Author: David Hebblethwaite

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Naomi Alderman

9th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

I heard Naomi Alderman read from her novel The Liars’ Gospel at an event in 2012. It is a mystery to me why I’ve not yet got around to reading the book, because I thought Alderman’s excerpt was superb – visceral (literally so, as it described the ritual sacrifice of a lamb) and evocative. Her story in the Granta anthology, ‘Soon and In Our Days’, is very different, but just as good.

We join the Rosenbaum family at their home in Hendon for Passover. As the father of the household recites the verses that call forth the Prophet Elijah, down comes Elijah, fiery chariot and all, saying, ‘Happy Passover to you. Have I missed much?’ What follows is a comedy of misunderstanding (‘What is “Yogacizing”? And “The 30-day Body Cleanse?” Some sort of ritual bath?’) and situation (how are the Rosenbaums going to look after those fiery horses?) that made me laugh out loud. Alderman’s straight-faced tone makes the story, but she also captures how the locals’ rather English reserve rubs up against Elijah’s directness. Great stuff, which further underlines that I ought to read more of Alderman’s work.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Edge Hill Prize 2013: the shortlist

8th May 2013 / / 5 Comments

A week after Chris Beckett won the Clarke Award, along comes the new shortlist for the award he won a few years ago, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize (there’s a former Clarke winner on this year’s Edge Hill shortlist, too). It is, I think, a cracking list:

That’s a really strong set of writers. The only one of the books I’ve read to date is Diving Belles (which I loved); you can read my review by clicking on the link above. I’m aiming to read and blog as many of the rest as possible before the winner is announced on 4 July. I hope (expect, even) to discover some extraordinary stories.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Tahmima Anam

7th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

‘Anwar Gets Everything’ is taken from the forthcoming third part of Tahmima Anam’s Bengal Trilogy. Clearly I’m going to have to go and read the whole series, because I really liked this extract. It’s narrated by a builder whose life ends up changed after a new boy starts on the site. The gruff narrative voice is so strong, and Anam has an eye for a vivid detail (her description of the workers’ bunk beds, whose rails become too hot to touch, stood out especially to me). I’ll be reading more of Anam’s work, that’s for sure.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Ned Beauman

6th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

I haven’t really got along with Ned Beauman’s work to date. I read Boxer, Beetle and wasn’t particularly enamoured of it, which in turn has meant I’ve not felt inclined to pick up The Teleportation Accident. ‘Glow’, Beauman’s novel extract in Granta feels like a definite change of pace for the author: it chronicles an encounter in a Burmese bar and a subsequent love affair that will lead to its protagonist cooking up a new drug. There are some striking turns of phrase here, but I get the sense that Beauman is holding back a bit, so it’s tricky to judge what the full novel might be like.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Kamila Shamsie

5th May 2013 / / 1 Comment

Kamila Shamsie has written five novels, though I’ve not read her previously myself. Her Granta piece, ‘Vipers’,  is set during the First World War, and focuses on Qayyum, a Pashtun drafted into the British Indian Army, who loses an eye at Ypres and is sent to convalesce in Brighton. For one thing, the passages describing Qayyum’s injury are agonisingly vivid. On a more thematic level, Shamsie presents Qayyum as an unworldly sort who gets caught up in webs of bureaucracy and power that he can’t perceive, both in the army and afterwards. ‘Vipers’ is extracted from Shamsie’s forthcoming novel, and it has me intrigued.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4

5th May 2013 / / 21 Comments

I try to make a point of reading books by young writers, because I’m interested in seeing what people of my generation are writing. So I was always going to be looking out for the latest Granta Best of Young British Novelists. I’m blogging this as a story-by-story project, but the posts may (where applicable) also take in what else I’ve read of the authors’ work. Here are the contents:

That list will gradually turn into a set of links to my individual posts. So let’s go…

Clarke Award 2013: And the winner is…

4th May 2013 / / 0 Comments

Quite a belated announcement at this point, but this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Dark Eden by Chris Beckett. Not the result I had predicted, but that’s the Clarke for you.

All congratulations to Chris Beckett, who’s a writer I think deserves to be much more widely read. I didn’t get around to reviewing Dark Eden properly, so instead let me point you to some of my previous reviews of Beckett’s work: I’ve written about his Edge Hill Prize-winning collection The Turing Test (and did a guest post for Gav Pugh’s blog on the title story); and I considered his novel The Holy Machine (in a double review with Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys).

