Adventures in reading
In the years following the First World War, Moss’s narrator travels to Germany to look up Hasso von Koekritz, an old acquaintance now working for the Security Police in the Allied-occupied Rhineland. Koekritz finds himself in a difficult position, caught between the people and the occupying forces; matters come to a head at a procession through the town. I can appreciate this story conceptually as a character study of Koekritz, but the writing just does nothing for me.
Rating: **½
It would be understandable enough if anyone who saw the very first episode of The TV Book Club, this time last year, decided not to tune in again; back then, it was a superficial mess of a programme that spent more time talking about its guest’s autobiography than the actual chosen book. However, a new series began last night, and the show seems to have turned a corner – though still flawed, this latest episode was leaps and bounds ahead of what The TV Book Club used to be.
First of all, we were introduced to the new personnel: Dave Spikey and Jo Brand have been joined as regulars by Meera Syal and Adrian Edmondson (Laila Rouass didn’t feature in the studio, but her voice was heard in the compilation introducing the books for this series, so perhaps the presenting team will rotate week by week), both of whom proved very worthwhile additions who were engaged with the discussion. This week’s special guest was Cherie Lunghi, who – hurrah – didn’t have a book of her own to promote; after an interview with her that was noticeably briefer than has been the case in the past, we moved on to the next item.
Every episode of The TV Book Club has had some sort of filmed insert, but these have tended to be frivolous items of little value, which made Kirsten O’Brien’s report on A.A. Milne such a refreshing change – no gimmicks, just a straightforward, informative piece about an author. That’s the sort of thing I want to see from this programme.
After the break, attention turned straightaway to the week’s book choice, Room by Emma Donoghue (great to see the format streamlined in this way, too). Room strikes me as a good choice for a book club, with plenty to discuss; and the panel made a good job of it in the time they had, even suggesting a couple of things that hadn’t occurred to me when I read the book. Lunghi didn’t seem to contribute much to the discussion, but Edmondson and Syal were both insightful, which bodes well for the rest of the series.
In the midst of all this improvement, then, Jo Brand’s continued tendency to undercut discussions with a droll remark is becoming increasingly tiresome. Two instances stood out to me this week: after the A.A. Milne item, Brand asked drily, ‘Are we Pooh fans, then?’ – and, after some thoughtful comments from other panellists, brought the whole discussion crashing to a halt with, ‘Well, I hated him!’
Later, in the Room discussion, Brand said that, even though she thought it was well-written, she found Room hard going because she likes books to be escapist; Meera Syal responded by asking, ‘Shouldn’t books reflect the darker side of life as well, though?’ It was refreshing to see Brand being challenged in this way and made to justify her position (which she did, though not very convincingly: reading with a particular aim in mind is fine, marking a book down just because it has a different aim is a poor way to respond to that book).
Mostly, though, my impression of this episode was of a programme seeking to raise its game, and that makes me optimistic for the rest of the series. The TV Book Club is one of the few places on British television where one can find discussion of books (and possibly the only one that’s reader-focused), so it’s a great pleasure to see it stepping up to the mark.
The lovely Suzanne Brouette declares that she will marry whichever of the celebrated comedians Robichon and Quinquart is judged the better actor by the people of Paris. The two performers decide that this can only be settled if they take on serious roles, but where to find them? Merrick’s name was unknown to me before reading this anthology, and I discover that his work has mostly fallen into obscurity; that’s unfortunate, because this story was good fun, and I liked the vigour of the prose. I’ll have to see if I can track down any more of Merrick’s writing.
Rating: ****
Nadifa Mohamed, ‘Summer in the City’ (2010)
Laura Dockrill, ‘Topple’ (2010)
Elizabeth Jenner, ‘It Snows They Say on the Sea’ (2010)
It seems there is something of a trend at the moment for publishing individual short stories. To name two publishers doing so, I’ve already come across Nightjar Press and Spectral Press – and now Clare Hey has launched Shortfire Press, which is specialising in electronic-only editions of stories. Shortfire has launched with three titles, and it is a very strong selection.
***
Nadifa Mohamed arrived on the literary scene last year with Black Mamba Boy; I liked that novel (albeit with a few reservations), and I like this story even more. The events of ‘Summer in the City’ take place in London over the course of a few hours, shortly before the birthday of Mohamed’s narrator, Hodan Ismail. Hodan has asked for a bike, and that’s what she’ll get – but not, as she discovers, the one she wanted. That scene, in the middle of the story, is nicely handled, as Hodan tries to reconcile her disappointment at seeing the rusty ‘old woman’s bike’ her father has bought from a neighbour with the feeling that she really ought to be grateful for a gift that her father would hardly be likely to have received as a child, and certainly wouldn’t have grumbled about if he had.
