The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (1992)

I really did not like this book. At all. I honestly didn’t know anything of the story before I started reading, but I was pretty disappointed to discover that it is, basically, a melodramatic romance. Ostensibly the story of four people holed up in a crumbling villa at the end of the Second World War, for all its writerly affectations (more on that later) the book is basically two love stories, one told as a reminiscence and one playing out in the villa before our eyes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a love story, but neither love story in The English Patient is very compelling, and neither yields any original insights into the human condition that one might expect from a lauded work.

Please excuse a little superficial psychoanalytic criticism on my part, but it’s also a strangely masculine book, with extended descriptions of men “penetrating” the Libyan desert and interminable sections detailing macho bomb-defusal practices. I usually enjoy digressive sections on technical matters (as in Farrell’s excursus on Victorian medicine in The Siege of Krishnapur) but in The English Patient they are insufferable, technical fetishism at its most boring. More telling, however, is that the main characters in the book are the men. While Hana has more of a voice in the narrative than Katherine, neither of them are fully fledged characters in their own right. What we know of Katherine begins and ends with what the male English patient tells us about her, and Hana only seems to exist in relation to the men in villa, responding to their actions.

However, my main problem with the book is the prose. It is gratingly one-note, and that note is writerly, which I mean in the perjorative sense. It is so self-consciously literary and affected that it dominates all the characters’ voices, rendering them identical. That might not be so bad if Ondaatje wrote beautifully, but in my opinion he does not. He seems never to have met a metaphor he didn’t like. Wires in bomb fuses are likened to tributaries, a piece of cloth is likened to a placenta, with no sense of there being any actual meaning behind the relation. Every character speaks with the same awful, awkward, affected cadence, every character likens objects to other objects so dissimilar as to be ridiculous. I found it to be tiresomely overwritten.

There are a few other problems too, like the wild coincidences and improbabilities that drive the plot, the unbalanced narrative that focuses on certain characters to the exclusion of others, and the general superficiality of it all. If you like Ondaatje’s prose, then I’m sure you’ll find this a pretty enough book, but still, it doesn’t actually say anything interesting or original. And if you don’t like his prose, well, this could prove a painful read.

The Siege of Krishnapur, by J.G. Farrell (1973)

I really enjoyed this book, and I think I liked it even more than Troubles. A fictional account of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur is a genuinely exciting and sometimes funny adventure story, a subtle examination of colonialism, and a rigorous and detailed account of a particular historical moment. It’s full of fascinating digressions, about Victorian medicine for example, that reminded me a little of the detailed, non-narrative examinations of whaling techniques in Moby Dick.

The plot is relatively simple, and, like Troubles, strands a collection of British colonial characters together in a dangerous situation to see what unfolds. The characters here are gathered together in the East India Company compound in the fictional city of Krishnapur when the Indian Mutiny breaks out. The majority of the book focuses on their efforts to outlast the siege, and on the moral and ethical reflections that the siege provokes. One thing that struck me was the paucity of Indian characters, but the reason for this is, I think, clear. Farrell is not trying to speak for the Indian victims of British colonialism. That type of paternalistic writing on behalf of the subaltern belongs to an earlier literary era, think E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. The focus of Farrell’s book is the muddled, naïve, sometimes cruel, and sometimes silly nature of British colonialism. It’s an interesting approach, not hectoring, but subtle, definitely passing a critical judgement but allowing his characters to come to some realizations themselves. Disillusionment is the dominant emotional tone of the book.

The dazed Collector, the sardonic Magistrate, the vain young army officers, the disgraced Lucy, the poetic Fleury, the feuding doctors, and the frankly insane Padre are all memorable characters, and give us a great cross-section of Victorian ideas and attitudes. Farrell’s book is great because it’s not just one thing; it’s not just an adventure story, it’s not just a war story, it’s not just an examination of colonialism, or Victorian social mores. It’s all of these things, and I liked it a lot. I'm really looking forward to the third volume of Farrell's Empire Trilogy now!

The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker (1995)

I should have written this review when I actually finished the book, but I've been a little busy and am only now getting round to it. Anyway, I liked The Ghost Road, but it felt a little incomplete to me. I try not to take extraneous issues into account when reviewing these books, but I can't help wondering if Barker won the Booker for the entire Regeneration Trilogy, of which this book is merely the final part, because for me The Ghost Road didn't really work as a stand-alone novel.

