Bedside Book Pile Update

At the beginning of 2019 I took a photo of the pile of books by my bed, with the hope that I would have an entirely different stack by the end of the year. At the beginning of 2020 I took another picture. Readers, I did it!

I've peaked too early, with the conclusion - it's like turning to the last page before continuing with the story (people who do that blow my mind) - but for those who would like to play along with the moves of the game, they began in this post, and they follow below:

Bedside book pile July 2019

In July I only read one book from the book pile, and it was Kerry Young's Gloria, which I admit I chose because of the cover and the plaudits - from The Guardian ('a vivid portrayal... heartfelt, sparky and affecting), Independent on Sunday ('A punchy tale of pungent characters and impassioned entanglements'), and The Observer ('A blindingly good read'). The author was born in Jamaica and has mixed Chinese and African heritage; she is hailed as 'stand-alone talent in the new emerging generation of writers from the Caribbean region'.

This is Kerry Young's second novel; the first was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and apparently many of the characters are the same - I haven't read it but it would appear to be almost the same story told from a different viewpoint. There is violence, prostitution, illegitimacy, class conflict, prejudice and redemption. I enjoyed it up to about half-way through, and then I began to get bored - it had nothing fresh or original to say and the pidgin English style became tiresome. Many others disagree, so maybe I should try another of her novels, but I'm not really in any hurry to do so.

Other books I read in July that were not on the list were The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett (easy-to-read part thriller; part supernatural; part comedy novel about a primary school teacher's issues with mental illness in a rural NSW town), Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair (a damning critique of grand projects; from urban developments and shopping malls to the structures involved in the London Olympics), and Rocky Road by Robert Wainwright (subtitled 'The Incredible True Story of the Fractured Family Behind the Darrel Lea Chocolate Empire', it covers the 'experiment' of a woman adopting children to be playmates for her 'natural' children and the consequences thereof).

Books read from pile: 17/25

Bedside book pile August 2019

In August I read two books from the pile and two not. John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River covers much of his usual ground - bears; large-breasted women with largely undefined personalities; wrestling; writers; running and being attacked by dogs. It is brightly written with an eye for detail (the logging industry is well represented) and a fair bit of fourth wall breaking.

I also read Today I Am A Book by xTx, because my peculiar reading scheme dictated that I needed to read a book by an author beginning with X. All of the short, poetic segments (it feels wrong to call them stories, and, besides, they have the tart juiciness of an orange) in this collection are introduced with the words ‘Today I am a…’ It is a great creative writing exercise, and a way to express thoughts and feelings, but a lot of them are complicated and negative.
 
Bonus reading (books not on the list) were the graphic novel adaptation of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (each chapter illustrated by a different illustrator gives it a sort of disjointed feel) and The Book of the Heathen by Robert Edric, which has a heart-of-darkness feel to the nineteenth century Congo explorations undertaken by a European mapmaker and anthropologist companion.
 
Books read from pile: 19/27

Bedside book pile September 2019

In my rules, it counts if you add a book to the pile and read it in the same month. Hence Someone Like Me by M.R. Carey counts. It has a good, creepy cover, and the novel has overtones of Stephen King, rooted in reality with strong doses of popular culture, and the central theme of split or multiple personalities. 

I also read Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford, which is excellent. While it has less of the explosive passion of Fight Like a Girl, it features more cohesive arguments and channels the rage of gender injustice in a more constructive flow.

Not on the list, but I read it anyway, was a new version of The House f Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca, this time adapted by Rona Munro. It was suggested to me by a friend that I might like to direct it, but I am not keen, as the story still basically just features a bunch of women sitting around waiting to get married and hating each other because they are not the chosen one. The modern translation may try to bring out the injustice of the situation, but it is still a gender nightmare. 

I also added An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, because it was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker prize. It may be dressed up with classical mythology and Igbo traditions, but it is basically a patriarchal tale of a man behaving badly when he doesn’t get what he wants from a woman.

Books read from pile: 21/29

Bedside book pile October 2019

October was a great month for reading for me, with Harvest by Jim Crace, shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, being one of the highlights of the year. It is glorious, beginning in a bucolic vein (like Hardy’s pastoral interludes) but rapidly becoming much darker and more claustrophobic. Set against the movement from common land to enclosures; wheat crops and cattle to sheep it asks questions about private ownership of public land, when there are changing masters who is in charge of themselves, and how easy it is to blame women as witches to provide easy scapegoats.

Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet began with Autumn, published last year, and continues here with Winter. The subject is quite different but many of the themes are familiar. It is written in a continuous fluid style, but with short sentences and without irksome stream-of-consciousness. The novel embroiders snatches of literature and legend into a rich tapestry: a retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for our times. This is a novel of stories and interpretations. We are given tales of fertility; the Green Man, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and defenders of past rituals and natural bounty. Smith combines the richness of the past with the frustrations of the present and a glimmer of hope for the future, believing that communities and compassion can overcome division and isolation.

Mum gave me a copy of The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn, which I read and left with Scarey Sis, who I thought would enjoy it as much as I did. The author loses her home for financial reasons, and her husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness. With no ties to bind them, and very little money to support themselves, they set off to walk the South West Path. The tale is as much about the 630-mile trek as it is about homelessness, compassion and the state of the nation.

