What Book to Read?

Colm Tóibín is highly acclaimed, but up till now I hadn’t read anything by him. So I’m putting that right, and starting with one of his earlier novels. The Blackwater Lightship is his third, and was published in 1999. It is set in the early ‘90s, on the east coast of Ireland.

The story begins with Helen comforting her younger son who has had a nightmare. Helen, her husband Hugh and her two children prepare for a party, where there is Irish singing. The next day, Hugh and the children leave for a holiday; Helen is to follow later. But her plans are interrupted when she receives a message that her brother Declan has AIDS and is very ill. He wants to see her, and he wants her to tell her mother and grandmother how ill he is and why. They do not know that he is gay. Helen has recently become reconciled with her Granny after a long estrangement, but she has had no contact with her mother Lily for many years. Lily has never met her husband and children. Helen, Lily, Declan and two of his friends arrive at Granny’s isolated house by the sea. How will they cope with the tension of being together under these circumstances?

Though Declan’s illness is described in some detail, this is not primarily a book about AIDS, or even about being gay. Its main theme is mothering – which is why Helen is first shown as a mother, even though Hugh and the children are peripheral to the rest of the action. Helen feels a ‘bitter resentment’ towards her mother, which has ‘clouded her life’. ‘I would really like to run my mother over in the car’, she says, ‘that’s what I would really like to do.’ Declan hasn’t lost contact with Lily in the same way as Helen, but the best mothering in his life has come from two of his gay friends. Lily feels ambiguous about her own mother, who in turn is critical of her. Is it too late for these wounds to be healed?

A second and related theme is absence and loss. The Blackwater lightship of the title is an absence. There used to be two lighthouses off the coast, and Lily remembers as a child thinking that the two were a woman and a man who sent ‘mating signals’ to each other with their lights. Now the Blackwater lightship is gone and only the Tuskar lighthouse remains. ‘I thought it would always be there,’ Lily says. The death of her husband when he was still young is a loss that has shaped her life, just as the loss of her father has shaped Helen’s. What, she wonders, will it be like to be ‘back as a member of this family she had so determinedly tried to leave’? There are various symbols of loss in the story, for example the ruined house further down the beach which has fallen victim to the erosion of the cliffs. The sea, on the other hand, is a constant – though one that is indifferent to human needs and feelings. This is not the most cheerful of stories. But it is also about love.

A review I read of this book by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books was more than usually helpful to my understanding of it. He sees the novel as particularly Irish, in part because of the mixture of old and new in Irish life and culture it depicts. The young, for example, are not stereotyped as ‘modern’, or the old as ‘traditional’. Hugh teaches in an Irish school; Helen is principal of a comprehensive. Lily runs a company that sells and installs computers. (‘Just call us,’ she tells her customers, ‘and we’ll be here for you’ – they get more mothering than poor Helen ever did.) Granny carries a flick knife, and is learning to drive. The responses of the characters to Roman Catholicism and homosexuality are also somewhat unexpected.

Eagleton also places Tóibín’s prose in an Irish context as ‘post-colonial’. He describes his style as ‘austere’, as opposed to some earlier ‘colonial’ Irish writing which was ‘elevated, extravagant, mythopoeic, laced with surreal fantasy’; English, but deliberately dissociated from England. Tóibín, he says, has moved on from this. His writing is spare, but does not lack detail; in fact it is very precise. But it avoids any hint of sentimentality, which is something of a feat, given the subject matter – though the book is much the stronger for it.

The Blackwater Lightship was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1999; the prize went to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. If I were choosing which of the two to read, I’d pick this one; despite its subject matter, it is much less depressing.

You can read more about Colm Tóibín here

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Maybe it’s a coincidence that I read The Year of the Flood (2009) in a week when new reports show human-caused climate change is accelerating at a dangerous rate, but such warnings sure add punch to this book’s dystopian message. It isn’t about climate change as such. The world’s climate has changed drastically in the story, but ‘the Flood’ isn’t caused by it. It happens, however, because of the same greed and stupidity that is inhibiting action on climate change now. If you don’t believe in human-caused climate change, you will probably find this book an improbable flight of fancy. Atwood doesn’t see it like that; she says the book is fiction, ‘but the general tendencies and many of the details are alarmingly close to facts.’ And I fear she is right.

The book is set in the same time and place as her earlier novel, Oryx and Crake (2003); see my review here. While the earlier story is set in the heavily guarded and privileged Compounds where scientists and their families live and work on genetic engineering, this one is set in the pleeblands, the decaying and crime-ridden urban areas outside the Compounds. Some of the same characters appear in both novels and both explore the immediate impact of the catastrophe that has overtaken the world, and the lives of some of the characters leading up to it. The technical challenge here is to write a stand-alone book when the material relates so closely to the earlier story. For example, you know right from the start of The Year of the Flood that there has been a catastrophe, but you only know what caused it if you have read the earlier story. I don’t think this matters, as the ‘cause’ in this story isn’t really relevant; the disaster is just something that happens to people, whatever the immediate cause. But then I’ve read the earlier book.