Set during the First World War, the book has two main narratives. The first follows young solider Billy Prior, who, having been treated in Craiglockhart Hospital for "shell shock" by W.H.R. Rivers, is heading back to the trenches of France. The second follows Rivers, as he works to heal the shattered men arriving in Craiglockhart from the trenches. The second narrative is itself split in two, with half focusing on Rivers’ interactions with his patients, and the other half focusing on reminiscences of his anthropological fieldwork in the Solomon Islands. Perhaps unsurprisingly, being an anthropologist, I found this narrative the most compelling part of the book. Barker uses Rivers’ ethnographic account of death and mourning on Eddystone Island to throw the slaughter of the First World War into even greater relief. Fundamentally, Barker creates a kind of identity between Rivers and his ethnographic other, Njiru. Both are healers, and both deal with the consequences of death, including ghosts, but whereas Njiru’s practice functioned to make Eddystone society whole again following a death, Rivers’ practice seeks to make individuals whole again, following which they will be sent back to the trenches where they will almost certainly be killed. Billy Prior is the manifestation of Rivers’ success: he is healed, he no longer feels fear, which allows him to function as a soldier and return to the trenches.

However, I’m not sure that this Eddystone narrative added anything new to the standard discourse of the barbarism of supposedly civilised nations during war. Also, I just didn’t feel that the characters stood on their own. Njiru, for example, is little more than a trope, and Billy seemed like a character we were already supposed to have engaged with and were expected to automatically fall in beside. I constantly felt the presence of the other volumes of the trilogy haunting this one. I’m sure that as a whole they're great, but I’m not sure that The Ghost Road works in isolation.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by Roddy Doyle (1993)

A great book! Just so good. A more perfect account of childhood is difficult to imagine. The entire book is written from the perspective of the 10 year old eponymous character, and it’s just uncanny how perfectly Roddy Doyle captures the thought processes and language of being that age. I remember feeling and talking exactly the same way as Paddy when I was a child, so much so that at times it got a little bit too uncanny for comfort. Part of that has to do, I’m sure, with the fact that I was born and raised in Kilbarrack, the real name of Barrytown, the northside suburb of Dublin where most of Doyle’s novels are set, and so I knew exactly where Paddy was talking about when he talked about the old train bridge, the seafront, and the shops. Now, I was born ten years after the novel is set, so the transformation that Paddy witnesses, from semi-rural hinterland to bustling suburb of housing estates and Corporation houses, was already complete by the time I was born, but still, there’s something about reading a book set on the very road you grew up on that is a little disconcerting.

But this book isn’t just about what it was like to grow up on the northside of Dublin in the mid 60s. Paddy’s hopes, fears, motivations, triumphs and failures would be familiar to anyone, and it’s to Doyle’s credit that he’s able to give both a brilliantly evocative portrayal of those particular times, and an almost perfectly accurate account of being child more generally. He does such a great job of reproducing the confused and excited stream of consciousness of childhood, which jumps from football to friends to dinner to school to parents to telly in the blink of an eye. The way Paddy deals with his world, his curiosity, the way he makes sense of the things that present themselves to him, how he handles the frustration of being a relatively powerless observer of the events going on around him, it’s just perfectly told. It rang so true. It’s really unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner (1984)

Pretty ambivalent about this one, to be honest. One the one hand, the prose is nice. On the other hand, nothing happens. At all. Now, I don’t need every book to be a rip-roaring page turner, but a little bit of plot wouldn’t hurt. I’ve read books with little or no plot before, books that are more like disconnected reflections on the human condition or whatever, and I’ve enjoyed them, but Hotel du Lac was a little difficult to like, mostly because its insights into said human condition are relatively bland. By the end I was as bored and jaded as the characters.

