Book review: Alms For Oblivion Volume 1

Simon Raven's Alms For Oblivion is a novel sequence - ten books - centred on a group of characters from Britain's upper (& upper-middle) class around the middle of the twentieth century. Rather than being a conventional series, following a group over time, or exploring the same timeframe from different perspectives, each of the novels is essentially self-contained. The plots, settings - and often styles - differ from book to book, but they all take place within the same world, with minor characters from one novel becoming major characters in another and events in some books being referred to in others (not to the extent that you need to have read the earlier one - you should, though, of course). Thus, over the course of ten novels, or even just the four here, Raven is able to build and populate his own little version of upper-class England.

This collection contains the first four books written in the sequence (over the course of the series, Raven jumped around in time, so these books are the fourth, fifth, third and first books respectively by that measure - but it's best to read them in the order they were written, I decided). The first, The Rich Pay Late, primarily deals with business and political deals in the mid-1950s London. Donald and Jude, who co-own a printing business, try to take over a political journal. That's basically all there is to the plot, although of course there are complications, but Raven uses that simple story to begin building his world. An astonishing array of characters is introduced, and with them, the complications of their various relationships - friends, enemies, allies of convenience, lovers, ex-partners, barely tolerated business colleagues etc. And Raven has tremendous fun with these relationships and complications, telling the story with a charming lightness of touch and an admirable ability to make his characters well-rounded and occasionally unlikeable.

Book two, Friends in Low Places, takes place not long afterwards and largely deals with the same set of characters, but with a different focus. Indeed, if anything, the spread of characters is even broader, with a plot revolving around various factions trying to gain control of compromising papers, the government's attempt to set up holiday camps, competition for political election, and the personal travails of a host of characters. At times it was hard to hold in my head who was who and how they all related in Friends in Low Places, but by the second half of the book all the threads are pulled together and the surprisingly intricate plotting becomes an asset. Some of the more prominent characters from The Rich Pay Late are reduced to secondary characters here, but we also get to see some of them from other perspectives, so they're painted more (or less) favourably than they were earlier, or different sides to their personalities are illustrated, or the toll taken on them by the events of that earlier book is evident.

The Sabre Squadron essentially introduces a whole new range of characters - although a couple from the first two novels make appearances. Daniel, a young mathematician, heads to Germany to try to unravel the final work of a man who was either a genius or insane (or both). He discovers that quite a few people are interested in his results, and in the novel's second half it becomes almost a spy novel as Daniel - and his findings - are jostled between different people, each with their own agenda, and he begins to wonder whom he can trust. The Sabre Squadron begins as a campus novel, becomes a spy novel, and ends on a quite unexpected note. The realignment of characters in the series is initally off-putting, I found, but Raven soon settles us into this new cast and this book makes clear that the whole Alms For Oblivion series is not going to be bound merely to the same (admittedly large) cast in the one setting.

The final novel in this volume, but chronologically the series' first, is Fielding Gray, named for its protagonist (& narrator), who has also appeared in each of the three previous books. Set during his final year of school - in 1945, beginning just as WWII ends - and based around a few of his friends and schoolmates (several of whom are significant characters in The Rich Pay Late & Friends in Low Places), Fielding Gray is, in its first half, a fairly typical English boarding school novel - which is not a complaint, mind you, since I usually enjoy the genre - focusing on his relationships with his friends, his difficult and domineering father & meek mother, the headmaster and various teachers, and typical plotting for such books (first crushes, growing philosophical/political consciousness, sporting matches, squabbles between friends, plans for holidays etc). As has become the norm in this series, however, the second half of Fielding Gray takes some unexpected turns, mixing tragedy with comedy, action with introspection, and fleshing out the main characters, especially the title one.

These four slim novels (the four together run to just under 900 pages) are each a quick, compelling read. Raven is a master of narrative pacing, always encouraging you to read just a little more. That, along with his beautifully crafted prose, commitment to drawing out his characters and ability to keep the reader on their toes via shifts in direction, made me race through these four and look forward to the remaining six novels in the series. Raven is one of those authors who is not well-known now (he died in 2001, and most of his books - including, until recently, this series - are out of print), but who nonetheless has a group of devoted fans. This volume has added me to their number.

Book review: The Yips

Nicola Barker came to my attention courtesy of Darkmans, her 2007 novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I loved that book so much that I have subsequently read almost everything she wrote before then, along with her 2010 Burley Cross Postbox Theft, and so when I saw she had another new book out, I jumped on it. And then was very glad to see it longlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

Barker is one of the most distinctive writers in modern English fiction. Her style is one that I can understand grating on some people, but I personally find her novels hilarious, imaginative and wonderfully populated. The Yips in some ways pushes her style even further - most of the 550 page book is dialogue (I've seen estimates that it's up to 90%), much of which is overlapping, stylised and tangential.

