A very well written book in individual passages and moods which are reminiscent of Andreï Makine and an interesting discussion of an ordinary life whiA very well written book in individual passages and moods which are reminiscent of Andreï Makine and an interesting discussion of an ordinary life which draws flattering comparisons to Stoner or Gilead – however the book simply lacks the weight to convey a whole life, in particular the avalanche which kills the narrators wife is clichéd and the treatment of the war and prison camp simply too perfunctory – nevertheless an enjoyable, easy read....more
The book centres on three mid-20 characters in 21st century South London: Harry – a lesbian who acts as a high end drug dealer, typically selling to bThe book centres on three mid-20 characters in 21st century South London: Harry – a lesbian who acts as a high end drug dealer, typically selling to businessmen in their offices, or showbiz types, behind the front of being a recruitment agent; Becky a bi-sexual dancer, working as a waitress in her Uncle’s business (her own father she finds being a famous but now imprisoned political activist) and funding her dancing by working as a masseuse; her unlikely boyfriend Pete – a hopeless drug-addled layabout, who has largely given up on modern society due to lack of opportunities (it is unclear if Tempest expects us to have any sympathy for this character). There is also Harry’s sidekick/enforcer/protector Leon – although we get little colour on him. The book opens with Harry, Becky and Leon fleeing after some form of heist and then unravels the back story leading to it - Harry and Becky meet at a party early on and are immediately attracted, meeting again at a lunch when Pete and Harry visit their mother and her new boyfriend (a timid optician Graham); after her usual drug supplier is temporarily imprisoned, Harry is then attacked by a stand in and ends up with Leon beating him and them robbing him – it then turning out that Becky’s Uncles were the ones that lost the money; Becky dumps Pete when she finds he has got Graham’s son to pose as a client to see if she sleeps with her clients.
Vibrant but patchy debut novel from an urban poet, whose first rap album (“Everybody Down”) is effectively a rap version of the book – with each song corresponding to a chapter.
The book has something of a Zadie Smith/Tarantino/Trainspotting cross about it. The title presumably refers to the back stories we get on many of not just the main characters but often their forbears. The weakest part of the book is the description of emotions – the characters (perhaps due to drugs but this is not acknowledged) seem to be experience radical and violent emotions at almost any event.
Nevertheless an interesting and provocative debut....more
“Life After Life” style book – examining the various lives of one women – each section finishes with her death, with then an intermezzo imagining how “Life After Life” style book – examining the various lives of one women – each section finishes with her death, with then an intermezzo imagining how she might have lived rather than died and filling in some more detail. The first section assumes that she dies as a baby in Galacia (on the fringes of the Austro Hungarian Empire in the 1900s) and follows the fortunes of her Jewish mother and Catholic railway official father as they split after her death; the last is about her “final” death, suffering with dementia in an old people home and about her son searching for memories of her in Vienna. In the intermediate stages she grows up in starvation struck, immediate post war Vienna and ends up in a suicide pact; enters Russia as a Communist activist and emigrant from Austria, but then is caught up in Stalinist purges; is mourned by her teenage son when she dies from a fall in Communist Berlin having carved out a career as a Socialist writer.
The strength of the book is how it captures, in a single life and in a short novel, so much of 20th Century central European history. A clear theme is the arbitrariness of great political events and how they affect individual lives by chance (in one of the strongest Intermezzo’s an increasingly hierarchy of Soviet officials decide on a whim whether to pass her file on up for eventual arrest and even execution, or if to hold it back). The weakness is perhaps some of the individual passages – which are muddled and uninteresting (what is less clear is whether this is the translation or the original)....more
Sparsely yet powerfully and evocatively written novella.
Jane Fairchild is a foundling, born at the turn of the century, working as a maid but bought Sparsely yet powerfully and evocatively written novella.
