More of the Bayou

Hot on the heels of In the Electric Mists with Confederate Dead, I whipped through another book in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series on the weekend. Sunset Limited was similarly gripping and atmospheric, a perfect lazy long weekend read. We even (finally) had some rain here which was quite appropriate given the almost constant rain in Burke's New Iberia, Louisiana.

Sunset Limited is a more complicated story than In the Electric Mists... and I think it suffers a little for it. There are lots of characters, some of whom only last a chapter or two, and I will somewhat shamefacedly admit I had to flick back now and then to remind myself who was who. Characters are often introduced only to be killed (usually very violently- a warning to more faint hearted readers) pages later. All the plot threads are unravelled by the end but I think the story could have been told with greater clarity.

That said, the story was pacy and compelling. It centers around an unsolved murder from Dave's past in which a labour organiser, Jack Flynn, was crucified and left for dead on the side of a local barn. Jack Flynn's two adult children, Cisco and Megan, return to the town at the beginning of the novel and this forces the town to address some old demons from their community's history.

Burke touches on some interesting ideas in Sunset Limited. His characters are forced to acknowledge a violent history in their town that many would rather forget. There is also an interesting dissection of the class system in New Iberia as we see the relationship between rich plantation owners and the poorer working class whites and blacks in town. Dave Robicheaux challenges the local philosophy that only the poor ever really pay for their crimes. There is also the obvious Christian imagery of the crucifixion which is linked in to the idea of the town's need for redemption. Burke doesn't hit the reader in the face with these bigger concepts- they could be ignored if plot is all you're after- but they give a greater depth to what could be a fairly ordinary crime story

I really enjoyed this novel but in some ways I feel it is less than the sum of its parts. I thought a more unifying thread was needed to bring everything together successfully. As expected, Burke creates his world of New Iberia in gorgeous rich detail, but maybe at times he needed to hold back a little and not give the reader so much of everything when it comes to plot.

Breaking the Silence

There has been a rather long silence here at this delicious solitude lately. Partly this has been because my work has changed this year, and with extra responsibilities there, there has seemed to be little time to write here.

Also, I've had a sort of writer's block when it comes to my blog. Somehow when I'm on the internet I seem to be more easily distracted by other bright and shiny sites and have neglected my own. Embarrassingly enough, Facebook has been sucking up my time, as has my recent obsession with cooking blogs. I'm not quite sure where that came from but perhaps in times of stress and tiredness it is quite nice to read the sort of blogs that don't make me feel just a little guilty about not writing posts for my own blog.

Finally my reading has been a little lacklustre lately. The last two books that I read for my book club were fairly uninspiring and before that I spent a lot of time reading The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, which I enjoyed to an extent but which didn't really deliver in the long run (for me at least, I know lots of other people loved it).

Thankfully though I now have two weeks holidays and have read some great books that actually make me feel like blogging again.

Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the crime fiction of James Lee Burke. I had heard all sorts of good things about his Dave Robicheaux mysteries but hadn't gotten around to actually reading one until this week and I really loved it. In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is steeped in atmosphere. Burke is particularly good at evoking the smells of the landscape, which might sound strange, but is absolutely appropriate when describing a place as humid and lush as the Louisiana Bayou where the novel is set. Although this novel falls somewhere in the middle of what is now a long series of novels, it worked really well as a stand-alone book. A back story was hinted at but I didn't feel that I needed to read all the others in the series to understand what was going on here.

In many ways the novel covers typical crime fiction territory. Robicheaux is a troubled detective with a chequered past and a gruff demeanour. The plot concerns the serial murders of young prostitutes, possibly connected with mob activity. So far, fairly standard. However it is Burke's descriptive writing that really brings the setting into vivid life. I really felt like I was right there in New Iberia, Louisiana. I could feel the dripping humidity and the smell the rotting vegetation. There is also an intriguing sub-plot involving the appearance of the confederate soldier ghosts that give the novel its title, which in lesser hands might have been a bit silly but actually works here. I'm curious to see what the film version of this novel will be like- it's due for release this year some time.

The other book I've read, and loved, recently is David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. I recently raved about When You Are Engulfed in Flames in this blog, and I loved Me Talk Pretty One Day for all the same reasons. Sedaris is clever, funny and touching in these personal essays. The thread that runs through the book is one about language and speech, as the title suggests. One of the most touching essays is the one in which a speech therapist is assigned to David at school in order to 'correct' his speech, a process that amounts to little less than formalised humiliation. This links nicely with one of the funniest essays which describes Sedaris' language lessons in France in which the class is routinely humiliated by their sadistic French teacher. The attempts of the class to describe, in broken French, the meaning of Easter is laugh out loud funny ("It is a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus" etc).

On that note, I wish you all an enjoyable Easter break and am heading off now to curl up with a cup of tea, some chocolate and another James Lee Burke mystery.

King Dork

King Dork by Frank Portman is one of the most fun reads I've had in ages. It's ostensibly written for young adults but, like with the best fiction in any sub-genre, its appeal is much broader than that. I think the quote from someone called John Green on the cover of my edition says it best: "If you're in a band or wish you were, if you loved or hated The Catcher in the Rye, if you like girls or are one... King Dork will rock your world." I'll leave it up to you to decide which of these categories I belong to, but suffice to say, my world was rocked.

King Dork is the story of Tom Henderson, a teenager who is hopelessly uncool, struggles to make friends or meet girls (although he thinks about this a lot), and spends most of his time with his only friend Sam Hellerman, thinking up band names, roles and album titles of their not yet actually formed band (e.g. The Sadly Mistaken, GUITAR: Moe Vittles, BASS AND LANDSCAPING: Sam 'Noxious' Fumes, FIRST ALBUM: Kill the Boy Wonder. There's a lot more where that came from- see the 'Bandography' at the back of the book).