In fact, that sort of describes the book as a whole. The action, such as it is, centres on Stuart Ransom, a past-his-prime but ludicrously egotistical professional golfer, and Gene, a middle-aged man who works multiple jobs, including at a bar where he meets Stuart. (The first scene begins mid-conversation as a tipsy Stuart holds forth to Gene and barmaid Jen.) We cut away from them to meet Valentine, who lives with her mother. Her mother has recently suffered an accident which has left her confused about who she is, and who Valentine is. No connexion between the two settings is evident to begin with, but of course we expect that eventually they will meet up. Barker takes that convention further, though, by gradually adding more and more relationships, so that each character ends up having no more than one degree of separation from any other character. Charting the relationships between the characters in The Yips would result in a cobweb with every point linking in different ways to each other point.

There's not really a plot, as such. Things happen, but they seem slightly irrelevant compared to sitting back and watching the ever-increasing cast of characters come to know each other (& themselves). Few novels could have, for instance, a major character forcibly abducted by another character, left in the boot of a car for a few hours before being rescued by third character (based on suspicions of a fourth!) and yet have that barely register as an important event in the book's world. In fact, several of the characters involved seem mainly to see it as a case of an inconvenient piece of plotting spoiling their story. (The book itself is not that meta.) Throughout all her inter-connected storylines and relationships, Barker takes evident delight in confounding expectations and taking the story in different directions to what the reader may expect.

And throughout it all, we're treated to Barker's talent for eccentric characters, oddball locations (few novels have been set in Luton before, I suspect) and comically overstuffed writing. The blurb, to give some idea, lists some of the characters: 'a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interferring barmaid..., and a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist with his considerably more pious wife'.

There are many readers who would probably read that description and recoil in horror. As I said above, I can understand why people wouldn't like Barker's style. For me, though, it's a perfectly composed comic novel - dense but quick to read, largely plotless but still convoluted and joyfully highlighting characters, occupations and locations that fiction rarely touches. Not all of Barker's books are perfect, but I've enjoyed her last few in particular so much that she's one of my favourite living authors.

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?

Book review: Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky

Last year, I read & review Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, a novel set in (just) pre-WWII London about George, a perenially near-broke young man who wastes all his money socialising with people he doesn't really like just because Netta, the object of his obsession, is in their group. While I loved the book, for some reason I had it in my head that Hangover Square was, if not Hamilton's only novel, certainly his major one. Recently, looking through the NYRB Classics catalogue, I discovered that they publish two of his other books - this one & The Slaves of Solitude (which I have not yet read, but will soon). Both, as is customary for NYRB Classics, have gorgeous covers too. So I ordered it quickly and read it as soon as it arrived.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is actually a collection of three linked novellas which were published separately in 1929, 1932 and 1934 before being collected together in 1935. Each focuses on a different character: The Midnight Bell is the story of Bob, a young bartender at the pub of that name who falls for a beautiful prostitute, Jenny. Her story is told in the shortest part of the trilogy, The Siege of Pleasure. And The Plains of Cement follows Ella, Bob's coworker at the Midnight Bell, who also has a crush on him.

As with Hangover Square (1941), the world here is of the young & impoverished working classes. The Midnight Bell can be seen in some ways as an early version of that later novel - Bob has little money, is very proud of the savings he has, but continually throws it away to impress Jenny. She is no Hooker With A Heart Of Gold, either - while her own story in the second volume fills in her character and presents her more sympathetically, she is clearly interested in Bob only to the extent that he can help her out of her financial problems and occasionally show her a good time. The problem is, of course, that he is barely richer than she is. Time after time she stands him, ignores or is rude to him and all-too-clearly (at least from the reader's perspective) grasps after his money while offering little in return. Apparently based on a period in Hamilton's own life, he brings both a sympathy and a clear-eyed perspective to Bob's story: we see every one of Bob's series of bad decisions, but at the same time that we dread everything he does and wish we could reach through the book's page and give him a firm shaking we also never stop hoping that it will work out for him.

In the brief The Siege of Pleasure (just over 100 pages), we jump back in time to see how Jenny went from being a sensible, indeed model, maid to a pair of eldery sisters and their infirm brother to prostitution. Here, rather than the several-months timespan of Bob's story, we see the shift in Jenny's life over the course of one night: after having landed her new job, she goes out for the night with a friend she doesn't particularly like. Lacking the willpower to do anything else, she ends up not only trying alcohol for the first time, but going on a rather impressive bender, along with her unlovely friend and two random men they meet. Hamilton leaves most of her subsequent journey up to us to imagine, but while the idea of one night's drunkeness leading to life as a working girl might seem simplistic or extreme, Hamilton's success here is that he sells the idea. Given the chance to focus on just a couple of days, Hamilton's gift for creating an atmosphere is in full flight.

