What Book to Read?

Published in 2017, this book deservedly won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Quite randomly, a character in the book wins a Pulitzer Prize. ‘It’s not Pew-lit-sir’, he says. ‘It’s Pull-it-sir’. That’s an in joke. Perhaps if you want to be deeply moved or challenged it’s not the book for you. But if you want to forget for a while the awfulness of things, you’ll love it.

Arthur Less is a middle aged, middle brow writer. He lived for a number of years with Robert Brownburn, doyen of the Russian River School of writers in California; he’s the one that wins a Pulitzer. (The Russian River Writers Guild is real; Robert sounds a bit like the ‘beat’ writer Alan Ginsberg.)  Arthur has more recently been living with Freddy, but they have split up, and Freddy is about marry someone else. Though he is of course invited, Arthur cannot bear the thought of being anywhere near the wedding, so he accepts a swag of invitations that will take him overseas – to a teaching post, a conference, a travel article, anything … He plans to spend time in Mexico, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India and Japan. What could possibly go wrong? The book is the story of his travels, with flashbacks to earlier events; it is also an exploration of getting older, and what it means to love.

Arthur’s surname, Less, is an aptronym, a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner; think of Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind. Less is – or at least he feels he is – less of a writer, less of a person, less loveable than other people. He is, he says, ‘Nobody’.  When his most recently published book is praised in Italy – having been largely ignored in the United States – he thinks it must be because the translator ‘worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian’. Believing he must have been mistaken for someone else and is in the wrong car, he ‘readies himself for full mortification’. Asked to read from the book in Germany, he thinks he is being set up for a ‘writerly humiliation planned by the universe to suck at the bones of minor artists like him.’ In France, criticism from another writer leads him to think not just that he is ‘a bad writer … a bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse. He is bad at being himself’. In India, he thinks ‘What an ass he is, everywhere he goes.’

The book is suffused with a gentle, wry humour. Often this arises when things go wrong. He’s (naturally) lost his luggage; ‘he is well acquainted with humility. It is one piece of luggage he has not lost’. What he has lost ‘will circle the globe to no purpose, like so many travellers.’ Sometimes it is because of the disjunction between Less’s catastrophizing and what actually happens; when, for example ‘life has pardoned him at the scaffold steps’.  And sometimes it’s just in the writer’s understated observations, as in ‘the restaurant … is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor’.

Less’s most recent manuscript has been rejected by his publisher, and one of his hopes for the journey is that he can somehow fix it up at a writers’ retreat in India. This doesn’t happen quite as he hoped, but he does get to revise it. His agent says it is ‘Too wistful. Too poignant.’ Arthur realises ‘with a joy bordering on sadism’ that he can ‘deglove every humiliation’ of his character ‘to show it’s risible lining’. And ‘somehow bittersweet longing begins to appear in the novel … It changes, grows kinder … our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.’ ‘If only one could do this in real life!’ And this is exactly what Greer does for Less.

The book opens with an unnamed narrator saying: ‘From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad’. And Greer gives him some victories. Another character says to him ‘You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool, you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won.’ Arthur’s response is of course that he doesn’t feel victorious, he feels defeated. But he isn’t, in fact, the terrible, undeserving person he thinks he is. We know he is a good person from the narrator, who seems to have an overview of Less’s life. I didn’t think much about this narrator at the beginning; it was as if it was just Greer writing about Less. But as the story goes on and Greer inserts the narrator more and more, he or she takes a bigger and finally crucial role. I didn’t guess who he or she was until almost the end of the book, though looking back there are clues there for the more astute reader. These post-modern conceits might in less sure hands – pun intended – have been annoying, but here I think they work very well. As the narrator says, it is a love story.

You can read more about the author and his other five books – four novels and a book of short stories – on his website.

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I admire J.K. Rowling. I love the way she uses her fame to support social justice causes and to call out sexism and racism; see for example her tweets lambasting Donald Trump. After a tentative start with the first couple of Harry Potter books, I enjoyed the series. (Everyone loves the Harry Potter books, but I think they improved as they went along.) I am also very much enjoying Rowling’s crime series written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith; here’s my review of the first one. But The Casual Vacancy? Not so much.

This book (2012), the first she wrote after the Potter books, belongs in the category of adult social comedy, though like many books so categorised, it is certainly not funny unless you like you humour very black. It is set in Pagford, a small, post-card-perfect town in the West Country. The town is run by an elected Parish Council (a local government term, nothing to do with the church). The Council is also responsible for the maintenance of a rather squalid housing estate, known as The Fields, just outside the town; it is largely inhabited by welfare recipients. The Council is divided between those who believe that the residents of The Fields benefit from their association with Pagford, and those who want to be rid of any responsibility for them. The casual vacancy on the Council arises when one of the elected representatives, Barry Fairbrother, a keen supporter of The Fields, dies suddenly, leading to a bitter campaign between the two factions to fill the vacancy.

