Never Let Me Go

Predictably, I'm entranced by yet another Kazuo Ishiguro novel.  Never Let Me Go caught and held my attention, surprised me (even in the way that it surprised me), and will have me reflecting on its themes for some time to come.

Kath, Ishiguro's main character, is another subtly unreliable narrator.  Her narrative style is deceptively simple - a bit of "dear diary" and lots of plain blunt language.  If you think her style is boring, I believe you are missing the marvellously rich subtext lying in the things Kath does not quite say.  The narrative push comes from her allusion to stories before a chapter break after which she tells the story. This style, combined with the touch of mystery, made this hard for me to put down.

It turns out that the mystery aspect, as well as the "science fiction" aspects of the story ended up being the least interesting things about this novel.  Instead, this is a story about the human condition, and the themes are distilled by filtering them through the lens of a dystopic alternate reality.  The most striking  idea for me was the idea of community - how we need to construct communities, how belonging to a community can distort a person's perception of fundamental aspects of life, and what it means to a person who is left out of community, or whose community has disappeared - and perhaps ultimately the tragic loneliness of the human condition.

At some point toward the end, I became frustrated that this was not actually a mystery novel, and that it did not tackle the 'political' aspects of the issues it raised.  But the characters' submission to their destinies moved the spotlight to the contemplation of what it means to have a full life -  can it be that art, love, friendship, belonging, duty, and sacrifice are enough? I'm still not sure.

Highly recommended.

Darkmans

Darkmans by Nicola Barker is the most modern novel I have ever read.

I was set up to be unimpressed.  Its a brick of a novel - at 838 pages my  paperback copy weighs in at more than 2.5 lbs.  In addition to its doorstop quality, the novel is published in a sans serif font and is littered with italics - two things that generally drive me nuts.  Furthermore, Barker's use of large spacing to denote inner thoughts of her main characters took me several hundred pages to get used to - and all that empty space contributed to the large size of the final product.

I thought it would be a chore to read, and I had already given myself permission not to finish if I couldn't make it through before my library check out expired.  But about 300 pages in, I began to have a hard time putting it down.  By the end I was actually disappointed that it wasn't even longer.

The novel follows seven main characters, all loosely connected and living in Ashford, England at one end of the new Channel Tunnel.  The book opens with Daniel Beede, a man who had originally petitioned for the location of the Channel Tunnel, but when the plans called for the destruction of a historic property his support turned to protest.  His failure to halt the construction haunts him daily.

There was an ugly scuffle.  But he saw it!  He stood and watched -- three men struggled to restrain him -- he stood and watched -- jaw slack, mouth wide, gasping -- as History was unceremoniously gutted and steam-rolled.  He saw History die -- 

NO!
You're killing History!
STOP!

Kane, Beede's son is also haunted by history, as he flashes back to his mother's slow wasting death while he, a teenager, acted as her sole caretaker.  In their own ways, each of the other major characters carries the weight of their history on their shoulders, and each are also plagued by the kind of modernity symbolized by the Channel Tunnel.  There's Isidore, an apparently mentally ill security officer, his wife Elen, a chiropodist, and their autistic son Fleet; Kelly Broad, Kane's teenage ex girlfriend; and Gaffar, a Kurdish immigrant who acts as personal assistant to Kane in his dealing of prescription drugs.

Kane, Beede, Dory, Elen, Fleet, Kelly and Gaffar are all to varying degrees also haunted or inhabited by something more insidious - the Darkmans.  Is the Darkmans the spirit of John Scoggin, a jester to the court of Henry VIII? Is it perhaps the small angry bird Phlegein?

Or are these characters each falling prey to their own mental weaknesses and driven by History. Perhaps the Darkmans is just a manifestation of their various schizophrenia, autism, drug use, etc.  Or maybe Elen, who appears to be at the center of all of this, is actually causing these possessions or hallucinations.  I spent the better part of this novel wondering if something supernatural was actually occurring, and I'm not sure I have a conclusion.