Jane Fairchild is a foundling, born at the turn of the century, working as a maid but bought up in a good orphanage where she learns to read. The story is ostensibly set on one day - Mothering Sunday 1924 – but narrated in the 1990s as she looks back at 90-ish over her life and on this day of all days which determined her unlikely career (via an Oxford bookshop where she mingled with University members, marrying one who went on to be a World War II codebreaker) as a famous author.
The family where she serves – the Nivens – meet up with two other families the Sheringham’s and the Hobdays. The Nivens and Sheringham’s both lost 2 sons in the war (making Mothering Day a poignant day) – the only surviving son Paul Sheringham is due in 2 weeks to marry the Hobdays daughter and is meeting her separately for lunch.
The clear idea of the book is around literary influences – the day is pivotal in Jane’s life, helping her to realise the power but also limitations of words, the difference between observers and actors, the difficulty in really knowing other people’s thoughts, the stories that people tell others and even themselves. Conrad (who she starts reading for the first time that night) is a clear influence on her and also on Swift’s story. ...more
Disappointing addition to the series – with Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver both possible fathers for Bridget’s baby. The book makes no real original obDisappointing addition to the series – with Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver both possible fathers for Bridget’s baby. The book makes no real original observations on pregnancy (in fact few which ring true and even those are clichés) and does not really advance the lives of the characters in any meaningful way. The book also seems increasingly written with an eye to the film adaption rather than capturing and updating the spirit of the original newspaper columns (for example by changing to a series of Facebook posts and tweets). ...more
Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My original review of this and the first volume Outline is below – on this reading I enjoyed finding quotes which summarised for me either Rachel Cusk’s underlying technique in writing the trilogy, or the choice of title for the first two volumes.
In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from. But time had given him density, like an assist filling in the sketched-out form.
They had arrived ... At the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.
It's a bit like a revolving door ... You're not inside and you’re not outside
Reality ... could serve in the place of fantasy as a means of distracting people from the facts of their own lives
I said that if she was talking about identification, she was right - it was common enough to see oneself in others, particularly if the others existed at one remove from us, as for instance characters in a book do
They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else's head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognise that these thoughts were her own.
Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river ... It felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit.
The translator was a woman of about my own age .... I had watched her create her own version of what I had written ... Sometimes talking [with her] about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living with her, not me. In the process of translation the ownership of it .. had passed from me to her. Like a house.
My eye continually drawn ... To the strange cloudscape that appeared to belong neither to night nor to day but to something intermediary and motionless, a place of stasis where they was no movement or progression, no sequence of events that could be studied for its meaning
It suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being last not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might also be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion the unitary self being broken down, of Consciousness not as an imprisonment in one's own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that came from shared experiences at the highest level
For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality
I like it that you ask these questions she said, but I don't understand why you want to know
I remembered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation
When he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else, something outside him that could be internalised
It was hard to listen while you were talking, I had found out more by listening, I said, than I had ever thought possible
I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of earth blindly moving in their black traces
Outstanding and innovative novels, the first two parts of a planned trilogy.
The books are narrated by a writer and now creative writing teacher, a recently divorced mother of two boys – this together with her name (Faye) mentioned only once in each book is almost all we know about her. Instead the book, narrated in the first person, is the record of various conversations with she has in which she plays a typically passive role listening to the other person’s life story and perhaps making a few comments and questions.
In the first book she visits Athens to teach a creative writing course, those she talks to include her neighbour on the plane (ex a successful shipping owner), the attendees at her creative writing course, friends, fellow teachers. The themes explored in the stories include the unreliability of other’s stories, storytelling itself, female identity, progression and improvement (and its inadequacy) but often basically people’s relationships with family.
All of the stories feature protagonists in not dissimilar positions to Faye and we realise that in some ways the stories and her reaction to them tell us about Faye by a process (one that Cusk in interviews refers to as “annihilated perspective” which is made explicit at the end of the book, when another teacher tells Faye about a conversation she had with her neighbour on the plane “the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing … what she was not …. This ant-description … had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition; while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank ….(which) gave her … a sense of who she now was”. In the book’s last paragraph, the Greek seat-neighbour contacts her and says (as she does not want to meet” that he will spend the day in “solicitude”, which she corrects to mean “solitude” – again a key part of the book’s theme.
