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Book review

When We Were Orphans is very nearly a great novel. I am probably going to spend most of this post explaining why it is nearly great, and how it just falls short. But first, a quick plot summary. It’s important as always to understand that these summarises iron out the plot in a very unrepresentative way, particularly so in a novel such as this where the time structure is so complex. The narrator is Christopher Banks, who when we first meet him is an aspirational detective having recently graduated from

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Cambridge, ‘setting himself up in the world’ in London. Over the course of several chapters Christopher slowly tells the reader the story of his childhood in Shanghai. When he was ten his father, a businessman involved in the opium trade, went missing. Christopher was convinced (at the time, and remains so) that he was kidnapped. A few weeks later his mother, who had been vocally active in opposition to the opium trade, also disappeared. After weeks without any sign of them, he was eventually sent back to live with a maiden aunt in Shropshire, and from there on to public school. In the present, Christopher recounts several meetings with former school-friends as well as an attractive and ambitious young woman, Sarah Hemmings, who incidentally is an orphan, and comes to play an important role in his life.

Time passes, and we are told that Christopher has become a successful detective. His detection skills are such that he can visit the scene of a crime several months after the event, and still discern sufficient evidence to solve the crime. While are always told about these abilities by Christopher they are never demonstrated or explained in any detail – the crime are just solved. Despite any natural scepticism – is he really as good at solving crime as he thinks he is – his skills are widely recognised and lauded. This work is in preparation for his most important case, a return to China to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his parents. This return is much delayed, and matters are complicated when he – seemingly spontaneously – adopts a young Canadian orphan, but finally after several years he returns to Shanghai and begins to try to solve his parents’ case. His work is a matter of much public interest and his success is so much taken for granted that he is asked to confirm details of the arrangements for the ceremony when his successfully located parents are returned to freedom. However the deepening conflict between China and Japan makes the investigation even more complex than it would otherwise have been, and it is only at the last moment that the secret of what happened to his parents is revealed.

While reading When We Were Orphans – and I read it in one compelling sitting – two authors came to mind as comparators to help me make sense of what was going on (because at times, what was going on made no sense!). One obvious influence seemed to be Kafka. Christopher is disorientated, struggling through a world that increasingly no longer complies with the ordinary rules of behaviour, where strangers know more about him that he expects, and where the landscape becomes strangely fluid and confusing. Christopher is unable to satisfactorily explain what happens to him in the novel. Frequently his view of the world seems dramatically at odds with the people he meets. His memories of school vary wildly from former schoolfriends (to emphasise the point Ishiguro has this happen twice). People look at him strangely when he makes everyday comments. He gets angry when people misrepresent events from his past:

For gradually, from behind his cheerful anecdotes, there was emerging a picture of myself on that voyage to which I took exception. His repeated insinuation was that I had gone about the ship withdrawn and moody, liable to burst into tears at the slightest thing. No doubt the colonel had an investment in giving himself the role of an heroic guardian, and after all this time, I saw it was as pointless as it was unkind to contradict him. But as I say, I began to grow steadily more irritated.

There is a common perception among the people he meets that his investigation will in some unspoken way do more than locate his parents (who he unquestioningly believes are still alive) but also resolve the growing military and political tension between Japan and China which threatens to spill over into an international conflict.

The Kafkaesque atmosphere of the novel intensifies when the search for his parents reaches its climax. Working his way on foot through the ruins of a slum on the frontline between the Japanese and Chinese forces, he meets a badly wounded Japanese soldier who may or may not be his childhood friend Akira. They finally reach the building Christopher has become convinced is the place where his parents are being held, but inevitably he is wrong. He is whisked away by the Japanese forces and safely returned to the British consulate where he finds out the real fate of his parents.