This story is about a greenie Christian group, God’s Gardeners, who get a brief mention in Oryx and Crake. They live in the pleeblands but reject the consumerist and hedonistic culture that thrives there, and in the Compounds. Instead they try to be to be self-sufficient by growing their own food and recycling cast-off consumer goods. They respect all living things as created by God. Short sermons by Adam One, the leader of the group, and hymns from their ‘Oral Hymnbook’ are scattered throughout the story. This is carried in linked but separate narratives by two of the group, Toby – told as third person – and Ren in the first person. This is again a considerable technical challenge, especially as there are numerous time changes covering the periods before and after the catastrophe, but Atwood is a master at this sort of thing, and I found it easy enough to follow once I got a little way into the story. Toby and Ren each has her own story within the larger trope of a small number of people who survive a catastrophe but then have to battle to survive its aftermath – Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids comes to mind as an earlier version (though that is science fiction, not speculative fiction).

Atwood gives full reign to the horrible detail of the society the Gardeners live in – the gangs, the violence, the crazy quest for permanent youth and beauty. At one point Toby has to advertise a health spa. It doesn’t do gene therapy, but it does do ‘herbal elixirs, system cleansers, dermal mood lifts; vegetable nanocell injections, mildew-formula micromesh resurfacing, heavy-duty face creams, rehydrating balms. Iguana-based hue changes, microbial spot removal, flat-wart leech peels.’ What a wonderful list! Details of the Gardeners’ own practices are equally inventive. Ren, for example, has no cavities in her teeth; ‘The Gardeners were against refined sugar and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.’ Atwood’s skill makes what might seem ridiculous totally believable.

Atwood’s characteristically ironic style makes it hard to know exactly how to take the Gardeners’ religion. They believe that one day soon there will be a second flood which will overwhelm the human population of the earth. Unlike Noah’s flood, this one will be waterless, leaving the flora and fauna of the planet, which they see as just as important as humans, to recover from the desolation wreaked by humans. Adam One has many sensible things to say in his sermons, but surely some of it is a joke, as in the suggestion that Jesus called two fishermen as his first apostles, ‘to help conserve the Fish population. They were told to be fishers of men instead of being fisherman of Fish, thus neutralizing two destroyers of Fish!’ The Gardeners are right about the ‘flood’ but I think the story is open-ended in terms of otherwise endorsing their views.

I understand Margaret Atwood is writing a third book in this series. You can read more about her here. She won the 2000 Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, which I reviewed here. Oryx and Crake made the short list in 2003, but this one didn’t even make the long list in 2009. I really don’t know why, though maybe some people find it preachy – all that stuff about species extinction and extreme weather ….

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I’ve been writing this blog for quite a while now, but I still sometimes find it difficult to say why I like a book, or why I don’t. I can see that this book is one many people will like, and indeed it was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. But instead of being moved, or touched by it as I know other readers are, it rather irritates me. The challenge is to find out whether this says something about the book, or about me – or some combination of both.

Harold Fry has recently retired from his job as a salesman for a brewery. He is shy and retiring to the point of self-effacement. He feels he is a failure. He and his wife Maureen scarcely speak to each other, and neither seems to have anyone or anything meaningful in their lives. One day Harold receives a letter from Queenie, a former work colleague, telling him she is dying of cancer. Harold writes to say he is sorry, and goes out to post the letter. But instead of doing so, he decides to walk to see her, just as he is, even though he lives on the south coast of England, and she is in a hospice in Scotland. The story then follows his journey, the people he meets and the memories he has of his life. ‘In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy of its own.’ The narrative is shared with Maureen, as she struggles to come to terms with his abrupt departure and to decide what she really feels for him.

On one level the story deals with the reality of blisters, weather, washing and sleeping arrangements. I didn’t find these details particularly convincing; no one could walk with their feet and legs in the condition that Harold’s are soon in. Nor do I find it convincing that his mind could be occupied only by memories; no one’s mind could be as blank as that. But this isn’t primarily about reality – it’s about Harold’s journey of self-discovery. That the difficulties are unrealistic, and yet he keeps going, is the whole point. He needs to achieve something. ‘I have to keep walking’ is his mantra. And the primacy of memory over any other thought is essential to the structure of the story; much of the narrative drive relies on the gradual revelation of events earlier in Harold’s life. But the hints that are given along the way undermine – for me – the power of Harold’s final revelation.

Harold begins his journey in the faith that it will somehow help Queenie, even though a doctor he meets along the way tells him that incurable cancer is – well – incurable. But it seems that the world needs ‘a little less sense and a little more faith’. I guess one of the things people like about the story is Harold’s fidelity to his purpose in the face of various obstacles to it. He is a modern version of John Bunyan’s Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), with his own hill of difficulty and slough of despond. Indeed, the book’s epigraph is from Bunyan. But there is nothing overtly religious about this pilgrimage, even if at times it seems almost to take on the air of a search for Buddhist enlightenment. ‘But you have to let go,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know that at the beginning, but I do now. You have to let go of things you think you need, like cash cards and phones and maps and things. ’

All this is perfectly reasonable, so what am I complaining about?  I think it is the way Harold’s self-discovery is expressed. Take this passage where Harold is reflecting, as he often does, on his new understanding of things. ‘He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other, and a life might appear simply ordinary because the person living it had done so for a long time.’ Really? It comes down to whether you think this is meaningful or trite. One reviewer praises Joyce’s ‘unerring ability to convey profound emotions in simple, unaffected language.’ I find the writing too often lacks depth and the story feels contrived. But I can imagine other people, like the reviewer, feeling quite differently.

So is it the book, or me?  Probably both. The book is sometimes sentimental, and I often don’t have the warm emotional response to books that I know other readers have. Best you try it yourself.

This is Rachel Joyce’s first book. You can read more about her here.

