Reviews | Nose in a book

Twanging those heartstrings

July 18, 2010March 11, 2012

This book grew on me slowly. At first I found it a little annoying, like it was trying too hard to tug on the reader’s emotions, but then I got caught up in the story and by the end I was thoroughly enjoying it and impressed, even.

It’s narrated by eight-year-old Caroline, or Carrie, who details her life in North Carolina in her diary, or at least that’s how it’s initially presented (it doesn’t really make sense because there’s flashbacks, but I’ll let that go). Carrie daydreams a lot and loves her little sister Emma to distraction but the telling moment is when she declares that she doesn’t mind school because it gets her away from home.

Home is not a nice place for Carrie. Her stepfather is a violent drunk who coerces Emma into his bedroom frequently. Carrie’s mother either ignores or excuses the abuse and is not above beating the girls herself. It’s a shockingly horrible life and I suppose it’s a tribute to the author to say that it’s not a chore to read – somehow it’s not all negative, there’s lots of positives, at least the way Carrie sees it.

The characterisation is excellent, certainly in the case of Carrie. The prose is pretty realistically the voice of an eight year old. At first I found it a bit wearing, because eight year olds don’t have the greatest vocabulary and they do repeat annoying slang phrases and Flock has captured that very well. Thankfully she hasn’t misspelled it all realistically but she has used North Carolina vernacular.

This isn’t the greatest writing or the deepest of books and the storyline is likely to affect you more than the prose but it isn’t a bad read. Certainly better than I expected from the first few pages.

Published 2005 by Mira Books.
ISBN 978-0-7783-0084-7

The value of books

July 7, 2010March 11, 2012 1 Comment

Books v. Cigarettes
by George Orwell

This is part of the Great Ideas range, yet another excellent and also stylish set of paperbacks from Penguin that are either excerpts from longer works or collections of shorter essays, as this one is. They’re small and affordable (unless like me you find you want to buy the whole set – there’s 80 of them so far!) and well designed. And from what I can tell from my sample size of two, the contents have been carefully and skillfully chosen.

It would be hard to go wrong with George Orwell, mind, which may be why Penguin already has three books of his writings in this range. Everything I have read by Orwell – fiction, autobiography, letters, newspaper columns – has been exceptionally well crafted, intelligent but also interesting and accessible. He was very open about things like money, social background, politics and patriotism, which are things we can all relate to and yet seem so rarely to be discussed.

I picked this book up in the wonderful Toppings bookshop in Bath, one of that now rare breed of independent bookshops that are bigger than a shoebox and have a genuinely good selection of books, which was appropriate because two of the selected essays deal with buying and selling books, and I found Orwell’s thoughts on the subject and expectations for its future fascinating. In the opening essay, he compares his spending on books with his spending on tobacco, to see whether there is merit in the claims he often hears that books are too expensive for “normal” people. With some lengthy reasoning and a little maths he concludes that this is rubbish and the true reason that people don’t buy books is that they consider reading to be a dull pastime, not the cost. I wonder what he would have made of the breaking of the Net Book Agreement.

Which brings us to his second essay, on bookselling. Orwell worked in a bookshop for a time and makes some lively, often caustic, observations of regular customers that he remembers. But what I found most interesting were his closing remarks. First, that “any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop…combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman” – a surprisingly shortsighted comment from the man who wrote 1984. And second, his description of how working in a bookshop made him fall temporarily out of love with books, almost made them repulsive to him. That was a real surprise to me and I’d like to hear from any booklovers who have worked in a bookshop to see if they felt the same.

The other essays deal with book reviewing (which he is most vicious about, sadly), patriotism (he was just too young to fight in the First World War and felt it very keenly), free speech, his experience of a particularly awful French hospital and his time at boarding school (an endlessly fascinating topic to me, and one that is of great interest here because he was a scholarship boy, so he was an outside observer to the high end of the class system that dominates such schools). It’s a truly excellent selection of writing and I doubt it will be long before I buy more books from this series.