Books read from pile: 24/31

Bedside book pile November 2019

I practically devoured The Testaments by Margaret Atwood; a thinly-veiled polemic against totalitarianism. In her acknowledgments at the end of the 2019 Booker-Prize-winning novel, Margaret Atwood thanks “the readers of The Handmaid’s Tale; their interest and curiosity has been inspiring.” If my desire to know what happened after The Handmaid’s Tale is in any part responsible for the writing of this book, 35 years after its predecessor, you’re welcome. It’s been a long time coming, but it is certainly worth it, and after all this time, it still has a clear directive: “We must continue to remind ourselves of the wrong turnings taken in the past so we do not repeat them.”

For something completely different, I read The Cat who Sniffed Glue by Lilian Jackson Braun - it was on my bookshelf so why not? It's a light-hearted mystery featuring an eligible bachelor, and two Siamese cats. It positions itself firmly in the category of 'cosy mysteries', subsection; if you know what to expect from this genre; you won't be disappointed. 

A friend recommended that I read Brothers by Yu Hua. It is a sprawling and picaresque epic focussing on step-brothers Baldly Li and Song Gang. The first half of the novel concentrates on their childhood and adolescence during the Cultural Revolution, and the second half features their adulthood, successes and otherwise during the early period of China's Opening-Up. It is wry, ribald and Rabelaisian with plenty of sex and violence delivered as farce and satire.

Books read from pile: 25/34

Bedside book pile December 2019

I was quite busy reading in December; one of my favourite pastimes so no complaints here! I also polished off four books that were on he list, and one that wasn't. Starting with the one that wasn't,  A Universe of Sufficient Size by Mirian Sved was a recommendation from a friend. Spanning continents and three generations, this rich novel of mathematics, politics, friendship, family, sexuality and love, features numerous time and narrative shifts. And I loved it.

Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao also details an incredible friendship, also across continents and decades. But the persecution in this one derives from sexism rather than fascism and the women in this novel (Savitha and Poornima) are variously raped, abused, starved and mutilated because they are female and they are poor. It becomes a touch stereotypical, which is a shame, because it could have a lot to say beneath the layers of cliche.

The Girl Before by JP Delaney is supposedly an erotic thriller, but it feels a little predictable and formulaic. It's not about a girl, before, after or present; it is about a house and a man’s viewpoint of manipulation and control. It is an entertaining read, but it is not earth-shattering. Shock value isn’t everything, and its veneer wears off very quickly - maybe it's time to give this style of book (girl in the title = unreliable narrator) a rest.

If it is not already apparent, let me state that I love books and books about books, so Ex Libris by Ross King, which purported to be about a whole library, should have really stocked my shelves. But it felt flat, partly due to the confusing plot, which was all over the place (and not in a good way), and partly due to an over-indulgence in historical research - I know it's set in the 1600s and the author is very knowledgeable about the period, but I didn't feel as though he needed to shoehorn those facts in at every available and inopportune gap in the narrative. 

Where I was overwhelmed with insight and anecdote was Anthony Holden's biography, Olivier. He was a theatrical colossus and he made as many right as wrong choices of production and partner, but he remained dedicated to a craft that changed rapidly from stage to screen. It's also fascinating because it was written 40 years after Olivier's acting heyday and 40 years before today's judgmental generation. Holden, therefore, manages to review Olivier's towering performance of Othello without once mentioning the awkward issue of blackface. Those were different times indeed.

Books read from pile: 29/35

Bedside book pile January 2020

And so I begin again...

Cooking the Books

The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes

(Harper Perennial)

Pp. 428

We all know Mrs Beeton, right? She was a Victorian matron who presided over bland food in bizarre combinations (calf’s foot blancmange, anyone) and fussy serviette folding. She wrote a book about cookery, servant management and other household hints that became a byword for bourgeois and has been much-derided ever since it was written.

Well, wrong, according to Kathryn Hughes’ scholarly biography, which also includes a plethora of information on the changing times, consumerism and attitudes towards women and home-making. Mrs Beeton, née Isabella Mary Mayson, was 21 when she began working on the first Beeton's Book of Household Management which was published in 1859 in serial form in her husband, Sam Beeton’s, Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Much of it was copied or stolen from other (often unattributed) sources. She died aged 28, although it benefitted her publishers to pretend that she was still alive as they brought out myriad editions of her books in different packages and formats.

As a young wife, Isabella had no idea how to run a household and probably wished there was a manual, but as there didn’t seem to be one, she began to write it herself. She offered help to women floundering in domesticity, and “emphasised the moral duty of the middle-class mistress in keeping her expenditure in check by brushing up on her arithmetic rather than her conversational Italian.”
This was not to say that Mr and Mrs Beeton were against educating women or thought they should be chained to the kitchen sink, and in fact they were adamant that “those women who needed to should have access to properly paid and respectable jobs.” The key phrase here is ‘women who needed to’, as they assumed, as did all publications of the time, that “a woman’s first and proper desire was always to marry, have children, and run a happy home.”

In an interesting aside, Hughes notes that this situation is so reversed that homemaking is now generally only appealing to those who don’t ‘need to’. Neither condemning nor condoning Mrs Beeton, this attitude also politicises the supposedly simple choice of being a housewife.

Perhaps Mrs Beeton is best known for her recipes, although most of them are not original. She was possibly the first person to include a comprehensive index at the front and to cross-reference the entries. The inclusion of cooking times and listed ingredients first, before the method, was also innovative albeit derided by ‘proper’ cooks who maintained one should always read through the recipe in full anyway. Beeton's Book of Household Management was the first British cookery book to use colour plates (in 1861) to show readers exactly how the food should look when it came to table.