The second book contains some slightly weaker elements – a key part of the book is Faye’s decision to buy a very run down flat and to bring it builders to renovate and soundproof it – her elderly and hostile neighbours downstairs are unconvincing and one dimensional (and oddly do not have any story of their own – almost uniquely across the two novels), however the overall effect is still compelling. Faye’s intervention in people’s accounts of their lives (her hairdresser, her builders, one of her students, some recently divorced and remarried friends), deliberately adding her own views and seeking their perspective on it, is much greater in this book – and as a result the accounts have more of a common theme looking at change and reinvention and its interaction with freedom. She also meets a man with whom she starts a tentative relationship – and has a feeling of pulling away from a precipice....more
Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My original review of this and the second volume Transit is below – on this reading I enjoyed finding quotes which summarised for me either Rachel Cusk’s underlying technique in writing the trilogy, or the choice of title for this first volume.
There was so little interface between inside and outside, so little friction
Sometimes .. the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that writing comes out of tension, the tension between what is inside and what’s outside. Surface tension, isn’t that the phrase – actually that’s not a bad title
The perimeter of shade had receded and the glare of the street advanced, so that we now sit almost at the interface of the two
Clelia favoured symphonies: in fact, she possessed the complete symphonic works of all the major composers. There was a marked prejudice against compositions that glorified the solo voice or instrument …. It occurred to me that in Clelia’s mind .. [symphonies] perhaps represented … a sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts, and the individual was blotted out
In the center of Clelia’s apartment was a large light space, a hall, where the doors to all the other rooms converged. Here standing on a plinth was a glazed, terracotta statue of a woman
It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me
Her consciousness, at that point - she was forty three years old - was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams and knowledge, and the plethora of her day to day responsibilities, but also of other people's - gleaned over years of listening, talking, emphasising, worrying - that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries depressing these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no more certain what has happened to her and what to other people she knew
This feeling of being negated as I was being exposed has had a particularly powerful effect on me I said.
He hasn't realised how many English meanings came from Greek compounds. For instance the word ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as to hide behind silence.
I don't compose myself from other people's ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else's poem.
I waited for him too ask me a question, which after all would only have been polite, but he didn't, even though I had asked him many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew the view to be under threat.
She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifetime habit of explaining herself, and she thought about the power of silence, which put other people or of one another's reach.
Outstanding and innovative novels, the first two parts of a planned trilogy.
The books are narrated by a writer and now creative writing teacher, a recently divorced mother of two boys – this together with her name (Faye) mentioned only once in each book is almost all we know about her. Instead the book, narrated in the first person, is the record of various conversations with she has in which she plays a typically passive role listening to the other person’s life story and perhaps making a few comments and questions.
In the first book she visits Athens to teach a creative writing course, those she talks to include her neighbour on the plane (ex a successful shipping owner), the attendees at her creative writing course, friends, fellow teachers. The themes explored in the stories include the unreliability of other’s stories, storytelling itself, female identity, progression and improvement (and its inadequacy) but often basically people’s relationships with family.
All of the stories feature protagonists in not dissimilar positions to Faye and we realise that in some ways the stories and her reaction to them tell us about Faye by a process (one that Cusk in interviews refers to as “annihilated perspective” which is made explicit at the end of the book, when another teacher tells Faye about a conversation she had with her neighbour on the plane “the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing … what she was not …. This ant-description … had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition; while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank ….(which) gave her … a sense of who she now was”. In the book’s last paragraph, the Greek seat-neighbour contacts her and says (as she does not want to meet” that he will spend the day in “solicitude”, which she corrects to mean “solitude” – again a key part of the book’s theme.
