I have unashamedly pinched Robert McCrum's header from his column on books in yesterday's Observer Review [19 February] in which he laments the increasing rarity of the 'slim volume' as this was exactly our moan at the last book group meeting. As McCrum says, 'the covers of books are too far apart'!
The moan arose because everyone had so enjoyed Barnes' Sense of an Ending remarking particularly how much he could say in 150 pages and other similarly brief titles came to mind such as Monsieur Linh and His Child, Saramago's Death at Intervals, Marani's New Finnish Grammar and, of course, the incomparable Point Omega by DeLillo. All titles that are brief in terms of pages but far more complex in emotion, thought and characterization than so many of the block busters one has to wade through nowadays where the lack of the editor's blue pencil is so obvious. Beckett of course was the master of a few words.
Of course, I do not deny that their are some mighty tomes worthy of their length and depth such as War and Peace or A la recherche de temps perdu or Ulysses - one could go on - but then, there is also The Strangers Child and Freedom and, more recently, The Art of Fielding whose lengths are baffling and tedious.
Thank you Robert McCrum for drawing attention to this issue!
Monday, February 20, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Waterline by Ross Raisin
Raisin's first book, God's Own Country, was a triumph and a delight, full of humour and acute observations of his compatriots and won him among other awards, the Guardian First Book Award. I was therefore excited to see a second book by him in the lists but wary also as second books often disappoint. Not in this case. Waterline is a challenge, a deep study of a man dealing in an extraordinary way with loss. But it is not depressing because Raisin, just when you think you can bear no more, makes you laugh - not just smile but an acknowledgement that to live in this world at all you must have a sense of humour.
The narrative is about Mick, a Glasgow minicab driver, a job he had turned to after the closure of the shipyards where he had been a skilled worker fiercely proud of each ship launched. After a spell in Australia, he, his wife Cathy and their son, Craig, return to Glasgow and rebuild their lives. Robbie the eldest son married and stayed in Australia. The novel opens with the death of Cathy from asbestosis for which Mick blames himself with the grim reminder of the asbestos dust that used to cover his work clothes laundered by Cathy. After the funeral, when all the family have left and Mick is alone, he becomes obsessed by the fact that he cannot picture his wife's face and soon cannot bring himself even to enter the house, preferring to spend his days and nights in the garden shed with increasing amounts of alcohol until finally he ups sticks and takes a bus to London where he changes his name and takes up a job as a pot washer in a hotel in Heathrow. After a short time he is fired and finds himself on the streets, homeless and penniless but too proud to seek help from the 'social'. He meets up with another Glaswegian in a similar predicament, Beans, and together they lurch from night shelters to soup kitchens to park benches in an odyssey told by Raisin with such compassion and love that we can never again look a homeless person in the eye without guilt.
Raisin has a skill in writing about the overlooked in society. He is a Yorkshireman and set his first novel in Yorkshire but this time has moved to Glasgow where he has never lived and yet he handles the colourful Weegie slang with ease. His description of and insights into the relationships Mick has with his sons, Craig and Robbie, and with Beans are profound and moving. Mick's feelings are deep but like many men from his background, he is not articulate in voicing them. Craig resents his father and blames him for his mother's death and, in an effort to improve their relationship, Mick goes for a pint with Craig and in the pub, the pair sit in silence with desultory glances at a football match on TV but nevertheless, afterwards, Mick feels closer to his son. Here Raisin is dealing with those on the 'waterline' of society, just barely keeping their heads afloat. In one of his recollections, Mick remembers the painters of the great ships he help build and how they used to leave their nicknames scrawled along the waterline, just barely visible. And Mick becomes, for a time, one of those on the margins of society, just barely visible.
Without wanting to introduce a spoiler, the ending might be thought, as Anthony Cummins from the Observer did, 'schmaltzy' and 'sun-kissed' but it has a certain inevitability and in no way detracts from the impact and poignancy of the story. In an interview, Ross Raisin, on commenting about the level of society that he writes about, said 'I'm interested in how responsible society is for someone like Mick, and how much someone like Mick chooses to detach themselves from society like that, and how a person might become, bit by bit, day by day, a bit detached from the world, to the point where the world no longer recognises that person as an individual.’
