Tag Archives: Booker prize nominee

Book review

The Bookshop is set in the sleepy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough — “an island between sea and river”. In 1959 the novel’s ‘heroine’ Florence Green opens a bookshop in the long-vacant property called Old House, one of the oldest properties in the town. There is surprisingly some local opposition to her venture. This opposition centres on local notable Violet Gamart who has been toying with “the idea of converting it (Old House) into some kind of centre — I mean an arts centre — for Hardborough“. Old House is an unlikely location for an arts centre – it has stood empty for years, is quite small (from what we can tell) and is riddled with damp, not to say that it also seems occupied by a ‘tapper’, the local word for a poltergeist. Is there something more to Mrs Gamart’s plans than meets the eye – what is problematic with the idea of a bookshop?

Florence ignores Mrs Gamart and goes ahead and opens her shop, employing a young assistant, ten-year old Christine Gipping, to help out. Christine is by far the liveliest and most interesting character in the novel, although the author’s continual reference to her pre-pubescent state is a little creepy:

“Christine replied that now the evenings were getting longer her elder sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts… ‘You don’t need to worry about anything like that with me” she added, “I shan’t turn eleven till next April. Mine haven’t come on yet.”’

Lightly comedic episodes ensue as Florence struggles to make a success of her venture. She secures the patronage (of sorts) of Edmund Brundish, who is the nearest thing Hardborough has to aristocracy, and turns to him for advice when trying to decide whether to stock Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The novel is a best-seller but the usual suspects are horrified at both the book’s subject matter and the shop’s subsequent success. I was hoping that the novel might explore the explosive impact Lolita would have had on a small-minded English town in the late 1950’s, but that opportunity is passed by.

I was quite harsh towards The Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald’s 1990 novella about a fictional Cambridge college, not least because of its lack of authenticity. Novels don’t have to be realistic, of course they don’t, and the author can introduce elements of fantasy for many different reasons. But novels that purport to realistically portray a social setting and believable characters need to at least aspire to being authentic, or alternatively to have a really good reason why authenticity is departed from. And time after time Fitzgerald fails this simple test. The poltergeist that haunts the bookshop is an obvious example – perhaps it represents the town’s hostility towards Florence’s enterprise (although it pre-dates the shop’s opening). But there is no real attempt to integrate the ‘rapper’ into the narrative – it is just there, then it is not. Another example relates to the portrait of ten-year old Christine. While she is a well-developed character, are we really expected to believe she chipped/lost her two front teeth by them being hit by frozen washing on the laundry line? That’s just nonsensical and not in the least amusing. Possibly it is intended to show how hard life is for the Gipping family, and how resilient they are despite everything thrown at them – but teeth broken by frozen laundry is such a clumsy unconvincing way of showing this. Similarly we are invited to believe that Christine is the first child in her family to not pass the eleven plus. She is instead assigned to the local technical college, which her mother describes as “what we call a death sentence. I’ve nothing against the Technical, but it just means this: what chance will she ever have of meeting and marrying a white-collar chap ?” Only about one in eight children passed the eleven-plus, so the idea that bright Christine would have been the old child in their family not to pass is hard to credit. There’s also a description of a new housing development built on the edge of quickly eroding cliffs – another instance where the novel forfeits all credibility for the sake of a clumsy metaphor.

Probably most ludicrous proposition in the novel is the idea that a ‘stupid’ backbencher could draft, propose and pass through all its Parliamentary stages a major change to planning law, including late amendments which allow compulsory purchase orders in a wide range of circumstances, which is then implemented in a matter of months, simply to find a mechanism to lever Florence out of her shop. A generous buy-out proposal from Mrs Gamart would have been infinitely simpler. I understand that Fitzgerald wants to demonstrate that life and the powers that be are unfair to well-meaning people like Mrs Green, but this is an incredibly heavy-handed way of making that point.

There are moments in the novel which almost bring it to life. I did enjoy for example Mr Brundish’s encounter with Mrs Gamart, when his lack of an internal monologue leads him to speak his mind openly to her:

‘”You had better offer me something” he said loudly, and then, in precisely the same tone: “The bitch cannot deny me a glass of brandy.”‘

There’s far too little of this character, and Fitzgerald kills him off casually almost immediately after this encounter in order for her primary scheme – the compulsory purchase of the shop – to go ahead. Instead we see far too much of Milo North, a lazy dilettante whose purpose in the novel never really comes into focus.