The past keeps piling up.  Yes.  But that's only normal, surely?  Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who sees it, if I am the only one who sees the same tree -- the same old book, the same wall, the same piece of road -- as thousands of eyes have seen it before, and who feels the weight, the terrible weight -- the actual weight -- of all this apprehension.  As if I am the only one who feels history, who sees the atom of pure emotion raging away behind everything.  The buzz and clash of the atom.  This awful friction.  This urge to truth.  This urge to destruction. This urge to vengeance.  Oh God!  Where does it flow from?  Why?  For what?!  And how much longer can I possibly be expected to hold it all back?

Her imagery is immediate and visceral;  the characters, eclectic and engaging; the plot, haunting.  Its a book I'll be thinking about for weeks to come.

As an afterthought, this is the third novel I have read that was nominated for the 2007 Booker prize - and each of these have been truly fantastic.  It must have been a very hard choice for the committee, and I'm torn about whether I would have picked this one, or Animal's People.  The Committee chose The Gathering, which was also excellent, but perhaps predictably resembles many other past winners in ways that neither Darkmans nor Animal's People did.

Atonement

I finished this book a few months back, and it has taken me this long to finish a blog post about it. Its not that I didn't like this book - it was very well written, and the story sucked me in. Maybe because the end was so jarring - I sat back and reflected about the novel for a long time trying to piece the whole together. Maybe it is because it had come so highly recommended to me - and I really thought I would like this more. But having just finished watching the movie, I find my thoughts distilled enough to proceed.

Many people seem familiar with the plot: Briony is the youngest child in a affluent home. Out of boredom, powerlessness, naivete, and motives I'm not sure even Briony understood, she accuses a family friend of a horrible crime - and then suffers with the guilt of her knowledge for the rest of her life. Briony's choice to change the end of her story for her readers begs many interesting questions - what is the intrinsic value of honesty? How much guilt can and should a person suffer or self-apply in the aftermath of such an event? How much responsibility can be taken for the outcome of a series of events that one may have set in motion, but did not further contribute to?

Needless to say, the writing is exquisite. The story is vivid - especially in parts 2 and 3. describing the war scenes and the hospital. But the characters, while interesting, were not as compelling as I had hoped or maybe needed. Each of the main figures serves as a person and as a sort of allegory or type, which distanced my emotions from them in the book. Also, they were mostly annoying aristocratic types, which I did not connect well with. This was not so in the movie, which (unusually) was better in connecting my emotions to the rawness and tragedy of the plot in a way I was not able to in the book.

The film's ability to connect me to the story did not come without certain sacrifices. In the movie, many of the fascinating ambiguities are necessarily lost, and the story is reduced in its complexity. But perhaps that is precisely my problem with the book: the nuances and complexity were a bit too much to also permit a deep emotional connection.

Instead of feeling the book was deeply meaningful, when I finished this book and put it down I was immediately over it. But watching the film has reminded me of the fantastic aspects of the book, and I find myself more than willing to keep and open mind and give it a re-read another time.

C

The more I sit and think about this novel, the more I am fascinated by it - I think it might be brilliant.  This is not to say I enjoyed every aspect of my read, or that I understood why on earth Tom McCarthy took me to certain places until well after they were over.  But his dexterous weaving of complex themes is starting to make more and more sense as I reflect on them - or am I finding patterns and interpreting codes that don't exist?

The novel opens with the birth of a baby boy, Serge Carrefax, second child of an eclectic set of parents.  Serge's father runs a school for deaf children that emphasizes teaching them to speak and be understood - and he is fascinated with "modern" wireless communication technology.  Serge's mother is deaf (and a former student) who inherited a family silk factory - complete with insect-residents.  Serge's older sister Sophie is his greatest companion (and a compelling character) until her untimely death.  From these characters, three themes emerge - communication, insects, and death - and are repeated in countless ways time and again through Serge's action-filled life.

It is the continual re-appearance of these themes in Serge's life that ultimately makes this book a comprehensive unit.  Serge's adventures as a sick adolescent, WWI pilot, architecture student, drug addict, and Egyptian explorer often cause jarring juxtapositions in the story that took me some getting used to.  But I'm having so much fun reflecting back on what it all means, and trying to decode the appearance of insects, communications and death throughout the book, that I'm not sure it matters to me anymore.  And don't get me started on the book's title - there are so many instances of the letter C that I can't begin to decide the importance of them.  And what about Serge's lifelong problem conveying physical perspective (a problem indeed for a student of architecture)?  I would love to convene a discussion group just to pick apart this novel.