Another 100 pages of the biography remain after Isabella’s death, reinforcing the idea that she and Sam were Mrs Beeton between them, and that the reputation which was built up around her had very little to do with the woman herself. It made sense for the publishing company to “pretend that Mrs Beeton was alive, well, and looking forward to supplying the nation with yet more words of wisdom from her immaculately-run home.” 

Friday Five: Iain (M) Banks

I really admire Iain Banks. When I was a humble bookseller in Manchester, he came to the shop to do a singing session, which ended up in a drinking session at the pub. I was slightly intimidated by him. He was a large man with a big beard, prodigious talent and uncompromising politics (that I feared included a dislike of the English, but turned out to be a dislike of the Tory government, which I think all of us shared).

It seems to me to be no coincidence that four very important men in my life (Him Outdoors; Hoggy; Will and Scooter) all rate him very highly too. Many of my memories of his books are tied up with memories of these people, and my Manchester bookselling days, which makes him a sentimental favourite as well as a literary legend. I was very sad to hear of his death, which is a loss to the thinking (and drinking) world.

I am currently reading Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, which I bought for Him Outdoors about a decade ago. He read it but I never did, until now. It is taking quite a long time to read the mix of travel, taste, tradiion and tall tales, as I accompany the turning of pages with sipping of malt whisky. Surely there is no ohter way to do it? I'm sure this will make it into my top five favourite Iain Banks books, but here are another five to be getting on with in the meantime. I have included my original notes and the dates I read them.

Five Fabulous Iain Banks books:

1. The Wasp Factory (1994) This novel is brilliant; there is no other word for it. It was my introduction to Iain Banks through my brother who recommended it to me telling me it was one of his favourite novels, but it could be considered sick. I suppose it could. But the chillingly horrific aspect adds to its excellent spell in which I was bound from the moment I picked it up.
   The novel is narrated by Frank, a sixteen-year-old recluse with an overly fertile imagination and certain grotesquely bizarre habits. Living alone with his father in a remote part of Scotland, he admits before the novel commences to have killed three of his relatives and we soon realise he is more than capable of doing so again.
   He tortures animals, collecting them on sacrifice poles. He predicts the future through the use of the wasp factory: the wasps choose a certain passage to crawl down, at the end of each is a particularly nasty way for them to die. Frank is generally not a very nice person, but at least he loves his brother, Eric, who is no better, with a penchant for setting light to dogs. Eric is being held in a mental hospital, but he has escaped and is heading home.
   Frank is highly intelligent but very intense and even, at times, sensitive, such as in his friendship with Jamie, a dwarf. The novel contains some startlingly graphic images, such as a brain full of maggots, which make the reader more inclined to credit the rest of the novel with its extremely unusual ideas.
   It ends with a dramatic twist which makes you want to re-read it in the light of what you now know. It really is a stunning debut novel with tributes pouring in from most papers such as 'brilliant dialogue', 'cruel humour', 'weirdly talented', 'barnacled with the grotesque', 'minor masterpiece', and 'unsettling'. Others were less enamoured, claiming it is sick, crass, repellent, depraved, obscene, lurid, vicious, distasteful, and repulsive. All of which titbits, incidentally, are reprinted in the opening pages.
   The Wasp Factory certainly made a shocking impact when first published. Some reviewers loved it, others hated it, but all realised its power and significance. I loved it and wish all debuts were this impressive. Certainly unforgettable and I doubt, as The Times hoped, 'a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish.'


2. The Crow Road (1995)
   I had to check The Wasp Factory wasn't a one-off, so I read this one too. It is excellent - a good story and well-written. It has the same shock-tactics, beginning with 'It was the day my grandmother exploded', and continues in a similar style.
   Prentice McHoan returns to his family on the west coast of Scotland, having fallen out with his father over a question of religion and principle. His grandmother informs him that he is a 'pivot' and that the rest of the family revolves around him. As he delves into the past, discovering more about his uncles, some of what he uncovers proves to be extremely disturbing to him and his sense of family values.
   Prentice has an irritating flat mate, who runs the bath full of hot water and then leaves it to cool down, and fills the kettle to the brim when he only needs enough for a cup of tea. He plays rugby and accompanies Prentice everywhere. Prentice also has an older brother Lewis, who has become a successful stand-up comic by telling jokes about his family, which Prentice resents.
   Prentice is also concerned with alcohol, drugs and sex. The only thing which is obvious is that he gets the girl in the end. There is a revelatory scene where Ashley (the girl in question) uses her cervical muscles to spell out 'I love you' in Morse code while having sex.
   The rest of the novel is not nearly so predictable. It flashes between time and characters with great regularity as Prentice discovers more about the Crow Road. This is a set of papers left behind by Uncle Rory after his disappearance; the crow road being a place whence people went when they died, according to Grandma Margot.
   Many of the novel's excellent snippets make you wonder about Banks' sanity, but none of them can be divulged because they all interlink and would reveal the story. The 500 pages simply fly by. More please!