“A warm meal that was growing cold”

1st May 2013 / / 1 Comment

Herman Koch, The Dinner (2009/12)
Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

See four people dining in a restaurant: they’re doing something inherently private – eating together, talking – yet in a public place. The boundary of personal space grows blurred when the floor manager leans in close to point out the different ingredients of each dish. The emphasis he places on provenance reminds us that this is not just a meal; it’s a performance, theatre on a plate – or so the restaurant would like its diners to think.

The tension between public and private, and the act of weighing up one’s options in the knowledge that someone is looking on, are constant themes rumbling under the events of Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner. The two couples in this case are Paul (our narrator) and Claire, Serge and Babette. Paul is somewhat reticent to confide in us: at first, Serge and Babette are simply ‘the Lohmans’ only a couple of chapters later do we learn that Serge is Paul’s brother, and later still that Serge is leader of the opposition party, and a likely future prime minister. Yet Paul is at pains to emphasise that he’s not going to name the restaurant where the four met. Clearly, there is familial tension here, and something that Paul does not want to become known.

Eventually, we come to it: Paul’s son Michel, and Serge’s son Rick, have been captured on CCTV attacking a homeless woman; the purpose of the meal is for the Lohmans to discuss what should be done. That’s the theory, anyhow. But Paul’s stalling tactics delay them, and once the discussion starts, it becomes clear that the incident is being used by the brothers for a curious and uncomfortable game of one-upmanship (Paul is secretly proud that his boy was the one in charge). The Dinner becomes a study of two men (and Paul’s attention is indeed primarily on himself and Serge) attempt to save face whilst still trying to get one over on the other, as every solution to the Lohmans’ predicament that’s mooted is first viewed in those terms.

What makes Koch’s novel even more uncomfortable to read is the sense that we’re only scratching the surface of what is going on here. Paul increasingly reveals himself to be a violent and prejudiced individual, and he doesn’t seem to mind who knows, for all that he watches his tongue in other ways. This may then naturally lead us to wonder what else we don’t know about the other characters – by novel’s end, we only have a partial picture of what has happened and what may be to come; and Claire has evidently been holding things back from Paul, so that could all be just for starters…

For me, it’s the ordinariness of the situation that really makes The Dinner work, the way that Koch insidiously disrupts this family gathering. I gather that The Dinner is the first of Koch’s books to be translated into English; I hope there will be others, as I’d be keen to read more.

This post is the latest stop on a blog tour for The Dinner. Check out the other posts in the tour by clicking on the banner below.

the dinner side banner

Clarke Award 2013: in review

28th April 2013 / / 2 Comments

I find the Clarke Award difficult to call this year, in terms of both what I think might win, and the order of personal preference in which I’d place the place the books. I think there are a number of books on the shortlist which are very close in quality, and they’re so different that they become hard to separate. But that’s no reason not to have a go, so let’s line the books up and whittle them down…

***

First out of the balloon this year is Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars – which is actually not as harsh a judgment on the book as it might seem. In the few years that I’ve been reading the whole Clarke shortlist, the titles I’ve thought weakest have ranged from OK to downright awful – but The Dog Stars is pretty decent. It has issues with plotting, and its treatment of female characters, but it’s also wonderfully written. My greatest problem with Heller’s novel as a Clarke contender, though, is that I can’t help feeling it would be stronger without its speculative content.

With reluctance, I’ve reached the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 just isn’t my type. I enjoyed Galileo’s Dream a few years back (admittedly some aspects more than others); but 2312’s panoramic view of a terraformed and colonised solar system didn’t engage me to nearly the same extent. I found Robinson’s prose beautiful at times (some of the best scientific writing I’ve come across in a work of fiction for a long time), but other parts of the book left me feeling indifferent. I must acknowledge that I’m not ina position to be able to form a proper view on 2312; but, on the basis that I enjoyed the remaining books on the shortlist more, it’s my second title to go.

Chris Beckett is one of my favourite contemporary science fiction writers, someone I always feel is serious about using sf to explore particular issues. Dark Eden is not quite Beckett at his best, but it’s an interesting piece of work nonetheless. It tells the tale of an abandoned colonists on a distant world, who have made rituals out of the wait for three of their number to return from Earth with help. Beckett is efficient and effective at showing how the colonists’ language, thoughts and behaviours have been altered by their isolation. I also appreciate the way he examines not only the desire for change (the novel centres on a teenage colonist who wants to break away from the others’ ritualistic existence), but also the need to keep going once a great change has been made. I like Dark Eden, but I don’t think it reaches as far as the remaining books on the shortlist, so I’m discarding it next.