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After his book The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, Hollinghurst said that it brought to an end the sequence of books in which he has consciously explored gay identity and its fight for recognition.  The Stranger’s Child (2011) is his first book since then, and yes, he has gone beyond being ‘just’ a gay writer – if in fact that was what he ever was.

The story is told in five parts. Each is a fragment, complete in itself but part of a larger story, different aspects of which are revealed in each section. Some of what has gone on in between is alluded to, but some is withheld, and of interest to those in subsequent sections, and of course to the reader. The connections are rich and subtle, and I won’t go into them here, because the interest of them is part of the book’s appeal. Suffice to say it begins in 1913. Cecil Valance is spending a weekend with his Cambridge friend, George Sawle, at George’s comfortable middle class house, ‘Two Acres’, in an outer London suburb – then more of a village. Valance, a poet and something of a celebrity at Cambridge, is heir to a baronetcy and a landed estate, Corley Court. It is clear to the reader from the start that Cecil and George are lovers, but not of course to George’s family. The second part is set in 1926; it deals with another weekend, this time a house party at Corley Court arranged so that a biographer can interview people who knew Cecil, who died in the First World War. The third section is set in 1967; Corely Court is now a school, and two more young men, one of them a teacher there, are falling in love. The main action again involves a party with the Sawle family and others, or their heirs, from the earlier sections.  In the fourth section, set in 1979, another biographer is researching a life of Cecil Valance, and there is a brief coda set at a funeral in 2008.

Hollinghurst says that ‘From the start I’ve tried to write books which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position. To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position.’ And certainly several of the major male characters here are gay as a matter of course. In a major departure, however, there is also an important female character, Daphne, who is not gay, and Hollinghurst seems to me to do an excellent job of understanding and presenting her feelings. Of course he has never wanted to be known as primarily a gay writer: ‘I only chafe at the ‘gay writer’ tag if it’s thought to be what is most or only interesting about what I’m writing,’ he says. ‘I want it to be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other things as well – history, class, culture.’ Here, I think he has succeeded brilliantly. The subtle class differences, for example, between Cecil, and George and his family at Two Acres, are cleverly evoked. They help create an almost unbearable narrative tension that originates in the hidden homosexuality of the two young men but goes well beyond it.

But history, in the form of biography – or rather the unreliability of biography – is surely the major theme of the book. Some facts are unknown and unknowable. Others manage just to elude the biographers’ eager (greedy?) hands. Some things that seem like facts are not. Some characters might wish to be truthful, but find it impossible to be so. Daphne, for example, acknowledges: ‘What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt about what she thought then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say.’ Memory is completely fallible. Daphne again: ‘He [the biographer] was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.’ Some of the characters prefer concealment. And how far does the biographer simply assert things without a solid basis of evidence? How far do other people believe them? The reader ends up knowing a bit more than the characters about what happened, but we are still left with a satisfyingly realistic measure of doubt.

In a review in The Guardian, one critic states that Hollinghurst ‘has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today’, though he thinks this is not his best work. I understand why he makes this claim. Hollinghurst writes beautifully, and the nuanced and clever plot is a delight. The critic goes on to say: ‘It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he’s not very interested in women; that there’s too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable. These objections, incidentally, seem to me largely philistine or dishonest … And, flawlessly executed though this book is, it has rather less bite than its predecessors.’ I agree that none of the characters is particularly likeable. By showing them from a number of perspectives, Hollinghurst shows them as fully fallible – a realistic, though somewhat depressing perspective. But for the rest, I guess I’m either philistine or dishonest.

The book made only the long list for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, but I liked it better than the book that won – Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending; see my review of it here. There’s almost nothing about Hollinghurst on the internet. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t have a web page.

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True to form, I’m reading the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner nearly a year late; the short-list for 2012 was announced on 11 September. Also pretty much true to form – see some of my other reviews of Man Booker winners – I wouldn’t have voted for it. I haven’t yet read anything by any other of the 2011 short-listed candidates, so it may have been the best of the bunch. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

This short novel is described as a meditation on memory, ageing and regret. Tony Webster is middle aged, middle class, retired from his job as an arts administrator, divorced, but on friendly terms with his ex-wife and daughter. He tells his story in two parts. In the first, he reflects on his youth, his last year at school, his time at university, and the period just after. He knows he may not be remembering things as they really happened. These are ‘approximate memories which time has deformed into certainties,’ he says. ‘If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impression those facts left.’ What he recalls in particular is Adrian, a friend from school, and Veronica, his first girlfriend. After they break up, Veronica goes out with Adrian. In the second part, he tells how he has now been left a small bequest and another document in the will of Veronica’s mother, whom he met only once. This prompts him to try and find out why she left anything at all to him. What is the relationship between what he remembers, and what he now finds documentation of?

Questions about an understanding of the past – ie history – are central to the novel. Early in the story a history class debates the nature of historical responsibility – an important issue in the book. But what is history? Tony’s history teacher asks this question of his students. Tony suggests it’s the lies of the victors, which in a sense sums up the first part of his account, he being the ‘victor’ in the sense that it is his version we are reading – though equally it could be ‘the self-delusions of the defeated’. His friend Colin suggests it is cyclical, events essentially repeating themselves. And yes, there are at least two crucial elements that seem to be repeated in this story. Then Adrian quotes a (fictional) French thinker, saying history is ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Yes, of course we were pretentious,’ Tony admits. But pretentious or not, everything else revolves around such imperfections of memory and inadequacies of documentation. The unreliable narrator is a fairly common literary trope – I’ve even reviewed a couple of examples (Balthasar’s Odyssey, by Amin Maalouf and the classic Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). But in this case, unreliability is woven into the structure of the story. Fiction is necessarily contrived, but I can’t help feeling that here it is contrived to make a historiographical point, rather than a good story. I’m not sure what the point is, though.