A lot of the humour and enjoyment in the novel comes from Tom's wry observations of those around him. He is an outsider with excellent insight. Some of the funniest moments for me were his comments about his try-hard hippy step-father, also called Tom:

Our official legal relationship is pretty recent, though he's been around for quite a while. I don't know why they decided to get married all of a sudden. They went away for the weekend to see Neil Young in Big Sur and somehow came back married. They still refer to each other as partners, though, rather than husband-wife. 'Have you met my partner, Carol?' Like they're lawyers who work at the same law firm, or cops who share a squad car. Or cowboys in the Wild West. 'Howdy, pardner.'

Later in the novel Tom goes even further into articulating the difference between the 60's generation and those who came after them (although I did have to think that most teenagers today would have parents who grew up in the 80's rather than the 60's). He combines this with a critique of the Catcher in the Rye, the book most of his high school English teachers are obsessed with (forgive the long-ish quote, I think it's worth it to get a flavour of the book):

Look, it's not even that bad a book. I admit it. I can feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Holden Caulfield. I can. And I can see why the powers that be have decided to adopt it as their semi-offical alterna-Bible. Things were really bad in the sixties. You were always getting kicked out of your prep school, or getting into fights at your prep school, or getting marooned on deserted islands on the way to your fancy English boarding school. And when you finally got off the island, your 'old man' was always on your 'case', and Vietnam just drove you crazy, plus you were constantly high on drugs and out of touch with reality and it was sometimes a little more difficult than it should have been to get everyone to admit how much better you were than everybody else. It was rough. I get it. I really get it. Up with Holden. I'd have probably been the same way.
In the end, though, the attempt to save the world by forcing people to read Catcher in the Rye and dressing casually and supporting public television and putting bumper stickers on Volvos and eating only weird expensive food and separating your cans and bottles and doing tai chi and going to the farmers' market and pronouncing Spanish words with a cartoon-character accent and calling actresses actors and making up your own religion and so forth- well, the world refused to be saved that way. Big surprise.

Tom also has some cutting things to say about education, particularly in his description of AP classes (which I believe are advanced classes in American schools). At Tom's school the AP classes spend their time making collages and doing role plays while the plebs in the regular classes (including the narrator) do endless vocabulary lists in English. Needless to say, everyone is reading Catcher in the Rye. As a high school English teacher (who loves Catcher in the Rye by the way) this was pretty close to the bone for me, and had me rolling on the floor with laughter.

King Dork has a pacy plot which somewhere part-way through turns into a crime mystery, a funny, coming-of-age, crime mystery, romance mash up that just works. The ending slightly stretches believability but somehow Portman pulls it off. This is definitely not a book a book for younger teenagers (sex and drug references aplenty) but would suit savvy readers in the upper years of high school. And, as I mentioned, there is lots here for adults to enjoy as well.

Restless

I read William Boyd's novel Restless in a day and a bit (give or take a few hours for necessities like eating and sleeping). It was a perfect book for the moment (that being mid-way through my long summer holidays, in the middle of a heat wave and with plenty of time on my hands). Please forgive my review though, which might be rather shallow- I read this book quickly and it was a few weeks (and a couple of books) ago, and I'm embarrassed to admit that it has already faded a bit from my memory.

Restless alternates between a hot summer in England in the 1970's and pre-WWII Europe, London and America. In the 70's we follow Ruth who is a single mother and English language tutor to non-English speakers. She has been given a document by her mother, Sally, which reveals that Sally is, in fact, Eva Delectorskaya, who was recruited to the English Secret Service in the years before WWII after the murder of her brother Kolia. Eva/ Sally's memories are revealed slowly as alternate chapters in the book and it is these chapters that I found most exciting. It describes Eva's training, and her first real mission in Belgium, all under the watchful eye of Lucas Rohmer, the mysterious agent responsible for her recruitment. This half of the novel reads much like a traditional spy novel, or rather, what I imagine a traditional spy novel would be like, given that it's not a genre that I've read much. Eva's story is exciting and mysterious and full of the kind of cloak and dagger stuff totally sucks in the reader.

Back in the 1970's, Eva/ Sally, who has been living a fairly staid rural life in a quiet English village for many years, has begun to believe that she is in danger once more. Her daughter Ruth is enlisted to help Eva investigate some of the details of her past and to help her uncover current dangers. Ruth is, understandably, stunned to find out about her mother's past and curious enough to help her with her current situation. Ruth also has to navigate some of her own personal problems, from the unwanted house guests that won't leave her flat, to her unsatisfying romantic life.

It's hard to say much more about the plot without giving away some rather fun twists in the story. This is a gripping and entertaining novel with a quite haunting message about the long term consequences of a life steeped in suspicion and betrayal. The title refers to the restlessness of the spy who can never really trust anyone, never really relax again.

My only complaint about Restless might be that I found the parts set in the 1970's slightly less interesting that the flashbacks to Eva's spy years. I also felt that at times Boyd didn't quite capture the voice of Ruth Gilmartin who narrates this part of the book. Interestingly enough, both my husband (who read the book after me) and I thought the narrator was male before she was specifically referred to as a woman. This might be because the author is male, but I do feel that she had a more 'male' voice at times, that the character wasn't quite well-realised enough.

Overall, I found Restless a really enjoyable, un-put-downable read. I was totally swept up in the world of espionage and was genuinely surprised by some of the twists and turns in the plot. The hot English summer described in the book was a perfect match for the long, hot summer days we have been having here.

The Scandal of the Season

While on holidays over Christmas I was looking for a light, fun read. Something not too challenging. And I hoped that Sophie Gee's historical novel The Scandal of the Season would fulfil my requirements. I had heard about Gee's novel on an ABC TV special on the genre of romance- one of the series hosted by Jennifer Byrne. Sophie Gee appeared on the panel and came across as clever and interesting so I figured I should give her book a go.

