Category: Non-Fiction

Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters (2012)

23rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

The infinite monkey theorem says that, given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter will almost certainly produce the complete works of Shakespeare just from tapping the keys at random. As Scarlett Thomas points out in the introduction to this creative writing book, though, writers don’t work that way – they write with purpose (though of course that’s not the be-all and end-all of a finished work), and don’t have unlimited time. This is one of the recurring themes of Monkeys with Typewriters: that writing is more than a technical exercise, even if you can see some of its workings.

It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have chosen to read this book had the publisher not sent me a copy on spec, because I’ve no ambitions to write fiction. But Thomas has such a distinctive style of writing fiction that I was intrigued to see what she had to say. It turns out that Monkeys with Typewriters is interesting for readers as well as aspiring writers. Thomas is less concerned with telling her readers ‘how to write’ as encouraging to think more deeply about how what they read and write works.

The first half of the book is devoted to ‘Theory’, and especially to examining the mechanics of plots. Thomas goes from Plato, through Aristotle and Nietzsche, to Northrop Frye and Christopher Booker, examining (and sometimes criticising) the different ways plots have been analysed and classified. There’s plenty of food for thought here, even for a non-writer – I like Thomas’s distinction between story (the chronological events that happen) and plot (how those events are arranged by the writer), which I hadn’t thought of in the way before. It’s also fascinating to see the connections Thomas makes, such as when she highlights the similar basic narrative arcs of Toy Story, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and an episode of Supernanny. Underneath it all is an enthusiasm for writers to find and do their own thing; after presenting her idea of ‘the eight basic plots’, Thomas invites her readers to devise their own taxonomy.

After ‘Theory’ comes ‘Practice’. Some of the material in this section (such as the chapters on having ideas and the practicalities of writing) is inevitably going to be of more specialised interest – but, even then, it’s not unengaging. The rest will surely get any reader thinking anew about characterisation, narration, and how sentences work. Thomas is an excellent guide through her examples, drawing on classic and contemporary texts alike (from Anna Karenina and Middlemarch to The God of Small Things and number9dream). For her, it’s not about one size fitting all, but about whatever works in context. And this section might well cause you to add one or two books to your to-read list; it only took Thomas to quote one short sentence (‘The lawn was white with doctors’) to convince me I ought to read The Bell Jar.

Whether you want to write or not, Monkeys with Typewriters is the kind of book that renews your enthusiasm for reading in general, a book that believes – and encourages its readers to believe – that great fiction matters. Thomas ends her book with a checklist of key questions for writers. The last one is: ‘If the only copy of my novel was stranded on the top of a mountain, would I go up to rescue it?’ Perhaps the key message of Monkeys with Typewriters is that the only fiction worth writing – and reading – is the sort for which you would head up that mountain. And I’d say a book which argues that is one worth reading.

Ewan Morrison, Tales from the Mall (2012)

20th August 2012 / / 6 Comments

Sometimes I’m not sure what to make of the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. Look at its processes, and you might conclude it’s not worth paying attention to – often it seems to come down more than anything to which books have the most vociferous supporters. And the make-up of this year’s shortlist suggests there are structural issues with the Prize’s processes, which I believe are now being looked at.

But – fair’s fair – for all its flaws, the Not the Booker has a track record of highlighting interesting books. I’ve read all bar one of the previous winners, and all were very much worth my time. So I’m not about to dismiss a title associated with the Not the Booker Prize lightly, not even when – like Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall – it attracted a deluge of nominations at a stage where the guidelines clearly stated only one per book was necessary. That alone almost put me off Tales from the Mall; but a book deserves to be judged on its own merits, and this one sounded genuinely interesting – so I decided to read it. I’m glad I did.

In his introduction, Morrison describes Tales from the Mall as an attempt to ‘document the folk culture of the mall’ (p. 8). The book is built from short stories, retold anecdotes, and factual sections; loosely structured as a journey around a mall. This is a structure which neatly mirrors the subject: a shopping mall is a place where people gather together but have very separate, individual experiences; Morrison presents a set of individual pieces which collectively tell a broader ‘story’ about the mall.