If I were to rank these six novels purely by my enjoyment of the reading experience, Nod by Adrian Barnes would top the list – but is that enough to make me think it should win the Clarke? I like Nod’s nervy energy; I think it does interesting things with the form of apocalyptic fiction; and it shares with Dark Eden an interest in how mythologies may develop. But Nod also has its shortcomings: its portrayal of female characters is problematic (to say the least); it puts all its eggs in one basket, and gleefully throws the basket at the reader’s window. When I look at the two other novels left, I see fewer flaws and broader achievements, and I think those qualities make them more worthy of the Clarke than Nod.

There is no doubt in my mind that Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker is a showstopper, probably the most theatrical book on the shortlist. It has linguistic fireworks, grand imagination, and an underlying vein of seriousness to balance out its more playful aspects. Angelmaker has broad ambitions, and pretty much achieves them, even when they might seem contradictory. There’s a lot to recommend about Harkaway’s novel, and I think it would be a worthy Clarke winner – but for me it is just edged out by the last contender…

Intrusion by Ken MacLeod works on a smaller canvas than Angelmaker, and is a much quieter book. But it has a concentrated vision of a society stifled by prohibitions, ruled by a government afraid of anything it can’t label; and it uses very well the idea of seemingly innocuous details coming together in unexpected ways. It’s the completeness of vision – and the sharpness of observation and exploration of vision – that brings Intrusion to the top of the Clarke shortlist for me.

***

How about a guess at which novel will actually win? I don’t think my ordering here is going to be the same as the judges’ – I doubt that Nod will survive as long in their process, and I’m certain that 2312 will end up higher on their list than I placed it. But I do suspect that The Dog Stars will be shown the door early on, and that Dark Eden will be overshadowed by some of the other books. I’d expect the final tussle for the winner’s mantle to be between two of Angelmaker, 2312 and Intrusion  – and my instinct is to plump for Angelmaker as the likely winner. But maybe I’m barking entirely up the wrong tree; whatever, the winning title will be announced on Wednesday.

Reading round-up: late April

25th April 2013 / / 0 Comments

Rebecca Wait, The View on the Way Down (2013). On the day of Kit Stewart’s funeral, his brother Jamie left home unannounced – and the Stewarts are still feeling the repercussions of Kit’s death five years on. Over time, we learn that Kit took his own life following depression; but Wait keeps her main focus on the rest of the family, in a way which suggests that they never fully understood what Kit was going through. And the novel truly shines in showing the myriad little cracks and frictions running through the family as a result of what they haven’t told each other. This is a quietly powerful novel, and a strong debut for Rebecca Wait.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). I first read The Great Gatsby a couple of years ago and, for whatever reason, it didn’t really click with me. I don’t know why that might have been, because this time I really enjoyed it. Fitzgerald introduces Jay Gatsby as a vastly wealthy and charismatic figure, then proceeds to reveal the shallowness and fakery underneath. The dissection of the upper echelons of Roaring Twenties society is so concise and precise; and the way Fitzgerald balances one’s sympathies for his characters is marvellous. I re-read this for my new book group, whose general consensus was that The Great Gatsby is indeed great. And I say the same.

Jim Bob, Driving Jarvis Ham (2012). This novel is narrated by the old friend, ‘manager’ and occasional chauffeur of one Jarvis Ham, a semi-lovable eccentric/loser with unfulfilled dreams of stardom. Jarvis’s friend has been reading his secret diaries, but the two of them won’t be keeping secrets much longer. Driving Jarvis Ham is an absolute joy to read: there’s such a strong voice, with the narrator’s sharp eye and dry humour. But, in between all the laughs and the lovingly scrappy illustrations lurks something rather more sinister, that gives the novel a real edge. It’s a winning combination.

G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen (2012). Jobbing teenage hacker Alif honours the wishes of his love Intisar (who’s now betrothed to another) to remove himself from her life, by creating a  program that can detect Intisar (and hide Alif from her) to an impossibly sophisticated degree. Doing this ruptures the boundary between the worlds of humans and djinn; so, when Intisar gives Alif a book written by djinn that encodes the secrets of reality, Alif finds himself straying between worlds – and being pursued. There are some nice ideas in this debut novel, and a good deal of brio in its telling. But Alif himself is a frustratingly flat character, and there’s a sense that the political issues touched on by Wilson stay in the background, and slide by Alif’s adventures rather than confronting him. Still, Alif the Unseen is promising,and it’ll be interesting to see where Wilson goes next.

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