3. A Song of Stone (1998)
   As I have come to expect from Iain Banks, this novel is weird and wonderful. The narrator, Abel, tells his story to ‘you’, his lover, although she was there for the most part, as he looks back on his life recalling the events that led to his impending death.
   Abel owns a castle in Scotland complete with servants, game and trout streams. When a war wages through the country (there are no dates, it appears to be set in some dystopian future, although ‘when’ is immaterial), he and his lover attempt to flee but they are arrested by a lieutenant and her ragged army and imprisoned in their former home.
   Possession is a major theme. The army now owns the castle in which it wreaks havoc and destruction. “My home, our home, laid waste, sacked and ruined; the collected treasure of a handful of centuries, an entire family tree of ancestors and half the countries of the world all obliterated in one night of frenzied abandon.” The castle, built centuries ago for defence, cannot stand up to cannon-fire and is eventually razed, outliving its function, and strangely liberating Abel by taking his possessions from him.
   The question of possession in relationships is also raised. Abel’s relationship with ‘you’ is very strange. They share each other sexually with others without jealousy or regret, although there is still evidence of affection. Many of their friends think they are depraved and eventually drift away, leaving them isolated. They are not ashamed of their actions and don’t consider them debauched, although they do secretly bury a stillborn offspring, afraid that they have gone too far. This, and other hints, Leads the reader to question the nature of their relationship.
   A Song of Stone is a dark nihilistic novel. It looks at the worst of human nature; its brutal side. There are scenes of torture and disgusting images, perhaps reminiscent of Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. Iain Banks has a dim view of humans, believing they are ultimately concerned with themselves and their own gratification, often through destruction of both material possessions and moral strictures. It is as excellently written as the rest of his novels, but left me feeling empty and depressed.


4. Feersum Endjinn (2002)
   This was a rare foray for me into the world of science fiction, but I like Iain Banks, so decided to see what difference an M would make. The style is similar. The prose is lucid, the plot well worked, and the characters distinguished, as the narration leaps between them, some telling their tales in the first person, others having them told on their behalf. The dark nihilism of Banks’ other works of ‘artistic’ fiction (if there is such a category, as removed from ‘science’) is present here, but this world is futuristic, and Banks can allow his morbid imagination to run away with him, and us.
   The year is “by the new reckoning….called the second-last”. The Encroachment is coming, like some sort of second ice age, as the sun dims to darkness. In this world, people have seven lives and their accumulated knowledge and experience is held in the crypt, into which people can travel through virtual means - incorporating ‘constructs’ – talking polar bears, sloths, and ants. One of the characters learns as she goes along. Her vocabulary expands with her knowledge. Another cannot spell and records his thoughts phonetically, all of which makes demands upon the reader. Others speak in technical jargon or flit through parallel realities as they stretch the fabric of time. Utterances such as “ ‘U ½, ½ u?’ I sez (& am finkin O-O)” require concentration, but it is well-rewarded.


5. Transition (2009)
   This novel is supposedly the mid-way point between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks, so you get the best of both worlds; nitty-gritty realism and fanciful sci-fi imaginings. From the opening sentence – “Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator” – you are immediately plunged into chaos and confusion.
   The narrator is a transitionary, someone who can flit between worlds where they can interfere and affect outcomes. Some of the tasks of the Transitionary are to do good; to intervene by introducing people to each other, leaving a book lying around for them to discover, stopping them from entering a building that is about to collapse. But these are not the roles the Transitionary relishes and which keep him awake at night.
   Some people are able to tandem, which is to take another person with them when they transition. Most transition with the help of a special chemical in tablet form, called septus, although the Transitionary does it by sneezing, like Nadia Popov in Rent-a-Ghost. An organisation controls the transitions and the quantities of septus, but what happens if people can flit or transition without it? Also, some people are able to pervert the natural order by assuming new bodies and simply refusing to age or die. As with all of Iain (M) Banks’ novels there is an element of paranoia and the fear of powerful corporations, and he advocates disorder and natural arbitrariness.
   With or without the M, Ian Banks is instantly recognisable and any novel of his will provide a good read. You know what to expect up to a point. His genius is that he can take similar ingredients each time – sex, torture (this gets a bit preachy and there is an obvious swipe at the Bush administration and Guantanamo Bay), drugs, whisky and of course, Scotland – and create an entirely new concoction.

Books read in April 2012

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in April 2012. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

Caleb’s Crossing – Geraldine Brooks (3.5)
This novel is based upon the true story of the first Native American to go to Harvard, told through the narrative of Bethia Mayhew, a missionary’s daughter. Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Bethia rides her pony around the island and spies upon the Wampanoag tribe, fascinated by their painted faces and strange dances. She befriends Cheeshahteaumauck, nephew of the most powerful and aggressive paw-paw or shaman of the tribe. He calls her Storm-Eyes; she calls him Caleb, and they learn each other’s language and customs.

Bethia’s father attempts to convert the tribe, little realising that Bethia has already made inroads. Much to the anger of the shaman, he takes Caleb to raise him with his own son, Makepeace, and teach him Latin and Greek, preparatory to entering Harvard. Although Bethia is far brighter than her brother, as a girl reared in a Puritan family, she is forbidden from learning, and cannot maintain the same friendship with Caleb. Her plight is to be indentured as the men’s housekeeper in payment for Makepeace’s attendance at school, where she remains in contact with Caleb and his friends, while also eavesdropping on his lessons in her unquenched thirst for knowledge.

Two threads run through Bethia’s narrative. One is the water, and the other is Caleb. Fortunately Brooks avoids the modern storyteller’s habit of enforcing an anachronistic love-story, but their tales are nevertheless interwoven.

The novel is written in the form of fragmented diaries, which only pick up the story at random passages, and give it a disjointed feel. Perhaps because it is true and Brooks felt restrained by the facts, or perhaps because the narrative voice of the Puritan doesn’t allow for colour, but the novel is strangely uninspiring from a usually vivid author.

