The Glass Bead Game (#72)

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse


What I said then:

Weirdly, this seems to have the same basic plot as Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games. Maybe I’ll read them back to back.

What I say now:

Haha, wow, they're not very similar at all. I think I was fooled by the word 'game' appearing in both titles. Where Banks' novel is an enjoyable romp, Hesse's is a stately, philosophical, largely plotless examination of life, spirituality, art, and the meaning of it all.

One of the reasons I've been absent from this blog for so long is that this review was the next I had to write and I have no idea how to go about it, because I simply lack the vocabulary to follow Hesse into the never-ending abstractions of thought that he leads us. I'm no philosopher; I'm just a guy.

In the 23rd Century, all intellectual and artistic production has ceased: at some point along the way it was decided that, with the music of the great classical composers, art had reached its highest apogee. In this future, a caste of 'game-players' have synthesised all knowledge into its root concepts, concepts that the 'game' (which is part music, part mathematics, part performance) then states and recombines in ways which give intellectual pleasure to the audience. Here's Hesse himself: "The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property --- on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ." It's an incredibly ambitious concept, tying the entirety of the arts, of science, and of religion together into one great attempt to perfectly understand humanity.

So that's the background. Hesse's novel has us follow the life of Joseph Knecht, who begins as a passionate but unfocused student and ends up as the Magister Ludi (the supreme Glass Bead Game player in the world), which allows the author to expand on his concepts one piece at a time, the reader gaining knowledge and understanding as Knecht does. And that's basically the book: Knecht wrestles with philosophical ideas and with his own place in the world, and we watch him do it. It's dense and difficult, with barely any story to speak of, but it's also kind of amazing (it's hard not to be dazzled by the breadth of knowledge Hesse displays).

The book ends with three short stories that are linked to the main body of the novel, and those stories were probably the highlight of the novel for me: they managed to combine their exploration of Hesse's philosophical concerns with more rigorously focussed storytelling, and I felt they were more successful as a result.

The Glass Bead Game is a really unusual book, and though I can't honestly recommend it (it's just too likely to bore people, I think), I can say without reservation that I'm glad I read it myself, and if you approach it like it's a philosophical tract rather than a novel, I think you'd find much to admire in it.

Cheers, JC.

Rabbit, Run (#75)

Rabbit, Run by John Updike


What I said then:

I bought this years ago, and really only because I knew Updike’s name and at the time that seemed like reason enough.

What I say now:

Though slim, this book was a slog to get through. There's something about Updike's writing style that just doesn't chime with me: it felt too studied, like it was trying too hard or something. His tale is one of small suburban decay, and often he'd be caught reaching too far in his attempts to give the details of his mundane setting the metaphorical weight he so desperately wanted them to have. Does that make sense? It was like, the main character could never just walk home beneath a row of streetlights, the streetlights always had to be symbolising something profound about the way the character's life was in constant flux between darkness and light, or some bullshit like that. Everything was freighted with meaning, but the meanings were spelled out and too obviously artificial. If you make everything poetic, then nothing is, you know?

So the plot basically runs thus: Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is a massive selfish jerk who can't face the responsibilities of adulthood, and he proves this fact again and again. Rabbit was a star basketball player in high school, but those days are gone. Approaching his mid-twenties and stuck in a loveless marriage to a pregnant girl that drinks to escape her own boredom (and she is still a girl, as Rabbit is still just a boy), one night he snaps or something and just drives off and leaves her. He only makes it as far as the next town over, where he shacks up with a sorta-kinda prostitute for a few months. Having knocked the new girl up, he promptly ditches her and heads back to his wife when she has the baby ... only to argue with her and run out again (twice, somehow).

Seriously, Rabbit is a fucking arsehole.

You can write about arseholes, there's nothing wrong with that, but they've got to be interesting. I don't have to like your characters, but I do have to find them captivating. Rabbit was just an oaf, an uncomplicated oaf, and I found his company pretty much unbearable. Not because he was an arsehole, just because he was boring. It wouldn't have been so bad if Updike had seemed to have any insight into the guy, or was able to shed any light on his psychology, but he really didn't. At the moments of highest drama, the moments when Rabbit decided to turn one way or the other, it never illuminated anything. Those moments always sprang from moments of random impulse, and we never got a chance to properly understand them.

There were other things that bugged me. Updike has his (not particularly intelligent) characters participate in that silly literary convention where, in conversation with one another, they'll speak in 'meaningful' non sequiturs, giving poetic summations of something or other which have nothing to do with the conversation they're actually having. Also, when the sex scenes come, Updike switches modes completely, getting both deliberately vague and kind of breathlessly excited. That obvious excitement, coupled with his horribly old-fashioned gender politics, had me leaving those scenes feeling pretty scuzzy.