Circling back to the same timeframe as The Midnight Bell, in The Plains of Cement, Ella's story largely avoids the trick of just showing us Bob's story from the perspective of his friend. That's what I'd expected - Ella moping while he's out wasting his money on that cheap floozy (it's worth noting that, from the moment Jenny first enters the bar, both Bob & Ella know exactly what she does for a living). Instead, we see Ella's life parallelling Bobs - she also meets someone at the Midnight Bell and her story mostly deals with that relationship. Mr Eccles is a relatively wealthy older man who takes a liking to Ella and begins taking her out, assuming a stronger and closer relationship than she is willing to enter into. While she likes him well enough, and is pragmatically aware of the benefits of attaching herself - and eventually marrying - a wealthy man, Ella is unable to commit to the idea. Partly this is because of her unspoken, unreturned, love for Bob, but she also finds Mr Eccles (she struggles to even call him by his first name) too eager, too ridiculous, too quick to assume that they are dating, then engaged. As with the first two entries, The Plains of Cement is told in a third-person perspective of the lead, and again Hamilton shows a fine talent for developing his characters. 

Across all three stories, Hamilton's genius is in describing his world. It's obviously a world he knew well - as noted, the story of Bob was drawn from his own life, but more broadly, these working people and their lives were what he lived in. At times when reading Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - and especially the first part - I felt almost ashamed of not having a glass of booze in my other hand. In some ways, though, that would have been redundant - so effectively is this world recreated on the page that there's almost no way to get any closer to how the characters feel.

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.

Book review: The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes is a novelist I've never quite been able to get into. I've read a fair few of his books, and enjoyed some of them (Talking It Over, Flaubert's Parrot, Arthur & George), but have never felt passionately strongly about any of them. There's also been a couple I've disliked or have forgotten soon after reading them.

Yet, for many, Barnes was the great hope of this year's Booker Prize shortlist. I won't go into the details here (there's plenty elsewhere on the internet if you care), but this year's Booker long- & shortlists disappointed many because of the dominance of unremarkable novels and a general sense that the chosen novels were far from being representative of the best fiction published by Commonwealth authors in the last year. I've not read enough of them to really weigh in on that question - although that's in part because a lot of the shortlist, let alone the longlist, had no appeal to me, which may add some credence to that school of thought - but it was certainly a common reaction. Against all this, one author & their book were received near-universally well, so the sorts of people who care about these sorts of things hoped that Barnes' The Sense of an Ending would take the prize this year. And, indeed, it did.

All that background aside, The Sense of an Ending in any year would make a worthy contender for the Booker Prize. I say that for two reasons: first, it is a very good novel; and second, it is the sort of thing Booker panels over the last few decades have tended to reward. That latter is, perhaps, a slightly backhanded compliment, since it can be argued - not unfairly - that the Booker Prize does favour, amongst a few other things, beautifully written accounts of middle-class people taking stock of their lives. Sometimes that sort of book drives me to tears of boredom, but sometimes - as with The Sense of an Ending - it can be done effectively and made into something more than the genre trappings would suggest.


Key to the success of The Sense of an Ending is the perfectly-pitched narrative voice. Tony Webster is not always perfect, but he is likeable. At one point, the older Tony realises what an awful, childish thing he did to a friend when they were at university, but Barnes conveys this convincingly - his embarrasment at realising how badly he'd reacted, his genuine surprise at learning this and his remorse for the consequences of his actions.  And that scene, and its aftermath, is a good microcosm of Tony thoughout the book - honest about his failings without being self-pitying, and generally accurate in his self-assessments. And, not incidentally, often quite funny.

The first section of The Sense of an Ending takes place at Tony's school, within his little group of friends, and specifically focuses on newcomer Adrian. Slightly distant from his new friends and classmates, the high school-aged Adrian demonstrates a remarkably mature & philosophical approach to life, which is often played against the adolescent pretensions of Tony and their other friends. The boys head off to (different) universities, but remain in contact for a while. However, Tony's spiteful reaction to news from Adrian ends their friendship and they fall out of touch. In the second, longer, section Tony reflects on his relationship with Adrian & also his first real girlfriend, Veronica, and in the process learns some things about each of them, including himself.

Reduced to such a description, The Sense of an Ending might sound both slight & boring*, yet I found it to be neither. It is indeed short (150 pages in the small hardcover format), but Barnes packs those pages with more events and character development than many much longer books. There is a mystery which Tony has to figure out, and things he must confront, but these are organic parts of the story - unlike in some novels, in which such plot points feel tacked on, here it is impossible to imagine anything like this book without Tony's low-key search to figure out exactly what happened between him & Adrian, and Veronica. (There are, in case it's not already obvious, fairly significant plot points from the first section of the novel which I'm choosing not to mention here. That may make this summary seem vague, but I personally hate reviews which spoil such surprises.)

In some ways it seems unfair that Barnes should have won the Booker in a year generally considered to have one of the weakest longlists in the prize's history. Yet, in years to come, people will forget that, and see The Sense of an Ending as another winner, and one which was deservedly chosen. And, for most people, who don't care about the Booker Prize one way or another, it will remain nothing more or less than a very good novel.

