Author Archives: The Reading Bug

21st century literature, Book review, Ian McEwan, Spy stories, Sweet Tooth

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Read in the Jonathan Cape hardback first edition.

Serena begins a relationship with the writer, Tom Haley, she is “running”, without telling him she is a “spy”. This provokes a strong reaction from one of her colleagues. Much of the novel is spent reaching this point, filling in Serena’s early love affairs, including one with a professor at her university who in later turns out, to little surprise, was leaking information to the Russians earlier in the Cold War.
Serena reads Haley’s short stories, and we are given detailed synopses of them, including extensive quotes. This gives us the stories within stories which gives the novel a complex structure. Eventually the details of the MI5 funding come out in the press, no doubt leaked by this jealous colleague, and the relationship reaches at crisis.  In the final chapter there is a revelation which reframes the rest of the narrative in a very similar way to the disclosure at the end of Atonement, and prompts the reader to look at the novel in a completely different light. This technique could be irritating – it’s not really necessary – but the successes of the novel elsewhere outweigh this distraction.
The central character appears to be an open, slightly delusional, slightly dishonest, and not very likeable character, and prior to the final chapter revelation I (and I think most readers) thought this was simply a flawed narrator of the kind we are very familiar with in much contemporary fiction. The fact that McEwan has gone further than this doesn’t I think take us anywhere particularly new – one kind of flawed perspective in a narrator is very similar to another; it is not as if we get any closer or indeed further away from “the truth”.
A couple of other moans before I try to get to why I read this novel in little over 24 hours. First, the period detail which McEwan tries so hard at getting right. The problem with this is that his trying is just too apparent – for example telling us the price of a pint of beer in 1974 (13p). Period detail needs to be accurate and appropriate, but not flaunted. Second, the plot developments, other than the final twist, and too obvious – the Cambridge don who turns out to be a spy is just a bit of a cliche, and can be seen a mile off; like-wise the boyfriend who is not just that much into sex with his hot girlfriend, who shockingly turns out to be gay. And so on. Lastly, the Monty Hall problem, which McEwan doesn’t spend too much time on, thankfully, has already been done in Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident” and comes across as tired here.
So why did I keep reading with such interest? McEwan’s prose style is mature and well crafted – there is rarely a false note with the language (as opposed to the plot). The central character is a bit wet and dim, always a few pages behind the reader and her associates, but is generally likeable and pleasant. Some of the period and geographic detail also struck a personal chord, and many of the other writers referenced were familiar. In itself that’s not enough to account for the interest, so I think what I am going to do is let the novel settle in my mind for a bit, maybe read some reviews and reread a few chapters, and come back to it in a few weeks.
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21st century literature, Book review, Flood, Stephen Baxter

Flood by Stephen Baxter

Working on the basis that anyone Terry Pratchett decides to work with must be pretty damn good, I decided to give Stephen Baxter another try after “The Long Earth” (see review last month). “Flood” appeared to stand out from the other recommendations for reasons I haven’t decided upon. The name really tells you most of what you need to know about the premise of the book – the world floods in genuinely biblical proportions. The novel opens in the very near future with the release of a small group of hostages from their captives in Spain, a release facilitated by the Gates/Jobs/Branson like boss of one of the hostages. FloodFrom this point the waters begin to rise, and never stop, and we follow the lives of the hostages as they try to adapt, along with the rest of the world.

You can probably pencil in most of the main events along the way – the gradual breakdown of society, the development of enclaves of the rich, the move to a floating society – didn’t Kevin Costner cover this in Waterworld? There is little to keep you reading beyond the inevitable and unending succession of watery disasters. I didn’t identify with any of the principal characters, and I got the impression Baxter didn’t either, so lightly did he ink them in and so casually did he kill them off. The episodic nature of the description of the flood is reinforced by regular time jumps – several years pass between chapters, and if this is an attempt to avoid any boredom with the inevitability of the progression of the flood then it doesn’t work.