All in all, there just wasn't much to like about this book. At all. There are another three books about Rabbit Angstrom, but I've had my fill of him, and of Updike too.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72

Necronomicon (#82)

Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft

 
What I said then:

When I realised there was actually a book called the Necronomicon, I had to have it. Classic, bleak horror. Fun!

What I say now:

Actually, this wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd hoped. Lovecraft wrote a multitude of horror stories for American pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties, and Necronomicon is a chronologically arranged collection of some of his best, and most well known, tales. It's also eight hundred pages long.

There was my real error. If I'd picked up a book which contained a small handful of stories, and maybe one longer novella, I might have been able to appreciate the good things Lovecraft does. He's pretty good at establishing atmosphere; he sets most of his stories in a tainted, haunted version of rural New England, a setting which is pretty off-beat and unusual; and he definitely had a flair for inventing demons and ghouls and alien consciousnesses.

Unfortunately, under the weight of eight hundred god damn pages, all these positives came to seem repetitive and dreary. Honestly, the vast majority of the stories contained in this collection are incredibly similar: similar in setting, in tone, in language. Once I'd read five stories, I wasn't surprised (or even particularly interested) again.

Add to the repetitiveness his exorbitantly 'gothic' language, which sometimes was so overblown as to almost serve as its own parody. Check this sentence out (a character has just heard a horrifying sound): "To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones." Yikes.

That sentence gets at another of my issues with Lovecraft: he has an almost complete fear of actually describing anything. He won't tell you about the horrible monster or whatever, he'll relate how horrible his characters feel upon beholding it. Describing something's effects, rather than the thing itself, is always a good way to get on my nerves. (There is one way to make this work, which is to have me care so deeply about the characters, and know them so well, that hearing about the creature/alien/thing's effect on them is enough to sustain the drama. Unfortunately Lovecraft's characters are, without exception, two-dimensional nobodies, so this option wasn't available to him.)

There are more than a few stories where, having told us in exruciating detail about every step in an expedition into some haunted, blighted place, Lovecraft completely wimps out and says 'Oh, what they saw there was so horrifying that I can't even relate it to you, that's how scary it is! The end.' Seriously. That rivals 'and then they woke up and it was all a dream' as one of the worst ways you can end a story, and Lovecraft did it over and over again.

There were occasional stories that stepped out of his usual, frustrating patterns, and they were by far the highlights. The stories being arranged chronologically, it was also really interesting to follow his growth as a writer across the years: he definitely became a better writer with time and practice. Those occasional moments of interest were nowhere near enough to make up for wading through the rest of it though.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
books to go: 79
note: I've fallen way behind with my reviews (sorry 'bout that), which is why the numbers don't quite add up here. Not that anybody probably pays attention to this stuff, but I'm totally anal-retentive, so I feel compelled to explain.

Independence Day (#83)

Independence Day by Richard Ford


What I said then:

The continuing travails of a grumbling bastard, first met in The Sportswriter.

What I say now:

Richard Ford writes intricate, poetic novels that are critically acclaimed, and that are frequently prize-winners, and that I really just don't like very much.

It was years ago that I read The Sportswriter, the first in Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy, and I remember virtually nothing about it. The faint ghost of that book did, however, give me a peculiar sense of dread whenever I'd look at my list and see that Independence Day (Bascombe #2) was still on my shelves, waiting for me. It wasn't as horrible a reading experience as I was expecting, but I can now say with absolute certainty that Richard Ford's novels just aren't my cup of tea.

In Independence Day, Frank Bascombe, divorced former sports journalist, is now working as a real estate agent in small town New Jersey. Over the course of the 4th of July weekend, he nearly sells a house to a pair of schmucks, he falls out and then back in with a woman he's been seeing for a while, and he and his wayward teenage son take a roadtrip to visit the basketball and baseball hall of fames. And every step of that incredibly slight plot is described in minute (almost excruciatingly minute) detail.

The main issue I have with the way Ford writes is that he's too caught up in his quest to write lovely 'poetic' sentences ('poetic' in this context meaning 'meandering, slightly obtuse, and utilising unusual vocabulary choices). Character, plot, meaning --- Ford is willing to sacrifice all of those in search of pretty combinations of words. I just can't dig a writer like that. Maybe the most egregious example of what I'm talking about is that Independence Day is written in the first person, from the point of view of a fairly ordinary real estate agent. Yet Frank Bascombe, our main character, has an interior monologue that would put most published poets to shame for linguistic ingenuity. It's supposed to be a realist novel but nobody in the world thinks or talks the way Ford has Bascombe think and talk. And as such, I found it impossible to believe in the character. I never was able to imagine Bascombe as a real man; he was always too artificial a construct.