It seems that the title of this book is the same as that of a book of essays by the literary critic Frank Kermode, published in 1965. This can hardly be a coincidence, so in order better to understand Barnes’s book, I had a look at some of the essays. Kermode says he is trying ‘to make sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.’ Barnes seems to be saying that the sense we often make of our lives is illusory, because based on unreliable memories. As Adrian says, ‘we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us’. Not a lot of help. How can we know ourselves, if the narratives we construct about our past lack all objectivity?

Barnes’s book, and its award of the Man Booker Prize, were mostly greeted with critical acclaim. He has been praised for the ‘intricate’ structure of the novel, for the ‘precision’ as well as ‘the nuances of language’. But I couldn’t help agreeing with one critic who said it ‘occasionally feels more like a series of wise, underline-worthy insights than a novel’.

You can read more about Julian Barnes on his informative website here.

PS. Veronica has a ‘comfort book’ – I Capture the Castle – which happens to be one of my favourite comfort books, though most people don’t seem to have heard of it. It’s by Dodie Smith. Not sure what this says about either of us, but I’ll write about it one day.

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On one level this is a compelling book. But on another level, I’m just not sure whether David Mitchell isn’t being too clever by half.

The novel is made up of six separate stories. There are some links, which I’ll talk about later. There are eleven sections, with six consecutive stories, the first five of which come to an abrupt finish, one even ending mid-sentence. The sixth story is complete, and is then followed in reverse order by a further instalment of each the other five, more or less resolving them. Mitchell uses a musical example to describe this structure. One character is writing ‘‘a sextet for overlapping soloists’, piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.’ ‘Revolutionary or gimmicky?’ he asks. And that’s a very good question.  The name given to this piece of music is ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’.

The first of the six stories takes the form of diary entries by a young, God-fearing American sailing between Sydney and California around 1850. His ship puts in for repairs to the Chatham Islands, where he learns of the fate of the Moriori people who have, with the assistance of white ‘entrepreneurs’, been enslaved by the more war-like Maoris. The style writing in this section, and the views expressed by the characters are brilliantly authentic, reminding me of the writing of Joseph Conrad, though I gather that Herman Melville’s Typee and Moby Dick may also have been a models. The second story is about the sextet composer, and is set in 1931. It takes the form of letters he sends from Belgium, where he has fled from his creditors, to a lover in England. The style is quite different, but again I am reminded of the writing of that period: Evelyn Waugh, perhaps. The third story is an American style thriller set in 1975, about a young reporter who is chasing the story of a cover-up of faulty design of a nuclear plant – The China Syndrome, anyone? The fourth is a sort of Kingsley Amis style farce about an elderly publisher who finds himself imprisoned in an old folks’ home; it’s set at the time of writing. The fifth story is a piece of speculative fiction about a future where society is run by a corporation, with genetically engineered ‘fabricants’ doing all the labour; one of these recounts her story to an archivist.  I use the term ‘speculative fiction’ rather than ‘science fiction’ in Margaret Atwood’s sense that the drivers which could produce such a future outcome for society are already in place. (Similarities between this section of Cloud Atlas (2004) and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) must surely be coincidence.) The sixth section is set even further into a dystopian future, after ‘the Fall’, and is an account of a visit of one of the few ‘Prescients’ left in the world to a Pacific island (Hawaii) inhabited by people living in conditions equivalent to the early mediaeval. So much of ‘civilisation’ has been lost that language itself is but a shattered remnant.  I read these stories with a mixture of pleasure, amusement, interest, and horror. But also with an increasing sense of frustration. Is this anything more than mimicry? If it is convincing does this matter? Do the six pieces somehow make up a whole?

There are a number of superficial links. Luisa Rey, the reporter, reads the letters of Robert Frobisher, the composer. Omni, the fabricant, sees a film made of the story of the publisher, Timothy Cavendish, who in turn will publish the adventure of the reporter, now presented as a book, rather than as ‘reality’. Omni is considered a goddess in the final story. And so on. Some of the characters have a similar birth mark, and at times feel a strange sense of familiarity: Luisa, for example, stands ‘entranced, as if living in a stream of time’ when she hears the Cloud Atlas Sextet. And Omni, in the act of falling, has an earlier memory of falling, which is an experience of Luisa. But none of these links lead anywhere in narrative terms that I can see.

The search for unifying themes is perhaps more productive. Characters in the first – and therefore the last – story propose that progress and civilisation are the destiny of the white man, despite the terrible cost of colonialism on display. All of the other stories in their own way dispute the idea of progress, either personal or material, with accounts of exploitation and betrayal. They seem rather to endorse another view from the first story: that ‘The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat’. This nihilistic position is somewhat modified in the sixth and central story, where the Prescient character suggests that the difference between being civilised and uncivilised is that civilised people can see beyond their immediate desires. All people have both civilised and uncivilised impulses, but there is hope that the civilising ones may win out. There isn’t, however, much evidence for that in these stories.

Despite the cleverness of all this – or perhaps because of it – I can’t help feeling there is a whiff of the Creative Writing class about the book: Postmodernism 101. Produce a piece of writing that illustrates the principle of fractured narrative. Write a thriller that makes use of all the conventions of the genre. In a series of short pieces, show mastery of six different writing styles. ‘Revolutionary or gimmicky?’ I think for once I agree with the judges of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. They short-listed Cloud Atlas, but the prize went to the conventionally structured The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst. I’m glad I read it, though.

