Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

The idea that a death of a parent can be kept secret starts to become core to the story. As a result of being orphaned the children start to fall apart leaving food to go off and their routine to fall apart.

The battle for supremacy continues between the eldest children but the disintegration of the family unit, which comes together briefly when the mother is buried in concrete in the cellar, soon drifts apart again.

It is hard to like the main voice, Jack, not just because he is a loner but because he seems to deliberately set himself apart from the world. As a piece of fiction that gives a description of a 15 year old attitude it is accurate.

What should be interesting is the pattern the family fall into once the school holidays end and the grief has started to ease.

More tomorrow…

Rites of Passage - post II

This is quickly becoming a book about class with the narrator to blame for several problems connected with it.

The first problem is that by effectively blackmailing the captain into talking to him by dropping his connections the ship’s captain feels undermined. As a result in an attempt to reassert his authority the captain demolishes the parson. In a scene of drunken breakdown the parson disgraces himself and then takes to his bunk and will not move – even to use the facilities.

On the other front the lieutenant who has risen up from the ranks from the a common sailor is offended when it is pointed out to him that you can never leave your past behind. That comment clearly rankles and there is a scene later on when the narrator is confronted with a need to explain and justify the remark.

The book runs along smoothly but you cannot make up your mind quite what category this falls into. Is it a comedy? It certainly has its comic moments. Is it a social commentary on the British class system at the time of the Empire and within touching distance of the era of Nelson? It does display the sort of people travelling to discover a new life.

Maybe the ambition of Golding will become clearer in the next couple of day’s reading.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

There is always a hint of the incestuous with the close knit family with Jack the main character being aroused at the sight of any substantial quantity of his sister’s body. But over hanging the family is the slow decline of the mother who becomes bedridden and then finally dies.

For Jack and his elder sister Julie the question with their mother’s death becomes one of control. Who will now run the family and be in a position to give orders? Jack was told by his mother it would be a task for both of them but that message was never passed on before her death.

Meanwhile the teenager becomes isolated and unkempt being ashamed of his acne and of his lack of friendships, even in his own family.

More tomorrow…

Something to argue about...

Whenever lists are produced it always produces fodder for numerous arguments. So The Times no doubt will have a fair few letters in next Saturday's edition and on its Book site in response to its list of the best post-war British authors.

For those who did not see it here is the top twenty:
1. Philip Larkin                             11. C.S. Lewis
2. George Orwell                          12. Iris Murdoch
3. William Golding                       13. Salman Rushdie
4. Ted Hughes                                14. Ian Fleming
5. Doris Lessing                             15. Jan Morris
6. J. R. R. Tolkien                          16. Roald Dahl
7. V. S. Naipaul                               17. Anthony Burgess
8. Muriel Spark                              18. Mervyn Peake
9. Kingsley Amis                             19. Martin Amis
10. Angela Carter                            20. Anthony Powell

Rites of Passage - post I

At the weekend The Times book section listed the top 50 post-war British Authors. It was a pretty comprehensive list and each author had a recommended text. In third place was William Golding and the little summary recommended his To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy. I have had the trilogy on the shelf for ages and never got round to reading it. Well that is not quite fair. When it was made into a television series it rather put me off but now that is a distant memory and with the Times prompting it seemed a good time to tuck into the first book.

The idea of the text is that it is a diary being written by a man heading off to Australia for three or four years in service of the British Empire for consumption by his sponsor His Lordship. The first 100 pages at times seem like a farce as the unsuspecting narrator manages to upset the captain, insult one of the other female passengers and falls victim to the money making schemes of the man charged to look after him.

But there starts to be some sort of success and he soon starts to make friendships and ends up being the olive branch that brings back into circulation the vicar who has been banned by the captain. He also has an encounter with the best looking female on board but no sooner having had a tryst in his cabin with her he starts to regret it.

The world of the ship is alien to him and no matter how much he walks about it and requests tours of below decks he can only see it through land based eyes. The idea of segregated society and Sunday services marks him out as someone alien to the world of the seas rather than the reformer he prefers to see himself as.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

In its attempt to try and summarise the noughties so far the Guardian put together a series of articles in one of its issues last week to encapsulate the last seven years. When it came to looking back over literature one of the main conclusions was that these last few years have been dominated by Ian McEwan.