Fitzgerald is highly thought of and considered by some critics to be under-appreciated. I can’t agree. When you compare this slight, unconvincing novel to J L Carr’s A Month in the Country for example, you can see the huge gulf between them. Both are sketches of life in rural England, but Carr’s characters come alive, are recognisable and have interesting stories to tell. It would be unfair to say Fitzgerald’s don’t come to life in the same way but they are light sketches compared to the vividness of Carr’s portraits.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1978

Aside
Book review

I thought Galgut’s The Promise showed sufficient – well, forgive me – promise to justify trying another of his earlier Booker contenders. In a Strange Room stretches the definition of novel to near-breaking point. It comprises three first-person (although more on that in a minute) narratives. The narrator is a South African writer named Damon. In the first section, The Follower, Damon is travelling in Greece when he meets a German tourist, Reiner. They strike up a strangely detached friendship which is renewed months later when they plan a walking trip together in Lesotho. Damon seems to be on holiday perpetually, and when back in South Africa couch-surfs without every needing to find a job. His trip to Lesotho is funded by Reiner, but the practicalities of a walking tour in a tropical African country with very limited infrastructure are never adequately addressed. Part-way through the tour an argument leads to Damon abandoning Reiner and the trip and returning to South Africa. Throughout the narrative there is a luke-warm sexual tension between the two men which is never acted upon.

The ‘novel’ thing to do would have been to have Reiner appear during the later narratives in the novel, but Galgut eschews this approach. Instead he is quietly forgotten as Damon moves on to his next adventure, this time a walking trip (initially solo) in Africa. This chapter, ‘The Lover’, appears to be set a few years after ‘The Follower’. Damon is older and a little wiser, but still listlessly travelling non-stop without the burden of a career or occupation to hold him back from his nomadic existence. In Zimbabwe he meets three Europeans – a French man and a pair of Swiss twins. Although they have different routes they keep bumping into one another, until eventually they decide to travel together. Damon is clearly attracted to one of the twins, Jerome, who has “a beauty that is almost shocking”, and changes his travel plans to he can join them. They crisscross Southern Africa with the expected complications with visas and passports, but not a lot happens. Damon doesn’t appear to enjoy his travelling – he really could be anywhere. Later he follows Jerome back home to Switzerland before moving on to London and beyond. The relentless travelling without destination or direction is obviously a metaphor for how Galgut sees his own life, but it gets a bit tedious.

The novel’s final section, ‘The Guardian’, features yet another unsuccessful journey. Damon accompanies Anna, a friend suffering from manic depression, on a recuperative journey to India. He is totally out of his depth in dealing with Anna’s illness – despite his best endeavours he cannot protect her from herself, and she ends up taking an overdose. The Indian hospital system struggles to give her the treatment she needs to survive, and the situation descends into a chaotic, distressing nightmare.

These three journeys have some thematic links, but they also had a strong personal memoir sense. On an ‘acknowledgments’ page at the end of the text, the author thanks the editors of the Paris Review ‘where these pieces first appeared, suggesting that they may not have been conceived as part of a larger whole at the time they were originally published, and have been welded rather uncomfortably together to create a text of sufficient length to justify publication in a book format. Although ostensibly they are all about journeys, the third section involves very little travelling, and is really focused on the serious issues regarding metal health and suicide. I don’t think they sat together well at all, and ‘three long short stories’ would have been a more honest representation of the text.

In a Strange Room is written in the third person, but occasionally often the narrative flips to the first person: he talks about the Damon character as if he is someone else, and then at other times, sometimes changing in the course of a single sentence, he will describe him as “me”. To me this was a slightly irritating device. After the initial confusion of working out what was happening – was there someone else present? – it just became an affectation. I assume it was a way of showing the unreliability of memory – when the memory was vivid ‘I’ was used because the narrator felt present, when it was less clear ‘he’ was used to indicate the lack of connection. That’s how I rationalised it anyway. But it emphasised all the more clearly that In a Strange Room is a memoir, albeit an unreliable one used as a creative springboard for a novel about rootlessness.