My copy of The Scandal of the Season has a big gold sticker on the front proclaiming 'Women's Weekly Great Read' (for those of you overseas, Women's Weekly is a magazine aimed at middle aged housewives- recipes, celebrity interviews, that sort of thing). While I like to think of myself as egalitarian and certainly not a snob, I have to admit, I'm not that comfortable walking around with a big sticker on my book proclaiming that I have the same reading tastes as Women's Weekly readers. It doesn't sit well with my image of myself as an urban sophisticate :-)

Having revealed to you all that I'm a hopeless elitist, hopefully I can redeem myself somewhat by saying that none of this stopped me from actually reading The Scandal of the Season. The premise of the book is interesting. It is set in the eighteenth century and gives us a back story to Alexander Pope's famous poem, 'The Rape of the Lock'. I had studied the poem at university but that was a while ago and my memory of the poem is pretty sketchy, not that this mattered much, as Gee fills the reader in on the details.

The story involves the real life seduction of glamourous socialite Arabella Fermor by the dashing Lord Petre. The seduction is seen through the lens of Pope, who features as a main character in the novel, and his friends (cousins to Arabella) Martha and Teresa Blount. Gee has researched the period carefully and it is the historical details that I enjoyed most about the novel. She gives an interesting insight into the sexual lives of women at the time, and the enormous role that money and social status play in romance and marriage. Arabella and Lord Petre fall in love but cannot hope to marry as they are not social equals. Gee portrays the dangers facing young unmarried women who must preserve their virginity at all costs if they wish to marry well. Married women of aristocratic background seem to be able to indulge in affairs if they wish, an aspect of the society that I found fascinating. Men, as usual, seem to be able to get away with romantic indiscretions at any stage.

Another really interesting plot line involves a Jacobite plot to assassinate Queen Anne. Most of the major characters in the story, including Pope himself, are Catholics and therefore part of a persecuted minority (and possible suspects in any Jacobite plot). Many characters have memories of Catholics being burnt at the stake in the streets of London and there is a general fear that such violence will return. The novel starts with the murder of a Catholic priest and this theme continues throughout. I had known a little about the religious conflicts in England at the time, but Gee really brought this aspect of eighteenth century London to life for me.

Unfortunately, however, I didn't feel that The Scandal of the Season ultimately lived up to its potential, even as a light summer read. For a start, I think Gee has a problem writing realistic dialogue. The witty exchanges between characters just didn't really work a lot of the time. Also, a lot of the character exposition felt laboured. Gee describes the feelings of characters in enormous detail where I think she could have revealed this information more effectively through their actions. Finally, the plot, which is strong for most of the novel, just kind of peters out at the end. A stronger finish would have made me enjoy this book a lot more, although I guess that is the constraint of working with material based on actual historical events.

Gee's novel is a literate and well-researched book but with some major limitations. In the end, I found it interesting but have to disagree with the Women's Weekly 'Great Read' label. Not that I'm a snob or anything...

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

When I bought David Sedaris' collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames, as a Christmas present for my husband, I hadn't read anything by Sedaris but the reviews of this book had been fantastic and somehow I knew it would be his kind of thing. Happily, I was right. My husband raced through it in a day or so and then I got my greedy mits on the book.

Sedaris seems to be pretty well known to Americans but less so here in Australia (or maybe I'm betraying my ignorance?). All I can say is that I wish I had discovered him for myself sooner. Sedaris writes an almost perfect personal essay. It's a genre that doesn't seem that common these days and more's the pity.

Many of these essays made me laugh out loud. Sedaris has a lovely self-deprecating sense of humour that allows him to share his personal humiliations with the reader in a way that only makes him more likeable. He is particualrly funny when writing about the gaps in understanding when he is in non-English speaking countries. For example, his struggles with the French language (Sedaris lives in France) reach a particularly funny peak when he describes how he answers all questions with 'd'accord' (meaning 'okay'). Using d'accord as a catch-all response to questions that he can't understand leads him into some very strange situations, one of which involves ending up in a doctor's waiting room full of well-dressed French people wearing only his underpants.

Sedaris is just as good at depicting other characters that he encounters. One of my favourites is his abrasive, outspoken New York neighbour, Helen, who has lived in her apartment for 50 years and reserves her right to say whatever she likes about anyone ("Stick it up your ass," she tells Sedaris, "I'm not your goddamn mother." When he points out a friend of his on Oprah).

Sedaris and his partner Hugh are listening one of Sedaris' first appearances on NPR when Helen knocks on their door:

"Listen," [Hugh] whispered. "David is on the radio."

"So what?" Helen said. "A lot of people are on the radio." Then she handed him an envelope and asked if we'd mail in her stool sample. "It's not the whole thing, just a smear," she told him.

His portrait of the foul-mouthed, angry, opinionated Helen could have been played for laughs at Helen's expense, however like in many of these essays, Sedaris ultimately reveals the humanity and vulnerability of his subject, as well as his affection for her.

It's this more serious side to the essays that makes them really outstanding. They are not just descriptions of funny incidences. Each essay comes back at the end to close with a thoughtful point, a kind of 'a ha!' moment that brings the whole essay together and makes us realise that we are not, for example, just reading an essay about a taxi driver who quizzes Sedaris on his sex life, but actually considering how easy it is to feel superior to others. Sedaris makes his writing seem utterly effortless and yet anyone who has tried to write this sort of thing knows how hard it is to achieve such an understated style. This is elegant, funny, intelligent writing, and, really, what more could you want?

Thoughts on Reading in 2008

We're a good way into the first month of 2009 and finally I get around to writing my post on reading in 2008. Oh well, diligent posting does not seem to be the way for me...

2008 was a great year for reading at this delicious solitude. I read 39 books, which is ok for me, but I'd love to read more this year (and I really think I should be able to count Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell as more than one book!). There was lots of contemporary fiction on the list and not many classics. As usual, then, I'll vow to read more classics this year. It's just that I get swept up in those shiny new books!

The discovery of the year for me was Michael Chabon. I read and loved The Yiddish Policemens Union and went on to read The Wonder Boys and Maps and Legends. The Wonder Boys is the book I now count as my favourite novel and I heartily recommend it. My newfound love of all things Chabon is strange because I read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay a couple of years back and was not overly impressed. Was it a matter of the other books being better? Or had I changed? Ah, the eternal mysteries of reading!