Published 2008 by Penguin. Essays originally published between 1936 and 1952.
Number 57 in the Great Ideas series.
ISBN 978-0-1410-3661-8

The other side of the fence

July 3, 2010March 11, 2012

The Romantics
by Pankaj Mishra

This debut from Indian novelist Mishra is at once beautiful and eye-opening. It provides an insight into different cultures in India, both native and visitor, and how they work (or don’t work) together.

The story follows Samar from university to postgraduate restlessness to his first job and in many ways is the tale of his ‘coming of age’ or ‘finding peace with himself’, but resolution is not the name of the game here and uncertainty is ever-present.

Samar is a Brahmin and, like most of his caste, by the 1980s his family has little of the old money left and can just afford to keep him until he’s 21. Until then he reads ferociously and, despite his studious quietness, mixes with quite a range of people. His neighbour Miss West is a middle-aged Englishwoman and through her Samar meets a whole host of westerners who come to India for spiritual reasons that he can never quite grasp (presumably these are the ‘Romantics’ of the title).

Mishra does a good job of encapsulating his hero’s mixture of revulsion and jealousy of these people, particularly of their money, freedom and opportunities – things he will never have. Mishra gently pokes fun at these visitors and their various reasons for coming to India – from having read a certain popular book to studying alternative medicine – but also points out the similarity between their displacement, their struggle to find a life path, and Samar’s.

I’m still not sure how much of my enjoyment of this book was based in it opening up to me a world I’ve never experienced, from a viewpoint I can never experience. It’s definitely a book that made me feel guilty for wanting to travel to far-flung places to widen my horizons when, of course, a week in Pondicherry could never tell me what life is truly like there.

Samar also has Indian friends, such as fellow student Rajesh through whom he sees a glimpse of India’s rural poor, a life lesson he badly needs after comparing himself to the westerners. His friendship with Rajesh and other Indians is markedly different from the one he enjoys with Miss West and her friends, which I found very interesting. The westerners are very quick to share the minutiae of their lives and each other’s. It takes a long time for Samar to discover that their true thoughts and feelings are kept just as hidden as his own, and cut them just as badly.

The book also includes a number of passages that lovingly describe India, particularly the Himalayas, and these could be quite moving. The author clearly loves his country. But it was the east–west relationships that really made this book the fascinating read that it was. From a glance at his website, it appears that he has written a lot of essays on this theme and other issues affecting modern India, so I shall be checking those out.

Published 1999 by Picador.

Teach a man to fish

June 26, 2010March 11, 2012 3 Comments

The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway

I don’t need to tell anyone what a great book this is, I’m sure. It’s actually the first Hemingway I’ve read and was a great introduction. The prose is plain yet full of endless layers of meaning.

On one level this was a tough book for me to read. You see, I have this thing about fish: a profound dislike, repulsion even. So the story of a fisherman necessarily included details that frankly reviled me.

It was also slow to grab me (relatively; I mean, the whole book’s barely 100 pages long). Even though I knew from reputation that it’s a very simple story, I couldn’t help feeling, ‘Is this really it? Is there no more to it?’ But once the old man goes out to sea that feeling passed and I was captivated.

Hemingway’s ability to voice the old man’s every thought and emotion is astounding. This is a poor man, living a tough life that is nearing its end and his thoughts do meander to religion, death, the meaning of life and the beauty of nature, but always in just the right tone, staying clear of anything touchy feely or intellectual. The old man is very matter of fact and quickly snaps himself out of flights of fancy or memory trips. Only one incident from his past is described in any detail and this is because the old man draws on the memory to give him strength.

I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t get this book, or wouldn’t agree with the millions who rate it as one of the greatest novels ever written. I needn’t have worried and will definitely read more from my Hemingway boxset in the future.

First published in 1952. Specifically cited when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

See also: review by Marie of Little Interpretations.