Edith, a writer of middle-brow romantic fiction, is banished to the eponymous hotel because of an initially unrevealed transgression that is, apparently, so awful and shaming that her friends have packed her off into foreign exile. What can this quiet, almost timid novelist have done, we wonder, that necessitated this drastic step? When we finally find out, it’s so underwhelming and anti-climactic that it’s almost the perfect summation of the entire novel. It’s not that Edith hasn’t transgressed, she has, but in a way that is so average and normal that the reaction, banishment, seems completely disproportionate. Now, I know I sound like I’m arguing in favour of the spectacular (if a character in a novel is going to transgress, it should be in a big, exciting way) but I’m not. I’m just pointing out that for a book written in 1984 the crime and the punishment seem more fitting to 1934. And really, that’s the problem with this book, for me. It seems to be shaped by a moral discourse and a sexual politics of a much, much earlier age. It just seems so incredibly old-fashioned. It's impossible for me to picture people like this actually existing in the mid 1980s.

As an aside, it’s going to be interesting to go back through all these Booker winners and see how many of them use a hotel as a central plot device, the perfect location to bring a disparate bunch of characters together and let them bounce off each other in a kind of human Brownian motion. So far, a hotel has been a featured site in Banville’s The Sea, parts of Naipaul’s In a Free State, Farrell’s Troubles, and now Brookner’s Hotel du Lac. Characters in literary fiction seem to spend a lot of time in hotels!

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Everything about The Remains of the Day, from the plot to the prose, is precise and controlled, and in a way it has to be to tell this particular story. This is probably one of the best examples of form and content determining each other that I’ve read.

Written in the first person, the narrator is Mr. Stevens, the precise and controlled former butler to Lord Darlington and current butler to the new owner of Darlington Hall, the American Mr. Farraday. Stevens is undertaking a journey across England to visit the former housekeeper Miss Kenton, ostensibly in the hopes of getting her to agree to return to her job at the Hall. Stevens actually, however, brings us on a journey into his personal history, told as a series of reminiscences as he travels across England. From his early days in service to Lord Darlington, to his quarrels with Miss Kenton, to his memories of his father and his reflections on the notion of dignity, Stevens takes stock of his life, and of the principles and ideals that have guided him professionally and personally.

Having a character very slowly and gradually reveal himself to the reader while simultaneously obfuscating himself from himself takes a really impressive literary talent. Stevens is never quite able to make explicit the realisation about his life that the reader is, and this is what makes the story so heartbreaking. Stevens is incapable of betraying the ideals upon which he has based his entire life, even though we know, through his subtly revealing narrative, that at some level he knows it has all been for naught. For to explicitly admit that Lord Darlington was anything other than a perfect Englishman, to admit that he has spent his life in service to a flawed man, and that he has neglected to seize opportunities for personal happiness in favour of meeting his professional obligations, would force Stevens to admit that the role that he has made absolutely central to the meaning of his life has been a mistake, a lie, and thus a waste. Stevens is unable to face the desolation that would result.

The Remains of the Day is an affecting portrait of loneliness and not quite acknowledged disillusionment. It’s also a scathing portrait of the power of the English class system, and the sacrifices it demands of its subjects. One of my favourites of the Booker winners.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Wolf Hall has some great examples of the hyperbolic blurb on its cover, including quotes suggesting that it is “the most gripping book you’ll ever read” and that it is “dizzyingly, dazzlingly good.” I know it's hard to avoid hyperbole when writing a review, but come on, it’s so good that you’ll literally get dizzy reading it? Anyway, Wolf Hall is a good book, and a very enjoyable read, but it’s not going to change anyone’s life. It’s nicely written, very evocative of place and time, and it is genuinely engaging, but it has, in my opinion, an important flaw that stops it from being really great, and that is the characterisation of the book’s central figure, Thomas Cromwell.

It’s clear that Mantel is writing against accepted ideas about Cromwell, and is trying, as it were, to rehabilitate the man in the face of the myth. But, as the book progresses, her efforts at rehabilitation seem increasingly forced, and therein lies the problem with this kind of historical fiction: in reimagining the story of a well known historical figure, an author is forced to deal with the actual events of history, and the disconnect between imaginative fiction and historical record is sometimes awkwardly apparent. The story of how the son of a blacksmith could possibly secure for himself positions of power that were unthinkable for someone of his class origin are dealt with in a curiously detached way. By purposefully ignoring the sheer cunning and brute force that Cromwell is widely believed to have used to advance his own position, Mantel makes his success almost unintelligible. Cromwell becomes Wolsey’s protégé, but we’re not really shown how; he becomes Henry’s most powerful advisor, but through such gentle insinuation that it's almost unbelievable. We rarely see Cromwell act with real ruthlessness, it’s always tempered and never cruel. Especially towards the end of the book, when Cromwell is finally successful in securing Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, Mantel’s characterisation of him seems almost disingenuous. In a way, I felt that Mantel was too concerned to rewrite Cromwell as a hero, and I felt that she was constantly trying to write an inverted version of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, with More the villain and Cromwell the hero.

