Rereading project 2012: The Day of the Triffids

In the wake of rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four last month, I decided to continue in the English Dystopias vein for my June reread. Initially I tried Brave New World, which I mentioned in passing in writing about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but found it hard to write anything worthwhile about it. But that gave me the idea to return to John Wyndham's classic sci-fi, The Day of the Triffids. Unlike any of the other books I've covered so far in this series, I came to this novel fairly recently - I read if for the first time only a couple of years ago (for this and many other things, my eternal thanks must go to the North Sydney Public Library - I also saw the excellent miniseries version via their gracious benevolence).

Longtime reader/s, if any, will be aware of my somewhat mixed feelings about plot (in short: it's great if there is one, but plenty of potentially interesting books have been spoiled by the addition of a plot where none was necessary). I was somewhat surprised, especially given how recently I first read The Day of the Triffids, how little plot there actually is here. In short, seven years before the story begins, a new type of plant is discovered, eventually named the triffid. Though useful (it produces a sort of super oil), the triffid is dangerous - they come equipped with a powerful sting and a seemingly aggressive behaviour, including the ability to move. Our hero & narrator, Bill Masen, a biologist specialising in triffids, is stung in the eye & thus blindfolded when a beautiful series of comets streaks through the night sky. The next morning, he discovers that everyone who saw the display - almost everyone else - is now blind. He meets a girl (the appallingly named Josella) who was drunk and thus also missed the comets, and the two try to survive. The triffids, sensing the opportunity to take over, begin more overtly attacking and killing the blinded humans.

So, yes, in a way, a lot happens. But Wyndham handles it masterfully, making his whole book about the premise. What would you do if tomorrow morning you awoke and found that everyone around you was blind? Yes, now it would be a fair bit different to in 1951, when the book was published (and, more or less, set), but services quickly drop out. Electricity, fresh water, telecommunications, the chains of supply that bring food to us - all fall apart remarkably quickly. Wyndham obviously put a lot of thought into what effects his scenario would have, and in doing so, he creates a world that we can live in through Bill. Bill's an ordinary man in many ways, other than his professional knowledge of triffids which turns out to be vital, but otherwise torn: should he try to help the helpless people around him? Or is that merely delaying the inevitable, prolonging their misery while decreasing his own chance of survival? Stores can be looted in the short term, but if ongoing survival is your aim, a big city is no place to be. That fact is brought home - fully half of the novel is set in London, before Bill is finally able to leave and look for a suitable place to live in the country. Not only are supplies in short order, but everyone - blind or otherwise - is fearful, confused and desperate. Wyndham is unsparing in his descriptions here: The Day of the Triffids is never gory, it never revels in the misery of the world it creates, but it's impossible to read without thinking about what it would be like to be in Bill's shoes, or in the place of those less lucky than him who simply wake up one morning blind. (Within the first few chapters, several characters commit suicide, and many others turn violent, especially when they encounter the still-sighted like Bill and Josella.) Wyndham seems to actively encourage us to think about how we would react in Bill's place.

Bill is an obvious character for us to latch on to, and his narration is perfectly judged. I don't often include lengthy quotes in these reviews (mostly because my eyes glaze over them in others'), but this short paragraph (from just before Bill leaves London) wonderfully conveys the feeling of standing in the middle of a city and knowing that neither it, nor anything else you've known, will ever be the same again:

Above it all rose the Houses of Parliament, with the hands of the clock stopped at three minutes past six. It was difficult to believe that all that meant nothing any more, that now it was just a pretentious confection in uncertain stone which could decay in peace. Let it shower its crumbling pinnacles onto the terrace as it would - there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives. Into those halls which had in their day set world echoes to good intentions and sad expediencies, the roofs could in due course fall; there would be none to stop them, and none to care. Alongside, the Thames flowed imperturbably on. So it would flow until the day the Embankments crumbled and their water spread out and Westminster became once more an island in a marsh.