The different types of text in Tales from the Mall serve different functions. Broadly speaking, the factual material shows the intentions behind the mall: it’s a controlled and controlling space (one designed to encourage people to stay and shop; given names meant to evoke certain reassuring qualities), but also one where that can be subverted (one of the chapters is a list of pranks taken from a social networking site). The fiction and anecdotes, however, are more about the actuality, suggesting the different roles that malls might play in people’s lives.

It’s striking how few of Morrison’s characters are at the mall primarily to shop. In this book, the mall may be a neutral space where a separated father goes to meet his children. It may be a place to arrange a meeting with a blind date – somewhere to create a new persona. It may be the place to escape from life’s woes. Morrison paints a nuanced picture of an institution (institutions, really) being put to many more uses than the one for which it was designed.

The characterisation within individual stories can sometimes veer towards the stereotypical (the separated mother in ‘Food Court’, with her extensive assortment of modern-day worries about her children’s health, springs to mind). But I think it’s fair to observe that everything in Tales from the Mall – characterisation included – has been shaped to serve the book’s wider project. The real protagonist of this book is ‘the mall’ itself, less as a specific place than as a concept. It’s an idea that remains in flux, as malls themselves face competition from online shopping, and are re-emerging with apartments attached as a means of trying retain their usefulness.

There’s been some questioning over whether Tales from the Mall should have been eligible for the Not the Booker Prize – is it actually a novel, or a collection of short stories? For the purposes of this review, that doesn’t really matter, though I have (deliberately) been calling it a ‘book’ rather than anything more specific. I do find myself thinking about Morrison’s book as a complete unit, though. It feels like a composite portrait of its subject, and a different way of approaching fiction. If the Not the Booker brings to light more works with the distinctiveness of Tales of the Mall, then it’s worth following.

Elsewhere
Ewan Morrison’s website
Cargo Publishing
Interview with Morrison at Scots Whay Hae!
Some other reviews of Tales from the Mall: Savidge Reads; Subtle Melodrama Book Reviews; Paul Reviews Books; Stuart Kelly for the Guardian.

Book notes: William Wharton and P.Y. Betts

10th August 2012 / / 2 Comments

William Wharton, Birdy (1978)

Al and Birdy were both scarred by their experiences in the Second World War. For Al, the damage was largely physical – he now has a jaw made of glass – but for, Birdy, it was mental. Now in a psychiatric hospital, Birdy is living up to his name and acting like a bird. Al has been brought in to try to get through to his old friend; he recounts to Birdy stories of their younger years in Philadelphia. Alternating chapters chronicle Birdy’s developing fascination with birds as a child.

Birdy has recently been republished in the UK by The Friday Project (along with Shrapnel, a previously unpublished war memoir of William Wharton’s). As a first-time reader of Wharton, this is a powerful book, because of the way it depicts such a vivid character as Birdy becoming lost in his own mind. Al’s engaging reminiscences show how enterprising and resourceful he and Birdy were; in Birdy’s chapters, these qualities are applied to the keeping of birds. Wharton portrays Birdy’s slide from this to a too-close association with birds convincingly, which gives Al’s later attempts to reach Birdy all the more force.

Some other reviews of Birdy: The Bookbag; Read with Style; an appreciation of Willam Wharton at Eleventh Stack.

P.Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye (1989)

In the 1930s, Phyllis Betts wrote several short stories, contributions to Graham Greene’s magazine Night and Day, and one novel (French Polish)… then she wasn’t heard of again for another fifty years, until Christopher Hawtree tracked her down to a Welsh smallholding; she was eventually persuaded to write this memoir, which I’m reading in a lovely hardback edition from Slightly Foxed.

People Who Say Goodbye is a joy to read, principally because Betts is so engaging, both as a writer and character. She has a knack for identifying the telling details that bring the people from her childhood to life; such as Dr Biggs, who pronounced ‘bowels’ as two syllables, and who treated all ills with a swift examination by stethoscope, followed by a prescription of brown cough mixture and red tonic. The young Phyllis and her mother also had a robust, no-nonsense attitude to life (‘What happens to all those dead people who are put into graves?’ asks Phyllis. ‘They rot,’ her mother repies).

But that quotation points also to the undercurrent of darkness in the book. Living through the First World War – and especially with a hospital down the road – the reality of death was never far from Phyllis’s life. As Betts puts it, the people who say goodbye don’t come back. It’s the careful balance of moods that makes this memoir such a rewarding read.