Read it and weep!
The narrative is about Mick, a Glasgow minicab driver, a job he had turned to after the closure of the shipyards where he had been a skilled worker fiercely proud of each ship launched. After a spell in Australia, he, his wife Cathy and their son, Craig, return to Glasgow and rebuild their lives. Robbie the eldest son married and stayed in Australia. The novel opens with the death of Cathy from asbestosis for which Mick blames himself with the grim reminder of the asbestos dust that used to cover his work clothes laundered by Cathy. After the funeral, when all the family have left and Mick is alone, he becomes obsessed by the fact that he cannot picture his wife's face and soon cannot bring himself even to enter the house, preferring to spend his days and nights in the garden shed with increasing amounts of alcohol until finally he ups sticks and takes a bus to London where he changes his name and takes up a job as a pot washer in a hotel in Heathrow. After a short time he is fired and finds himself on the streets, homeless and penniless but too proud to seek help from the 'social'. He meets up with another Glaswegian in a similar predicament, Beans, and together they lurch from night shelters to soup kitchens to park benches in an odyssey told by Raisin with such compassion and love that we can never again look a homeless person in the eye without guilt.
Raisin has a skill in writing about the overlooked in society. He is a Yorkshireman and set his first novel in Yorkshire but this time has moved to Glasgow where he has never lived and yet he handles the colourful Weegie slang with ease. His description of and insights into the relationships Mick has with his sons, Craig and Robbie, and with Beans are profound and moving. Mick's feelings are deep but like many men from his background, he is not articulate in voicing them. Craig resents his father and blames him for his mother's death and, in an effort to improve their relationship, Mick goes for a pint with Craig and in the pub, the pair sit in silence with desultory glances at a football match on TV but nevertheless, afterwards, Mick feels closer to his son. Here Raisin is dealing with those on the 'waterline' of society, just barely keeping their heads afloat. In one of his recollections, Mick remembers the painters of the great ships he help build and how they used to leave their nicknames scrawled along the waterline, just barely visible. And Mick becomes, for a time, one of those on the margins of society, just barely visible.
Without wanting to introduce a spoiler, the ending might be thought, as Anthony Cummins from the Observer did, 'schmaltzy' and 'sun-kissed' but it has a certain inevitability and in no way detracts from the impact and poignancy of the story. In an interview, Ross Raisin, on commenting about the level of society that he writes about, said 'I'm interested in how responsible society is for someone like Mick, and how much someone like Mick chooses to detach themselves from society like that, and how a person might become, bit by bit, day by day, a bit detached from the world, to the point where the world no longer recognises that person as an individual.’
Read it and weep!
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Death Comes to Pemberley
Out book club last night discussed The Sense of an Ending and in the course of the discussion, P.D. James' new title, Pemberley came up. James, one of our members - none of whom are ever stuck for the mot juste - delivered the most pithy and conclusive review of a book I have ever heard, viz;
If you like Jane Austen and enjoy detective novels, you will hate this.
What more can one say?
If you like Jane Austen and enjoy detective novels, you will hate this.
What more can one say?
Monday, January 30, 2012
Costa Book Award: Pure
Is there the sense of an ending of first class literature in the award of the Costa to Andrew Miller for his historical novel, Pure? According to the pundits, there was considerable and bitter dissension amongst the judges. I have mixed feelings about it. I am always uneasy with historical novels because we cannot help but bring our accummulated knowledge and twenty-first century sensitivities into play when reading them and consequently are in turn delighted or appalled by events in a way that is anachronistic. Miller himself pens a note at the end of the novel claiming that 'this is a work of the imagination, a work that combines the actual with the invented...' so this is not history. Is it literature?