* Almost all novels, from literary fiction to airport potboilers, sound either boring or ludicrous (or both) when their plot is described in a paragraph or less.

Book review: Woman's World

Norma and Roy are sister & brother in their twenties who live with their mother in London.  It appears to be the early 1960s, although this is never explicitly stated. Roy has just started a new job as a delivery driver for a local laundry company. Norma is obsessed with looking her best & being a glamorous modern woman. Their mother, Mary, doesn't seem to like Norma very much, but is always glad to see Roy.

For most of the first couple of hundred pages, Woman's World is dedicated to setting up its characters and the world they occupy. The plot doesn't really kick in until about halfway through the book, but the first part of the book is nonetheless ripe with mysteries: why does Mary distrust Norma? As the book begins, Roy has just returned from being away for a while - where had he been? What lies beneath Norma's superficial-seeming character? What is the significance of Norma's 'accident' in the past that gets mentioned a few times?

Woman's World has an intriguingly noir-ish setup. Rawls tempts the reader with these puzzles before bringing it all into sharper focus with the mid-book plot twists. I don't intend to say anything about those, in part because my reading of Woman's World was somewhat spoiled by having read an indiscreet review which gave away a major plot point without acknowledging that it was about to do so.

What is worth mentioning, however, is the unique and fascinating way in which Woman's World was written: Rawls wrote the basic story in rough draft form, and then pieced all his words together by cutting up old women's magazines. Every single word, punctuation mark, page or chapter number comes from an actual women's magazine - articles, stories, advertisements: according to the author's postscript it took five years to assemble. While this is an interesting gimmick, it's not only a gimmick: since Norma narrates the story (even the bits at which Roy but not she is present), we begin to understand her addiction to these magazines and devotion to presenting herself as the sort of woman 1960s magazines idealised.  For the reader, it is often a subtle commentary on these standards, as Norma's narration occasionally veers off into endorsements of cleaning products or clothing styles.  It also acts to underline the contrived nature of Norma's character as she tries to present it to the reader. As the book progresses, we get a better idea of why she might use such a method to tell her story.

As I said, I'm not going to reveal too much more of the plot or revelations throughout Woman's World. Yet I give it a strong endorsement, since it manages to succeed on two levels: on a mechanical level, it's an intriguing way of writing a book, and yet the story & characters are interesting enough that the form serves in conjunction with the content, rather than distracting from it or covering up a shortage of actual ideas. Woman's World is well worth your time and should attract an admiring audience.

Book review: The Novels of Eric Ambler

Posting has been a little light here recently, I know, since I've spent most of my life over the last few weeks engaged in marking essays. But I thought I'd do a little post on a series of books I've read over the past few months.

Near Central Station, on my way to work, is a bargain bookshop - full of remainders and other unloved but new books. They offer a completely unpredictable range of books, mostly pretty cheap, so I stop by there on a regular basis and see what's in stock. Sometimes I go weeks without buying anything, other times I'll pick up a handful of books on a single morning. The cheap prices can be good at inspiring me to check out things I probably wouldn't have otherwise, and Eric Ambler's books are a case in point. They had a few of his five books as recently republished by Penguin, in their Modern Classics line. The striking black & white photos caught my eye, and then the blurbs and quotes convinced me to pick up a couple of books by an author whom I hadn't even of until then. Over the next month or two they got in a copy or two each of his other books from this series, so I now have read all five that Penguin reprinted (he wrote more than that).

After the cover art, the thing that attracted me the most was some touchstones mentioned in the blurbs - Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock. Both of those are good comparions, so far as I'm concerned, so I paid my couple of dollars per book and started reading one (Epitaph for a Spy) that night.

The Greene & Hitchcock comparions were accurate. The latter's regular theme of Innocent Man Caught In Conspiracy runs through Epitaph, as well as most of the others (Cause For Alarm most particularly). Written during the late 1930s and early '40s, WWII is looming for everyone. Ambler effectively captures the tone of innocent - sometimes naive - men who get embroiled in international intrigue. The conventions of the IMCIM genre are pretty well established by now, of course, but some of that groundwork was laid by Ambler in these books.

Each of these books has its own charms. I found Uncommon Danger (the earliest of these five) to be a little weaker than the rest, but all of them pack compelling plots, well-drawn characters and tight prose into relatively short books. Ambler also sought to reflect a left-wing political perspective into his stories, arguing that the spy genre should not be the exclusive bounds of the political right (particularly during the WWII era). Thus both the villians and the plots are built on a more left-wing political perspective than most modern spy/thriller novels. The politics is certainly never preachy, however - Amber's aim, generally realised, was to incoporate his political leanings into the fabric of his novels without making them overtly political (& therefore tedious) novels.