The other thing I found infuriating was Bascombe's wishy-washiness. In pretty much any given chapter, after an achingly detailed thought process, he'll come to some dramatic conclusion about life and living ... only to re-think one or two chapters later, and come to the opposite conclusion. I don't have any problem with that per se, it's kind of realistic and speaks to something fallible and uncertain about us puny humans. But Ford did it again and again, until Bascombe seemed like nothing so much as a weather-vane, swinging in the breeze. When, at the novel's close, he comes to a series of (what I'm sure I'm supposed to believe are) giant, life-shaking conclusions, it's impossible to give a damn, seeing as I've been conditioned by the novel to expect he'll just change his mind again in twenty minutes time. If none of his thoughts ever actually matter, they never actually matter, y'know? So ... why am I reading this book again?

As I said at the top, Richard Ford is one of the most respected, well-reviewed American novelists working today. Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize, for god's sake. I just think he kind of sucks, and I'm glad that I'll never read another of his books ever again.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
books to go: 82

Sons and Lovers (#91a)

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence


What I said then:

A refugee from Year 12 Literature. If I hated it enough to never finish it, why the hell have I kept it?

What I say now:

Year 12 (the last year of high school, for any non-Aussies who may be reading) was a long time ago now: 13 years, in fact. I found Sons and Lovers completely obtuse and impenetrable back then, and gave up on it with something close to joy. Over the course of these last 13 years, this book has become monstrous in my mind, my memory turning it from a kinda boring novel into the ultimate test in reading endurance, a test I had failed miserably. I probably kept the damn thing because, while it had won a battle with my seventeen year-old self, I didn't want to admit that it had won the war.

And honestly, it wasn't too bad. Sure, at times it's impenetrable and obtuse, and I can say with complete conviction that I'll never read another D.H. Lawrence novel, but Sons and Lovers isn't without its pleasures, either. You just have to dig for them.

Plot-wise, it's actually a very simple book. Gertrude Morel marries below her station, and quickly falls out of love with her coal-miner husband. She instead lavishes affection on her two eldest sons, who return her obsessive love in kind. Paul, the second son, finds his relationships with women poisoned by his relationship with his mother. His attempts to court first Miriam, a local farmer's daughter, then Clara, a suffragette, and his inevitable returns to his mother's embrace, form the bulk of the novel.

I'm very much a plot/narrative/story lover, and the moments in the book when things were actually happening were by far the highlights for me. The first few chapters, which give a potted history of the Morels' marriage and the childrens' early years, were very good. Unfortunately, the kids grow up to be insufferable bores, and once Paul (who really needs a smack in the head with a wet fish) takes over the novel, it degenerates into a windy, quasi-philosophical head-scratcher. Paul's budding relationship with Miriam, in particular, seems for long stretches to be constructed of nothing but pretentious conversations and air.

This paragraph comes just after Paul has lost his virginity: "To him now life seemed a shadow, a day, a white shadow, night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like being. To be alive, to be urgent, and insistent, that was not-to-be. The highest of all was, to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being." I don't know about you, but that might as well be gibberish, for all the meaning I can take out of it.

For all that, though, even the second half of the novel can suddenly surprise you with a moment of wonderful clarity. Pretty much any conversation that Paul has with his mother falls into this category: her character is fairly plain-spoken, and she usually inspires Paul to finally just say what he bloody means in return. Their interactions, and the deftness with which Lawrence sketches the Oedipal perversity of their love for each other, work beautifully.

Another frustration I had was that Paul and Miriam live their lives with such intensity of feeling that they seem to be in a constant state of hysteria. A simple walk down a country lane will have Paul in radiant love with Miriam at one moment, for something as daft as the shape of her arms, then filled with hate for her, when she says something to him in the wrong tone of voice. Their emotions are never moderate, and they change at the drop of a hat, and God, Lawrence drastically overuses the word 'hate.' It's such a bizarre rollercoaster that you stop taking any of their feelings seriously, and their relationship devolves into a sludge of meaningless emotionality.

Also, Lawrence's gender politics, as evidenced by his treatment of Miriam and Clara, is pretty offensive. Yes, he was writing a long time ago, and it's probably not fair to judge him by modern standards, but he makes one of his characters a suffragette then makes her happiness completely dependent on serving a man. It's really kinda gross.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Untouchable by John Banville. I get to buy a book! I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy recently and thought it was a masterpiece, so I figured I'd continue with a 'repressed English spies' theme. Banville's novel is a fictionalised take on the Cambridge Five, and I've heard good things about it from several people.
books to go: still 91

Revolutionary Road (#95)

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

What I said then: 

The absolute favourite book of one of my colleagues, I’m not letting myself watch the movie until I read it.