There is a large cast of characters; Wikipedia lists twenty main ones, rather too many in my view, making it hard, at least initially, to remember who is who. While the main plot centres on the battle over the vacancy, all the characters have their own stories, for most part concerning relationships between husbands, wives, partners and friends, and parents, their children and their friends. And there is not a really happy person amongst them.

I have no idea what her intentions were, but to me this book reads as if Rowling, having written only children’s books up to this time (albeit wildly successful children’s books), decided to show she could write about people in ways other than the black and white characterisations we find in the Harry Potter stories. With this in mind, she makes sure that almost every character has both good and characteristics, motivations or actions. This of course reflects reality. The problem I have is that she pretty much emphasises the various ways in which the characters are unpleasant to each other, to the point I found it hard to much like anyone in the book. This undermined my enthusiasm for reading on, and after the account of a particularly miserable dinner party about half way through, I started skipping to find out what happened, rather than seeking to understand the situation of all the characters. A member of my book group thought Rowling was perhaps challenging the reader to go beyond initial dislike and look more deeply at the human condition, but if so, I failed the test.

Some characters have no redeeming features at all, like the Chair of the Council, Howard Mollison, and his wife Shirley. Theirs is not a Voldemort take-over-the world-style evil; it is petty malice, snobbery and racism expressed through gossip and inuendo – a distinction I expect Rowling was consciously making. Others, like their daughter-in-law Samantha have some redeeming features, whereas others again, like Kay Bawden, are basically good, though with insecurities and terrible judgement that get in the way of happiness. Of the five teenagers who play a significant role, four – Krystal, Andrew, Sukhvinder and Gaia – are kids trying to find their way in varyingly difficult circumstances. But Stuart, aka Fats, with his possibly realistic but nevertheless nasty lack of empathy, his calculating selfishness and his self-justifying glorification of a warped existentialism, seems to me to have little going for him. Only Barry Fairbrother, dead by page 4, seems to have been a genuinely nice person, and even then his wife resented the time he spent helping other people. (His grief-stricken wife and children seem more or less ok too.)

As you would expect from Rowling’s juxtaposition of Pagford and The Fields, the book touches on a number of social issues including racism, addiction, theft, domestic violence, rape and child neglect. And the writer being who she is, it is not surprising that while residents of Pagford might like to think that these are issues only in The Fields, they are also issues in middle class Pagford, though manifested in somewhat different ways. Class is also an issue; I was a little surprised that Rowling emphasised the class difference between the Pagford and The Fields residents so starkly in the language they use – standard English versus lumpen argot – but maybe this is an accurate representation of reality. And if the poor characters come off worse, then that’s a reflection of reality too. Given the complexity of these issues, and the minefield of personal relationships between the characters, it’s not really surprising that there isn’t a happy ending for any of them; for some there is tragedy, deserved or undeserved, while for others there is the merest vestige of hope.

It’s a long book. I think it might have benefitted from some judicious editing. I preferred some of the Harry Potter films to the books because the films were rather more condensed, and the same may well be true here. Fans of the book – and there are many – can point out that every character has important interactions with other characters, so none could be left out. And I do agree that underneath the verbiage Rowling weaves a very good plot. This is her great strength; she engaged me so that I certainly wanted to know what was going to happen, even if I finished up not reading every word. But books I really like I know I’ll read again, and this won’t be one of them.

You can read more about the book – its characters and plot, and its critical reception – here. You can read more about J.K. Rowling here. The Casual Vacancy was made into a three-part TV series in 2015.

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Published in 2008, this book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. And deservedly so in my opinion. I recently reviewed the 2014 winner – Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – and this one is, if not a better book, then without some of the flaws that made Tartt’s book so frustrating at times.

I also recently wrote that I preferred books with a strong narrative thread. It is obviously foolish to generalise in this way, because this book does not have a strong narrative thread, and the structure still works well. It is essentially thirteen interconnected short stories, a form that allows both sustained development of character and setting, and the quick insight of short stories. Olive Kitteridge, her husband Henry and to a lesser extent their son Christopher are the main characters in seven of the stories; Olive’s role in the other six varies from significant to just a mention. The two in which she has only a mention are perhaps the weakest links of the thirteen, lacking the connection the Kitteridge family gives to the whole . With one exception, when Olive goes to New York to visit her son, they all take place in the small town of Crosby, on the coast of Maine; the book presents a slice of small town American life, as well as a portrait of Olive from mother of a young child to a 74 year old widow. No dates are specifically mentioned, but the sequence begins when Christopher is quite young, in perhaps the 1970s, and ends during the presidency of George W Bush. We know this because Olive is concerned about ‘another’ terrorist attack and is horrified to find that someone she is getting know and like voted Republican.

