Category Archives: Book review

21st century literature, Alan Hollinghurst, Book review, Booker Prizewinner, gay literature, The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

Continuing in my attempt to catch up with the best part of a life time of not reading Booker prize winners, I recently finished, not without a fair amount of persistence, Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty”. Hollinghurst is a slow writer – he has only written half a dozen novels in total – and the only other work of his I have read is the “Swimming Pool Library” which feels like decades ago.

This novel is a leisurely portrait of the life of a rather pampered young man in mid 1980s London, when Thatcherism was at its most rampant and Aids was beginning to have a dramatic impact on the lives of gay men.

Nick Guest leaves Oxford and lodges with the family of one of his undergraduate friends, Toby. Toby’s father Gerald is a Conservative MP. Nick is a Guest in more ways than one – welcomed as a lodger, his homosexuality is acknowledged by the family but largely on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. Their’s is a social liberalism that has some clearly defined limits.

Nick begins his sex life with a romance with a black Local Government worker, but his affection for Toby remains undimmed. In parallel the political life of the family father develops, culminating in a visit from Mrs Thatcher which is vividly realised – I wonder if this was all Hollinghurst’s imagination, or whether he was present at something similar. Nick them moves on to a clandestine relationship with another Oxford friend, who keeps up a front of heterosexuality, and introduces Nick to a cocaine dependency.

The third phase of the novel sees things all fall apart. Aids takes Nick’s first boyfriend, then his second, and again in parallel Gerald’s political career falters over a financial and then sexual scandal, something the conservative party seemed to specialise in in the 1980s. Finally Nick is thrown out of the lodgings he has enjoyed for far too long, and takes an Aids test which he expects to be positive.

As a portrait of gay privileged life in the 1980s this is probably the definitive work, for what it is worth. But the novel had other attractions for me. Hollinghurst is particularly good at the detailed nuances of social interaction – words and gestures are accurately dissected for their meaning. This isn’t just the fact with the wealthy – the visit to the black, evangelical family of his first lover, Leo, where his sexuality is quite literally the love that dare no speak its name, is captured perfectly in all its ambivalence.

i didn’t fall in love with this book – the central character is far too unlikeable and unsympathetic, almost narcissistic – and it didn’t make me want to turn to more of Hollinghurst’s works. The Booker short list for 2004 was weak by comparison with some years, although this novel did beat David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which by comparison was far more innovative and readable. But I was left admiring Hollinghurst’s craftsmanship, which is more than I can say for many of the other novels that have won the Booker subsequently.

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21st century literature, Ark, Book review, Stephen Baxter

Ark by Stephen Baxter

“Ark” is the sequel to Baxter’s “Flood”, reviewed here a few days ago. This is a real doorstep of a book, as science fiction often is, which picks up the story several years before “Flood” ends. The central theme – a space rocket takes survivors to another world to avoid the apocalyptic flooding of earth – had already been heavily trailled in “Flood”, and Baxter covers some familiar ground in opening, presumably for the benefit of readers who hadn’t read the previous novel. (Incidentally, JK Rowling was a master of this – she always got the “what you missed” section out of the way early in the Potter novels, with considerable economy – although towards the end of the series she stopped bothering, on the grounds if you didn’t know Harry was a wizard etc then you had been living in a hole in the ground for the last five years. Anyway, back to “Ark”).

“Ark” has a very similar construction to “Flood” – short chapters following a large group of characters, with a few individuals at the core; occasional significant time jumps; a tendency to somewhat casually kill people off and usher in new generations quite regularly.  In fact this is probably best seen as a mirror novel of “Flood” with the only significant different being the terrain – space instead of earth and water.

Baxter indulges himself with a leisurely account of the early days of the flooded earth space programme, constantly threatened by the rising water and the human tide which accompanies it. The group of Candidates being trained to undertake the flight are examined closely, although I felt that the time jumps and the sudden deaths made it harder to care about any of them. Zane, the most vulnerable, was unconvincing – someone with his vulnerabilities and weaknesses would be unlikely to have passed the various vetting processes.