Having read Saturday last year and before that a few years ago Enduring Love and enjoyed the former much more than the latter it seemed like a good idea to expand the knowledge of this writer.

The Cement Garden has an almost Norman Mailer feel to it with its content including equal doses of death and masturbation. It also echoes the family theme that ran through Caste in the Forest. But there is more of an Englishness to it so the characters are awkwardly self-aware with the four children and the family unit being very natural.

The father orders 15 bags of cement to cover the front, side and back of the house in concrete. He has been warned off heavy labour because of a heart attack but he cannot resist working with his eldest son to start laying a path. He drops dead and leaves two daughters and two brothers left with a mother who is also dying. There are clearly tensions in the family, not just because of the death but because of the problems caused by adolescence.

The future looks bleak for the children. More tomorrow…

bookmark of the week

With the exhibition only being a few minutes down the road I finally took the decision to visit the Tutankhamun And the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition at the 02 Dome in Greenwich. The tickets were expensive and the gift shop extortionate – this bookmark was £2.95 or just shy of $6. The exhibition itself was airy and rather stretched out making it no doubt feel bigger than it actually needed to be. On the positive side it did tell a story about the background to the emergence of Tutankhamun that was mostly fresh information for me and most of the other visitors but on the downside the exhibits from the Tutankhamun era were not as extensive as you expected and instead of the legendary death mask this golden coffinette for the viscera of King Tut was the main highlight, which is shown on the bookmark.

Beautiful things from an amazing period of history but maybe it should have been handled by a proper museum rather than housed in a palace of entertainment.

book review - The Road

The Road is one of those books that gets talked about over a hot dog at a friends barbeque or in the pub. For most people I spoke to it was the first time they had come across Cormac McCarthy and the Pulitzer Prize and the critic’s recommendations wowed them. But one friend persuaded me to read McCarthy before the paperback of The Road came out so there was an odd route to The Road.

But it was a route worth commenting on because without reading No Country for Old Men and the Border Trilogy it would have left me at a distinct disadvantage. There are several things it takes time getting used to with McCarthy. The first is the lack of quote marks and the lack of chapter headings. The second is that you become acquainted not only with his themes – a dying age and the end of the cowboys – but also with his ability to deliver shocking violence.

Come to this without any of that understanding and it might well have forced some people off. I know of at least one person who did not stick with it and that is a shame because this is exactly what great fiction is all about. It is epic in its ambition to paint a picture of a world that is post apocalyptic and its last few inhabitants. It is focused in its characterisation basing almost the entire book on the relationship of a father and son. Plus it is clear in its message – kill the planet and something dreadful awaits us all.

The story is on the one hand quite simple with a father and son walking the road to the coast, a couple of hundred miles, dragging all they can in a cart. They search for food and other tools on the way, risking running into other survivors in the process. They stumble across a group of cannibals and almost become victims to them. But the wariness the father has all the time leads them finally to the coast. There the end comes for the father as he dies of some sort of tuberculosis type condition leaving the boy to the care of another family.

Throughout there are musings on God – does one exist in that sort of world – the past and crucially life and death. If there is nothing but death eventually then why not end it now – a choice taken by the boy’s mother. At the end of The Road you are left with numerous questions. It is surely for that reason that this book has been so highly regarded. In a world where global warming and nuclear weapons – just two ways both long and short – that we could destroy ourselves, dominate the headlines few things make you think as much as this. By painting a vivid picture of what it could be like if it all goes wrong this book should sound the alarm for all of us.

Version read – Picador paperback

The White Lioness - post VI

This has been a bit of a hangover from 2007 and so it is with some sense of relief that it has finally come to a conclusion.

The thriller ends with some bravery in style with Wallander the hero sliding into depression after solving an international crime. Part of the problem is that the crime was too big for the humble Swedish policeman and he never realised how much he did to foil a plot to kill Mandela.

This is an incredibly political book and although the message is a worthy one it does make that mistake of preaching sometimes. There is a postscript where Mankell makes the point that the period in South Africa before the first free elections was one of major insecurity. The problem is that reading this book now it is all a bit historic and we know what happened with Mandela so the sense of tension is lost slightly. The other problem is that towards the end there are a series of mistakes that are meant to add to the tension but after a while become slightly irritating.