The second book contains some slightly weaker elements – a key part of the book is Faye’s decision to buy a very run down flat and to bring it builders to renovate and soundproof it – her elderly and hostile neighbours downstairs are unconvincing and one dimensional (and oddly do not have any story of their own – almost uniquely across the two novels), however the overall effect is still compelling. Faye’s intervention in people’s accounts of their lives (her hairdresser, her builders, one of her students, some recently divorced and remarried friends), deliberately adding her own views and seeking their perspective on it, is much greater in this book – and as a result the accounts have more of a common theme looking at change and reinvention and its interaction with freedom. She also meets a man with whom she starts a tentative relationship – and has a feeling of pulling away from a precipice....more
You throw your hands in exasperation, and I can see why.
I re-read this book, together with “Schooldays of Jesus” and “Death of Jesus” back to back
You throw your hands in exasperation, and I can see why.
I re-read this book, together with “Schooldays of Jesus” and “Death of Jesus” back to back in a single day following publication of the third (and final) volume in the trilogy.
My reviews of the second two, terribly disappointing, volumes in the trilogy are here:
This book starts with Simón (a Middle Aged Man) and David (a 5-6 year old boy) arriving on a boat in a new country (having fled their homeland for reasons not made clear). We quickly learn that Simón is not David’s father but “adopted” him on the boat after an incident when a letter David was carrying, explaining who he is and who is mother is, is lost – Simón resolves to help David and to find his mother.
The book starts deeply in Kafkaesque territory – the new state they enter (and where they are given their names) is a drab and austere socialist state, where many of the inhabitants are immigrants, where food is largely restricted to bread and bean paste, the workers attend philosophical classes and other educational classes in the evenings and where much is free or cheap but basic and bureaucratically administered.
The society in which he settles is one that encourages both a forgetfulness about past (a washing clean of past lives) and a suppression of natural (or to that society illogical and unhelpful) passions and urges.
Simón takes a job as a stevedore – arguing with the other stevedores about what he senses is missing in their lives (passion as opposed to goodwill, meat as opposed to bread). He strikes up a friendship with a mother of one of David’s friends, Elena– who allows him to have sex with her but more to resolve his urges than from any passion or interest.
Simón is on a quest to find David’s mother – and while walking past a tennis court where he sees a woman Ynes and her two brother’s playing, he decides that she is David’s mother and rather oddly she accepts the role, moves out of her privileged housing and lives with David in Simón’s flat.
It is obvious from early on that David sees himself as special – and those around him (particularly Inés) encourage this thinking, with Simón perhaps the only dissenting voice.
We like to believe we are special, my boy, each of us. But, strictly speaking, that cannot be so. If we were all special, there would be no specialness left. Yet we continue to believe in ourselves.
Simón buys David a children’s Don Quixote to teach him to read – and there are clear parallels between David and the Don Quixote character and his attitude to life and between that novel and something of what Coetzee is attempting here.
Don Quixote is an unusual book. To the lady in the library who lent it to us it looks like a simple book for children, but in truth it isn’t simple at all. It presents the world to us through two pairs of eyes, Don Quixote’s eyes and Sancho’s eyes.
When David eventually starts school, he refuses to conform – arguing that numbers have their own identity and are much more than labels for sets of similar things, and so refusing to count or do addition conventionally – he also refuses to show any reading skills (despite it being clear that he taught himself to read from Don Quixote in only a few weeks).
[He has] a specific deficit linked to symbolic activities. To working with words and numbers. He cannot read. He cannot write. He cannot count ……. He can recite all kinds of numbers, yes, but not in the right order. As for the marks he makes with his pencil, you may call them writing, he may call them writing, but they are not writing as generally understood. Whether they have a more private meaning I cannot say …… A specialist may be able to tell us whether there is some common factor underlying the deficit on the one hand and the inattentiveness on the other.
David’s unusual approach to numbers is discussed as:
He won’t take the steps we take when we count: one step two step three. It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black see of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void.