You can read about the book here. A film based on it is due for release later this year. It sounds more optimistic than I thought the book was; maybe I’ve overstated the darkness.

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This book, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007, is described on the cover as ‘Witty, original, inventive … utterly compelling’. I didn’t find it so. I didn’t much like it. Why do I feel so differently from experienced critics and readers like the Man Booker judges?

The story is narrated by Veronica, one of a large, dysfunctional Irish family, (‘why are we all so fucked’), and deals with how she reacts to the suicide of her younger brother, Liam. The book is about feelings, emotions, memories and relationships. The narrative wanders from past to present and from real to imagined, the boundaries of the latter not always being clear. The ‘gathering’ of the family for Liam’s funeral could be considered the climax of the book, though Enright undermines any sense of this by describing much earlier in the story some of what happens after the family meets for the funeral. ‘The seeds of my brother’s death were sown long ago’, she says, and for much of the book she is casting about for someone to blame for what took place. But she is not even certain that the incident she considers vital really did happen. And of course she blames herself: she is ‘looking for the point where she betrayed her own brother’.

This is no doubt a very credible evocation of how someone who is unhappy, unbalanced even, and dissatisfied with their life might feel, and Enright deserves credit for a sensitive portrayal of this state. She is in general in control of her material, and the changes between past and present – or imagined past and dream-like present – are handled well. By the end, it is possible to see shape in what seems initially a shapeless account.  And though there are things I don’t like about her writing style, it can be arresting, as for example in the following passage. ‘There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight – which was thought a little enthusiastic – and then there were the pathetic ones, like me, who had parents who were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.’ That last word explodes like a little bomb.

Now for what I don’t like. Enright’s writing is often described as lyrical, which I take to mean that she sometimes writes metaphorically, as in: ‘The air between them was too thin for love. The only thing that can be thrown across the air of Dublin town is a kind of jeering.’ Whether or not you like this kind of writing is probably a matter of taste – and I don’t. The Man Booker judges apparently do.

I’ve acknowledged that the story has a structure which contains its disparate nature, but I don’t feel the resolution, such as it is, really resolves anything. This is partly an issue for me of organisation, and partly of moral content. I’m left at the end with a sense of anti climax.

Then there is the question of whether Veronica is a character the reader can engage with. You don’t have to like a character, but where a book is so dominated by one narrator, you do have to be intrigued, even fascinated by her. And I’m not. I found myself thinking ‘get over it’, as she drove – well over 0.05 – around Dublin in the middle of the night, no doubt echoing her inner journey of discovery. Her insight that she is somehow living her life ‘in inverted commas’ only made me shrug. Her weighty pronouncement on her grandmother that ‘For a woman like Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made’ seemed merely pretentious. It’s true she is self aware and mocking at times, but even that doesn’t endear her to me. Exploring the love/hate relationship she has with her siblings – Liam included – should be stimulating.  I find it merely unrealistic. But I know that lots of other people would disagree with me, and even label me un-empathetic.

An author can reasonably expect a literate and empathetic reader, and readers can expect that good literature will engage them. And here we have the old problem: if it doesn’t happen, is it anyone’s fault? Is one side or the other deficient? Or is it just a matter of personal preference?

You can read more about Anne Enright here. And some more favourable reviews are listed here.

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This is a beautifully written and thoughtful book about important subjects. But I found it so depressing that it was hard to keep reading.

The story is set in the mid 1980s, mostly in Kalimpong, near the border of India and Nepal, at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains. It concerns the doings of Jemubhai Patel, a retired judge, Sai, his orphaned grand daughter, and their cook – who is never named. The experience in America of Biju, the cook’s son, forms a counterpoint to the main narrative. There are also flash backs to the judge’s marriage and the time he spent in England preparing to sit for the Indian Civil Service exams.

The judge has imbibed a respect for doing things the English way. He spends his time reading English newspapers and playing chess; he doesn’t even mix with the small Anglophile community in Kalimpong. He eats meat with a knife and fork in a country where most people eat rice and dahl with their fingers. Sai is a teenager who has been brought up at first in a convent and then in the judge’s house. She also speaks English and respects English customs. She is in love with Gyan, her maths tutor, a young man from the local college. The cook does his best to look after them in the proper English way. He is immensely proud of his son. Biju entered America on a tourist visa which he has overstayed, and is now working illegally – or rather, being exploited – in a succession of poorly paid jobs in dirty restaurants. Then one day a group of young men calling themselves the Gorkha National Liberation Front steal the judge’s old hunting guns, and nothing is the same thereafter.

Desai ties the small doings of the characters – going to the market, arguing over brands of cheese, reading the National Geographic, stealing guns – into the larger themes that concern her. These include poverty, ignorance and inequality in India, the legacy of colonialism and the alienation of Anglophile Indians from their society, the growth of globalisation and consumerism, the experience of emigration, and the attractions of insurgency. In all of these, nearly everyone in the story loses out, partly through their own choices, but more because of the shaping forces of these broader themes which they have inherited.