I think we all know without spending too much time considering the issue that long months and years in deep space would be terribly boring, and it is a challenge to the author to make them seem less so. He can fast forward decades in a page but we still return to the same setting with the same crew (give or take) and the same set of issues.

After ten years the crew reach Earth 2, which despite its flora and fauna and evidence of advanced intelligence is considered by most to be uninhabitable – leading to a three way split between them – some try to settle Earth 2, others decide to return to Earth, hoping that the waters had receded (they hadn’t!) and a third group vote to push on another unimaginable 30 years to a possible Earth 3. I would have liked to hear more about what happened on Earth 2, but this group is not mentioned again. The group that returns to Earth find Ark 2, an unlikely underwater settlement, but the main focus is on the group that travels on to Earth 3, giving us a lot more of the same. Planet fall, when it comes, is almost as much a relief for the reader as it must have been for the passengers.

I have no evidence for this, as usual, but my hunch is that what really interests Baxter is the speculative science behind inter-stellar travel, colonisation of new planets, etc, and the plot and characters in this novel as simply window-dressing around this core. Which isn’t really good enough is it?

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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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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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21st century literature, Book review, Booker Prizewinner, John Banville, The Sea

The Sea – John Banville

 

Read in a Picador 2006 edition. Winner of the 2005 Booker prize.
A generic Booker prize winner is emerging from my reading of recent weeks. The short novel is narrated by an older character looking back on a formative incident from their youth – an incident that is not revealed until well into the novel. This incident has profoundly affected the later life of the main characters, but like the sun cannot be looked at directly, and has to be revealed slowly and through hints and subtle references. Other than this climactic event there is little plot development, and all the characters are seen through the prism of this incident. The typical 21st century Booker favourite is heavy on atmosphere and imagery, but light on some of the more traditional components of the novel such as story.
The Sea could almost have been written as a “How to win the Booker prize” exercise, ticking so many of these boxes. This does it a disservice however, because within the generic Booker candidate is a much stronger novel struggling to get out.
The plot is easily summarised: Max Morden, (a pun on “maximum modern”?) recently widowed, having lost his wife after a long illness, goes to drink himself quietly into oblivion in a seaside boarding house from his youth, where, many years earlier, “something happened” – the traditional formative experience. Max narrates the novel in a stream of consciousness which flits from one time period to another. Slowly the childhood summer where he met the Grace family is unfolded. While clearly distressed at the loss of his wife, the narrator is still able to craft elaborate metaphorical descriptions of the Grace family and their seaside summer.
In what way does this childhood experience make the man, as we are led to conclude? Why does being witness to a traumatic childhood experience, combining sex and death (and while this is a spoiler, apologies, the real surprise would have been if his childhood had not been marked by an experience combining sex and death, wouldn’t it?) make Max the man he becomes? Does it affect his ability to form adult relationships, make a career, or otherwise live his life? Apparently not – there is no real hint that his average career and average life has been affected by the incidents of this extraordinarily long summer.
The fallibility of memory is often a strong theme of these novels, but is played straight here. Max misremembers, adjusts his focus, admits to fallibility, but on other occasions when the authorial voice is stronger has a stroner grasp of time and place. While he recognises these memories may be fallible or flawed, this doesn’t detain him long – nothing comes of the gap between memory and reality.
The reviews quoted on the cover and back of this novel focus heavily on Banville’s use of language. He has a particular flair for imagery which while not directly associated with the thing being described, does have the effect of making the reader pause and reflect. At times this tips over into plain over-writing, such as when a farmyard is described thus – “Big shallow muslin-draped pans of milk lost in their own silence” (53). This doesn’t really mean anything, but has the effect, if you are like me, take another pass at the sentence. Most of the time though the imagery works well; seabirds dive like “torn scraps of rag” (64), a waiter approaches “tentative as a fox cub” (65); a car engine cools “still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint” (79). I particularly liked the narrator’s description of lying in bed next to his wife like “toppled statues of ourselves” (99)
Banville (or is it Morden?) tiptoes on the border with nonsense so frequently that is not surprising that occasionally he oversteps – such as when “being alone with Myles was like being in a room which someone had just violently left” (83); or when Chloe’s teeth are described as having “a faint tinge to the enamel of her incisors that was green indeed, but a delicate damp grey-green, like the damp light under trees after rain, or the dull-apple shade of the underside of leaves reflected in still water” (138).
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually a great novel – or more specifically that Banville has the potential to write a great novel. The writing here is allusive, (I got lots of echoes of Eliot which I haven’t traced yet) complex, very clever, and improves with time – rereading for this blog very shortly after the first reading was a surprisingly pleasant experience, not having to worry about the distracting nonsense of the big reveal, and being able to just enjoy the writing instead. Absolutely this is a flawed novel, but would it be too patronising of me to say it shows great promise?
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21st century literature, Book review, Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