I’m not sure if I would read the next book in the series. Maybe, but I’m going to take a break from this type of fiction for a while and head back to something old and something Russian.

A review will follow shortly…

The White Lioness - post V

The humble Swedish policeman gets his man and nails the ex-KGB agent ending his personal terror. The interesting move is that the terror is ended for Wallander with sixty odd pages to go until the story climaxes presumably taking the narrative back to South Africa.

The pace in these pages is impressive. But the problem is that the events are highly charged with emotion because Wallander’s daughter is involved. After her escape the detective actually uses some of his skills to track down the Russian killer but there is far too much jumping around without much Holmes type detection to back it all up.

As you might be able to tell this book has not been quite the experience I expected and following this you are tempted to drink down some Dostoyevsky as some sort of classical remedy.

Last chunk should come tomorrow…

Book review - The Black Madonna

The moment when Doris Lessing stepped out of a cab and had a microphone stuck under her nose to get her reaction to winning the Nobel Prize was a classic piece of television. She seemed to be indifferent and it was only on a follow-up interview on Newsnight that the achievement seemed to have started to sink in. For me the name Lessing was one that had never really been bleeping on the radar so the prize and the coverage had the result of putting it in my mind. It also helped that my local library put together all of her books promoting them.

The Black Madonna is a collection of short stories with the title story going first. They all have the same thing in common being set against a colonial background but they cover different issues.

Some of the stand out stories concern the gap between the whites and the blacks and the discovery that the later has pride and justifiable resentment. The girl who wanders into the native village describes wonderfully the feeling of alienation that the natives must feel back in her world. Then there is the cook who heals a boy but refuses to share the secret with the scientist that hopes to exploit it to make a fortune. There is a great ability to lift the curtain and show you on the other side.

Lessing manages to use a few pages to deal with racial, class and sexual issues that other writers might have resorted to acres of print to get the same message across. Her character portraits are deep but never overpowering and there is often an autobiographical feel to it with the leading characters being young girls.

In some ways the world that Lessing describes is a world that has gone much like that Kipling but there is a difference. Her stories comment on the world she describes and the characters show the ugliness and gap between those who believe they are masters and those who have to play the role of servants. The reality is that those who serve are the real masters of the land they live on and their continued existence and often silence is a protest rather than an acceptance of slavery.

Would this give you a desire to read more Lessing? It would but it would also provide you with an indication of where she is coming from. It is not that often you come across a voice that is so well defined and so clearly feminine. Most of these stories reserve the insight into the racial colonial world to girls and women. That is something that might make me read more because there is a style here that is distinctive. But as suspected this collection of short stories is an ideal starting point.

The White Lioness - post IV

This book is something I had planned to get through last year but it has dragged on a bit. It has quickly come down to a simple chase between two men to be the first to kill the other. On the side of good is Kurt Wallander and facing the policeman is the crazed ex-KGB officer who shoots in the back of the head for fun.

The political story line about an assassination of Nelson Mandela continues to rumble on in the background but this is more about the cat and mouse game in Sweden. Maybe it would have been better if it had simply stayed that way and limited the horizon rather than to try and make it some sort of international thriller. The story would have felt more believable and the Swedish landscape given more of a chance to feature.

Still there is enough pace about the writing to make you want to find out about what Wallander does next and by page 400 his daughter has been taken hostage. Maybe his father will start to show more respect for his policeman son if he can solve this crime?

More tomorrow…

The year of the book?

One of the highlights of last year was joining a library. It was not the first time I had been a member of a library and have usually had a card since a young boy. But moving around London in the last few years denied me the motivation to settle down enough to get a library card. That changed this year and it has been a great source of not only books but also occasionally advice.

With that in mind it seemed a great shame to read The Independent’s article about the closure of so many libraries this year. It seems that investment is lacking. But part of the problem must also be the identity crisis that most libraries seem to be going through. Are these temples of learning that are open to all? Or are they cheap alternatives to Internet cafes and Blockbuster film rental stores? No doubt there is a happy balance between the two but even my local library seems to fall on the wrong side of that tightrope.

Let’s hope that if the government is serious about 2008 being the year of the book that the investment in libraries, and in particular providing books for the public, will improve this year.

A year of reading - part two

In the second part of my review of the books consumed this year there has to be a mention for a couple of authors in particular that provoked a frenzy of reading activity.

