Books read in April

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

A Special Providence – Richard Yates (3.9)
This is a tale of a mother and her son in which Alice relies on Prentice in a way that cannot be healthy and copes with setbacks by simply pretending they’re not happening. She likes to play the victim, and she avoids reality by making sculptures and living in a fantasy world. At times the novel reads as though it is floating on a cloud of valium. As a 1940s American divorcee, maybe Alice is drugged up, but hers is more probably an alcoholic fug.

In this world, men go out to work and women stay at home, keeping house and raising children in stifling suburbia. Women have long boozy lunches where they get through “round after round of relaxing Manhattans” and then drive home. Alice punctuates this inertia with impulsive gestures and hysterical pronouncements. She likes to imagine her life as a drama almost as if she has cast herself in a film or television adaptation of her life.

Prentice inherits some of this theatricality and when he goes to war he uses it as an opportunity to prove something. He feels worthy during the war and sad when it is over. “The war had ended too soon. The purpose had gone out of his life. There was nothing for him to do now but exist from day to day, enjoying the peace and the luxury that he felt he didn’t deserve.”

Existing from day to day is mind-numblingly dull in this suburban American lifestyle. The Stepford Wives element is painful and heart-wrenching to read. I feel for this generation. They may have lived in the land of plenty materialistically, but the souls of the nation are impoverished.

Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh (3.5)
Nominated for the 2008 Booker Prize, this novel received favourable reviews in the more intellectual press, although I don’t understand why. The novel is diverting, but not exactly deserving. Hailed as a Salman Rushdie with a touch of Dickens, he is more like a Bryce Courtenay: not that there is anything wrong with that if you want to create a sprawling saga, but it’s not exactly literary fiction.

In the first of a planned trilogy, a boat called the Ibis is loaded with ‘coolies’ and criminals from Calcutta and shipped to Madagascar where it is intended that they work on the sugar plantations. After a rambling 533 pages, they have not reached their destination and a mutiny is planned. In other words, it’s far from plain sailing.

One of the main problems is the host of characters who may be colourful, but they are not credible. It is as though Ghosh went to a pick and mix store of stock personalities and chose one of each. The novel is packed full of detail of customs and culture from the growing of poppies and the processing in an opium factory to the court cases and burnings on funeral pyres. There are many threads to the story but none of them stand out and the result is a tangled mess.

The other issue, and it is a big one, is the language. In conjuring up some pirate seafaring patois, the author has created words whose meanings you have to guess or look up on the internet (he has his own site dedicated to it) like Lewis Carroll’s nonsense speak or some ghastly fantasy novel. I’m sure it’s all very clever, but I can’t be bothered looking up a translation – I’d really rather know what the author was talking about. Swathes of the novel are completely nonsensical.

There are some fairly obvious metaphors within the novel – the main one being a theme of equality. When the passengers are crammed into the hull of the Ibis, they are literally all in the same boat. Many of the characters assume disguises and new identities – a major theme being the possibility of reinvention or reincarnation. “They were all kin now; their rebirth in the ship’s womb had made them into a single family.” The most appealing part of the narrative is the description of the camaraderie that develops, particularly among the women on board the ship, banished below decks for the duration of the voyage.

For everyone in this story, the poppy seed is the guider and decider of their fate, and the nature of opium addiction is examined at length. Scatological violence, cruelty and perversion pervade the novel but everything just seems a little too hard; a little too hopeless which inures the reader to the suffering and lessens the dramatic impact. This first part of the trilogy concludes on the verge of the Opium Wars, so will I read the others? Probably, but I won’t be making it a priority.

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates (4.3)
As is my wont, I had to read this book before I saw the film. It is a heart-breaking work of subtlety and dissatisfaction with characters and situations so commonplace and real that they are still powerful 50 years on. Frank and April Wheeler live on Revolutionary Road, a suburban enclave where housewives raise perfect children and have cocktails and dinner waiting when their husbands come home from work. They believe they are above this version of domestic bliss and they mock it with wry smiles and plans to move to Paris, but ultimately they discover their road leads to nowhere and they are as trapped as everybody else.

The novel commences with a disastrous amateur play. The precise descriptions are brilliant and it soon becomes apparent that everything is a façade and everyone is acting a part – some are just better at it than others. Frank’s career aims are decidedly modest as he sleepwalks through his “deadly dull job in the city and deadly dull home in the suburbs”. He looks for fulfilment elsewhere but, despite having the perfect family complete with beautiful wife, admired and coveted by all the neighbours, and the clichéd affair with his secretary, he doesn’t know where to find this self-affirmation.

His marriage to April is part of his projected persona. They don’t know, or care to know anything about each other, preferring to deal in the abstract. Frank wonders, “Was his wife unhappy? That was unfortunate, but it was, after all, her problem.” He has no idea and little interest in her daily existence as though she only comes to life in relation to him.

