More of everything

Lent is over so I am reading fiction again.

Clytemnestra falls into the “more women’s voices from the Greek myths” section. A brilliant debut novel from Constanza Casati, telling the life story of one of the Greek female murderers. Wife of Agamemnon, he of the Trojan wars, Clytemnestra is tricked into handing over her eldest daughter for a sacrifice, from then on throughout her life, her deepest motive is revenge. It hsa to be said that she has much to do, since Agamemnon has already murdered her husband, Tantalus, and their son, before taking her reluctantly and furiously as his wife, it is no spoiler to say that she gets her own back.

More Australiana. A new writer of Australian fiction hits the shelves. Patricia Wolf is clearly intent on joining the growing number of women writers who dwell on the less attractive aspects of life. People do disappear into the outback, and many of them are unsuspecting, unprepared tourists and backpackers, so Outback slots neatly into the macabre world of the crime thriller and the all too real life of the red desert that is typical of so much of the continent, whether Queensland (as in this novel) or Western Australia or Northern Territory, all areas covered by similar novels by other authors. A second DC Walker thriller is due out this year.

This is the third novel from Eleanor Catton. She won the Booker Prize for Luminaries, a novel set at the time of the New Zealand gold rush. She was, at the time, the youngest winner. Birnam Wood is an eco-warrior based novel set in post-earthquake/pre-Covid South Island. The title of the book comes from the name of a collective of guerilla gardeners who plant vegetables on unused, abandoned sites around Christchurch. Because of the association with Macbeth, the reader is left pondering which character is the Macbeth, which the Lady Macbeth etc but I think that is to slightly miss the point. The collective move plants around, as in the play. Catton’s novels are usually highly structured and this is no exception. Each section deals with different aspects of the life choices of the main characters, how they intersect but also what their motives and philosophies lead them to accomplish/destroy/exploit. A fascinating and eye-opening saga set in a fictional peninsula of New Zealand and the consequences of greed versus community.

This is a harrowing Irish novel, new territory for Sebastian Barry, since he is not in this novel mining little pieces of his own family history. Still, it is written with compassion and grace, which is exactly why the reader returns to his works. A retired policeman (Guarda) is approached to assist in a cold case on which he worked when he was active in the service. It is a brutal murder of a priest. That Tom McNulty knows more than he gives away does not stop the memories rising to the surface, to trouble his increasingly confused mind. He has had a lot to deal with, and reawakening the old times causes all sorts of hallucinatory moments, until at last he confronts his grief. Old God’s Time deals with a very dark aspect of Roman Catholic Irish history, this novel should probably come with a warning, but that said, it is a brilliantly conceived telling and well worth reading.

Blogging the Booker 2014/4

To say that I love family sagas would be an understatement. Plantagenets, Pallisers, Cazalets, Yorkists, Stuarts (naturally!), Mehra, Princes of Gwynedd – name any surname you like, if there is a book about them then I have read it or have it on my pile or I am waiting to hear about it. I love the internecine squabbles, the paterfamilias, the matriarchs, the lot. So imagine my joy when I started to read The Lives of Others [not to be confused by the book of the film] by Neel Mukherjee.

Indian family sagas are a class apart, think of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, or any novel by Rohinton Mistry. This is largely because it is common for them all to live in the same house…wonderful (for the reader anyway), perhaps not so wonderful for the Bengali daughters-in-law; for the woman leaves her home and lives with her husband under the same roof, and in status, under her mother-in-law. Her sisters-in-law will also join her, and her status will depend on the status of her husband: boro, mejo, shejo, chhoto – eldest, middle, between middle and youngest, youngest. And since suttee was condemned by the British and made illegal, woe betide the one whose husband dies…

[name]suggested that if [name] sat beside her mother-in-law, the sight of her son’s widow might break her heart. [name], now in her widow’s white, the vermilion line in the parting of her hair permanently removed using the big toe of her husband’s corpse before it was taken away for cremation…

Woe to anyone who thinks that I skim read. This passage comes towards the end of the book and is seared into my brain. As is the equally unflinching description of police brutality. The novel is based in Bengal, in Calcutta between the years (roughly) 1923 to 1967, with a stretch backwards and forwards to encompass parts of the story that the reader needs to have to fill in the gaps. So this means before, during and after Partition, and more crucially before, during and after the Naxalite Rebellion. I will not go into details about Partition, since once the Ghosh family discover that Calcutta is to stay in India, their experience of it is material, but peripheral.