I considered including some brief plot synopses here, but decided against it because they seem sort of silly when reduced to a sentence or two. And of course, to some extent, they are silly - spy or crime novels from earlier ages usually do sound as such, revolving as they tend to do around singular master criminals whose defeat signals the collapse of their whole network and organisations with names like The Red Hand Brigade and reliant on the non-existence of technologies (how many Agatha Christie novels, for instance, make sense in a world in which almost everyone has a mobile phone?). Thankfully none of Ambler's books are based on the Master Criminal Whose Death Or Capture Solves All The Problems, one of my least-favourite tropes in fiction. Nonetheless, Innocent Man Caught In Conspiracy stories perhaps fare worst of all when summarised. They rely for their entertainment value on the reader/viewer being pulled into the world, wondering how they would cope themselves, and knowing that the hero will 'win', but not knowing how that's possible. Yes, they can be silly, but they can also be a heck of a lot of fun.

Eric Ambler has been largely forgotten compared to some of his contemporaries, but unjustly so. Kudos to Penguin for reprinting his novels, and I'm glad to see that some of his others are also available from other publishers via Amazon. If you feel like a quick, entertaining but thoughtful read, I can happily recommend Eric Ambler to you.

Book review: Hangover Square

Most of us who read regularly have books that are on our radar for a while before we get to them. A casual reference somewhere, a review that sounded promising, having a look in a bookshop (tactile or electronic). As someone who not only reads a lot, but is always on the look-out for reading suggestions, I constantly have a bunch of books on a mental list that I mean to read sometime soon. (This is in addition to the bunch of books I have sitting on the bookshelf next to my bed that I mean to read sometime...)

Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel Hangover Square: A story of darkest Earl's Court was one such book. As often happens with these things, I can't put my finger on where or from whom I got the idea that I should read it, but over the last couple of days, I finally have. Sometimes these long-intended books are ultimately disappointments, or simply underwhelming. Hangover Square was neither: it is a compelling, involving, even moving book.

George Harvey Bone lives in London, in 1939. He scrapes by with bits of money from here & there, rarely working, but often drinking. He has fallen in with a small group of similar people - all in their late-20s-early-30s, and all of whom enjoy drinking their nights away. Central to this group, and George's reason for sticking with them, is the beautiful Netta. George is somewhat slow, friendlier than most of his group; Netta is contemptuous, an aspiring film star. So far, nothing out of the ordinary. But George is also prone to what he calls 'dead moments', where his genial, somewhat passive, personality is replaced by one in which he realises that it is his duty to kill Netta. When his head clickes back to normal after one of these periods, he has no memory of any of these thoughts. (None of this, I should point out, is spoiler: Penguin included it in their blurb, and indeed we learn all this in the first chapter regardless.)

Hangover Square is thus a portrait of two different sides of George, neither of which is fully aware of the other. It succeeds because both work: the straightforward George chapters are a moving story about a hapless fool infatuated with an awful woman (& make no mistake: Netta is one of the least-likeable characters I have ever encountered in fiction - she treats George appallingly, taking advantage of his doglike devotion to get him to pay for her to do things intended to attract other men, and not even stooping to basic civility in her relationship with him while doing so), and also trying to break out of wasting his life away via his drinking habit. The 'dead moment' chapters give a compelling feel to a clear case of mental illness, a man who is driven to kill someone, without really knowing why. That both sections are about the same man only heightens the tension.

In many ways, Hamilton has written a thoroughly modern novel - one that, with a few alterations of period detail, could have been published in the last few years. (Early on, characters treat ten pounds as a significant chunk of money, and are able to go out several nights in a row, including once to a high-class restaurant, off the haul. The imminent WWII looms over the book & characters, particularly in the last few chapters.) George, when not in his dead moments, is sympathetic despite his frustrating incapacity to ditch Netta. Hangover Square is often grim, and it will be the rare reader who finds Netta anything other than utterly despicable, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am glad I finally got around to reading it.

Book review: Pilcrow

So, the posting here has been pretty sparse lately, I realise. Semester starting and all sorts of other things going on will do that. I will try harder to maintain a more-regular posting schedule from now on...

First, credit where it's due: I read Pilcrow after reading the wonderful reviews of it & Cedilla (which we'll get to in a moment) over at the wonderful book-reviewin' blog Asylum. If you're interested in thoughtful reviews of interesting books on a regular basis, I recommend you keep an eye on that blog.

Anyway, Pilcrow is the first book in a (proposed) four-volume novel by British writer Adam Mars-Jones tracking the life of its narrator, John Cromer. (The aforementioned Cedilla, volume two, was published late last year.) Pilcrow is also the name of the paragraph-break punctuation mark that you're probably familiar with if you've done much of the accursed Track Changes in MS Word.