The Day of the Triffids is not a long book (around 230 pages), but it's a surprisingly dense one. Even my brief plot summary above should indicate that, but its main interest is not 'this happened, then this, then this...', but rather Wyndham seems to have come up with an idea and then decided not to complicate matters, just to think about 'what would happen if this premise came true?' In doing so, he's created a world, and dragged us into it. The book ends on a strangely lowkey note - another indication of Wyndham's real interest in this story. We're left with a lot more to imagine - knowing what we know to that point, what might happen afterwards?

What would we do? How would we cope?

Rereading project 2012: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Few twentieth-century novels cast shadows anywhere near as long as Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was not the first dystopian novel, as it clearly cribs from Huxley's Brave New World (Huxley certainly thought so - follow that link, by the way), and there are plenty of novels from the 20th century which were more influential, in literary terms, than Orwell's final book. (Even the whole dystopian/alternative history type of novel has largely been submerged into the science-fiction genre.) Yet it's hard to think of any other English-language novel that has contributed anywhere near as many ideas or phrases to our society as has Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Catch-22 gave us the title, of course, but not as much else from that book has penetrated public language.) A short list of words/phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, memory hole, Room 101, 'Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia'. Not to mention one of Orwell's most famous sentences: 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever'.

But how does Nineteen Eighty-Four stand up as a novel? Actually, better than I remembered - and I say this as someone who's loved the book since I first read it (in school, like many). This re-read has emphasised what a well-constructed and wonderful novel it is - not just as an excellent satire of totalitarian, but as an entertaining story as well. I'm not going to bother with any sort of plot summary here, by the way, and will assume that you're at least passingly familar with the story. (So, there will be spoilers.)

Orwell does - and does surprisingly subtly and effectively - an excellent job of building his world. Yes, occasionally the polemicist in him gets the better of the novelist in him and he does sometimes disobey the 'show, don't tell' rule of storytelling with wild abandon, but it's the small details in the first section of Nineteen Eighty-Four that really convey what we need to know. The dreadful taste of the standard-issue gin, the scarcity of razor blades, the horrible lunches served at Winston's work - they all emphasise the sheer poverty of Oceania. Similarly, Orwell never defines a lot of the terms or groupings Winston encounters, but he tells us all we need to know and leaves us to fill in the blanks ourselves. And this is all aside from the fact that one of the most damning critiques of the Soviet Union came from the Left, and came remarkably early (whatever modern-day members of the Right might want to believe, Orwell would have had very little sympathy for their arguments).

The love story that forms the centre of the middle sections of Nineteen Eighty-Four is - perhaps surprisingly - another instance of Orwell's skill and an oft-overlooked reason why this novel works as well as it does. Winston and Julia may not be the most-lovable characters in all of fiction, and their 'romance' is based almost entirely on their shared unorthodoxy, but it also presents each of them, in their different ways, with a chance to be human in a way that nothing else in their world does. Together they find a small way to reject Big Brother and the Party, and that's enough to override their knowledge that none of it can or will last. Humanity, our shared need to feel things, is the only way to respond to a system designed to crush everyone into uniformity.

One of my problems with Nineteen Eighty-Four on previous reads has been the overly long extract from Goldstein's book presented halfway through. This has all the excitement that one would expect from a forty-page section of a novel wherein the two main characters sit together and read a book called The Theory and Practice of Collective Oligarchy. It is - I still think - too long and it derails the book's momentum to that point. Yet, re-reading it over the last couple of days, I couldn't help but wonder if that wasn't the whole point. The frustrating thing - for Winston, for us - is that this book, so long sought-after, promising so much, ends up being somewhat underwhelming. It doesn't really tell us (or Winston) much that we/he don't already know. And since he never gets to finish reading it, we never get to anything interesting. But maybe that's intentional. O'Brien later tells Winston that he co-wrote the book and emphasises that it - being a part of the Party's plot all along - merely confirmed Winston's suspicions without offering any suggestions or possible remedies. The dissidents' plot is hopelessly vague because it has to be. 'Goldstein's' book is repetitive, longwinded and obvious, and that should be our first clue that it's not what it appears to be, what Winston wants it to be.

