The Pursuit of Love

Nancy Mitford is one of those names that I’ve heard of but never really known anything about.  To be honest, I had no idea what kind of books she wrote and so assumed they be quite a lot like Muriel Spark.  I really enjoy Spark and her tales of resourceful women who seem to be decades ahead of their time.  The Pursuit of Love is kind of like that, but instead of telling the story of working class women making their own way, it’s about incredibly wealthy daughters of lords trying to find love while they make their way through the world. 

It’s mostly the story of Linda Radlett, as told by her cousin Fanny.  Linda is obsessed from a very young age by the idea of love.  She doesn’t care about whom it is she ends up loving and so marries the first man she meets, and then leaves him for the next slightly charismatic man she meets before flitting off again to a wealthy French duke.  The book manages to balance the marvellously whimsical and completely dark.  Linda is kind of a moron.  Although she’s in Paris prior to World War Two she has no concept of what’s about to happen and finds the politics of the whole thing completely dull.  This is her saving grace, really, as a character because she’s also a bit of a bitch. 

It’s a gloriously witty book.  The early parts remind me a bit of things like Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging; the wit and the charm and the ingenuity of girls who want to find out about sex and boys.  Their observations on growing up are wickedly cynical, “I think Linda realised there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilised men really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificially and art more or less perfected.”  It’s fun to see the girls develop into into women, even if Linda never really grows up.  She remains obsessed by the idea of “Hons”- the right kind of people, and “counter-Hons” well into adulthood, even going so far as to pronounce her abandoned daughter a “counter-Hon.”  Linda is free-wheeling and self-obsessed.  She’d be a nightmare to know, but it makes for terrific reading.

In contrast to this, The Pursuit of Love also manages to be romantic.  It mocks romantic tropes, but buys into them too.  When Linda and her French duke first meet Linda’s past marriages are described as like people she mistook for friends in the street, only to find out that they were strangers.  The pair do ignore the impending war partially because it doesn’t interest them, but also because they recognise that it will lead to their separation which they need to pretend isn’t on the horizon.  It’s a lovely little tale about being redeemed by love without straying into saccharine sentimentality.

The Pursuit of Love has been a total balm to my disillusionment with reading that’s been going on for the last couple of books.  I’m so glad I read it.  Added to that it kicks off with remembrances of Christmases past with a house full of family.  It really started to get me in the mood for the coming festivities.

I’m now moving on to another Margaret Atwood Tale; The Robber Bride.

At Swim-Two-Birds

First of all, let’s address the important question.  Why the hyphens?  The disappointingly mundane answer is Swim-Two-Birds is a place.  Frankly it’s a shame.  I was dying to know how birds swim.  It’s an odd book.  Reading it is a lot like being talked at by the old mad drunk in the pub.  You know the guy that I mean- the one with the jaundiced eyes who reeks of booze and spews bullshit stories about the time he met Princess Di.  The one everybody edges away from.  Unfortunately, there’s no way of edging away from a book and so the nonsense continues for 200 pages.  And we’re supposed to revel in this.  This is where I reach the crux of why I didn’t enjoy reading At Swim-Two-Birds.  I just didn’t get it. 

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the Henry Miller-esque, “let’s sit around and get drunk without any plot development because we’re writers,” type of book.  This is definitely one of those but, worse than that, it seems to be channelling Ulysses.  I fucking hate Ulysses.  It’s not just the whole set in Dublin and nothing’s happening thing, either.  I think what Flann O’Brien’s going for is comedy modernism.  The result is dreadful poetry about flowers (“O leafy-oak, clumpy-leaved/ You are high above the trees…”) and extracts from stories about telling stories that are based on other stories written in different styles going nowhere.  I’m sure that there are some redeeming features to the book but I was so bored by it all, I didn’t notice them.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  O’Brien has a certain penchant for colons that I (punctuation nerd that I am) can totally get on board with.

I have a difficulty in taking the book seriously.  Part of this is because I just can’t tell if the book’s being serious or not.  There’s one point where it becomes wankily pretentious about the ability of the reader to know characters in books vs plays.  It’s insufferable and I’m only about 90% that it’s intentionally so.  One of the barriers to my taking the book seriously is the author’s photo.  O’Brien- or rather Brian O’Nolan, to use his real name- looks quite a lot like Bruce Campbell dressed as Al Capone.  It’s the same photo as is on his Wikipedia page.  Check it out if you don’t believe me.  It’s one hell of a chin.

Basically, I was unimpressed by the book.  Again, it’s probably not that bad but it’s everything I hate about modernism in one place.  The comedy elements also mean that these are over emphasised- so it kind of ends up being even more modernist than the standard fare which doesn’t help matters at all in endearing the book to me.  I get what O’Brien was going for and I think he got there; but it didn’t produce something that was particularly fun to read.

Up next time around is Nancy Mitford’s In Pursuit of Love.  I’m all done with work until after Christmas, so I’m hoping to get some serious reading done in the next ten days or so.

What Maisie Knew

I don’t have that much personal experience of divorce.  No-one in my family’s really done it- aside from one second cousin (or similarly obscure relative).  And Steph’s divorce dissolved into a sitcom like farce of not letting my great grandmother find out.  It was fun when I was ten, but I’ve never quite figured out why it was necessary.  I’ve since found out that my great grandmother was divorced herself, and at a time when it was actually a bit scandalous.  Anyway, the point is that my main frame of reference for the effects of divorce on the children is anecdotes from friends and Jacqueline Wilson books.  And Jaqueline Wilson wrote about it far better than Henry James.

What Maisie Knew is the story of Maisie Farange and her family.  Her parents wage war over who gets to keep her in the divorce as though she were the good china.  Neither parent is particularly interested in her for reasons beyond cheap point scoring and one-upmanship.  The end result is a (clearly super-responsible) judge decreeing she be shipped back and forth between the two every six months.  Or, at least that’s the idea.  Both her mother and father are chronically incapable of sustaining a monogamous relationship and soon enough they’re off cheating on their new spouses.  Maisie then passes into the care of her cuckholded stepfather and her governess Mrs Wix.  It sounds like a good story, but it’s kind of… completely unengaging. 

I’m not sure if it’s a problem that I have with the way James writes.  I love gothic horror, but The Turn of the Screw bored me half to tears.  I had the same issue with What Maisie Knew- it’s difficult to write about a book that I couldn’t connect with in any meaningful way.  There are bits in it that I know, objectively, are funny but they didn’t hit the mark.  For example, Maisie’s stepmother describes her father as a man who changes in everything every three days, but is completely consistent in the amount he hates her mother.  Usually, I love people being pithy and scathing.  It’s one of my favourite things.  And I don’t know why I don’t love it when James does it.  It’s infuriating.  Maybe I just overtaxed myself with the recent travelling and reading binge I went on.  Fingers crossed that I can get back into the groove for my next read…

I’ve just started Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.  I’m not quite sure yet why it needs so many hyphens.  

Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

I was so looking forward to reading Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.  I’ve mentioned my love for a good crime novel before and I’m a big fan of the Nordic Noir that’s been all over the place in the last couple of years.  So, the amount I didn’t enjoy this book was a huge surprise and, more than that, a huge disappointment.  I can’t put my finger on exactly why I found it so difficult to engage with the book, but I have a few theories…

On the digital version I have of the 1,001 list the book’s called Smilla’s Sense of Snow.  This is a much better title; there’s alliteration, the fact that the “Miss” has been dropped brings it in line with Anglian names- in short, it’s a better (if less literal) translation.  It’s not something I’ve noticed, or really considered to any extent before, the only time I remember noticing it was in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls which is an English book written as through it were translated literally from a Spanish text.  It may be because I know about the alternate titles I spent a lot of the book considering the role of the translator.  There are parts that are clunky in a way that is clearly down to the translation and I think that creates a barrier to enjoying the narrative.  There are two forms of the word “you” in Danish and choses to explain this explicitly at one point, even though there’s enough implication to explain the same.  It makes me wish “thou” was still in common use in English, just so we could avoid the confusion.

Another of my gripes was the constant reference to Smilla’s age.  She’s thirty-seven.  This is not old.  Someone really needs to tell Peter Høeg this.  I’m sure that what he’s going for is a criticism of Danish culture and its treatment of single women; he certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to its racist attitude to Greenlanders, but he misses.  Throughout Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, she is so negative about her age and it doesn’t fit with the rest of the book.  Smilla gives not one shit about what she is supposed to do according to society, but takes incredible care to ensure that no-one sees her bald spot.  She uses the phrase, “at my age” or something similar more than my eighty-something year old grandmother and has exactly the same attitude of incapability towards some things.  If she were a man or even the maverick she professes to be, at thirty-seven she’d still consider herself in the prime of her life.

My third issue with the book was a petty and personal one.  The latter half of the book is taken over by massive ice-breaker ships and docks.  I cannot stand ships.  The idea of industrialised boats and their grime reminds me of the smell of my father’s car when I was a child.  He works with boats and would leave his equipment in his car almost permanently until the stench of the dirt had seeped into the seats.  It would always give me splitting headaches on long car journeys and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow gave me the same kind of headaches. 

I feel a little cheated in all.  There are wonderfully cynical moments; any book that includes the phrase, “nothing corrupts like happiness,” should be a personal favourite instantly.  But these moments are too few and far between.  Smilla sees herself as a renegade, but she’s financially dependent upon her wealthy father still, through choice rather than necessity and, to honest- she’s just kind of a dick.

My next read is What Maisie Knew by Henry James. Considering my past experiences with James, I have a bad feeling about it.

The Golden Notebook

After reading two of her books I’m still not too sure what to make of Doris Lessing.  There was this moment in Shikasta where everything fell into place and I could finally enjoy the book.  I kept expecting that moment in The Golden Notebook, but it just didn’t come.  That’s not to say that this is a bad book at all, it’s just bloody heavy going and I’m not convinced that the pay-off is worth the effort of wading through the book.  It tells the story of Anna Wulf, writer.  While most definitely not suffering from writer’s block she fills four notebooks with ponderings about separate aspects of her life, finally combining them in the titular golden notebook.

I won’t be entirely negative about this book, because there are parts of it that I really enjoyed.  Mostly these moments occur in the black notebook, which is about Anna’s past and her writing life.  One section of it tells a story set in Southern Rhodesia during World War Two and it’s just fantastic.  I think that I liked this bit because it’s simply the part with the most coherent narrative. Nowhere else in The Golden Notebook do people have such clear cut motives.  I get that Lessing is recreating how directionless people actually are and the fact that life is made up of these open ended narratives, but at 576 pages this is a really frustrating read.  There’s a part with a wonderful cliff-hanger in one of the Free Women sections of the book (these chronicle Anna’s current life).  One character attempts suicide and even this, when the narrative resumes goes off at an unexpected and undramatic tangent.

I also really wanted to like this book because it’s full of politically aware and forward thinking women.  Anna and her friends love to discuss socialism and sex and are, for the time, frank about both.  But again, they drift.  Everyone ultimately ends up disillusioned with socialism before it even kicks off and, yes this reflects history but it’s still immensely unsatisfying.  And, as much as I want Anna to be a feminist, after a string of unsuccessful affairs she reveals that her ultimate goal in life is to get married.  She doesn’t need a husband; she’s financially independent and able to look after her daughter.  It’s a ridiculous goal to have.

Ultimately why I don’t like this book is because it feels like an overlong joke.  Throughout, Anna insists that she is not suffering from writer’s block and that she does not want to write another novel.  It’s abundantly clear to basically everyone else that this is a lie.  Anna eventually overcomes this denial about 540 pages into the book and by this point it doesn’t even feel like character development, simply because her character’s been deconstructed to the point that there is no character to develop.  Anna’s character is confused throughout.  She refuses to be defined as a writer at one point in the book because this is just one part of her life, but as the four notebooks show, each element of her life blends into others.  No, she is not one thing, but an intrinsic part of what she is is a writer.  I think I’ve read this book too young.  It’s definitely one of those stories that I feel like I didn’t enjoy because I missed something.  I’m not a mother and I don’t have experiences of socialism that I can compare Anna’s to and I’m just left feeling a bit naïve.

I am currently reading artsy Danish crime thriller Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, by Peter Høeg.

The Talented Mr Ripley

The Talented Mr Ripley is, like Get Shorty, one of those films I haven’t seen because I’ve been waiting until I’ve finished the book.  Also, I sort of thought that I’d already seen and hated it when I was much younger.  But it turns out that was Catch Me If You Can.  Added to that, it turns out that Patricia Highsmith also wrote Strangers on a Train, which is an awesome film.  Basically, this all meant I quickly overcame my initial trepidation about The Talented Mr Ripley.  And I’m very glad I did because this is a pretty decent read.  It’s not the most highbrow or heavy going thing out but it’s a good old yarn.

According to imdb, the book and film are actually slightly different.  So, a quick recap of the plot may be necessary.  Tom Ripley is paid by the wealthy Mr Greenleaf to travel to Europe and persuade his errant son Dickie to return to America.  This leads to an odd friendship between the two men, which is constantly under threat from Dickie’s sometime girlfriend and Tom’s money worries.  Knowing time is short Tom murders Dickie and assumes his identity.  Things go downhill from here.

The friendship between Tom and Dickie is completely ambiguous.  Tom is obsessed with Dickie, that much is clear but whether it’s because he’s in love with him or because he wants to be him is never clarified.  Once Tom takes over Dickie’s life, he certainly enjoys the riches but he is genuinely hurt by the breakdown of their friendship.  Dickie’s girlfriend Meredith is certain they’re having an affair, but Tom believes himself incapable of forming attachments to other people.  This is one of the more interesting elements of the novel.  Although he enjoys the money, Tom quickly comes to realise that he will always be alone for as long as he is Dickie Greenleaf.  He accepts this as a necessity of his life- even before the whole murder thing, he knows he will never fully connect to anyone.

It’s a terrific thriller in that a good half of the book is dedicated to the net slowly closing in on Ripley as the lies and bodies mount up.  It kind of reminds me of the books that inspired a lot of the noir films.  The protagonist is undoubtedly a crook motivated predominantly by money, but he’s immensely likeable.  The joy of the book is finding out how Tom’s going to get out of appears to be an impossible situation.  Knowing that there are sequels kind of ruined the tension in this case, but even so I still had a nagging feeling every now and then that Tom was in too deep.  

I read The Talented Mr Ripley in one go in the back of a car and it was exactly the right sort of book to read in those circumstances.  It’s not too deep, but it’s engaging.  This is the kind of book that’s rightly referred to as a real page turner.  It’s not even a case of sacrificing style for substance, because there’s bucketloads of both.  In short, it was just a really satisfying read.