My other great discovery of 2008 was Australian crime writer Peter Temple. I have given copies of his excellent novel The Broken Shore to so many people now, that I keep forgetting who has and hasn't received a copy from me. I went on to read another Temple crime novel, Black Tide, which I am yet to review in these pages but which was also outstanding. Temple is brilliant at evoking a sense of place and the rhythms of Australian speech. He also writes a bloody good story.

In brief, I also loved reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, a great big crazy Dickensian fantasy of a novel, and I loved Graham Greene's The Quiet American for its contemporary resonances. My favourite young adult novel of the year was Scott Westerfeld's Peeps which is the vampire novel that should be selling more than Twilight. I'll take cool New York vampires and sassy, tough female characters over the vapid Bella and vacant Edward any day. Still, the 14 year old girls that I teach would beg to differ...

So overall 2008 was a another great year for reading. It looks like 2009 is also shaping up well if William Boyd's excellent novel Restless which I've just finished is anything to go by.

The Architecture of Happiness

This morning I finished reading Alain de Botton's thoroughly enjoyable book, The Architecture of Happiness. I've realised that I've become a big fan of De Botton's clear, thoughtful writing after loving The Art of Travel and now finding this book as good, if not better. He has a nice way of simplifying complex ideas and making clear the relationship between philosophy and ordinary, every day life.

The Architecture of Happiness is, obviously, about architecture. De Botton explores why we find certain buildings beautiful and why they might make our lives better. As in The Art of Travel, the text is accompanied by simple black and white photographs that look unassuming if you just flick through the book, but which compliment the text in clever and thoughtful ways as you read. De Botton covers a lot of material and I almost feel I could read this again just to soak up the ideas a little more thoroughly.

Some of the most interesting points in the book for me came towards the end. De Botton describes how the great architect Le Corbusier had what seems in hindsight to be an absolutely crazy plan to flatten parts of central Paris and replace the buildings with a vast parkland studded with enormous high-rise tower blocks of apartments. Rather than dismiss the idea, De Botton examines its rather idealistic motives and compares them to the reality of how people live and interact with urban landscapes. In doing so, he articulates some of the unease I feel with the city I live in- one which was planned in the early twentieth century with similar ideals about modern living in mind:

A city laid out on apparently rational grounds, where different specialised facilities (the houses, the shopping centre, the library) are separated from one another across a vast terrain connected by motorways, deprives its inhabitants of the pleasures of incidental discoveries and presupposes that we march from place to place with a sense of unflagging purpose. But whereas we may leave the house with the ostensible object of consulting a book in a library, we may nevertheless be delighted on the way by the sight of the fishmonger laying out his startled, bug-eyed catch on sheets of ice, by workmen hoisting patterned sofas into apartment blocks, by leaves opening their tender green palms to the spring sunshine, or by a girl with chestnut hair and glasses reading a book at the bus stop.

When I read this I instantly had a way of putting into words why, despite the fact that the city I live in has lots of open space and parkland, a high standard of housing, good roads with little or no traffic problems, and excellent facilities, I will never feel the same excitement and sense of possibility and even happiness here as I have in London or New York or even Sydney. While I'm not about to up sticks and move out of here right now, I feel a sense of relief in being able to explain why I don't really love the town I live in. For me, it is a great achievement of a book when it can clarify thoughts the reader already had but couldn't articulate.

De Botton gives voice to the idea that good architecture deeply affects us, that it can make us better, happier people. I've always felt quite sensitive to my surroundings and whether they make me feel comfortable or inspired and I don't think I'm at all alone in this. De Botton tries to break down this sensation and explain it in a rational way, and in doing so charges architects with the responsibility to use their skills to create a better world. De Botton explains, architecture is as much a kind of psychology- bad architecture being a failure to understand people and how they live. Beautiful places are, however,

"...the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans- a combination that allows them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had."

Falling Hopelessly Behind

My blog posts have become sadly infrequent (well, sadly for me at least, as I really enjoy posting here). This is for all the usual reasons of things both within and beyond my control. But now that reports are written and the long summer holiday is tantalizingly within reach, I'm determined to get back into it and once again crank up this delicious solitude.

I've got lots of Australian books to write about, including a couple of crime novels. I've also re-read and loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas after seeing a great documentary about Hunter S. Thompson. I'm hoping to write about The Architecture of Happiness, another Alain de Botton book that I'm finding fascinating, and as always, I'm enjoying a Margaret Atwood collection of stories, Good Bones.

But first up I've got to get out there and catch up on my blog reading which has also been sorely neglected. I'm sure you've all been far more diligent than me, and I have to hear about your reading.

Watch this space for more posts soon...

The Two Elizabeths

I'm currently reading two very English books, from roughly the same era (well, mid-twentieth century-ish) and which are both written in a really delightful, quiet, precise and beautiful way. They are both also, co-incidentally, written by women called Elizabeth.

Elizabeth David's cook book French Provincial Cooking is justifiably famous. This is a cook book that is easy to read cover to cover. Even the lists of ingredients are poetic and evoke long, warm summer nights in Provence or other such picturesque French country experiences. I'm only just realising what a debt so many modern celebrity chefs owe Elizabeth David. Her writing sounds remarkably contemporary, despite the fact that this book was written in 1960. Her promotion of fresh, seasonal ingredients and simple, clean flavours would be right at home in any modern cookery writing.

My favourite bit in the book so far is when Elizabeth David writes about Provence:

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on to a train. Here in London it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place at all. But now and again the vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof, or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside will rise out of my kitchen pots with the smell of a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew.

It is really lovely writing, and whether I ever cook anything from it or not, it is worth reading.