Some other reviews of People Who Say Goodbye: Stuck in a Book; 20th Century Vox; I Prefer Reading.

This book fulfils the Biography category of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.

Book notes: coming of age in Texas… and a history of sweets

10th June 2012 / / 3 Comments

Tom Wright, What Dies in Summer (2012)

Tom Wright’s debut novel chronicles one summer in the life of Jim Bonham, who lives in Texas with his grandmother (having been estranged from his mother and her current partner, and his father having passed away), and has frequent visions of a dead girl standing by his bed. At the start of the novel, Jim finds his cousinL.A.(Lee Ann)  sitting, shaking on the porch; she becomes part of his and Gram’s household, and what happened to her will be revealed over the coming months. That summer will also see the two teenagers discover a dead body (the girl of Jim’s visions), and Jim learning more about life and himself.

It’s in the latter aspect that What Dies in Summer shines brightest for me. Jim draws a distinction between being intelligent and smart, and comments that L.A. is much smarter than he. We see evidence of this near the beginning, when L.A. verbally outmanoeuvres a stranger who tries to trap her and Jim, when the latter would clearly never have been able to think like that. However, despite his lack of street-wisdom, and despite the fact that L.A. remains largely a closed book to him, Jim does grow and learn through his encounters with both dark and light aspects of life; Wright creates some beautifully judged passages depicting this. Jim’s narration also has a nicely unpolished quality, which really makes it feel like a voice that belongs to its character (something I do like to see in a first-person narrative). All in all, I’d say that Tom Wright is an author to keep an eye on, and What Dies in Summer certainly a debut worth checking out.

Tim Richardson, Sweets: a History of Temptation (2002)

Regular readers of this blog may know I’m partial to a bit of quirky social or cultural history; so much the better if, like Joe Moran’s On Roads, it can reach a little deeper than its immediate subject. Sweets is not on the same level as Moran’s book – perhaps inevitably, given that its subject matter is rather frivolous – but it is fun and interesting.

Tim Richardson takes a broadly chronological approach, with brief asides to focus on particular kinds of sweet. I find the book’s account of the early history of sweets a little dry in places, a little too heavy on detail; more engaging and lively are the anecdotes and insights on contemporary sweets – though the chapter on nineteenth-century confectioners and their ‘benevolent tyranny’ is fascinating. But Richardson’s enthusiasm is apparent throughout; and his closing whistle-stop tour of the world’s sweet cultures leaves me curious to know what some of the products he mentions taste like.

This book fulfils the Cookery, Food and Wine category of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.

Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (1988)

2nd May 2012 / / 6 Comments

A million books were given away across the UK on World Book Night last week, and I got one of them at my local branch of Waterstones. I tend to think that the ideal book for World Book Night is something that you wouldn’t ordinarily think of reading, but that looks interesting once you start to consider it – a gentle nudge away from your comfort zone, in other words.

That’s just the sort of book I received in Touching the Void, Joe Simpson’s account of his and Simon Yates’s 1985 expedition to climb Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It’s what happened on the descent which makes the story so famous: Simpson broke his leg, and, whilst being lowered down the mountainside by Yates, got stuck in mid-air. With Simpson unable to move up or down, and Yates losing his grip, Yates decided he had to cut the rope joining the two of them. Simpson fell into a crevasse, but nevertheless beat the odds and made it back to camp, alive.

Touching the Void begins prosaically enough:

I was lying in my sleeping bag, staring at the light filtering through the red and green fabric of the dome tent. Simon was snoring loudly, occasionally twitching in his dream world. We could have been anywhere. There is a peculiar anonymity about being in tents. (p. 15)

That tent will, naturally, assume vital importance later on; in a neat mirroring, the familiar light inside the tent at the beginning becomes an alien sight when Simpson is approaching it from the outside, in desperation, towards the end. This is one of several examples in the book of the same thing taking on different qualities at different times – the mountain scenery is by turns hostile and welcoming, for instance.