Pilcrow (the novel) begins - after a brief flash-forward to him learning to drive - with John's boyhood in 1950s England. He is a curious (as in, interested) boy, probably fairly typical in a lot of ways for 1950s English children. His father was a pilot in the war, and is emotionally reserved towards his family (again, fairly typically, I suspect, although there are also hints that his nature goes beyond this), and his mother is the dominant figure in his life - something of a snob, perhaps even a social climber. The early sections of the book lay out this life in a low-key way, setting the scene for the change that drives most of the rest of the story: when still quite young (five or thereabouts), John is struck with a rare illness that vastly reduces his mobility. Essentially, he loses all movement in his legs, and most of that in his arms. Confined to his bed, and needing near-constant care from his mother, John's life takes a significant turn.

Through the rest of Pilcrow, we follow John up until his mid-to-late teens. He eventually moves from his home to a hospital, where he stays for several years until moving to a school for handicapped children. During that time he undergoes the things that almost everyone does during those ages (emotional and intellectual developments, sexual awakening, struggles with friends and family), plus of course the issues brought on by his near-total immobility.

And that's about it, plot-wise. Thankfully, Mars-Jones is interested enough in the premise and characters of his story to not overstuff the plot. Through John's narration (from a later age), he are taken slowly, but always compellingly, through what it might have been like to grow up as John: the narrator's voice is wonderfully done, and the sizeable array of supporting characters are evocatively described. Few of them are as deftly-drawn as John's mother, although some of his schoolmates & teachers are strikingly well-observed (I have a special fondness for the spying/secret agent-obsessed Julian). Rather than an inherently-propulsive plot, what makes Pilcrow such a pleasure to read are the small details: Mars-Jones has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what John's life would have entailed. And he describes it all in a pitch-perfect voice - while John is perhaps more reflective than the average child, the combination of his reflection-encouraging circumstances and the fact that the book is narrated from later in his life means that Mars-Jones avoids the pitfalls of the rarely not-annoying implausibly brilliant child narrator.

Doubtless a 525 page book with a distinct absence of whiz-bang plottery is not for everybody - especially when the book sorta just ends, with three books to come (Cedilla, I should note, is even longer - 700+ pages in hardcover). But those who are willing to delve into John Cromer's life will find much to enjoy, from the consistently sparkling prose and well-imagined characters to the various set pieces throughout. Pilcrow is a novel to move through slowly, not a novel to race through, but neither did it ever feel like a slog. I'm now eager to get (& get into) Cedilla, even though that will still mean a few years (presumably) until the next volume comes out.

Book review: The News Where You Are

What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn's first novel, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 - but sadly didn't make the shortlist, despite being one of the best novels I read that year. Her followup, The News Where You Are, was published a couple of months ago, and I finally got my hands on a copy last week (note: the fault was all mine). I'm disappointed that it didn't make this year's Booker longlist, because that would have exposed it to a greater audience, but I'm sure it will still find a happy readership.

Frank Allcroft is a middle-aged local news presenter in Birmingham. Unlike some of his colleagues, who see regional news as a trivial relic, Frank genuinely likes the local focus and has developed minor local fame as the teller of incredibly corny, poorly-delivered, jokes in the news broadcast. His predecessor & friend Phil, who left Birmingham for brighter things with a national audience, has died in a hit & run incident. His late father, a once-renowned architect, is suffering the final indignity, with most of his buildings being torn down & replaced by more modern designs. His mother, determindedly unhappy, lives in an aged-care home. And Frank finds himself increasingly worried about the forgotten people - those whose deaths are barely noticed, and whose lives are swiftly erased.

The News Where You Are is a novel about people's legacies - how they are remembered, how their lives (& deaths) affect those around them, and how we the living continue living without them. Frank finds himself investigating the life & death of Phil's friend Michael, who has also recently died (Phil and Michael were both a generation older than Frank), and tries to track down people who may have known this friend of a friend, hoping to find someone who might remember Michael. He also spends time with Cyril, an unsuccessful comedy writer whose only consistent gig appears to be scripting Frank's wince-inducing puns for the news, and Michelle, Phil's (young) widow. As his father's buildings are being scheduled for demolition, he tries to save at least some of them. And he, along with his wife Andrea & daughter Mo, try to brighten the life of his mother. Through these intertwinning elements, we also occasionally flashback to Frank's childhood, with his self-important father trying to design a better world through architecture, and also to the last few months of Phil's life.

O'Flynn weaves these tiny moments together effectively. While The News Where You Are might sound overwhelmingly melancholy, those themes are handled with a lightness of touch that finds small moments of humour and a warmth towards its characters that keeps the book from sinking into depressing bleakness. Much of this has to do with Mo, who is refreshingly real for a child in a modern novel (she's not brilliantly intelligent or talented, and actually acts in ways that seem familar). Mo's genuine desire to make her grandmother happy, and her interest in some (but not all) of what her father tries to show her are well-drawn characteristics. Frank himself is aware that his increasing interest in the past, and in people who have died, is not entirely healthy, but also recognises that he needs to remember people and deal with his father's & friend's legacies.