Another type of unreliable narrator, where the author slowly and deliberately exposes the narrator’s delusions, and a more convincing ‘reality’ is shown, is more closely associated in my mind with Nabokov, and in particular with his extraordinary Pale Fire. For a long time I expected to find out that Christopher’s descriptions of his prowess as a detective, his childhood memories of his life in Shanghai, and his status within the ex-patriate community, were going to be revealed as delusional, (possibly as a result of an addiction to opium, which would have been ironic!). But while his account of his story is clearly flawed, the essential elements are apparently reliably narrated. He is, everyone agrees, an extremely successful detective, his prowess is widely recognised and appreciated, and he does survive the arduous journey along the front-line of the battle of Shanghai. Which leaves the many instances in which he is baffled by the behaviour of others around him, and they by him, unexplained. Ian McEwan does something similar in Enduring Love where the hints throughout the novel that the narrator’s account of the ballooning accident is flawed come to nothing, and the final chapters confirm that everything we have been told is true despite the many improbabilities and suggestions that ‘something’ is wrong with the account.

Why include scene after scene emphasising the unreliable nature of Christopher’s narration only to finally confirm its essential accuracy?

There are a couple of other issues I wanted to mention before closing. In a Guardian review of the novel, Philip Hensher focussed on the slightly awkward phrasing of much of Christopher’s narration:

“Ishiguro’s avoidance of phrasal verbs is a major problem here – it gives his narrator a circumlocutious, cautious air which isn’t really very helpful. More than that, it gives him a particular tone of voice which is not that of his social setting. It is bizarrely unconvincing as an idea of upper-middle-class London in the 1930s – I think Ishiguro will find that society beauties did not say ‘pardon’ then and do not now – and the inadequacy can be pinned down to the narrator’s voice, and his choice of verbs, as much as the details. “

This comment breaks a fundamental rule of reading, which is that if you notice something ‘off’ about a novel don’t just assume that it is a weakness in the author’s abilities as a writer (especially as we are talking about someone who had already won the Booker in 1989 with Remains of the Day). Instead ask the question – why? Why does it sound as if English is not the speaker’s first language? Could it be that Ishiguro is trying to convey the fact that Christopher lived for the first ten years of his life in China and is not convincingly part of the upper-middle-class world he circulates in? Is his fractured relationship with reality being conveyed here with his ‘circumlocutious, cautious air’? Giving a character a specific voice to illustrate their character wouldn’t be that revolutionary a technique would it?

Not wanting to end on too negative a note, but the novel’s description of the ‘fate’ of Christopher’s mother is grotesque and plays to very out-dated cliches about the Chinese. I’m not going to dwell on this or be more specific, and I am sure such things did happen occasionally, but it’s needlessly distressing.

So why ‘nearly great’? Even Ishiguro himself accepted that ‘it’s not my best book’. If he had been able to conclude the novel with an explanation that allowed the reader to make sense of Christopher’s confusion, his apparent ability to solve long-past crimes with the aid of just his slightly ridiculous, sub-Holmesian magnifying glass, and the many conversations where there is obviously a big gap between what he tells us and what is ‘actually’ perceived by the other characters, then the novel would have been an exciting mystery. I still enjoyed reading the novel, but I was so disappointed in the lacklustre ending where everything that had been promised failed to materialise.

When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000

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Book review

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962

After the title of each of these reviews I include the publication date, blithely suggesting that the novel appear complete and final in the year given. Clearly, that is often a simplification – the publication history of many novels is more complicated than this would suggest. The appear in instalments spread over years, are significantly revised, appear in underground magazines then remain banned for years before a final glorious emergence. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich has a complex publication history which is an important element of the novel’s overall historical significance. Solzhenitsyn served almost ten years in a prison camp of the kind described in this novel. In 1957 he was released from the exile that followed his imprisonment and began writing One Day. In 1962 he submitted the novel to a literary magazine. He must have been aware that its content – a devastating description of life on a soviet labour camp – was going to be contentious, and that publication in the Soviet Union was improbable. Although Stalinism had officially ended with his death in 1953, the USSR remained an authoritarian society where criticism of the state was discouraged.

Instead of summarily rejecting it, the magazine’s editor submitted the manuscript to the Communist Party Central Committee for permission to publish. It ultimately reached the desk of Nikita Khrushchev who approved its publication. I can’t be certain but I think this decision was part of a conscious attempt to demonstrate that post-Stalin Russia had moved on from the labour camps and oppression of Stalinism, presenting a new face to the world. If that was the plan I think you can say it succeeded, although some critics have drawn a causal line between the book’s publication and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union (although I have to say that feels quite a stretch to me.).

