The Story of Lucy Gault

Yet another Booker book with a fantastic set up that fails to deliver.  Lucy is mistakenly, through a series of unfortunately events, abandoned by her parents at the tender age of seven.  Under the impression that she has been downed, her parents abandon their home, flee Ireland, and in their grief do not look back for over 30 years.  But Lucy has not died - she remains in the home waiting hopefully for her parents' surely imminent return.  And the reader waits with Lucy.

 

But as time progresses, it becomes apparent to the reader well before it is understood by Lucy or the small community supporting her that the return of her parents can only be a disappointment.  Lucy is no longer a litter girl but a grown woman, whose choices have left her isolated and outside of the sphere of the living for entirely too long.  No reunion can achieve what either Lucy or her parents secretly wish for - for everything to be made whole. 

 

But because it is primarily a book about waiting, about life slipping by unlived, it is ultimately not a very engaging story.  Perhaps this was William Trevor being too good at achieving what he set out to do.  Sure, Trevor's prose is clear and descriptive, but it was not enough to keep me wanting more.  I was consumed by the isolation and hopelessness, and the sense of wasted life that were the themes of this novel, and no ending could have reinvigorated me enough to induce me to recommend this book very highly  to others.

Breakfast on Pluto

I had a hard time with this one.  The main character is Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a transvestite prostitute.  Patrick was fathered by an Irish Catholic priest and dumped in an abusive foster family - and he dreams of his beautiful birth mother.  Pussy is an outcast in her tiny Irish hometown , and she leaves, first for the City and then for London to seek a better life.  But Pussy has bad luck when her married politician sugar daddy is killed by Irish terrorists, and then in London where she becomes a prostitute and gets mixed up in terrorist plots.

To start, I think it would have helped if I recognized more of the popular cultural and historical references to  Ireland and England circa 1970.  I know I missed an awful lot of the references (for example, the title of the book), and I even had a hard time following the plot references to terrorist plots because I just don't know much about the era.  I'd be interested to know if anyone who enjoyed this book could confirm that having this understanding helped their enjoyment.  

But unlike other novels set in unfamiliar times or locales, I was not inspired to learn more because I wasn't connecting with the story or characters.  This is probably because I found the narrative thread to be very weak - the chain of events was hard to follow, and it seemed to jump around a lot between times and places with little continuity.  I like something with more of a story arc.  As a result, I got lost and ended up rushing through the end just to be finished.  While Pussy was certainly a colorful and interesting character, the book didn't manage to retain my attention.

I finished this book on June 17, 2012.

The Secret Scripture

After completing this novel, I have decided that Sebastian Barry is one of my very favorite novelists - and I have only read two of his books.  It is his rich and detailed writing style that I love - and his ability to connect his images to a story and to characters that I connect with on an emotional level. 

The narrative is split between two characters - 100 year old Roseanne is an inmate at an asylum, and has been for many many decades.  She's not clear why she has been committed to the asylum for all of these years, but she recounts her past as she remembers it in her journal, which serves as half of the narrative.  Her doctor, Dr. Greene recounts the other half of the narrative in his medical log.  He too does not understand why Roseanne has been an inmate and he is drawn to unearthing her past just as he avoids his own.

The Secret Scripture is a novel about memory and the past - as my favorite Irish novels seem to be.  But it is also a beautiful story about loyalty, loss, and the tricky line between independence and isolation.  And through this, Barry creates fantastic images. I can still picture the burning rat, and Roseanne's mother's clock, because they were described so richly and connected scenes that evoked very strong emotions. The hammers and the feathers --I can still see them falling.

Simply put, I really enjoyed this book. The imagery was so compelling because it was connected to a moving mystery told by two engaging and complex characters.  I loved both the story being told by Roseanne, and the story that lay underneath as revealed by Dr. Greene - both the mysteries and the answers.  In my opinion, it surpassed The White Tiger, which won this year.

Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha

The first thought I have, after finishing this book, is "I hope we don't have boys."  I don't have children yet  and maybe it is a boy/girl thing but the world of little 10-year-old Paddy Clark was slightly horrifying to me. 

Paddy is a key member of a group of young boys growning up in the suburbs of Dublin in the late 1960's.  The story takes place generally at the time Paddy is making the change from a carefree boy to a more knowledgeable and troubled adolescent.  Paddy narrates a stream of conscious child's patter of the random facts, tribalism, adventure and meaningless violence of life in his little gang of hooligans.  He also slowly awakens to the reality of his parents' troubled relationship, as he tries to single-handedly hold their marriage together and protect his younger brother from the emotional harm it could wreak.