Periodically sitcoms (especially long-running ones) have clip-shows – episodes comprised principally of clips from previous episodes, put together mainly to maximise the use of content originally used elsewhere. I can’t shake the suspicion that In a Strange Room is the novelists version of that technique. There’s plenty of precedent for this approach – the one that springs to mind is Raymond Chandler who re-used short stories originally published in crime magazines as the components of novels such as The Big Sleep. But Chandler could get away with this, making the whole much larger than the parts. I’m not sure Galgut achieves the same effect.

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut 2010

Aside
Book review

Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood, 1996

Alias Grace is a fictionalised account of the mid-nineteenth century murder of Thomas Kinnear, a Canadian farmer, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Two servants, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the murder of Kinnear, and while McDermott was executed, Marks was sentenced to life in prison. This is Grace’s story.

AliasGrace.jpg

The novel opens several years after the date of the murders. Grace is being interviewed by Dr Simon Jordan, a researcher into mental illness who is investigating her case. Jordan has a vague idea of opening an asylum, and thinks that a breakthrough in Grace’s treatment will attract the investment he needs. He has been engaged by a group of local well-wishers who have been petitioning unsuccessfully for Grace’s release for some time. Grace has no clear memory of the murders and is unable to say clearly whether (as McDermott claimed) she helped strangle the housekeeper. There is some doubt as to her mental capacity – she has served some of her sentence in an asylum, although at the time the novel opens she works as a trusted servant in the home of the prison governor.

Jordan’s treatment consists of bringing an everyday item – a piece of fruit for example – to each interview, and encouraging Grace to tell her story. This is an effective approach for the purposes of the novel – these interviews are the heart of the narrative – but as treatment they have no effect whatsoever. Grace’s story remains consistent throughout, and there is no breakthrough of any kind. Her memories range back to her family’s migration to Canada from Ireland, her going into service (that is, getting her first job as a servant) and the time she became close friends with Mary Whitney, a slightly older and more experienced fellow servant. We know Mary is significant in Grace’s story because she used her name when briefly on the run following the murders. Mary is one of many women in the novel who suffer at the hands of men, in her case becoming pregnant outside of marriage and having to seek out a brutal illegal abortionist.

Grace enjoys her time with Jordan, and her inner monologue confirms she constructs her story to keep him engaged and interested. His story is very different from Grace’s, but it eventually shares a strange similarity when his landlady seduces him and then tries to persuade him to murder her drunken and abusive husband. Jordan has choices Grace did not, and he abruptly leaves both Toronto and the narrative. With him leaves any hope of a pardon for Grace. After almost thirty years she is however eventually released, begins a new life in the United States and marries in fulfilment of a prophesy made by Mary Whitney many years earlier.

This is not a mystery novel. There is no denouement, no final reveal of ‘what really happened’. The ambiguity as to Grace’s involvement in the murders is never clarified. I never really expected it to be but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a slight sense of disappointment – the urge to discover ‘the truth’ is a powerful one. Using a real-life incident as the skeleton of a narrative is not a new idea of course, and there was little overall about Alias Grace that felt particularly original. If you had asked me before reading the novel how I thought it might be constructed, given the premise, I would have anticipated multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, a combination of different forms – letters, diary entries etc – and an ambiguous ending. There are plenty of texts constructed on similar lines, such as A S Byatt’s 1990 Booker winner Possession and Graeme McRae Burnett’s much later (and shortlisted) His Bloody Project. There was an obvious sense of the novel’s artificiality. Sometimes that’s fine; here it was disappointing, as the immersive narrative, the story of the murders, was constantly interrupted by yet another reminder that this is all a construct.

If a novel is going to be self-consciously crafted, then the author has to be highly skilled at the craftwork to avoid the artificiality being off-putting. And of course Atwood is without question a fine writer. While avoiding being overly didactic this novel has a lot to say about the role of women in nineteenth century society, where frequently the choice was between domestic servitude, an unhappy marriage, or the streets. (Jeremiah the peddler, (alias Geraldo Ponti, magician, alias Dr. Jerome DuPont, “Neuro-Hypnotist”,) represents a glimpse of an alternative life for Grace, an exotic life of adventure, but it is one she never seriously considers). At times she almost enjoys life as a household servant – it is better than starving with the rest of her family – but there don’t seem to be many positive choices elsewhere. Dr Jordan summarises the options as follows:

“In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn’t have it both ways, he’d pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they’re supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.”

We are led to believe that his views have not materially changed since this time, and this is presented as a progressive view compared to those who would dismiss ‘fallen women’ without compassion. But it is still not much of a choice for the women in the novel.