According to his dossier Shukhov was in for treason. He’d admitted it under investigation – yes, he had surrendered in order to betray his country and returned from a POW camp to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What the mission could be, neither Shukhov himself nor his interrogator could imagine. They left it at that – just “a mission”. The counter-espionage boys had beaten the hell out of him. The choice was simple enough: don’t sign and wear a wooden overcoat, or sign and live a bit longer…

Like thousands of his fellow Russian soldiers, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sent to the Gulag – a prison labour camp – as ‘punishment’ for surrendering to the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. This was seen as a betrayal of the USSR and a lack of ideological commitment. The novel – as the title suggests – follows Ivan across the course of one typical day. He wakes feeling unwell, but is reluctant to try to get medical help – he knows this is unlikely to help. Punished for lateness he goes to work with his squad, the 104th, on a construction site. Here the winter cold freezes the mortar if it is not applied quickly enough. Shukhov is an experienced prisoner and knows all the best ways to keep warm, avoid the punishments of the guards, and find enough to eat. His focus is always on survival – he often notes other prisoners without the skills to survive the privations of the camp, forecasting that they are going to die sooner or later.

One day is one of those novels that has become an important cultural and historical artefact. It has moulded the way people think, write and speak about Soviet and other labour camps – cold, brutal and unforgiving, even if ultimately and barely survivable. It shows the extent to which literature, even novels that are simply descriptive rather than polemical, can have a significant impact on national political affairs and public opinion.

Shukhov is a consummate survivor, but his life is exhaustingly hard. The novel ends on a note of the slightest bitter-sweet hope – one day Shukhov’s sentence will end, and he will be free. Perhaps the same will happen for Russia:

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years.”

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Book review

Rites of Passage, by William Golding, 1980

Rites of Passage is an account of a voyage by sea to Australia. Set in 1812, at the end of the Napoleonic war, the voyage is undertaken by a group of Britons in search of a new life in Australia. The ship is a converted man-of-war, an aging battleship. The story is told in the form of a journal written by Edmund Fitzhenry Talbot, a young aristocrat. We are told this journal is being written to entertain Talbot’s godfather, who is apparently a very influential man, and who has arranged for Edmund to work for the Governor of New South Wales in the colony. Talbot describes the ship’s layout, its crew and passengers, and the mainly weather-related incidents that comprise the voyage. He loses track of the days at sea when he falls ill, but as the ship approaches the equator the narrative slowly focusses on the fate of one other passenger, Reverend Colley, and something that happens to Colley when the ship crosses the equator – the rite of passage in the novel’s title.

Colley’s role in the novel is largely one of scapegoat. He accidentally offends the ship’s captain by intruding on the quarterdeck without permission, something forbidden in ship’s orders. Colley makes clumsy efforts to repair his relationship with the captain, but is rebuffed. He becomes a focus for the crew’s attention, and is hazed during the crossing the equator rituals. These central events happen ‘off-screen’ – Talbot the novel’s principal narrator isn’t present when they happen, and is only vaguely aware of them (his focus is on chasing a young woman of negotiable affection around the ship) and in the subsequent journal pages written by Colley they are only alluded to tangentially and ambiguously. Whatever happens, Colley then gets blind drunk and there is a further incident with the crew in which sexual activity with one or more of the ship’s crew is hinted at. Struck by shame Colley retreats to his cabin, refuses all food and drink, and eventually dies. In the nineteenth century shame could be fatal, apparently.

Golding seems to have based this incident on the well-documented practice of humiliating crew members when they cross the equator for the first time. If the Wikipedia entry is to be believed this practice continues in navies around the world to this day. It seems likely in the nineteenth century these ceremonies would have been less restrained than they are now. A record of the second survey voyage of HMS Beagle describes the crossing thus:

As they approached the equator on the evening of 16 February 1832, a pseudo-Neptune hailed the ship. Those credulous enough to run forward to see Neptune “were received with the watery honours which it is customary to bestow”.[2] The officer on watch reported a boat ahead, and Captain FitzRoy ordered “hands up, shorten sail”. Using a speaking trumpet he questioned Neptune, who would visit them the next morning. About 9am the next day, the novices or “griffins” were assembled in the darkness and heat of the lower deck, then one at a time were blindfolded and led up on deck by “four of Neptune’s constables”, as “buckets of water were thundered all around”. The first “griffin” was Charles Darwin, who noted in his diary how he “was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. — They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. —a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. —at last, glad enough, I escaped. — most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. — The whole ship was a shower bath: & water was flying about in every direction: of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.” 