As a highly regarded science fiction writer the very least I would have expected from Baxter is some coherent science, but that is probably the most disappointing part of the novel – the attempts to explain the causes of the flood are pretty risible. There are some successful things about this novel – the description of a generation growing up never having known land for example worked well for me – this is a small consolation to what is otherwise another hugely disappointing work. I am going to persist however and have ordered the sequel “Ark” as something stubborn within me wants to know where Baxter is going with this.

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http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jasper Fforde, The Woman who died a lot, Thursday Next

The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde

Read in the Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition.

This represents a return to fform ffor Fforde, after the disappointing “One of Our Thursdays is Missing”. The seventh in the Thursday Next series, eighth if you count “The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco”, sees Thursday recovering from injuries sustained in a kidnapping attack, and feeling her age. Offered a post in the Wessex Library Service we spend around 75 pages catching up on life in 1980’s Swindon, during which I was a little worried that the inventiveness of earlier books remained missing. But the scene setting is worth the time, because the book kicks in with a puzzling attack on Thursday’s family which is clearly the work of Aornis Hades, Thursday’s nemisis. From there the action never flags.

The span of the novel plays out over a week in which a lot happens in Thursday’s life. God has decided to cut out all the potential confusion about his existence, and make himself apparent to man. Mankind seems to have taken this in his stride, even when God gets a bit truculent and starts smiting some cities out of existence, downtown Swindon being next in line. So there’s that to sort out, as well as Thursday’s new job in the library service, investigating mysterious attacks on book collections by Goliath, her other nemises, if global corporations can be nemises, and indeed if the plural of nemesis is nemises. Her brother Joffy is now in effect mankind’s chief negotiator with God over the difficult “meaning of life” question. Aornis has escaped, and needs tracking down. And the lives of her children get more complicated as the grow up – Friday is due to murder someone at the end of the week, Tuesday (keep up there) is investigating how to deflect God’s wrath via an anti-smiting device, and Jenny doesn’t exist.

How Fforde keeps all these balls in the air, adding in jokes about Dark Matter (setting up the next book in the series nicely) and a range of wacky ideas about time travel, avatars, parallel worlds (thrown in and lightly thrown away) and of course the Book World, is hard to describe, but he does, masterfully.

The acid test of a good read is if you don’t want it to stop. I read this in a couple of days flat, and didn’t even notice that it was over 350 pages (just checked) – whereas Wolf Hall (for example) was on a slow countdown. I know that probably makes me a sucker for light comic fantasy (and a good dodo joke) – guilty as charged.

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21st century literature, Book review, Booker Prizewinner, Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 2009

Wolf Hall won the Booker prize in 2009, and its sequel, Bringing up the Bodies, is the Bookies’ favourite for the 2012 prize. If it weren’t for this accolade I very much doubt if I would have read it, not being an historical fiction fan, and I certainly would not have persisted to the end of the 650 pages.
This is very much the “anti-Booker” – instead of the usual slim volume of sensitively crafted, flawed memories, this is a detailed recreation of the life of Thomas Cromwell. As always the best and first question to ask is “Why?” – which Mantel helpfully answers in a short Q&A published at the end of this Fourth Estate paperback edition. Mantel found Cromwell a mysterious figure, and decided to give him a voice. This she does very well – his portrait is well rounded and convincing. He comes over as a sympathetic figure, caught up in turbulent times, trying his best to follow his conscience whilst at the same time to survive and prosper.

Mantel draws heavily from the historical record, which is of course legitimate – Shakespeare did very much the same – and we get a detailed insight into the key characters from this crucial period in English history. There is, as you will have guessed, a faily big “but” coming. In fact, several. Where to begin?

First, everything takes such a long time to happen, and while we wait for Henry to divorce Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn the material used to fill the gaps is not interesting enough to carry the reader along – I confess I took a two week break half way through reading this, and only returned out of a sense of duty or stubborness.

Second, the author’s much criticised use of the male singular personal pronoun is deeply irritating. Usually, but not always, “he” is used to refer to Cromwell. The idea no doubt is to pull the reader closer into identifying with him, but it generates huge confusion virtually on every page, which is compounded by large blocks of dialogue and the use of the present tense. You can usually work out in the end who is being referred to, and devices to make the reader pause and think are often no bad thing, but here the main impact is one of irritation.