To which Simón is advised:
As for being afraid of the empty space between numbers, have you ever pointed out to David that the number of numbers is infinite …. There are good infinities and bad infinites, Simón … A bad infinity is like finding yourself in a dream, within another dream within yet another dream and so forth endlessly. Or finding yourself in a life that is only a prelude to another life, which is only a prelude et cetera. But the numbers aren’t like that. The numbers constitute a good infinity. Why? Because being infinite in number, they fill all the spaces in the universe packed against each other as tight as bricks.
The contrast between Simón’s philosophy (which would be more like our own) and that of the country he joins is interesting. The country rejects progress and history as meaningless, abstract concepts; sexual attraction is seen as illogical - a woman points out the lack of connection between physical attraction and the mechanics of sex and asks why if he loves her he wishes to push his most unattractive parts inside her.
Is he insisting on the primacy of the personal (desire, love) over the universal (goodwill, benevolence). And why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living like everyone else? Is it all part of a far too tardy transition from the old and comfortable (the personal) to the new and unsettling (the universal)?
But despite that Simón starts to conform very slowly to the society expectations – in particular his past life, before meeting David, barely features in his thoughts.
David’s unusual behaviour and in particular his unwillingness to conform to educational norms is seen as a symptom of his yearning for his true identity.
The real I want to suggest is what David misses in his life. The experience of lacking the real includes the experience of lacking real parents. David has no anchor in life. Hence his withdrawal and retreat into a fantasy world where he feels more in control.
I would say that what is special about David is that he feels himself to be special, even abnormal …. David wants to know who he really is but when he asks he receives evasive answers like “What do you mean by real” and “We have no history, any of us, it is all washed out”. Can you blame him if he feels frustrated and rebellious, and then retreats into a private world where he is free to make up his own answers.
When the authorities decide to move David to an institution, Ynes and Simón (and a hitchhiker they pick up) flee for the countryside.
The book (like the trilogy) is written in Coetzee’s trademark austere and sparse writing – with stilted and formal dialogue and with a lack of adjectives or description, and actually read as though translated (for example from German or Russian).
After a strong start thought I felt that by the book’s end the limited plot was increasingly seeming to act simply as a filler for rather banal philosophical discussions and to the use of analogy for analogies sake.
And my end reaction was close to my opening quote.
Nevertheless this is the strongest in the series by some way – as a one off book it would have made I think a slightly failed but interesting experiment....more
He is about to answer {another of David’s interminable questions} about to produce the correct, patient educative words, when something wells up in
He is about to answer {another of David’s interminable questions} about to produce the correct, patient educative words, when something wells up inside him. Anger? No. Irritation? No more than that. Despair?
I re-read this book, together with “Childhood of Jesus” and “Death of Jesus” back to back in a single day following publication of the third (and final) volume in the trilogy.
My reviews of the first and third volumes are here:
The second book picks up where the first finishes – Ynes, Simón and David reach the countryside town and initially work on a farm as labourers.
Later Ynes gets a job in the City and sponsored by three sisters who own the farm, David joins an academy of Dance, where he flourishes despite the disquiet of Simón and Ynes with the methods of the Academy – which relies on some pseudo-mystical connection between dance, numbers (which are seen very much the way David himself sees them as having their own identity and meaning) and astrology.
The academy is run by a husband and his cold but beautiful wife – she is murdered by the wild caretaker of the downstairs museum who has been telling everyone of his obsession with her and who confesses to her rape and murder (while hinting and effectively proving to Simón – who does not want to know – that he was actually having an active affair with her and strangled her simply to see what it was like).
David is obsessed with this character and his passion (as opposed to the boring Simón) – a character who is clearly inspired by Dostoevsky. As an aside I can only recommend people to read books by the publisher Dostoevsky Wannabe, rather than this misjudged attempt to be one.
David is more and more convinced he is a special child and is indulged by those around him to believe so. He and Simón have a strange relationship – Simón still feels parental responsibility for David, but the latter delights in making it clear to everyone that Simón is not his father and also annoys Simón with his persistent questioning, and refusal to accept the reality of life but to instead assume life should be fashioned around him to his own satisfaction and requirements.