Percy Jackson and the Sea Monsters – Rick Riordan (3.7)
The second instalment of Percy Jackson’s adventures in the land of myths and Greek gods continues where the previous one left off. Percy (son of Poseidon) is happily playing basketball in his New York school gym when he is attacked by a race of giant cannibals (Laistrygonians) who live in the far north, possibly Canada. He is soon back at Camp Half-Blood, the summer camp for demi-gods where all is not so friendly as before and, like later terms at Hogwarts, there is an air of danger.

Chariot races take the place of Quidditch. They are a sport the children love but which are extremely dangerous and would never be allowed in the sanitised education department in which we live today.

Percy is sent on quests by Hermes, a shifty character dressed as a courier, who delivers messages, provides him with travelling equipment, tells him stories and is surprised when Percy wants them to have a moral. “Goodness, you act like it’s a fable. It’s a true story. Does truth have a moral?”

Percy must sail through the Sea of Monsters, through which all heroes sail on their adventures. It used to be in the Mediterranean but now the power of Western Civilization has shifted to the United States (with Mount Olympus being above the Empire State Building, and Hades being under Los Angeles), the Sea of Monsters is off the east coast – the Bermuda Triangle, where weird things happen that mortals can’t explain. He battles many mythical beasts such as hydra in a Florida swamp, and the Gray sisters in a taxi. He encounters pirate ships manned by skeleton ghosts, Edward Teach (Blackbeard) who likes celery, Circe turning men into guinea pigs, Cyclops, sirens, Charybdis and Scylla, the Golden Fleece, and man-eating sheep.

Percy is again assisted by Annabeth (daughter of Athena), Tyson (Percy’s half-brother and actually a Cyclops) and Clarisse (daughter of Ares) in his attempts to find and release his friend Grover, the satyr. All the children are trying to win the admiration, or even simply the attention, of their God-like parents while the Gods have to act indirectly and cannot intervene every time their child is in trouble. With echoes of Tolstoy, Riordan writes, “Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy.”

The novel is fast-paced and narrated in a relaxed, humorous style, full of mythological references and throw-away lines. Mostly it is perfectly pitched to provide entertainment with a sprinkling of education and is a fine sequel. I’m still looking forward to reading the next one.

The Gathering – Anne Enright (3.9)
When Liam Hegarty’s body is found washed ashore at Brighton, it falls to his sister, Veronica, to break the news to their mother. She is one of seemingly endless children (I think there are nine) and the whole family congregates for the wake and funeral. Veronica was closest in age and sentiment to her alcoholic brother, and his loss throws her into a reverie in which she remembers her childhood and reflects how unhappy she is with her present domestic situation: estranged husband; two daughters.

Veronica reinvents her past and it is important to her that she tells her story well. She is obsessed with sex and how people’s bodies fit together, which strikes the reader as awkward – imagining one’s grandparents having sex (in graphic detail) is not comfortable. Themes of sex (as opposed to love), abuse, children and procreation, are thrust upon us throughout the novel.

The novel has that blindingly brilliant but increasingly irritating Irish literature style of recording every minor detail. There are random asides and semantic tangents that lead to cul-de-sacs, like Virginia Woolf or, yes, I’m afraid it must be said, James Joyce. Veronica allows herself to be easily distracted by wordplay, and, in trying to comment on all minutiae, she can run out of specifics and trails off into vagueness. Although she makes constant perceptive comments, you begin to wonder how discerning these are, or whether they are just another device to distract you from the fact that there isn’t actually a story.

Waiting for Sunrise – William Boyd (3.6)
Waiting for Sunrise begins in Vienna in 1913 with elements of psychology and seduction, but it soon becomes a First World War spy thriller along the lines of John Buchan or John Le Carré. The switches between the two genres can cause disorientation, but the plot twists are intriguing enough to keep the pages turning.

Lysander Rief is an actor, like his famous father before him. The novel commences as he walks into an appointment with a psychiatrist, Dr Bensimon, whom he (and presumably his fiancée, Blanche) hopes will be able to help him with his anorgasma (failure to reach climax during sex). Dr Bensimon suggests parallelism as a cure. His theory, which is discredited in a mocking cafe scene by Freud, posits that we can change our past by inventing new memories. “The world is in essence neutral – flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It’s us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory.”

And therein lies the essence of the novel, as nothing is as it seems and pretence is everywhere. Vienna (and London as it transpires) is, “So nice and so pleasant, everybody smiling politely, nobody farting or picking their nose. But below the surface the river is flowing dark and strong. The river of sex.” Everything is a facade, created for maximum effect, from the poses of actors to the disguises of spies.

The war changes things beyond recognition. While it may appear unlikely that a mild-mannered actor can become embroiled in secret codes, torture and blackmail, these are interesting times. The “dislocation and sudden rupture” of war casts him in a new light, placing an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. The novel is extremely readable, offering personal insight alongside the thrilling tale.

Books Read in February 2012

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in February 2012. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

The Postmistress – Sarah Blake (3.2)
There are some things about The Postmistress that don’t make sense. Iris James runs the post office in Franklin, a small Cape Cod village, where she insists there is no such thing as a postmistress; it is a gender-neutral position. So why is the novel called the postmistress? Is it because it is marketed to women? Is it to draw attention to the fact that women in office were still unusual? Or is it to suggest an illicit relationship between the post and the woman who delivers it? Whatever the reason, it is meant to deliver a talking point for book groups – one of many.

The setting is 1940 and the spectre of war looms large (it’s the sort of novel that warrants such clichés in review), although many Americans question whether they need to intervene with Europe’s problems. Frankie Bard is an attractive female reporter from Greenwich Village, with a decidedly male name and a distinctively feminine outlook. She attempts to get the situation across to the listeners in the United States to sway their emotions and their decisions. Hopefully her dispatches are less hyperbolic than the purple prose.