Although sometimes I felt lost in the middle, this read was worth it and has stayed with me for many days.

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.

Sacred Hunger

This is my first re-read in my Booker challenge, so I have to admit to already knowing I love this book.  I think this might have been my fourth time through, but having the focus of needing to write a blog post helped me enjoy the writing in a new and deeper way.

This is a novel about the triangle trade in the mid 1700s, and is it about the struggle between greed, profit, humanity, enslavement, liberation and civilization - some pretty heavy themes that I traditionally associate with American literature (though Unsworth is British).  So much about this book is exquisite:  the depth of the characters, the fluxuating narration style, the the vivid metaphor and rich language, and the incredibly moving story.  The juxtaposition of Erasmus and Paris was a perfect tool in playing out the contradictions and moral pitfalls of the various aspects of the slave trade.  And even though there are probably a hundred named characters in the novel, each character, no matter how minor, came across as a complete and real person, with a purpose in the narrative.

One of the aspects of the writing that really struck me this time around was the prevalence of metaphors related to slavery, and the various ways in which people and even objects can be shackled, caged, and enslaved - including and especially the drive for profits, the Sacred Hunger of the title: 

It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.  New shackles were being forged here, in the light-filled loft, amid smells of oil canvas and raw hemp and tar, the creeping fringes of the sail-cloth, his feelings for Sarah Wolpert and for his father.

I first read this for part of an interdisciplinary college course called "Slavery and Labor in Film and Literature" - and it was by far the best part of that class.  It is still one of my favorite of all of the Bookers I have read - and I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Mother's Milk

Edward St. Aubyn's quirky, scathing little novel touches on a resonant subject, which made for a surprisingly delightful and balanced read.  The tale is narrated by three members of the Melrose family who are as a whole intellectual, self-centered and empty people.  The narration bounces between characters with ease; from precocious 5-year old Robert who opens the book narrating the circumstances of his birth first hand in a bitter voice, to Patrick, the father of the family narrating his dissatisfaction with life resulting in substance abuse and infidelity, to Mary, the mother, and her preoccupation with mothering and spoiling her second son, to the detriment of all other relationships.  They are a witty, sarcastic bunch who offer negative yet entertaining commentary on several subjects, including the wealthy and upper class, adherents of new age theories, and Americans (in general).

Alone, this style would become tiresome and unsustainable.  But the book also offers commentary on the various ways in which families repeat the mistakes of their elders, or, in trying to avoid certain mistakes, swing the pendulum too far to the opposite.  Patrick is obsessed with his elderly mother's decision to leave her vacation home in the south of France to a New Age institution run by an Irish "shaman."  Mary is wounded by her mother's disinterest and uninvolvement in her childhood. Who knows what little Robert and Thomas will be attempting to recover from in the wake of their parents' choices.  The power of parenting - and especially mothering - is explored in a wide variety of contexts.

This imperfect novel contains some absolutely delightful gems of description:

"His attention, which usually bounced from one thing to another was still...His mind was glazed over, like a pond drowsily repeating the pattern of the sky."

"They made their way back toward the stone table, trying not to smile too much or look too solemn. Patrick felt himself sliding back under the microscope of his family's attention"

"She went on decanting the poison of her resentment into him for the next two hours."

But the novel ends abruptly, and the witty and sarcastic voices do become a bit tiresome before it does. 

The Ghost Road

See, this is exactly why I decided to read the Bookers.  I don't normally pick up a war book - in fact I usually run the other way.  I would never have chosen to read this book by perusing the library or even on recommendation from a friend.  And war novels are bad enough but WWI?  seriously?  Trenches, and new technology, and All Quiet on the Western Front and...? It happened before my grandparents were even born.  We spent about a week on it in high school history and it didn't interest me then.  I certainly didn't think it would captivate me now.

But it did.  And as apparently historically sourced as this novel was, it wasn't actually about war, but about life, and the fact that so many things we take as Either/Or are really points on one long continuum.  The novel first takes Sane/Insane.  But who is crazy and who is sane?  Is there even a clear line there?  Or even more provocatively (and sadly, too many people can't see past this one) what does it mean to be Straight/Gay? 

