The Corrections

I was disappointed by The Corrections.  It’s taken me absolutely ages to write this blog, just because I have so little passion for the book.  I think it is, mostly, another case of sky high expectations that couldn’t realistically be met.  Jonathan Franzen’s book is the story of a family; elderly couple Alfred and Enid and their three adult children and Enid’s desire for “one last Christmas” before Alfred is lost entirely to his Parkinson’s.  While I was hoping for some feeling of connection with the family dynamic I didn’t feel it.  Everyone in the book is kind of terrible.

Part of my issue is that it’s a very long book, around 600 or so pages, that starts off with a hell of a long visit to middle child Chip.  Chip is a wanker.  He’s a misogynist.  An ex-collage professor who, even years later and after losing his job for it, still thinks he was the victim after an affair with a student.  He spends much of his time in the early stages of the book being bitter and writing a screenplay about how evil women are.  I do not like Chip.  I think he put me the whole book.  After so many pages with him, I was unwilling to give any time to the people who raised him.  They did a shit job.  He’s an awful person.  His brother and sister aren’t much better, but I have sympathy for them at least.  Eldest son Gary is suffering from depression and so he gets a lot of leeway, their sister Denise is just chronically unable to get her shit together.  She ruins any job that she has by sleeping with pretty much anyone.

I expected something from the book that it never delivered upon.  My family has been through the ordeal of having a member have an incurable and degenerative disease, granted it was Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s, but I still expected some level of familiarity or connection.  That just wasn’t there.  The family dynamic is such an odd one, and it crops up both between the Lambert kids and Alfred and Enid as well as between Gary and his wife and kids.  My problem with it is that rather than interacting with each other, they just try and impose their will upon each other.  Sometimes it’s like they have no connection to one another.  Or emotional maturity.  No-one has any emotional maturity and I think a book essentially about Parkinson’s calls for a dose of it. 

I’m sure there are some parts of the book that I did enjoy.  It certainly picked up after Chip was in it less.  And Denise’s parts were actually pretty entertaining.  But the overwhelming feeling that I am left with is disappointment.  And after leaving it some time, a good couple of weeks, it’s the feeling that I’m left with.  There are no parts of the book that stand out as excellent and I wanted there to be.  I always want there to be when I read a book on The List.  This isn’t like Intimacy.  I can why people could love this book, but I don’t.  I think maybe if I’d been in a different frame of mind when reading it I’d have loved it and would be singing its praises right now; or even if Franzen had started the whole thing by introducing us to Denise rather than Chip the chauvinist.

I’m now reading Momento Mori by Muriel Spark.  

Intimacy

I so enjoyed TheBuddha of Suburbia that I was super looking forward to reading more of Hanif Kureishi’s work, even more so when I found out that he also wrote My Beautiful Laundrette.  My Beautiful Laundrette is a wonderful film.  I can’t recommend it enough; if you haven’t already seen it, go and watch it now.  Even if mid-1980s mixed-race gay relationships aren’t your thing, it’s worth a watch for Daniel Day-Lewis’s hair alone.  Anyway, back to the point: I had high expectations for Intimacy.  It doesn’t really disappoint, but after such a long run of great books, it seems a little mediocre. 

The plot is simply the thoughts of a man, Jay, on the night before he leaves partner Susan and their two children.  Jay’s kind of a jerk.  After refusing to marry Susan he repeatedly proposes to his much younger mistress.  I’m not a big believer in marriage, but even I can see that this is a pretty shitty move on Jay’s part.  Everything plot-wise is revealed in flashbacks, so we get a sense of the relationship falling apart while we already know that, ultimately, Jay has no real interest in saving it.  I spent a lot of this book feeling bad for Susan.  She could do better.  It’s not by any means a bad book- no I didn’t like the main character and the ending- to spoiler it- is completely unbelievable.  His oft proposed to ex-mistress is waiting with open arms once Jay leaves his family.  It doesn’t seem likely and he’s not likeable enough that the unlikely can be overlooked.

I do like the narrative structure of the book.  It’s incredibly difficult to make 150-odd pages of essential plotlessness interesting, but Kureishi nails it.  The fact that you know the relationship is doomed from the start gives the whole thing this wickedly bittersweet air.  It does, however, make the book very difficult to write about.  Most things that aren’t Jay leaving Susan feel like subplot- his happily married friends and his miserably divorced ones.  The tone of Intimacy is much more grown up than The Buddha of Suburbia, I remember comparing that book to Adrian Mole at the time.  The adult tone isn’t too surprising, given that Kureishi is writing about adults this time, and cynical ones at that.  The book is a short one, and in all reality not much happens.  This does not make for edge of the seat blogging.