J.D Salinger
Starting with Catcher in the Rye, which was everything you expected it to be with the teenage anti-hero, there was enough about the style to provoke a delve into the short story collections. The creation of the Glass family, which seemed so genuinely biographical, is something that weaves throughout his other books. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters both expanded on the family history. The pivotal event, apart from the family being involved in a popular radio series as children is the suicide of the eldest son Seymour. That event stirs his brother Buddy to be the voice of the narrator that looks for clues to the suicide and catalogues the impact on the siblings.

Cormac McCarthy
One of the great things about loving books is that it can lead to interesting conversations with friends. One of mine led to an exchange with a McCarthy loving friend. I didn’t act on his enthusiasm until half way through the year and then tackled No Country for Old Men and the Border Trilogy. Those four books, which concentrated on the changing nature of Texas and the mystery of the Mexican border, were the perfect preparation for The Road. Probably my favourite book of the year, The Road is able to take the idea of a dying world to its logical conclusion. Once there all that is left is love, hope and a fading respect for some of the traditions of the past.

Crime fighters
Thrillers have always been a source of relaxation and there were some great surprises. The Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo managed to grip you with Roseanna and introduce a ten book series following the exploits of Martin Beck. As the year ended the first two had been read and Father Christmas had delivered the third. Henning Mankell, another Swedish author, looked like delivering the same quality with Faceless Killers but his next two books, the third of which I am still wading through, failed to deliver. Arthur Conan Doyle provided the holiday reading in Switzerland as I visited the falls where Holmes had fought with Moriarty.

British humour
Times gone by, a gentler age, were easily discovered leafing through the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and the Lord Elmsworth stories by P.G. Wodehouse. Although none of the above provided many laugh out loud moments they all threw open a window into the past when it was possible to get into a farcical scrape and still come out of it having kept the reputation of the upper classes intact.

Short stories
One of the pleasures, and occasional chores, of 2007 was being ambitious enough to fill each lunch hour with novellas or collections of short stories. Some of the best were provided by Rudyard Kipling who produced colonial tales that showed his ability as a writer. The same colonial background was used by Doris Lessing in The Black Madonna. But one of the masters of the short story genre, Edgar Allan Poe, provided a selection of stories that often seemed far removed from real life. Some of the most memorable include The Fall of the House of Usher and Murder in the Rue Morgue. There are little pockets of supporters for short stories and whenever they pipe up Anton Chekhov is often used as an example and he also provided some powerful food for thought during lunch hours.

Books read 2008

1. The White Lioness by Henning Mankell
2. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
3. Rites of Passage by William Golding
4. Close Quarters by William Golding
5. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
6. Tough, tough toys for tough, tough boys by Will Self
7. Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. Wise Children by Angela Carter
9. The Heart-Keeper by Francoise Sagan
10. Fire Down Below by William Golding
11. Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide
12. Then We came to the End by Joshua Ferris
13. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
14. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
15. Helena by Evelyn Waugh
16. The Road to Calvary by Alexei Tolstoy
17. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
18. House of Meetings by Martin Amis
19. Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
20. A Buyer's Market by Anthony Powell
21. The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
22. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell
23. At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell
24. The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks
25. Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh
26. What's Become of Waring? by Anthony Powell
27. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell
28. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
29. Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh
30. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
31. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
32. The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
33. The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
34. A Void by Georges Perec
35. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
36. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
37. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
38. Venusberg by Anthony Powell
39. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
40. Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks
41. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
42. The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy
43. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell
44. The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell
45. Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh
46. Wier of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson
47. spies by Michael Frayn
48. Pincher Martin by William Golding
49. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkein
50. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
51. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
52. Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov
53. The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
54. The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
55. The President's Last Love by Andrey Kurkov
56. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
57. The Unfree French by Richard Vinen
58. The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell
59. Books do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell
60. Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell
61. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
62. Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell
63. A Dog's Heart by Mikhail Bulagov
64. The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
65. The Free Fishers by John Buchan
66. The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulagov
67. The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
68. All in the Mind by Alistair Campbell
69. A Cab at the Door by V.S. Pritchett
70. The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon
71. A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel) by Mikhail Bulgakov
72. Lines of Fate by Mark Kharitonov
73. The Fire Engine that Disappeared by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
74. Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
75. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami