Tag: literature

Book notes: Connell, Jones, Thomas

21st April 2011 / / 8 Comments

Rebecca Connell, Told in Silence (2010)

Rebecca Connell’s second novel, Told in Silence, is a portrait of a family with secrets; no one is all that they appear to be to others. Violet Mason was eighteen, working as a legal secretary and just about to start university, when she fell in love with – and married – a thirty-year-old lawyer named Jonathan Blackwood. Now twenty-one, Violet is a widow, living with Jonathan’s parents, Harvey and Laura, and making tentative steps towards regaining a normal life. Then, at Harvey’s birthday party, an old friend of Jonathan’s, the darkly attractive Max Croft, arrives on the scene; Violet finds herself drawn to Croft, but he brings with him a suggestion that Jonathan’s death may not have been accidental, as Violet believes – and that someone close to home may be responsible.

Told in Silence turns on the gradual revelation of new sides to characters and their relationships, first in Violet’s narration of the present day (and flashbacks to her life with Jonathan), then in Harvey’s written account addressed to his son. It begins with Violet herself, who presents a determinedly ordinary face to the world, one that masks all she has been through. The Blackwoods are not quite the happy couple that Violet sees. Jonathan may be the character of whom we see the most sides, even though (or perhaps because) we always encounter him at one remove. Connell’s unfurling of her characters’ secrets keeps the pages turning and builds up her novel’s momentum, which then leads with a certain amount of inevitability towards an ending that’s both open and quite apposite. Told in Silence is a tense read that asks how sure we can be that we truly know someone.

This review also appears on Fiction Uncovered.

Link: Rebecca Connell’s website

Cynan Jones, Everything I Found on the Beach (2011)

Hold is a Welsh fisherman, trying his best to help out Cara and Jake, the widow and son of his late friend Danny. The chance discovery of a body on the shore presents him with a risky opportunity, for the dead man was carrying packages of drugs; Hold decides to go ahead and deliver them, so he can use the money for Jake’s and Cara’s benefit. Alongside Hold’s story, we read of Grzegorz, a Polish man who came to Britain hoping to improve his lot, but now stuck working in a slaughterhouse and picking cockles to make ends meet for his young family; and we follow the criminals heading for Hold, who have doubts and worries of their own.

Everything I Found on the Beach is a quiet book, muted of palette and careful in its use of detail. The depictions of place seem to have had the specificity wrung out of them, which contrasts effectively with the very precise depictions of process – and appropriately so, because what the characters are doing is more significant to them than where they are. Cynan Jones establishes some interesting points of comparison between the lives of his characters: the methodical nature of Hold’s work as a fisherman finds echoes in both Grzegorz’s job at the slaughterhouse and life in his shared home, though the two men’s attitudes towards their situations are subtly different. Likewise, while Hold is questioning whether he really wants to go through with delivering the drugs, the criminals themselves are examining their place in the world.

All in all, Everything I Found on the Beach is a quietly evocative study of lives changed by some drastic choices.

Link: Parthian Books

Mike Thomas, Pocket Notebook (2010)

Jacob Smith is a police firearms officer with a foundering marriage, a steroid addiction, and aggressive tendencies. Unable to save the victim of a car crash, Jake takes his frustrations out on a drunk he’s arrested for a public order offence, which is what first brings him to the attention of his senior officers. As time goes on, Jake faces growing pressure; he’s being investigated for his behaviour at work, his dealer wants paying, and Jake’s erratic personal life sees him lusting after at least three women other than his wife. Something has to give… and indeed it does.

Pocket Notebook is a simply stunning debut from Mike Thomas, himself a serving police officer. The rapid-fire narrative style captures superbly the whirlwind of thoughts inside Jake’s mind, painting the officer as a man constantly on edge. Thomas intersperses Jake’s narration with extracts from the regulation notebook in which he records his activities; this device creates an effective contrast between the chaotic energy of Jake’s thoughts and the more formal structure of the notebook – a structure occasionally (and increasingly) interrupted by reminders that Jake is not the fine upstanding copper he appears (or did at first) to the outside world.