All good fun but the element of humiliation is never far off.

For a novel about a sea voyage there is surprisingly little about sea-voyaging in Rites of Passage. Yes, there’s plenty of description of the ship and its working, and Talbot devotes a lot of time to learning ‘tarpaulin’, which he claims is the sailors name for their slang and technical terms about the working of the ship. But for a voyage half-way round the world, the novel is in many ways claustrophobic, confided within the narrow constraints of the ship. There’s no mention of the ship ever docking for supplies for example. At the end of his journal Talbot describes it as: “some kind of a sea-story but a sea-story with never a tempest, no shipwreck, no sinking, no rescue at sea, no sight nor sound of an enemy, no thundering broadsides, heroism, prizes, gallant defences and heroic attacks. Only one gun fired, and that a blunderbuss!” which is about right.

This is largely because the novel isn’t really about the voyage at all. It ends long before Australia is reached for one thing – the destination and the new world it represents is unimportant. This novel is really much more interested in the social structures which govern life on board. The ship as a metaphor for society is an image that goes back as far as Plato. In case the reader has missed the point, Golding names his ship Britannia. The passengers and crew are carefully stratified into a class system distributed through the ship’s decks, with strict codes of conduct and conventions (which of course Colley is punished for breaking).

Ostensibly Rites of Passage is a straightforward story of a sea-voyage. But as you might expect from a Nobel-winning novelist there’s plenty more going on than you are initially led to believe from the flawed narrative voices. But the novel also felt very old-fashioned. It could easily have been written by Conrad in the first decade of the twentieth century, o, earlier. People dying of shame tends not to happen in novels written towards the end of the twentieth century! The narrative structure, based around Talbot’s journal, felt forced to me, harking back to the early epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. For all his status and education Talbot is an unobservant narrator, never able to get to the bottom of what causes Colley’s death. The text within a text, Colley’s fragmentary notes which Talbot discovers in his cabin and pastes into his journal, are written in a more authentic, accessible voice, and came as a bit of a relief.

I can’t honestly say this was an enjoyable read, with the archaic language and the claustrophobic setting combining to give the novel a constricted, stifled atmosphere. It is is the first in a series in which Golding continued the voyage towards Australia, and we find out more about the characters he introduces here. Once again I find myself hesitant about investing more time in a trilogy, although this time for very different reasons than when I finished The Ghost Road!

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Book review

The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer, 1974

The Conservationist is set during the period in which the racist apartheid regime governed South Africa. This deceptively simple but immensely powerful novel is a devastating portrait of a South African businessman who is unable to ‘conserve’ his position in society, and which foreshadows the eventual demise of the apartheid regime. Not for nothing was the novel banned in South Africa at the time of its publication.

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The novel’s protagonist and principal narrator, Mehring, is a successful industrialist who has bought a farm a few miles outside the city where he lives. He drives out to the farm most weekends, past the ‘location’, the blandly neutral term for the township where most local black South Africans are forced to live. The farm is looked after for him by Jacobus, an obsequious black farm-manager, and a largely anonymous population of farm-hands and their families. Mehring has no interest in farming – he sets any losses he makes against his tax liabilities – and has no real links to the land. His farmhouse is a sterile empty sleeping place, luxurious compared to the damp quarters where the farmhands and their families are forced to sleep.

Gordimer narrates the events of the novel through Mehring’s stream of consciousness. This creates a dense narrative jumping freely between topics and time periods. This gives the text a dense, layered complexity. Mehring’s history including his divorce and his detached relationship with his teenage son, slowly emerges. As most readers will identify with the narrator, who presents all events from the most sympathetic point of view possible, it takes time for us to see Mehring as the unpleasant and unstable character he really is. His casual relationships with women for example are portrayed as adventurism rather than exploitative, and it is not until we are shown him assaulting a teenage girl during an aeroplane flight (he convinces himself the ‘encounter’ is consensual) that his predatory nature is fully exposed.