Of course, Nineteen Eighty-Four finishes on a decidedly pessimistic note. Our hero is beaten, in every sense, and loses whatever humanity and individuality he had gained in the first half of the book. He betrays, and is betrayed by, the only person he really cared about, and is betrayed by the only person he admired. His triumph at the very end is amongst the most depressing in all literature, for it represents the flickering out of the last prospect of hope we could have had for him. We can hope that his earlier feeling that the Party would be overthrown, eventually, might come true, but there's no reason for us to think that, really. It's also worth noting what a dreadfully depressing world the Party has created for themselves. Even the Inner Party, the controllers of Oceania, lead lives that are caught up in the world they have created. They may have more luxurious surroundings - nicer apartments, better chocolate and booze, less risk of being exterminated - but ultimately they live in the same depressing world as everyone else. Being the face stamped on forever is obviously a horribly grim future, but being the wearer of that boot is hardly a great prize either. Humanity is removed from both ends of the scale, leaving the world nothing more or less than a machine.

Nineteen Eighty-Four isn't Orwell's best novel - that's Animal Farm (which also gave us at least one memorable and much-used phrase) - but its qualities as a book and as a story are often overlooked because of its remarkable qualities as a piece of political and social writing. Orwell was not the finest prose writer of the 20th century, but his simple, direct and understated style serves this story better than anything else would have. And he still gets in some wonderful writing - that first sentence is among fiction's best ('It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen'). I came back to Nineteen Eighty-Four for the political and social observations, but I finished it with a stronger appreciation for what a wonderful novel it is.

Re-reading Project 2012: Three Novels By Agatha Christie

In mid-February, I spent a few days at my parents' house in Brisbane. While there, I dug out some of the things I'd stored in their ceiling space when I left, including a pile of old Agatha Christie novels. Throughout my teenage years, I worked my way through her bibliography - I think I may've read everything she published under her own name (she also wrote some romance novels under a pseudonym, but I've never bothered with those). Yet I haven't re-read many of them at all in the last decade or so, and I thought it would be interesting this month to re-read three of them and see how I react many years after my first - or indeed any subsequent - reading of them. I decided to pick one Hercule Poirot, one Miss Marple and one non-series book to sample the range of Christie's books.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Arguably one of her most famous books, along with Murder on the Orient Express and maybe a couple of others, this is a relatively early book and apparently caused a big sensation at the time of its original publication because of its (unprecedented?) twist ending (which I won't spoil here).

Briefly, the story is narrated by Dr Shepherd, the GP in a small-ish English village. It begins immediately after the death of Mrs Ferrars, a local woman, but that is merely prelude to the titular murder of prominent local - and Shepherd's friend - Roger Ackroyd. As it turns out, the mysterious new neighbour next door to Shepherd and his sister is none other than famous, newly retired, detective Hercule Poirot, who gets pressed into helping solve the case. For much of the book, it's almost like an Agatha Christie by numbers routine - Poirot decides to help out, the local police think he's a little strange but nonetheless are glad for the help (so long as they still get credit), and Poirot works in his own inimitable way to root out secrets from everyone who could possibly be a suspect. This last ends up being one of my main gripes against Christie's books - none of them are long, but almost all of them occasionally get bogged down in frustrating red herrings. If someone dies at a country house (which is what happens in a decent proportion of them), it will emerge that
a) almost everyone else in the house - along with a few neighbours etc - will have a secret, many of which are at least potentially grounds for a motive,
b) several tedious chapters will be spent sorting out exactly who was where when the murder or other significant events occured (at least a few of the characters will lie about this),
c) almost none of a) or b) will matter to Poirot in solving the crime.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a pretty good example of these tendencies, but is of course redeemed by the ending. Yes, it's silly and less plausible than many of her novels, but it is a damn good twist (even if it has been quite cleverly skewed by Pierre Bayard in Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, which argues that Poirot was wrong in his deductions). Indeed, Christie thought it such a good ending that she later reused it in another book (which I won't name, for obvious reasons). But throughout Ackroyd, we see Poirot at his best - he was always served well by having a narrator/assistant, which is why the Hastings books are amongst the best Poirots - and many of the characteristics for which Christie was famous: the misdirects, the quickly but effectively drawn cast, the unspectacular but utilitarian prose, the gentle humour. She would grow to hate Poirot - in much the same way Arthur Conan Doyle did with his most-famous creation - but in this early novel he's still on show as one of fiction's most interesting detectives.

