The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
Historical fiction. Hmmm. On the whole, I’m, not keen. There’s something a little too loving about the way many authors treat the past, and research often weighs a book down. As it happens, I’m currently reading a book that was researched to death, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, which couldn’t be less weighed down if it tried. If that’s the standard (and it is), then Kate Grenville’s novel is not up to the mark.
Humour. Irony. Has the modern novel forgotten about its history? Novelists should be made to (re)read Fielding, Cervantes, Bulgakov, Thackeray, Rabelais and Gogol. Bulgakov wrote at the height of the Great Terror, and yet could find humour and irony. The Master and Margarita is perhaps the least serious novel of the 20th century, and yet it doesn’t suggest for a minute that the soviet regime was innocent. There is little or no humour here.
The Secret River is a very conventional novel that traces the development of William Thornhill from waterman on the Thames to the penal colony at New South Wales. The blurb tells us that Thornhill is ‘a man no better or worse than most’. Well, that sounds like a riot.
Once again there is a political undercurrent here, although it’s altogether more successfully executed than in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Here we are forced to confront the moral dilemma of the colonist: how does he treat the indigenous people? This is far from a simple matter. Convicts were, after all, forced to be there and had a right to try to survive. Clearly the aboriginals had the right to be there too.
While this is an interesting question (and one the novel stays well away from providing an answer to), it doesn’t sustain the narrative well enough. The novel is broken up into very small sections, and this renders it episodic and disjointed. Ultimately we feel for William and his family, but there’s a rather disconcerting moral emptiness at the core of the book. Perhaps this is deliberate. Is it asking us: ‘what would you do?’
The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
I hinted in my booker predictions that I wasn’t that fond of this novel. I suppose that’s partly because it’s so obviously a Booker novel that I find it all a little formulaic. There’s more than a hint of Rushdie and others have found echoes of Naipaul (although I’m not familiar with his work, so I’m not a reliable guide on that). Not that there’s anything wrong with being influenced by great novelists, of course.
There’s the classic picaresque Indian milieu (the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga) where a motley collection of misfits come to be divided by politics they don’t believe in or understand. A substantial portion of the book is set in the New York immigrant community, which are by far the weakest sections. The end is a the same time utterly predictable and silly.
The publishers are keen to tell us how much this is a novel to help us understand the lives of immigrants, and those ‘left behind’ and that’s noble and everything, but I find myself allergic to issue fiction. I remain impervious to David Hare’s argument in Obedience, Struggle and Revolt that political drama (or fiction) is somehow more valuable than ‘pure’ drama.
The novels I admire the most have very little, if anything, to do with politics. Of course, looking at how people are affected as the tide of history sweeps over them is certainly a worthy subject for fiction; one only has to think of the Prague sections of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to see that. Maybe this is just an attempt to do something similar that failed to resonate with me.
I think ultimately that I’m prejudiced against novels like this. I’m not keen on admitting that to myself, but there we are.
Book Backlog
I’ve been a very busy reader recently, but I’ve been less than disciplined in posting here. I promised reviews of the Booker nominees, and didn’t deliver. Since then, I’ve read the following books:
- Kingdom Come (J.G.Ballard)
- A Life’s Music (Andreï Makine)
- Travels in the Scriptorium (Paul Auster)
- The Berlin Wall (Frederick Taylor)
- April Fool’s Day (Josip Novakovich)
- The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)
- Hotel Savoy (Joseph Roth)
- The Fugitive (Marcel Proust)
- House of Meetings (Martin Amis)
- A Sad Affair (Wolfgang Koeppen)
- Be Near Me (Andrew O’Hagan)
- Arlington Park (Rachel Cusk)
- Your Face Tomorrow - 2: Dance and Dream (Javier Marías)
- The Life of Hunger (Amélie Nothomb)
- Death in Danzig (Stefan Chwin)
I’ll tackle them one by one over the next few days. First, the long-awaited Booker reviews.