In my opinion, Mantel is not really able to reconcile her imaginary with the actual events of history. Cromwell shows loyalty only to Cromwell, even though Mantel would have us believe otherwise. How else can we understand his willingness to work with the enemies of his disgraced patron and friend, Cardinal Wolsey? How else to make sense of his rapid rise against the odds? Cromwell was no doubt a talented, brilliant man, but by eschewing the darker, nastier parts of his character Mantel leaves us with a somewhat unconvincing portrait.

Troubles, by J.G. Farrell (1970) - The Lost Booker

I’m sure everyone reading this blog (hello to all three of you!) knows the story behind The Lost Booker, but I might as well go over it again. In 1971, two years after the Booker prize was founded, the committee decided to change the rules so that the prize was no longer awarded retrospectively but was instead awarded to the best novel of the year of publication. To facilitate this, they moved the award date from April to November. However, this meant that a whole host of books published in 1970 were no longer eligible. When this gap was noticed, relatively recently, it was decided to hold a special one-off competition for all the books published in 1970 that were made ineligible for that year's prize due to the changing of dates. Well, Troubles, by J.G. Farrell, was chosen as the best of those books, which is why 1970 now has two official Booker winners. Farrell would go on to win the Booker in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, which would have made him the first author to win the Booker twice, had Troubles been award the prize in 1970.

Anyway, on to the actual review. Troubles is a funny and touching book, a love story in some ways, an examination of the collapse of the British Empire in others, an excellent novel that deals subtly with some of the complex issues and events of Irish history. Set in the crumbling Majestic Hotel just before the War of Independence, the book deals with the travails of Major Brendan Archer, a retired British Army officer and veteran of the trenches of the First World War, who travels to the Majestic to meet the fiancée he accidentally acquired while on leave some time previously, and who ends up becoming seduced instead by the dream-like atmosphere of the hotel, its eccentric residents, the townspeople, and most especially by the Anglo-Irish Spencer family who own it.

The hotel is microcosm of the Anglo-Irish state. Collapsing around the ears of its incompetent and possibly mad British landlords, besieged by the IRA but threatened too by the ruthless brutality of the Black and Tans supposed to protect it, the hotel, like the state, is caught in an inexorable slide towards obsolescence. It’s a beautifully written book, subtle, funny and poignant, and the characters are memorable. As an Irishman, I was maybe a little put off by Farrell’s tendency to romanticise the Anglo-Irish characters somewhat, presenting their destruction, and the beginning of the end of the British Empire, in tender, almost elegiac tones, but I still really enjoyed the book and am glad that it has finally received the recognition it deserves.

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood (2000)

An excellent novel, right up there with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Banville’s The Sea as one of my favourite Booker winners so far, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a book that spans genres and invokes various types of text, moving from love story to science-fiction novel, from telegrams to newspaper clippings, as it tells the story of the Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, daughters of a broken industrialist in inter-war Canada.

It’s hard to really describe the breadth of vision Atwood displays, because, ironically, the book’s focus is so narrow. It somehow manages to be a compelling romance, a social history of Canada in the 20th century, a treatise on aging, a pulp sci-fi adventure (no joke) and a murder mystery of sorts, while always remaining tightly focused on the lives of its two main characters, Iris and Laura Chase. Dealing with issues of history and memory, love and imagination, the violence and oppression to which women were subject in the early 20th century, and the practice of writing itself, the main action of the book plays out against a background of the First and Second World Wars, and the Great Depression. This may all sound confusing and overstuffed, but it isn’t. That Atwood is able to deal with so many themes, events and textual forms while never losing her focus on the personal story of the Chase girls is a testament to her skill as a writer.

