Astonishing Splashes of Colour

This is the story of Kitty, a woman with a peculiar family history who has suffered a personal tragedy resulting in the loss of her unborn child - and the loss of her ability to have children.  This experience has knocked Kitty a little off her rocker, and we follow her through a series of interactions that cause her to unravel further.

I really wanted to like this novel because of its title.  As the first few pages indicate, "Astonishing splashes of colour" is a quote from Peter Pan, which evokes an image of an adult who failed to achieve maturity, and prefers to live in a land of childhood.  In many ways, this is Kitty - so much of her identity is wrapped up in the fantasies she has created about the mother who was absent from her childhood, and about her older brothers, and even about her unique marriage partner.  And of course, her mental images of these people cannot stand up to the truth as it is revealed to her throughout the story, and this created much of the driving force of the plot.

But ultimately, while I appreciated moments of this novel,  it fell short for me.  I can't say I actually enjoyed it.  I think in order to appreciate the novel you have to like, or at least understand and sympathize with Kitty.  But I found her frustrating, foreign, and unsympathetic for most of the story.  Her choices are sometimes so poor that I could only cringe and watch the fallout from a distance - and that's not how I feel about the characters I engage with.

An interesting nominee, but not really my taste.

Oryx and Crake

I had the fortune, or misfortune perhaps, to read this book during last week's major snow and ice storm in the Pacific Northwest.  Ice collected on our trees and brought down massive branches onto the electrical lines (to dramatic cracks and snaps!) across the region.  We lost power Thursday morning and didn't get it back until Monday night - nearly 5 full days of dark and cold. It was an ideal setting to read this novel about a horrifying dystopia set not too far into the future.

Jimmy/Snowman is perhaps the only human left alive on Earth, following a massive plague of dubious origin.  He co-exists with various animals and people (?) who have survived as the result of genetic engineering - the rakunks, pigoons, and wolvogs, as well as the Children of Crake, a humanoid race created by Jimmy's childhood friend.  Perhaps what is so frightening about the world described by Atwood via Jimmy's flashbacks is that is seems so possible - large self-contained communities owned and run by massive corporations, human obsessions with aesthetic perfection and agelessness, and even (and mot horrifying to me) the ChickieNob chickens that have been modified to grow 12 legs and no heads.  Atwood criticises several social institutions and trends by taking them to their extreme but logical extension, with compelling results.

Atwood doesn't wrap nearly everything up, and I am still uncertain about the nature of the love between Jimmy and Oryx/Oryx and Crake, and she leaves the end unresolved and big questions completely up to the reader's determination.  Sometimes I find this way of completing a novel lazy, but in this case it was perfect.  And as usual, part of the brilliance of this novel was Atwood's facility with words - creating them, twisting their meanings, and substituting them for each other.

Of course, it could be that I was in a post-apocalyptic mood, but I thought this was a fantastic novel - FAR superior to Vernon God Little which won this year.

Vernon God Little

Well, apparently I'm fitting myself right into a stereotype.  Lots of reviews I browsed have noted that Americans tend to dislike Vernon God Little - and I really didn't enjoy this book very much or understand why it merits a Booker Prize.

The story is told by a 15-year old narrator, who is a survivor after a school shooting and was the shooter's best and only friend.  Vernon is suspected by the townspeople of having had something to do with the shooting.  And because the shooter turned the gun on himself, they are looking for someone still living to blame.  Vernon makes several terrible choices that only demonstrate to the police and to the news media covering the story that he is guilty.  I suppose this was perceived as a relevant if gritty topic, after Columbine in 1999 was followed by other similar news events.  I was a high-school student during the peak of that era.  But this story failed to resonate with me.

I think the author, DBC Pierre (a pseudonym) was attempting to write satire about big issues in American- particularly Texan-culture:  the media's all powerful and corrupting influence; gun control and violence; fast food, obesity and the diet obsession; the myth of the classless society; the American judicial system and the death penalty; and, perhaps, Christianity.  I get that he discusses these issues, and paints a not-flattering picture, but that's not really what I dislike about this book.  I just didn't think this novel says anything new or interesting about these issues - it didn't make me see any of this in a new, or different way, and his insights are muddled and trite.  It just seemed to me like an excuse to stereotype and then laugh at a perception of American culture that is only partially true.

Perhaps the only parts of the story that I was able to appreciate were small moments when the narrator behaves in a way that really brought to life the mixed-up fifteen-year-old kid he was meant to be.  He has major conflicted feelings about his mother, and the guilt she applies like twisting a knife in his back.  His instinct to bottle his feelings and failure to communicate with the outside world in any meaningful way -- even when those feelings and communications could save him a world of trouble -- rang true for me.  And apparently for others, as several people apparently really enjoyed this book.