The stories all deal with events of everyday life in families and the community. People go to work, plant tulips, have breakfast at the marina, walk their dog. They are faithful or unfaithful to their partners, good friends or sometimes not. They gossip. They have people over for tea. Underlying these ordinary activities are the themes of public and private grief, loneliness, aging and death – though not all who die are old. In several of the stories there is some sort of betrayal. This makes the book sound depressing, but it isn’t. I think this is because of Strout’s humanity; she shows deep empathy with all her characters and their situations, even the unpleasant ones – and that includes Olive at times. Ultimately Strout seems to be suggesting that people do what they can to cope with life. Olive knows that things aren’t fair: ‘Stupid – this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right’. But she ‘had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most it was a sense of safety in the sea of terror that life had increasingly become’. And Olive does ultimately does find some comfort. The prevailing tone is bitter-sweet.

The book begins with Henry, a good and kind man, looking back at the joys and sorrows of his life as the town pharmacist and husband of Olive, who teaches maths at the local junior high school. After this, the Kitteridge family chapters are dominated by Olive’s point of view. She is anything but good and kind; she is often combative and angry, her judgements harsh. She is as one critic says, both fierce and thwarted’ .People are morons, simpletons, snot-wats. As she later acknowledges, she never says sorry. But we also see a different side of her; her humour, her love of people, her acute self-awareness and her a concern for others. In several of the other stories she is a source of comfort.

Strout’s empathy is amplified by the form of her writing. She uses ‘free indirect speech’, in which a third-person narrator adopts the words or tone a particular character might use. At her son’s wedding, for example, Olive ‘drops her gaze so as to avoid getting stuck in one more yakkety conversation’. The use of ‘yakkety’ is very much Olive’s word, as is the word ‘ridiculous’ in ‘The tulips bloomed in ridiculous splendor’, though both are narrative statements. We are seeing the world from in this case Olive’s perspective. This means Strout never takes an authorial overview which can make use of a wry or sardonic perspective to deprecate a character or point of view*. There is no satire in the writing but what the characters impart; mostly there is an honest realism about people’s feelings and relationships, even when they are deluding themselves, or hiding their feelings behind polite nothings. This, coupled with the small town environment, might make it sound like the writing is folksy, but it isn’t. There is the bitter as well as the sweet.

In 2014 a mini-series of four episodes based on the book were shown on American TV to universal acclaim. I hope they didn’t glamourise Olive too much. In the book she is large and not particularly attractive; it is part of what makes her a compelling character. The Wikipedia entry on the min-series describes Olive as ‘misanthropic’ so I guess it doesn’t. Her part is played by Frances McDormand, who won various prizes for her acting and also co-produced the series, so hopefully it was well done. It was shown in Australia (but not free-too-air) in 2015. You can read more about the mini-series here, and about Elizabeth Strout and her work here.

*I don’t mean it is a bad thing to have a satirical authorial voice – some of my favourite books and all that – it’s just that the free indirect speech give a different result.

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After reading some of Mitchell’s recent books, I’ve gone back to the beginning to read his first one, published in 1999. It’s probably just as well I enjoyed some of the later one before trying Ghostwritten, because without some understanding of his work, I doubt if I’d have got beyond it. I would probably have admired his prose, but given up entirely on the content.

Like Cloud Atlas (2004), which I reviewed here, and The Bone Clocks (2014) – here – Ghostwritten is a novel in a number of parts – nine in this case. Each part has a different narrator, a different location and a completely different feel to it. The first and the brief coda at the end have the same narrator, Quasar, who is a member of a millenarian doomsday cult responsible for a gas attack on the Tokyo subway, based on a real terrorist incident. The second is about Satoru, a young Japanese jazz lover working in a record shop in Tokyo. The third is a monologue narrated by financial lawyer Neal Brose, who is part of a money laundering scheme in Hong Kong. The fourth is told by an old Chinese woman who runs a tea house on Mt Emei, the Sacred Mountain, and who has lived through and suffered under the warlords, the Nationalists and the Communists. But heaven forbid that Mitchell be considered a realist writer; the fifth section is told by a disembodied spirit, a ‘noncorpum’ which survives by inhabiting living hosts. This section takes place mainly in Mongolia, where the spirit is trying to trace its origins. The sixth section is set in St Petersburg, where Margarita Latunsky is a museum attendant in the Hermitage Museum; she is also working for a gang of art thieves. The seventh section features Marco, a part-time drummer and part-time ghostwriter in London. In the eighth section, Mo Muntervary is a physicist studying quantum cognition; she returns to her birthplace in Ireland in an attempt to evade American officials who want to use her work to create intelligent weapons. The ninth section is the text of segments of a talk-back radio program in New York, where the announcer is contacted by an entity, Zookeeper, that seems to the reader, though not to the host, to be a disembodied artificial intelligence. The brief coda returns to the Tokyo underground.