Be careful what you wish for – I was bemoaning the absence of a novel with a structure or plot, and this is what the bookshop’s shelves presented me with.
 
I normally start these entries with a plot summary to provide me with some means to remember the book by in months and years to come, as well as being at heart a traditionalist. This novel is itself deeply traditional – with one exception – it reads almost as a pastiche. Briefly, it follows the adventures of Lysander Rief, an improbably named actor who is in 1913 Vienna for psychiatric treatment of a sexual problem. This problem melts away when he meets another ex-pat, an English artist, Hettie Bull, who swiftly and artfully seduces him under the nose of her Austrian lover. Like most of the other problems in the novel this psychological issue is transient and easily solved – nothing much stands in our hero’s way. Hugely improbably Hettie later accuses him of rape when their affair leads to a pregnancy. Rather than being a serious threat to our hero this is simply a way to disguise their affair from her sculptor common-law husband. Despite the charge being transparently fabricated, Lysander escapes Vienna in a comic disguise with the help of some shadowy embassy officials. It is hard to take this or any other peril he faces seriously when all problems fade away so easily.
 
This is the start of his wartime career as a spy, and where the Buchan pastiche really gets going. The embassy officials contact Lysander back in the UK. He has joined up on the declaration of war but been posted to an internment camp in Wales. On the pretence of collecting payment for the legal and bail bill incurred in Vienna they persuade him to travel back to Europe to track down a spy. He brutally tortures the relevant information out of an embassy official who dies of a heart attack shortly thereafter – we can never be entirely sure if this is as a result of the torture, but quite possibly. Another comedy disguise allows escape back to the UK, despite his being shot in transit by a fellow spy as the result of a misunderstanding. All this promises mystery and suspense that never quite materialises, but the recovered code points to a mole in a UK Government War Ministry, which Lysander, once quickly recovered from his wounds, infiltrates. Uncovering the mole is a business-like affair, quickly done, and the book shudders to a halt with the spy’s eventual perfunctory revelation and dispatch. There is no twist in the tale or denouement beyond the resolution we had been shown 100 pages earlier.
 
Throughout the novel false trails are laid none of which go anywhere. Mysterious characters are sketched in and then fade away and are forgotten. The front line of the war is visited briefly in the manner of a tourist, and the solution to the various puzzles thrown in Lysander’s way can all be resolved without much effort. This all adds up to an author on auto-pilot.
 
I mentioned earlier one instance where this novel differs from its Edwardian predecessors, and that is in its frank treatment of sex. Lysander effortlessly sleeps his way though the book, with none of the women immune to his charms. The treatment of women in this novel has not been picked up on by any of the reviewers I have read, but to me it was ridiculous – he only has to snap his fingers for corsets to be unbuckled and stays removed, an Edwardian James Bond.  
 
If fiction which is unchallenging and instantly forgettable – and I found myself having to check on the novel’s bland title – is to your taste then I would have thought an original, such as Riddle of the Sands or 39 Steps would be much more rewarding fare.
 
 
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