This confusion is made worse by the huge cast of characters, many with the same name, who are often lightly sketched. I gave up bothering to try to work out who was who, who was related by birth or marriage to who, and so on – the investment of effort and time wasn’t proportionate to the reward.

Finally, the title is simply a teaser for the second book in the series, (I am assuming it is a series – there are a lot of wives to go), Wolf Hall being the home of the Seymours. It is an evocative metaphor for the dog eat dog world Henry created amongst his court, but it is a bit of a cheat.

In the end, do we care enough about the central character to justify the 650 pages? I didn’t I’m afraid, and unless you are a big historical fiction fan (think Philippa Gregory or Alison Weir) I would not recommend this.

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20th century Literature, Anthony Burgess, Book review

The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess

Read in the Kindle edition
Julius Xavier Enderby, poet, is one of my all-time favourite literary characters.

Book 1 – Inside Mr Enderby, published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell in 1963. We first meet Enderby through the eyes of a group of time travelling school children, on an educational trip to visit some of the poets of yesteryear. There are echoes of Joyce Grenfell in the teachers admonitions to the students not to misbehave, which of course they do. Enderby lives alone, in squalor. His bathroom is his sanctum, where he composes his poetry, filing much of it in the bath which he shares with a family, indeed generations, of mice. He lives a narrow, routine existence, troubled by the outside world as little as possible. But people just won’t leave him alone.

Nasty neighbours and a nosy landlady are a nuisance, but his problems really start when he wins a literary prize, which he accepts in person at an event in London – or rather doesn’t accept, his speech getting away from him somewhat. After that he loses control of his life. Vesta Bainbridge, women’s editor of “Fem”, takes him in hand, and begins the arduous task of transforming him into husband material. She succeeds to the extent of getting him in a fit state for their marriage but the change is temporary, and he manages to escape from her (on their honeymoon in catholic Rome) as she rapidly transforms herself into his dead step-mother. At some point, apparently angered by his betrayal, his muse, always conceived as a literal companion, deserts him. Seeing no future without poetry, Enderby attempts suicide. He attempt fails, and we leave him in a rest home undergoing a cure to rid him of his infantile obsession with poetry and its trappings.

Book 2, Outside Enderby. The psychiatric transformation of our hero is no more effective nor long lasting than Vesta’s attempt, and with the return of his muse, Enderby is about to leave his job as a barman when fate once more intervenes. The bar where he works is being used as a venue for a pop group – the lead singer of which has plagiarised some of his poetry, left behind in his flight from Vesta’s home. The singer is shot by a bitter former band member, but Enderby is framed, and flees. Taking a holiday flight to Tangiers, narrowly escaping the clutches of a matronly astrologer on the way, he tracks down Rawcliffe, a failed former poet who had plagiarised his extended poem, the Pet Beast, turning it into a schlock horror film script. Rawcliffe, who is in all the anthologies, is dying, and Enderby cares for him in his last days, instead of killing him as intended. Enderby inherits Rawcliffe’s bar, and settles down into a comfortable life of exile. But the happy ending is denied him, because at the end of the novel he is visited – literally – by a personification of his muse, who is a cruel mistress, and who appears to intend to desert him, once again.

It appears that Burgess planned books one and two as a single volume, and only published them separately when a serious illness threatened to be (indeed was diagnosed as) terminal. But having created this character it seems Burgess couldn’t really leave him alone.

Book 3, A Clockwork Testament, or the End of Enderby, finds Enderby lecturing in creative writing and minor Elizabethan drama in New York. He is more of a fish out of water than ever, finding much in New York and his students to frustrate and anger him. This is a lighter revival of Enderby, putting him in comic situations in which his frustrations with the modern world are never far from the surface. Enderby makes no compromises for his new situations, and is blunt to the point of being offensive towards his black students, particularly in his liberal use of the N-word – what would have read as challenging and daring in the 1970s comes across as simply offensive in 2012, not that Burgess would have given a stuff. But this is true of many treatments of this issue, and we should be wary about imposing 21st century values on 1970s Britain, or any other period for that matter. Which I suppose is his point.