I found, generally, this to be an easy book to read quickly but I’m really struggling to write about it in much depth.  As I said, compared to the stuff I’ve been reading recently, it’s fairly mediocre and I’m not really sure why it’s on the list.  It’s a book that’s hard to see as an enduring classic or anybody’s favourite.  Maybe it comes down to lack of experience in the world.  I’ve never had a family to abandon and I don’t really care much for kids- especially Jay’s fictional and nameless ones, so some of the emotional punch of the family’s inevitable upheaval is lost on me.  In the end I’m just left with the feeling that Susan is better off without Jay and I really don’t think that’s what Kureishi was going for.

My next book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

Chocky

So it’s blog time again and once more I have a book to rave about.  I’ve missed this.  It feels like it’s been an age since I’ve had a run of books that I really enjoyed and now I’m in one again and hope it lasts.  It never lasts.  I’ve been sporadically on about how much I love John Wyndham all year and I can’t believe I never tried his stuff before now.  I know we’re only half way through, but he’s shaping up to be my personal discovery of 2015.  Suffice to say, like The Midwich Cuckoos and Day of the Triffids before it, Chocky is just excellent.

It tells the story of David Gore, distant father to his two children: ten year-old Polly and her adopted older brother Matthew.  To be fair, he’s kind of a shit father to Polly.  He’s never really that interested in what she has to say- usually it’s nonsense about Twinklehooves the pony, main character in her favourite book series (as an aside, these are a pretty hilarious parody of kids’ books and include stories of Twinklehooves joining the circus and ballet).  Anyway, Matthew hears voices; or more specifically a voice, in his head and so is the more attention worthy child.  As the book goes on David and his wife Mary become more convinced that Chocky is more than just an imaginary friend, especially once they discover that she has the ability to control Matthew’s body.  As benevolent as these possessions are Chocky is an unknown and so Mary fears her to the point where it becomes clear that Chocky has to go.

There’s a hell of a lot to like in this book.  The more I read of Wyndham, the more I think that he was just decades ahead of his time.  Chunks of Chocky centre around the fact that Earth is pretty backward scientifically speaking and that we will, eventually need a new source of power.  This is a book written in 1968 implying that solar power is primitive.  I didn’t even know the technology for solar power existed in 1968. 

There’s also some marvellous gender politics at play.  Chocky, not being human, finds the delineation between male and female ridiculous.  While her confidant Matthew is find with this, she is only into using a gendered pronoun because no-one else can get their head around the idea.  You can see why she picked him.  Where this does however fall apart is the characterisation of Mary Gore.  Sometimes, it’s hard to see why David married her- she is the main negative influence in the book and David has a tendency to come across as scornful of her concerns for her child.  He doesn’t respect her worries.  He lies to her and makes Matthew complicit in his lies.

This is more cerebral sci-fi than Wyndham’s other books that I’ve been going on about this year.  Rather than concerning events that effect entire towns or countries, it’s the story of one family and their ability (or lack therefore of) to cope with extraordinary circumstances.  The actual science-y bit is theoretical in the extreme and not all that important to the plot.  In the end, it’s the family dynamic and the relationship between Chocky and Matthew that decides the story’s outcome far more than any science deus ex machina.

My next read is Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy.  

The Nose

I’m a little bit worried that my blog post about The Nose will end up being longer than the story itself.  So, brevity being the sole of wit; I will attempt to curb the outward flourishes and keep this short.  I think I’m failing already.

Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist little tale is the story of a man, Major Kovalyov, who one day wakes up without his nose.  Meanwhile, said nose turns up in a bread roll at his neighbour’s house and subsequently arses around town pretending to be a gentleman.  Our hero is, naturally, desperate to be reunited with his olfactory organ- it’s simply not the done thing to be seen without one’s nose.  But he receives no help.  Apparently, you can’t advertise for a missing nose in the Russian press.  It’s no more ridiculous than Vladimir Putin’s ice hockey skills, but only one of those stories will fly.  Clearly there are some differences in the press between now and the 1830s.

It’s a nice short story- quick and fairly easy to read.  I think I’m showing my ignorance of literature in general when all I can think to compare it to is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.  It has the same matter of factness as the whole, “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin,” thing.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the version I read used the words “giant insect” or something of a similar ilk as opposed to “monstrous vermin,” so it was even more deadpan.  Thus the issue of translation rears its ugly head again.  But I’m getting off track…

I’ve never been too confident about what the kind of absurdism in The Nose and The Metamorphosis is sending up.  I’m sure it’s very obvious if you’re more up on mid-19^th Century Russian culture than I am, but to me it’s far less clear cut than something like The Trial.  It’s an enjoyable read nonetheless. 

Part of me does feel, though, that this story has been somewhat ruined by Harry Potter.  It’s so difficult to imagine without a nose without being at least slightly influenced by Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemorty face.  It makes it very difficult to take Gogol’s absurdist story seriously.  It probably needs to be taken seriously.  No doubt it’s really a critique of some atrocity committed in pre-Revolutionary Russia; wizardly connotations are almost certainly inappropriate.