And how about Civilized/Uncivilized?  By far the most fascinating bits of this story were Dr. Rivers' flashbacks to the time he spent as an anthropologist in Melanesia in about 1908 - the British Empire was about to Christianize and "civilize" the islands northeast of the Australian continent, and Dr. Rivers got a glimpse of the end of their traditional (un)civilization.  And Pat Barker contrastes this traditional headhunting society with the total insanity of the European theatre of World War I just ten years later.  Her portrayal of this clash was beautiful, terrible, and so very real.

Or how about the continuum of Alive/Dead?  Njiru certainly sees it as a continuum, and at the end of the novel, Dr. Rivers sees it too.  When does Billy Prior, our other narrator, cross that boundary -- is there a definite boundary there to cross?  And the end of the book, just days before the end of the war,  we are faced with the falsity of the dichotomy of War/Peace.

Excellent, excellent novel, and I'm even tempted to go back and read the entire trilogy, of which this is only the last book.  Yes, of war novels.

Parrot & Olivier in America

I'm not sure why I thought I would like this book more than I did.  I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of the early 1800's Europe as a moment in history, but the look at America as a burgeoning democracy was enticing.  However, the stylized language, as accurate as it may have been, was wearisome and cumbersome.  It was longer than it needed to be.  Character revelations came too late - I already didn't care about them or their motives or histories.  Themes of incarceration, class in democracy, and the male friendship between the two title characters were not well developed.  I was just bored.

The book follows Olivier, the snobbish son of French nobles in post-Revolutionary France, and Parrot, his reluctant English servant, who was originally trained as an engraver.  Olivier is forced to escape to America to avoid a revival of the revolutionary feeling in Paris with Parrot, along with his French mistress and her elderly mother, under the guise of completing a book about the American prison system.  Blah blah blah he has several encounters in the new world, a brush with the law and a failed romance.  Parrot discovers a new life and artistic ability in America and is happy.  Olivier is not. 

Sure, there were some good moments - Peter Carey is clearly an expert even if I didn't care for this novel.  I loved the insect metaphors he peppered throughout: people resembling wasps, silkworms, crickets and butterflies.  I particularly liked his description of a French wine encountered in America:

I bemoaned the palates of the Philadelphians who had called his Medoc cold and sour.  Miraculously, it was free of sediment, and rushed into my glass at that perfect stage of life.  In a year it would be a dowager with a faded old corsage, but as it entered my mouth it was vigorous and manly, completely composed, its orchestra all present and correct.  Oh heavens, that such small things make a man so happy.

Although this glass of wine sounds excellent, the rest of the novel just wasn't for me.

Last Orders

Last Orders is a solidly good book.  I read somewhere that all good Booker books create their own language to draw you into their world.  The unique language is what elevated Last Orders.

The story is a bit depressing (so you know I liked it).  Jack has died, and his best friends and adopted son are tasked with the job of fulfilling his final wishes or "last orders."  Bonus: this involves a road trip!   On the way, the characters (and absent wife) reminisce about their time and experiences together - involving World War II, marriage, children, and a changing and modernizing world.  Each character takes turns narrating short, succinct chapters with pithy reveals.

I have not read many books set in working class mid-century London, and this was a learning experience for me.  Motors and cars represent the modern world (but Ray is still obsessed with horses).  Vincey, Jack's adopted son abandons the family business for a new future in cars.  But as with any future, this one isn't all its cracked up to be. Perhaps like the cars, the narration moves too quickly at times - I had to put the book down after some passages to think on the revelations that just occurred.

More interesting and accessible for me was the role and position of the women in this book who, although mostly absent, seem to drive the character and motive of each of the narrators.  Ray, the prime narrator has the most interesting relationships with women.  His daughter's struggle to find independence, his wife's failure to do the same, and his complicated relationship with Amy were my favorite parts by far.  But each of the narrators struggles with the male/female relationship, especially as husband/wife and father/daughter.