A Murder is Announced

Christie never, so far as I know, disliked Miss Marple as much as she did Poirot, but many of her Marple books feature the elderly detective as a marginal character, whereas Poirot was always centre stage. That was by design, given the two characters' styles, but it does mean that there are some Marple books where she barely appears. A Murder is Announced is not the extreme end of that, but it's a good example of how the Marple books as a whole work. Unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, A Murder is Announced is one book I barely remembered, so reading it this time meant that I was in some ways reading it for the first time.

Unfortunately, A Murder is Announced is not Christie at her prime. The set-up is intriguing: the local paper carries a small notice to the effect that there will be a murder that evening at the house of Miss Blacklock and all her friends are invited to be there. A group from the small village turn up on time, to see an attempted robbery where the culprit ends up shooting himself. Miss Marple gets involved, a couple more murders take place and the ultimate villain is caught by falling into Miss Marple's trap. Yet the story, even by the standards of the genre, is just completely implausible: not one, but two sets of siblings whose identities and relationships are secret; multiple people going by someone else's name; a fantastically complicated plot wherein what should have been a simple murder committed by one person against another becomes a whole big routine; and Miss Marple stumbles onto the truth of what happened after a cat knocks over a vase.

It is frustrating because, as I said, it's an excellent set-up. But one of the worst faults of Christie's plots was her tendency to create fantastically complicated plans for the murderer to carry out. Implausibility within certain limits is part of this type of detective story, and one cannot really criticise her books on those grounds, but A Murder is Announced takes this altogether too far. It also features one of my least-favourite devices in her novels: a scene where we witness a murder taking place, but with the identity of the murdered withheld in an incredibly clunky manner ('she heard someone approaching'... followed by a conversation between the two in which the 'someone' is never named - particularly irritating in this book because the 'she' in question had just begun to suspect another character. That other character is the 'someone' who walks up to her and chats for a moment before killing her).

Miss Marple was always inferior to Poirot, but this book is far from either character or author at their best.


Ten Little [Racial Slurs]

Well. We must begin with the title, which was of course from a different time (1939: 'before racism was bad, as David Brent might argue). Nonetheless, its impossible for modern eyes to get past it, especially since it drawn from a poem frequently referred to in the book, and all the action takes place on and island named after the same word. (Publishers later renamed it Ten Little Indians, apparently believing that to be better, before its modern re-naming as And Then There Were None, which was a better title from the start anyway, even aside from the racial dimension.)


Anyway, all of that is unfortunate, not least because this book is actually one of Christie's best. Closer in some ways to a thriller than to a conventional detective story (my copy, pictured here, describes it as a 'detective story without a detective'), Ten Little N-Words inspired, directly or not, many of the tropes of contemporary thriller books/movies. Ten strangers are each summoned in different ways (offers of jobs, free holidays, chance to catch up with old friends) to an island off the coast of Devon. We learn early that several of them have things on their consciences, but after they all arrive - to find their host absent - they are all charged with committing murders for which they were never found out. They soon begin dying, one by one, following the descriptions in the titular poem, and begin to suspect each other. Christie does a fine job of creating a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere with her ten characters on a small island and with no way of leaving. (Against that, characterisation here is pretty weak - perhaps no surprise, given that it's one of her shortest books, clocking in at only 190 pages. Thankfully, the first to die is the worst-drawn character - Christie always had trouble with Modern Young People, usually making them sound like nothing on earth. In this case, the Thoughtless Young Man, responding to someone else's criticism of fast driving, shrugs and says, 'Speed's here to stay', as if anyone in the history of the English language would ever say that.)

