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.