Time's Arrow

Time’s Arrow; Or the Nature of Offence is not quite what I expected.  I’m not too sure what I was expecting, in all honest, but it wasn’t this.  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it (if enjoy can ever be the right word when applied to books about the Holocaust), I did.  I just thought it was going to play out differently.  Ironic, I guess, for a book that starts at the story’s end. 

In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis tells the story of Dr Tod T. Friendly, a former Nazi concentration camp doctor living out his days in America under the most fake sounding alias ever.  As I mentioned, the story itself is told in reverse, from the point of view of an unnamed narrator: a soul like figure hitching a backwards ride through Tod’s life.  The reader learns of Tod’s life selling stolen drugs, visiting prostitutes and trying to escape his past long before his acts are revealed.

I think what surprised me most about Time’s Arrow was it treatment of the Holocaust.  Tod- at this point known as Odilo Unverdorben- is a doctor as Auschwitz during the war.  Although we know he is subsequently plagued by nightmares of the concentration camps, there isn’t actually that much detail about his role there.  Prior to this, the book makes a big deal out of suffering- stating “Atrocity will follow atrocity, unstoppably.  As if the atrocity that came before was necessary to validate the atrocity that will come after.  Stop now and… But you can’t stop.”  And so often when people write about the Holocaust they turn the atrocity into a spectacle.  It’s kind of shocking to have this missing.  On top of that, naturally, things are running backwards and so- to the narrator- the Nazis are benevolently creating thousands of lives.  It creates this strange and innocent disconnect between fact and perception of reality that’s really effective (more on that later).  It’s a nice contrast between what the narrator perceives as dreadful doctoring earlier in the book.

There are also some tremendously sad parts.  For example, the narrative waits decades- excited to finally meet his wife and daughter.  When we do meet his wife Herta for the first time, it is awful.  The marriage at its end is loveless and even the hope of the couple’s daughter, Eva, is extinguished.  She features in letters between the two, dying and then falling sick.  When Odilo finally manages to visit his family Herta is still pregnant and there’s a horrible moment when you realise that the narrator will never meet the daughter he has waited for for so many years.  It’s the same with Herta; when times moves past the point when the relationship starts, the narrator cannot understand why the pair no longer talk and is left broken hearted- especially as Odilo is not concerned in the slightest by the breakdown of a relationship that is, for him, yet to start.

One of my favourite things about the book is the way that the narrator retains its innocence.  Throughout, although there are indications something is wrong, the narrator never fully twigs.  It’s this that allows the Holocaust to not be an atrocity.  And it gives the reader a character to empathise with throughout the novel.  I mean, it’s probably not okay to care about a Nazi war criminal, but the narrator isn’t- it’s just a voice that’s stuck with that particular villain.  It has no impact on events.  It’s such a clever device. 

There are so many layers to Time’s Arrow.  I read a couple Martin Amis books previously, but I’m now left with the impression that he’s far better than I gave him credit for.  There’s very little about this book that’s not worth writing about (there’s lots that I’ve skipped over in regards to the changing names of the protagonist and his escape from punishment for his crimes)  or interesting in some obscure way.  My only gripe is that backwards conversations are right hard to follow. 

I’ve now moved on to Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.  So far, so good. 

The House of Spirits

I’ve not come across Isabel Allende before.  I think she must have been hidden away in some certain dark corner of The List.  The House of Spirits is the only of her books to feature and, not to damn it with faint praise, it’s good.  It’s Allende’s first novel and it’s a shame that it is her only work on The List because I’d love to see how she develops as an author, there are bits of her work that I think if they refined through a couple more books, would morph into something fantastic. 

Allende’s book tells the story of one family through four generations- although the first generation is out of the way fairly early on.  It focuses on married couple Clara and Esteban Trueba, their respective parents, as well as their children and granddaughter.  It is only Esteban who is present throughout the entire novel and although he is (at times) the narrator and it is the tale of his life, his power lost and gained, this is very much the story of the women of the family.  Esteban builds a fortune and becomes a senator at the time of deep political unrest in Chile- he is adamantly conservative while the rest of his family is pretty left wing.  Somehow despite all the conflict this naturally causes, he remains the beloved patriarch of the Trueba clan.  The House of Spirits is a long book with a lot of characters, so it’s impossible to concisely outline the plot of the thing.  And I understand I’m making it sound like Esteban’s story.  Even though the overarching narrative is his, the story is made up of women who find routes to power, despite being a position of little or no authority in society.