There is no doubt I think that Miller is good on detail. His characters are well drawn and fleshed out and in lingering on the ordinary, he makes it extraordinary. We smell the streets, the shops even the breath of the inhabitants of Paris in 1785 and spend a highly amusing evening seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the newly built Odeon. But he leaves us curiously unsatisfied by omitting the bigger picture. There is no sense of impending revolution - apart from the activities of four locals enthusiastically painting graffiti nightly on the walls. There is one passing reference to Rousseau, a nod to the Bastille with another to Diderot and the Encyclopedists. But the overall picture is one of a thriving and busy petit bourgeoisie more concerned with their wine and cheeses than any ideas of fraternity and equality.
The story concerns one, Jean Baptiste Baratte, an engineer from Normandy, who is charged by one of the King's ministers to clear the church and cemetery of Les Innocents which has become so over-filled that the sheer number of corpses have caused it to collapse into the basement of a local house. Centuries of interred bones are to be lifted and moved to newly constructed cemeteries outside Paris. Jean Baptiste is new to Paris and takes up lodgings with Monsieur and Madame Monnard and their daughter in their house overlooking the cemetery. Immediately he becomes aware of the 'stink that creeps through the open window' and which he has even smelt on the breath of the local inhabitants and feels that, as a young man of ideas and ideals, he can conceive of this work as something worthy and serious. As he begins his task we gradually meet the curious characters who will populate his life for the duration. And these characters are the best part of Miller's work. For the rest, Baratte could be quoting Miller himself when he says, in a rather awkward sentence, 'what the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later'. But of course he never does.
Baratte is quite an interesting man, one absorbed by an identity crisis. Every night as he settles to sleep he asks himself, who am I, where do I come from, what are you, what do you believe in. He believes in the power of reason, a child of the Enlightenment, and this in the face of the madness of his work in the cemetery dealing with the thousands of bodies and bones who have lost all identity. He is conscious of his dignity, his scholarly achievements and his position in Normandy as the son of a master glover who also owns land. His attention to and care of his workers seems to be curiously out of joint with eighteenth century mores and I would question its veracity. Sometimes he seems as worthy as the NHS and Social Services rolled into one! He finds love and companionship with a gentle whore, Heloise, an accomplished autodidact who collects books.
This is a good story but unambitious with no great literary merit. A holiday read for next summer!
There is no doubt I think that Miller is good on detail. His characters are well drawn and fleshed out and in lingering on the ordinary, he makes it extraordinary. We smell the streets, the shops even the breath of the inhabitants of Paris in 1785 and spend a highly amusing evening seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the newly built Odeon. But he leaves us curiously unsatisfied by omitting the bigger picture. There is no sense of impending revolution - apart from the activities of four locals enthusiastically painting graffiti nightly on the walls. There is one passing reference to Rousseau, a nod to the Bastille with another to Diderot and the Encyclopedists. But the overall picture is one of a thriving and busy petit bourgeoisie more concerned with their wine and cheeses than any ideas of fraternity and equality.
The story concerns one, Jean Baptiste Baratte, an engineer from Normandy, who is charged by one of the King's ministers to clear the church and cemetery of Les Innocents which has become so over-filled that the sheer number of corpses have caused it to collapse into the basement of a local house. Centuries of interred bones are to be lifted and moved to newly constructed cemeteries outside Paris. Jean Baptiste is new to Paris and takes up lodgings with Monsieur and Madame Monnard and their daughter in their house overlooking the cemetery. Immediately he becomes aware of the 'stink that creeps through the open window' and which he has even smelt on the breath of the local inhabitants and feels that, as a young man of ideas and ideals, he can conceive of this work as something worthy and serious. As he begins his task we gradually meet the curious characters who will populate his life for the duration. And these characters are the best part of Miller's work. For the rest, Baratte could be quoting Miller himself when he says, in a rather awkward sentence, 'what the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later'. But of course he never does.
Baratte is quite an interesting man, one absorbed by an identity crisis. Every night as he settles to sleep he asks himself, who am I, where do I come from, what are you, what do you believe in. He believes in the power of reason, a child of the Enlightenment, and this in the face of the madness of his work in the cemetery dealing with the thousands of bodies and bones who have lost all identity. He is conscious of his dignity, his scholarly achievements and his position in Normandy as the son of a master glover who also owns land. His attention to and care of his workers seems to be curiously out of joint with eighteenth century mores and I would question its veracity. Sometimes he seems as worthy as the NHS and Social Services rolled into one! He finds love and companionship with a gentle whore, Heloise, an accomplished autodidact who collects books.