The judge is a horrible man, who covers his insecurity – so dramatically heightened by the hostility and prejudice he encountered in England – by shouting and abuse. In England, ‘He retreated into a solitude that grew in weight day by day. The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow’. ‘He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred, and for what he would become, he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians, both’.  Sai is a pleasant enough young woman, but she is drifting and purposeless. Biju is simply overwhelmed by the ‘unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant’ – the frustrations and miseries of his existence, inflicted, often enough, by his more successful fellow countrymen. The cook is kind, but his whole being is defined by his status as a servant. What happens to them, and to most of the other characters, amounts to misery piled on misery, humiliation on humiliation. As one character says, ‘There is nobody who won’t abandon you’. There is nobody who is redeemed. As for the Gorkha National Liberation Front, they ‘were living in the movies’. If they stirred up hatred, ‘extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event’.

Desai writes all this in a delicate and whimsical style. But that only makes the frustrations and misunderstandings, the betrayals and the losses seem even worse.

I know literature is supposed to tell us truths about ourselves, and this Desai does with a vengeance. Looking back at the end of the book, I couldn’t find one single untainted moment where happiness or hope wasn’t about to be disappointed. Things just are, and must be accepted. No wonder I felt depressed by the book.

The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in 2006. You can read an interview with Desai about herself and about writing the book here. For a different view of some of the same issues in India, see my post on The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

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The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and I’m not sure how I missed it at the time. But I’m really glad I’ve made up for it now. Funny but sad to the point of tragic, it is a biting satire on the divisions between rich and poor in India. At least I assume it’s satire, and that the details are an overstatement to make a point; if it is an accurate description of reality, then I guess it’s not in the least funny.

The book takes the whimsical form of a letter from Balram Halwai to Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, the purpose of which is to explain, by reference to his own experience, how India fosters entrepreneurship. China, apparently, lacks entrepreneurs, whereas ‘our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewerage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs’. Written over several nights, most of the letter focuses on Balram’s life up to the point where he starts his own successful version of outsourcing (ie ‘doing things in India for Americans over the phone’); this is covered in a few very clever pages. So most of the book is about his experiences as the son of a poor village rickshaw-puller who becomes a driver for a rich master in New Delhi, and how by a single act of ‘social entrepreneurship’, he becomes an entrepreneur himself.

Balram uses two metaphors to describe the life of the poor in India. They live in ‘the Darkness’, whereas the rich live in ‘the Light’. And the poor live in ‘the Rooster Coop’, meaning not only do they live confined in terrible conditions, but they think of themselves as having no escape. ‘The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop’, Balram says. The essentials of the coop include the bonds of family and location, economic dependence on the rich, chewing paan and a deep sense of servility. Anyone who tries to buck the system is picked off and destroyed. ‘Democratic’ elections, the police and the justice system are nothing more than shams, and inequality is cemented by corruption at every level of society. Hence the picture of the rooster on the cover.

So how does Balram escape? He isn’t sure himself. ‘If you ask me to explain how one event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my master to thinking that – I will tell you that I myself don’t understand these things’. When he is at school, he is able to read, and so rare is this accomplishment, the school inspector dubs him a ‘white tiger’ – a creature that comes along only once in a generation. Poetry also has something to do with it: Balram hears the lines ‘You were looking for the key for years/But the door was always open!’ and realises ‘a man can make himself vanish with poetry’.  ‘The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave,’ he says. ‘To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India’. But it takes more decisive action for Balram to free himself. Hence the title, and picture of the white tiger accompanying that of the rooster on the cover.

You might wonder how all this poverty and misery can be funny. Here are just two out of many possible examples of Adiga’s skill with words and ideas: first, while Balram is still a driver – ‘From the amount of garbage thrown outside the walls of the house, you knew that rich people lived here’, and second, when he has become an entrepreneur – ‘You’ll see my friends when you visit Bangalore – fat, paunchy men swinging their canes, on Brigade Road, poking and harassing vendors and shaking them down for money. I’m talking of the police, of course’. However dark the story, and as Balram warns, it is dark, Adiga’s light touch and ironic view make the book thoroughly satisfying for me. His achievement is all the more remarkable, given that this is his first novel.

You can read more about Adiga here. His second novel Last Man in Tower (2011) is described as a painful tragicomedy, so I guess it’s pretty much in line with his first.

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I saw the BBC mini series (2009) based on Small Island (2004) before I read the book. But I’m happy to report that even knowing what happens, I still found the book immensely appealing. Perhaps I’ve hit on a new definition of good literature: a book that gives pleasure even if you’ve already seen the film.

Andrea Levy was born in London after her parents migrated there from Jamaica in 1948, and she draws extensively on their experience. The book moves back and forwards in time and place from before World War II to 1948 in England and Jamaica. The story starts in 1948 with Hortense arriving in London to find Gilbert renting a room in a house belonging to Queenie Bligh. Hortense reveres England as the mother country and Gilbert has experienced it as a volunteer in the RAF during the war. But will it live up to their expectations? Queenie is letting rooms to make ends meet. She married Bernard to escape a life of drudgery on a farm, but although he returned to England after serving in the army, he hasn’t come home. Each main character tells how they arrived at this point in their lives, and what happens next.

One of the reasons the book holds my attention is that it offers a more complete picture than the film. That concentrated on Hortense and Queenie; the book gives space to Gilbert and, to a lesser extent, Bernard as well. Each character tells their story in the first person, and each character has a distinctive voice. This means that the reader gets to see the same situation from two or even three different perspectives, and can understand the feelings and responses of each participant. Hortense’s and Gilbert’s misunderstanding of each other are part funny, part heartrending. Hortense’s coldness to Queenie is equally painful. Bernard is the least appealing of the characters, but even he has moments where redemption seems possible. Creating this web of interactions with understanding and compassion, humour and pathos, is no mean feat, and Levy has managed it very effectively.