The discussion about the potentially corrupting influence of art, as exemplified by the popular response to the vulgarised film treatment of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” dominates much of the novel. This is Burgess’s response to the media storm generated by the film of Clockwork Orange, hence the otherwise inexplicable title of the third novel in the series, in case the point were to be missed (which of course it is now much easier to do, with Kubrick’s film available to watch on terrestrial television, and pretty tame stuff compared to, for example, the Saw movies.)

The fourth and last Enderby novel, Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby, in which Burgess imagines what might have happened to our hero if he had not taken the post in New York. Here he is offered a role scripting a musical representation of the life of Shakespeare, variously entitled Will! Or An Ass for an Actor in a very different part of America, rural Indiana. Here he is as much a fish out of water as anywhere else, and comes in for a lot of stick from the cast, crew, financial backers, and the community generally. He becomes besotted with the female lead, April Elgar, a gorgeous African American actor, who befriends him and who allows Burgess plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his scholarship and knowledge about Shakespeare’s dark lady of the sonnets.
The musical is of course chaotic, and on the opening night Enderby has to take the part of Will, which he does triumphantly (after his own fashion) – ad-libbing, breaking the fourth wall, ignoring an intervention from a US Equity equivalent representative who tries to stop the show, ending in a dance of the beginning of the world on stage with April. Instead of the usual time travelling tourists, Burgess book-ends the story with more erudition about Will and Elizabethan theatre – a story about spying and the theatre in Shakespeare’s time to open, including a theory on Shakespeare’s involvement in the development of the St James’ edition of the bible which I have never taken the time to follow up but if taken at face value appears very convincing, and ending with a science fiction tale about a time traveller going to an alternative 1590’s London to meet Shakespeare. The trip doesn’t end well, but this stand alone story is a far more interesting treatment of the parallel worlds theory than “The Long Earth”.

Why is Enderby such an endearing, successful character? He meets many of the criteria you would look for in a sit-com character – good hearted but hopelessly adrift in the modern world, always falling unwittingly into comic situations, and at the same time puzzlingly attractive to various maternal and not so maternal women. For Enderby poetry is the all-consuming mistress that he cannot allow himself to be distracted from. The comedy switches from quite low brow, scatological stuff to highbrow meditations on Elizabethan theatre and Shakespearean scholarship.

Burgess’s style, throughout the quartet, is one of the major enjoyments of the novels. He plays with language freely, at times showing off, but rarely distracting from the overall fun of the piece. Here’s an example from Book 2. Enderby is serving drinks in a bar when he meets an old acquaintance, whose breath, he notices, smells of onions:

“Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions.  “Onions” said Hogg.”

I can just imagine Burgess’s pleasure at meeting the no doubt self imposed challenge of repeating “onions” four times consecutively without interruption nor syntactic trickery.

I’ve read these novels for pleasure several times since discovering Inside Enderby many years ago, and apart from the easily offended they should be a joy for all readers. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