Apart from one or two points in the opening descriptive passage that don’t quite work, the rest of the story is similarly fine. I particularly like Mohamed’s knack for bringing characters to life in a couple of sentences. We meet some characters only in passing, maybe through only a snatched conversation, yet it’s still possible for us to create a vivid picture of them and imagine what their stories might be. The author also has a very good control of mood, as the tale shifts from a light-hearted tone to something more serious. I look forward to Mohamed’s next novel with even greater anticipation than previously.
***
‘Topple’ is the first piece by Laura Dockrill that I’ve read, but it will not be the last. This story documents brilliantly the evolution of the relationship between the narrator and the object of her attention (which is sometimes affectionate, other times not). The tale begins at a swimming pool when both are aged eight, and the girl has the first stirrings of a feeling for which she may not yet even have the concepts (‘I hope I don’t miss you leaving, little red-eyes bellyflopper. Even though boys blatantly aren’t my thing’).
So the story moves forward through the years, never ringing a false note. Now the girl and boy are friends; now they aren’t. He has a girlfriend; it matters; it doesn’t. Growing up. Birthday parties (will he come? does she want him to?). Clubs (will he be there? will he be alone? does he even remember her?). Drinking. Jobs. On. Off. An air of uncertainty (around the relationship, yes, but the girl is also uncertain about herself, to an extent, as she grows up) remains throughout. ‘Topple’ is an incisive contemporary take on will-they/won’t-they – and you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out if they will.
***
The third Shortfire launch story is by a new writer, Elizabeth Jenner. ’It Snows They Say on the Sea’ is a short but effective character study. A couple look back on a week when inclement weather and shift patterns kept them from seeing each other, despite their living under the same roof. They communicated largely through notes left while the other was sleeping. Now (the beginning says), they resolve not to let it happen again: ‘They will buy highlighter pens, make charts, tack planners to the fridge with plastic vegetable magnets.’ But that sounds to me more like a good intention than a serious plan; perhaps, then, the couple can laugh at that week from this distance.
One of them can, anyway. Jenner reveals a fracture in the relationship that has the potential to grow into a deeper division: the woman seems to have shaken off that week, but the man still dwells on it. In carefully detailed prose, we see the myriad little ways he was affected by her absence (or, at times, her proximity), and what the result has been. This story is a great start for Jenner, and – along with the other two pieces here – a superb start for Shortfire Press.
Scudamore, a celebrated painter, reflects on his memories of his cousin, Alicia, who, he feels, has needlessly squandered the opportunities that life brought her way. I’ve got to admit that I don’t know what to make of this story — it is not clear to me whether Galsworthy intends his readers to approve of Scudamore’s stance or to have more sympathy for Alicia. It frustrates me to have to leave a story unreviewed like this, but I have nothing else to say about the piece.
‘Of course, I can convey nothing of that indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that difference from the common things of experience that hung about it all…’
That’s Lionel Wallace, who is telling Wells’s narrator about the magical garden he apparently found (or was it a dream?) as a child on going through a green door in a white wall. Despite coming across that same door several times subsequently, Wallace has never entered it again, though he has thought about it.
That quotation encapsulates neatly the ambivalence I felt towards M.R. James’s story, and feel again towards this one: to me, the best stories of the fantastic do and should ‘convey [the] quality of translucent unreality’ — and I don’t think Wells was writing at a time before there were stories that did so. I find the central metaphor of ‘The Door in the Wall’ (the ambivalence of longing — or not — for escape) eloquent; but there isn’t the true sense of fantasy that I want from a story of this type.
Rating: ***½
Elsewhere
Read the story online
Amongst my longer reviews, I’m going to start posting brief notes on some of the other books I’ve read. Here is the first round-up:
William Coles, The Well-Tempered Clavier (2007)
Kim, Coles’s narrator, looks back on his Eton days in the early 1980s. At the age of seventeen, Kim fell for India James, his beautiful young piano teacher — and, somewhat to his surprise, found his affection reciprocated. Of course, these are difficult circumstances in which to conduct a relationship anyway, but Kim’s eagerness to think the worst does nothing to help. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a neat portrait of a teenage crush as a whirlwind of uncertainty and possibility, a rush of love (or lust, or both) mixed up with doubt. I think the level of foreshadowing in the narration dilutes the novel’s impact somewhat, but, in general, this is a worthwhile debut.