What I say now:

A large part of me was dreading reading Revolutionary Road, because it's the kind of book I tend to be pretty dismissive about: a high-minded, capital L 'Literary', examination of white, middle-class suburban life. I'm not saying a book like that can't be good (Revolutionary Road, as I'm about to tell you, is very God-damn good indeed), they're just not really my thing. I find them dull. In fact, I tend to find them just as dull as I'd find their characters, if I ever met them in real life. Yes, I'm looking at you, Jonathan Franzen. And Richard Ford. And the second, way-less-interesting, half of White Teeth. And I could go on and on.

(There's an element to this dislike which I'll probably go into with my therapist one day, to whit: I'm not interested in books about ... well ... me. White, middle-class people have all sorts of psychological weirdness going on beneath their seemingly calm exteriors? Yeah, no shit, I already know that because I've been paying attention to myself all this time. Come on, novelists, I want you to tell me something I don't already know.)

So ... I approached Rev Road with trepidation. And I finished it completely blown away. This is truly one of the great novels of the 20th century.

For those that, like me, haven't seen the movie, the fairly simple plot runs as follows: It's the late 50's and Frank and April Wheeler live in a neat suburban home. Frank takes the train into New York every morning for work, while April stays home with their two small children. And Frank and April hate their lives. It's much more complicated than that, obviously, but at heart the novel is about the couple's distaste for the pristine prison they've constructed for themselves, and the self-loathing caused by their failed attempts to escape it. There's nothing particularly new or exciting about the plot of Revolutionary Road. It's in the execution that it's electrifying.

When they write, nearly every author (and definitely every author working in 'realist fiction') is attempting to do something that ought to be impossible. They're trying to combine scratches of ink on paper in such a way that they can conjure up some kind of emotional truth, some kind of imaginary reality. And they're trying to do it so well that you, the reader, forget about the ink and the paper and buy into the emotion of things that never happened. The best way to make us forget the ink and paper is to write with clarity, never giving our brains that jolt that makes us look away from the page, that makes us remember that it's all imaginary.

Yates writes with a clarity that borders on perfection. Because Revolutionary Road exists, I kind of feel like I should never bother reading another realist novel, and that nobody should ever bother trying to write one, because it's simply not possible that it'll ever be done this well again. With brutal, forensic precision, Yates is able to delve right inside the heads of his characters and bring their psyches, kicking and screaming, into the light. Each word is the right word. Each sentence perfectly captures a single idea. Each line of dialogue they speak, each decision they make, each regret they harbour, adds its own little piece to our understanding of Frank and April.

To give give just one small example: several times throughout the novel, Frank changes his mind about things within the scene that we're reading. At the start of the scene, he's convinced of one thing, and by the end he's convinced himself of its exact opposite. In a lot of novels that might seem muddled or unclear to the reader, but it's because of Yates' clarity that he gets away with it. We understand Frank perfectly at both ends of the spectrum, and we've understood him at every single moment as he's slowly changed his views. Even though Frank himself is confused by his own addled thoughts, we readers never are.

If I had one small criticism, it would be that in the second half of the novel Yates begins to broaden his story out beyond Frank and April, letting other characters have their turns under his knife. It's not that those sections were weaker, it's just that part of me wishes that we'd stayed trapped with Frank and April through to the bitter end. Though, to be fair, that might have made it too harrowing to finish.

Anyway, read it. It's not a book that will entertain you, really (it took me a long time to read because I had to take a break after each chapter and think about it for a while), but it is a book that will astonish you.

(Oh, and as for the movie? I don't think I'll even bother now. The thing Revolutionary Road does so magnificently is the one thing that books will always be able to do better than movies; that is, get inside a character's head. Honestly, I can't even really fathom why you'd even try to adapt it, or how.) 

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
books to go: 94

My favourites: Crash by J.G. Ballard

 

A long time ago I had a plan that I'd do a bunch of reviews of my all-time favourite books whenever I didn't have anything else to write about. Which is pretty much code for "whenever I'm really struggling to get through the book I'm reading." Which is what's happening now. For whatever reason, Drood just ain't really doing it for me, but more on that in another post or two. For now, let's talk Ballard.