There is without question much fine poetic writing in Alias Grace.

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

At times Grace’s narrative voice comes close to overlapping with that of the omniscient narrator – she uses language and expressions that don’t seem authentic for a young Irish emigre:

“Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.”

But that is nit-picking – overall this is a strong exploration of the role of women in the nineteenth century. It’s not in any way sentimental – yes Grace is a victim but she is also quite possibly a murderer as well. (The supernatural explanation for the murders that we are given at one point towards the end of the novel is a red herring in my opinion – I don’t think we are intended to consider it the revelation that some readers/reviewers have treated it as.) I am not sure if I am being overly harsh in reflecting my disappointment with the lack of originality in Alias Grace, despite the many deft touches such as the use of the quilting motif through the novel. But I think The Handmaid’s Tale made many of the same points much more powerfully because of the originality of the novel’s premise.

Standard
Book review

There are a number of novels buried within Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels struggling for our attention. Juggling such a wide range of themes and structures would be difficult in a novel of conventional length, let alone one of barely 160 pages, and in the end I was not convinced that Fitzgerald pulled it off.

First there is a light academic comedy. The novel is set in 1912 at a fictional Cambridge college, St Angelicus,whereThe Gate of Angels - Wikipedia Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow, cycles around the city, argues half-heartedly at ‘the Disobligers’, a typically pompous debating club, and falls in love. The locals are all a bit slow-witted, the police bumbling, and the academics fusty and crippled by tradition. The college has a rule that

“no female animals capable of reproduction were allowed on the premises, although the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated”

The blind Master has such finely tuned hearing that he can detect kittens somewhere in the grounds, and wants them removed as soon as possible.

All in all very reminiscent of something by Tom Sharpe or perhaps early Kingsley Amis. I wouldn’t have minded reading this novel, but the focus swiftly moves on. 

The second element is the novel of ideas. In 1912 physics was in ferment, with Fred’s chosen specialist research field, quantum theory, challenging our ideas of matter, time and space. Not surprisingly St Angelicus is firmly in the traditionalist camp. A novel that looks at the developing ideas about the atom, the debates between scientists, the challenges to faith etc would have been interesting, and from what I can tell was Fitzgerald’s intended focus, but what we get here is only a brief discussion, passing mentions of Rutherford, Geiger and Mach, before we move on to the next component. 

Wikipedia describes The Gate of Angels as an historical novel, and there are certainly elements of this genre here as well. The first world war is imminent, and is going to tear apart everyone’s lives, reshaping the world as we knew it. Everything I have read about this period suggests that a global conflict was expected by just about everyone, and it was really only a question of when, but apart from a quick mention of “the cousins” (the Kaiser and George 5th) this component is passed over quickly enough. The struggle for women’s suffrage features, albeit largely in a comic fashion – the men in the novel are bemused by the concept.

In her biography of Fitzgerald Hermione Lee wrote that her interest in this time period derived from a perception that it was

a time of very great hope… of the coming of the 20th century, hopes of a New Life, a new world, the New Woman, a new relationship between the artist and the craftsman”

We certainly can find some of these themes here, together with the scientific debates I have mentioned, but surely this is an overly optimistic view of the period given the carnage that was to follow so swiftly?

This is also a romantic novel. Fred is involved in a collision between his bicycle and an unlit farmer’s cart. A young woman, Daisy Saunders, is also knocked unconscious in the accident, and they are taken in by a local householder and put into the same bed to recover. The intimacy of this experience causes Fred to immediately fall in love with the young woman. The novel switches to London for several chapters to tell Daisy’s unfortunate story; this is a change of pace which feels at times like a necessary diversion from the academic debates back in Cambridge. Fred’s dogged pursuit of Daisy is quiet sweet in a way, although it’s not exactly Heathcliff and Cathy. There’s also a ghost story thrown in for good measure, before the novel ends abruptly leaving the reader to fill in what we can presume is a happy ending should we choose to do so. 

So as you can see there is a lot going on here. The question I am struggling with is whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The typical clichéd critical description of Fitzgerald’s novels is “polished gems”. I’m not convinced. The writing was uneven and much of the characterisation two-dimensional – a number of Fairly’s academic acquaintances are introduced, but none are developed beyond a quick sketch, and are all forgettable. This is only the second novel by Fitzgerald I have read, and reading my 2017 review of The Beginning of Spring I can see I had similar reservations. The 1990 Booker judges entirely understandably preferred A S Byatt’s much more complex and rewarding Possession. Definitely the right call.