The other Elizabeth I am reading is Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbour in one of those lovely dark green Virago Modern Classics paperback editions. I have to admit to having been hopelessly ignorant about Elizabeth Taylor (the writer, not the actress of course) and had not heard of her until I picked up this novel. But so far I'm loving the precise observation and insight into character in this novel set in a quite English seaside town after WWII. Beneath the calm surface, tensions abound in the village, with the story centering around Beth, her husband Robert who is the local doctor, and their neighbour Tory, who is Beth's best-friend but who is also having an affair with Robert. I can't wait to see how it's all resolved but so far Taylor has avoided any sense of melodrama in a plot that could tend that way.

More on both books as I work my way through the provinces of France and the intrigues of English village life...

Carry Me Down

Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland is a disturbing and brilliant novel (a combination of adjectives that applies to some of my favourite pieces of literature). It totally divided my book group last week. There were some who hated it so much they could hardly even discuss the book- and these are lovely, educated readers- and then there were those of us who just fell totally in love with the beautiful writing and the bizarre world that Hyland creates (I like to think we were right!).

The book is set in Ireland in the 1970s and is told from the point of view of 12 year old John Egan. John would have to be one of the most unusual and fully realised characters in recent writing and his world is definitely a strange place for the reader to spend time in. John is physically mature beyond his years and is verging on a kind of madness (although the nature of this was hotly contested in my book group- some saw John as a dangerous sociopath, others, myself included, preferred to think of him as a troubled child who is reacting to the traumas he experiences). He is an only child who enjoys a disturbingly close relationship with his depressive mother and feels a kind of rivalry with his handsome, unemployed father. The family lives with John's grandmother on whom they depend financially, a situation that is fraught with tension.

John believes he is a human lie detector and uses his skill to interpret his interactions with those around him. And while he dreams of making it into the Guinness Book of Records with his unique skill, those around him expect him to grow up and fit into society's expectations. He is a boy whose physical body has outstripped his child's mind.

Hyland plays with the idea of madness and explores the way in which children can live in imaginative worlds that resemble the worlds constructed by the insane. She asks us to question the effect of a child's environment on their behaviour, particularly when the action moves to an extremely grim housing estate outside of Dublin. She also explores what we consider 'normal', ending the novel with a welcome hint of hope for John and his parents (or that is how I interpreted the ending, others in the book group felt it was a relentlessly depressing ending).

Carry Me Down is at times a very bleak book but I found that overall the beauty of the writing and the fascinating characters made this book un-put-downable. At times John is a funny, astute narrator who I genuinely liked, despite his confronting behaviour. It won't be a book for everyone, and it's not one to read if you want a light read, but it's definitely one of my favourite reads of this year.

Recent Reading

For someone who rarely reads much other than fiction, I seem to have found myself reading outside of my usual comfort zone lately. For starters, I read Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett for my book club. Bennett has written an account of his search for the source of the unbelievably cheap underpants he buys at his local department store in New Zealand. The book becomes a kind of investigation of the crazily successful Chinese manufacturing industry, and of the Chinese economy and culture more broadly. Where Underpants Come From is an engaging read and is sometimes quite funny but I found Bennett's innocent-abroad persona a bit grating after a while. He seems to feel that because he is an amateur that he doesn't really need to go beyond superficial insights or do much research. While it's interesting to read about his experiences in remote parts of China, I couldn't help but think that there must be more thoughtful books on Chinese culture available.

I've also finished Michael Chabon's books of essays called Maps and Legends. Those of you who follow this blog will know that I love Chabon's fiction and I was happy to find that I also enjoy his thoughts on other people's writing and the process of being a writer. Chabon has twin fixations, genre fiction and his Jewish heritage, and he brings together these elements in the fantastic final essay entitled Golems I Have Known, or Why My Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon. In the essay he uses the idea of the golem as a metaphor for creating fiction and he plays with the idea of truth and its relationship to fiction. Other essays cover such topics as Arthur Conan Doyle, the short story, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and various moments in the author's own creative life. I found myself agreeing with Chabon's championing of genre fiction and, as always, enjoying his writing style and humour. In one particular passage Chabon writes about the influence of science fiction on his own writing in a particularly lovely way:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and "round" characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill- or rather I didn't want to lose- that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, that was sometimes called "the sense of wonder." If my subject matter couldn't do it- if I wasn't writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together- then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week.

Happily, I think he has achieved that rather ambitious aim.

I'm now half-way through Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History which is a collection of autobiographical essays, so far mostly about Franzen's rather fraught and anxious childhood and adolescence. There are some similarities to the Chabon book; both authors share a middle class, suburban upbringing and are roughly the same age, and both tend to write in a slightly self-mocking but ultimately confident style. However, where Chabon focuses on writing and books, both his own and those of others who have influenced him, Franzen's book is much more a straight down the line autobiography. So far I'm really enjoying The Discomfort Zone. Franzen has a way of capturing the painful awkwardness of adolescence that I could really relate to. He also captures the relationship between a child and their parents so accurately that it made me wince. These are the same things I remember liking about The Corrections and so I imagine fans of that book would enjoy this smaller, more intimate and personal piece of writing.

When I finish Franzen, I'm determined to get back into some fiction so top of the list is M.J. Hyland's Carry Me Down which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year (or the year before?). I have to admit though, I have enjoyed my little side trip into non-fiction and I might well find myself back here before long.