Pretty much any time I read anything by J.G. Ballard, the main thing that strikes me is how unique his imagination is. If his novels and stories are any guide, he seems to think differently to every other member of the human race. I really believe that nobody else on earth would have been able to write the fictions that Ballard did ... and I find the experience of reading them thrilling, exhilerating, exhausting, and completely fucking mind-exploding. His Complete Short Stories, more than 1,000 pages long and covering more than forty years of writing, is like my own personal bible.

(His best known work, the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, is by far the most 'normal' thing of his I've ever read, and stands out like a sore thumb within his body of work. Having read it for Year 11 English when I was at school, when I stumbled on Crash a few years later it actually took me a while to realise that they were written by the same guy.) 

Crash is narrated by a television producer named Ballard, and the book opens with a brief moment of violence as Ballard's car runs out of control and he spears into an oncoming sedan. Immobilised by crushed metal, Ballard is forced to look at the scene that confronts him, that he has caused. The other car carried two people: the male driver is dead, his body lying shattered on Ballard's own hood; the female passenger, Helen Rimington, is beautiful and barely injured. The frankness of her gaze as they wait, locked together, for rescue workers to cut them loose, reminds Ballard of the intimacy of sex. From that moment, sex, death and traffic collisions become linked in his mind.

Once in hospital, Ballard is discovered by Vaughan, a paranoid TV-scientist who is obsessed with the sexual possibilities of car accidents and is gathering together a group of crash survivors who feel the same. Together they fiercely explore their bizarre hope for an intersection of concrete, glass, steel, blood and semen. They plan accidents, then carry them out. They sneak into wrecker's yards to fuck in the twisted, mis-shapen seats of smashed cars. Ballard tracks down Helen Rimington and involves her in the group, opening up her scars and treating them like a vagina. Vaughan plans the perfect accident, in which he hopes to kill himself and Elizabeth Taylor (who's shooting a movie at a nearby studio).

Just in case my little summary hasn't given the game away, I'm gonna come out and say it: Crash is fucking fucked up. Essentially it's about the fusion of humanity and technology, which is a fairly common science-fiction trope (Ballard began as a pure sci-fi writer, before evolving into something much deeper, and stranger). The genius of Crash, though, is twofold: Ballard brings this idea out of the realm of the fantastical and sets it in the real world and, having done that, he makes it perfectly literal. The metaphor at work in Crash is infinitely more powerful than any of its sci-fi equivalents because it's so grounded in reality, yet at the same time so alien. Vaughan actually wants to mate with his car, to integrate the most perfect technology of his time into his own body. In the novel this involves being pierced by steering columns and leaking blood and semen onto dashboards; in the forty-odd years since Crash was published it has involved the invention of computers, walkmans, the internet and iPhones, and the subordination of our daily lives to increasingly elaborate technologies.

When thinking about this book it's hard not to picture that guy on the tram chatting into the glowing blue headset-phone-thingy and freak out a bit about how on the money Ballard was all along. I mean, fuck, I'm blogging right now.

The writing in Crash is deliberately quite cold and mechanical, Ballard describing acts of savage sexual violence with repetitive language more suited to a technical manual. I know a number of people who find it nigh-on unreadable. (It actually has a hell of a lot in common with another of my favourite books, American Psycho --- the same collision of sex and violence, and a similar bludgeoning repetitive style. What does it say about me that I love them both? Probably nothing good ...)

If you're able to lock into its tone and read it on its own terms, I believe Crash has as much to tell you about humankind in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as any piece of art I've ever come across. I honestly can't think of any higher praise than that --- it's a remarkable book.

Cheers, JC.

currently reading: Drood by Dan Simmons

books to go: 97

To Have and Have Not (#104)

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway


What I said then:

I inherited a Hemingway box-set from my sister, and this is one of the ones I've got left.

What I say now:

After I finished To Have and Have Not I did a little bit of research, looking up online reviews and stuff. And I was quite relieved to discover that this is generally considered Hemingway's weakest novel ... so I wasn't imagining things! Apparently Hemingway himself said it was written in a rush to fulfil contractual obligations with his publisher, and called it 'a pile of trash.' I don't know if I'd go so far as him, but he's in the ballpark.

During the Great Depression, Harry Morgan has for years made a living running contraband between Cuba and Florida. Now he's settling down, putting his criminal past behind him and trying to eke out a living taking rich arseholes out sport-fishing. When one of his customers stiffs him on a thousand dollar tab and leaves him penniless, Morgan agrees to take on that old cliche and do one last job.