Iris is among her listeners, as is Emma Fitch, young pregnant wife of Will, the town doctor. Will Fitch has gone to London to try and do some good while assuaging his conscience. In a highly implausible plot point, he meets Frankie in a bomb shelter, and Emma hears the report of the devastation without realising her personal involvement. Will gives Frankie a letter for Emma that she cannot deliver; an act which assumes major significance due to the war. Not since Romeo and Juliet has an undelivered letter caused such consternation.

Frankie tries to wrest some of the importance to herself, detracting from the great events unfolding on the world stage. She claims, “Some stories don’t get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight ahead at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn – one could carry the world that way.” But the story is told, and this is the fundamental philosophical paradox: we are meant to feel for her because she doesn’t divulge her secret, but if it really were secret, we wouldn’t know or be able to feel it.

The author writes in the ‘story behind the story’ that the central question of the novel is ‘How do you bear (in both senses of the word) the news?’ It is increasingly common for the author to attempt to direct our thoughts. When Frankie’s boss tells her the difference between reporting and recording, he suggests, “You need a frame. People need to know where to look. They need us to point.” This gives the reader very little to do and so this reader practically gave up.

Books Burn Badly – Manuel Rivas (3.8)
I know people will love this book and liken it to work by Salman Rushdie and Garcia Marquez among others, and level charges of magical realism and colourful history at it, but it just didn’t enthral me, despite the gorgeous cover. Perhaps it is because there are too many characters, or it jumps around in chronological order so much, or the persistent overuse of personal pronouns (who is he this time?).

The premise of the novel is the well-documented fact that, during the Spanish Civil War, the Falangists burned books at the Coruña Docks on 19th August 1936. Books were stolen and removed from burning piles, then buried or hunted down and all are highly valued. Words, sentences and books become prized objects in a land of uncertainty.

A prisoner learns Braille so that he can read at night. A harpooner “practised the art of saying ugly words in foreign languages for them to sound a little distinguished.” A woman realises she must welcome words into her relationship with a man “man lived in a state of extreme alert with language.” Can the beauty of language mitigate the malice of action? “What would you think of someone who recites beautiful poems and sings melancholy songs before committing a crime? Does this affect the poems they recite and the songs they sing?” Such is the existentialist nature of the novel that questions like this arise frequently.

The language is, indeed even in translation, remarkably seductive, and it is easy to forget the factious fighting and allow the perfect prose to wash over you. Although frequently dealing in the abstract, it is the details that baffle. The novel and the characters maintain their distance; there is probably a way into this intricate novel but I failed to find it.

There are people who draw pictures of “women with things on their heads”; there are people who claim that “In this country, history always spoils everything”; there is a prophet who is excellent at predicting the past; there are also those whose recollections bear little resemblance to reality. These people may or may not be the same person. It is difficult to fathom how they relate to each other, if at all, due to the previously mentioned excess of personal pronouns.

And through it all, there are books and words and stories. A man who listens to radio stations in foreign languages claims that, “Words sound wonderful when you can’t understand them.” That may be, but when you can’t understand novels, they are merely frustrating.

Books read in January 2012

Below are short reviews of the books that I read in January 2012. The numbers in the brackets are the marks I have given them out of five

Kraken – China Miéville (3.3)China Mieville’s Kraken is a revelation. It’s different from most books; blindingly well written and absolutely bonkers in a fantasy apocalyptic world. Billy Harrow is minding his own business as a curator of a giant squid, his museum’s prize exhibit, but when it mysteriously disappears he is drawn into a wonderfully weird world as he attempts to recover it. He soon discovers that he is not the only one trying to find it, and that it is worshipped by a bunch of Krakenists.

Billy is soon involved with Marge (his friend’s girlfriend) in a frightening parallel world in which all seems normal but really isn’t. There are streets which no-one knows exist, and which don’t feature on maps because they are sort of folded in on themselves: Everything is unusual.

And the characters are fantastic. Goss and Subby are hideous ciphers from macabre nightmares that turn people inside out or kill them in other violent and gruesome ways. They may or may not work for Tattoo, who is exactly as his name suggests; a moving ink face carved into his enemy’s back. Collingswood is a sort-of policewoman, although her uniform is unkempt and her manner downright rude. She works for a ‘special’ branch, can hear people’s thoughts and owns an invisible pet pig that snuffles out information.

Billy has an angelus ex machine watching him, to avenge him and protect him from evil pursuers. It is physical remains and/or specimens in a bottle, which rolls around the floor and follows him with a grinding noise. He teams up with Dane, a renegade double agent from the Kraken cult, whom everyone thinks stole their colossal leader, and a union-leader who cannot assume his own form but has to fill an empty vessel such as a Captain Kirk action figure or a St Christopher medallion.

What all of these disparate groups have in common is a belief that things are coming to an end. To each, however, the ending will be different because although all Doomsday cults believe in revelations and apocrypha, they are all fascinatingly individual. In any holy book, it’s only the last chapter where it gets interesting.

There is a depth to this novel that surpasses the usual fantasy/ good-versus-evil/ quest fodder, with some serious issues addressed. They are hidden in humour and intelligent writing as the author refuses to accept the standard cliché. Mieville’s black comedy and sense of the weird combine to make an imaginative riot – surprisingly fun for fantasy – and doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is the biggest achievement in this genre.