Moments in History

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne are two books for young readers that share their basis in tragic periods from history. I read both books recently and was struck by some of their similarities. Both books share a sense of dread and fear, and both raise the issue of how brutal events in history might be mediated for younger readers.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was first published in 1976. It tells the story of the Logans, a black family who are struggling to survive in the Deep South of America during the depression. The story is told from the viewpoint of Cassie Logan, a young girl who is on the cusp of realising that she lives in a society that views her and her family as second class citizens. Cassie's proud family have worked hard to protect her and her siblings from the racism of the world around her, but as she begins to interact with a more adult world there is no way that she can remain in blissful ignorance. The Logan family have fought hard to buy their own piece of land, therefore maintaining more independence than a lot of other families who work as share-croppers in the area. Unfortunately their independence also makes the Logans a target for local whites who are angry that they are getting 'above their station'.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry owes a debt to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird which was published the decade before Taylor's novel. They share a young female narrator and an episodic plot structure that mixes amusing anecdotes with a more serious plot line that slowly builds throughout the novel. Roll of Thunder however has something that Mockingbird doesn't have, and that is a real sense of danger and impending doom. The fact that this is a novel told from the perspective of a black family means that we as readers are central to the action. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout herself was never likely to be the victim of racism but Cassie Logan runs some very real risks when she stands up for herself. To my mind, Mockingbird is the better of the two novels but there is certainly a place for both in the canon of American literature.

Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry tells a story that it is important for young people to hear. Taylor balances out the moments of despair and fear however by ensuring that there is still a sense of hope in the novel. For me, that sense of hope is really important when writing for young people, especially readers who might not be able to put such events into perspective on their own.

***Spoiler ahead***
It is this sense of hope that is almost totally absent from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne's novel is about the holocaust and tells the tale of a small boy, Bruno, whose family move to the mysterious 'Out-with' (Bruno's pronunciation) at the behest of the very important man known to Bruno as 'the Fury'. Bruno's father has been hired to run the camp that adult readers will recognise immediately as Auschwitz.

Ostensibly this is a novel for quite young readers- the protagonist is 9 years old and the story is simple and almost fairy-tale like. Of course, this is no fairy-tale and adult readers will know that things aren't going to end well for Bruno and Schmuel, the friend Bruno makes who lives behind the fence.

It's not that I think that children should be protected completely from awful moments in our history, however what I do object to is the way this book lures children in with a sweet and innocent tone, only to hit them with an absolutely devastating and, let's face it, unrealistic ending. While no-one with an understanding of history would expect things to go well for Schmuel, Boyne adds in a twist in which Bruno himself becomes a victim of the holocaust. Bruno's death, the book seems to suggest, is only fair given that his father is responsible for systematic genocide. This seems a particularly brutal way for the author to make his point.

If we are going to expose children to the horror of the holocaust, is it too much to ask that it at least be historically accurate? Even the central premise, Bruno's friendship with Schmuel is extremely unrealistic. There are lots of books about this period in history that present the material in a more honest and open way. Anne Frank's diary springs to mind as perhaps more suitable for young readers.

When I think back to myself at 9 years of age, I think The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas would have been unreasonably disturbing. I think we owe it to young children to be honest with them and while Boyne's intentions are noble I don't think his book serves a useful purpose in the way that it makes a really awful part of history even more disturbing for such a young audience.

Catching Up

There's been lots of reading and not much blogging happening around here lately so it seems time for a bit of a round up post.

I'm reading a couple of interesting books for school at the moment. I just finished Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor and am working my through John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Both are young adult novels that deal with terrible, tragic times in history: segregation in the American South in the 1920's and Nazi Germany, respectively. The two books are very different in style but there are some striking similarities so I'm planning a proper post on these two together.

I'm also reading Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which I'm ashamed to admit I've never read before. The play rollicks along but it seems to me the very obvious anti-semitism makes this a tricky one to stage today. In the front of my edition there's an interesting essay by the Australian actor John Bell on how he approached the challenges of playing Shylock without resorting to negative stereotypes. It really made me want to see a thoughtful production of the play.

I finally finished Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold's gorgeously magical depiction of the world of, well, magic in San Francisco in the early part of the twentieth century. Watch this space for a proper review soon.

Now I'm getting stuck into Tim Winton's collection of inter-linked short stories The Turning for my book club and just loving it even though I'm only a few stories in. There is just something about the way Winton captures Australian speech patterns and rural Australian landscapes that I find irresistible.

Finally, I've bought some wonderful new books over the past week. I bought a very beautiful copy of Michael Chabon's collection of essays called Maps and Legends. Honestly the multi-layered cover is so gorgeous that I can hardly bear to open this one, but of course I will because of my newly found love of all things Chabon. I also got some great bargains at an academic remainders store in my city: a crime fiction novel by Australian author Peter Temple called Black Tide, Margaret Atwood's book on writing called Negotiating with the Dead and a great little collection of poetry called Out of Fashion which is edited by poet Carol Ann Duffy (all the poems are about fashion, dressing or undressing, and a range of contemporary poets have each submitted a poem of their own and one from 'another time' which all makes for a great range of interesting poems).

All this makes me think how lovely it is to have a really enticing pile of books in the house and almost makes up for the winter chill that has descended in full force this week.

The Quiet American

I have recently converted to being a Graham Greene fan as a result of his small but perfectly formed novel, The Quiet American. I had read some Graham Greene before (Our Man in Havana) and was not particularly drawn in by his writing, although I could see that technically it was good. The Quiet American, however, really blew me away.

The Quiet American is narrated by the main character Fowler, a middle-aged English reporter who is living in Vietnam in the 1950s. The events take place during the war against the French colonialists just prior to American involvement in the Vietnam War. The 'quiet American' of the title is young aid-worker Pyle who meets Fowler and promptly falls in love with Fowler's beautiful young Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong. Despite their conflict over Phuong, Fowler and Pyle are friends, of a sort. However as Fowler begins to discover more about Pyle's actual work in Vietnam, their friendship becomes untenable and events reach a dramatic climax.

Fowler makes much of his role as a reporter (as opposed to a commentator). He tries to remain detached from the war that he reports on, refusing to take sides. This proves difficult though, especially when Fowler is confronted by horrific violence and bloodshed. For the reader, there are constant questions of how true Fowler's claims of detachment are. How much does losing Phuong colour Fowler's attitude to Pyle? And, since the story is told in hindsight, how much does Fowler's later knowledge of Pyle effect his retelling of the story? By the novel's climactic end, Fowler is forced to takes sides and realises that efforts to remain neutral are futile. He has realised that even doing nothing is in itself an act of choosing sides.