Know your medium

June 19, 2010March 11, 2012 2 Comments

It Sucked and then I Cried
by Heather B Armstrong

So this is a lesson in how a decent blog does not necessarily make a decent book. Heather Armstrong’s blog Dooce is widely considered to be the most popular personal blog on the internet, with tens of thousands of visitors every day. She is a huge influence on other bloggers and has some interesting things to say. Taking one of the more eventful sections of her blogged life and writing a book about it should have been a great idea, right?

The thing is, what works in a blog does not necessarily work in a book and a decent editor would have stopped this book from being published in its current form. Large sections of text are reproduced verbatim from the blog, which I understand the temptation behind, as the blog is so successful, but a lot of the same people will read both and it’s disappointing to read the same jokes, the same descriptions, the same insults over again.

In a blog you can jump from one topic to the next, or start a story and then pick it up again a few weeks (and a few thousand words) later. In a book you need more structure. Skipping out of your timeline to tell a funny anecdote from the past doesn’t always work. And you also don’t need to keep repeating things. In a blog it’s acceptable to assume that people need reminding of a fact you mentioned several entries ago, if they read it at all. In a book it’s a fair bet that the readers of chapter 10 also read chapter 2. Quite recently.

But more crucially even than that, in a blog you can get away with writing in all caps for emphasis, assigning cute but stupidly long nicknames to people or breaking out in a sickeningly mushy ode to your loved one. None of those things are appropriate in a book. They make it incredibly hard to read more than a few pages at a time. One of the most grating things for me was the reproduction of Heather’s monthly letters to her daughter Leta. Now, this is something a lot of “mommy bloggers” do when they have babies and it’s a sweet idea that may even have been original to Dooce. On a blog you can skip past them if you’re not feeling soppy because they do tend to be very soppy indeed. Heather’s letters are no exception and they seemed wildly out of place in this book. The odd phrase from them could have been quoted or incorporated into the retelling but pages and pages of baby talk very nearly made me stop reading on.

It’s really very disappointing because the basic story of Heather’s difficult pregnancy, depression and postnatal depression is one that was interesting on her blog and these are subjects that should be talked about more. I commend her for her openness and looked forward to this book to find out more about the experience. Though there was some more detail than in the blog it was written in an awkward style and was hard to read.

What this book confirmed for me was that Heather is not a successful blogger because she writes well. She does not. She is successful because she has interesting and often controversial things to say and she’s sometimes funny. And because of that story about her being fired because she said rude things about her employer on her blog. Other bloggers have done this better and I think I know now why I haven’t read Dooce for a year or so.

Published 2009 by Simon & Schuster.

In the future there will be war

June 12, 2010March 11, 2012 4 Comments

The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman

Tim has been bugging me for a year to read this so I finally gave in. I can see why it instantly became his favourite book. It’s an immensely clever look at war and humanity, with some very interesting ideas about space travel and the future.

This is one of those books that I think is brilliant but I didn’t hugely enjoy reading. I tend not to like war-set stories, particularly those that focus on the fighting and the tactics. While there was much more to this novel, there was a lot of war stuff to wade through and that meant that my overall enjoyment took a big hit. It was all, of course, necessary. The clue was in the name.

It wasn’t in any way a slog to read. The storyline is clever and the writing is accessible even for people like me without the greatest background in physics or military tactics.

I don’t want to give away too much of the storyline but it begins with the conscription of William Mandella into Earth’s army in space. Space travel is near light-speed and makes use of black-hole-like gateways so that vast distances can be covered, but the cost of this is that space travellers do not age as fast, so when the first soldiers return to Earth they are still in their 20s but decades have passed (it’s something to do with general relativity), which is reflected both in the age of their loved ones and in the great changes that have happened – socially, politically, environmentally and technologically. It’s a clever way of adding emphasis to the returning soldiers’ sense of displacement.

This is one of those rare occasions where I think the background of the author and the time of writing are relevant when honing your thoughts on the book. Haldeman is a veteran of the Vietnam War and wrote this shortly afterward. He even starts the book in a future near enough so that the officers who train Mandella are Vietnam vets themselves. This drives home the parallels between the fictional war and the real one, though they at first seem starkly different.