Similarly his racism is revealed slowly. He mainly avoid overtly racist language but is completely dismissive of the concerns of his workers, and accepts the status quo of apartheid without question. Progressive challenges to his ideas from his son and ex-wife are casually dismissed. (It was such a pleasure to read about the struggle to liberate Namibia as an independent country – Mehring dismisses even the name – knowing that a few years later it was to become a reality.) As well as being a lonely racist predator, Mehring is also a shell of a man devoid of any particular interests. The choice of him to carry the narrative weight of the novel almost completely on his own was a bold one. He’s not a nice man to spend a great deal of time with.

What elevates the novel from a simple portrait of an unpleasant, unthinking South African businessman is the incident which sparks the events of the narrative. One day a dead body is found on the farm. The death is clearly murder, but the police refuse to investigate – it’s just another dead black man – and bury the body where it was found, on Mehring’s farm. Although outraged by this – his farm isn’t a morgue! – Mehring does nothing to resolve the situation, and the body remains where it was buried in a shallow grave with no marker or memorial. As the novel progresses the body haunts Mehring, even though he is not apparently aware of the impression it has had on him. He returns obsessively to the field where it is buried, and the language of burial, death and decay starts to take over his thoughts and speech. At one point he even sleeps near the body, seeming to start to identify with the corpse. One night while walking in the field his foot gets caught in some mud, and he imagines the dead man is grabbing his leg, refusing to let him go, in a fairly literal playing out of his nightmares.

At the novel’s climax, as Mehring’s personal life continues to deteriorate and his state of mind crumbles, a biblical flood forces the remains of the body back to the surface, as was always going to happen one way or another. The metaphor is plain – the bodies of black South Africans will haunt the white supremacists until they are forced to confront their crimes and responsibilities. Without consulting Mehring Jacobus decides that the man deserves a proper burial this time and he is finally laid to rest.

This novel is a dramatic contrast to its fellow 1974 Booker prize winner, Holiday. Although there are superficial similarities – both are fairly thin in terms of events, both use a first person narrative structure – The Conservationist is dramatically more ambitious and bold in its scope and execution. It would be fascinating to contrast this novel with that of Gordimer’s fellow Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee, Disgrace. One is set years before the end of apartheid, where the way forward in terms of the dismantling of the racist South African regime was hard to navigate; the latter is set after the end of apartheid where people like Mehring are having to face the damage they have wrought on the country.

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Book review

In a Free State by V S Naipaul, 1971

The version of In a Free State which won the 1971 Booker prize consists of a framing narrative and three short stories – “One out of Many,” “Tell Me Who to Kill,” and the title story, “In a Free State.” In his introduction to the edition of the novel that I have just read, Naipaul explains that he was originally advised by his editor to publish just the core narrative as a stand-alone novella, without the supporting stories and text, but how at the time he over-rode her advice, and obviously felt vindicated given the Booker award. However, he goes on to say that he eventually came to realise that her advice was correct. In a Free State is now published on its own without the supporting text, and that was the version I read for this review. Part of me thinks that might constitute taking a short cut, and that I ought to go back and read the longer, prize-winning version, but that would be sadistic. The stand-alone version works fine.

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In a Free State is set in an unnamed African country that has recently acquired independence from a colonial power. The king has been deposed in an ongoing coup, with the President about to take power. The king and the President are from different tribes, and the delicate balance of power introduced by the colonial government has started to collapse almost immediately after independence.

The narrative is told by Bobby, a Government official. We are never told his role or status, but we are led to understand that he is white and has decided for now to remain in the country. He has been attending a conference in the capital city in the north of the country, the President’s power-base, and he plans to drive back to the south where the King is based. He offers a lift to Linda, the wife of a colleague, who wants to make the same journey.

The night before the journey begins Bobby tries to pick up a young man in the hotel bar. The bartering over price goes badly, and the young man spits in his face. This is a disturbing scene: Bobby has obviously been comfortable paying for sex before now, when his role in Government gave him a position of authority, but now his status is beginning to slip:

“Bobby thought: this boy is a whore. Bobby was nervous of African whores in hotel bars. But he was prepared to bargain. He said

“You are a brave man. Going about with all that cash. I never carry more than sixty or eight shillings on me.”