The passage I’ve quoted there also contains the first of Simpson’s observations about the peculiarities of climbing. I’ve never been up a mountain myself (though I have done my Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and so have some experience of outdoor activity), so perhaps I didn’t connect personally with the descriptions of climbing as I might otherwise have; but this exchange did strike a chord:

‘What shall it be then?’ Simon held up two foil bags. ‘Moussaka or Turkey Supreme?’
‘Who gives a toss! They’re both disgusting!’
‘Good choice. We’ll have the Turkey.’
Two brews of passion fruit and a few prunes later we settled back for sleep. (p. 39)

It’s the odd combination of foods and flavours which brings home the reality of having to eat what you’ve got, and of eating for energy rather than taste – a sense of how one’s priorities change on a mountain. We also see the kind of mentality that may be needed: Simpson tells the story at one point of how, on a previous expedition, Yates saw two unfamiliar climbers fall to their deaths from the same mountain he was climbing; when he returned to camp, says Simpson, Yates ‘had sat numb’, turning the incident over and over in his mind; but, the next day, ‘he was his normal self again: an experience absorbed, shelved in his memory, understood and accepted, and left at that’ (p. 64). The capacity to put even the worst experiences behind you can, this suggests, be useful – even vital – to mountaineers.

Yates’s capacity to do just this is tested to its limit when he’s faced with cutting the rope; as Simpson shows (in passages written from Yates’s viewpoint), this was both an impossible choice and, really, no choice at all. As he’s making his own way down the mountain, assuming (quite reasonably) that Simpson is dead, Yates veers back and forth over the question of how to describe what happened, whether to feel guilt or resignation. Simpson creates a fine portrait of an extreme moral dilemma.

But it’s Simpson’s account of his time alone and injured on the mountain which live most vividly in my memory. The description of his plummeting into the crevasse, then lying there in the dark, is horrifying; and we feel Simpson’s pain and frustration (as far as that’s possible, of course) at every slow step of his journey down. It makes his survival seem all the more remarkable.

This edition of Touching the Void includes a section written in 2003, after the making of the film version. As part of this, Simpson describes how he returned to Siula Grande and played himself in reconstructions of the incident. This seems so strange, I can’t begin to imagine what it might have been like, nor find the words to describe how I responded to reading about it. Simpson himself closes the book reflecting on how his life has changed in such unexpected ways:

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in? I’ll never know (p. 215).

So, Touching the Void ends with a question we might all have cause to consider at some point – and it has opened a window on an extraordinary human experience. A fine book for World Book Night.

This book fulfils the Travel category (though ‘travel writing’ seems an inadequate way to describe Touching the Void!) of the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012.

A selection of 2011 favourites

28th December 2011 / / 6 Comments

Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying the festive season. Now it’s time for my annual look back on my favourite reads of the year. I’m going to split 2011’s list in two: six books from this year, six published in previous years. The lists are in alphabetical order of author surname, and all links will take you to my reviews.

Without further ado, then, here are six of my favourite books that received their first UK publication in 2011:

Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I love fantasy with structural elegance, and this book has it: it’s the tale of a girl who can taste the feelings of whoever made her food (and hence detects trouble in her family’s relationships); what I like most is that it works equally as well whether you read the protagonist’s ability literally or metaphorically.

Stuart Evers, Ten Stories About Smoking

Certainly the best-designed book I read in 2011 (it comes in a flip-top box made to resemble a packet of cigarettes, this is also a fine set of stories which use smoking as a metaphor in various ways; I look forward eagerly to Evers’ debut novel next year.

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox

Variations on the tale of Bluebeard, embedded in the broader narrative of a writer and his muse, who is rather less imaginary than she appears. The sheer range of Mr Fox is impressive, but it’s a great read to boot.

Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country

The idea of a novel written as a ramblers’ guide might seem gimmicky, but what makes this book work is the way Segnit uses the structure as a means of characterisation: the protagonist’s wife has left him, and the walking-guide format is set against a more novelistic style as the narrator tries to keep a hold on his world.

Conrad Williams, Loss of Separation

A fascinating psychological portrait of a pilot who’s recovered from an air crash, only to find that his girlfriend has disappeared.  Williams brilliantly plays creeping personal fears of decline and loss against grander horrors, and asks which is truly the most frightening.

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

A superb portrait of a divergent England ruled by the Church, where members of the Secular Movement have been exiled to a nearby island. Wood creates a vivid sense of place and character, and a subtle sense of how isolation has changed the Islanders’ ideas about faith.

