More book reviews
I’m ploughing through the book backlog at a decent pace, with three more finished this evening. They are:
- The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe
- The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Kuen
- The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
Just as I thought there was some order returning to my piles of books, there was a book sale at work today where I picked up seven paperbacks for a pound. Reading is never-ending (I hope).
Book backlog
I’ve been remiss recently in writing up my reviews for 26 Books. Tonight, I caught up on three that were waiting - The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera and Exit Ghost by Philip Roth, which still leaves me with five on the pile, plus the half-dozen I have on the go at the moment. If work would get out of the way, I might be in with a fighting chance to finish them before the end of the year.
2006 in Review
I’ve got hopelessly behind in my reviewing, and it’s time to wipe the slate clean. My friend Shane Richmond has invited me to take part in his new group blog called 26 Books. The idea is that each of the six authors should read and, crucially, review at least 26 books over the course of 2007 (i.e. one book every two weeks). In 2006 he did this on his own blog, easily completing the 26th book before Christmas.
Of course, it’s not a competition, but I aim to read and review roughly double that number of books in the same time. Anyway, this will be my last post on this blog for the foreseeable future. I thought I would sign off with my list of the best and worst of 2006. I should stress that I’m choosing only from the books I’ve read this year.
Best New Novels
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
- House of Meetings by Martin Amis
- Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland
Worst New Novels
- Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard
- Theft by Peter Carey
Best Contemporary Novel in Translation
- Vertigo by W.G. Sebald (trans Michael Hulse)
- Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (trans Edith Grossman)
Worst Novels in Translation
- The Life of Hunger by Amelie Nothomb (trans Shaun Whiteside)
- Your Face Tomorrow II: Dance and Dream by Javier Marias (trans Margaret Jull Costa)
- Embers by Sandor Marai (trans Carol Brown Janeway)
- White by Marie Darrieusecq (trans Ian Monk)
Best Novels in Translation
- In Search of Lost Time (Vols IV-VII) by Marcel Proust (trans John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Lydia Davis; ed Christopher Prendergast)
- The Trial by Franz Kafka (trans Richard Stokes)
- Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (trans Len Rix)
- Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg (trans Paul Britten Austin)
- The Class by Hermann Ungar (trans Mike Mitchell)
- A Sad Affair by Wolfgang Koeppen (trans Michael Hoffman)
Best Short Story Collection
- Matters of Life and Death by Bernard MacLaverty
- Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
Best Non-Fiction
- A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous (trans Philip Boehm)
- How to Read Wittgenstein by Ray Monk
- The White Cities by Joseph Roth (trans Michael Hoffman)
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Others that are worthy of a mention that don’t fit or otherwise didn’t make it onto the list
- Amongst Women by John McGahern
- The Dark by John McGahern
- Death in Danzig by Stefan Chwin (trans Philip Boehm)
- Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth (trans John Hoare)
On the whole I read very few books that I didn’t enjoy or find some pleasure in. I have hundreds of books waiting for me to read, so I’d better get on with it. See you on www.26books.com, I hope.
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.
Booker Prize Predictions
I haven’t had time to write up my review of all the Booker contenders, and the winner is announced tonight. So, here are my predictions and my personal choice.
To put things in perspective, I thought that last year there were two outstanding novels (Banville’s The Sea, the winner, and A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry) and two very good ones (Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and Arthur & George by Julian Barnes) on the shortlist. If any one of those novels were on the list this year they would be the runaway winner. It’s a very disappointing list this year.
That said, there are three books that I’m undecided between: Carry Me Down by M.J.Hyland, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar and Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. It’s very difficult to pick a winner out of those three. I keep wavering between them, but in the end I think I’m going to plump for Carry Me Down with Mother’s Milk a close second.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sarah Walters or Kiran Desai won.
But the really big question is: why isn’t Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me on the list? That’s the best eligible novel I’ve read this year by a long distance.
Booker Prize Thoughts
Every year, there’s a different set of things to irritate book lovers in the Booker Prize Shortlist. This year, established names such as Peter Carey and David Mitchell have missed out in favour of relative unknowns. The only previously nominated author is Sarah Waters.
As with last year, I’m aiming to read all of the books on the shortlist. Last year my favourite of the nominees was John Banville’s The Sea which actually won the prize, although I had thought that Julian Barnes would finally get the nod for Arthur & George.
So far I have read all but Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn and the last 100 or so pages of The Secret River by Kate Grenville and it’s not easy to pick a winner. Personally, I didn’t think much of Waters’ The Night Watch and I stand by that judgement. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her win it, mind. The best novel, which is after all what the Booker is supposed to be about, is either Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland or In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar in my view.
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a Rushiesque novel that is ultimately rather aimless and sentimental, even though it has moments of great beauty and pathos. It reminded me a lot of Rushie’s Shalimar the Clown, without any of the irritating bits. It’s exactly the kind of book that can win the Booker.
Once I’ve finished all the books, I’ll post my reviews, name my choice and prediction for the prize.
The Damned United (David Peace)
David Peace is the author of several Yorkshire-based novels, most notably the ‘Red Riding Quartet’, a sequence of novels about the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. He was chosen as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British’ novelists in 2003.