The only reason this doesn't earn tippy-top reviews from me is that it took me a longer time than normal to sort the characters out at the beginning, and Graham Swift apparently used up his good surprises in the middle of the book leaving me a bit disappointed at the end.  But it was a worthy read and winner.

The Quickening Maze

The Quickening Maze is set in the English countryside, in an asylum for the troubled and insane in the mid 1800's.  The romantic decay of the mind, contrasted with wildness of nature, in which famous poets of the era are characters - sign me up!  Even the title is suggestive, poetic, romantic, and half-mad.  But if you like all of these things you may be disappointed in this book.

The story follows the Allen family, owners of the asylum, upon the arrival of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet, and his older brother who takes up residence in the asylum.  The story does not have much of a strong central plot, though there is certainly a traceable arc.  The story is variously narrated by Mr. Allen, his 17 year old daughter Hannah, John Clare, an older poet and resident of the asylum, and a woman named Margaret who has been at the asylum for some time.  The two male characters and the two female characters are easily comparable in their actual and potential life experiences, though I'm not sure to what end.

It just never lived up to the potential.  The characters were not as interesting as they should have been.  The Mr. Allen and his family felt like caricatures and never really came alive on the page.  Alfred Tennyson was a bit boring, and not nearly as poetic as I had hoped.  The crazy characters, John Clare and Margaret were the most interesting:  Margaret with her delusions related to Christianity and her abuse at the hands of her husband, John Clare with his disillusionment with the modern world and his experiences with the Gypsies.  But they were not interesting enough to make this a book I would recommend to anyone.  It wasn't terrible - just disappointing.

Wolf Hall

Well, I just finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.  I had been saving this as sort of a reward for slogging through other Booker books that I wasn't as excited about in advance (e.g. Vernon God Little).  But I am surprised--while I certainly appreciate aspects of this novel, it just wasn't a very fun or satisfying read for me.  I guess this is what I get for setting expectations.

By far, the best part of Wolf Hall is Thomas Cromwell, the most modern man in England.  I am a true fan of historical fiction, and I have read numerous novels set in Tudor England (plus the HBO series The Tudors is one of my guilty pleasures) so the "plot" and many of the issues of the day were not new for me.  However, it was incredibly new to feel sympathy and appreciation for the often-villanized Thomas Cromwell.  I call Mantel's Cromwell the "most modern man in England" because he is able to break the bonds of class, free himself from the Church, and profit from modern notions of banking, statesmanship and commerce while nearly all of the other characters struggle with their just-out-of-the-middle-ages mentalities.  The London of his era is in many ways stuck in darkness:

And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city's uncounted populations of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and ducks' bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless padding feet; limestone or leaden, metaled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs.

Yet Cromwell's attitudes are contrasted with the London of his era.  He has traveled extensively in Europe and been exposed to the Italian and Flemish Renaissance cultures.  He is fascinated with a "machine" that would assist the user in memorizing all of the written works in the entire world.  He teaches his daughter Greek and teases her about being the Mayor of London one day.  You get the feeling that he would fit almost seamlessly into modern American life.  And yet he is a caring, sensitive-souled person, who navigates beautifully between the fickle moods and treacherous hearts of the residents of King Henry VIII's court.  I could read about this Thomas Cromwell all day.

But I'm not sure that I could read Hilary Mantel's unique style for much longer.  My complaint is something many reviewers have noticed - the indefinite use of pronouns.  Although Cromwell is clearly the main character, and the narration includes his thoughts that are not spoken aloud, Cromwell is almost exclusively referred to as "he" - even when there are any number of men in a scene or referenced in prior sentences that are also "he."  Accordingly, I frequently found myself having to flip back a page (or several pages) to identify the speaker.  While some have suggested this is Mantel "making us work" for her book, I found it to be very tedious and it distracted me from the characters and story.  For me, it just seemed like incorrect grammar.  Coupled with her sometimes distracting alteration between using quotation marks for dialogue and then not (without any discernable rhyme or reason), I found the experience of reading about this wonderful character to be lacking.

She does write many passages of perfect scene-setting description, and she has an ability to draw me back just as I am feeling like giving it a rest.  The first chapter is one of the most engrossing I have read of any Booker book so far.  But I am torn about whether I will read her sequel.