Greene contrasts Fowler's cynicism and detachment from events with Pyle's naive belief that he can understand and change the situation in Vietnam. Pyle stands as a kind of American 'everyman' in the novel. He has wildly optimistic and confident views about America's role in Vietnam and fails to read the subtleties of the situation. Fowler sees Pyle as dangerous in his innocence, describing innocence as a kind of 'insanity'. Pyle is less innocent than he seems but also more dangerous. His simplistic idealism reflects the kind of attitudes that got the US bogged down in an unwinnable war. Pyle is America on a post-WWII high, determined that the rest of the world share the democratic freedoms that they have. This is not in itself such a terrible goal, but is certainly one that can (and did) have devastating consequences.

The Quiet American is so successful partly because it is so relevant to modern conflicts. It foreshadows America's involvement in Vietnam and the quagmire of the war in Iraq. In fact, it stands as a useful metaphor of any nation hoping to blindly march in and show another country how it should live.

Graham Greene doesn't do great female characters and Phuong is very thinly drawn. Perhaps she is meant to represent Vietnam- she is a victim of the manipulation of others but in the end she endures, quiet and unknowable but unchangeable in a way. This is a small criticism though because Greene's real focus is the central relationship in the novel, the friendship between Fowler and Pyle. I find it hard to bring to mind a novel that so accurately depicts a male friendship. Theirs is an incredibly complex relationship. At times it seems that Fowler barely even likes Pyle but the final lines of the book, in which Fowler wishes he could talk to Pyle about what has happened, are incredibly moving.

There is so much in this novel and it is told with such beautiful simplicity. There is something astonishing in a novel that evokes a time and place so strongly and yet is so relevant to contemporary world politics. The Quiet American is a classic, and deservedly so.

Wonder Boys

What is it that I loved so much about Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys? It's hard to capture now that I try to write my thoughts down. In fact, I think it's the books that I really love that I find the hardest to blog about perhaps because it's those books that are hardest to disect and analyse. Part of me wants to keep the experience of reading Wonder Boys whole and untouched. On the other hand, I want to rave about a book that I love and encourage others to read it in the hope that they have the same experience. So here goes...

One thing that I love about this book is that it is so totally different in subject matter to the two other Chabon books I've read. Compared to the noirish detective fiction of The Yiddish Policemen's Union or the epic adventure of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it could have been written by someone else. And yet... there is a certain consistency of style and language that Chabon maintains despite his amazingly wide-ranging subject matter. He writes with such confidence, with long winding sentences that never trip over themselves and feel fresh and honest and clever and... ok, I'm getting too breathily enthusiastic now.

So what's Wonder Boys actually about? The narrator is Grady Tripp, a writer and academic who has written some very successful novels in the past but finds himself now stuck on an unfinishable novel called 'Wonder Boys'. Rather than writers' block, Grady has a kind of writers' diarrhoea and his draft has reached colossal proportions with no end in sight after seven years of writing. Grady is forced to confront his failure to complete the novel (and the possibility that maybe 'Wonder Boys' isn't really very good) when his debaucherous, lecherous, old friend and editor Terry Crabtree (played by Robert Downey Jr in the film version- what perfect casting!) arrives in town for a literary festival and to see when the book will be ready.

At the same time Grady finds himself tied up in the worries of his student James Leer, a troubled and talented young writer, and his mistress who just happens to be dean of the university and is also pregnant with Grady's child.

What follows is a few days of complete chaos as Grady, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, stumbles from one disaster to the next. There's a dead dog to dispose of, a shoot out, a stolen car, a wife who has left him, a Passover dinner, Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, booze, cigarettes, dope, and all the while the sneaking suspicion that Terry will uncover the truth about the unfinished manuscript in Grady's study.

Despite the chaotic messiness of the plot, Chabon never lets his material get away from him. This book is never self-indulgent and its free-wheeling plot is actually cleverly constructed to build the picture of a character who has lost control of his life. Chabon writes very well about writing in Wonder Boys, capturing the way we can lose perspective on our own work. Through the character of student James Leer he explores the constructedness of writing- James lives through old movies and uses them to construct much of his writing and, it is revealed, his life.

There is such a wonderful use of humour in this book as Grady's adventures descend into the ridiculous, but there is also a wonderful humanity. Chabon never loses sight of his characters, and while they might land themselves in cartoonish scenarios, they themselves never become cartoons.

This is a really hard book for me to describe mostly because I just loved it so much, and I'm not sure I've done it justice here. The most I can say really is go out and read it yourself if you haven't done so already.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm in love with Michael Chabon. How did I not see this before when I read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thought it was only 'pretty good'? Clearly I was in denial because after reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union for my book club and then quickly following it with Wonder Boys, I can't believe I wasn't raving about Chabon years ago.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Chabon's take on genre fiction, in this case the hard-boiled detective novel. All the usual factors are there: the troubled maverick detective, a body in the first chapter, crosses and double crosses and a plot that moves along at a cracking pace. Chabon works his magic to make something new out of this familiar terrain. The main way he does this is by setting his novel in a re-imagined world, one in which a homeland for Jews is established after World War II in Sitka, Alaska. Tension is created by the imminent 'reversion' in which the homeland will be returned to the US and the 'frozen chosen' of Sitka will be out on their ear.

The novel begins with the murder of a young, chess-playing heroin addict in a cheap dive of a hotel which also happens to be where detective Meyer Landsman is currently residing. Landsman becomes obsessed with solving the crime, despite the more pressing concerns of his own mess of a life, and it leads him into the dark and secretive world of the Verbover sect, a group of devout and corrupt Jews with their own plans for survival after they are kicked out of Sitka.

The plot is fast and clever but it is Chabon's use of language that really sucked me in. He channels Raymond Chandler and his ilk but then gives it a twist of his own. This is smart, funny writing that still has real emotional pull. Here's a taste from early in the book, introducing the main character:

According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Meyer Landsman has only two moods: working and dead... He has the memory of convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

Chabon also litters the text with his own brand of Yiddish slang that gives the alternative world that he has created a feeling of authenticity. It is this attention to detail that makes Sitka really come to life.