The Blind Assassin is not just a good story, though. Atwood’s prose is brilliant, and her imagery is beautiful and evocative. It’s a pleasure to read an engrossing page-turner that is also beautifully written, as so much contemporary fiction seems to have one quality or the other, but rarely both.

Notes on the Process 3.

Vernon God Little was such an awful reading experience that I decided to take a break from the Bookers for a while to read some other stuff, including Roberto Bolaño's staggering 2666, a novel so good that it made Vernon God Little seem even worse, if that's possible, than it appeared at first. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on the project so far.

1. It's going pretty well! Apart from the above mentioned travesty (how the jaysus did it win??!?) all the books I've read have been good.

2. Now that I'm back from Fiji, and my options for books to read are comparatively boundless, I think I'll have to really commit to reading a certain number of Booker winners a year, or else I'll just keep reading other things and never catch up!

3. Really, how did it win??!

Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre (2003)

As lazy, as trite, as smugly self-satisfied a satire as it is possible to imagine, Vernon God Little is, in my opinion, a painfully bad book. The plot is boring, the characters are cartoonish, the imagery is infantile, the prose is abysmal, and the main theme, the media’s voyeuristic obsession with violence and tragedy as entertainment, is so hackneyed as to be almost meaningless. A middle-class fantasy of white-trash clichés, this is easily one of the worst books I have ever read. And I’ve read Rule of the Bone.

I usually don't like to summarise the plot in my reviews, but I have to here, because its banality is a key problem. A teenager, unable to convince the police in his small Texas town that he wasn’t involved in a school massacre, flees to Mexico where he is betrayed before being whisked back home for trial, conviction and sentencing. That’s it! Nothing else really happens, so the plot isn’t exactly complex or interesting in and of itself. The writing can be summed up in a single word: ass. The word “ass” appears, in some form, on almost every page. To call the book scatological is to understate its author’s obsession with asses and shit, which is handy enough, because the book itself is utter shit. Saying "ass" every page is not daring, it’s not "using the vernacular," it’s just repetitive and contrived, like the rest of the prose.

As for the characters, rarely have I read a book where the author has such clear contempt for his or her own characters. Never have I encountered such a collection of gross stereotypes, lazily deployed to such cynical effect. Practically everyone, bar Vernon, is greedy, treacherous, and shallow. There isn’t a single adult Texan who isn’t morbidly obese and dripping with barbeque sauce. Similarly, there isn’t a single adult Mexican who doesn’t have greasy hair and gold teeth. There’s even a “wise old Black convict,” just to complete the pantheon of American stereotypes. And this is my main problem with the book: it is not, at all, about challenging our preconceptions, presenting us with difficult themes or ambiguous characters, or saying something new about the problems of contemporary society. It is only about making bland, conventional points about “the media” and “consumerism” while confirming easy stereotypes and playing to the lowest common denominators. As such, it’s a masterpiece of pandering. An odious book, I’m well rid of it.

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie (1981)

This is definitely, without a doubt, the best of the Booker prize winners that I’ve read so far. I loved it! An amazing novel, which is somehow both the story of one individual and the history of an entire country, Midnight’s Children is a really fun read, completely bananas and fantastic and tragic and just brilliant.

Saleem Sinai is writing his life story, and it just so happens to be one of the most extraordinary stories every committed to paper. Born on the stroke of midnight on the day India became an independent nation, Saleem’s life has been, he tells us, inextricably linked to that of his country. Present at, or possibly responsible for, the pivotal moments in India’s history, Saleem tells us of his journey from middle-class snot-nosed kid to outcast teenage slum-dweller to soldier to magician’s assistant to enemy of the state to pickle maker, and explains how his own experiences are linked to those of the treacherous politicians, murderous generals and martyred poets who have shaped the history of India.

A dazzling combination of history and myth, Midnight’s Children is a magical-realist retelling of the story of the modern Indian nation-state seen through the eyes of a boy who is both completely unique and an exemplar of his time and place. Saleem’s story really is, as he says, an amazing “chutnification” of history. The writing too is amazing. Rushdie has a real gift with words; his sentences are complex and ornate but compelling and never obfuscating, and the way he makes them twist and turn back on themselves, making clear what was foreshadowed, is really fun to read. This is definitely a book I will read again and again. There’s so much in it to admire and enjoy, it’s a real pleasure.