“You need two hundred to do anything in this town”.

“A hundred at the outside is enough for me”.

The rest of the novella is a traditional road journey across the divided country, with strong echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While the Conrad novella is a portrait of a primitive Africa in the early stages of colonialisation, In a Free State is set at the end of Empire. The novel is dominated by images of the decay of the ‘civilisation’ that the white settlers have constructed. The landscape is reclaiming the towns and settlements built by the Europeans and reverting to a more ‘natural’ state, reversing the process of colonisation:

Many of the houses that looked abandoned were occupied, by Africans who had come in from the forest and had used the awkward, angular objects they had found, walls, doors, windows, furniture, to re-create the shelter of the round forest hut. Within drawing-rooms they had built shelters; they had raised roofs on verandah half-walls. Fires burned on pieces of corrugated iron; bricks were the cooking stones.. ..On the sidewalk grass had grown around rubbish from the houses, things that couldn’t be used and had been thrown out: cracked squares of picture glass, fragments of upholstered chairs, mattresses that had been disembowelled for their springs, books and magazines whose pages had stuck together in solid, crinkled pads.

The 2001 Nobel Committee described Naipaul as “Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings…His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished”. I’m struggling to relate this comment to In a Free State, which is dominated by the voices and perspectives of the white settlers, with the black characters often sullenly mute, or saying what they are ordered to say. The central characters’ attitudes towards the African people they meet are consistently negative; they are nameless, mostly fat, and there are persistent references to how they “stink,” and smell like “rotting vegetation.” That in itself doesn’t invalidate the novel – what Empire does to the imperialists is something worth exploring – but it doesn’t feel like a history of the vanquished.

Bobby is a unlikeable character. His recent experience of mental illness is mentioned but not explained – as a representative of the colonial power I read this as suggesting that colonialism itself is sick. It is possible that Naipaul intended the same suggestion by making Bobby gay (there is one bizarre episode where he is repulsed by the concept of a vaginal deodorant!). Midway through their increasingly difficult journey Bobby and Linda, (such bland European names) spend the night at a hotel run by a colonel who treats his African servants like slaves. The hotel was built to attract European tourists to the area, and is in an obvious and accelerating state of decay, with only muddy water coming out of the taps. (The echoes of these scenes with J G Farrell’s Troubles, another portrait of a military figure trapped in a decaying hotel at the end of Empire, are inescapable. Did this theme, also central to Something to Answer For, really dominate the English novel of the 1960s and 70’s, or is this a coincidence?) The Colonel fully expects to be murdered one day by the servants he abuses. Bobby has another unsuccessful attempt to pick up a young man for sex; he also seems trapped in a cycle of failure and frustration.

The road journey format of the novel works well, building the suspense as the military presence in the area increases and they approach their destination. Towards the end of the journey Bobby is beaten by some soldiers at an army checkpoint, a beating he accepts stoically as the price of his presence in this part of the world. Finally the compound is reached, and while the rest of the town and countryside is in flames, the area preserved for white settlers seems untouched. Perhaps this suggests that the real price of being in a Free State is paid by the freed rather than by the colonialists?

I didn’t enjoy In a Free State at first. The central characters are unappealing. The descriptions of the countryside are repetitive and a bit flat.

The verges widened; a few tarnished villas were set in large gardens. There was a roundabout, its garden still maintained, and the highway entered the town. Cross-streets, each with a new black-and-white board bearing the name of a minister in the capital, could be seen to end in mud after two or three hundred yards. The town had been built to grow. It hadn’t grown. It remained a collection of old tin-and-timber buildings, its flimsiness pointed by the small new bank building, the motor car and tractor showroom. The mud-splashed police barracks, low white concrete sheds flat to the ground, already looked like the hutments of the African quarter in the capital.

But while this is without doubt a book that is hard to warm to, my instinct is that it will grow on me.

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Book review

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015

The Buried Giant is an enigmatic, allegorical novel. Do those two features work well together – can an allegory actually be enigmatic, because if it is then is it really an allegory (and if so of what?). These are the questions that I am grappling with in shaping this review, whereas I suspect they may actually be a distraction, because The Buried Giant is first and foremost an enjoyable story.