As one might expect from having read other of Mitchell’s books, these sections have some links, with characters from one having walk-on roles in another. Thus Neal Bose sees Satoru and his girlfriend in Hong Kong, his maid is the granddaughter of the Chinese tea house keeper, a backpacker staying at the tea house goes to Mongolia as the unknowing host of the noncorpum, Marco shoves Mo Muntervary out of the way of a taxi, the man whose life story he is ghostwriting knows one of the art thieves in Moscow and so on. A few of the characters appear in some of his later books.

These ‘coincidences’ highlight one of the major themes of the book – the importance of chance. Quasar has been given a code phrase and number to ring after completing his mission but the cult has betrayed him and the number connects to a random phone – that of Satoru’s record shop. But in going back after closing up to answer the phone and hear the, to him, meaningless message, Satoru meets the girl he is already attracted to and they begin a relationship. Marco’s section deals overtly with chance. His band is called the Music of Chance. He speculates on a possible pregnancy arising from a tear in a condom he has used: ’Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the shelf …’ Then there is his own identity. ‘Why am I me?’ he muses. ‘Chance, that’s why. Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman Chance.’ And he visits a casino, just to rub in the point. Mo Muntervary’s quantum cognition also raised the issue of chance: ‘Quantum physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty’, she thinks.

But are these encounters and actions coincidences? There is also a counter theme; that of design. Some actions are controlled by a non-human intelligence, either the noncorpum – as when the backpacker decides to go to Mongolia – or by artificial intelligence in the radio talk back section. It seems that Mo Muntervary – from the previous section – has designed this artificial intelligence to conform to four ‘laws’. But there are circumstances in which it is impossible to comply with all of them at once. So has design failed too? I found the radio talk back section deeply confusing. A check of comments about the book on the internet confused me even more; see for example this one, which tries to trace the supernatural connections through all the sections.

So what is Mitchell trying to do? His deliberate refusal of coherent narrative, and the themes of chance and design, suggest he wants the reader to approach perceived reality with scepticism. And maybe this is where the title comes in. Marco, the ghostwriter, is talking to the man whose ‘autobiography’ he is writing; the man says ‘the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.’ Marco replies ‘it doesn’t seem very honest. I’m not writing what really happened.’ ‘We’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us’. ‘So where does that leave us?’ Marco asks. ‘How well does the thing read?’ is the answer he receives. Hmm. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Nothing that I’ve said takes away from the undoubted power of Mitchell’s writing, though I think it is even better in some of his later books. But I might not have gone on to read these, based on this one. This is because I found it pretty depressing. The hopeful sections seem well and truly cancelled out by the hopeless ones. Mitchell sees a dystopian future, and, it seems to me, no chance of avoiding it. But given how opaque it all is, I might be quite wrong. Do tell me what you think.

David Mitchell doesn’t seem to have a web page. But here’s a review of the book – not that it helps all that much.

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Back in 2014 I reviewed Some Hope, published in a volume consisting of the first three of St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992) and Some Hope (1994). Mother’s Milk, was published in 2005 and short-listed for the Booker Prize. I said at the time that I was looking forward to reading it. But now that I’ve got round to it, I found I didn’t enjoy it much at all. I think this is partly the book, and partly me.

The novel begins in August 2000. By this time Patrick is practising as a barrister – though he doesn’t seem to do much actual work – and is married to Mary; they have two small children. (OK, I know August is holiday time.) The first section of the story is told through the eyes of Patrick’s son Robert, who is far more insightful and introspective than any five year old I’ve ever met. Can the birth of his little brother Thomas really cause him to remember what it felt like in the first days of his life? The second section, set in August 2001, is told through Patrick’s eyes. On holiday at his mother’s house in France, he is horrified to see the hold Seamus, clearly a fake healer and genuine con man, has over his mother Eleanor – and her property. But at the same time he is board, listless and self-pitying, and ready for an extra marital affair. The third section is Mary’s story; she devotes herself to motherhood and tries to find ways of dealing with Patrick’s infidelity. The fourth section, set in August 2003 has no particular protagonist; the family travel to America.