And, remarkably, the ending works. It's overly elaborate, like so many of her plots (including the other two here), but in this case it's effective. The method of conveying it is perhaps a little clunky, but there was really no way around that. In some ways, the book's brevity (not that any of her others were much longer) helps create the propulsive and tense atmosphere which pervades.

So, what did I think of these three books after this re-read? Well, two of them I quite enjoyed, one I was mostly bored - with bouts of frustration - by. They all have the virtue of being quick, escapist reads - so long as you can keep all the characters in your mind, that's all the reader need bring to the read. The parts of Christie's writing which annoy me will not come as a surprise to anyone who's read any of her books - the over-reliance on stock characters, the occasionally dreadful dialogue, the tedium of working through chapters describing the irrelevant movements of characters and the addiction to murders (even quick, unplanned ones) happening in overly complicated ways - make it hard to love these stories uncritically. But they're still fun and, occasionally, quite brilliant. Agatha Christie wrote during a period in which light authors such as herself were expected to publish a least one thing a year, and I do wonder how her books would've been if she'd had more time to spend on each. Rather than writing nearly 80 books of varying quality, she could have done half as many but increased the average quality of each, perhaps. (For another instance of an author who churned out too many books with similar plots when they might've been better served by writing fewer but better things, see Wodehouse, P.G.) But that was the way things worked through the mid-20th century, and so we can't blame her for that.

Re-reading Project 2012: Emma

The second entry in my re-reading project for this year is Jane Austen's Emma.  Like A Suitable Boy, I've read Emma multiple times before (twice, I think, compared to the half-dozen of ASB), but not for a few years.  In this review, I will be a little bit spoiler-y, so proceed with caution if you've not read it but don't want to know what happens.

Pride & Prejudice is probably most people's default choice for their Favourite Austen Novel, helped of course by the excellent (& faithful) BBC mini-series a decade or so ago and the actually-pretty-good movie a few years later. And certainly it's a hard one to argue against, but personally I've always had a bit of a preference for Emma, for the following reasons:

1) The title character.  Austen apparently set out to create a less-likeable central character*, and certainly Emma can be a little unpleasant, especially to modern eyes. Her early obsession with taking on the socially unfortunate Harriet and setting her up with a respectable young man at the expense of Harriet's (returned) feelings for Robert Martin comes across as hopelessly patronising, assuming she knows better than Harriet whom she should marry.  (Of course, by the standards of their society, she's right - Mr Elton or Mr Churchill or Mr Knightley would all be very advantageous marriages for Harriet. And two of them also would have made pretty decent husbands too, had they shown any interest in her.)  Yet what makes Emma an appealing character is that she learns from her mistakes - after the awkwardness resulting from her efforts to matchmake Harriet with Mr Elton, she takes a much more passive role in hoping for the best for Harriet.  Emma also does have a genuine affection for Harriet, as well for quite a few other people in her life.  She's sometimes thoughtless - both in her matchmaking and in a particularly cutting remark she makes to Miss Bates late in the novel - but she also feels bad about these and recognises without hesitation when she has erred.