William Coles’s website
Legend Press
The Well-Tempered Clavier blogged elsewhere: Reading Matters; Stuck in a Book; Musings from a Muddy Island.
Simon Lelic, The Facility (2011)
Lelic’s debut, Rupture, played about with the conventions of the police procedural to produce an interesting examination of bullying, and the issue of where our sympathies should lie if someone who is bullied takes extreme measures. The author’s follow-up novel, The Facility, looked set to do a similar thing with a different subgenre and moral issue, namely the near-future political thriller, and the issue of government responses to security threats – but it’s not quite as successful.
Several years hence, a ‘Unified Security Act’ has been passed in the UK, which essentially allows the government to go to any length in the name of maintaining security. A secret hospital/prison has been established, and a number of people detained there without explanation. We follow three protagonists: Arthur Priestley, one of the imprisoned; Henry Graves, governor of the facility; and Tom Clarke, the journalist approached by Priestley’s wife, Julia, who believes her husband has been detained under false pretences.
Thinking back to Rupture’s brilliant handling of multiple first-person voices, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment that The Facility’s third-person narrative voices weren’t as sharply delineated. But Lelic has a knack for creating a sparse atmosphere that reflects the austere nature of the facility.
The novel could be seen as inverting the stereotypical trajectory of this kind of story, in that it’s less concerned with revealing the great conspiracy of silence at its heart than with keeping things hidden – for example, it’s not until a third of the way through that we learn why the facility was established (to quarantine people with some unspecified disease), and there’s a general sense of murkiness to proceedings throughout. This is an interesting approach, one that closes off the possibility of easy answers to the problems it raises; but I think it also makes it difficult for the novel to really examine those problems. Though there are some moments that reveal moral complexity, overall I feel that this novel doesn’t treat its issues in the same depth that Rupture did its. The Facility is good as far as it goes; I just wish it went a bit further.
Simon Lelic’s website
Extract from the novel
The Facility reviewed elsewhere: Metro; Sunday Herald.
Catherine O’Flynn, What Was Lost (2007)
I was looking forward to reading this, as it sounded just the sort of quirky book that I enjoy. And parts of it were just that — but the whole didn’t quite hang together.
In 1984, ten-year-old Kate Meaney decides to set up her own detective agency, covering her Birmingham neighbourhood and nearby Green Oaks. After 68 pages following Kate, the action shifts to 2003, where we spend the bulk of the novel’s remainder, in the company of Kurt, a security guard at the Green Oaks Shopping Centre, and Lisa, assistant manager of a record shop. We learn that Kate Meaney went missing back in 1984; by novel’s end, we find out what happened to her.
I find O’Flynn’s control of voice good: she really captures the mixture of precocity and naivety that makes up Kate’s character in the first section; and there are some striking vignettes of people in and around the shopping centre in 2003. Kurt and Lisa don’t come across quite as strongly, but there’s still a sense of the monotony and frustration they feel in their working lives.
Yet I’m not sure that What Was Lost quite works at the broader structural level. There are themes running through the book concerning the limitations of consumerism and the decline of traditional industry, but I don’t see that the main plot fully reflects those themes. It’s tempting to see Kate’s disappearance as representing a loss of innocence; but that reading doesn’t quite hold up for me, because there wasn’t really innocence there to begin with — for example, the 1984 depicted in the book does not appear to be a substantially safer time and place for playing games of girl detective than the 2003. I liked What Was Lost particularly at the beginning, but the rest didn’t live up to that early promise.
Tindal Street Press
What Was Lost blogged elsewhere: Asylum; Dovegreyreader; Farm Lane Books.
There’s a page here on BibliOZ.com that lets you look up the New York Times bestselling books in the week you were born. I tried it out, and this is what I got:
Fiction bestsellers
1. James A. Michener, The Covenant
2. Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca
3. Stephen King, Firestarter
4. E.L. Doctorow, Loon Lake
5. Cynthia Freeman, Come Pour the Wine
6. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, The Fifth Horseman
7. Sidney Sheldon, Rage of Angels
8. Lawrence Sanders, The Tenth Commandment
9. Irving Wallace, The Second Lady
10. Helen MacInnes, The Hidden Target
11. Jean M. Auel, The Clan of the Cave Bear
12. Danielle Steel, The Ring
13. Robert Elegant, Manchu
14. J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales
15. Irving Stone, The Origin
Non-Fiction bestsellers
1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
2. Douglas R. Casey, Crisis Investing
3. Woody Allen, Side Effects
4. Wayne Dyer, The Sky’s the Limit
5. Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey, Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet
6. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness
7. Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds
8. Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, Ingrid Bergman: My Story
9. Betty Crocker’s International Cookbook
10. Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great
11. Studs Terkel, American Dreams
12. Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose
13. Shelley Winters, Shelley: Also Known as Shirley
14. Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
15. Robert G. Allem, Nothing Down
There are many books there that I don’t know, which I suppose is only to be expected, given that these bestseller lists are American and I’m not. But I do have a few thoughts:
127 Hours is a film about Aron Ralston, a climber who became trapped in a canyon for several days, his only course being to cut off his forearm. It’s the second Danny Boyle film I’ve seen (after Slumdog Millionaire), and once again I’m very impressed, though the two movies are very different.