The book continues in the style set in the first three books; it is a clever diatribe against the fatuousness, snobbery and malice of the English upper class. St Aubyn’s ear for dialogue and his biting wit are as sharp as ever, as you can see in one of my favourite exchanges. A child has been bullying Robert; his mother offers a kind of apology. ‘I’m sorry about that … Eliot is so competitive, just like his dad, and I hate to repress all that drive and energy.’ ‘You’re relying on the penal system for that,’ Patrick replies. Gold. There is also the continuing theme of the harm parents can do to their children. Both Patrick and Mary fear to pass on to their children the deplorable traits they think their parents gave them, but is there not a danger that in avoiding those, they are passing on others?

So what’s not to like? I found Patrick too self-pitying, too much given to what one reviewer calls ‘spoiled-brat whininess’. Another reviewer, who found the book ‘enjoyable and entertaining’ wrote that ‘we are very much on his side’. But I didn’t feel that way. It’s true he is highly self-aware; consider the following exchange: ‘Oh, darling,’ said Julia, resting her hands on Patrick’s shoulders, ‘are you your own worst enemy?’ ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Patrick. ‘I dread to think what would happen if somebody else turned out to be better at it than me.’ This can be perversely amusing, but it’s highly artificial and makes me want to shake him. Ultimately I don’t care what happens to him. Obviously the reader doesn’t have to like a character, but being indifferent to them is fatal to engagement with the story.

My reaction to Patrick is perhaps symptomatic of my reaction to the whole book. When I read Some Hope back in 2014 I was still in to mood for acerbic social commentary directed at the English upper classes. Now I don’t find the whole genre funny. After dislocation arising from Brexit in England and disaster of the election of Donald Trump as President in the USA, the worsening effects of climate change and the threat of recession, the boorishness of the upper class doesn’t seem worth wasting time on. St Aubyn doesn’t see it in class terms; he sees ‘a democracy of entrapment. Everyone is trapped in their personality’. True, no doubt, but those people who aren’t the English upper class – that is most of us – are also trapped in an economic system likely to leave us much worse off than the already rich and powerful. Knowing that some upper class people are unpleasant and probably unhappy doesn’t help much. I guess I won’t be reading At Last (2012), the final novel in the set, even if it does resolve some of the issues raised in Mother’s Milk.

St Aubyn doesn’t appear to have a web-site, and has only a very brief Wikipedia entry. But you can find out much more about him, and how his fiction mirrors his life, in any of these three interviews, here, here or here.

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Like many of Ian McEwan’s books, Sweet Tooth (2012) is a story with a twist. For better or worse, before reading it I saw a review which unconscionably gave away that twist. This means I didn’t read the book in the way the writer intended; I already had knowledge that put a different slant on things. I’m not going to reveal the twist, but it may be that my reading is a bit perverse because of knowing it. I did wonder if the reviewer gave away the twist because it made the book more interesting to write about. If so, I can see there may be some excuse for this; the twist means there are a whole series of double meanings which give a sardonic humour to the story. Yet you can’t pick up on the double meanings unless you know the twist, read the book twice, or have far better recall than I do. But even though these double meanings are clever, knowing what’s to come meant I didn’t find the story compelling.

Sweet Tooth is billed as a spy story, but even trying to think about it without foreknowledge of the twist, it lacked for me the interest, let alone the high tension of good spy novels like Le Carré’s. In the late 1960s, beautiful young Serena Frome goes to Cambridge to study mathematics because her mother wants her to. She spends most of her time reading fiction and doesn’t get a good degree, but enjoys various affairs, the most important being with a History tutor, who is much older than she is. He gets her an interview with MI5, who take her on. Most of the work she (and other female graduates with much better degrees) gets to do is purely clerical. But because of her knowledge of fiction, she is given the task of vetting an author who MI5 think might fit into an operation they have named Sweet Tooth. Believing that much of the literature and commentary of the time is left-leaning, they want to subsidise, through a compliant Foundation, authors that might be critical of communism and the Eastern bloc – rather similar to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. She is sent as a representative of the Foundation to interview the writer, a university lecturer named Tom Haley. He is pleased to accept the stipend offered because he wants to write without having to spend most of his time teaching. But Serena and Tom find they are mutually attracted. Furthermore, one of her colleagues is also jealously attracted to her. What could possible go wrong? The story is helped along by a minor twist concerning her Cambridge lover, with the major twist coming at the end.

Of course even without the twist – though the novel is inconceivable without it – there is much more to the book than a genre-style spy story. (I was amused to note that McEwan has adopted some of Le Carré’s spy jargon, with ‘the watchers’, a ‘honey trap’ and the ‘fifth floor’. I’m sure he’s being deliberately referential.) There is the usual clever if somewhat facile characterisation, achieved with minimum fuss; you can for example perfectly visualise Serena’s parents, though is there a resort to stereotypes involved? I found Serena rather shallow. And then there is the interesting setting of London in the bleak years of the early 70’s, the coal strike, the three day week and the Irish troubles; people wore dressing gowns at work over coats to try and keep warm in unheated buildings. Even if the suspense isn’t as developed as in a Le Carré’ spy story, there is some tension as Serena is increasingly embroiled in lies which threaten both her personal and professional life. There are also some dead-ish ends which feel a bit like padding.