April’s dreams and ambition were all curtailed when she fell pregnant and their lives were changed irrevocably. When she discovers she is pregnant again she is horrified that they will have to cancel their plans to move to Paris. Frank considers his wife unnatural for not wanting another child, suspicious of her demeanour and afraid this means she might harm their existing offspring.

It is a brutally misogynistic world where women are expected to endure and if they are not entirely satisfied, there must be something wrong with them. April is born ahead of her time and unable to do anything about society’s expectations. “It is an enormous, obscene delusion – this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs.” She is simply drowning in suburbia.

In this neighbourhood numbed from reality, the residents merely tread water, doubtless assisted by Valium and Prozac to help them sleepwalk through their muffled underwater world. It is a horrifying idyll and I read it with my eyes wide open and tears of frustration on my cheeks. If the film is even half as good, it deserves the Oscar accolades.

S. – Slavenka Drakulić (4.5)
S. is a fictional everywoman who became pregnant after being repeatedly gang raped by soldiers in a Serbian prison camp. Now in hospital in Sweden she contemplates her feelings for the baby that she wishes was still-born. She looks back on her time in the camp with a sense of detachment. She was made to feel like an object when placed in the ‘women’s room’ where “She was in a storehouse of women, in a room where female bodies were stored for the use of men.”

From the moment a soldier enters her ordered world as a school-teacher and makes her leave, get on a bus and transports her to the camp, her life ceases to be her own. It is as if she is merely watching it, and this feeling of paralysis pervades the novel. It is almost bleaker to talk in generalities and assumptions like whispers because things are too terrible to mention out loud. The women don’t talk about rape because if word got around that they had been defiled they would not be able to go back home to their villages, their husbands or parents.

S. learns quickly to live only for the moment and not worry about anything that doesn’t directly affect her. It is amazing how resilient people can be and how they can adapt to even the most horrific situation. All she wants is to be left alone and survive through to the next day. She and the other women want the men to go out into the field and shoot people, turning their attention away from them.

Despite the romantic notion that women band together in times of stress, S. finds this is not the case. The first lesson of survival in the camp is selfishness; you must do whatever you can to survive; if you share food you might starve. They quickly learn to fend for themselves. “If she survives, she will survive alone, in spite of, rather than together with the other women.” They are all afraid, but only for themselves. They make decisions which have nothing to do with right or wrong, and everything to do with staying alive.

Their memories will breed hatred – their lives have been destroyed, but the future is even bleaker because the sons will seek revenge and the cycle of war will perpetuate. This is a harrowing novel and a female companion to The Tenth Circle of Hell. It may be only 200 pages long, but it is powerful and painful and gives a voice to a generation of silent women.

Books read in March

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

Gem Squash Tokoloshe – Rachel Zadok (4.3)
Faith is a child growing up on a farm in South Africa. Her father is away on business most of the time and he comes home at the weekends, until he stops coming. Her mother, Bella, fills her head with tales of fairies and bad spirits, who lurk around the house and come out of the paintings, until she is terrified to close her eyes.

Her life is unusual, but she is a resilient child with childish concerns who hates the eponymous gem squash, which are served boiled up for dinner on Sunday night and are supposed to remind Papa that home was the best place to eat. Mary, who used to work on the farm, tells Faith about the tokoloshe, an evil spirit who steals their souls while they sleep because the land they live on doesn’t belong to them.

Not only is the first hint of the deeper apartheid that Faith doesn’t understand, but it naturally gives her nightmares. Bella counters them by telling her that tokoloshe are afraid of gem squash and if she eats enough of them they will protect her. Such inventive stories are appealing until it becomes uncertain as to whether Bella actually believes them herself. With her mysterious father gone, Faith’s mother drifts into madness.

Nomsa is brought in to help about the place, and Faith befriends her, not caring that she is black and that little white girls are shunned when they go to market with their black housekeepers. The child becomes protective of her mother, perverting the natural order of care. Young Faith sees things she should never have to see, as Nomsa is raped and murdered, and her mother is violently abused. But even in these horrific incidents, there is beauty in description.

Faith copes by diminishing herself physically and metaphorically, and she is taken in by her mother’s sister in Johannesburg. She grows up with a brittle personality, constructing a defensive shield out of sex, alcohol and drugs and seems to be heading into the same spiral of madness that saw her mother locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Part two of the novel is fourteen years after the ‘incident’ when her mother dies and leaves Faith the farm. Faith returns to a place full of unreliable memories but sharp evocations of place, where she struggles to remember the events of that fateful night, persuade the hostile black workers living on the farm to work for her, and to become a young secure woman although she feels desperately alone. The first section is the better part of the book, as Zadok captures the youthful voice expertly.

