionally or otherwise, the end is as predictable as it is depressing.

As a very amateur poker player I did enjoy the accounts of the various games Claire plays, some of which are very absorbing, and I appreciated the brevity of style. This isn’t a book that will take up too much of your time. But it has a very definite audience, and I just wasn’t it.

The daughter of a legendary card player with skills of her own, Claire doesn t want to go into the family business. She s heard the call, and she desperately wants to become a nun. But when her convent comes under financial threat, Claire must leave what she loves to save what she loves and enter an international poker tournament.
Both a poker novella and a meditation on faith, The Big Blind is a taut, heartfelt and compelling new book from multiple award winner Lavie Tidhar.