The Naxalite Rebellion is less familiar, though you may have done some background on it if you followed my suggestion last year and read The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, another family saga. Neel Mukerjee‘s book is much more detailed and explicit. The main character in the book, Supratik, becomes a Naxalite, one of the many middle class intellectuals who went into the rural areas to spread the gospel of Chairman Mao, with his bible The Little Red Book. Contrary to all wisdom and practice Supratik keeps a notebook, written but never presented to a member of the Ghosh household, which is how the reader gets to know in some detail, what happened and how the rebellion was fomented and developed.

Naxal, Naxalite and Naksalvadi are the names of various guerrilla groups in India, mostly associated with the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Naxal derives from the name of the village Naxalbari in West Bengal where the movement had its origin. Naxalites are far-left radicals, supportive of Maoist political sentiment and ideology. Initially the movement had its centre in West Bengal. In affected areas the poorer sharecroppers, displaced people living on a less-than-subsistence diet, harried from above by venial landowners, loan sharks and others (all exploiting the poor for their own ends) were persuaded to revolt.

This is the central theme of this book. In cities, it is the poor, the servant class that is the victim of massive, though normally benign, repression and in the rural areas, repression on a scale which almost beggars belief. Calcutta, and many other Indian cities, became choked with the desperate, starving immigrants from the rural areas; droughts, famines, dysentery and LANDGRAB drove thousands off the land, teeming into the city where cholera and unemployment and starvation greeted them – corpses lay unattended in the streets: food for cats, dogs and carrion crows.

This novel casts a steadfast eye over this hideous scene. It is this disparity of opportunity that drives Supratik away from his upper middle class home [another outsider] to the farms in Medinipur, with his cadres of intellectual supporters to teach the villagers that there is another way to live. He shares their lives, planting, harvesting rice, living on thin rations and spreading the word, and yet he remains an outsider, at first they are suspicious, then accepting and eventually sporadic rebellion does break out, but never enough to sweep away centuries of exploitation.

In the final chapter of the book we link back to our ‘hero’ in an action that takes place in 2012. Naxalite actions were still happening across approximately ten states in India, the Naxalite-related deaths were down 50% from 2010 to 2011. Largely now affecting displaced forest dwellers whose land is being taken from them for state-owned mining operations.

The dust jacket shows a full moon on the front and a thumbnail of a moon on the back, there are lunar symbols throughout; though the moon is not as integral to the story as it was in The Luminaries, last year’s winner.

Neel Mukerjee gives the reader two glossaries, one on family relationships and a useful vocabulary. This book is not all doom and gloom. I loved it and fully expect to see it on the short list, it is early days but I would back it as a winner, though reserve the right to change my mind later. At this stage last year I was backing Eleanor Catton – and look what happened!

Man Booker 2013 winner

Well done, Eleanor Catton. Brilliant choice, brilliant news. I have been hoping for just this result ever since I read The Luminaries.

Man Booker 2013 short-lister Eleanor Catton – Her debut novel

I have finally caught up with The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, I am not at all sure why it slipped under my radar since it is highly praised by people I admire, like Kate Atkinson who described it as “compulsively good”; Joshua Ferris described it as “mesmerising, labyrinthine, intricately patterned…” She is also an author whose background ticks all my boxes: born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, and female! I was fortunate to be able to obtain from Primrose Hill Books a practically new First Edition, which comes wittily with four Rehearsal tickets, punched to show that the performance has been attended. Great idea!

All that said, I found there were some real problems with the book. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, at least some of the time I was completely unclear where I was in the story. It is a complex and difficult plot to follow and without using a spoiler it is hard to explain. Put simplistically, there has been a case of sexual abuse by a teacher on a pupil of Abbey School; the fall out is largely described by Isolde, the sister of the ‘victim’ and deals with how she gets treated afterwards, it deals with the now compulsory group counselling that takes place after such an event – Isolde’s problem with this being that she is two forms younger than the other girls in the group session and is only there because of her close relationship to the event protagonist. There is also a very successful treatment of Victoria, the ‘victim’, by her peers; both before and after she actually returns to the school, in gossipy, speculative, girly-bitch-sessions – not pretty, but pretty accurate!