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20th century Literature, Book review, Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Let’s start with the title. About ten years ago a film was made of this novel, but due to wrangles with the Waugh estate the film was called “Bright Young Things” not “Vile Bodies”. (This is from memory, unverified by Wikipedia). The name change mattered, because the irony of the phrase “Bright Young Things”” is easy to miss (or dismiss), whereas there is no missing the bitterness and bleakness of the original title. And make no mistake, this is a bitter, and unblinking bleak portrait of the mid-war, middle class world Waugh inhabited, where the humour underscores the emptiness of people’s lives rather than detracting from it.
This is satire at its crystalline, brilliant, best. The plot, such as it is, follows the misfortunes of Adam Symes and his assortment of friends, relatives and acquaintances. But the series of disjointed incidents portrayed is simply a vehicle for Waugh to shine a light on the shallow, broken society of mid-war Britain. There are several deaths, too many for them to be shrugged off, including an accident with a chandelier, a suicide, and Agatha Runcible’s descent into madness and thence death arising from a motor racing accident. (The choice of name here, from a nonsense word coined by Lear, points out the nonsensical nature of the lives of many of the characters. All of these deaths are passed over very lightly, almost in passing; Simon Balcairn’s suicide in particular is quite chilling – he gasses himself, and in putting his head in the oven he at first holds his breath, realises this is missing the point, then chokes, collapses and dies. 
It would be all too easy to take this as simply a light hearted portrait of the rich and stupid at play. There is some playfulness in the novel – for example in the way Symes creates characters and themes for his gossip column, which are then picked up and copied by fashionable London. But the novel is a much more damning critique of British mid war society than this. Waugh seems full of bile towards his subjects, constantly snatching any prospect of happiness or financial stability from them. The Bright Young Things portrayed are not happy or fulfilled – their relentless parties and jaunts are just a desperate attempt to district themselves from the emptiness of their lives. The final “Happy Ending” chapter, in which Chastity’s broken life casts her up in a war zone as part of the detritus of some devastating future conflict, is a chilling summary of where the country is heading – to death, dissolution, and decay. Instead of having partying young people on the front cover, a better illustration would be Munch’s “Scream”.
 
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20th century Literature, Book review, Coming Up for Air, George Orwell

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell, 1939

Apart from 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell is best known for his journalism. And rightly so – his earlier novels have the feel of a writer learning his craft, not in terms of crafting a sentence, but in terms of developing a plot, story, and characters.
In this later novel (1939) George Bowling is a fat, forty something insurance salesman, trapped in a loveless marriage and yearning for the freedom of his bucolic boyhood of Edwardian England. The nostalgia is suffocating – I was reminded irresistibly of Peter Kay in some of the riffs on how boiled sweets were better before the War. The first person narrator insists he is not deliberately romanticising his past, and acknowledges there were many things wrong with pre-War England, but the overall impression is that the modern world is rotten with commercialism, population growth, and a lack of freedom. There are some vivid images to illustrate this, not least a sausage that tastes of fish. All highly clichéd – all of our boyhood summers were sunnier, all our food tasted more of itself, everything was less hurried and less threatening. As boys of course we could take pleasure from simple things that as older men we are bored with.
But Bowling’s ennui is much more deep rooted that this. He loathes his wife, barely tolerates his kids, and can find no pleasure in every day life. He is trapped, and looming over everything else is the threat of war. He is not particularly frightened of the coming war, but what he dreads even more is the post-war world, which he expects will be totalitarian. Here there are some strong echoes of 1984, with the boot stamping on the human face, forever, being foreshadowed by Bowling’s visions of post war society.

 

Orwell was a socialist, a member of the left wing Independent Labour Party, and had recently risked his life in the Spanish Civil War. But none of this political perspective appears in this novel. While Bowling fears the future, there is no suggestion anywhere that there is anything he or anyone else can do to control or affect it. There are some Communist and a trotyskist characters who make a very brief appearance in the novel, but they are dismissed as “People’s Front of Judea” figures. The Labour Party figure in the same scene is passed over without any suggestion that he, or what he represents ie working people getting together and trying to improve things is in any way a solution to the problems he identifies in society. There is an apolitical pessimism that sits strangely with what we know about Orwell’s politics – does this reflect some kind of personal despair with the way of the world – a giving up almost?

Orwell mines his journalism heavily in this novel, which adds to the suggestion that it was something written to generate funds rather than a work of inspiration. All through I kept getting echoes of other things he had written elsewhere (eg Bowling’s thoughts on urban myths, swans breaking your legs, etc). The novel spends about half of the narrative reminiscing on Bowling’s boyhood, and after a quick scene of domestic unhappiness he goes to try to rediscover his childhood haunts, and is inevitably disappointed.
All this is formulaic stuff. The plot device at the end of the novel, in which Bowling hears a radio SOS (do they still have them now?) and thinks it is for him, when it is not, followed swiftly by the accidental bombing of Little Binfield, a not so subtle pre-figuring of the war to come, is clumsy in the extreme. I must say however that my memories of some of the scenes, as well as the overall storyline of the novel, stayed with me strongly over 30+ years from first reading, so there must be more to it than I have given credit thus far.