I found the bits about Paddy's relationship with his parents' troubles to be touching and very well done.  My heart ached for Paddy as he suffered.  The rest of it, however, was a scattered story of the tiny violences  of boyhood: the "dead leg" given as a joke, seriously physical abuse inflicted on a little brother simply for being weaker, beatings of friends as part of secret rituals, and perils of dares and reckless curiosity.  While it painted a vivid picture, this would have been better as a short story.  I grew quickly weary of the pointless pain and suffering the little boys inflicted on each other out of boredom, and greatly wished for a deeper meaning.  I also have to admit that I was annoyed by the lack of development of the female characters - Paddy's mother and sisters and the mothers of his friends.  I get that that the female characters weren't exactly the point, but it would have helped me identify with something in the story.

A Long Long Way

It is fitting that my copy of Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way contains quoted praise from J.M. Coetzee, whose novel Disgrace had me impressed and appalled: appreciative of the mastery and cringing from the subject in a way similar to my reaction to this novel.  A Long Long Way resonates with me - days after putting it down I can't get his images out of my head.  Unfortunately, those images are scenes of gruesome death in the trenches during World War I (not exactly my favorite).  But while I won't be wanting to revisit the topic for a while, I have to admit this was a masterful book, and I'm disappointed that it lost out to John Banville's snooze The Sea for the 2005 Booker. 

Barry begins with a sympathetic and complex character, Willie Dunne, who takes the reader on a journey through the emotional landscape of war: terror, pain, loss and horror, yes, but also camaraderie, nationalism, familial love, and hope.  But Barry's true gift is in describing the horrors of the war with gorgeous and almost poetic language.  I especially admire his descriptions of the first chlorine gas attack ("it was the force of something they did not know that drove them shoving and gasping away from that long, long monster with yellow skin"); the awful thick mud encountered in the trenches, and the shattering cold of a winter on the front lines.  These moments of description overcame my general aversion to war novels to the point where I can picture myself re-reading this book.

Willie Dunne also experiences the worst of the war: the piss and shit and blood and guts and tears and panic of the Irish soldiers in Belgium and at home.  My Irish history is a little rusty, so I needed to read up on the the uprising of 1916.  But a detailed knowledge was not necessary to understand the emotion and tragedy of their situation.  Barry successfully made me feel emotional about an unexpected subject, and painted a vivid portrait that took me somewhat reluctantly into the scenes.  It was deeply moving, and perhaps even scarring.

The Sea

I really thought I would enjoy this book.  I have a high tolerance for descriptive character driven novels where almost no action occurs.  I really enjoyed The Gathering - see! I like depressing Irish writing about death and memory.  And Banville has such a way with words!  I found myself looking up a new word on my iPhone dictionary app (which is free, and yes, you can judge me) on every other page - I can't remember the last time my vocabulary was challenged so much.  And Banville always always chooses exactly the right word, which results in a vivid description of a thing or a place.  This book is full of tiny moments of great loveliness, and arresting descriptions of very ordinary things.

Then why didn't I love it?  The beautiful words and images just washed over my leaving almost no impression at all.  I think the key issue for me was Banville totally failed to make me feel emotionally invested.  The main character is a boring man - he even admits it himself!

... the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality.  In place of, yes.  I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have.  I was always a distinct no-one...

So, at least for me, beautiful prose alone ultimately falls flat.  I need some more personality.

The Gathering

Veronica Hegarty has lost her mind and her life is a train wreck.  Her favorite brother Liam has been found dead, a suicide, at the age of 40.  Her marriage has been on the rocks, her relationships with her numerous family members range from uncomfortable to estranged, and her memory is fading or invented.  I loved this novel.

Veronica, the eighth of 12 children born to an Irish family in the mid-twentieth century, narrates her grief in a vivid, visceral and graphic way.  For a woman with so many relationships, she has almost no intimacy, except once, long ago, with her brother who is now dead.  She is overwhelmed by this loss:

"And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone.  It seems like such a massive waste of energy - and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking.  We each love someone even though they will die."

But Veronica has a secret about Liam - at least she is pretty sure she does.  Memory is such a strange beast though, she finds that if she tries hard enough she can conjure a memory about almost anything - even if she knows it couldn't have happened, or if she knows it happened to her sister and not herself.  But what she knows - that Liam was "interfered with" as a boy of 9 - she has never told anyone in the family.  This play with memory, and the "something immoral about the mind's eye" that Anne Enyeart explores through Veronica's narration is what captivated me so thoroughly.  Because the narration skips across time, and because Veronica blends fiction, memory, and the here-and-now so seamlessly, the facts surprise us even as we anticipate their telling.

It's not a comfortable book.  (I could have written this entire review on the various and creative symbolic meanings of penises in the novel, for example).  Enright doesn't shy from some of the hardest subjects I can think of: suicide, child molestation, infidelity, alcoholism.  But Veronica becomes such a real and sympathetic character that I had a hard time putting the book down.