At this point, it's pretty entertaining. Hemingway does a good, economical job of introducing us to Morgan, a man who's fed up and out of his depth, and forcing him to plunge back into a life of crime. It could be the start of a decent little thriller. But, after agreeing to ferry a dozen Chinese from Cuba to the U.S., Morgan turns from a hapless dupe into a stone-cold psycho. He throttles the leader of the Chinese, dumps the rest overboard, and steals their money. For no reason. It runs absolutely counter to the character we've been introduced to, and makes me lose any interest whatsoever in Morgan's fate. This being a Hemingway novel, he eventually gets what's coming to him, but from throttling-Mr-Sing on, it is absolutely impossible to invest any emotion in Harry Morgan, or anything that happens to him. I was reading it to finish it, not for any pleasure.

Hemingway also does something bizarre with the last third of the book: suddenly, after Morgan and Morgan alone has been the focus for the first two-thirds, Hemingway starts tossing in secondary, and tertiary, and quaternary (look it up!) characters by the armful. He's the literary equivalent of Bernard Black making wine, only not nearly as much fun. We're suddenly introduced to a whole new set of rich arseholes (the equivalent, I suppose, of the rich arsehole who screwed over Morgan at the beginning) and asked to care about their insipid affairs, decaying marriages and inevitable suicides. It's really strange, and utterly pointless.

The writing itself is quite good (though I could have done without the random swinging between first and third person), but it can't make up for a plot composed almost entirely of holes. I've still got For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises to come; I hope they're better than this.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The March by E.L. Doctorow
books to go: 103

The Magic Toyshop (#108)

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

What I said then:

All I really know about her is that many many people have insisted that I read her. I hope they know me well. 

What I say now:

All those people, they know me ... okay.

Melanie, fifteen years old, wakes up in the middle of the night while her parents are on an overseas trip, having left her and her siblings in the care of a nanny. She sneaks into her parents' bedroom, takes out her mother's wedding dress, puts it on, goes out into the moonlit garden and promptly locks herself out of the house. She takes the dress off and, naked, climbs a tree to her second storey window, dragging the dress behind her. When she finally forces her way back inside, the dress is torn to shreds. At that moment, on the other side of the world, her parents die in a plane crash.

Thus runs the first chapter of The Magic Toyshop, and it's an incredible piece of writing. Melanie's disordered thinking as she decides to try the dress on, as though she's trying on the idea of growing into a woman, is rendered with a panache that belies its subtlety. And when Melanie wanders the night-time house, and goes out into the garden, Carter's writing makes everything alive in a way that's nearly impossible to describe. She doesn't write what the stairs, or the lawn, or the nanny's cat look like; she writes what they think. Everything, even inanimate objects, seem to have their own opinions, their own agenda. Simply, there is magic in the air, animating everything. It's a really wonderful chapter, and an amazing start to a book. Unfortunately ...

After her parents' deaths, Melanie, along with her younger brother Jonathan and baby sister Victoria, are sent to live with their uncle and his family in London. Uncle Phillip owns a bizarre toyshop, and makes all his products himself in the basement, but the toys and puppets he crafts are the only thing he loves: he is a cold despot over his household. His Irish wife, Aunt Margaret, was struck dumb on her wedding day, and has never said a word since. Her brothers Francie, a kind man who plays the fiddle, and Finn, a scruffy vagabond with an imp's eyes and roving hands, live with them as well.

And the bulk of the novel consists of Melanie's impressions of her new situation and Finn's attempts to seduce her, which swing from indifferent to passionately sincere. But after we reached the toyshop, it was difficult to really care about anything. Every character but Melanie felt crudely drawn; the curious vividness which animated everything in the first chapter dies away (even though the puppets, Halloween masks and wooden toys that stock the shop should have been easy to bring to life).

The characters don't seem to live their own lives, instead simply going through the motions, pulled hither and thither by the author to suit her needs. Some will argue that's the point, that Carter is making puppets out of her characters because that is what Uncle Phillip (the villain of the piece) is trying to do to those under his thumb. Which is all well and good, and wonderfully clever, but if in trying to do something literary and clever an author causes me to lose interest in their story, I'd say they've got their priorities all wrong.

Carter is clearly an incredible wordsmith, and I'd be interested in reading some of her later (I'm told, maturer) works - The Magic Toyshop was her second published novel - but this one left me cold. Which, after the revelatory first chapter, was a damn shame.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
books to go: 107

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (#110)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What I said then: 

A glimpse of the horror of Russia’s gulags.

What I say now:

Well, my Russian kick is officially over: this is the last Russian book I own. And I've sure ended it on a downer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had first hand experience of the gulag system. He had been fighting for the Russian army in 1945 when he criticised the way Stalin was conducting the war in a letter to his brother. Arrested for treason, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Siberia. When those eight years were up, he was not released; instead he was given a life sentence on a new charge. It was only after Stalin's reign ended and Kruschev took control of Russia that he was finally freed.