There is a nightmarish quality of fear in this novel. You can almost feel the heat, smell the sharp tang of sweat and taste the metallic texture of dry earth and blood. The cover illustrations by Yoko Ikeno of faintly menacing silhouettes against a glowing orange background are reminiscent of Jan Pienkowski, while the writing reeks of Toni Morrison in spiritual phase. It is disturbing, haunting and achingly beautiful.

Paula Spencer – Roddy Doyle (3.8)
In this novel, we catch up with Paula Spencer, the anti-heroine from The Woman Who Walked into Doors. It’s ten years since that book finished, she hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days, and she’s learning how to be a recovering alcoholic. By trying to control her life and take little steps with small expectations, she is getting through one day at a time and things are slowly getting better. She has learned to be satisfied with the little things, and they really are achingly simple. She is keen on keeping lists because it’s all slipping away, and she is proud of minor advancements, such as remembering to take a bag to the shops.

Paula has to rebuild her relationships with her children and allow them to hate her. She knows she has no right to be a part of their lives and it is genuinely heartbreaking to see how she has hurt them. She can’t dwell on the past or wallow in guilt; she has to accept it and learn to deal with the present. Her daughter, Leanne is a borderline alcoholic and as Paula watches her drink vodka she feels unqualified to comment. She talks about nothing with her, but when Leanne is drunk, they come to blows.

Roddy Doyle’s distinctive style suits the story as he writes credible dialogue with dashes and repetitious short sentences. Silent thoughts are no different from words spoken aloud. Paula Spencer is an immediate novel with contemporary concerns. Roddy Doyle mentions the smoking ban, ratemyteachers.com, Liverpool winning the Champions League Final in Istanbul and Kylie Minogue getting breast cancer.

The setting of this novel may date it but the sentiments won’t. It is bleak at times and absolutely heart-wrenching, but there is hope. You can try and put your life back together. You can emerge from addiction, but you have to accept that you can never go back. There are no easy answers or feel-good flights of fancy in this novel. It’s good, grim and realistic. And it’s short, sharp and painful – Roddy Doyle at his best.

People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks (3.5)
This novel follows the imagined history and developments of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a medieval Jewish prayer book recovered and saved by many people who have risked a lot to preserve it. Now it is in the hands of expert book restorer Hanna Heath, who attempts to understand what, other than its age, makes it so special. As she finds various things within the book, such as a butterfly wing, a wine stain, a white hair or a grain of salt, the reader is transported back to their origins and so we learn the journey of this talismanic book and the characters whose lives were touched by it.

Hanna examines the book from a forensic angle as she gathers evidence about its origins. She tracks the book through Venice, Vienna, Sarajevo, Tarragona and Seville, searching for clues, cracking codes and solving mysteries and riddles en route. I assume, if The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, that this sort of thing is very popular.

Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for March, but People of the Book is far from high-end literature. The characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue is creaky and unconvincing. Hanna harbours deep competitiveness and resentment towards her mother, who isn’t at all realistic. Hanna herself is not a likeable character, which isn’t a problem per se, but she is arrogant, and guilty of over-explaining to the reader to prove her credentials. She also keeps harping on about her Australian background, which isn’t actually relevant.

The sections featuring Hanna are irritating but they are thankfully interspersed with fictional accounts of times of historical significance in which the Haggadah played a part. The book shadows the Diaspora of the Jews, but there are also similarities with other religions. The novel is fairly simplistic and the religious/political elements are not exactly subtle, but it makes for a good read, nonetheless. I’d recommend it for a holiday book – it will pass the time and it really won’t matter if you leave it on the plane.

The Tenth Circle of Hell – Rezak Hukanović (4.5)
This memoir of life on the death camps of Bosnia argues that Dante was wrong, Hell consists not of nine circles, but of ten. This is the tenth as narrated by Rezak Hukanović, a journalist, radio announcer and poet in the city of Prijedor who survived the Omarska and Manjača camps. He writes of his experiences in the third person, referring to himself as Djemo because he felt that the brutal events he endured and witnessed must have happened to someone else.

In an almost Orwellian nightmare, Bosnians were rounded up by the Serbs in 1992 and sent to prison camps where the ‘guards’ were people with grievances against old neighbours or teachers. At night they called out lists of names of men whom they would beat for no reason. Some returned with broken bones and some never came back at all. It is terrifying how quickly these people turned against each other and how brutal and bestial they became if they scented weakness or a chance for revenge.

The physical agony was bad enough, but the mindless degradation was pervasive.
The prisoners had to hope for outside help or that the guards would recover some humanity. The prisoners themselves attempted to help each other whenever they could, bringing meals to the sick and trying to mend broken bones. While some attempted to remain positive, others simply attempted to remain alive as the sense of hopelessness became routine.

The Tenth Circle of Hell is a powerful but depressing memoir. When we read Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn we shook our head and said we could never let these things happen again. But we did. If these people never forgive each other, the shame is all of ours.