Because Serena reads lots of fiction, and because she is involved personally and professionally with a writer, McEwan has lots of opportunity to comment on literature. Serena tells us – the story is presented in the first person – that she doesn’t like post- modern writers who were ‘determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions … I believed writers were paid to pretend … So no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art, no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary. No room in books I liked for the double agent.’ She believes in ‘mutual trust’ between reader and writer, and dislikes the ‘fictional trick’. Haley, on the other hand, admires post-modern novelists – though he isn’t really given much scope to explain why. And of course McEwan’s work is the height of ‘tricksy’, the novel depends on a fictional trick. And what would a spy story be without a double agent? In terms of her relationship with Tom, Serena is her own double agent. The point of all this cleverness is only made clear at the end.

Some reviewers have suggested that there is a large measure of autobiography in McEwan’s presentation of Haley. Serena reads and summarises – at boring and surely unnecessary length – several of Haley’s short stories and his short dystopian novel; the stories in particular apparently sound very like some of McEwan’s early short stories, given their bleak or ‘noir’ character. (The short novel actually sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only worse.) Haley’s agent and publisher are, or were, actually McEwan’s. Haley teaches at the University of Sussex, where McEwan did his undergraduate degree; he is clearly satirising Selena’s snobbish approach to the place. And Haley reflects McEwan’s literary tastes, as you can see from the final twist.

The novel has generally been favourably reviewed, for example here, and here, so my rather lukewarm response may indeed arise from knowing the twist. But I don’t think so; indeed its cleverness, which lies in its ‘tricksy’ nature, is not evident on a first read (though maybe the reviewers knew the twist …)  McEwan is generally considered to be an excellent story teller, but I just can’t get excited about this one. It’s too clever by half. You can see from my reviews that I didn’t much like Solar (2010), reviewed here, or even his Booker Prize winning Amsterdam (1998) reviewed here. So best read the book. Twice.  If you can be bothered.

You can find out more about Ian McEwan and his work here.

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In the interests of fair disclosure, I have to say up front that I’m not a fan of Peter Carey. I didn’t even enjoy his (second) Booker Prize winning novel, True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), reviewed here. The Chemistry of Tears (2012) shares one of the same devices used in the earlier book: a story imagined around a real event or object. In this case it is an automaton, a swan that moves as if real. The story is partly about its creation, and partly about its restoration. Carey says that happening to see it being refurbished in a museum was the impetus behind the book.

Catherine Gerhig is a horologist who works at the Swinburne Museum (the V&A?) in London. One day her secret, married lover, who also works there, dies suddenly, leaving her bereft. Her boss, who may be in love with her too, gives her a new project to distract her: the reconstruction of a mechanical swan. The other half of the story, told in sections that alternate with Catherine’s, concerns Henry Brandling, a rich Victorian whose beloved son is ill with consumption. Henry hopes that the gift of a mechanical toy will improve his health, or even cure him. He initially thinks he has commissioned a mechanical duck, but the German watchmaker/inventor instead constructs the swan. Catherine reads Brandling’s story in the journal he kept of while the automaton was being constructed.

There are clearly meant to be parallels between the stories: whether ‘the huge peace of mechanical things’ can overcome grief is central to both of them. Both Catherine and Henry experience misery, rage almost amounting to madness, frustration and betrayal. It is a matter of opinion whether the two stories are fitted together like a well-oiled machine, or are mechanical in the pejorative sense. Catherine’s story has oddities enough, but Henry’s journal is positively opaque, and I got quite lost trying to work out what was going on. Much of it relates the story of the German watchmaker, Sumper, who has more or less kidnapped Henry; he tells Henry about the time he spent in London working with Sir Albert Cruickshank on something that sounds a bit like a computer, whose aim was to bring order out of chaos. Again there is a clear parallel with the reconstruction of the swan, but so what?

It doesn’t help that I found it hard to empathise with Catherine. She seems to have been made needlessly unpleasant, responding to grief with alcohol, drugs and rudeness. Nor could I understand her relationship with her assistant, who is apparently some sort of spy – but who for and why bother – with the Dickensian name of Amanda Snyde. She seems to have some kind of weird religious interest in the mechanism that makes the swan work, but again, I couldn’t see the point of it. I understand that not everything in a novel has to have some point, but in a novel about fitting together parts so they will move, you’d think her role would one of those moving parts. Perhaps it was and I failed to see it. But if so, I’m surprised that no one else in my book group could figure it out either.