 

 

The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1990

Aside
Book review

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, 1985

The popularity of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale may have been what inspired Margaret Atwood to return to Gilead and the story of the eponymous handmaid Offred. (In the TV adaptation this character is called June, but so far as I can tell this name is not used in the book). It was certainly a factor in my decision to finally getting round to picking up this much-admired classic.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set the near future. A radical religious group, the “Sons of Jacob”, has captured power in the United States. The president has been assassinated, congress murdered, the constitution suspended, and the possession of jobs and separate bank accounts is forbidden to women. This is only the beginning of a dramatic overhaul of society in which all other religious groups are banned and a Talibanesque Old Testament-inspired model of society is imposed.

Declining birth rates caused by pollution and radiation mean that now only a few women are able to have children. These women are taken into slavery and forced to produce children for the ruling class of men, the “Commanders”. They are known as handmaids, a title derived from the story in Genesis of Rachel and her slave Bilhah. Women (and their children) are commonly treated as possessions in the Old Testament, and this inspires many of the new social structures and traditions in Gilead. All women have rigidly defined roles and and must follow a strict dress code: Commanders’ wives wear blue, handmaids red, and Marthas (servants) green.

The story is narrated by Offred, a 33 year old woman who records several months of her life as handmaid to a Commander and his embittered wife. As well as telling the reader about her imprisonment and the daily tortures she faces, she includes memories of her life before and during the revolution, which she describes as “The other time, the time before”. Life is brutal for almost everyone in Gilead, but the enslavement of women and the ritualised assaults for the purpose of breeding is particularly horrifying, even if Offred has slow begun to come to terms with her captivity. Her fond memories of times past provide some slight relief from the brutality of her new life.

Things improves marginally when the Commander begins to meet her secretly at night, not for sex, but to play Scrabble. This surprising development lightens the mood slightly and allows them to develop a less formal relationship. This is rule-breaking that could easily end badly for Offred, but she welcomes the hint of freedom it offers. She also agrees when the Commander’s wife, Serena, proposes that she tries to get pregnant by Nick, the family chauffeur, the implication being that the Commander may be sterile. At the same time Offred learns from her shopping partner, Ofglen, that there may be an underground resistance working to overthrow Gilead.

Offred’s narrative ends abruptly, leaving it unclear whether she has been taken into custody for her small acts of resistance, or whether she escapes Gilead. A mis-judged epilogue set in 2195 explains the events of the novel were recorded onto cassette tapes and are now considered an historic document charting the early years of the Republic of Gilead. While it appears a more equal society has now been restored, the lecturer is insensitive, treating the victims of the regime as a source for clumsy jokes. 

There are several disturbing aspects to this novel. It is utterly convincing in its demonstration how the injustices towards women in today’s society came to be the first step towards their enslavement in Gilead. Offred describes her life before the collapse of society as largely happy, but

“I never ran at night, and in the daytime only beside well-frequented roads. Women were not protected then. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out, but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, or at night.”

In other words the seeds of Gilead and its oppression of women are inherent in today’s society. Another incident recounted in the novel emphasised this point. Offred describes a book-burning scene. But these are not nazis burning books about Marxism, but women burning hard core porn.

“You see what things used to be like? That’s what they thought of women then!”

I think the author may be suggesting here that freedom of speech extends to even content we find offensive, and that once we start burning books or magazines because they are upsetting, we are on the path that lead to censorship. Atwood in other words is out to challenge the reader rather than present a scary story which we can walk away from knowing we are lucky not to live there.

There are some obvious parallels between The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984. Both are set in a relatively near future in which people can remember and contrast life under the previous regime. Both envisage totalitarian control of society in which thought crime can be punished by death. Sex is strictly controlled by society and is used as an act of rebellion by the protagonists. War dominates daily life in both Gilead and Eurasia. The state spies on and tortures its opponents and punishes any deviation from the rules, and uses collective gathering, such as the daily hate or the Salvagings to keep the people in check. The novels even share the same feature of an epilogue or postscript looking back at the society from a more liberal future. The other characteristic the novels share is their approach to language. In 1984 language is under attack through the introduction of Newspeak, constantly being diminished to reduce the risk of thoughtcrime. In Gilead they take this further, so all writing and reading is forbidden to women (which is why seemingly mundane invitation to play Scrabble is so dangerous thrilling to Offred).