For instance, there’s the great changes that happened in the USA while soldiers were away in Vietnam. Hippies, free love, rock music, drugs, civil rights, feminism. These are not hugely dissimilar from the changes that Mandella struggles with. There’s the use of drugs and hypnotism to condition the troops to hate the enemy (I’ll admit here that I don’t know that much about the Vietnam War besides what I learned in A-level history many years ago but I believe there was drugging of the troops – is that right?) There’s the use of old-fashioned military tactics against a little known enemy who fights very differently.

What I liked most was the personal struggle to deal with so much unknown and so much change. By making Mandella the narrator this book keeps its focus on an individual’s reactions to news and events, however huge those events get.

The political and sociological changes to mankind as time passes are completely believable and the way that information drip feeds out to the soldiers, light-years away from Earth, is very well crafted. I did find the middle section hard-going because it paints a dark, depressing picture of the future that was all-too believable and I suppose that frightened me. But it was worth reading on. I enjoyed the second half of the book much more than the first.

As a depiction of mankind’s future this is a great book. Shame about the war but it’s an unlikely future that doesn’t have war in it, right?

First published as a serial in Analog magazine. First published as a novel in 1974. Revised by the author 1991.

Big ideas for a big story

May 29, 2010March 11, 2012 1 Comment

The Magus
by John Fowles

This is a crazy book that plays with concepts of humanity, deceipt, morality, psychology and storytelling, all wound up in a thoroughly enjoyable adventure that is packed full of suspense, action, beautiful scenery and romance. It’s full of big ideas but it’s also a great fun rollercoaster of a story with so many twists and turns that I often felt as confused as the hero.

Said hero is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who doesn’t know what to do with his life and is generally miserable. He narrates the story and makes for a very interesting perspective on events. He is shallow, naive and quick to change his mind. On many a page he says “I knew for sure…” or “I understood now…” only to be proved wrong a few lines later.

Not that he can be entirely blamed for changing his mind about certain things. The central premise is that Nicholas goes to teach English on a remote Greek island and there meets an old man, Conchis, who lures him into a bizarre game in which nothing and no-one can be trusted. There were times when the situation got so dark or confusing that I found it far-fetched that Nicholas would continue going back for more, but on the other hand he’s a selfish young man who’s been placed at the centre of a millionaire’s play – that’s got to be good for the ego – and, of course, there’s a young lady involved. Actually, more than one. It’s
complicated.

There are so many layers of lies or potential truths that I constantly reached passages that read like a conclusion was about to come and at first I’d think “But hang on, there’s 400/300/200 pages left” but by the end you’re not ready to trust anything, even the last sentence.

And of course there’s the element of belief – what is real and what is imagined? Nicholas is in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language before he arrived, the weather is relentlessly hot, the people are very different from those he’s used to spending time with, the landscape is obviously foreign – nothing is familiar. That must take a toll on the way a person reacts to events they are confronted with. Not to mention the question of what and who we trust and why. As a middle class intellectual, Nicholas is pre-conditioned to believe obviously educated, well read, well spoken people. As a womaniser he’s inclined to believe anything a woman who flirts with him says. And this is clear and obvious to anyone who wishes to take advantage of his gullibility.

The morality of the story is the thing I found hardest to get on with. This was written in the 1960s but set in the 50s and, though in some ways it’s surprisingly modern (yes, women can separate sex from love and use their bodies accordingly) it’s also harshly judgmental of Nicholas, who is really just a bit of a drifter and a womaniser who never pretended to be anything else. He is put through the mill to perportedly make him a better person and yet, with all of the questions that this long book asks, it is never suggested that maybe Nicholas doesn’t need to be changed, that he’s basically decent from the start. In fact I think I liked the original Nicholas who was sure of what he was and good enough to be honest about it, though he was generally unhappy with his life, more than the Nicholas at the end of the book who has been frightened into doing nothing, trusting no-one, fearing everything.