There is a certain strange freedom with writing within an established genre. Rather than it being formulaic, I think a good writer uses the shared understanding between reader and writer to leap-frog straight into more interesting territory. In genre fiction there is less time spent on establishing just what the book is and more time getting on with the really interesting stuff. Or that's what Chabon manages anyway. Sure, there are plenty of badly written crime novels, but there's lots of really turgid 'literary fiction' and the whole snobbishness around genre fiction is really undeserved, especially when you read a crime novel as good as this.

In my next post: why Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys is my new favourite book. Yes, folks, it's definitely love...

Coming out of hibernation

The days are short and fresh. The nights, long and cold. It's mid-winter and that means report writing, head-colds and that feeling that this month will never end. But finally on the last day of June, I've found time for a catch up post. Rather than go through each book in its own proper review, I think I'll just sum up my recent reading.

I bought The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole by Stephanie Doyon for no other reason than that it had a great cover. I should have known that wouldn't work out so well. It's not that I didn't like this book but it rather felt like time in my life that could have been better spent (on a really good book, say). Doyon peoples her novel about a small and miserable backwoods town in the US with a cast of unlikeable characters. It's not just me, she spends time telling the reader that Cedar Hole is full of losers, which frankly does not make for an exciting reading experience. I don't have to love the characters in a novel but I have to be interested in them. Doyon is a capable writer and there are some interesting moments in the novel. I just don't think this book knows what it wants to be. While Doyon seems to be aiming for a comic novel, some of the quite dark and serious subject matter breaks the mood and left me feeling unsatisfied.

On the hand, I absolutely loved The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. I really can't sum this up and do it any justice so I'll break my word and leave this one for a longer review. Just trust me that it's fantastic.

Finally, I quickly devoured Stephanie Meyer's young adult vampire novel Twilight over the weekend. This novel has been huge amongst girls in the age group that I teach. I would have loved it as a 13 year old but unfortunately it seemed a bit thin to this jaded adult. The novel is about Bella Swan, a teenager who moves to a small town in Washington where she meets and falls for the mysterious and devastatingly handsome Edward Cullen. Surprise, surprise, Edward's not like other boys. It takes about five minutes to work out he's a vampire and about another five to get sick of the total power imbalance between Edward, the dangerous vampire with super strength, and the frail, accident-prone and completely trusting heroine, Bella. Give me Buffy the Vampire Slayer any day. At least it was obvious in that show why a centuries old vampire might find the teenage girl interesting as anything other than food (and satisfying to know she could beat him if it came to a fight). Still there is plenty of seething sexual tension (very inoffensively portrayed) to explain the huge appeal this book has to its audience. Try Peeps by Scott Westerfeld if you want an example of how this sort of thing really ought to be done.

Hearts and Minds

One thing I enjoy about fiction is the ability it has to show you a part of the world that you know little about. Sometimes a novel can make you feel like a true insider in a way that few other mediums can, by making you feel you inhabit a place and time completely. Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton was one such novel for me. In this novel, Thorton reveals some of the workings of the cloistered and arcane world of life in a Cambridge University college, a world seems quite strange to the outsider.

The fictional St Radegund's College is a women's college that has, for the first time ever, appointed a male head of the house. The new 'mistress' is James Rycarte a former tv journalist and foreign correspondent. Rycarte's position as an outsider is a useful device for explaining the complex world of the college to the reader. Through the course of the novel Rycarte comes to understand the peculiarities of the college, with its balance between different academic factions and a fiery student council, and the many obscure traditions and protocols of the centuries old college.

The other central character in the novel is Martha Pearce, dedicated Senior Tutor at St Radegund's, mother to a worringly aimless daughter, wife to a hopelessly self-centred husband and ultimate peace-maker and diplomat in the quagmire of inter-personal relations between staff at the college. Martha and James find a connection at once and together they negotiate various crises, including a student rent strike and the ethical dilemma of accepting a wealthy Italian parent's enormous financial donation.

For me, Martha was the most convincing character in the novel. There was something about her constant feeling that she can never do enough for her family or in her demanding job that seemed to ring true. Her efforts to hold together her marriage to her lay-about poet husband were frustrating but all too believable, as was the difficulty she has watching her daughter fall ever further into depression.

Hearts and Minds is fairly light reading. It isn't trying to be anything terribly deep and meaningful, the cover even hints that the book might be aimed at the (cringe) 'chick lit' market. Fortunately Thornton avoids the major pitfalls of that genre and does not sink into sentimentality. There is the suggestion of a romance that is very nicely resolved at the novel's end. The plot is restrained, maybe at times a little too restrained. I don't think it would have hurt to inject a little more drama into the story, but it's a small quibble with what is essentially an enjoyable read.

This novel was kindly provided to this delicious solitude by the author.

Victoriana

Hot on the heels of having read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I recently found myself reading yet another modern take on the Victorian novel. Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith is a rip-roaring yarn set in 19th century England. Waters draws on the tradition of social realism, combining it with a good dose of the Gothic, to create a page-turner of a novel. The plot flies along, taking the reader on what is a pretty entertaining ride. This is a Victorian novel seen through a contemporary lens. Characters swear and have sex, something that doesn't happen much in Dickens.

Waters writes skillfully and entertainingly but at times this book stretched the bounds of believability for me. Somehow everything works out a little too neatly and the coincidences and connections are forced at times. I found the experience of reading Fingersmith very much like reading Waters' more recent novel Nightwatch. Both were great fun but neither really stayed me. Waters' writing seem to promise something that it doesn't quite deliver. Fingersmith plays around the edges of some really interesting ideas, such as the role of women and women's sexuality in Victorian England, but it never quite soars for me. I'm interested enough in Waters' writing though to want to read her novels in the future, just to see if they ever really fly.