The book ends even more strangely with Simón deciding to join the academy himself.
The second book is much weaker than the increasingly tiresome first
Before the end of the first book Simón tires of the austerity of the land and of the silly questioning of David. And we quickly tire of Coetzee’s writing and the disjointed superficial philosophical discussions.
By the second book this wearInéss is engrained from the very first page.
Further issues include:
The murderer character seems transported from another novel.
Coetzee adopts a device of using phrases like “Says he, Simón” in what is a third person book largely written from a single point of view. Hilary Mantel of course uses a similar device in “Bring Up The Bodies” itself a slight weakening of the incredibly effective unattributed “he/him” in “Wolf Hall” which brings us into Cromwell’s mind despite the third person voice. In this book however the effect is simply to add an additional layer of irritation to the reader – or at least this reader, Says he, Gumble’s Yard.
There is even a rather pathetic attempt at something done so much better by Douglas Adams (and unfortunately this seems deliberate given something in the third book)
Perhaps we should be scouring the world not for the true answer but for the true question.
But perhaps worst of all, David’s quasi-mystical view of numbers which is one of the oddest parts of the first novel becomes almost central, and worse than that linked with a rather ridiculous mix of performance dance and cod-astronomy.
And the very act of having a second book implies that Coetzee clearly has some form of intention for the novel whereas the first could in isolation been have read as an interesting experiment.
Our own reaction to the idea that there is some deep intent here, mirrors that of Simón to the mathematical dance.
Can you make sense of this? He whispers
He, Simón, soon loses interest.
No I don’t call it philosophy. Privately, I call it claptrap.
Originally written novel which takes the voice of the eponymous social-misfit, sex-offender and his Irish mother who has exiled him to London to get aOriginally written novel which takes the voice of the eponymous social-misfit, sex-offender and his Irish mother who has exiled him to London to get away from the risk of either prison or being beaten up. The book is mainly told in Martin John’s voice and includes lists, one sentence chapters, and lots of repetition of key phrases and ideas, designed to convey the obsessions and circularity of his thoughts.
The book perhaps drifts for too long, and although there is some narrative progression in the second half - the very narrative loses some of the stronger sense of the first half without actually giving any real narrative resolution.
An entertaining and easy to read novel – the cricket scouting and schoolboy cricketing background is interesting (particularly the frequent referencesAn entertaining and easy to read novel – the cricket scouting and schoolboy cricketing background is interesting (particularly the frequent references to previous Bombay heroes and prodigies) and the book also serves as a reflection on the failures and frustrations of modern India. Overall though the plot seems to meander and lack real resolution, which stops it being an excellent novel....more
Quirky retelling of Hamlet – which explicitly draws off the line: “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space Quirky retelling of Hamlet – which explicitly draws off the line: “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams”.
Some of the writing is brilliantly descriptive as are the foetus’s musings on life as a foetus and on the prospects for his life ahead. The Hamlet analogies are everywhere and range from subtle (an implicit debate over “to be or not to be” when the foetus muses on whether to kill himself in the womb to prevent the crime, the murder and crime still to happen but the foetus still unable to prevent it – so that overall the book has an almost temporal reversal to the play), to the comic (the house full of refuse as “something rotten in the state of Denmark), to the contrived (Claude ordering a Danish breakfast takeaway). Similarly the life and impression of the foetus can be both clever and (as with the way he gains his world awareness) contrived. The plot while swept along on its own logic and actually gripping (will the murder remain undetected or not) is best not examined in detail (why would the foetus suddenly lose all its intelligence in future – it seems to stay self-aware even after being born; why would Trudy simply not divorce John and get half the house).