I’m currently reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.  I haven’t actually finished this one yet which is sort of a novelty at this point.

The Buddha of Suburbia

First off I need to fess up.  I’ve broken my own rules.  By my reckoning, this is book number six in a row from a European author.  This has frustrated me far more than is reasonable.  For all my meticulous planning, I’ve been caught out.  Having said this, The Buddha of Suburbia is a pretty worthwhile book to get caught out on.  It tells the story of Karim and his family.  Growing up in the 1970s in the suburbs of London, it’s the story of family life and being a young adult trying to carve out a career.  It’s also what I think is the first book so concerned with racial identity that I’ve read since beginning the blog.  It’s sort of like Adrian Mole with added racism.

Karim’s father leaves his wife and two young sons for Eva, a local woman who encourages him to become the titular mystical figure both because she believes full heartedly in it and for fiscal gain.  The motives are never really cleared up.  Haroon loves Eva, but his belief in the mysticism he espouses is mostly a side effect of this.  He abandons India and all the associated cultures until it benefits him.  He’s a stark contrast to his best friend, Anwar, who retains his sense of traditionalism despite never returning to his country of birth.  Naturally, things are further complicated in the second generation.  They are English, but have Indian-ness thrust upon them.  Anwar’s daughter is forced into an arranged marriage and Karim as a struggling actor ends up blacking up to play Mowgli in a theatre production of The Jungle Book.

One thing I appreciated about the book was Kureishi’s treatment of passing time.   Slippery devil that it is, it makes fools of us all and, as I’ve quarter-life-crisised my way through 2014, I’ve noticed it more than ever.  Or rather, I haven’t noticed the passage of time.  It’s gotten away from me.  Barring one frankly bizarre incident of an overzealous shop assistant when I was buying Ibuprofen recently, I can’t remember the last time I got IDed.  I am, without a doubt, an adult and I have no idea how it happened.  This realism is reflected in The Buddha of Suburbia.  It starts with Karim working towards his A-Levels, then all of a sudden and with no ellipsis, he’s twenty.  Later in the novel six months pass in a sentence.  It’s alarming.

One thing I’m not too sure about, though, is Karim’s confidence.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s not just that as a teenager he’s as smart and snide as most people can only dream of being in their adult years, but it’s also his sexual confidence.  Again what I’m talking about is when he’s a teenager.  He’s utterly cool in hitting on and sleeping with both men and women alike in a way I’m sure most teenagers aren’t.  I remember just a hell of a lot more awkwardness about sex when I was seventeen.  I’m not sure if it’s not a believable representation of a person, or if I was a bit of a loser when I was a teenager and so what everyone to be the same.

I really enjoyed this book.  It deals with family with a sense of begrudging love and that phase in which we pass from teenagers being mortified by their parents’ behaviour into adults who see the funny side of said mortifying behaviour.  Reading it prior to a big old family reunion definitely geared me up to deal with mine.

In my travels I also read The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.  Come back soon for that blog.

The Comfort of Strangers

The Comfort of Strangers starts with an epigraph from Cesare Pavese, "Travelling is a brutality," it claims.  This isn't the best thing to read at the beginning of two days journeying.  Even if the ultimate destination is family.  In fact, if you pair this with my general mind-set that agrees with Douglas Coupland's claim that, "All families are psychotic" you have a pretty accurate picture of my feelings as I embarked upon the book and upon my travels.

Now, I actually quite like Ian McEwan.  There are definitely issues with his writing and they crop up again in The Comfort of Strangers but in all, I like the man.  This book is about Colin and Mary, a couple on holiday in an unnamed city who meet Robert and Caroline, natives of said unnamed city who go in for the Kathy Bates in Misery type of hospitality.  At just 100 pages it's a short book but it says everything that it needs to.  At times it even feels as though McEwan's added in descriptions of just everything and political arguments to reach the magic 100 pages that define a novel.  (I expect you're all confused about this.  In retrospect, I know the "it's not a novel unless it's 100 pages long" rule is a lie, but it's a lie that was told to me by a teacher when I was very young, so it stuck).  I know I've said that with Pat Barker's short books you're left wanting more, but that's not the case with McEwan.  I felt exactly the same way about Amsterdam.

Colin and Mary are very typical McEwan characters.  They're very Guardian.  The only real difference is that Mary hasn't actually succeeded in her painfully middle class, high-paying artistic career.  The heroes of Amsterdam and Enduring Love would weep.  It's Mary's former job in an all female theatre company that brings up one of the more interesting conversations, in a book littered with half formed discussions of feminism.  Caroline is appalled at the idea of all female plays and asks incredulously that without a man, "what could happen?"  I know I work feminism into this blog a fair amount but it's an important issue and it's important to me, so when I'm dealt a book like this that shows the difficulties of women who enjoy a subservient role I should be over the moon.  Instead, I'm a little disappointed.  The book's not long enough to do any more than identify that there is an issue and doesn't begin to touch upon all the complexities.  Robert becomes a caricature at times, spouting of speeches reminiscent of the verses of It's a Man's Man’s Man’s World.  Robert and Caroline remain two dimensional villains, so the debate is lost.

This is a good book and a good story.  My only issues with it are the slightly niggles that crop up in almost all of McEwan’s books: silly stuff like the amount of times he uses the phrase “love-making” or a derivative of it. It’s like he’s never heard of another euphemism for sex.  For some reason, McEwan’s refusal to name the city annoys me too.  I know he’s going for mystery, but it’s feels like such a clunky device by which to achieve it.  I can’t help but think he could have found a more subtle way to unnerve his audience.

My next blog will be all about Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.  I’ve actually already finished it, so it should be up soon.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth can be characterised by two quotes from the book.  The first, “when science has spoken, one can only remain silent thereafter!”  Which is followed up later by, “science is composed of errors.”  These two attitudes are at war throughout the book and make it a pretty odd read.  It was written and set during the Age of Enlightenment and there are elements of the contemporary scientific chic running through the story: the parts about palaeontology and geology are full of facts and seem pretty scientifically sound, to a lay person at least.  And then there’s a bit with an ocean underground.  And not an ocean of lava.  One with water, and sea monsters.  It’s an odd juxtaposition.

In many ways it’s like Around the World in Eighty Days.  Predominantly concerned with the madcap adventures of three people, this book too is narrated by the voice of reason.  Axel sets off (despite his frequent and numerous objections) with his charismatic uncle, Professor Lidenbrock.  Like Phineas Fogg, Lidenbrock brokers no argument and sweeps other along in his wake.  One such soul is the doggedly loyal Hans, who is hired in Iceland to guide the pair, but is- naturally- the only reason they don’t both die several times over.  I sort of imagine him like Fezzik from The Princess Bride, a gentle giant type, lumbering along after a hapless protagonist and being slightly wonderful.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Around the World in Eighty Days.  I think it’s a combination of knowing what to expect and personal taste.  Aside from a strange pre-pubescent obsession with semi-precious gems, I’m not all that interested in rocks.  All the talk of igneous and sedimentary stones drags me back to the migraine inducing boredom of geography lessons.  There’s also the fact that my copy of Journey to the Centre of the Earth is annotated.  I don’t think that Verne was paying too much attention when he wrote the book and so there are quite a few discrepancies and factual errors, all of which are pointed out by William Butcher’s sarcastic notes.  It’s not even that Butcher’s looking down on the book, in the introduction he goes on about how the entire story is a festival of sexual tension and penetrating pick-axes.  This is bullshit.  Butcher basically just needs to decide whether to treat the book with reverence or derision.