The Little Shadows – Marina Endicott (3)
The novel focuses on the performing world through which a trio of sisters is shepherded by their mother, Flora, after their father’s death. Set in the run-up to the First World War it trips across Canada with pauses at theatres and boarding houses as the family struggles to get by. They perform a singing sister-act (all totally decent and nothing even slightly burlesque) and are taught vocal dexterity and audience manipulation. The chapters are introduced with snippets from manuals such as How to Enter Vaudeville, which give the novel an instructive flavour. As the girls are taught, so are the readers, and although initially interesting, it becomes a little tedious as if the author has to explain her position rather than allowing the reader to discover it.

Although the sisters work well together and depend on each other, they have separate characters and concerns, endearing them to different admirers. They have a special bond as sisters tend to do, especially in novels like this. Bella, the youngest, wants to make a name for herself, and she has talent in that direction. She is the one with the acting talent and sees herself as different from other people; she loves the life and the spontaneity of the theatrical circuit.

Being a novel about three girls, men and relationships with them are doubtless going to be introduced. Flora, the mother, has many occasions to throw herself on the mercy or sympathy of former male acquaintances. Aurora, the oldest daughter, feels a responsibility to marry well, to keep the family out of poverty. She aims for men of position in the world of vaudeville (although that doesn’t necessarily work out so well) and treats affection as a business transaction. Clover, the middle sister falls genuinely in love but her man leaves her for a war on another continent. It was a highly restrictive world for women, and while the stage marked them with a subtle stain, it also briefly set them free.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan (4)
Percy Jackson is the new children’s hero – literally. His mother may be mortal, but his father is a God, and not just any God; he is Poseidon, God of the Sea and one of the big three (the other two being Zeus and Hades). This first book in the series begins in the real world, and Percy finds out who and what he is, as we do. There are many similarities with the Harry Potter franchise, but magic is substituted for the power of the Gods, and the (primarily Greek) mythology is learned almost by osmosis as the adventure races along.

Percy lives with his loving mother and repulsive step-father; this story-book set-up is superficially explained later in the book. He is confused and hurt, bullied, disorientated and suffers from dyslexia and ADHD. These turn out to be special gifts: the letters float off the page because his mind is hardwired to read ancient Greek, he can’t sit still in the classroom because of his “battlefield reflexes”, and he has attention problems because he sees too much, not too little.

When the attentions of the monsters gets too alarming, Percy is sent to a summer camp – Camp Half-Blood – where all the orphaned or unwanted children are like him; half-bloods with a god as a parent. Here he forms friendships with a girl called Annabeth, daughter of Athena, and a satyr called Grover. The three of them go on a quest to recover the stolen lightning bolt of Zeus. Zeus is not at all happy about its disappearance, and is prepared to wage a cataclysmic war to retrieve it.

The book is packed with fabled beasts and mythological figures. Percy notes that, “In a way it’s nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong.” All the gods are the same – they move with Western Civilization, so now they are in America, and the entrance to the underworld is (obviously) in LA.

As well as thrilling exploits, interesting knowledge and relationships between characters, the book also has elements of humour. Percy Jackson is a great new hero and his adventures will be keenly followed as children gets to grips with his world.

Books read in November

Below are short reviews of the books that I read in November 2009. The numbers in the brackets are the marks I have given them out of five.

The Icarus Girl – Helen Oyeyemi (3.3)
Jessamy Harrison, born to a British father and Nigerian mother, is a bright, intelligent girl but prone to violent tantrums, fierce illnesses and an inability to cope with social situations. In an effort to counter the disruptive tendencies, her parents take her to stay with her family in Nigeria where she meets TillyTilly on her grandfather’s compound. Delighted to have made friends with such a captivating character, Jess only begins to realise there may be something suspicious when TillyTilly follows her home to England, no one else can see her, and bad things start happening.

Jess is an intense girl with strange ideas and big fears of the unknown. Many children retreat into their imagination but Jess’ mind does not seem like a safe place to be. She is afraid to open her mind to people and air her worries; unwilling to relinquish any perceived control, she builds her own isolation. Clear, taut prose creates a chilling and unsettling atmosphere, while the mixture of Christian ritual and Nigerian superstition heightens the sense of cultural dislocation.

It is a debut novel and there are still some immature devices and unrefined elements. The first-person child narration hampers character development, while the repetitive and slightly predictable structure is not entirely satisfactory. However, both the substance and style make this young author one to watch for the future.

Press Pass: 40 Years of Award-Winning Press Photography – Geoff Dale (3.8)
The subtitle of this book of black and white photographs is ‘the critical moments that make the news… and how to capture them.’ The last part of that sentence is essential because, although the book does provide a social commentary of New Zealand over the past 40 years, it is also of interest to budding amateur photographers as each image includes details of the photographic settings such as exposure, focal length, shutter speed, and aperture width.

The book is divided into six sections: awards; news; features; portraits; sports; photojournalism. The portraits are an eclectic mix of faces familiar to New Zealanders, including Roger Douglas, Kelly Tarlton, Dame Whina Cooper, David Lange, Keisha Castle Hughes, and Rod Stewart. The news covers events ranging from the Mt Erebus crash or the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior to the Auckland blackout or the Queen Street riots.

My favourites are probably the sports photos. It is very hard to capture an instant and in fact, he says that the photo of the celebration often makes a better shot than the actual scoring of a try or the taking of a wicket. Persistence, patience and preparation are crucial. He provides explanations of technique – how to capture motion and blur the background; how a telephoto lens can give a shortening effect; how to light a shot at night or use an exterior flash.