McEwan cannot resist his exposition – here the foetus muses on 21st Century geo-political risks that may occur after his birth, on how his life in the middle class London compares to other lives he could have lived in previous times, or alternate classes or countries, and he uses the discovery of his budding penis when moving around as an excuse for a digression into gender politics. However overall this, while containing classic McEwen unlikeable, self-satisfied West-London dwelling upper middle class characters and some sneering at the poor, is a delightful read, richly packed with enjoyment and content and allusion....more
Overall a very strong book – which while not matching the excellence of “The Room”, still has the same sense of confined space and adds an element of Overall a very strong book – which while not matching the excellence of “The Room”, still has the same sense of confined space and adds an element of mystery and discovery. ...more
Book set over a short period as the Catholic cardinals gather to elect one of their members as the new pope.
In many ways a classic Harris political tBook set over a short period as the Catholic cardinals gather to elect one of their members as the new pope.
In many ways a classic Harris political thriller – and one which in the successive rounds of Papal ballots bears a strong resemblance to the elections in the Cicero trilogy – sharing also the sense of well-meaning and civilised people in an all-encompassing struggle for power.
The book is sympathetic in its treatment of Catholicism, all of the papal candidates and those around them are portrayed as being fully genuine in their faith, although at times struggling for a sense of God’s voice and presence – while at the same time touching on many of its challenges (the tension between reformists and traditionalists, reconciling the wealth and power of the church with Jesus’s preaching, the rise of the third world particularly Africa which both revitalises the church but also gives rise to social views which are seen as reactionary in the first world, the rise of Islam and religious war).
The ending is unnecessarily implausible and gratuitous, nevertheless the book proves gripping and follows Harris’s skill of extracting tension from what initially can seem a mundane subject matter....more
Evie is a 14-year-old alienated from both her mother and her (absent and divorced) father – and also struggling with identity, sexuality and friendshiEvie is a 14-year-old alienated from both her mother and her (absent and divorced) father – and also struggling with identity, sexuality and friendship and unhappy at the prospect of a Boarding school to which her parents have decided to send her to deal with her behavioural and lack of education activities. She finds herself attracted by a group of rebellious girls and their charismatic leader Suzanna – and travels with them to their base, a commune (and in effect a cult) run by the charismatic but predatory Russell, who himself is in thrall to a pop singer.
Quickly induced to perform sexual favours for Russell, Evie also loses her virginity to a threesome with Suzanna and the pop singer and loses much of her innocence and the ability to hide her activities from her parents when she is spotted after leading a mischievous break-in to a neighbour’s house (the 11 year old son of whom she has dominated sexually to give her money, money which supplements that she has been stealing from her mother and which she uses to buy her way into the chronically underfunded cult). Sent to live with her father she escapes back to the commune, but narrowly avoids involvement in a break in to the pop singers house (ordered by Russell after the singer fails to get him a record deal) – the break in actually being an infamous massacre. The book is mostly told in the first person contemporaneously with the events (albeit with also the benefit of hindsight – we are often told how events later proved crucial or how they were later reported), but it is interspersed with the 40-year-old Evie (now someone who acts as an in-home carer, meeting a friend’s son who asks her aggressively about her past – although not convicted for the murder she was identified as a commune member and bit player) reflecting on the events.
The plot and the commune is modelled very heavily on the Manson cult and Sharon Tate murder – at times a little too closely (slightly odd plot details turn out to be explained that way). The looking back part never really works – there is very limited perspective on the events looking back, the main purpose seems to be a combination of exposition (enabling the 40 year old Evie to report on details she did not witness, particularly the murders) and a slightly clunky attempt to link the cult with the perpetual willingness of young girls to allow themselves to be demeaned by men in order to gain acceptance (in this case the friend’s son’s girlfriend who allows his drug dealer friend to grope her).
However the book succeeds brilliantly in capturing in conjuring a feeling of place, a picture of lassitude (in the Californian Summer) and ennui and how the need to feel attractive and wanted (interestingly in Evie’s case to Suzanne not to Russell) can overcome all other compulsions and morals.