I don’t want to attack Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  It’s a good read for what it is- an adventure story about three people on a suicide mission to achieve an arbitrary goal.  Okay, a fantastic goal.  It’s infuriating to admit, but the main thing I don’t like about the book is that it flies in that face of science.  My literary self wants to scream, “suspend your disbelief, you fool” but I can’t.  It’s not even modern scientific theory that it goes against.  Axel’s main objection to the whole affair is the burning to death in the Earth’s molten core bit.  And starving to death.  And having nothing to drink (Axel does complain a lot).  In retrospect, I might just be a bit too old for this book.

Next up and first in a long line of travelling to the Lake District books is The Comfort of Strangers by (another UEA alum) Ian McEwan.

Anna Karenina

I’m not too sure what to say about Anna Karenina.  It’s the first proper classic I’ve dealt with here and so I want to be able to write something terribly profound.  Naturally, I can’t think of a thing except, “I liked it- mostly.”  For a very famous book I didn’t know much about it prior to reading apart from the names Anna and Count Vronsky.  Knowing I’d be reading it at some point, I avoided the recent Kiera Knightly and Jude Law film version like the plague.  And I’m glad that I went into it without too many preconceptions, I think I would have been more disappointed if I did.

First off, it’s a long book: one of those long books that could have been made so much better by an editor who would just put their foot down a bit.  You know, someone to say, “I know it’s a pet cause, but these chapters where one of the characters spends methodically ploughing his fields?  Leo, they’ve got to go.”  It’s as well written as it can be, and it’s still bordering on engaging, I’ll give Tolstoy that, but there’s still a hell of a lot of content that could have been cut and we’d still have understood that Levin is a country boy at heart.  There’s another section later in the book about a shooting party that bored me stupid, reading about people killing animals for pleasure (or their frustration at failing to) just doesn’t do it for me.

Having said all that, there is a lot going on in the book.  One of the most interesting bits for me was the contrast between the treatment received by Anna and her brother, Stiva.  Both are guilty of infidelity but they are not treated in the same way by society.  Spoiler: things are worse for the woman.  Stiva is not only still welcome in Russian society despite his womanising, he is also seen for some baffling reason, as an appropriate go between when Anna and her husband attempt to hash out a divorce.  Anna even fairs worse than Vronsky, the man she has left her husband for and it’s this that leads to her death.  Even after she has died, she is still condemned, no one learns from her death.  Affairs for women lead to death.  Stiva gets a promotion.

There’s a fair bit of politics in the novel, the kind I half remember from my history A-Level.  The Russian Revolution was a while later than Tolstoy’s writing, but you can see the groundwork being laid in it.  The feudal system is still in place in this book but some people are starting to feel bad about it.  All the fore mentioned chapters on farming are Levin’s attempts to bond with his peasants.  Levin doesn’t fit in in Moscow and frequently airs his controversial views.  But again, nothing has changed by the end of the novel.  I really enjoyed reading this book, but it’s definitely one I wish I’d read earlier.  There’s so much I’ve forgotten about Russian politics and I’m sure I would have gotten so much more out of the book if I’d have read it when I knew those things. 

Anna Karenina simply wasn’t what I thought it would be.  For a book named after a character, she appears in it startlingly little and is a character acted upon rather than one who acts herself.  Other than loving Vronsky and her son, she does very little.  And (aside from the odd moment) is a woman whose life is at the whims of charismatic men.  I think I was expecting a stronger woman to take charge of the role of the tragic hero.  It’s the odd moments that annoy me most, possibly.  Every so often Anna just says, “fuck it” and is pretty much amazing, only to be brought back into line.  It’s a shame she couldn’t retain a little more of that spirit for a while longer.

I am currently reading The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst.  Blog posting may be a little sporadic for a bit while I attend my grandmother’s funeral.

Another World

Having read what I think might be a fair amount of Pat Barker’s work in the past (hell, I’ve even blogged about her already), I was pretty sure of what I was getting myself into with Another World.  Aside from the fact that is caused Asleep by The Smiths to get stuck in my head something chronic, it was pretty much what I expected.  Although it’s set in modern(ish) times, it is mostly about World War One.  This time, though, Barker’s focusing on memories and interpretations rather than the events themselves.  Added to this there’s a pseudo-horror-ghost story thing that I was hoping would be utterly appropriate in the run up to Hallowe’en.  (I am well aware that this ship has now sailed, and at this point would like to reiterate my holiday).

The World War One stuff’s difficult to argue with really.  Geordie is a 101 year-old veteran slowly dying.  Fairly appropriately, the closer he gets to death, the more the war spills out of him.  It’s not that he has a burning desire to confess while there’s still time, quite the opposite actually, but the memories that used to haunt him return at night.  Barker slips in odd lines to the prose itself that paraphrase the war poets, Wilfred Owen especially- Geordie’s last words are, “I am in Hell”- echoing Owen’s Strange Meeting (“By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell”).  Sorry, there’s a spoiler there.  The 101 year-old dies.  I want to say that there’s also an element of Barker Peggy-Sue-ing her way into the book in the form of Geordie’s main confessor Helen.  She is an Oxford scholar who used his experience in her dissertation.  I’m not sure if Barker did actually have conversations like those between Helen and Geordie but I feel like she’s challenging the reader to assume she did only to remind us it’s only a book.

This unease is caused by the ghost portion of the book.  Another World actually focuses on Nick and the amalgamation of his and his (relatively) new wife’s families and children.  One night when redecorating the family discover a portrait of the house’s original owners, the Fanshawes.  It’s sufficient to say not only is it a creepy-as-hell scrawled on the wall affair but also the Fanshawe family mirrors Nick’s own.  Naturally, a bit of digging reveals a murdered Fanshawe son, fallen foul of fratricide.  At this point things don’t look too good for the infant Jasper, especially as his half-brother seems adamant on taking out his violent tendencies on him.  Half-sister Miranda also appears to be playing just as much of an ambiguous role in it all as her historical counterpart, who may or may not be haunting the modern family.  And then, right on the last page, Barker goes and writes, “It’s easy to let oneself be dazzled by false analogies- the past never threatens anything as simple, or avoidable, as repetition.”  Because, of course, Nick’s family are not the Fanshawes.

As much as I feel like I’m having the rug pulled out from under my feet at the end, I like the book.  Barker has a talent for writing short books that leave you wanting more- not as an epilogue to her stories, which are complete, but throughout the stories themselves.  She is a minimalist, but I want more.  More of the illusion that the Fanshawes and the Halfords, more worrying about Jasper’s fate, more stories about children killing one another.  So close to Hallowe’en especially, I want a clearer cut ghost.

I've just finished the last of my holiday reads (it was only a few days away), Anna Karenina.  Expect a new blog soon.

Petals of Blood

Every time I read an African book I am appalled by my own ignorance.  I consider myself a fairly smart and well educated woman, but when I read the words ‘Mau Mau’ all I can think of is the legal high that half of Jeremy Kyle’s guests seem to be addicted to.  Turns out that there was this whole Kenyan rebellion thing and that’s what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s on about in Petals of Blood.  That explains all the murders and arrests, at least.  The book is actually about the ruination of rural Kenya through industrialisation and capitalism.  I’m really glad that I finished this book before my holiday; it’s not exactly easy going.