Of course, this is more than just the tale of a family.  Esteban’s political leanings aside, Clara is a clairvoyant.  This is what gives her power.  She is the lynchpin of her family, not just because of the love she has for them, but because her word is so often more than law.  It is the literal future.  When she dies, half way through the book, she is never really gone.  Just as, in life, she could speak to the dead; in death she continues to influence the living.  Her knowledge of the spirit world also makes her unknowable.  This, too, is power.  Esteban is a man in control of everything when in his prime.  He can love Clara but he can never own her. 

There was only one thing that put me off about this book and that was the shifting narrator.  Almost all of The House of Spirits is told in the third person but, for a few pages or so every chapter, it moves into Esteban’s voice.  I’m not sure why this is.  It doesn’t add enough to the story to justify how jarring it is every time it happens.  I can only assume that Allende gives Esteban this voice as he is the least likeable of the characters by far.  He is responsible for his family falling apart, and it’s really only because of the first person interludes that we know that his actions are the product of misguided love.  They are his saving grace.

I’m not too sure what it was, but I didn’t love this book.  It was perfectly good whenever I was reading it, but whenever I put it down I lacked the motivation to go back to it.  And I’m not sure why.  Despite its sprawling nature, it’s remarkably easy to care about each of the characters (even if Esteban is a bit awful at times).  I think I wanted more from this book than it was able to provide- I was after something unputdownable, and this is essentially a pretty quiet family drama, with a bit of politics thrown in.  But even this doesn’t cause the reader too much drama.  Clara’s visions mean that the reader is long forewarned against any death and, for that; House of Sprits loses its emotional punch. 

My next blog will be about Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis.

Inside Mr Enderby

Anthony Burgess always said that his least favourite of his novels was A Clockwork Orange.  I read that book when I was about 15 or 16 and I loved it.  It’s amazing in the way it plays with language- it’s barely in English but by the end Nadsat’s completely understandable.  So I was naturally really excited to read more of Burgess’s work; namely Inside Mr Enderby- his only other entry on The List.  And I’ve got to said I was bitterly disappointed. 

The book tells the tale of Mr Enderby, a professional poet.  He’s pretty shit at the poetry.  And life in general.  After having several a few small successes poetry-wise he ends up marrying Vesta Bainbridge, editor of a woman’s magazine.  He can’t handle her.  He doesn’t want her- he sees her as a suffocating surrogate for his dead step-mother.  With Vesta he is unable to write poetry.  Anyway, the marriage is unsurprisingly short and following a mental breakdown Enderby attempts suicide ending up in hospital, reborn as Piggy Hogg, he gives up the poetry for a (presumably) better life.  This life continues on to sequels.  I did not bother with the sequels.

As I said earlier, I did not enjoy this book.  I think my main issue with Inside Mr Enderby was simply that I’m too young.  I know that this book is a satire and I can tell where the punchlines are.  The real issue is that I’m too young to remember the period of time that it’s satirising.  It feels a bit like watching an episode of Spitting Image- I get the jokes, but there’s a whole whack of cultural context that I just don’t get.  What’s especially annoying is the fact that it’s the more subtle humour that I’m not getting.  There are numerous references to things like flatulence that aren’t really my kind of humour and those are the main bits that don’t require a context. 

One of my other issues with the book was the ending.  Throughout the novel Enderby is completely uninterested in sex.  He’s not harmed by it, he just does not care for it.  It’s one of the many things he is cured of in the novels conclusion and that’s what annoys me.  He does not need curing.  He’s a bit of a loser and a jerk for most of the book, but he is not sick.  He only becomes unwell when he loses his ability to write poetry and so the change in him makes no sense.  His cure is to give up the thing that made him happy as a childish pursuit and instead chase something that he has never wanted previously.  I think my problem is that I didn’t read Enderby as a comic character.  I felt for him when his marriage fell apart because his wife wanted things he could never give.  I feel for him at the end when he’s chided along to a better life by a wry and smug doctor.  And I don’t believe it was Burgesses intention for the reader to empathise with his main character in that way.  The narrative is harsh and cruel and mocking and he just needs a bit of understanding.

I wish this book were better.  I know that Anthony Burgess was capable of brilliant things- even if he was disparaging of them.   Maybe he just had poor judgement.  Inside Mr Enderby is ridiculous judgemental of its main character; a fairly pathetic and harmless man, and Burgess hated his most famous work.  It’ll probably be quite a while before I come back to any of Burgess’s other books and not just because there are no others on The List.  I feel like he must have written something else good.  For me, that just wasn’t Inside Mr Enderby.