***

And now half a dozen from previous years:

Chris Beckett, The Holy Machine

A translator in the world’s only atheist city-state falls in love with one of the city’s lifelike robots; when a new law raises the possibility that the android’s personality will be erased, the pair are forced to flee. Becektt’s complex examination of science, religion, and what it means to be human makes an interesting comparison with The Godless Boys, which I read in tandem with this.

Joe Moran, On Roads: a Hidden History

A wide-ranging and perceptive history of the British post-war road system. If that sounds dry, I can only emphasise that it’s quite the opposite, as Moran spins gold from such an everyday topic.

Sarah Salway, Leading the Dance

Another book which turns the ordinary into something more, this time in the form of short stories which reveal the significance of ostensibly mundane events to the people involved in them.

Robert Shearman, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical

The single best book of short stories I read in 2011. Shearman combines the unremarkable and the fantastic to brilliant effect in a collection whose main subject is love, seen from various angles.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The story of how cancer cells taken from a poor African American woman played a vital part in modern medicine, though for twenty years her family didn’t even know a sample had been taken. Though this is a fascinating tale in its own right, Skloot’s orchestration of her material makes it all the more so.

Mike Thomas, Pocket Notebook

I didn’t know what to expect from this story of a police officer going off the rails, and it utterly blew me away. One of the best written books I’ve read all year, one of the sharpest character-portraits… I can’t wait to see what Thomas writes next.

***

So that’s my dozen picks from the reading year. What books have you most enjoyed?

Three Pieces: Granta 117 – Horror

11th November 2011 / / 2 Comments

Today, I’m trying out a different approach to blogging about an anthology, by concentrating on three particular pieces from it. The anthology in question is the Autumn 2011 issue of Granta, whose theme is ‘Horror’. It was my first time reading all three of these authors; I’ll go through their work in the order in which it appears in the anthology.

Will Self, ‘False Blood’

This is an account of how Self was diagnosed with and treated for polycythemia vera, a condition which causes the blood to thicken through the overproduction of red blood cells. It’s a very frank piece: Self writes matter-of-factly about his past of drug-use – neither apologising not seeking to justify it, but simply treating it as something that happened – and how it left him afraid of needles, which made his treatment (by having excess blood extracted) all the more difficult.

The horror of ‘False Blood’ seems to me to lie less in the mechanics of Self’s illness and treatment (though there is certainly some of that, and you may well find yourself picturing the blood flowing – or otherwise – through your own veins) than in something more existential. Self reflects on death and disease, and how we dress them up in metaphors in the vain hope of making them more palatable – and comes to the conclusion that it’s better to confront those phenomena without metaphors. But Self acknowledges that disease has been one of the key metaphors he has deployed in his fiction.

So, just as the very blood-flow which sustains Self’s life is now threatening it, so a cornerstone of his life’s work has gained a chillingly personal resonance. Perhaps the true horror of this piece comes from the thought of being betrayed by the most familiar and trusted of things.

Rajesh Parameswaran, ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’

A tiger wakes up one day (“the worst and most amazing day of my life,” p. 167) and realises that he feels love – the love that comes from a deep friendship – for his keeper, Kitch. But where is Kitch today? Ming is getting hungry and wants to see his keeper and friend. When Kitch finally arrives, he’s with another, rather nervous, member of zoo staff; the tiger’s friendly move towards Kitch scares the other man, so Kitch strikes Ming with his stick – and then it all goes wrong.

When I started reading ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’, I thought Parameswaran’s decision to give the tiger such a fluent, human-like narrative voice was amusing but perhaps misjudged – surely that wasn’t how an animal would really think? But now I see that the voice was judged perfectly, because the affect of the story is founded on the tension between the measured, reasonable tone of the narration, and the way Ming’s animal instincts intrude upon it. It’s not just that the tiger tends to misinterpret the human characters’ behaviour; it’s also that the way he reacts and explains himself can be at odds (sometimes chillingly so) with what his voice lulls us into expecting. This story is extracted from Parameswaran’s forthcoming collection, I Am an Executioner, to which I now look forward eagerly.