This is a good story but unambitious with no great literary merit. A holiday read for next summer!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Marriage Plot ... triumph or disaster?
After two vigorous and haunting novels, Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, another Jeffrey Eugenides was an exciting prospect but The Marriage Plot is a rum do! There seems to be a lot more going on here than is immediately apparent in the deceptively simple narrative.
On the surface, it appears straightforward involving a triangle of students in their final year in Brown University in the eighties [Eugenides' own alma mater]. Madeleine is pretty, WASP, rich, an English major student with a passion for the works of Austen, James and Eliot. Her final year dissertation centres on the marriage plots in their works. However, in the course of the year she began hearing people dropping names like Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and, intrigued, she signs up for a Semiotics module where she meets the second of our protagonists, the love of her life, Leonard. Leonard is a Biology and Philosophy major, poor, of humble origins and, as we discover, a manic depressive. Madeleine, however, is smitten, to the distress of her 'treasured friend' Mitchell Grammaticus, a religion major, who is totally devoted to both God and Madeleine, convinced that one day she will be his.
The book opens on Graduation Day when Madeleine is going to confront her parents with her decision to go with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has secured a research fellowship in a lab and to cohabit with him. Mitchell is more than unhappy with this decision but still considers God is on his side in the long term and is planning to take the obligatory year out with the standard tour of Europe and India where - if you're into religion - they have everything. The book goes forward then with the progresss of the three over the following year.
Madeleine is given the lion's share of the narrative and Eugenides tells it convincingly in a well constructed manner. Nevertheless, his treatment of her is shallow in many respects. While Leonard and Mitchell pretty much limp from day to day, Madeleine has a firm plan and is applying to graduate school with a definite project on Victorian novelists in mind. We hear nothing however of her progress with her work and Eugenides occupies himself almost entirely with her relationship with Leonard and, to a lesser degree, with Mitchell. At the same time, there is no 'marriage plot' as such. Rather, underlying the story, is a polemic against modernism and the seeming pretentiousness of students taken with the new philosophers of semiotics and deconstruction. He pokes fun at a student who ridicules the idea that a book should be 'about' anything. At her first class meeting in semiotics, eight of the ten students showed up in black t-shirts and ripped black jeans, one with his eyebrows shaved off! It seems that Eugenides is turning his back on the inventiveness of his earlier work and the idea of experimentation in favour of social realism and the traditional narrative. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the character of Madeleine is drawn with such empathy. In a recent interview with Eileen Battersby, Eugenides said he loved the 19th century novels and it does seem as that is what he trying to achieve with this work. But the 19th century novels worked because they reflected the zeitgeist of the time and the institution of marriage was a commitment of a totally different nature from today. To impose such a structure on the mores of the 21st century does not convince which possibly explains the ending.
Eugenides tells his story with in a straightforward fashion - more Updike than Franzen - and he tells it well. His characters are likeable, even the self-destructing Leonard - but it lacks the originality of both Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. It is not a little autobiographical including not only his time in Brown but also his own stint working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta from whom Mitchell eventually flees! One could almost forgive him - but not quite - for his diatribe against Europeans who, he claims in one section, had produced no decent rock music of their own and 'whose relationship to the sixties ... was essentially spectatorial'. I know some French and German students who might heartily disagree!
It is an easy read but it is not a literary masterpiece sadly.
On the surface, it appears straightforward involving a triangle of students in their final year in Brown University in the eighties [Eugenides' own alma mater]. Madeleine is pretty, WASP, rich, an English major student with a passion for the works of Austen, James and Eliot. Her final year dissertation centres on the marriage plots in their works. However, in the course of the year she began hearing people dropping names like Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and, intrigued, she signs up for a Semiotics module where she meets the second of our protagonists, the love of her life, Leonard. Leonard is a Biology and Philosophy major, poor, of humble origins and, as we discover, a manic depressive. Madeleine, however, is smitten, to the distress of her 'treasured friend' Mitchell Grammaticus, a religion major, who is totally devoted to both God and Madeleine, convinced that one day she will be his.