Despite my standing up for him, there were times – many of them – when I wanted to shout at Nicholas. He is so obviously wrong at times and just plain stupid at others. I even figured out a perfect line of work for him so he woudn’t need to drift/teach any more (if you’ve read this give your ideas in the comments below and we can compare!). But where with some books that would be frustrating, with this one it felt good to engage so fully, to get emotionally involved in bits that weren’t a love story (though it is one of those as well).

And yet, though I was fully engaged and the story is definitely eventful, I found this was a slow read. I read every day, often far later into the night than I should and it still took me weeks to get through. It is a long book but I think it’s also one that requires you to pay attention to every detail. There’s so much talk of clues and hints that I often re-read passages in case I’d missed something important. I found that I even read the descriptive passages closely where I would often skim the lengthier ones in other novels. Fowles’ descriptions of Greece are spellbinding and more than once I found myself looking up holidays to Greece when I put the book down.

Many a long essay has been written about this book and I can see why, but from a personal point of view I will conclude with: this is a good read, an extremely good read, that makes you think and yet doesn’t feel at all ‘worthy’. Highly recommended.

First published 1966 by Jonathon Cape. Revised by the author 1977.

Maybe I’m just too squeamish

May 23, 2010March 11, 2012 2 Comments

Kick-ass
by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

As with all novels, I prefer graphic novels that have a complex storyline and meaty (though not necessarily likeable) main character. I don’t necessarily need multiple layers of meaning, but I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator or a bit of ambiguity. In terms of graphic novels, I greatly enjoyed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and We3 but Kick-ass didn’t cut it. It’s simple, colourful fun and it’s also very brutal.

The thing is, you can usually get away with more violence in books than, say, film because you’re not depicting it – it’s left to the reader’s imagination. But here, the violence is drawn for you and, while it may not be photorealistic it’s real enough to make me squirm.

The story is pretty basic. Loser kid gets so fed up with life he decides to don a superhero costume and beat up bad guys. He researches in comics first and creates an online fanbase. But he has no real training and his only “ability” is a willingness to be beaten up to within an inch of his life over and over. Still, he enjoys being an internet sensation and it gives him something to get him through his “normal” life. But then copycats spring up all over and start to become as famous, or maybe more famous, than him. With better weapons. And who on earth are these people Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, who shy away from publicity and seem like they might have some actual training?

If you’re not bothered by violence and gore then this is great fun and I’m sure the film will be too. I may check it out, but I’ll admit that I’m in no hurry.

Published 2010 by Titan Books
ISBN 978-1-8485-6535-7

To sleep, perchance to dream

May 15, 2010March 11, 2012

Girlfriend in a Coma
by Douglas Coupland

This is a strange novel in many ways. It’s about the end of the world, and this is made clear from the start, and yet it doesn’t feel like a story of apocalypse. The story starts with a group of teenagers and, though it spans 20 years, the characters don’t progress much. Which is the point of the whole story.

Jared died when he was 16 years old. He was a football star with more sexual experience than all of his friends combined, then he died of leukaemia. He narrates the story of his friends’ lives. It is a story of middle-of-the-road ordinariness. Its characters exist on the brink of failure. They don’t fulfill their dreams or achieve greatness. And yet these people are somehow important in the story of the end of the world.

It’s an interesting concept, that the people who have an important role to play aren’t the statesmen or the philosphers or the rich and famous. Instead, they are the lost, lonely people who need some persuasion to see that they are lost and lonely. But it’s also frustrating because you feel that they don’t deserve to be chosen, that they should be handling the survival of the human race better. Or at least I did.

It’s well written and the characters are very very real. For most of the middle section I would recommend not reading this last thing before you go to sleep (you’ll understand when you get to that part). It’s gripping and enjoyable. However, my frustration with the emptiness of the characters overtook my enjoyment of the story at times.

Published 1998 by Flamingo
ISBN: 978-0-0065-5127-0