A second reason for finding it compelling reading is the inherent interest of the subject matter. Racism is a major theme; Levy is interested in exploring what it meant to be black and British in London immediately after the war. She shows the variations of prejudice, first in Jamaica, where light skin is more socially acceptable than dark skin, then in its brutal manifestations in England during the war, where Jamaicans were included in the colour bar imposed by the US Army on its black troops and finally in the ignorant bigotry of the post war British population at large. Queenie is a wonderful exception, though even she cannot ultimately escape the general intolerance. The lesson is that the West Indian community has to rely on itself.

I also found the siren call of the mother country to her colonial subjects fascinating, especially when contrasted with the indifference and even hostility of the British to those subjects. Gilbert, for example, realises that while his education in Jamaica was British centred – he can name all the canals in England – few in England even know Jamaica exists, let alone acknowledge the right of its black inhabitants to live in England. Even though the country has been shaken up by war – all the bits that had been blown up ‘settling in different places’ – there is almost no understanding that changes in the empire will have implications for people in Britain. I wondered if the picture of herself Levy has included in the book is intended to underline the legitimacy of West Indian aspirations to European culture; it shows a smiling black girl pointing her toe, dressed in a frilly white tutu.

Small Island was the winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004.  Levy’s most recent book, The Long Song, was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

You can read more about Andrea Levy here.

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Anne Tyler is another writer who was on the Man Booker International shortlist. She is an American, but that must be about the only thing she has in common with the winner, Philip Roth. Her books deal with the personal and the domestic, rather than the broad themes of American experience – though arguably the domestic is important in the American experience, whatever critics think. Her main characters often find themselves at odds with their role in life, needing to come to terms with themselves in some new way. This is certainly true for Liam Pennywell, the protagonist of Noah’s Compass (2009),Tyler’s eighteenth book.

Liam is sixty, widowed, then divorced from his second wife, with three daughters. He has just been ‘downsized’ from his job teaching grade five students at a private school. Seeking to economise, he moves to a cheaper apartment, where on the first night, he is assaulted, and wakes up in hospital with no memory of what took place. He is distressed by his amnesia, and wants to find out what happened.

Liam is not an assertive man. If his back is agonizingly sore, he will tell the doctor he is ‘experiencing some discomfort’. Nor is he confident and successful. “But face it:” he says, “I haven’t exactly covered myself in glory. I just … don’t seem to have the hang of things somehow. It’s as if I’ve never been entirely present in my own life.”  He has lived, it seems, on the margins of his family’s lives. Will this experience jolt him into a new direction?  But as he tells his grandson Jonah, a compass for finding direction wouldn’t have been of any use to Noah; he wasn’t going anywhere, he was just trying to stay afloat on the flood.

A major theme in the story is memories – lost and found. ‘The trouble with discarding bad memories’, Liam thinks, ‘was that evidently the good ones went with them’. Offered the chance to confront his attacker, he wonders how important the memory, if it returned, would seem in comparison with other things he has forgotten. ‘Where’s the rest? Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood, and my youth, my first marriage and the growing up of my daughters?’ he asks himself. ‘Why, he’d had amnesia all along.’ But the story is also about contentment, and while this is  a less passionate state than happiness, Liam’s pleasure in his quiet, sparse life is one of the joys of the book, as he thinks to himself of what Socrates said about ‘the fewer his wants, the closer he was to the gods.’

I hope I haven’t made the book sound depressing, because it isn’t. Tylerwrites with quiet amusement about her characters and their various foibles. Some of the humour is achieved through the use of parenthesis, as in: ‘To be honest, Liam thought, the Pennywells were a rather homely family. (Himself included.)’, or ‘“You’re dismissive and sarcastic and contemptuous,”’ Louise – his daughter – says. ‘(Anger seemed to broaden her vocabulary – a trait Liam had noticed in her mother as well.)’ But everyone has their good side, even if they can appear inept or comical. There is no malice in the humour.

Tyler’s work attracts rather conflicting responses. Some admire her unassuming prose and empathy with marginal people.  ‘She chooses subtlety over grandeur; she thinks in minuscule rather than capital letters’, says one critic.  But others (perhaps including the Man Booker International judges) consider her bland and unchallenging: ‘our foremost NutraSweet novelist’, as one critic apparently called her. I don’t think memory loss is a bland topic. And I detect a bit of sexism here: if it is domestic, it can’t be important. But perhaps I’m over sensitive. And she has won a Pulitzer Prize – for Breathing Lessons, in 1989.  

You can read more about Anne Tyler here.

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This book has an epigraph from Jonathon Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels; he says he wrote it to ‘inform’ rather than to ‘amuse’, to ‘vex the world rather than divert it’. Atwood undoubtedly has a didactic purpose; she wants readers to think hard about the way the world is going. But she doesn’t see informing and amusing as mutually exclusive. (I don’t expect Swift did either.)