2) All the other characters. For a novel named after a single character, Emma does a remarkable job of filling out its world.  There's an extensive cast of well-drawn characters in Emma's life - her family, her friends & associates, and even some people she doesn't like.  Admittedly all we ever know about Robert Martin is that he is an excellent young man who loves Harriet, but that is actually probably fairly accurate in some ways.  There's no reason Emma would ever know him as anything beyond that - she knows him exclusively from reports from Harriet and Mr Knightley, and they both like him.  But elsewhere Austen provides some wonderful characters, including the twin comic pieces of Mr Woodhouse (permanently worried about the health of everyone, including being shocked that someone might even consider opening a window at night) and Miss Bates, surely one of the most annoying but accurate characters in English literature, with her never-ending run-on sentences, starting on one topic but diverting herself constantly before any theme is fully expressed.  Frank Churchill is an appealing male lead for most of the story, appearing (to draw a Pride & Prejudice comparison) like the best characteristics of Bingley and Wickham combined.  Better still is Jane Fairfax, who allows Austen to hit a beautiful but rarely-expressed character note: most of us know someone we feel like we should like, but we just cannot, without even perhaps being able to say why.  That's exactly how Emma feels about Jane, and it's a neat point for Austen to make (and one, incidentally, which helps us identify with and like Emma).

The only false move here is Mrs Elton, a one-note, thoroughly unlikeable and unsympathetic character.  Insincere, snobby, with a massively inflated sense of her own worth, Mrs Elton is far too broadly drawn - especially since she plays such a prominent part in the novel - to be believable.  For story purposes she had to be objectionable to Emma, but I think Austen overplays this point here.  Against that, I will note that her awfulness does allow for my favourite throwaway line in the book:

'Mr Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs Elton's beginning to talk to him'.**

3) The subtle reveal of the romance.  Again, to refer to Pride & Prejudice, this is a point in Emma's favour - from the start of the former novel, it's clear that Mr Darcy is the male lead and therefore the ultimate partner of the female lead Lizzie.  Emma does a much better job of providing some plausible alternatives for its main character - including the unlikely but oft-expressed option that she will not marry at all.  But for most of the novel, Mr Churchill is seen as a possibility for Emma, even if she seems to go off him after their initial (seeming) mutual infatuation.  On this re-read, I was quite surprised at how little a role Mr Knightley plays in the first half of the story, and how suddenly their romance seems to bloom (or, more accurately, how late in the novel each realise that's how they feel).  The result of this is that it's quite possible to read most of Emma without trying to pick who - and how - Emma will end up with, which makes the late reveal much more satisfying.  (A minor quibble here which will make sense only to those who know the story very well: I can't help but feel that she should have received the letter from Mr Churchill before Knightley's declaration.  Austen could have made something of Emma reading that Churchill felt free to flirt with Emma because he could tell she didn't care, perhaps making her stop & realise that soon she really would be the only unmarried person in her circle, and that maybe Knightley woudn't return her recently discovered feelings because he too saw her as someone without any romantic feeling at all.  But that's just a thought I had, and clearly Austen had other things in mind with Churchill's letter and Emma/Knightley's responses to it.)  There's also a neat way here in which, in more subtle terms that Pride & Prejudice, Emma and Knightley will be good for each other - he can provide for her the grounding she sometimes needs, and she can help him see the better side of people than he probably would otherwise.  It's no coincidence, although Austen doesn't slap us in the face with this, that each of them are seen to be better people - nicer to those around them, more tolerant of people they previously hadn't liked - because of the other.  Knightley is not just an improving influence on Emma; she does the same for him.


On top of those, of course, are all the other reasons why people still read Austen the best part of two centuries after she wrote - the wonderful writing, the way in which a social world was depicted (and, honestly, who cares if it's not accurate or representative? that's such a facile reason for disliking a work of fiction - like arguing that you don't like the Sherlock Holmes stories because some of the crimes were a bit far-fetched), and the endlessly entertaining characters and their romances.  Austen is not for everyone - a characteristic her writing has in common with every writer in every language - but to avoid her because you struggled through the first quarter of one of her novels in high school is to do a grave disservice to both yourself and one of the great writers.



* She would eventually succeed, intentionally or otherwise, with Mansfield Park and the detestable Fanny Price, English literature's least interesting lead character.

** I'm also very fond of 'There was not a dissentient voice on the subject, either when Mrs Perry drank tea with Mrs and Miss Bates, or when Mrs and Miss Bates returned the visit'.  Austen could be slyly hilarious, and I sometimes think of her like a grandma, outwardly pleasant, cheery and polite, but not fooled for a minute by those around her, and capable of making the odd cutting remark.