So there you have it.  Gogol’s The Nose is a good’un. To be honest, even if it were awful, it only takes about 20 minutes to read.  So why not read it?

I’m now back to reading John Wyndham.  This time it’s Chocky. 

A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is a heartbreakingly sad.  It’s an absolutely wonderful book.  It’s around 600 pages long and a good deal of that is filled with misery and yet, it’s a delight to read.  I think it must be a cultural thing because I’ve noticed it in multiple works of Salman Rushdie as well as Arundhati Roy’s The God of SmallThings, but Rohinton Mistry tells a story that winds its way through various deviations and distractions without ever seeming extraneous.  It must have been a nightmare to edit; I’m pretty sure at least a third of the novel is completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but it’s such a joy to read. 

The book is about four people living in and around Bombay predominantly during the 1970s.  First, there is Dina Dalal widow, small business owner and surrogate aunt to her lodger Maneck Kohlah, student of air conditioning and refrigeration (don’t worry, that fascinating subject is not really dwelt on in the book).  Dina’s two employees, uncle and nephew duo Ishvar and Omprakash Darji who are tailors looking to raise funds to return to their village, round off the foursome.  The book’s simply about how the relationships between the group shift and grow.  It doesn’t sound interesting, but it is.  It’s one of those stories in which a happy ending is within touching distance and then is irreparably broken because of one decision and, chiefly, circumstance.  Even though it’s pretty obvious that something bad is going to happen when everyone’s happy in a book and you’re only two thirds of the way through, it can still be just awful when that bad thing happens. 

As with a lot of previous books, I don’t to give away too much plot because I really want people to just go and read this book and spoilers suck.  I will say, however, that it’s another book that makes me aware of my general ignorance of the history of world politics.  The book’s set during the time Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister and while I know she wasn’t exactly the nice Gandhi and was assassinated for it, I don’t know that much about her.  After she became Prime Minister through rigged elections, India moved into a period known as The Emergency.  While this name reminds me a touch of The Event from the post-apocalyptic sketches on That Mitchell and Webb look, The Emergency was no laughing matter.  It was a 21 month period in which civil liberties were oppressed, forced sterilisation took place and political opponents were either arrested or murdered.  This is the backdrop to the misery of A Fine Balance and while Dina and Maneck initially attempt to ignore the problem, its effects on Ishvar and Omprakash make this impossible.

A Fine Balance is so good because it’s tapestry of experiences and voices.  Mistry splits our time between the four main characters and so our views on the characters and events are forced to shift.  I love books that do that.  It’s too easy to just like a character throughout.  It’s far more fun when they show the complexities of a proper human, or when you as a reader have to question just why you liked that character to begin with.  This is a book about a great tragedy and injustice and, still, it manages to be humorous and show the good side of human nature.  I’m not going to say it’s a particularly hopeful book.  To be frank, by the end it’s mostly fucking grim.  But there is still a small measure of kindness peppered throughout the awfulness and I guess that that’s as good as it gets sometimes.

Next time: micro-novella (aka short story) The Nose by Nikolai Gogol.

The Nice and The Good

The best thing that can be said about The Nice and The Good is that it’s good.  Or at least, it’s not bad.  Sharp eyed readers will notice that this is a case of damning with faint praise.  As with every time I don’t enjoy a book, I’m looking to lay the blame at my own door.  Iris Murdoch was a clever lady, naturally she could do no real wrong and so any failings must be my own.  The reason that I wasn’t sold on the book was simply my inability to connect with the characters and their various affairs and shifting relationships.

The book’s a bit like a soap opera in that it doesn’t really have a main character, but more of an ensemble cast. What kicks off the action, though, is the suicide of Joseph Radeechy- very clear outsider and co-worker of most of the adult male characters.  There’s an investigation carried out throughout the duration of the book, but most of the important bits take place away from the dreary London offices with the men’s families in Dorset.  The split in the locations is actually pretty interesting.  While the men can move between the two places, the women and children stay predominantly in the country.  Out of the way of the mistresses, one might argue.  If you believe The Nice and The Good, there are very few married women in our capital city.  I can only think of one incident in the entire novel when one of the wives ventures there.

My issue with the book, as I mentioned earlier, is that none of the characters are easy to relate to.  It may just be as I was ill and a touch feverish when I started the book no-one made too much of an impression on me, but I found so many of the characters difficult to connect with.  Take Kate Gray, for example.  Going by the blurb she’s one of the main characters and yet her main role in the story is to hit on one of her husband’s colleagues and laugh about the results with said husband.  I’m not too sure of her motives (they fell in the fever period of the book) but from what I could discern it’s because she thinks he might be gay and, mostly, for shits and gigs.  In short, they are neither nice nor good.  Kate’s husband, Octavian, isn’t much better.  While Kate prides herself on the couple’s complete honesty with one another, Octavian keeps hidden his late nights at the office with his secretary. 