What I found amazing about this book was the language used by the workers.  Once their (admittedly not idyllic) village is connected to the rest of the world by the New Road it seems that the politicians and industrialists will stop ignoring the plight of the people of Ilmorog.  Of course, they actually just end up being exploited all over the place- leading to strikes and trade unions.  One of the characters at the forefront of one of these movements-Karega- says something near the end of the novel, ‘the poor, the dispossessed, the working millions… they can and will change the conditions of their oppression.’  I was at the TUC Demonstrations in London last month and this rhetoric is identical to the stuff used by Len McCluskey.  It’s a truly depressing thing that it’s still needed.

Another thing that struck me about the book was a rant (there’s no other word for it) that the female lead, Wanja, goes on- again near the end.  It lasts about two pages and as much as I’d love to transcribe the whole thing here, I won’t.  The crux of it is simply, ‘if you have a cunt… you are doomed to either marrying someone or else being a whore.’  I love Wanja just a little bit for this rant.  It’s made me realise that I don’t read enough books populated by angry women.  It’s not the type of feminism that I generally subscribe to, but it’s wonderful to read a woman just being permitted to be angry at her subjugation.  Even if it is written by a man.

The author himself is also a fascinating man.  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was imprisoned and both he and his family were exiled from Kenya for 22 years because of his political views and because he was outspoken.  I still find it a little crazy that people can be imprisoned for just writing their views.  Yes, the novel is a politically motivated one, but it is just a novel.  It’s ridiculous and horrible that anyone can be imprisoned for telling stories. 

I understand that I’ve said basically nothing about the book itself.  It’s a story of a murder, taken very seriously by the policy because important men have died.  The murder itself is a minor element of the book, as what’s really focused on is how the Mau Mau Rebellion affected the lives of the books four main characters.  They’re drawn together in the tiny village of Ilmorog looking to escape to a more simple life, but it doesn’t last.  Westernisation finds them and, as it tended to do with indigenous cultures; it destroys them just a bit.

Up next time is Pat Barker’s Another World.  Due to the shear amount of travel I’ve done recently I’ve already finished reading it.

The Stone Diaries

I’m going to start by saying I simply loved this book.  It’s sort of just the life story of a woman, but it resonates.  I don’t know what it is at the moment, but I’m really into the whole story of a life thing.  I loved Cat’sEye and I love The Stone Diaries.  The stories and lives written about aren’t that extraordinary, but they’re deeply interesting.  It might be the sense of the daily grind building up to the bigger picture that they end up creating.  At one point in this book one of the characters describes her daily existence, ‘the alarm going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold.’  It’s a comfort to know it all adds up to something.

The novel tells the story of Daisy Goodwill.  Born in Canada in 1905 and dying in Florida in the 1990s, the book encompasses her entire life.  It’s odd at times, her first marriage is awkwardly and shockingly unfulfilled and her second is to a man who helped raise her.  This one has a pseudo-incestuous feeling to it.  Her life is lived in stages, in way very few are.  Love begins after her first marriage ends, and work follows that.  It’s neatly divided.  While I don’t believe for a second that anyone’s life is actually like this, or even was like this for a housewife in the 1950s, it allows for snippets of each event in Daisy’s life and structured character evolution.  It keeps things fresh too.  Ninety-odd years of ‘Daisy did the washing on a Saturday,’ would be bloody tedious.

What I like about The Stone Diaries is the way it uses documentary evidence as though it were are real biography.  In the middle of the book are photos of all the main characters excepting Daisy herself.  Entire chapters and events are told in an epistolary way.  Letters make up the bulk of multiple chapters and after she dies the story is told entirely through newspaper clippings and snatched moments of conversation.  It adds another element to it all.  Rather than just being Daisy’s life story we’re left with impressions of Daisy from her loved ones.

The last couple of chapters about Daisy’s old age and death particularly struck me.  It could be because my grandmother was currently very sick when I read it, and has since died.  The two chapters reflect on the gap between Daisy’s family and her; the infrequent trans-Atlantic visits from her daughter and the calls arranging care between her three children are all too familiar.  After she finally does die, her children are left piecing together her life from the objects she leaves behind.  Her life is reduced to lists of places lived, illnesses suffered, scrawled notes and old books.  They don’t discover her previous marriage until after she dies.  Reading it and knowing that my grandmother would die soon it made me wonder what she’s left, what we’ll find that doesn’t fit with the picture we hold of her and the things we’ll completely misinterpret.  I’m sure it will happen; there’s always something…

I’m currently reading Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.  Again, I’m coming to the stark realisation that I know nothing about African politics.

Hallucinating Foucault

I had no idea what to expect going into Hallucinating Foucault.  I’ve never read anything Foucault wrote and I generally know very little about him.  I don’t think these facts impacted upon my enjoyment of the book too much.  I could sort of tell that there was a layer to the book that was just out of reach, maybe an odd reference here and there, but generally all the pertinent bits are explained by Patricia Duncker for us slightly ignorant types.  At least I think they are.  It could be that there’s some whole other meaning to the book that’s only apparent to those with an intimate knowledge of Foucault.  If so I’m happy in my ignorance, it’s still a pretty good book.

Hallucinating Foucault is a tale of obsession and the line where that blurs to love.  The unnamed protagonist is a scholar writing his doctoral dissertation on fictional author Paul Michel.  At the behest of his equally anonymous Schiller obsessed girlfriend, he moves from studying the books to studying the man.  All this leads to the protagonist breaking Michel out of a mental institute and embarking upon an Autumn-Spring love affair.  All the while both Michel and Duncker are obsessing about the relationship between author and reader.

In a nutshell, this is a story about the importance of the reader to the writer and vice versa.  Paul Michel obsesses over Foucault and his work just as the protagonist obsesses over Michel himself.  It’s a cyclical tale.  Or rather it’s a tale of evolution.  While Michel only imagines a relationship with Foucault the man, the narrator seeks him out and lives that relationship.  Michel’s obsession with Foucault as his reader also contributes to his madness.  When his reader dies, believing that there is no-one to listen any longer Michel has a psychotic break- going on a rampage through the Pere Lachaise cemetery.  Once Foucault died, ‘there was no-one to listen and [Michel’s] language vanished along with [his] reader.’  Maybe these themes aren’t universal to authors and Michel was mad to begin with, but it kind of makes you wonder just who Duncker’s writing for.

Of course, Michel isn’t the only mad and obsessed figure in the book.  I’m unwilling to give away what is actually quite a clever twist, but it’s safe to say that every character has their own passion driving them and the narrative.  And as Michel remarks, ‘madness and passion have always been interchangeable.’ 

This is more than just a clever book about clever people getting a bit too into the things they’re reading.  It’s funny.  In fiction, lunatics out of their asylums always leave brilliant anecdotes.  And it’s sad.  After all, it is a story centred around doomed love.  The whole affair leaves you with a sense that the characters are even more lonely at the end than they were when the story began.  The narrator is a man to whom things happen surrounded by people who make things happen.  Both his girlfriend and Michel leave him for their other loves, his girlfriend for the intellectual life studying and translating Schiller.  Michel leaves him for Foucault.

My next book on the list is Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries.  I’ve also finally retrieved my actual book copy of the 1,001 list from my parents’ house, so now the next book selection process is set to be much more enjoyable for me.  Of course, if anyone has any suggestions, I’m open to those too.