The Damned United concerns Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days in charge of Leeds United. As a kid I grew up hearing how great ‘Cloughie’, as he was universally known, was from my mother, inexplicably a Derby County and Nottingham Forest fan. What we’d today call a ‘glory chaser’. If a context in which the word ‘glory’ and those two clubs could now be used seems difficult to imagine, that’s more of a testimony to Cloughie’s genius than anything else. Both clubs were minnows before he became their manager, and both have returned to mediocrity since.
Derby County beat the Leeds of Don Revie, whose presence looms over this novel, to the league championship in the 1971-72 season and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup the next year. Something that Derby County fans, then resident at the Baseball Ground rather than the new base of Pride Park, can never expect to experience again without a seismic shift in the way that football works.
Clough was known as ‘Old Bighead’. And what a bighead he was! Quotes include: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager, but I’m in the top 1′ and, on debating tactics: ‘ we sit down for ten minutes, have a chat, and agree that I was right in the first place’. Roy Keane, the recently appointed manager of Sunderland, who was signed by Clough at Forest, quoted his simple tactics: ‘pick up the ball, pass it to a red shirt and move’. It was good enough to win Forest the European Cup.
But despite his headstrong persona (which included him once punching a fan of my club, QPR), one always suspected that beneath everything was a deeply troubled man. His alcoholism cost him his job at Forest, and in later years, took its toll on him physically.
Peace’s novel seems to come as close as possible to getting inside Cloughie’s head. He intercuts scenes from his final match as a record-breaking striker for Sunderland and as a manager of Hartlepool (which Clough inexplicably refers to throughout as Hartlepools) with his brief tenure at Leeds.
The narrative treats the events at Elland Road (the Leeds ground then as now) as being in the present, while the time at Hartlepool and Derby are told as an interior monologue. Throughout the narrative, both before and during the Leeds episodes, Clough is obsessed with his nemesis Don Revie, his predecessor at Leeds. It is this obsession and the hatred of Leeds that it breeds that ultimately destroy Clough’s job at Leeds. His opening speech to the team is:
Gentlemen, I might as well tell you now, you lot may have won all the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, as far as I am concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.
As that extract shows, the book is full of footballer’s language, and is all the more entertaining for it. It is the first time I’ve seen the world of football adequately described fictionally, either on the page or the screen. This is a million miles away from a Kevin Costner baseball movie.
Ultimately, The Damned United is a book for people who know about and love football. And it’s pretty entertaining if you dislike Leeds United as much as the average football fan in this country (Elland road regulars and my mates GT and Ayaz notwithstanding).
While it’s not a great novel in my view, it is surely a better portrait of Cloughie than any biography could be, and it’s certainly an entertaining read. More to the point, it’s better than several of the books on this year’s Booker shortlist (reviews of all of them forthcoming). If you love football (the real football they used to play, not today’s Harlem Globetrotter variety) and are in the least interested in Brian Clough, you should read it.
The Innocent (Ian McEwan)
Every week in The Observer someone gets asked about their taste in books. One of the most interesting questions is: ‘Which living author is the most overrated?’. I’m never going to be interviewed by them, so I can reveal my answer here and now: it’s Ian McEwan.
It’s a total mystery to me why he is held in such high esteem in the UK. Is it because we’ve got nothing better to celebrate? Of living writers, there is Kazuo Ishiguro, John Banville (oh, alright, not from the UK) and Julian Barnes, to name only three, who tower over him. I find his style very aloof, pedestrian and pompous. His novel Saturday was one of the worst novels I’ve read recently.
The Innocent, according to the blurb on the back cover, ‘ensures McEwan’s major status’. I’m not really sure that that quote makes any sense at all. Whatever ‘major status’ might be, it’s not worth having, if this is what ensures it. It concerns a naive surveillance technician (Leonard Marnham) from Dollis Hill and his affair with a feisty young Berliner called Maria. The affair, the way it begins, the way it almost ends, everything about it are ridiculous. Initially, Leonard exhibits a painful lack of experience in bed, but within a few pages has turned into a domination freak.
Maria’s ex-husband Otto has a key part to play, and this really is the most ridiculous part of the entire story. McEwan is famous, if anything, for surgical accuracy. Here, his characters chop up Otto and wrap him in water-proof plastic, then haul him around Berlin in two boxes. And get away with it.
But the real curse of McEwan’s method is research. It’s the novelistic equivalent of putting the dreaded words ‘based on a true story’ at the start of a film. McEwan can’t help but tell you how thorough his research is, and he lays it all out for you in an afterword. But no amount of research can mask the leadenness of the writing. To judge from Saturday, written a full 15 years after The Innocent, not much has changed. The detail that he lavishes there on a squash game and, later, a brain operation are enough to make you want a lobotomy. And the conclusion in which a home invasion is foiled by quoting poetry is just risible.
The Innocent is a pretentious attempt to write a Berlin-based thriller, a sub-genre that I normally can’t get enough of. It looks down its nose at the ‘mere’ spy thriller, as though creative writing course trickery is somehow superior to storytelling. My advice? If you want a great Berlin-based spy thriller, look no further than Len Deighton’s wonderful Game, Set, Match trilogy. Don’t bother with The Innocent.