One of the few characters I could get on with was John Ducane- suicide investigator and Kate’s flirtation target.  He seems to have good motives: he risks his life to save a belligerent teenager, he plays matchmaker and re-unites a divorced couple.  He’s no angel, but he’s pretty likable.  My main gripe with him is that near the end he falls spontaneously in love with another of the characters.  Luckily, this spontaneous love is mutual, if not entirely believable.  It feels very much like a happy ending for Ducane that Murdoch just tacked on the end.  It simply does not ring true.

Overall, though, it is a fairly decent book.  The suicide investigation has element of black magic and black mail in it, which brings another element to the novel.  I’m pretty sure the only soap opera that would dare to attempt a dark arts subplot would be Hollyoaks, and that’s always fun.  Although with the way Murdoch writes, it’d definitely be Hollyoaks- as told by The Times.  Murdoch also raises questions around the morality of the Holocaust and the behaviour of those in concentration camps as a minor subplot.  This is the most philosophically interesting and difficulty part of the book and it’s barely given any time.  Both magic related murder and Holocaust philosophy are far more interesting than the romance nonsense happening in Dorset; it’s just a shame these parts aren’t given precedence.

Next time is the brilliant A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. 

Surfacing

Surfacing is a difficult book to love.  I’ve grown accustomed to Margaret Atwood’s later stuff and her later style.  I haven’t actually read much of her earlier work and this (being only her second novel) certainly falls into that category.  It feels like an early book too- less formed then something like Cat’s Eye (and a lot shorter) but still well worth the read.  This is a strange novel.  From the outset you seem to know where it’s going but all of a sudden the clear narrative driving force (the question of what happened to the narrator’s father) that you’ve followed disappears like a will-o’-the-wisp and you find that you’re left standing alone on uncertain ground.

It tells a fragmented story of an unnamed woman returning to a remote island in Quebec following the disappearance of her estranged father.  Very little is really resolved, instead what emerges is a disjointed account of isolation and infidelity and an inability to love.  Our narrator does not return to her childhood home alone; she brings with her married couple friends Anna and David and her partner, Joe.  These three are city dwellers and so are pretty much unable to look after themselves in a place with no electricity or indoor plumbing.  According, the narrator quickly assumes responsibility for them, leading to a downward spiral.  She cracks under the pressures of womanhood.  She is a divorcee who has left her child with ex-husband, having never really felt attached to it- the whole familial responsibility thing, it’s fair to say, isn’t her bag.  Having cracked under the pressure of it all, she eventually runs wild returning to the childhood haven of nature; falling back onto the information she was taught when young.

There’s feminism in Surfacing too; I get the feeling there always is with Atwood.  I’m not sure how effective it is in this book though.  Yes, the narrator has a breakdown because of her experiences as a woman, but at the start of the book she’s already abandoned a child that she felt so disconnected from that she refused to acknowledge it as her own.  She does not use gender pronouns in relation to this child; it is a removed and abstract thing.  Her whole attitude to the child is couched in language that makes her sound deluded, or at least suffering from some form of mental disorder.  As a result, the pressures put on her are called into question and her breakdown becomes less about her femininity and more about her mind.  The points where the feminism is strongest is when it doesn’t apply to the narrator; incidental things like Anna mentioning that her husband’s potential fury and abuse because she forgot her make-up on an overnight camping trip, or the descriptions of religious oppression and restrictions on women’s outfits in the nearby town.

There are moments in this book that really remind me of Cat’s Eye; things that I think Atwood returned to and developed further in her later novel.  Both the narrator of Surfacing and Elaine in Cat’s Eye grow up with nature due to their father’s professions and the way they are forced to abandon nature is remarkably similar.  As the girls start school and beginning socialising with other children their age both go against their family’s wishes and get involved in the church, due to curiosity and a need to fit in more than any strong religious leaning.  Naturally, for both, the religiosity is short lived.  I always like it in books when you can see the evolution of an author or a return to previous ideas.  It gives a sense of development and flow and it reinforces the fact that art isn’t created in a vacuum.

I don’t think I’ve summed up just why Surfacing is difficult to love, I’ve gotten distracted by feminism.  This seems to happen a lot.  It happens in life too.  It’s hard because nothing is clear.  It is not just the case that the narrator is mad and so her perception of the ills of the world and the treatment of women invalid.  Whenever women describe their oppression it sounds a tad insane, but the main instance of potential male insanity has a logical explanation.  Also, we never really do find out what happened to her father, which is really irksome.

My next read is a return to Iris Murdoch with The Nice and The Good.