Doing a small amount of background reading I came across the shocking fact that this novel was short-listed but did not win the 1986 Booker prize, which was instead awarded to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Time has not been kind to that decision. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing but the judges of that award must look back with some shame. Instead of the Booker the Handmaid’s Tale won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, even though the novel is clearly not science fiction. My other brief attempt at research also threw up (choice of words intentional) this classic example of missing the point. Writing in the Spectator, the writer Allison Pearson claimed

“I only wish that Atwood would tell her fans that she is not writing, primarily at least, about the way that Trump’s America could go in the future, but about how things are right now for females in repressive Islamic societies. We are so blessed compared to them. To don a red dress and white bonnet, to pretend their suffering is ours, to talk of tyranny, is the most appalling moral vanity.”

Yes and no. Surely Atwood is writing about how women are treated in patriarchal society, not just one country or set of social conditions. She is unlikely to have been writing about Trump’s presidency in 1985 anyway! It’s easy to scan round the world, find a society you don’t like (the Spectator isn’t a fan of Islam) and identify ways in which women in that society are treated similar to those in Gilead. You can if you wish do the same for women in America denied the right to have an abortion. It’s not a competition – which society is the most repressive towards women – the problem is that they all are. And they all use the same reasons – that women are not safe when they are free. I think this slowly dawns on Pearson, because she ends on this peroration

“Imagine a country where women have no jobs, no rights and are valued only for their reproductive success. Imagine a country where girls aren’t taught to read in case they get ideas. Imagine a country where boys eat lunch while girls have to wait. Imagine women having to cover themselves head to toe in case men get ideas. Sadly, we don’t have to imagine. There are millions of handmaids. The nightmare of Gilead is right here.

Her dislike of Islam overrides her need for consistency, because women wear head to toe clothing in many societies including the UK, women earn less than men, women face everyday sexism in the workplace, and the example of boys eating their lunch first is drawn for a reference earlier in the article to a school in the UK.

I am glad Atwood has returned to Gilead in The Testaments, which I look forward to reading. The Chaucerian echo in this novel’s title always suggested there were more tales to be told.

 

Standard
Book review

In the Kitchen by Monica Ali, 2009

Some novels are just difficult to get into. I am not thinking of the wilfully obscure novels, where you are never sure what is going on and where picking up a narrative thread is a challenge in itself. Instead I have in mind novels where not much happens, where the characters are not that engaging and where the issues being raised are ‘worthy’ rather than genuinely interesting. Books in other words that could benefit from the attentions of an editor with a radical approach to content.In the kitchen

Unfortunately, ‘In the Kitchen‘, Monica Ali’s third novel, falls into this category. The scenario is promising – set in the kitchen of a prestigious central London hotel, the Imperial, staffed by a United Nations polyglot of nationalities and headed by the woefully indecisive head chef, Gabriel Lightfoot. Lightfoot – Gabe – is secretly planning to set up his own restaurant in Pimlico, aiming for a Michelin star. The problem is he has had similar plans for years and he is beginning to realise it is soon going to be now or never. His relationship with his long-term girlfriend, Charlie, is on the same basis, forever just on the point of getting engaged, but never quite getting there.

Gabe is a dull character. An omniscient narrator tells the novel’s events from his perspective, guiding us into his thoughts and dreams, but we never really get to know him – or perhaps there just isn’t that much to know. We are told in detail about his childhood in a Northern mill town, in passages that scream out “research”, his troubled relationship with his parents (his father is slowly dying of cancer in that “sorry to be a bother” way of stereotypical Northerners) his years of training in kitchens around Europe, etc – but at no point does he ever transform into someone we care about or are interested in (and when I say we I of course mean I).

So many modern novels need a sudden death to start or end them and here the accidental death of a porter stumbling down some steps in the kitchen basement is the catalyst for the chain of events that the novel portrays. Yuri, the deceased porter, had been protecting a girl, Lena, whom Gabe, in a half-hearted investigation into the death (this is not, of all things, a detective novel, despite hints at some stage that it might develop into one) takes into his care. A strange relationship develops between the two, in that Lena succumbs to Gabe’s sexual attentions in a disinterested way and Gabe, knowing what he is doing is wrong, doesn’t seem able to stop himself. This is an abusive relationship without doubt, but the least of several evils as far as Lena is concerned. We soon learn she has been trafficked into the UK on the promise of a good job, and has escaped from her pimp from whom she is hiding.