The Gathering, by Anne Enright (2007)

After the death of her brother Liam, Veronica Hegarty tries to make sense of the ruin of his life, and her own, by remembering her and Liam's childhood, visiting the places of their shared past, and reimagining her Grandmother's life. So much of the book hit the mark perfectly, and how could I not love a book that uses Dublin words like “bockety” and “baggsed?”

However, as the narrator and only voice in the The Gathering, I eventually grew weary of Veronica. There's something so relentless about her unhappiness, which started to grate after a while. Also, the prose in which Veronica's voice is written, while brilliant, seems at times too mannered, too writerly, in a way that contrasts sharply with the terse, short snatches of spoken dialogue. The barrenness of that dialogue really throws the fecundity of the prose into relief, and maybe this is Enright making an argument about the disjuncture between the imperfect, improvised nature of speech and the studied, perfectability of the written word, but after a while it began to make the characters sound monosyllabic and disengaged, and the prose musings of Veronica too constructed.

A good book, well written, full of powerful, corporeal images of the interconnectedness of sex and death, eros and thanatos, that deals honestly and painfully with the wreckage of family secrets, and a particular moment in Irish history as the country transitioned from a barely repressed Church state into, well, something else. I just didn't enjoy it, however. There's no spark, no humour in the book. It's kind of a relentless slog through a miserable life history.

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979)

I was really ready to not like it, but I have to admit, Offshore really surprised me. Initially it seemed a little boring, but by the end I was completely won over by the beauty of the prose, the characters and the images. It was easily the most enjoyable read of the Booker winners so far, and is right up there with Banville's The Sea as the most purely novelistic. It was just, I don't know, lovely.

A motley crew of characters live on house boats and barges along the Thames. I won't summarize the plot, because there isn't one, as such. Instead, the book is about the various minor dramas that make up the interconnected lives of the river dwellers, focusing especially on Nenna and her two precocious daughters. The tide ebbs and flows, the boats fall and rise. The characters inhabit an in-between world, not quite at sea and not quite on land, a liminal space that seems inexplicable to everyone else.

The physical position of the boats mirrors the liminality of the characters, each of whom seems caught between different moments or ways of being: Nenna between independence (symbolized by her bright, carefree girls?) and dependence (on a husband who has left them rather than live on a barge); Richard between duty and happiness; Maurice between legality and illegality. The tide seems to push and pull the characters as it does their boats, with Fitzgerald giving us a visual and emotional representation of the ebbs and flows of their lives. All the way through the book runs a longing, embodied in the very boats themselves, old and broken though they may be, to cast off and head for the sea, mythical place of freedom.

It may lack the plot and "seriousness" of a book like Coetzee's Disgrace, but Offshore is so funny, charming, evocative, and beautifully written that I defy anyone not to like it. It's a perfect study in miniature, everything is where it should be.

The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch (1978)

There’s no way to get around it, this book is odd. I think that’s part of the reason why it's taken me so long to write this review, because The Sea, The Sea is just so strange. Even its strangeness is strange, because for the most part it's fleeting. In the main, the book is a relatively straightforward story about ego and obsession. But every once in a while it takes a turn for the supernatural, and the disjuncture between the mundane details of Charles Arrowby’s life of self-imposed exile in his ramshackle seaside house and the bizarre incidents that beset him, involving ghosts, monsters and Buddhist esoterica, is sharp and, well, strange.

Arrowby is a renowned playwright recently retired to the coast, and the book is, ostensibly, the result of his attempts to write his memoirs. The first-person narrative begins with teasing hints about the salacious details he might reveal about the private lives of various stars of stage and screen, before increasingly becoming a record of the events happening to him in the present: his swimming habits in the treacherous sea, the spurned women who show up at his door unannounced, the visits of his old theatre friends and of James, his mysterious half-brother, and, crucially, the unexpected presence of one particular woman, from his youth, with whom he becomes dangerously and tragically obsessed. It is the aftermath of Arrowby’s attempt to rescue this woman (shades of Orpheus?) from her life of normality that finally forces him to reflect upon his own monstrous, self-regarding ego and the illusions upon which it is built.