Get Shorty

Having heard that the book of Get Shorty is brilliant, I’ve never seen the film.  When both versions are highly acclaimed I’ve always wanted to read the book first.  I’m not sure if it has to do with books being my first love, or the fact that books are so much more open to personal interpretation.  The reason that I can’t stand the Harry Potter films is because they’re nothing like I imagined the books when reading them.  So, coming into Get Shorty, I didn’t know that much about it.  The only real experience I have of Elmore Leonard is the fact that I’ve seen Jackie Brown (adapted from Leonard’s Rum Punch) several times.  And knowing what Tarantino’s like, I assume that a hell of a lot of that’s not in the book.

As I’ve said before with the New York Trilogy, I love the hard-boiled style of noir and that’s rampant here.  Leonard was frequently compared to authors like Raymond Chandler who define the genre.  But this isn’t just a detective story.  I can see what would draw someone like Quentin Tarantino to his work.  Get Shorty is post-modern and knowing, I can only assume the film is even more so.  It’s a story about getting a film made and, although the main cast are fictional, it’s jam packed with references to real people and places that still stand up twenty-odd years on.  Despite it being published in 1990, it’s painfully eighties Hollywood, but in a sense that it now feels almost like a period text.  At this point, it’s basically retro.

I was also surprised by the character Karen Flores.  Crime books learn towards misogyny and, at first, she does appear to be there solely as a sex object.  She’s a failed actress famous for her breast and her screams, ex-wife of the actor that the main characters are actually interested in and initially kind of stupid.  But she is the one who succeeds.  When they take a script to the studio, they pass on it but give Karen a job because she is Hollywood-smart.  She isn’t as naïve as she seems and has learnt from her years in the industry.  The studio executive is another hard as nails woman who has the job she does because she’s the most competent person for it.  It’s wonderful that in a book largely about men threatening one another there are these strong female characters, even if they’re only peripheral ones.

Again, and I know I sound like a snob when I say this, it’s nice read something that’s not too dense.  Leonard once said something like, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’  And stylised as Get Shorty, it’s not a dense book.  There’s no real poetry to it; it’s just a good story told well.  This makes it a terrific page-turner.  Basically, this is a good genre book in one of my favourite genres.  Added to all of this there’s a sprinkling of Hollywood glitz and sleaze.  And who doesn’t love that?

Up next time, Hallucinating Foucault; debut novel of Patricia Duncker.  She used to teach at UEA (my old stomping ground).  Not to be biased, but I like it already.

Around the World in Eighty Days

When I was younger I was somewhat precocious about the books that I read.  I was a snob.  I still am if I’m honest with myself.  I started reading adult fiction when I was about 13 or 14 and never really looked back.  All this meant that I effectively missed out on a hell of a lot of classic literature that’s been re-appropriated for a younger audience.  So, until now, I’ve never actually read any Jules Verne.  I mean, when you’re a pretentious teenager, it’s much cooler to read The Inferno or The Bell Jar than it is a quaint little adventure now more closely associated with ten year-old boys than its original adult audience.

All of this sounds dismissive.  I don’t mean it to be.  It’s been an utter treat to read something that is just a simple and fun adventure story without the dark angst or introspective streams of consciousness.  It’s clear from the beginning that Phileas Fogg’s in it for the shits and gigs.  There are no worries even when everything thing is going wrong. Fogg’s cool demeanour is a point belaboured throughout the book.  When anything goes wrong, he’s Mr Cool with his contingency plans and easy come easy go attitude.  Despite all this, the climatic dash across the Atlantic Ocean is still marvellously tense.

I was also shocked by the lack of racism in the book.  I mean this, of course, in the period typical sense.  The book was written in the 1870s and, aside from a few playful snipes about the English and few off colour remarks about the Indian tribe from which Mrs Aouda is rescued, there seems to be a remarkable respect for other cultures.  In fact, the narrator is obsessed with providing the reader with facts and statistics about other cultures.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s a French book, I haven’t read that much French literature of the time which is specifically writing about other countries, but it’s such a contrast to the British stuff.  During the days of the Empire it seems we were unable to set a story abroad without an air of ‘we own that,’ as a side note.  The treatment of America is most notably different, Verne writes about them from the perspective a revolutionary brother in arms, as opposed to many British writers of the time who treated them like a wild runaway child.

My only criticism of the book is the characterisation of Fogg himself.  Whereas with his valet Passeportout and the dogged Mr Fix we’re given inner monologues and experience, Fogg has few scenes to himself.  He is means to an end; he acts with a single-mindedness that only serves to further the plot.  This means that despite being the hero of the book, he is unknowable.  And while the only possible ending to the book is his marriage to Mrs Aouda, there’s a lingering question of when they had time to fall so deeply into the love they profess to feel.  At best she loves an image she holds of him, which is as likely as not to be completely false.  Even so, it’s a crackingly entertaining read.  I’m just a little sorry I didn’t get around to it sooner.

I’m currently blasting my way through Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, so come back soon for that.

Shroud

It looks like the period of my reading books I enjoy will be short lived.  To be fair, I read The Sea by John Banville previously and wasn’t that impressed, so my expectations were quite low coming into Shroud.  It doesn’t help particularly that there’s a ludicrous author’s photograph on the dust jacket.  It’s hard to take someone who screams fusty 1920s Oxbridge professor so loudly seriously.  But it’s not just that.  The main character in the book is just as fusty and dry as Banville’s photo appears and, in short, I just don’t like him.

Within the first twenty or so pages Axel Vander, hero of the novel, has managed to complain incessantly about being old, tell a less than hilarious anecdote in which he demeans his now dead wife, and make any number of those xenophobic slurs only the elderly can expect to get away with.  How this is meant to endear anyone, other than old xenophobic widowers, to him is beyond me.  And this isn’t one of those Jane Austen Emma type things.  You’re not meant to hate Axel Vander.  In fact, for all her precociousness, I prefer Emma Woodhouse.

Again, though, the book isn’t quite so easily written off.  It’s divided into three sections, the first and last being set in Vander’s old age and the middle one his secret filled and scandalous youth.  Naturally, the middle section’s really good.  I’ll try not to go too overboard with the spoilers, but it’s so difficult to see how the character develops from a pretty awesome refugee who hooks up with and subsequently steals from a member of the British nobility to a gnarled and embittered old bigot.  The blurb claims the book is about a young woman blackmailing Vander, but this is soon forgotten as would be blackmailer is easily seduced by the old coot.  To be quite frank, it feels like some kind of grotesque wish fulfilment for Banville’s assumed male audience rather than a feasible plot.

Another of my issues with the book is the sense of anti-climax.  Early on in the tale we establish that Vander lives in lies, hence the inevitable blackmail.  When would be blackmailer Cass Cleave is introduced she is a wonderfully mysterious femme fatale.  Her power comes from the supposed knowledge of Vander’s secrets.  Naturally it turns out that she doesn’t know them all, any power she has is just an illusion.  She can’t outsmart Vander.  Again, throughout the entire book women just aren’t treated with respect.  The whole thing has a rather cloying air of triumphant misogyny.

I think what is at the root of all why I don’t like the book is the sense of entitlement that goes along with Vander.  He acts as though the world owes him a debt.  And it works for him; he’s a magnificently successful man of letters, who gets away with his secrets intact.  He’s not destroyed by the blackmail, in fact, he gains from it.  It’s just immensely frustrating to read about a character who is loathsome and yet loved by all and who doesn’t get his comeuppance. 

I’m currently reading Around the World in Eighty Days.  It’s fantastic.