This experience is obvious in his writing: every moment and every minute detail in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich rings with truth. It is a very simple book, which merely details one day, from waking to sleeping, of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov's term inside a forced labour camp.

There is no story, as such. Nothing really happens that could be considered dramatic. The power of One Day comes from its accumulation of arresting, hideous detail. Every prisoner, at every moment, is on the lookout for a chance to scrounge or steal anything that they can. Every movement is watched by guards, every bit of food or firewood or tobacco is haggled over and contested, and all of it takes place in cold that would, to most people, be unendurable. Allegiances can switch in an instant: a toadie can be hated at one moment, but if he's part of your work team, then he's as close as a brother the next.

One of the most striking sequences of the book has Shukhov's team racing back to the camp from their worksite, the guards running as just as desperately as the prisoners, to try and beat another group from another worksite to the gate: whichever group gets there first will be counted through the gate and get to the mess quicker. In the race through the snow, suddenly the guards and the prisoners are allies, everyone racing to beat the other work team. And yet as soon as they're through the gates, the hostility resumes. Your head reels just thinking about how adaptable those guys needed to be to judge where they stood at every moment, when a single false step would lead to ten days confined in unheated cells, with no work to keep them warm ... which in that climate, was very nearly a death sentence.

But look, there's really not much to say about this book. Its value is less that of a novel, and more that of an important historical document, for without it, the day-to-day reality of the gulags would be less well known. It's not a book to enjoy, but it is a book to appreciate.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
books to go: 109

Cat's Eye (#113)

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

What I said then:

"A key work from the Grande Dame of Canadian Letters that I haven't got around to yet."

What I say now:

Margaret Atwood is a freakin' genius, she's one of my favourite novelists in the world, and Cat's Eye may, after a bit of reflection, be the best thing of hers that I've read yet (A Handmaid's Tale, a sci-fi examination of the politics of women's bodies, is the other contender, in case anybody's interested). I've mentioned before in this blog that I have a very short list of authors of whom I will, before I die, read their complete works. Cat's Eye puts Margaret Atwood on that list. It's that fucking good.

Elaine Risely, a successful painter, flies back to her hometown of Toronto to attend the opening of a retrospective of her work. The journey back to the city of her youth leads her to remember her childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, which were marked by a destructive and traumatic 'friendship' with a neighbourhood girl named Cordelia.

And that's the plot, in a nutshell, but that summary doesn't come near to doing justice to the richness of Atwood's creation. Elaine has (probably) the most complex interior life, and fully rounded personality, of any fictional character I've ever come across. Atwood has captured perfectly the way that our lives shape us, the way a seemingly unimportant experience as a kid can stick in the subconscious and loom over us years later, the way that the person we become is subtly hinted at in the person we were. Narrated in the first person, Cat's Eye could be mistaken for a memoir if only it wasn't so ... whole, so perfect.

Elaine is bullied as a kid and the first half of the book will be horribly recognisable to anyone who was ever a child - that is, to everyone. As a portrait of a childhood, the book is remarkable enough, but it doesn't rest on its laurels: as they grow up, the relationship between Elaine and Cordelia grows infinitely more complicated, and sends its tendrils through Elaine's entire life, gaining in power even as the two girls drift apart. When the relationship's (and the story's) resolution comes, it's not what Atwood and Elaine have been leading you to expect ... but it's more powerful for being unexpected.

There's also considerable technical skill on display: as Old Elaine narrates Young Elaine's life, the reader is presented with two levels of consciousness simultaneously, that of the young girl experiencing events, and the old woman remembering them. That should be difficult enough for a writer, but Atwood doesn't stop there, having Old Elaine unaware of the significance of many elements of her own story, only to finally understand her own life at the very end of the book. It really is an incredible feat of reader-juggling, made even more impressive by the fact I only realised how great it was once I'd finished the book: it's so seamless that, during the novel, I didn't notice a thing (Philip Roth does something similar in his equally good The Plot Against America).

Anyway, my 2011 has had its first great book. Huzzah! And sorry about the lack of a front-cover picture up top, blogspot's being skittish about uploading jpegs. I'll try again in a day or two.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
books to go: 112

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (#118)

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

What I said then:

"The classic Cold War thriller." (side note --- Jesus, I need to go back and make these mini-descriptions more detailed. This is ridiculous.)