If you want to be an Orwell completist, try this – it won’t divert you for long. But for coherent political analysis stick to the journalism.

 

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Favourite authors lists

Comment: Favourite Authors (Four) – Poets

Favourite writers, continued – Poets.

31. William Blake, largely for Jerusalem

32. T.S. Eliot. When I studied Eliot in 6th form I was either told, or believed independently, that Eliot was impenetrably hard. Not surprisingly I found him thus. Returning to Prufrock or the Wasteland decades later something has happened, and they have become accessible, almost conversational. I find it hard to explain this transformation except to suggest that it is more complicated than just me being a bit slow aged 17.

33. John Keats. Rich, sumptuous poetry. All the more extraordinary that he produced this body of work in such a few short years.

34. Wilfred Owen – I am not in a position to argue this in any detail, but I have a suspicion that Owen wasn’t just our greatest war poet, but one of our greatest poets full stop. His works are compressed, intense, masterpieces, where every sound and syllable counts.

35. Shelley, for Masque of Anarchy, a brilliant piece of polemic which opens with this fantastic line about the Home Secretary, whom he accuses of responsibility for the Peterloo massacre:

“I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh”

And ends with this rousing call to arms:
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many — they are few”
Which would make a great slogan for the Labour Party don’t you think?

I also have a soft spot for Ozymandias:

36. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for Sonnet from the Portugese.

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

37. Kipling, for If. Nationalistic, misogynistic nonsense I know, but can’t help loving it.

38. Rupert Brooke, for Granchester. The section on the women of Cambridgeshire is hilarious.

39. John Herrick. Obscure Elizabethan poet, but some great love poems,

40. Brian Patten. Witty, warm and wise.

“I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.
On the journey I thought of you.”

Honourable mention to John Cooper Clarke for Evidently Chickentown http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw.

Having reviewed this list I can’t avoid the suspicion I have favourite poems rather than favourite poets. So be it.

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Favourite authors lists

Comment: Favourite authors (Three) – Playwrights

More favourite writers – playwrights this time.

21. Tom Stoppard – for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, some delightful playing with ideas.

22. Samuel Beckett. When Waiting for Godot was first performed in the 1950’s it left most audiences bewildered. It is a sign of the times that there can now be a passing reference to “Happy Days” (the one with the old people in the dustbins) in the Simpsons, and the writers assume that a good proportion of people (if not kids) will get it.

23. John Osborne. I fear “Look Back in Anger” would feel a bit dated now, no matter how it is staged – it is just one of those pieces specific to the post-War, post rationing 1950s. Maybe it would work in Keep Calm and Carry On austerity Britain, but I suspect not. Plenty of other decent work such as the Entertainer to justify inclusion.
24. Joe Orton. Full of wit, energy, and mischief. Favourite play – got to be “Loot”, or “What the Butler Saw”. His diaries and biography (“Prick up your Ears”) are worth reading too.

25. Oscar Wilde. No-one can turn a phrase like Wilde.

26. Harold Pinter. Some extraordinary powerful work, exploring the mundane and banal; the dramatist who rescued silence. Favourite play – The Homecoming – intense, dramatic, incredibly subtle.

27. Noel Coward. A surprise inclusion maybe, but try Blithe Spirit.

28. George Bernard Shaw. Shaw explored some issues that most playwrights of his generation steered well away from. Now we think of Pygmalion and “I’m a good girl I am”, but of course Shaw didn’t marry off Eliza and Professor ‘iggins.

29. Alan Ayckbourn, for “The Norman Conquests”. Farce when well done is brilliant, but really complex to pull off, and in this sequence of plays Ayckbourn does it effortlessly.

30 Ben Jonson. Shakespeare’s contemporary; far fewer of his works have survived, (or did he just write less?) but there is enough to show us how extraordinary the theatre of this time must have been.

A very white, male, English (the language rather than the country, of course) list, admittedly. But it would be fairly pointless claiming admiration for writers whose work I am less familiar with.

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