There are non-human characters, too. The sea is a looming presence against which the actions, and the lives, of the human characters seem petty and insignificant. The house is a haunted repository of someone else’s memories, where every creaking step and groaning timber speaks of previous lives. There is also magic, and death. It’s a dense, complex, impressive piece of art, this book.

Notes on the Process 2.

I haven't posted in months, and the next winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced in a week, thereby adding one more title to my list. Personally, I'm hoping Hilary Mantel wins for Wolf Hall, a novel about Cromwell's machinations in the court of Henry the VIII, because it looks great and because I don't think I can handle reading three JM Coetzee novels in short order. Anyway, to business.

1. Don't wait for feckin' months after reading a book before writing a review of it!

2. Don't be intimidated by reviewing a difficult, complex book. No one is reading this blog anyway.

3. Read more.

In a Free State, by V. S. Naipaul (1971)

Nominally a novel, but actually more like a collection of short stories, In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul is thus a little difficult to review. Should I focus on the novella, from which the book gets its title, or should I deal equally with all five narratives, and attempt to draw out the shared themes that give the book its coherence? I’ll try to do a little of both, the latter first.

In a Free State is, essentially, about experiences of being out of place. In this sense, it reminded me of Mary Douglas’ conception of matter out of place from her essay “Purity and Danger.” The stories are all about people who find themselves in places where they feel, or are made to feel, that they don’t belong; the stories are about boundaries, purity, pollution, incommensurability and just plain strangeness. The presence of an English tramp on a Greek ferry causes uproar, an Indian servant tries to come to terms with his new life in Washington D.C., a South Asian West Indian immigrant in London reflects on the ruins of his life, two white Britons in Uganda drive from the capital to their compound in the south as post-independence upheaval around them throws their presence in the country into relief, and finally, an Asian businessman travelling through Milan and Cairo reflects on cruelty and empire. I liked some of the stories a lot more than others. Some made for uncomfortable reading.

However, the main story, In a Free State, is brilliant. The contrast between the self-deluding Bobby, who claims to have some sort of authentic connection with “Africa,” and the cynical, weary Linda is very effective. At one point Bobby says that “Africa saved his life,” while Linda gives the impression that Africa ruined hers. But, though Linda is open about her prejudices, we’re meant, I think, to respect her more than Bobby, who is possessed of the same prejudices but who hides them under a thin layer of patronizing tolerance.

In the end, then, I couldn’t really say I that enjoyed the book. It was brilliantly written, provocative, but depressing, and I’m not sure that I agree with the central theme, which seemed to be the impossibility of being, in the full sense of the world, in a new place. That’s entirely too close to a Herderian argument about the inextricable connection of culture, place, and identity for my liking.

Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee (1999)

This is tricky. On the one hand, I thought Disgrace was great, but on the other, I’m not sure I understood it. Half way through the book and there I was, firmly convinced I was reading a novel about power and powerlessness, gender and race, but by the end I was thoroughly confused and not at all sure about what I’d just read.

I suppose that's an endorsement. I feel that good books, like good paintings or good pieces of music, are supposed to be complex, they’re supposed be a bit opaque and demanding, to work on multiple levels, engaging us in different ways at different moments. At some point, however, I felt like Coetzee lost me, or rather I lost him.

His prose is excellent; sharp, clear and short sentences that convey complex themes and emotions simply. The story, about a college lecturer, David Lurie, who retreats to his daughter’s farm after resigning in disgrace following an affair with one of his students, is somehow both straight-forward and deeply strange. A terrible incident involving his daughter forces him to reflect, though never explicitly, upon his own actions, and throws into relief the gendered power relations which structured and facilitated his affair with his student. His glib rationalizations, following the affair, about the rights of Eros seem particularly distasteful when viewed retrospectively through the lens of his daughter’s ordeal, and we are asked to think about the differences and similarities between Lurie’s affair and what his daughter went through.

However, I couldn’t really get a handle on the changes that subsequently came over Lurie. I couldn’t quite reconcile it with his character. I just didn’t get it, basically. I didn’t understand the particular form of these changes, why he started to care more for the dogs at the animal shelter, for example. But, I'm sure the fault is mine. This is a book that I probably need to read again, carefully, to really pick up on all of its nuances and meanings.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (2008)

This book was rubbish. Just kidding, it was great! An account of the life of a self-made Indian entrepreneur and murderer, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is both funny and furiously angry.