Next time: The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende.

after the quake

Collections of short stories are difficult to write about.  They take more consideration than a novel, especially something like Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (all lower case as per Murakami’s instructions to his translator).  Each of the six stories is essentially a reaction to the earthquake that hit Kobe in January 1995, but they’re also about displacement and disconnection from family, travel, hearts of stone and giant talking frogs.  Like any good book of short stories, themes repeat themselves and the later stories leave you with a sense of déjà vu.  None of the stories are set in Kobe, so the book is more than a tale of human suffering- it is about reaction to disaster.

Now, I was pretty sure that I was completely ignorant of the Kobe earthquake, but in researching it for this blog, again I was stuck by a sense of déjà vu.  In retrospect, I think it might have been one of the case studies I had to learn for GCSE geography.  After nine years, this is clearly something that I’ve completely forgotten about.  It’s kind of sad considering that I could still draw you a spot on diagram of the formation of an ox-bow lake.  Anyway, Wikipedia and foggy memories have led to Japan’s second largest earthquake of the twentieth century, a city half destroyed and a whole bunch of disaster prevention methods introduced into the country.

Murakami’s book focuses upon the destruction of the city.  Although it wasn’t written until 2001, well after the city was rebuilt, each story is set in February 1995 as the city recovers.  The earthquake is a motivator in some cases: in UFO in Kushiro, Komura’s wife leaves him after watching the devastation on TV for five days straight, in Honey Pie, Junpei cannot find the courage to propose to the woman he loves- as Murakami puts it, “he went on wondering.  And not deciding.  And then the earthquake stuck.”  Honey Pie also plays into the idea of displacement.  Junpei is originally from Kobe and estranged from his parents, once the city is destroyed he is without roots.  Mr Miyake in Landscape with Flatiron has left behind his wife and children who remain in Kobe to paint and build bonfires on beaches.  He is displaced even before the earthquake.  There’s also a story about a giant talking frog convincing a man to battle an angry worm to save Tokyo that’s fair more symbolic than I’m giving it credit for here.

I think in many ways, though, my favourite of the tales in after the quake is Thailand.  It tells the story of Satsuki, a doctor visit the (no doubt riveting) World Thyroid Conference in Bangkok.  I love her.  Her husband divorced her because she didn’t want children and she’s, rightly, angry about it.  The story is so great because she is allowed to be angry without being hysterical.  Her ex-husband still lives in Kobe and she wishes him dead while remaining a likeable character.  And yes, she blames herself for the earthquake because she wants him dead, but those are clearly just flights of fancy and the story is about her letting go of the anger but she’s not portrayed as being wrong for being angry in the first place.  In a book where most of the main characters are male, it’s a refreshing and entirely relatable portrayal of a woman.

As I said at the start, it’s near impossible to write about this collection of short stories.  They can’t be easily broken down into categories as each overlaps with others in an intricate Venn diagram of motifs.  The stories are excellent and funny and sweet.  I can’t explain them any better than that without thousands of words and giving all of their plots away, so just go and read them and then this blog will make a whole load more sense. 

My next blog will be Inside Mr Enderby by Anthony Burgess.  

Slow Man

Following last time’s tipsy ramblings we have Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee.  Now Coetzee appears a fair old amount on The List and fair enough, I guess.  He has two Booker Prizes- he was the first person to achieve this- and he has a Nobel Prize in literature.  Suffice to say, the dude can write.  Even so, at times when reading his work I have trouble seeing what all the fuss is about and Slow Man is an example of this.

The book tells the story of Paul Rayment, an average sixty(ish) year-old man with a failed marriage and a penchant for cycling.  When he loses his leg in an accident he is forced to rely on a nurse- Croatian born Marijana.  Naturally, despite a wildly inappropriate age difference and the fact that she is happily married, Paul falls madly in love with her.  At this point in comes Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous heroine of one of Coetzee’s earlier works that I am now really not looking forward to reading.  The parts she’s in are basically the worst parts of the book.  Anyway, she forces her way in, claiming to be drawn to the pair in some mystical and utterly bullshit way, interferes with Paul’s life a bit until he works his way through his hatred for her and into begrudging honesty.  All the while, Paul is making romantic declarations to Marijana and trying to convince her husband to let him pay for their son’s schooling.

I’m being very harsh on the book.  It wasn’t all terrible at all.  The sudden loss of (and subsequent clinging to) one’s independence is something I think everyone can relate to a bit- if not in themselves then in their aging parents or grandparents.  And Coetzee does it well.  Paul refuses to get an artificial leg and you get the feeling it’s because he is in denial.  Marijana frequently goads him as he acts as though the leg to grow back and the fact that he won’t get the prosthetic limb does make you wonder if he thinks that his situation is temporary.