Julie Otsuka, ‘Diem Perdidi’

Diem perdidi is Latin for “I have lost the day”, which sums up what has happened to the woman with dementia who is at the heart of this story. The text consists mainly of declarative statements about what the woman does and doesn’t remember (sometimes addressed directly to the woman’s daughter – though neither character is ever named). With what might seem to be a rather restricted palette, Otsuka paints vividly what has passed in the lives of the woman and her family; and what is now being lost, the little cruelties of (and those caused by) being able to remember the relatively distant past, and long-held routines, but not what happened a few minutes before. Otsuka’s prose is dotted with poignant turns of phrase, such as: “She remembers that today is Sunday, which six days out of seven is not true” (p. 252). Clearly another writer whom I need to read further.

Elsewhere
Granta magazine
Author websites: Will Self; Julie Otsuka.
Read an abridged version of ‘False Blood’ on the Guardian website.
Additional content on the Granta site.

Book notes: Moran, Harstad, Brill

12th September 2011 / / 7 Comments

Joe Moran, On Roads: a Hidden History (2009)

I’ve long been interested in social and cultural history, and there will always be a place on my shelves for books that illuminate the more unusual corners of history. On Roads is just such a book.

The British road system in the post-war years may not sound a particularly interesting subject for a work of history, but this is part of Moran’s point – roads are so commonplace that we hardly ever stop to think about them. What Moran suggests, however, is that the road system was a far more pragmatic creation than we might assume, and that the Brits’ relationship with their roads has, from the earliest days of the motorway, been an ambivalent one.

The sheer range of topics that Moran covers is remarkable, from road signs to service stations, caravans to roadside ecology. But, more than this, he tells fascinating stories (I had no idea that the design of British road signs had been so controversial) and makes some astute observations (such as that the image of the straight road has traditionally represented ‘cold modernity’ in England, whereas in America it’s a symbol of freedom and escape). On Roads takes an ostensibly ordinary topic and turns it into a rich and worthwhile book.

Link: Joe Moran’s blog

Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? (2005/11)

Stavanger, Norway, 1999: Mattias is a gardener, perfectly content with his lot. Born on the day of the first moon landing, Mattias’ hero is not first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong but runner-up Buzz Aldrin: willing to cede the glory, willing to be the second man. That’s what Mattias is happy to be – a cog in the machine, unconcerned whether others notice him.

But life won’t stand still and, when Mattias’ partner leaves him and his employer goes out of business, he accepts an invitation to go to the Faroe Islands with his friend Jørn’s band. However, instead of acting as the band’s soundman (or, as Jørn wanted, their singer), Mattias falls in with a psychiatrist named Havstein and the three inhabitants of his institution for those not quite ready to live independently – and now Mattias’ life is set to change.

Johan Harstad’s debut (translated by Deborah Dawkin) is a big, baggy novel which is unusually structured insofar as the narrative beats are not quite where one might expect them to be – but this gives the novel a distinctive flow. The story is told so thoroughly from Mattias’ vantage point that it distorts the very shape of what we learn; we gain only brief, distant glimpses of the other Mattias, the one who (for good or ill) is no quiet mediocrity.

There may be times when the prose drags, but some of the best moments are also the most densely written; overall, Harstad paints an interesting portrait of a man whose life is ordinary and remarkable all at once.

This review first appeared in We Love This Book.

Link: Video interview with Johan Harstad

Marius Brill, How to Forget (2011)

Magician Peter Ruchio was humiliated, and his career derailed, by a prank played by Titus Black at the latter’s eighth birthday party; fifteen years later, Black has grown up to be a famous illusionist (though he is not above committing murder to preserve his secrets), whilst Peter is performing tricks in restaurants and old people’s homes. A chance encounter with Kate Minola, a grifter on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, gives Peter the opportunity to take his revenge on Black; but his experiences ultimately lead  Peter to seek the help of Dr Chris Tavasligh, a neuroscientist working on a way to ‘reboot’ the human brain, thereby erasing all memories. That was three years ago, and Tavasligh subsequently disappeared; the book in our hands purports to be the scientist’s collected papers.

As befits a novel about a magician, How to Forget is full of misdirection; one is never quite sure which way the characters will turn, who can be trusted – and there’s a sense at the end that the real story is not the one we thought it was (the allusions to The Taming of the Shrew in the protagonists’ names serve, as far as I can tell, to highlight the idea of a story within a story). Not everything in the book works so well: the larger-than-life tone and occasional comic interludes tend to rub against the more serious episodes, rather than working with them; and it seems to me that Brill’s material on memory doesn’t quite integrate successfully with the plot. Better is the author’s comparison of Peter’s and Kate’s professions, which leads them to face up to some difficult questions; and the caper narrative has all the page-turning tension and momentum one could wish.