In many ways The News Where You Are is a small novel - it's short (250pp) and easily read, and O'Flynn doesn't really go in for huge, shocking plot twists (there is one revelation, but it's underplayed, not so as you'd miss it, but it certainly doesn't feel like a cheap thrill). Yet at the same time, as I've noted, it considers some fairly weighty themes like how we remember and are remembered, and friendship, and relationships with our parents and children.

Highly recommended, and I look forward to Catherine O'Flynn's third book.

Blogging the Booker 12: The Finkler Question

So, after a short break from the Booker longlist - during which time I read a few other things, including Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's latest (& wonderful) novel, and a 1930s English spy novel - I return to the Booker task at hand with Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which has made it through to the shortlist.

One issue I will be facing with these last few books from the longlist is knowing by the time I read them whether or not they've been shortlisted (of the five remaining when the shortlist was announced, two were, three weren't). That means that, to some extent, I'll be evaluating these ones - especially the two that did progress onto the shortlist - in terms of my thoughts of which other books didn't get shortlisted. Two books I really did want to make the shortlist - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet & Skippy Dies - did not, while two books I hadn't read - The Finkler Question & In a Strange Room - did.

All of which to say that I'm possibly going to be expecting a fair bit from those two novels. In fairness, they're on the Booker shortlist, so things should be expected of them.

Enough prologue, however. The Finkler Question is the first book of Howard Jacobson's I've read (or, to be honest, heard of), but it came with a quote on the front cover from Jonathan Safran Foer, who apparently enjoyed it. And, while I've been avoiding reviews of the Booker longlist entries until I've read them myself, I did know that this book has received some quite positive reviews to date.

However, it has left me a little cold. You remember that scene from Being John Malkovich where John Malkovich enters the portal to his own brain? And lands in a restaurant where everyone looks like him & keeps repeating the word 'Malkovich' with different intonations?

Well, The Finkler Question is a little like that, except the word is 'Jew'. We have three main characters - Julian Treslove, Libor Sevcik & Sam Finkler. Treslove & Finkler are late middle-age friends (since school), Sevcik is older. Sevcik & Finkler are Jewish (& both are also recent widowers), Treslove is not. But Treslove - who really is the main character - decides that he wishes he were Jewish, so he tries to become one. Other than his bond to the two other men, his reasons are not entirely clear. He just really, really fetishes Jewishness. Finkler is a celebrity philosopher (writing pop-philosophy books, making tv series etc), but is perhaps best described as a Professional Jew. He is, and indeed all Jewish characters in this book (which is to say: all characters other than Treslove) are, regardless of their level of religious observance, strongly opposed to the actions of the state of Israel. And they talk about it. A lot. To the exclusion of pretty much any other topic, with the occasional exception of sex.

One might call The Finkler Question a novel of ideas, but that's a little exaggeration. It's more like a novel of an idea. And that, for me, was its failing - if you're not really, really interested in the topic of Jewish identity among old, wealthy London men, then The Finkler Question gets a little tiresome. Jacobson can write well, and there are some wonderful sentences or descriptions, but for me this novel is just a little too monochromatic. I made reference in my review of The Slap to how that book often felt like it was inspired by the grand (particularly Russian) novels of the 19th century, in which characters sat around & discussed the problems of the day - social, political, philosophical, theological. The Finkler Question is the same, but with the difference that in those books, things actually happened in between those conversations - we had the Napoleon coming for a visit, shocking love affairs, murders etc. In The Finkler Question, those conversations are only broken up by things like Treslove going on a short holiday with his two estranged sons, reminding himself what a feeble father he was/is. (And even that scene only lasts about three pages.) Not every novel needs those sorts of things, of course - and I'm not even a particularly strong advocate of novels needing to have plots - but all I can say is that The Finkler Question, while well-written, never really grabbed me or made me care about its characters, other than to think that at least a few of them would've been well off to find themselves a hobby.

So, to return to the point I started with, perhaps I am unfairly judging this book against two that it beat onto the Booker shortlist - maybe I would've liked it better had I read it before I knew how the shortlist would pan out. And I don't regret reading it or anything, but I would be pretty underwhelmed were it to win the prize this year.

(Also: The Finkler Question is the first book I have bought & read via the Kindle app on my iPad. I might post some thoughts on that experience later.)

Next: Trespass, by Rose Tremain (which will invert the expectations I brought into this review, since it will be the first one I've read in the knowledge that it was longlisted but not shortlisted).

Blogging the Booker 10: The Stars in the Bright Sky

Alan Warner's novel The Stars in the Bright Sky posed a new problem for me in my trip through this year's Booker longlist - it's the sequel to a book I've not read. I toyed with whether I should prepare for this one by reading its predecessor (The Sopranos - and no, not that one), but decided that I should just judge The Stars in the Bright Sky on its own merits, as a standalone.