Another part of the book I enjoyed was a wonderful little rumination on love.  Even though his love is unrequited, he still loves Marijana.  He says that he doesn’t need her to love him back as he loves her enough for both of them.  It’s a lovely thought- this strange combination of eros and agape, even if it’s not entirely realistic and I’m sure it’s a thought anyone who has ever experienced unrequited love has had at some point or other.

My main issue with this book was Elizabeth Costello.  She is unnecessary.  The characters could have driven along the action without her and I’m not sure why she was there for most of it.  Coetzee is brilliant, but bringing her back feels lazy.  Slow Man had the potential to be really enjoyable, but she ruined that.  She is a book ruiner.  And I don’t think that there’s any worse thing to be.

So, there you have it- Slow Man.  It’s not Coetzee’s best book, but it’s far from his worst.  But when it’s compared to something like Disgrace or Youth, it’s nothing.  It’s not even comparable to Disgrace or Youth.  I am sure that it is only on The List because it was written by Coetzee and the Cult of the Author kicked in.  Had it been penned by anyone less revered, I doubt it would have made the cut.  It is quite simply mediocre.

My next blog will be all about Haruki Murakami’s wonderful After the Quake.  I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

The Swimming-Pool Library

My original post for The Swimming-Pool Library was written after drinking about two thirds of a bottle of red wine on an empty stomach.  Needless to say, it’s not a masterpiece.  Furthermore, it was scrawled in a notebook on a train, so it’s pretty hard to read.  So it could be a masterpiece, who knows.  The hand writing’s pretty illegible.  The train drinking also meant I missed out on some of the finer points of the last two chapters.  Which I think might have been a bit of a shame, as they’re definitely the best ones plot-wise.  Things happen in them other than ridiculous amounts of sex.

There is a lot of sex in this book.  I’m not particularly convinced that it’s a realistic amount of sex.  Granted, I don’t have Alan Hollinghurst’s experience of being a gay man in 1980s Britain, but I am the same age as the protagonist of the novel and no-one I know is having that much casual sex.  It gets a bit too much at some point.  I’m not sure when it is, but it definitely crosses the line into gratuitous during the course of the novel.  I think that my problem with it is that you can’t even really argue that it is eroticism.  Hollinghurst’s protagonist, spoilt grandson-of-a-Peer William Beckworth proclaims to love his numerous conquests but he doesn’t.  It all feels like surface level lust- not love.  It is, cliché of clichés, a book full of fucking rather than making love.  I feel dirty just having written so corny a sentence.  That’s not a thing I would have written sober.  There is a further problem to all the sex, though- and a more serious one.  William likes young boys- even conceding at one point that 14 isn’t too young; as long as they look older.  It’s a really troubling attitude for the hero of the piece.

I think that’s one of the issue that I really had with the book.  I’m sure that it’s mentioned one point that Will’s boyfriend, Phil is three years away from the age of consent.  And so it gets a bit like that Friends episode- where Monica inadvertently sleeps with a teenager.  It’s just icky.  A lot of the ground covered in this respect is similar to that of The Falling Star but there’s a difference.  Luc is a thing of fantasy, Phil is real and in Will’s bed.  The 25 year-old part of me is appalled by someone sleeping with someone so young; actually all of me is.  It makes 288 pages in Will’s company uncomfortable.

I must, at this point, state that I didn’t the book.  There are amazing parts.  For example, Will at one point is beaten to a pulp by a group of skinheads for looking for his black ex-boyfriend.  Until this point, Will has no grit.  There’s also a wonderful rumination on chronic singledom in the diary of Will’s best friend, James; “I thought of W[ill] already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all… how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself- younger too… [couldn’t] sleep.   Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight.”  I think that might be my favourite part of the book, James is my favourite character by miles.  I understand that, given the ending, Will needs to be of looser morals but James is relatable.  This is a book that involves 83 year-old men making pornos, and James is just a far more believable character than any of the novel’s aristocratic set.

My problem with The Swimming-Pool Library boils down to the issue of privilege.  Will is so entitled and the cost of that is only revealed at the end of the book.  For the vast majority of the book, his existence is enchanted and consequence free and it’s grating after a while to read about a main character like that.  I don’t feel like I can live vicariously through Will and so want a character I can actually relate to.  I want more James.

Next up is J M Coetzee’s Slow Man.