This relationship obviously has an impact on Gabe’s near-engagement with Charlie. Gabe’s enquiries into Yuri’s death uncovers the fact that the trafficking is closer to home that he would have thought. Meanwhile we learn more about the characters in the Imperial’s kitchen. But all this takes an unconscionable amount of time, and for long passages we seem to be on repeat, with Gabe stumbling through a series of aimless conversations with his business partners, his bosses, and his kitchen staff, all the while returning each night to the reluctant but submissive Lena.

Eventually the long nights and little sleep takes its toll, and Gabe suffers a mental health crisis. This seems to blow over quite quickly without any intervention or assistance and he recovers sufficiently to challenge the bad guys, repair his relationship with his family, and even take the first steps to getting back together with Charlie. Which leaves the reader knowing a little about modern human trafficking in the UK, but otherwise regretting the loss of a few hours working their way through the 400+ pages of disappointment. And by the reader I mean me, of course.

Standard
Book review

An Awfully Big Adventure, by Beryl Bainbridge, 1989 (spoiler free, for a change)

Bainb

An Awfully Big Adventure represents three firsts for me – it is the first Beryl Bainbridge novel I have read; this is the first deliberately spoiler-free review I have written; and never before have I finished a novel and immediately gone back to the beginning and started again. I suspect from the way the novel is so cleverly constructed Bainbridge may have intended this to happen. What I do know is that it is wonderful, even with the one big issue which I have with the novel, which I will come to in a minute.

Readmore
Standard
Book review, Muriel Spark, The Driver's seat

The Driver’s Seat, by Muriel Spark, 1970

What a disconcerting, puzzling book this is. At barely 100 pages it is little more than a long short story, but Spark gives the reader a lot to think about in this strange tale of her lead character’s last few hours on earth.

“She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling”. Continue reading →

Standard
Book review

Nutshell, by Ian McEwan

I am not going to review this novel. If you want to read an intelligent, thoughtful if slightly showy-offy review, try this or this even more florid review by Adam Mars Jones. This blog is a reading diary (hence the recent absence of content) where I record my impressions of the books I read. Usually these look at first glance quite similar to reviews, without the clarity of expression or depth of analysis you might otherwise expect.Nutshell

‘Nutshell’ is a curious, whimsical novel. In the last few years the Hogarth Press has been commissioning authors to write a series of novels re-imaging Shakespeare’s plays, and I thought at first that ‘Nutshell’ was a part of or inspired by this series. It appears not, it is a solo, voluntary effort.

In a nutshell, in ‘Nutshell’ McEwan takes the themes and ideas of Hamlet, and updates them to the present day. Hamlet is played by not a moody young prince, but an about to be born foetus. His mother and her brother in law lover are planning to murder his father. The unnamed and apparently unwanted baby is a passive observer of events, with much energy expended on maintaining the conceit that he can detect what is going on in the outside world through hearing, taste, and a fair amount of guesswork.

McEwan’s fierce dazzling intelligence shines through this short novel. It has an extraordinary breadth, ranging through many different genres, least successfully crime (the resolution whereby the lovers are caught by the dogged but uninspired police is appallingly clumsy). Contemporary politics, the Royal family, Brexit, Trump, are all referenced and swiftly disposed of for the more substantial feasts of philosophy, literary criticism, and absurd levels of sophistication in wine-appreciation (“No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Echézeaux Grand Cru. Put … a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009”)

There is, inevitably, a ‘but’ coming. More precisely two. The first is something that seems to have only been an issue for me, and that is that the narrator character, an extraordinarily erudite and cultured baby, reminded me unavoidably of Stewie from ‘Family Guy’. Once that narrative voice got in my head that was it. Stewie, as I shall now call him, channels Jacob Rees Mogg in his social conservatism, (or is this McEwan letting loose his inner fogey?):

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. …A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. …I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.