Re-reading Project 2012: A Suitable Boy

After I finished my F. Scott Fitzgerald reading/blogging project in December, I cast around for ideas for my next series.  I couldn't think of another author whose bibliography I wanted to work my way through - and nobody else suggested anyone - so I decided that this year I will re-read a bunch of my favourite novels and blog about them.  In some cases, I might find I like the book less than I thought I did, or I might appreciate different things to what struck me the first time around, and those would be interesting (for me, at least) to think about.

Re-reading is something I have a great theoretical appreciation for.  I think that the sign of a good book is one that you want to return to, and that you like more, or in different ways, to how you did when you first read it.  I also think that a lot of books - like a lot of movies and tv shows - actually improve the second time around. You can focus less on the Who-What-Where-When of the story and appreciate the telling more, notice details that you may have missed the first time around, and see how knowing the ending affects your reading (/viewing) of the beginning.

Against that, however, I have a huge pile of books I've not read at all, ready access to many more, a mental list of many books or authors I'd like to read and an account with the Book Depository.  So, in practice, I re-read much less than I would like to.

The first book in my 2012 re-reading project is in fact one I've read multiple times in the past (about four or five times, I'd guess).  I first read Vikram Seth's novel over a decade ago, when I was an undergrad, and I re-read it for the first time less than six months later - which fact is made more interesting because A Suitable Boy runs to 1474 pages in the paperback and took me about two weeks of solid reading to finish.  I don't really believe in allocating things as my all-time favourites, but A Suitable Boy is my standard answer when someone asks what my favourite book is.  Yet I haven't actually read it for a few years, so earlier this year I felt a desire to read it again.

A Suitable Boy, despite its daunting length, is a fairly straightforward novel.  Its main character is Lata, a 19 year-old girl in 1951 India. Her older sister has just gotten married, and now her mother thinks it's time to find a suitable boy for her youngest child.  But that's not it - A Suitable Boy has a huge cast of characters, and while Lata's story is the centre of the novel, almost as much time is spent with her new brother-in-law's brother, Maan, a warm-hearted but impulsive young man.  There are also separate but related stories about other members of each of Lata & Maan's families and their various friends and associates.  Along the way, A Suitable Boy touches on university politics, actual politics, literature and poetry, shoe manufacturing, families, rural life, religious tensions, cricket and India's national identity in the immediate post-colonial period.

That wide range of stories and characters is what makes A Suitable Boy more than a simple Pride & Prejudice re-hash in a different context (fun though that could've been).  Seth juggles all his elements perfectly, writing all his characters - even the unlikeable ones - which such warmth and empathy that we can spend consecutive chapters barely touching on Lata and her story without feeling like we're off the point.  All the stories and scenes are connected to Lata & her family, or Maan & his, even if neither of them actually appear there and even if the story has nothing to do with the ultimate question of whom Lata will marry.  As we move through this enormous book, meeting more & more characters (some central characters don't appear for the first time until 400 pages in!), Lata's choice for a husband narrow down to three boys.  Not everyone will be happy with her decision, but my most recent reading made me realise more clearly than ever before that it probably was the right one.

Returning to A Suitable Boy after a few years was like returning to a world I now know well.  Like the best long-running tv shows, A Suitable Boy's massive scope allows Seth to build an entire world and populate it with three-dimensional characters.  Parts of the novel are set in Calcutta and other real-life cities, but the bulk of A Suitable Boy is set in the fictional town of Brahmpur, which by the end of the book you feel to be entirely real.  Similarly, while some real-life Indian politicians appear, the fictional ones are so well-drawn that scenes between real and fictional characters seem completely plausible.  This is the rare novel which can be both heart-breakingly tragic and laughter-inducing hilarious.  We feel characters' joy, despair, indecision, anger, ambitions and friendship.

The warmth of Seth's writing, the scope of his stories and the wonderful characters will keep me returning to A Suitable Boy.