The title of the book is a little of a misnomer – as many chapters contain a number of maps, and the key introductory maps in each chapter often lack The title of the book is a little of a misnomer – as many chapters contain a number of maps, and the key introductory maps in each chapter often lack crucial detail or even full coverage of the region (hence the need for supplemental maps) – they are also reproduced in simple back and white, whereas perhaps the book could have been better with large scale colour maps. Instead the book focuses on ten areas: Russia, China, Western Europe, America, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, India/Pakistan, Japan/Korea, (and most weakly) the Arctic – in each explaining current political issues and how these have been inevitably shaped by geography including borders, navigable rivers, ease of internal travel, deep water harbours, and strategic depths into which to retreat.
Well written and easy to read book, if anything and unusually for a non-fiction book, insufficiently detailed but certainly acting as a good overall summary and interestingly recommended by my daughters Geography teacher to her to assist with her upcoming GCSE choices. ...more
Initially a promising premise, the book simply meanders and too many of the parts of the book, the reader is effectively left to work out what is happInitially a promising premise, the book simply meanders and too many of the parts of the book, the reader is effectively left to work out what is happening (and more damningly does not really care).
Overall, a renowned short story writer has aimed unsuccessfully for his first novel with what could have made an excellent novella....more
Eily, an 18 year old Irish girl (sexually abused as a child), comes to London to study a drama school – making a conscious decision to loser her virgiEily, an 18 year old Irish girl (sexually abused as a child), comes to London to study a drama school – making a conscious decision to loser her virginity, she starts a relationship with a middle aged actor Stephen (as it turns out reasonably well known, albeit living in an old run-down flat). The book effectively documents their turbulent and sexually charged relationship – including a lengthy account by the actor of his past (emotionally then physically then, as a teenager, sexually abused by his mother which leads him to a life of sexual and substance abuse – and one relationship which lead to a child, who now lives in Canada) and then a second account by his ex-lover and mother of the child of her views of him and the relationship with the daughter.
Most of the book – particularly the first half is written in McBride’s unique and experimental style, one inspired by method acting (something which is explicitly referenced through the story) – effectively a stream of consciousness/speech and feelings, interior and external monologue’s combined. When read once, holistically and quickly proves both readable and to give a reasonably strong impression of what is happening, but which when individual sentences are re-read makes close to no sense at all. Much of the action is sexual between the two protagonists (or Eily and others) or written under by Eily under the effect of alcohol or strong emotions or self-harming.
There are two very different styles when Stephen finally tells her all about his past (in huge detail) and when he more briefly recounts the conversation with his daughter’s mother. Although very unpleasant in subject matters these parts ground the book more and add an emotional (possibly slightly melodramatic) angle to Eily and Stephen’s story which when it resumes is in a modified version of McBride’s style – somehow reflecting the way in which the relationship of the characters (and their ability to face up to their past and how it has affected them) has changed.
By the book’s end this has become a conventional love story conducted and retold unconventionally by two deeply damaged individuals, as well as a book which clearly is partly autobiographical in its treatment of what it is like to live in London.
The first person character of the book is Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret – married to the Scottish king and subsequently widowed after he dies in The first person character of the book is Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret – married to the Scottish king and subsequently widowed after he dies in battle with Katherine of Aragon. Gregory chooses to portray Margaret as obsessed with her relative status to two of her closest associates when in England – Katherine of Aragon (initially betrothed to her beloved older brother Arthur) and her sister Mary (eventually married to the elderly French King before marrying Charles Brandon for love). Very much a typical Gregory book – and perhaps one of her best in that it picks up on a character little known in standard history and interprets better known events and characters from her female viewpoint. In particular the various machinations around Margaret’s relations with her second husband (Archibald) and even her attempts to get a divorce from him are depicted as the largely driven by the dictats of Henry under the influence of first Katherine (who wants to prevent any indication that marital disharmony and even worse annulment is permitted and then Anne who wants to portray the opposite). The downside of the book is its sheer length – at times the action can drag, particularly when covering internal Scottish politics and so giving a female/partly dissociated view on lesser known events. ...more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2016
(168)
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