Of course it’s not Catherine’s fault I couldn’t relate to her, or Amanda’s that she seems crazy; it’s Carey’s. I just don’t think he writes well about women. I didn’t find either of them convincing. It’s true I’ve been prejudiced against him ever since he wrote dismissively of his former wife – who had been his editor and muse – in his 2006 book Theft: a Love Story (though he shrugs this accusation off. You can read about it here). But the rest of the book club, who don’t share my prejudice, agreed neither character was realistic.

A review in the Guardian by the eminent writer and critic Andrew Motion didn’t suggest he had any of these problems with the book; rather the opposite. For him Carey exhibits ‘an easy-seeming mastery’ and is ‘too subtle a writer to spell out precise meanings …’ You can read his glowing assessment – ‘an impressive achievement’ –  here.

I have to admit that the swan itself is interesting, though I find it a bit bizarre. It was actually made in the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth as in this story. It is housed in the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Teesdale, County Durham, England. You can read about it here, and watch a YouTube of it in action here.

You can read more about Peter Carey’s life and work on his website.

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I recently reviewed Grenville’s The Lieutenant (2008), a moving but rather grim story about the first contact between white arrivals in Australia and the Indigenous inhabitants. A friend lent me The Idea of Perfection (1999) with the assurance that it was just as well written and much happier, and she was right.

The two main characters both consider themselves and their lives to be far from perfect. Douglas Cheeseman is an engineer, good at his work, but self-conscious and awkward with people. He has been sent to Karakarook, a small town in outback Australia, to demolish and replace a damaged bridge. Waiting to be served in the local pub, ‘he felt the urge to apologise simply for existing, much less wanting breakfast’. Harley Savage is equally gauche, and carries with her the belief that she is somehow likely to damage people she becomes close to; she feels she has ‘a dangerous streak’. She is an expert in fabrics who has come to Karakarook to help a local committee establish a pioneer museum. Karaakarook (Gateway to the Foothills), like so many outback towns, is dying, and the committee hopes to give it a fillip by encouraging tourism. The first meeting of Douglas and Harley, where they literally bump into each other, in inauspicious: ‘a moment extending itself into awkwardness … two bodies hitting together, two people standing apologising’. To make matters worse, they seem destined to be on opposing sides on an issue that is dividing the town: should the bridge, which is a piece of pioneer history, be replaced, or repaired? But seasoned readers are likely to guess that obstacles will be overcome, and that the two will find friendship, and probably something more. Their story is counterpointed by that of Felicity, the bank manager’s wife, who thinks the local butcher is in love with her, though it very soon appears to be the other way round. She wants to be perfect, but it is obvious that her idea of perfection is completely dysfunctional, and constrains her.

The craft of quilting runs through the story, and is one of the themes that offers contrasting views of perfection. Reflecting on the tradition of deliberately placing an asymmetrical piece in an otherwise symmetrical hand-made quilt, Felicity thinks ‘it was just another part of the perfection, really, not being perfect. But it only counted if you were not being perfect on purpose.’ She gave up quilting for fear it might damage her physical perfection (yes she is a bit crazy). But all of Hayley’s quilts are purposely asymmetrical; she thinks that ‘to anyone else [they] would probably look like something gone wrong’. Yet her quilts are highly sought after works of art, reflecting her passions and insights; any ‘perfection’ they have is unspoken.

One of the things that makes the book such a pleasure to read is that Grenville is ultimately kind to all her characters. This is despite the fact – or maybe because of it – that she writes about them with a certain dry humour, often conveyed by the italicising of certain words, as in: ‘The trouble was, even as woman looked at dog and dog looked back at woman, still life turned into life’.  Both Douglas and Hayley initially find the small town atmosphere somewhat hostile and intimidating – but this is a perception partly born of their self-consciousness. On better acquaintance, they find that the townspeople, despite, or even because of their eccentricities and inquisitiveness, can be kind and approachable. They both learn from their experience there. For Douglas, ‘the thing he would like to learn was not something you could ask anyone, although it was so simple. How do people get on?’  He realises that ‘crankiness could be a kind of intimacy’. Hayley comes to realise that ‘out here, people went by different rules … You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you.’ Coralie, the driving force behind the idea of a museum, and her husband Chook, foreman of Douglas’s work gang, seem initially hostile to Haley and Douglas respectively. They are furthermore on opposite sides in the bridge controversy which might be expected to make them antagonistic to each other. Yet by the end of the story, Grenville grants them ‘a second of simple love’, and Hayley realises that the love she has thus far pushed away, however complicated, could be ‘the simplest thing in the world’. And just as they learn from the town, the town learns from them.

Another nice thing about this book is its cover, which shows a wooden bridge which has bowed in just such a way as the bridge that has brought Douglas to the town. The cover is a photo – meaning that the story is inspired by a real life bridge. No wonder Grenville’s descriptions of it are so detailed and evocative.