That choice also carried the benefit of being easier.

Initially, however, I was worried that I was going to be lost without the context of the first book, as I had no idea who any of the characters were. But, having now finished The Stars in the Bright Sky, I can attest that not having read The Sopranos wasn't really a barrier. There were some clear allusions to the events of that book, but from what I can tell it was set a couple of years earlier than the events of its follow-up, and the two are largely unrelated in a plot sense. (Obviously those who have read both will get more out of the second, though.)

Anyway. The Stars in the Bright Sky is about six young - mostly Scottish - women setting off on a quick, cheap holiday together. Five of them were friends at school, but two have now moved away from their small-ish Scottish town to study, and one of them brings her flatmate along for the trip. Plans constantly go awry, tensions between them all are revealed, and secrets are uncovered. Warner captures the dialogue well, and the book is mostly a quick & easy read.

In our group, we have a group of contrasting types. The unofficial leader - certainly the planner - is Kay (one of the two from the original five to have moved away). The other student - who went all the way to London - is Finn, and her mysterious friend Ava (whom the others haven't met beforehand) drives much of the narrative action. Of the remaining three, Manda is the novel's clearest-drawn character - a loud, under-educated, frequently stupid &/or insensitive single mother. The other two, regrettably, are not all that distinct (one is a talented singer, the other is not) - and indeed often seem largely interchangeable. Granted, that may have been deliberate on Warner's part - to outsiders, it's probably quite common to see a group of friends & identify the organised one (Kay), the quiet & thoughtful one (Finn) and the loudmouthed one (Manda) and then the rest sort of blur together.

Nonetheless, for me, that was one of the failings of The Stars in the Bright Sky - two of the six characters are not all that interesting, and one of the others is perhaps too much of a lout, constantly saying awful things, malapropising on almost every page & fitting too easily into the role of the insecure type who acts out in the most obvious of ways. The other problem I have with The Stars in the Bright Sky is possibly a little unfair. As I say, it was an easy & enjoyable-enough read, but I did frequently wonder why it merited Booker longlisting. The Stars in the Bright Sky seems to me to be a fairly straightforward novel about a group of friends who set off on a holiday. The writing, while rarely clunky (although it sometimes was) didn't excite me much, & there didn't seem to be much of a larger point or anything going on. Again, I realise this is unfair - it's more of a criticism of the Booker longlist than of the book itself - but I'd be very surprised if Warner's book made the shortlist.

Next: tomorrow, the shortlist is announced. I'll do a quick post before then, summarising my thoughts so far & tipping what I hope the shortlist will include from the ones I've read to date. After that, I'm at the mercy of my fellow patrons of the North Sydney library, but hope to be able to get one or two of the remaining five by the end of this week.

Blogging the Booker 9: Room

As with The Long Song, Room's main of several triumphs is its narrative voice. Emma Donoghue's novel is one of the most distinctive & original books I've read in a while, combining both a fascinating central premise with a well-realised voice.

Jack, who turns five at the start of the book, & his mother live in a small room, which also forms the limits of their world. They never go outside. For Jack, the world is divided into the Real (him, his Ma, and everything in their small room) and TV (things he sees on television). He recognises that there is an Outside, but his mind doesn't really process how that works or what that Outside entails. Therefore, from Jack's perspective, there exists only one of everything - the one that is in their room. Thus, as he narrates the story, he says things like "Ma leans out of Bed to turn on Lamp".

Why these two people confine themselves to Room is only gradually revealed. This is a novel that it would be very easy to spoil, so I'll avoid plot details beyond the premise as outlined above.

Jack's voice, as narrator of this story, is pitched perfectly, as Donoghue gets deep into his skin & observes what it must be like to have spent one's entire (albeit young) life in one small room, with only one's mother and the television for company. As he grows, his mother tries to explain what Outside is actually like, but Jack is fundamentally unable to understand what she tells him - he has no frame of reference for the idea that there are things and people beyond the two of them. Room is thus largely about perception, and perhaps also about how our version of the world is a consequence of how & where we were brought up.

Again, I won't reveal any details, but I will say that the story developed in an interesting way - for a while I was concerned that the basic premise would never really be explained satisfactorily, which would have significantly hampered my enjoyment of the book, I think. But instead Room makes the most of its ideas, filling in some backstory while also moving forwards in the narrative. It's also quite a quick read, despite how it might sound.

So, another success on this longlist for me! I hope Room makes it through to the shortlist (announced next week) - it certainly deserves to do so. Another author of whom I had previously been unaware, I'll certainly have to look into some of Donoghue's earlier novels (Room appears to be her ninth book, according to the list inside). As I've said before, the discovering of new (to me) novelists is one of my favourite things about following the Booker Prize each year - even if I'm not always happy with the winner, there's usually something of interest brought to my attention.

Next time: All the Stars in the Bright Sky, by Alan Warner.