Set in Britain in what became known as the Dark Ages, the period in history roughly between the departure of the Roman occupation and the Norman Conquest, this novel tells the story of two Britons, Axl and Beatrice, as they journey from their village to visit their son. Journeys of this nature were at the best of times dangerous and challenging, here all the more so because Axl and Beatrice are old. Although peace has descended on the countryside following years of conflict between Britons and Anglo-Saxons, this is still a world full of danger and menace, so of it very practical – a fall or an infection could easily prove fatal – and some of it fantastical, such as the unspoken threat that lurks on the Great Plains, or the ogres that steal children away from villages.

The fantasy element of the novel sits a little uncomfortably alongside the highly realistic portrait of Dark Ages life, in all its primitive, brutish and short nastiness. It becomes slowly apparent that the people are being affected by a form of collective amnesia – Axl and Beatrice refer to it as ‘the mist’ meaning that they quickly forget even recent events, and lives their lives in a fog of the very recent past. Axl sometimes wonders if this is a blessing, allowing them to forget upsetting incidents in their past, whether it be the conflicts that have swept across the land between Britons and Anglo-Saxons, or the personal problems the couple have faced, despite appearing the model of old-age devotion.

An adventure element to the novel is introduced with the character of Wistan, an Anglo-Saxon warrior sent by his king in the fens to travel west on an unspecified quest. Wistan rescues a boy from some ogres and agrees to share Axl and Beatrice’s journey for some of the way. They meet an aging Sir Gawain, knight of the Round Table, who is also on a quest. Slowly the truth about the amnesia causing fog and the characters’ back story emerges, and while I don’t think I would be spoiling the plot for you if I said more, I won’t in case it might. The adventure element of the novel keeps the pages turning, even if the allegorical nature of the plot (nothing is ever just itself – it always represents or stands for something, and after a while this gets a little distracting) is really what we are here for, with the sword fights and escapes through mysterious tunnels just a bit of a distraction.

This is very much an aside, but I would have liked it if Ishiguro had avoided some of the cliches about the Dark Ages. Of course they were difficult dangerous times, but the savagery and lawlessness that is suggested is probably wrong. There is evidence, principally archaeological, that travel and trading between Britain and the continent continued after the Romans left, and that society continued in many ways unchanged, with cooperation and inter-marriage between Britons and Anglo-Saxons. But of course it suits the narrative here to have these as savage times.

So what’s the novel an allegory of? It’s a meditation on relationship, naturally, but however touching the relationship of Axl and Beatrice is this is not more than a portrait of a couple growing old together and coming to terms with the challenges their marriage has faced over the years. In the end Axl faces the loss of his wife with stoicism. Their journey through the country can be seen as Bunyanesque, with the challenges they face as metaphorical manifestations – ogres, dragons, dog-beasts – of child-rearing, infidelity and old-age. You have to work hard at these allegorical associations – Ishiguro doesn’t join any dots for the reader – and I am not convinced that they really work. Everyone will have their own personal interpretation of these symbols. The Buried Giant itself only appears in passing, and is a slightly easier puzzle – conflict in the land has been buried by the collective amnesia caused by Merlin’s spell, and when it awakes there will be a heavy price to pay.

I’ve read a few negative reviews of this novel, both when it was published and subsequently in preparing for this post. Some of the objections are relatively trivial – if the identity of the narrator in some chapters is unclear, does it really matter? (I did notice, and it niggled slightly, but I got over it). The concerns about Ishiguro appropriating the tropes of fantasy fiction – which when it boils down to it that just  means dragons – seem a bit ridiculous in hindsight. Of course you can put dragons into your novels if you want to, who says you can’t? That doesn’t mean you are showing disrespect to the authors who were writing about dragons before you came along with your Nobel prize and your realism. I think this is one of those novels that unsettle readers and reviewers when it first comes out, but over time comes to be appreciated for what it is.

Despite my minor reservations, this was a genuinely enjoyable read. The characters are interesting, and you come to care about them as more than just cyphers for the values they represent. Post-Roman England is realistically portrayed. What I really like about Ishiguro’s work is that he refuses to be pigeon-holed by genre – novels as varied as this work, Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day are all worth reading. Although it was published in 2015 this is his most recent novel – let’s hope the fuss about the use of fantasy tropes when it come out haven’t put Ishiguro off taking risks in his fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

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Book review

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Wow. Just wow.