You can read more about Kate Grenville here. The Idea of Perfection won the Orange Prize for 2000.

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This, Stead’s best known book, was published in 1940 but largely ignored until it was reissued in 1965 with an introduction by the American critic Randall Jarrell, who hailed it as a masterpiece. A new edition (2010) has an introduction by Jonathan Franzen who is just as enthusiastic. They concede the book’s weaknesses, but find great strengths to weigh against these. I guess it’s a personal choice whether you can appreciate the great things about the book, or feel depressed by the awfulness being described, and disinclined to read further. Even Franzen questions whether ‘enjoy’ is an appropriate response to the book. Either way, I have to agree it contains some great writing.

The book covers a year or so of the life of the Pollit family, Henny and Sam, and their six – soon to be seven – children. The eldest, Louisa, is Henny’s step daughter. The story is episodic, in that there are a number of set piece scenes – sometimes in my view over-long – that describe the life of the family, rather than forwarding the action. Indeed there isn’t much action until the end, when some of what has arisen earlier comes together in the climax of the novel. Instead of action there is wonderful description of landscape and keen observation of behaviour – though few of the adult characters are presented as likeable people.

It’s pretty trite to use Tolstoy’s comment that ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ in relation to this story, but I’ll do it anyway. This is because Tolstoy has got it wrong; you can’t separate families into ‘happy’ and ‘unhappy’ in this way. This is the story of a very unhappy family: Henny and Sam fight frequently, openly and bitterly. Sam ‘called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig; they had no words between them intelligible’. ‘Ugly duckling’ Louisa is the butt of their malicious comments and jokes, in addition to which, being the eldest at eleven, she has to look after the younger children and wait on her mother. But the Pollit children don’t know they are unhappy, because they know no other form of living, and they are objectively happy at least some of the time. For Louisa it is when she can escape into books or daydreams. To me, this blending of the experiences of childhood is far more convincing than ‘all happy’ or ‘all miserable’. But the misery is certainly laid on thick; every humiliation or disappointment one can remember from childhood appears here magnified by a factor of ten. ‘They all laugh at me,’ cries Louisa in despair. Henny sees everything in the blackest terms: ‘Isn’t it rotten luck,’ she exclaims. ‘Isn’t every rotten thing in life rotten luck?’ Sam thinks he is the voice of reason, but he is as selfish and cruel as his wife. The baby-talk language he uses to his children makes me cringe in the same way as fingernails on a blackboard. Yet the children seem to love them both. Even the tragic climax grows out of love.

Knowing a bit about Stead’s life helped me better understand the book. It is to a significant degree autobiographical, with the character of Sam based on her father, David Stead, a marine biologist, who seems to have been a domestic tyrant. Louisa is modelled on Stead herself; her mother died when she was very young, and her father married again, producing a further six children. I don’t know if her step-mother treated her as Henny does Louisa, but I hope not – though Stead no doubt cherished some of Louisa’s ambitions and dreams. The adult Stead had left-wing leanings, eventually marrying William Blake, a German Jewish Marxist, but she is clearly no starry-eyed idealist; Sam’s doctrine of universal love, his ‘humane folly’, is unswervingly revealed as superficial nonsense. Franzen suggests that Stead’s treatment of Sam is at times funny; I didn’t find it so, but she is certainly satirizing such ideas. The book has no overt politics, but the slide of the family from gentile poverty into grinding want underlies the bitter climax of the story; money – having it, not having it and losing it run like a red thread throughout the book. Sam’s belief in eugenics is an even blacker mark against him when one remembers that Stead’s partner was Jewish.

One aspect of the book that interests me is that the story was originally set in Australia, but the setting was changed because Stead’s publishers in America – where she was living at the time – thought an American setting would be more appealing to American readers. Critics like Jarrell and Franzen – both Americans– see some inaccuracies in setting and language, but I was completely unaware of these. Indeed I find it hard to see how it could have worked as a story in Australia, though I suppose gentile poverty is the same the western capitalist world over.

It’s a challenging book to read just now, when the spotlight in Australia is being turned on domestic violence. As Franzen points out, Stead, who probably never heard the words ‘domestic violence’, treats what we would call ‘abuse’ as a natural feature of the familial landscape. I found it heavy going.

It is impossible to do justice to the book in a short review. Read Randall Jarrell’s introduction if you have the Angus and Robertson edition and you can read a long review by Franzen in the New York Times here. There is a good short biography of Stead in the Australian Dictionary of Biography here, and there are several full-length biographies of her, the most recent of which is by Hazel Rowley (1993). The New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Australian fiction is named  the Christina Stead Prize in her honour.

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