When we first see Aron (played brilliantly by James Franco), he’s leaving home for an expedition, with no care to answer his family’s phone messages, or even to turn off the dripping tap he used to fill his canteen. Aron travels to Utah, and begins hiking; presently, he meets two lost female hikers, and guides them to the pool for which they’re searching. The Aron we meet in these first fifteen minutes is cocky, self-assured, slightly insufferable… yet still ultimately likeable, because he is so clearly in his element out here in the wilderness.
Things change, though, when Aron travels through a particularly narrow part of Blue John Canyon and dislodges a boulder, which falls and wedges his arm against the canyon wall. He can’t move the rock or his arm, no one can hear him shout – so there he stays for most of the rest of the film.
This could, of course, have been a recipe for a very monotonous movie, but Boyle and Franco extract a remarkable amount of variety from the situation. Franco shows many sides to Aron’s character, as he shuttles back and forth between practicality, despair and delirium. On the directorial side, there’s some clever intercutting that gradually blurs the line between reality and hallucination, as Aron thinks about his past and the outside world. There’s also a strong sense of claustrophobia in the filming. The scene in which Aron cuts through his arm is, as one might expect, bloody and hard to watch, but filmed in a similar way to the rest of the movie, as though to emphasise that the quality of this experience is not that different from any of the others Aron has gone through whilst trapped.
One of the other things that struck me about 127 Hours was its great use of music, as when Aron’s (ultimately futile) attempt after a couple of days to rig up a pulley is counterpointed by Bill Withers’ ‘Lovely Day’ on the soundtrack. Then there’s the ending, when Aron has made it out of the canyon and finds help; this entire segment is accompanied by the music of Sigur Rós, the default soundtrack, it seems, to big/epic/uplifting visuals these days. But whilst the music feels triumphant, what’s on screen doesn’t quite feel unambiguously so, because Aron is still desperate for water and hardly out of danger yet. Yes, there is some sense of triumph over the odds, and why not, because Aron is lucky to be alive after what he went through. But the main feeling I get from the ending is of life going on; which, I suppose, is what it does, following even the most extreme circumstances.
The latest Literary Blog Hop question asks: How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction? This is an interesting question for me, because, for a long time, I didn’t – or, perhaps, I did, but didn’t think of it that way.
I’m not sure that my school studies put me off the idea of ‘literature’, but they certainly got me out of the habit of reading it: closed-book exams were my principle reason for not studying English Literature at A Level (though I did study English Language, and went on to read History at university, so I didn’t drift too far away). As a result, there was – and remains – a big literary classics-shaped hole in my reading history.
What I was reading as a teenager was mostly fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, science fiction). A key turning-point came at the age of seventeen, when I found a cheap copy of the Clute-Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy in a book sale; it changed my reading world, because it advocated a different conception of fantasy from the one to which I was used, one that cut across types of fiction that looked dissimilar on the surface – one that emphasised imaginative quality. I thought, yes, this is describing what I want to read.
Fast-forward several years to university, and my dissertation on Victorian and Edwardian children’s fantasy as a source for the history of childhood, where I tried to apply some of the theoretical concepts that I knew from reading the Encyclopedia. Looking back at that dissertation now, I can see the seeds of my style as a reviewer. I started reviewing books online in 2004, again mostly (exclusively, to begin with) sf and fantasy, now with some horror added to the mix. My guiding principle was that these genres deserved to be taken seriously (I must acknowledge the influence of John Grant’s reviews for Infinity Plus, which had a big influence on my approach and style).
In 2006, I began writing for Laura Hird’s website, my first venue as a reviewer that didn’t have an sf/fantasy focus. I barely had to change my approach, and that should have been the first hint of what I’ve only really come to realise in the past couple of years, since I started this blog: that what I value most in my reading is not a particular type of work, but a set of qualities – good writing, a strong sense of craft, something out-of-the-ordinary – and that I can find those qualities in many kinds of books. That’s my idea of ‘literary’, and I wouldn’t want it any other way now.
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