Where I lost the thread was a whole series of scenes in which the saxophone teacher, a pivotal if shadowy figure in the plot, is seemingly ‘acting-out’, this with different girls playing out roles in the story. While the ‘role-play’ went on she, the teacher keeps re-thinking the casting, so that she imagines different girls (there are four main girls in the role-play) in the separate parts, how would giving the Isolde ‘role’ be different if given to Bridget, how would Julia perform as Isolde, and Isolde…

Then to add another layer of engagement (and difficulty) you meet Stanley, a student at the drama school nearby to where the saxophone teacher has her studio. He meets Isolde and in a complicated series of mistakes and misunderstandings happens be in an End-of-Year drama that ‘uses’ her sister’s story as the basis of the First Year production, to which because of Isolde’s relationship with Stanley, her parents come…

All this without even going into the quasi-lesbian relationships: among the school girls, the saxophone teacher, the saxophone teacher’s mentor, Patsy; ‘labyrinthine’ doesn’t even touch it!

The design of the book is also cunning, it feels like a notebook in the hand, this is because the dust-jacket is textured so that as your hand balances the book open to read, it feels as though you are touching a spiral-bound book. It is all very, very clever.

You will know that I am gunning for Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, there is no public voting so I am rather afraid I shall not get my way. But I do urge you to read both these books. I may not be quite so unequivocally supportive of The Rehearsal, but if you like to do things ‘in the right order’, you might feel obliged to start with this

The Man Booker shortlist & one that got away.

Since a couple of the books on the longlist were only published a week or so ago, I have failed to finish reading the whole list before the shortlist was published. One of the two, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri was so likely to be included in the shortlist that I left it until last to read, while I read Alison MacLeod’s new novel Unexploded.

It is pretty clear from the book jacket that this will be a story about World War II. Indeed it is. Although there is a great deal more unexploded emotion, than unexploded bombs. It is a very subtle look at the tensions of living in fear of invasion; in finding out in extremis what your husband is prepared to do in the event of the Germans actually arriving on the beaches of Brighton. So housewife, Evelyn and her conventional Bank Manager husband Geoffrey, find themselves at odds over the issue, even though in a very real sense, Geoffrey has done everything he can possibly do to provide for, and protect, her and their son, Philip.

The trouble is, the invasion doesn’t come. So all the tension and anxiety remains, the threat is unexploded so to speak. Meanwhile, as a local and eminent citizen, Geoffrey is appointed Superintendent of the local internment camp up on the Brighton Race Course, where among others resides his tailor, a Jew of foreign extraction and a German, one who has already fallen foul of his own country and been labelled a ‘degenerate’ and is interned: a Jew, a German and degenerate. The necessary conditions for everyone to go off the rails are all there waiting for the crash…

This novel draws together so many elements of wartime Britain, fusing the Sachenhausen forged bank-notes; the labour camps; George Bell, Bishop of Chichester; even Dr Metzger and the experiments on children into a seamless if shocking account of what it was like for the people who live through it. Even Virginia Woolf enters the story, her books The Waves and The Years both figure and prefigure some of the events in the novel, as indeed does the story of David and Bathsheba, cruelly twisted. The privations and also the pleasures: some natural, some illicit are all here.

This is a wonderful book and had stiff competition from a very talented longlist. For once there has hardly been for me a single dud, apart from The Kills. It has been a rare enough privilege to read such a good longlist. So all thanks and congratulations to the judges.

Now to the shortlist. What a difficult choice. The luminous 800 page thriller The Luminaries, set in the goldfields of New Zealand, against the jewel-like brevity of The Testament of Mary; the last (allegedly) novel by Jim Crace against the first novel by NoViolet Bulawayo. The Japanese-American Zen Buddhist priest or the American Bengali. An unenviable task, what a pity they cannot all win. Reading these books has been such a pleasure.

Man Booker 2013 – the fault lies not in ourselves but in our stars

Slight mis-quote, but The Bard must be used to it. What to say about The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton? Another very long book, definitely, but what a read! There were two things that struck me right where it matters, one may apply to lots of people and the other to only a few.

As a Piscean myself, I completely understand the radical effect that the moon and stars have on my moods and my physical well-being or not; whether they also effect my whole life I am less sure – but almost any Piscean will know what I mean. The other more serendipitous thing about this book is that earlier in the year (as many of my followers will know) I spent three weeks in New Zealand, two of them on the Canterbury Plain, so to read about those places when newly visited by Europeans and Chinese in the goldrush of the 1860s was pure joy. I didn’t even know there had been a goldrush! Excuse my complete ignorance.