The book begins with Snowman (as in Abominable) – who used to be called Jimmy – believing that he may be the last person alive after humans have been wiped out by a global catastrophe. He has for company a group of genetically engineered ‘humans’, and a lot of wild life, much of it genetically modified (like the pigoons and the wolvogs), and nearly all of it hostile. The climate is also hostile, with intense heat and tropical rain storms – though rising sea levels and changing weather patterns predate the catastrophe. Snowman spends a lot of time thinking back over how things got this way, and what it had to do with his relationship with Glenn Crake, a friend from his school days, and Oryx, who they first saw as a nameless little girl on a porno website. At the same time, Snowman is trying to work out how to survive in the new world – shades here of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

The world Atwood describes as existing before the catastrophe includes everything she presumably hates about the world today, taken to what might be its logical conclusion. The elite live in heavily guarded Compounds; everyone else lives in the pleeblands (yes, shades of 1984 – I must stop doing this). The main business of the Compounds is scientific research aimed at creating genetically modified products, most of which endeavour to prolong youth and even life itself for anyone who can pay. A rampant market economy prevails; the only things that matter are those that can be bought or sold. And total hedonism reigns; art and literature are disregarded and language itself is atrophying. Changes in the climate have been largely ignored, or accommodated in ways that favour the privileged. Any dissent among the elite or the pleeblanders is brutally repressed. Did such a society deserve its catastrophe?

The subject matter of this book is almost uniformly grim; even the ‘romance’ between Jimmy and Oryx is an illusion. But such is Atwood’s skill that her satirical voice makes it almost funny at times. Her tone is matter-of-fact, no matter how bad the fact. She makes a lot of use of parenthesis, juxtaposing what Snowman does with what he thinks, or undercutting some certainty with a rhetorical question, or through his own thoughts and the voices from the past he hears in his head. ‘It must have been during the initial mayhem, thinks Snowman, that some genius let out the pigoons and the wolvogs. Oh, thanks a bundle.’

Critics can’t seem to decide whether this is science fiction or speculative fiction. Atwood is clear that it is the latter. The questions in Oryx and Crake, she explains, are ‘simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?’ For her, science fiction takes science beyond current knowledge. Her point is that we already have the knowledge to do most of what she is describing in the book, and to label it science fiction would make it an imaginary future, not a possible one.

The problem with informing – or vexing – readers is that characters can become a mechanical part of the lesson. Atwood is far too good a writer to fall completely into this trap. Early in the book, someone misquotes Pope: ‘the proper study of mankind is everything’, but later Jimmy corrects it: ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man’. It is humans, not science, that have brought the world to this pass. Does Atwood’s account of human motivation stand up to scrutiny? I think it does for Jimmy.

At any rate, this is one book I can’t get out of my head, so I guess Atwood did a good job of vexing.

Oryx and Crake was short-listed for the Mann Booker Prize for 2003. You can read more about Margaret Atwood here.

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This is, as it says on the cover, a ghost story. It is also a slice of social history. After some initial doubts, I decided Waters does a terrific job of tying these together.

It is 1948 in England. The war is over, but the scars are still visible. Change is in the air, but not everyone is looking forward to it. Dr Faraday, a local GP, is called to Hundreds Hall, a decaying Georgian mansion is rural Warwickshire, to treat a servant. He gets to know the family – Mrs Ayres and her grown up children Roderick and Caroline, who are struggling to keep the place going. But strange and terrible things start happening at Hundreds Hall.

The Ayres are local gentry, but lack the capital to make a go of farming; the Hall is sucking the economic life out of them. They have even had to sell part of their park to the local council for a housing estate. They all to some degree resent their situation; Atlee and the Labour government are to blame. ‘Ordinary people hate our sort now, don’t you see,’ says Roderick. Faraday is a local too, but has risen from humble beginnings; his mother was once a servant at the Hall. He knows that change is needed – his patients’ poor living conditions are more than enough evidence of that. But he is worried about the impact of the impending National Health System, and his imagination is caught by the beauty of the old Hall. Hyde Parker, an architect, and Maurice Babb, a builder, in their different ways represent the coming age; the new meritocracy grates against the old gentry.

The story is narrated by Faraday, though most of the weird goings-on are related to him by others. They are presented as things that actually happen. But Faraday, a twentieth century man of science, cannot believe there is anything supernatural at work. He finds a ‘rational answer’, a medical explanation; there is something wrong with the person to whom these things happen. At first he thinks ‘nervousness’, then ‘delusion’. Is there some ‘family taint’? Or is it that the family, unable to cope in the modern world, seeks refuge in madness?

But why does a medical answer feel so wrong? And doesn’t Faraday’s approach only make things worse? For all his scepticism, Faraday himself can’t help feeling that ‘a far stranger thing’ is at work. Is the Hall literally sucking the life out of the Ayres? Waters has done a brilliant job of leaving the reader (as well as Faraday) unsatisfied by any explanation. I think her cleverness lies partly in the factual way in which the peculiar happenings are reported; this somehow manages to make Faraday’s rationality itself seem odd. It also lies in the picture she has drawn of Faraday, a self proclaimed ‘poacher’, making his way illicitly across boundaries, at ease with neither the old order nor the new; can we really believe in his rational explanation?

Waters has been described as a ventriloquist, able to reproduce the voices of past eras. She certainly conveys a convincing picture of England in 1948. It is not just the details – though these are impeccable. It is as much the tone of the writing. There are the deliberately dated phrases: ‘Awfully brainy girl, of course’, or ‘She pulled a face at the thought’ or ‘she was awfully dim’ to pick a few at random. And there is a restraint in the expression no longer found today, as when Faraday describes his surgery: ‘It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’ It’s the ‘enough’ and the ‘suppose’ that do it.

This is Sarah Waters’s fifth book. You can find out more about her here. Published in 2009, The Little Stranger is the third of her books to be short-listed for both the Man Booker and the Orange prize for literature.

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