What I say now:

I'm not a massive fan of the crime/thriller genre these days. I went through a phase in my early to mid teens when I read a lot of books by guys (it was always guys) like John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer and Frederick Forsyth. Then on my sixteenth birthday my Mum gave me Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five and The Magus, and I've never really looked back. So it was with some trepidation that I came to le Carre's classic spy thriller, fearing that it'd be too 'me-at-fifteen,' and not enough 'me-now.'

Happily, I can report that those fears were (mostly) unfounded. Unless I'm remembering Archer and Forsyth unfairly, le Carre is operating on a different level. His writing is mostly sparse and clear, and only rarely overwrought - something a lot of thriller writers slip into. The plot is clever but never so clever that it becomes unclear or difficult to follow. The main character, Leamas, is a fascinating bundle of (seeming) contradictions: he spends most of the book convincingly acting a part, but le Carre is careful to leave a few clues to his true personality scattered throughout, making him pleasingly enigmatic.

There's an unfortunate thing that can happen when you come late as a reader to a seminal work. If you're aware of all the stuff that followed, that imitated the original hit, then a lot of the original work's power can be lost to you. When something becomes a cliche, it's unfair on the book or movie that spawned that cliche. It's happened to me with William Gibson's Neuromancer, Ridley Scott's Bladerunner and, unfortunately, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold did succumb. The frisson of originality that it must once have had was lost. Luckily, it's a significantly better book than most of the things that came after it, so it still succeeds in its own right.

The other, more important, criticism that I'd make of it is a pretty familiar one. The mechanics of the conspiracy plot are smooth and logical and mesh perfectly ... but there's a love story attached. And the love story doesn't work at all. Towards the end of the book the couple's feelings for each other are what determines their actions, but when they sacrifice themselves for love it doesn't really fly, because the love story wasn't strong enough to earn the tough choices that they make. It's a common concern, I think, in genre fiction: everything else is cool, but then you've gotta have a girl, right? So she gets tacked on, and the romance is invariably the weakest link of the book (or movie). The moral of the story: no women! Or well-written women! Because if you're just gonna do it half-assed, that ain't gonna cut it.

Cheers, JC

about to read: The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

books to go: 117

The Diary of a Young Girl (#123)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank


What I said then:

The classic Holocaust memoir. (side note --- wow, detailed!)

What I say now:

Given the ridiculous restrictions I'm placing on myself, it's going to be pretty rare that I can follow a thread with my reading, letting one book lead me to the next. Usually I'll just be jumping all over the place. So I figured I'd take the chance to do a bit of 'themed' reading while it presented itself, and given how much I loved The Plot Against America I thought it'd be interesting to contrast it with this.

Presumably everybody knows this book. It's one of the most well-known, beloved books of the twentieth century (along with, I dunno, Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and American Psycho ... oh, just me?). Anne Frank got given a diary on her thirteenth birthday, the twelfth of June, 1942, in Amsterdam.  Twenty-four days later her family went into hiding in a 'secret annexe,' a suite of rooms hidden at the top of a warehouse. They were joined by another family and a mutual acquaintance, making eight people in all. With the help of about five or six Dutch men and women, they stayed there for more than two years, before being discovered, arrested, sent to concentration camps and, with the exception of Anne's father, killed in the very last months of the war. One of their helpers saved Anne's diary, which she'd been writing in all that time, and it was later published by her father.

As a document of one small drama within the greater unfolding drama of the war, the book is remarkable. In hiding, they listen to Churchill's speeches on the radio and discuss the pending invasion. They have scares when burglars break into the warehouse below them. They worry that the man who delivers potatoes knows they're there, then find out that he himself has been hiding Jews ... and that he's just been arrested. The small heroisms of those in hiding and their helpers deserve recognition, and this diary gives it to them.

Because of the book's  exalted place in our culture, I'd sort of expected Anne herself to be an angelic figure, a perfect girl. In fact, she was nothing of the sort: reading between the lines, she comes off as an ordinary, wilful teen who was occasionally obnoxious and annoying and, being the youngest person in the annexe, got on everybody's nerves. What makes the book really special is the way Anne grows in the two years in hiding, the way she begins to know and understand herself. The diary drastically shifts in tone, in keeping with Anne's changing moods, and the blunt reality of that reminds you that, hey, this was a real girl, and if she was angry when she sat down to write, she wrote angry. If she was dreamy, she wrote dreamy. If she was scared, she wrote scared.

It seems ridiculous to 'review' this book at all, really. It's great, its reputation is justified, and if you can get through the third-last diary entry --- which reads, in part: "It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." --- if you can get through that without needing to pull out a hanky or a tissue or pretending you've just been chopping onions, then you're more hard-hearted than I.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
books to go: 122