So the book: the luminaries of the title both describes the stars and also the characters in this complex and interesting, even delightful narrative. The novel is told from many different angles each focussing on the events of a single day and the weeks leading to that day: 14th January 1866.

This is Eleanor Catton’s second novel and it is astonishingly accomplished. I do not intend any disrespect to her when I say that her mastery of plot line, characterisation and suspense it quite breath-taking. While 800 pages in a lot of space to unfold a story, every single page is worth taking care with, each chapter is headed with an astrological position, followed by an italicized resume, read all of it! It is rather Victorian in its way, which is entirely appropriate, as is the configuration of the astrological chart cleverly illustrated by Barbara Hilliam. Ignore them and you miss half the delight and charm.

I also like the fact that the Cantonese and the Maori passages are not translated, it is not entirely clear each time what has been said, but then this is also true of the misunderstandings, germane to the plot, that arise on both sides. There is a large cast made up of Europeans, two Chinese and a Maori – this man’s name is Te Rau Tauwhare – it makes no difference but just to be helpful you should know that this is pronounced Teroo Towfaray. At the beginning of the book there is a character chart with addresses…look at that too. In fact, don’t skip anything.

I love the way EC delineates character, here is a taste, this is how she describes one of the Chinese diggers, who have a very lowly position in this speculators world of hard toil, good luck and bad judgement:

Quee Long was a barrel-chested man of capable proportions and a practical strength. His eyes were rounded in their inner corners, but came to a point at his cheeks; the shape of his face was almost square. When he smiled, he revealed a very incomplete set of teeth: he had lost two incisors, as well as his foremost molars in his lower jaw. The gaps in his smile tended to put one in mind of a child whose milk teeth were falling away – a comparison that Quee Long might well have made himself, for he had a critical eye, a quick wit, and a flair for caustic deprecation, most especially when that deprecation was self-imposed.

This is her description of Te Rau Tauwhare:

Te Rau Tauwhare was not quite thirty years of age. He was handsomely muscular; and carried himself with assurance and the tightly wound energy of youth; though not openly prideful, he never showed that he was impressed or intimidated by any other man. He possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication – for although he had a warrior’s reputation, and an honourable standing within his tribe, his self-conception had not been shaped by his achievements. He simply knew that his beauty and his strength were without compare; he simply knew that he was better than most men.

Aren’t you simply dying to read this? I loved this book and dearly want to see it on the short list. I do love a writer who understands the use of the semi-colon.

So my current short list would include: The Luminaries Eleanor Catton; The Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw; Harvest by Jim Crace; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki; either The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris or Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson which leaves one place for the books that have not yet been published, but at a guess it probably would include The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri. What this space!

The Booker Long List 2013

Well, here it is a list of books waiting to be read. Some new writers, some old favourites but 13 books chosen by this year’s panel under the Chairmanship of Robert MacFarlane. Since I am pretty sure this isn’t Bobby MacFarlane the footballer, it must be the writer of such books as The Old Ways and Mountains of the Mind. I hope he will not mind if I compare his writing to Iain Sinclair, who does for London what Robert MacFarlane does for the countryside: render into words the earth beneath our feet. Mr MacFarlane, the writer, has also brought out a new book, graphically reviewed by another old friend, William Dalrymple, called Holloway, which I haven’t read yet but will have waiting for me once I have got through THE LIST.

On to the list then: we have three new writers – NoViolet Bulawayo We Need New Names, Eve Harris The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Donal Ryan The Spinning Heart; we have very long books – The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton which runs to over 800 pages and very short books – The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibin, which latter has already been staged in America by Fiona Shaw, it was on in New York but I missed it by a whisker on my brief visit earlier this year, I was very disappointed indeed. There are previously listed authors who have not yet won – Tash Aw Five Star Billionaire, Jhumpa Lahiri (I think) The Lowland, and surprisingly Jim Crace, who was shortlisted for Quarantine, a truly remarkable book which went on to win other awards, but not The Booker, Mr Crace is long listed this year for Harvest, I read somewhere that he has said is his last book which is a pity. Along side those and no less interesting are Richard House The Kills, Colum McCann TransAtlantic, Charlotte Mendelson Almost English and Ruth Ozeki A Tale for the Time Being and Alison McLeod Unexploded.

So: no Khaled Hosseini, Samantha Harvey or Rachel Joyce all of whom are in my pile and will now have to wait. Unless the books that are not pulished until later this year haven’t arrived before I am done with the other nine or ten.

Watch this space!