Link: Marius Brill’s website

Triple Choice Tuesday

30th August 2011 / / 0 Comments

I’m the featured blogger in this week’s Triple Choice Tuesday feature over on Kim’s blog, Reading Matters. This is a feature where Kim asks bloggers and other bookish folk to choose a favourite book, a book that changed their world, and a book that deserves a wider audience. I had great fun deciding on my three  books, and writing about what they mean to me; I’d like to thank Kim for giving me the opportunity to take part.

Click here to discover my choices.

Book notes: Politycki, Skloot, Langford & Grant

24th February 2011 /

Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella (2009/11)

Matthias Politycki’s Next World Novella (translated from the German by Anthea Bell) is the latest title from Peirene Press, which would be enough on its own to interest me in reading the book, as I’ve enjoyed all their previous selections. Add to this that it’s a tale with shifting realities, and my interest only increases. Having read it now, though, it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on why.

Academic Hinrich Schepp finds that his wife Doro has died at her desk, where she has apparently been editing the attempt at a novel that he abandoned years before. Reading the manuscript, Schepp discovers that Doro’s edits constitute a commentary on their marriage, and that his wife was far from as content as he’d assumed.

The beginning of Next World Novella is especially potent, as the reader is a fraction behind Schepp in realising that Doro has died, and anticipates the jolt which is to come. There’s also effective interplay between the gradual unfurling of Doro’s true feelings and Schepp’s inability/reluctance to perceive the truth (e.g. he refuses to acknowledge the extent to which his abandoned novel reflected his own life). Yet I finished the book feeling that I hadn’t quite grasped something about it, and I can’t put into words what that might be. Next World Novella is well worth a look, though.

Interview with Matthias Politycki (Worlds Without Borders)
Next World Novella elsewhere: Just William’s Luck; Cardigangirlverity; The Independent.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

A brilliant fusion of biography, social history, and history of science, that tells a fascinating story. Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951; as with other cancer patients at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, a sample of the cells from Henrietta’s tumour was taken, without her knowledge, for research purposes. Those cells were the origin of the HeLa cell line, the first human one to be propagated successfully in the lab (‘immortal’ because they can divide indefinitely in culture). Henrietta’s cells facilitated many medical advances, but it was twenty years before her family even learnt that a sample had been taken.

Remarkable as this story is, it is Skloot’s treatment of it that makes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She moves back and forth between time periods and perspectives, weaving together details  of Henrietta’s and her family’s lives; the wider social and scientific contexts; the ethical issues raised by Henrietta’s story; and Skloot’s own experiences meeting and interviewing the Lacks family. There’s great breadth to the material, and Skloot’s control of it is superb. What an engrossing read.

Rebecca Skloot’s website
Interview with Skloot (Wellcome Trust)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks elsewhere: SomeBeans; Savidge Reads; Take Me Away; Lovely Treez Reads.

David Langford and John Grant, Earthdoom! (1987/2003)

A gloriously over-the-top spoof disaster novel featuring all manner of world-ending phenomena which appear on the scene in quick succession: a spacecraft on a collision course with Earth; an antimatter comet on a collision course with Earth; invading aliens; rabid lemmings; the Loch Ness Monster; a time-travelling Hitler who takes advantage of the handy cloning technology he finds on a Devon farm; sentient superglue… You get the idea.

Langford and Grant relentlessly send up the conventions of the disaster novel, with their cast of gung-ho male scientists and impossibly-attractive-yet-brilliant-except-when-the-guys-need-to-show-how-much-better-they-are female scientists; the plot contrivances which are eventually abandoned altogether when it suits; the characters’ helpful-for-the-reader recapping things they already know; and the prose. For example:

Jeb’s [the Devonian farmer] words rang hollow in his ears, not merely because in these grim days his accent was failing to convince even himself. Ambledyke Farmhouse was sealed against the horrors outside, its boarded-up windows blind as proofreaders’ eyyes. The inner dimness throbbed with a stench of ancient, decaying pizza. (p. 121)

Great stuff.

David Langford’s website
John Grant’s website

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