The book opens on Graduation Day when Madeleine is going to confront her parents with her decision to go with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has secured a research fellowship in a lab and to cohabit with him. Mitchell is more than unhappy with this decision but still considers God is on his side in the long term and is planning to take the obligatory year out with the standard tour of Europe and India where - if you're into religion - they have everything. The book goes forward then with the progresss of the three over the following year.
Madeleine is given the lion's share of the narrative and Eugenides tells it convincingly in a well constructed manner. Nevertheless, his treatment of her is shallow in many respects. While Leonard and Mitchell pretty much limp from day to day, Madeleine has a firm plan and is applying to graduate school with a definite project on Victorian novelists in mind. We hear nothing however of her progress with her work and Eugenides occupies himself almost entirely with her relationship with Leonard and, to a lesser degree, with Mitchell. At the same time, there is no 'marriage plot' as such. Rather, underlying the story, is a polemic against modernism and the seeming pretentiousness of students taken with the new philosophers of semiotics and deconstruction. He pokes fun at a student who ridicules the idea that a book should be 'about' anything. At her first class meeting in semiotics, eight of the ten students showed up in black t-shirts and ripped black jeans, one with his eyebrows shaved off! It seems that Eugenides is turning his back on the inventiveness of his earlier work and the idea of experimentation in favour of social realism and the traditional narrative. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the character of Madeleine is drawn with such empathy. In a recent interview with Eileen Battersby, Eugenides said he loved the 19th century novels and it does seem as that is what he trying to achieve with this work. But the 19th century novels worked because they reflected the zeitgeist of the time and the institution of marriage was a commitment of a totally different nature from today. To impose such a structure on the mores of the 21st century does not convince which possibly explains the ending.
Eugenides tells his story with in a straightforward fashion - more Updike than Franzen - and he tells it well. His characters are likeable, even the self-destructing Leonard - but it lacks the originality of both Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. It is not a little autobiographical including not only his time in Brown but also his own stint working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta from whom Mitchell eventually flees! One could almost forgive him - but not quite - for his diatribe against Europeans who, he claims in one section, had produced no decent rock music of their own and 'whose relationship to the sixties ... was essentially spectatorial'. I know some French and German students who might heartily disagree!
It is an easy read but it is not a literary masterpiece sadly.
This week they said ...
What joy! Nicholas Lezard has discovered What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici. Followers of my blog may remember that I have several times referred - and deferred - to this amazing work of literary criticism over the past year. Lezard rues how the Booker shortlist went horribly wrong this year having been 'on the point of recognising the influence of modernism' last year with Tom McCarthy's C. As he points out, the modernist canon has been around too long to deserve the sideswipes it receives from the likes of Amis. Read his piece in full in last Saturday's Guardian Review, p.19.
This was followed by Robert McCrum [today's Observer, 13 November, Review section, p. 42] recognising that English fiction 'is in the doldrums' and opining that the 'cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn'. In his opinion, the book market promotes quantity before quality producing what he terms the Ikea novel. 'Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer'. It has all the ingredients of a novel but is a simulacrum of fine writing. 'Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity'.
Its reassuring to know that my criticisms of the gods of the English literary scene are not totally off base.
This was followed by Robert McCrum [today's Observer, 13 November, Review section, p. 42] recognising that English fiction 'is in the doldrums' and opining that the 'cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn'. In his opinion, the book market promotes quantity before quality producing what he terms the Ikea novel. 'Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer'. It has all the ingredients of a novel but is a simulacrum of fine writing. 'Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity'.
Its reassuring to know that my criticisms of the gods of the English literary scene are not totally off base.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Booker Prize 2011: RESULT!
I have broken my own record! After years of unfailingly wrong guessing the result, I have finally got it right! Well done, Julian Barnes. Literature triumphs! As he himself said, Sense of an Ending is a beautiful book - beautiful to look at he meant. But it is also a beautiful book to read. Go for it!
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