Cat's Eye

Confession time: I quite like being really scathing.  It’s been quite a treat these last couple of weeks, reading things I haven’t enjoyed and thinking of ways to insult them.  It’s that whole thing Roger Ebert said, about negative reviews being fun to read and fun to write.  That being said, I was very glad to get back to reading something that I could actually enjoy.  The panacea comes in the form of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, with a great dollop of nostalgia for my own childhood hitting me the midst of what I can only assume is a quarter life crisis.

Atwood’s book itself is (like The Blind Assassin) essentially the story of a Canadian woman living her life.  I have a real thing for Canada, so this is fine by me.  The story follows Elaine Risley on a trip from Vancouver to Toronto and subsequently down memory lane.  Elaine’s early years are spent following her entomologist father around the wilds of Canada, sleeping in motel rooms and tents, playing with her older brother and collecting bugs.  When she finally starts school in Toronto, she’s wildly out of touch with the other girls and falls in with a group of girls who are more sophisticated that her and bully her through the guise of friendship and education.  It’s this part I can relate to- growing up in a tiny village; we had to amuse ourselves climbing trees.  When I reached secondary school in the local town they had things like shops to entertain them.  The girls there would have been just horrified by the leeches in the village stream.

As Elaine grows up, the balance of power shifts.  The girls go to different high schools, leaving Elaine alone with her prime tormenter, Cordelia, who is now dependent on her for companionship.  As the two grow up and drift apart, with Elaine becoming an artist in Toronto’s feminist scene and Cordelia disappearing into a mental hospital after an unsuccessful suicide attempt.  Although Elaine refuses to help her escape, leaving her in an asylum, Cordelia remains present throughout the rest of the novel.  We’re left with this aching nostalgia for the way things might have been, missing something that will never happen and that would probably be unwanted if it did.

There are a couple of reasons why I’ve been so into this book.  Like I said, it reminds me of being and kid and fills me with a ridiculous longing for my teenage years of backstabbing quasi-friendships.  I know things are better now, what with my independence, personal financial security and friends that I actually like, but it made me miss being twelve nonetheless.  Part of it’s the feeling of getting older that comes every year around my birthday.  Elaine’s obsessed with her own aging and the feeling she’s not quite managing it right.  She says early on that she can’t believe she’s had her life and that goes along with another idea; “that everyone else [her] age is an adult and [she is] merely in disguise.”  It’s the same feeling I get every time one of my Facebook friends gets married or pregnant.  I think my love for Cat’s Eye comes back to that idea I had about Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions- this is a very good book, read at exactly the right time.

Next time it's Shroud by John Banville,,.

Fateless

I feel a bit guilty about this, but I wasn’t that keen on Fateless.  It seems as though books about the Holocaust and concentration camps, especially those written by survivors should have a sense of gravitas that’s appreciated by all, even if you don’t actually enjoy reading about it.  I want to blame the fact that I basically read this book in my lunch breaks and write it off as just being in the wrong mind set to read serious literature in the thirty or so minutes a day I have to relax at the office.  It’s not that though.  Imre Kertész says part of the way through that he was surprised to find himself bored by his time in Auschwitz.  I feel much the same way.

And it is just the concentration camp bits that I couldn’t get into.  There are sections before and after Gyuri’s stay in Buchenwald that are really interesting.  The train journey between the camps and the missed reunion with his family are so good.  Or well written.  And there are other parts, I concede, that are fascinating.  There’s a running obsession with prisoner numbers.  Those with numbers in the hundreds or early thousands have a near celebrity status, there’s even an incident when we meet someone with an elusive two digit prisoner number.

Part of it, I think, is simply my being thrown.  We are taught that the Holocaust was a terrible thing and those in concentration camps suffered unimaginable horrors.  So, when these horrors are described as every day and mundane, it’s hard to know how to take it.  I feel like the journalist who appears near the end of the book; insisting that it must have been horrific and wanting that to be exploited while Kertész patiently explains that even suffering, when spread over a long enough period of time, becomes common place.  The issue with the common place is that it doesn’t exactly make for a thrilling read.  Likewise, it’s hard to get excited by entire paragraphs dedicated to comparisons of soup and bread rations between concentration camps.

It’s difficult because I’m aware that I’m finding excuses for not liking Fateless partially due to the subject matter.  It the story was about fictional suffering, I’d be so much quicker to write the book off.  But I have this niggling feeling that it’s probably just not socially acceptable to admit to finding the experiences of a real life concentration camp survivor tedious.  Even if that’s exactly how Kertész is going out of his way to present said experiences.  See what I mean about wanting there to be more suffering?  I’m a bit concerned that rather than a lack of anything in the novel itself it’s rather me that’s wanting for something, and that’s the crux of my unrest.  I’m just sort of worried I may have missed the point of the book altogether. 

Next up is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.  Swing by again soon.

The Lambs of London

Peter Ackroyd isn’t one of my favourite authors.  Due to its popularity, I had to wait an age to get Hawksmoor out of the library because it looked so interesting.  My logic ran: murder- brilliant; history- wonderful; history murder- best thing ever.  It wasn’t.  Things so rarely are.  Naturally, I left checking The Lambs of London a while for quite different reasons.  I don’t think I was wrong in my reticence.  In brief, it’s a book about a woman who loves a man who discovers a wealth of previously unseen Shakespeare texts, but things are not as they seem…

Now, I like Shakespeare.  I really like Shakespeare.  I’ve been to the Globe and I’ve seen the RSC and countless other Shakespeare productions.  Once, at the Edinburgh Festival, I even saw a three woman hour long version of Macbeth.  It was terrible.  The logistics of any of the scenes where the witches talked to anyone alone were a nightmare.  But, I think there might be a bit too much Shakespeare in The Lambs of London.  Or, at least, there’s a rank over appreciation of him.  It’s a tale full of learned men so busy genuflecting at the sycophantic alter of the Bard that they miss the most obvious plot twist since Secret Window.  It turns out (spoiler alert) that those previously undiscovered documents are fakes.  I’m not sure if the point Ackroyd’s trying to make is that maybe it’s time to get over Shakespeare, or at least to not believe in a thing so blindly that common sense is waylaid, because the writing’s so dry it’s very difficult to care.  I think this book might only be on the list because it’s chosen by academics who see in it parodies of their disliked colleagues.

Again, this is a book based on a true story and again, it’s the case that the truth is far more interesting than fiction.  Mary and Charles Lamb, two of the central characters, did exist and even wrote a book together about Shakespeare.  Far more fascinating is the forger at the centre of the tale: William Ireland.  Ireland was a real person who, in the 1790s, forged a lot of Shakespearian documents and even went as far as claim he discovered two new plays.  One of these, Vortigen and Rowena, even made it to the stage.  The real problem I have is with Ackroyd’s characterisation of Ireland.  In The Lambs of London, Ireland is a boy who does everything to impress his father.  I’m not sure why, Samuel Ireland’s a bit of a wanker.  Ackroyd doesn’t explain why Ireland so desperately craves his father’s approval and pride and that’s the downfall of this story.  It’s more concerned with actions than motives and without the motives in place; any actions themselves are difficult to relate to.  The book becomes simply: person x did thing y followed by a lengthy discussion about the wonder of Shakespeare.  Ackroyd’s an historian, not an author and it shows.  It’s a real shame, because I do really like Shakespeare.

I’m currently reading Fateless by Imre Kertész, so swing by soon for that.