 Dale took up photography after a knee injury stopped him playing rugby – a game he still loves – although working for a photo-agency he needs to take the photos the customers want, which are often of themselves, rather than of the match itself – it’s not all fun and games.

As a journalist for the New Zealand Herald for 28 years before becoming a freelance journalist, Dale admits the job is both a great honour and a daunting responsibility, allowing you to have a “front row seat at major events in the history of your country.” He explains that despite unprecedented access, you are still bound by deadlines, integrity and protocol.

A great photo is the difference between a story appearing on the front page or page 12, but newspaper photographers are seeing their specialist role eroded by ‘citizen journalists’ and lack of payment. This book shows what will be lost if this movement persists – the photographer’s art is a fine one, indeed and Geoff Dale is a great proponent of it.

The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean – Paul Theroux (3.8)
One of the Pillars of Hercules is the rock of Gibraltar; the other is the rock on the other side of the straits – Ceuta in Morocco – apparently flung there by Hercules as his tenth labour. Paul Theroux aims to travel from one to the other the long way round, all around the shores of the Mediterranean coast – the shores of light. Following this inland sea gives him an itinerary predetermined by the coastline, and he discovers that the towns and people along the shore have more in common with each other than they do with people from other parts of their country.

 Theroux is not above generalisations. The Spanish are “both very polite and very curious” while the Corsicans are proud. “The more generous and extrovert Italians were full of compliments.” The Greeks are “ill-tempered and irrational”; the Israelis are “gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humour”; the French are racist.

Descriptions of countries are equally succinct and often one-dimensional. He is obsessed by pornography and bullfighting in Spain, and dog mess on the pavements in France. Greece is “an awful place, of glum grey tenements and wrecked cars and rough treeless hills of solemn stone.” He claims to have no interest in politics but he has much to say about the small countries with the big ideals and the recent wars; Albania and Israel attract his severest criticism.

He likes Corsica with its “cold days of dazzling sunshine, its cliffs of glittering granite, the blue sky after a day of drizzle, its lonely roads.” He praises the Riviera as being the epitome of the Mediterranean dream. He can drift off on tangents and his prose can become almost whimsical. When he likes a place, he can veer off into flights of fancy, such as Venice which he describes as “the loveliest city in the world. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs.” Trieste on the other hand is simply, “A city of suits, a businesslike place with an air of solidity and prosperity.”

He travels alone because he has no fixed plans and changes his destination on a whim, but lack of a travel companion can make him feel lonely and he occasionally misses the normality of routine. He frequently mentions that he did his laundry and wrote up his notes. Knowing the personal details and the mechanics of the travel experience gives us a sense that we are there too, but it is also intrusive.

Grace – Linn Ullmann (3.4)
Johan has terminal cancer. He wants to exit the world with dignity so he asks his second wife, Mai, to help him when the time comes. When the time does come, however, he wonders whether he has made the right choice, why she agreed to do it, and why she is wearing new clothes and make-up for the first time as though waiting for him to die so that she can move on.

From diagnosis to death is a short space of time and Ullman captures the fear and impotence of palliative care. In this slender volume things happen with the swiftness of degenerate disease. Although he hasn’t got the strength to write them down, Johan has many memories, “rushing back now, like children demanding attention.”

He thinks of his first wife, Alice, and their son Andreas. He thinks of Mai as she brushes her hair with one hundred strokes every night. But most of all he thinks of his mother and his life with her as a child, from their daily summer walks to look for wild strawberries, to the magical mystery of Christmas Eve. When she was sick, he bargained with Death to take his father rather than his mother, and when she recovers but his father dies, Johan is at pains to explain to Death that this is “no small sacrifice.”

Expertly translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland, the prose is sparse but efficient and packed with meaning and the memories and anecdotes are introduced without blandishment. It’s short, it seems simple, but it is ultimately compelling and Johan will haunt you long after you have finished reading his story.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (4.6)
Generally I avoid books that claim to be delightful or charming as they are usually sentimental pap, but this really is as enjoyable as they say. It contains all the ingredients I like in a novel: epistolary form – check; discussions of books – check; island mentality – check; Occupied Territory during the war – check. In fact the only reason it doesn’t get top marks is because it introduces the infernal Jane Austen/Mr Darcy angle and threatens to become chick lit in the final pages.

It has been likened to 84 Charring Cross Road due to the correspondence between people who don’t know each other but meet due to a shared love of books. When Dawsey Adams buys a second-hand copy of Charles Lambs’ essays, he finds Juliet Ashton’s name and address in the front cover and decides to write to her asking if she can recommend him some more books.

Juliet is a writer trying to find a new subject for a book, and what better topic than the characters who live on Guernsey and survived the German Occupation. She discovers that they began a book club as cover for a pig dinner –and had to fill in the details to make it look realistic. Juliet interviews the members of this society by letter until she decides to visit them in person in May 1946 and discovers a host of quirky characters with unbreakable spirits.

In letters to her publisher and friends, she records the deprivation the islanders suffered as tales of domestic hardship became a fact of life. She feels great sympathy for those who had to make the terrible decision of whether to evacuate their children to England to live among strangers (they weren’t allowed to contact them or even know where they were staying for security reasons) or whether to keep them in Guernsey with the threat of German invasion – they had a day to decide.

Juliet has firm opinions on writing and romance – you know that things between her and her illustrious suitor, Mark, are doomed because he doesn’t understand the appeal of Guernsey and because, “Mark doesn’t write, he telephones.” It’s old-fashioned and a little bit twee, but sweet and comforting, to be read with a cup of tea and a biscuit.