I am a bit embarrassed that I have only now just got round to reading what must be one of the most powerful novels written this century. I can completely see why Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. In terms of subtlety, control and lightness of touch this novel ranks with Nabokov at his best.never

It’s also an extraordinarily difficult book to review without spoilers, and while my approach to spoilers in the past has been robust if not cavalier, here’s where I draw the line – because I can’t tell you (assuming you don’t know already of course) the central idea of this novel without undermining the long slow reveal which is a key part of the narrative structure.

I would hate you to think this all means that this is a ‘difficult’ novel. Part of Ishiguro’s genius is that it is deceptively simple. It is written in the form of the first person memoir by Kathy H, a ‘carer’. She describes a childhood spent at Hailsham, a boarding school somewhere in England. At first Kathy’s memories of school are unremarkable – this could easily be a traditional school story, all hockey sticks and midnight feasts, crushes on teachers and silly games. But the text is carefully sprinkled with suggestions that Hailsham is not your typical boarding school. Although the text opens with a stark sentence “England, 1990s” this is deceptive – and at the same time not, in that apart from the one key difference, this is a remarkably familiar, almost mundane world of bus shelters, offices, cassette tapes and cafes.

This is an incredibly thoughtful meditation on childhood and the mysteries of life. If that sounds pompous then I apologise because it is anything but. If you don’t want spoilers then stop here, because I find I can’t continue without commenting on the treatment of the novel’s major themes. The children at Hailsham and elsewhere are, we eventually discover, clones, bred for their organs, which are slowly harvested from them once they reach maturity. The moment when we find this out is a shocking moment of realisation – all of a sudden the references to caring, donating and ‘completing’ come into focus.

I doubt I am alone in wondering why the clones don’t reject the role in life set out for them as ‘donors’ and rebel, or just run away. The children’s pilgrimage to see a boat washes up on the Norfolk shoreline perhaps hints at their desire to escape their preordained fate. But I came to realise this would be missing the point. When the children are growing up at Hailsham they are gradually introduced to the concept that they will have their organs harvested and then eventually, after two, three or four operations, die. Dying is referred to as “completing”. They grow up understanding this is their fate and are taught not to question it. But don’t we all? We are all told about death, but we are also lied to about it. I don’t often quote the Daily Telegraph, but their reviewer put it really well – ”

‘Gradually, it dawns on the reader that Never Let Me Go is a parable about mortality. The horribly indoctrinated voices of the Hailsham students who tell each other pathetic little stories to ward off the grisly truth about the future – they belong to us; we’ve been told that we’re all going to die, but we’ve not really understood.”

Or as the narrator Kathy puts it

“What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”

We do indeed all ‘complete’, and few of us feel we have had enough time.

There’s obviously another perfectly valid reading of this novel which accepts this point – we all die – but goes on to make the point that we don’t all die by having our organs harvested and that society treats some people differently from others. The clones in the novel are treated by their non-clone guardians as little more than soulless meat. Hailsham, we are told, is a progressive school (farm) where the children (clones) are treated humanely, but we are also told that the movement to improve conditions for clones has declined and that they are now treated badly. One can only imagine what that means. This is surely a parable for the way people who we perceive as different, whether by race, gender, disability or religion are treated in some societies, dehumanised, ostracised, and even butchered. Or as Kathy puts it:

Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.” 

I feel I have only scratched the surface of this wonderful, powerful, heartbreaking novel, which I am sure I will return to one day. Like all great books it can only be read for the first time once – after you know Hailsham’s dark secret you can never un-know it – but this is so much more than a mystery novel. As a masterpiece of controlled writing and construction I can’t recall having read anything like it for a very long time.

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Book review, Booker prize nominee, Booker Prizewinner, Naipaul

A Bend in the River, by V S Naipaul, 1979

‘A Bend in the River’ reads like an updating of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, taken 60 or 70 years forward into the post-independence period. As with ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘A Bend’ is set in an unnamed African country in the interior of the continent. The setting is not the only similarity between these books – both have colonialism as their principal themes, and both are pervaded with a sense of impending danger and disaster. Naipaul Continue reading →

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