The God of Small Things

Forgive me, but this is basically a disjointed list of things I like about a book…

The God of Small Things is a novel that reminds me of that quote from The New York Trilogy that I was going on about a few weeks ago.  The whole, “Something happens… and then it goes on happening forever,” situation.  It’s structured around one event in the lives of a family and it’s largely about how one moment in your life can be turned into the event which defines it; the idea that the memory of a terrible thing outlasts the terrible thing because we cling to it as a means to define ourselves.   In the case of Arundhati Roy’s book, it’s the death of the twin protagonists’ cousin, Sophie Mol.  The concept that, “Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive,” to be precise.  This is so true of human nature.  Every year at this time television schedules are littered with documentaries about the World Trade Centre which serve to give no new information but only solidify events in our collective memories.  It’s an idea which I really like, considering my personal ambitions to read 1,001 books on an arbitrary list, it will surprise few that the nature of obsession appeals to me. 

Another thing I like about this book is the wandering narrative.  Yes, it is about the death of a child and although this is alluded to throughout, there’s so much extra in the story.  Roy builds the entire history of the family, taking the time to give each character their own backstory.  So rather than privileging just the main characters with motivation and personality, there’s a complex family unit.  It also means the book isn’t evenly balanced, which I love.  There’s an entire family history up until the death of Sophie Mol and then (and not to get too cheesy about it) the family is torn apart, the twins being separated and their mother banished.  Naturally there’s also a completely non-linear narrative structure; I don’t think I’ve mentioned anything yet that isn’t given away in the first chapter.

It’s also fascinating to read a serious book with so many female characters.  It’s something that’s quite often focused on in the world of film and television, but it happens in books too- women being marginalised.  But the Kochamma family is led by women who have largely escaped patriarchal figures.  The only adult male in the family is shown to be just as hopeless at love as the women and is largely present as a comic figure who feels he needs to take control of his women but never manages it.  Even if no-one in the story is particularly capable, it’s so refreshing to read about women who don’t centre their lives around men (save for the odd moment of pining). 

On top of all of the above there’s this wonderful tone when the story focuses on eight year-old twins Rahel and Estha.  Throughout the narrator remains a third person omnipotent job, but when describing the events that involve the children, it becomes more childlike.  Shorter sentences, simpler words or childish word play.  It’s largely subtle (they are intelligent children after all), but it’s there and it makes the whole thing more enjoyable and the terrible things more terrible.

At the moment I am just whizzing through Lambs of London, by Peter Ackroyd, so come back soon for more blog.

Things Fall Apart

A friend of mine finds watching the Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate incredibly frustrating because she says you can see the good film in there, it’s just been so poorly edited that it’s lost.  That’s sort of how I feel about Things Fall Apart.  It’s one of those books I’ve heard a lot about without actually hearing anything about. One of the everyone knows it, some studied at school type books that (I suspect) very few people have actually read.  Like a slightly obscure Dickens.  And, like much Dickens, I wasn’t that impressed.

The problem is, this isn’t a bad book.  I just read it far too late.  If I’d have read it when I was thirteen or so, no doubt I’d have a great appreciation for it.  The blurb claims that this is a classic tragedy and, while it does have that narrative arch- Okonkwo’s succeeds because of his resolve and ambition, but these ultimately cause his downfall- it’s not really that tragic.  Achebe uses such a simple syntax through that everything seems at a distance.  I really think this might be the first book I’ve read in about a decade that doesn’t even whip out one metaphor.  He spends half of a 164 page book setting the scene and telling us of far more traditional customs than are relevant at the detriment of character development.  The marriage of secondary characters’ daughters is not important, the feelings of the main character when his daughter is on death’s door could be.  There could be at least an explanation when she recovers.  The first part almost reads like a guide to another culture, all foreign words written in italics, emphasising their other-ness, with near total indifference to its characters.

When the plot finally does get going and Okonkwo is banished from his village, there is too little of the book left in which to tell a story.  It’s ostensibly about the British colonisation of Africa through missionaries, but the tale lurches forward years at a time, providing only a snapshot of life at each point.  By the end, Okonkwo’s waging war on some bloke who’s only been around for three pages and it’s impossible to care that both have gone too far.

I realise that literally everything I’ve said about Things Fall Apart is negative, but I don’t hate it.  Some of the customs are incredibly interesting, the idea that the reason so many children die is because they are all the same child reborn and infected with an evil spirit is fascinating.  My problem is, the entire novel reminds me of the kind of thing studied in school.  It wouldn’t be out of place on any year nine SATs curriculum as a reading comprehension text, the dreadfully boring kind that takes hours because of the illiterates pissing about in the back row (NB trying to convince someone who’s been teaching you for months that you now have Tourette’s because you saw it on TV is stupid, futile, and insensitive).  I don’t know why Achebe just didn’t make the book a little bit better.  He’s clearly got talent, but at every turn he chose the most simplistic route.  There is so much potential for character depth and introspection and literary devices that is not capitulated upon.  Maybe the most damning thing of all is that my favourite bit is the Yeats epigraph…

Next time on the blog: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Kafka on the Shore

Just recently Haruki Murakami’s been all over my Twitter feed.  He’s got a new book out, and by all the 140 character or less accounts I’ve seen, it’s marvellous.  He’s tipped to win the Nobel Prize.  Despite this grand reputation, I haven’t actually read anything he’s written until now.  I’ve been quite reluctant to read Kafka on the Shore because I got the idea from somewhere that it would be very fantasy and I really have to be in the right mood for fantasy.  There are a couple of fantasy elements in this book, men who can talk to cats and stones, other worlds, that kind of thing, but it’s mostly just the story of two journeys.  Don’t worry, I mean literal journeys with trains and coaches.  Not the X-Factor like, “I don’t care that I’ve been eliminated; it’s just been a wonderful journey,” shit.  People actually physically relocate.

This is the story of Kafka Tamura, teenage runaway and Mr Nakata, the mentally handicapped victim of an unexplained wartime accident.  Although the pair never meet, they both leave the same district of Tokyo and head to Takamatsu.  While Kafka is escaping his father in a fit of what first seems like teenage angst, Nakata is following his own mystical impulse.  The latter’s journey is kicked off by the murder of Johnnie Walker, eater of cat hearts, in what has to be one of the most viscerally disturbing book chapters I’ve ever read.  But then, I have always been a cat person.  What comes next is a melee of metaphors, possible incest and personal growth.  Okay, I lied a tad about it only being a tale of psychically journeys.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is I love about Kafka on the Shore and I think it’s the library.  Vast amounts of the book take place in the Komura Memorial Library and I really quite like libraries.  The way the characters treat the library is the way I feel about them.  Kafka is, quite frankly, an impossibly well-read 15 year-old boy that leaves behind a family that doesn’t understand him to take refuge in a library.  And he’s not the only one, in a very Alice in Wonderland “we’re all mad here,” everyone who comes to the library is exactly where they’re meant to be and they’re all a little odd.  It is the only place characters are free to be just themselves.  It’s even a place illiterate characters get sentimental about the pity of not being able to read. 

I want to write so much more about the book, but I’m holding back.  It’s the kind of book I want to cajole other people into reading without whacking them with any great big spoilers before starting my campaign.  I suspect it does really have a few flaws that I’m overlooking, but that’s oaky.  It’s a fantastic book.  Read it.

I’m currently closing in on the end of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.  It’s a short one, so check back soon.