The more serious issue is that McEwan is demonstrably better than this. For him to be writing a comedic novel about a ham(let)-fisted murder with a sub-Colombo style solution, constructed however cleverly around the scaffolding of the plot of Hamlet, seems such a waste of his energies and talents, almost like an academic exercise (“Rewrite Hamlet as a comic novel from the perspective of Hamlet as a foetus. No more than 200 pages, by Friday”). The jokes about the discomfort of a foetus being a few inches away from his uncle’s penis, for example, were obvious and clumsy. The novel’s anachronistic tone troubled reviewers (see for example the LRB review referenced earlier) but I think McEwan just about gets away with it, probably because the majority of his readers will share a generation with him, if not a world view.

At a shade under 200 pages, ‘Nutshell’ is an easy read with some jokes that make you chuckle, and some stunningly impressive prose. But it is not McEwan at his best, not by a long distance.

Standard
Book review

Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis, 2003

There is an undeniable trajectory to Martin Amis’s novels – downward. Not just in quality but in coherence, tone and taste. He peopled his 2003 effort ‘Yellow Dog’ with disgusting grotesques and events that made it hard to stomach. The best I can say about this novel is that it is not as bad as ‘Lionel Asbo’, but from the author of ‘Money’ this is such a fall.amis yellow dog

‘Yellow Dog’ was one of those novels that bitterly divided reviewers when it was first published. If you enjoy critical reviews, you will probably appreciate these more than the novel itself. In an industry where most reviews are by default favourable, this in itself was extraordinary. The Independent gave it both barrels:

Yellow Dog is a strange, sad stew of a novel, so aggressively unpleasant that it would perhaps be best accompanied by an author photograph of Amis flicking Vs at the reader….The fact that Yellow Dog is so bad is not a cause for celebration. Anyone interested in English fiction will be deeply saddened to see one of our country’s greatest talents produce such a purposeless novel

The Times Literary Supplement was more surgical, describing the novel as “not absolutely terrible”.

Tibor Fischer, one of Amis’s contemporaries went even further with this celebrated denunciation:

“It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”

If you have time you can also read numerous monsterings of the novel on Goodreads, which gives ‘Yellow Dog’ one of the lowest average scores I can remember seeing.

Plotwise the novel is a complete mess. Amis runs several storylines in parallel, tying them together at the end of the novel with a summary neatness that seems insulting, as if he just lost interest and stopped writing. We have an author assaulted in a pub, and acquiring a sexual interest in his daughter as a result; a plane slowly approaching a crash landing; a comet passing near to the earth, and a blackmail plot involving a sex tape and a princess. A tabloid journalist for the Morning Lark buzzes around doing what journalists in comic novels do, making up headlines and being offensive. None of this has any point or purpose. A visit to America to visit a porn studio is a clumsily inserted (forgive the pun) piece of repurposed journalism.

None of these plotlines are particularly interesting, devoid as they are of real characters. In fact, the image that came to mind when reading yet another set piece of absurdity was the adult comic, Viz. Joseph Andrews, the psychotically violent gangster, is surely a thinly disguised Big Vern, Henry 9th, King of England in this parallel universe, is any one of the comic’s thick but dim upper class characters; Clint Smoker is a tabloid journalist with a micro-penis. Like Viz but without the humour, Amis sets out to offend with these caricatures, the sexual violent, incestuous paedophiles that people the pages of ‘Yellow Dog’. The class hatred that seeped from the pages of ‘Lionel Asbo’ is equally obvious here. The working class are amoral, ultra-violent criminals, although in the interests of balance the upper classes don’t come off much better.

What redeemed ‘Money’ from these obvious criticisms was Amis’s ability to craft an elegant metaphor, a skill that seems to have abandoned him here. Here’s an example of a paragraph which is Money would have fizzed with vividness:

“The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beauty sleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore.” (page 289)

Do these images work for you? Do they conjure up thoughts of a bright sky crossed by aircraft trails? I wonder how many readers will still know what a pipecleaner looks like? The ‘light bedding after beauty sleep’ simile works after a fashion, although the beauty sleep addition is pretentious. He’s working hard, and it is not bad writing, it just doesn’t impress in the way ‘Money’ did, and to redeem the other features of the novel it really needed to be magnificent. I’ve chosen one of the more innocuous passages from the novel – dip into any page and there is gratuitous often sexual violence and pretentious philosophising.

This was a 50p charity shop find – I am glad I didn’t pay more.

 

Standard
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started