Born into poverty in a village in rural India, to a dying mother and a rickshaw pulling father, Balram Halwai tells us his story in the form of an extended letter to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao about the reality behind “modern Indian entrepreneurship.” Taken out of school by his grasping family and forced to work as a cleaner in the village tea shop, Balram is determined to get out of the Darkness (the countryside) and into the Light (the city). But when he does, as the driver of the son of a local landlord, he discovers that the crushing weight of inequality weighs upon him there too, just as it did in the village. As a servant, even to such a relatively enlightened master as Mr. Ashok, Balram is trapped in a cage of expectation, exploitation and humiliation, and it takes an act of ruthless violence to set him "free."

This is an absolutely unromantic portrayal of modern India. Balram’s story is one of shocking inequality and corruption. Through his eyes we see an India of binary opposites: of Darkness and Light, of flashy shopping malls and disgusting slums, of outsourcing call centers and back street brothels, of rich and poor, of masters and servants, described with often brutal frankness. Even so, I particularly liked the way Balram’s expressions of anger were often related almost as afterthoughts, as if they surprised even him, as if he himself was too inured to his position to be able to articulate or reflect upon his anger explicitly.

That the book is somehow scathing and funny at the same time is down to the unique voice given to Balram by Adiga. This is a book about injustice, but it isn't a book only about injustice, it's also about a great character, a funny and charming narrator, and the book is great precisely because he is.

Notes on the Process 1.

I just finished the second book on my list of Man Booker prize winners, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and I have a few thoughts about the process of reading these books and writing these reviews.

1. I'm going to try to read the books without having read their blurbs. This was difficult for The White Tiger, because there were blurbs plastered on every available inch of the book's cover. But I think it's necessary, because I find myself so easily influenced by them. Yes, I am mentally weak!

2. The fact that every book has won the Man Booker prize obviously means I have certain expectations for each. I'm anticipating an exceptionally boring blog where every post begins "this book is amazing."

3. Trying to keep the reviews between 250 and 300 words is difficult. On the one hand, I hate reading reviews that go on for ever, but on the other, a short review seems to encourage, in me at least, hyperbole. I want to convey a lot with a little, without using too many superlatives, but I also don't want to just summarize the book.

The Sea, by John Banville (2005)

An amazing book, probably one of the most affecting, beautiful and unsettling I have ever read, The Sea is an intense meditation on grief and memory. Banville's prose is brilliant, challenging and poetic, and even though it’s highly polished there's also rawness to it. His characters are memorable, and Banville has the ability to conjure them for us, fully realized, out of the smallest details and phrases.

Retreating, following the death of his wife, to the seaside town where he spent his childhood summers, Max Morden reminisces about his wife, and in particular about the fateful summer when, as a boy, he met the Grace family. Banville presents us with Morden’s interwoven thoughts, memories, and fears in startling and at times uncomfortable detail. Morden is not an easy character to like, but somehow I was drawn into his compelling world of rememberance and grief. I was particularly struck by how Morden’s memories of his childhood were both childlike and knowing, in the sense that while they were the products of an adult author writing the memories of his adult narrator, they also conveyed that oddly-directed clarity that, for me at least, characterizes certain childhood memories of my own.

Everything about this book, from Morden’s memories of the seductive and strange Grace family, to his anger and guilt over his wife’s death, to the descriptions of his fellow lodgers at the seaside guest-house, are absolutely crystalline. This is the first novel I have read in a long time where I really got the sense that every single word was carefully chosen. An excellent book.

The Books

The Idea

The Man Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in the literary world. "Any full-length novel, written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published this year, is eligible for the prize. The novel must be an original work in English (not a translation) and must not be self-published.

The judging panel changes each year. Every effort is made to achieve a balance between the judges of gender, articulacy and role, so that the panel includes a literary critic, an academic, a literary editor, a novelist and a major figure. A judge is rarely enrolled a second time."

The prize has been awarded every year since 1969. There were joint winners twice, in 1974 and 1992, meaning that 42 novels, and counting, have been awarded the prize.

I thought it would be fun to read all the Man Booker Prize winning novels. So, I'm going to give it a bash, and post small reviews (around 300 words) of each book here. Hmm, this is probably going to take a while...