Yet, for all that he may be an antihero, Jake is not an entirely unsympathetic character. We see that he does have admirable qualities, such as concern that some of the people he encounters don’t mess up their lives; it’s just that Jake is so far gone down the road he has taken that those qualities can’t hope to balance the darker aspects of his nature. And it is the latter that Thomas portrays so well as Jake loses his grip on reality, convinced all the while that what he does makes sense. Thomas draws the reader so fully into his protagonist’s mindset that it takes a while to adjust after leaving Jake’s side. Pocket Notebook marks Mike Thomas out as a major new voice whose work deserves our attention.

This review also appears on Fiction Uncovered.

Link: Video interview with Mike Thomas

Tim Powers, Declare (2000/1)

14th April 2011 / / 9 Comments

For many years, Tim Powers’ work has largely been out of print in the UK, but that began to change in 2010, when Corvus gave Powers’s novel Declare its first UK edition, which quirk of publishing explains how a ten-year-old book ended up as a contender for the Clarke Award. It felt a little odd to see Declare so nominated, but I was optimistic because I’d read and liked a couple of Powers’ novels previously; Declare won the World Fantasy Award, which I’ve generally found a reliable indicator of good fiction; and the Clarke judges had made fine selections elsewhere in the shortlist. I pretty much took it for granted that we had six strong nominees this year.

Well, now I’ll have to eat those words, because I simply cannot see that this book stands up to any of the other shortlisted titles.

One of the hallmarks of Tim Powers’ fiction is the taking the fantastic and slotting it into the gaps in reality to create an alternative and hidden history of the world; in Declare, the author does this against the background of the Cold War. In 1963, a British former (or so he thought) spy named Andrew Hale is reactivated to complete Operation Declare, the previously failed mission to attack the djinns of Mount Ararat.

Declare is a very long book – 560 B-format pages of close-set type in the edition I have – and the key problem it has is being overly stiff with research for much of that length.  Overall, I find it a very slow read (not ideal for a book which is part spy thriller), because so much detail is crammed in at the expense of pacing. Actually, come to that, the general stodginess of Declare makes it difficult to appreciate most other aspects of the novel. For example, there’s a proper sense of otherworldliness in some of the scenes featuring djinns (made particularly interesting by the matter-of-fact tone of delivery), but the impact is diluted by all the less effective surrounding material – the more conventionally ‘spy-thrillerish’ sequences don’t work nearly as well for me.

Perhaps if I knew more about, or were more interested in, the details of Kim Philby’s life (around which Powers has constructed the supernatural framework of his novel) – or if I’d read John Le Carré – I might appreciate more of what Powers is doing in the book. But it does seem to me that Declare is too content to assume that sort of interest on the part of its readers, rather than trying to generate it – hence the profusion on detail.

It’s been a while since I read Last Call and The Drawing of the Dark, but I don’t remember their being a chore to read; Declare, on the other hand, was just that.

Elsewhere
Tim Powers website

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Orange Prize shortlist 2011

12th April 2011 / / 2 Comments

So, the shortlist of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction has been announced, and it is:

Emma Dooghue, Room

Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love

Emma Henderson, Grace Williams Says It Loud

Nicole Krauss, Great House

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

Kathleen Winter, Annabel

My reaction? Well, Room is the only one of these that I’ve read (indeed, the only book on the whole longlist that I’ve read), and I thought it was good, so fair play to it. The Tiger’s Wife was already on my radar, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it (which I will get around to doing soon, honest). The Memory of Love wasn’t on my radar — and, judging by its synopsis (the lives of an English psychologist, a surgeon, and a patient reflecting on his past, intersect in Sierra Leone), is not something I would instinctively pick up — but I loved Forna’s entry in the BBC National Short Story Award last year, so I may well take a look at it.

I don’t have any experience of the three other authors’ works, so I can only go by how they sound to me. Grace Williams Says It Loud is a  love story between two people who were placed in a psychiatric institution; I’ve come across a brief extract, which I thought  well-written. I know Krauss received great acclaim for The History of Love, but the idea of Great House (three lives linked by the same desk) strikes me as potentially too gimmicky, and the excerpt I’ve read didn’t especially grab me. Annabel concerns a hermaphrodite in remote Canada; I suspect the quality of the prose will be key to the success of this book, and the extract I found was promising, very precise in its detail.

The winner of the Orange Prize will be announced on Wednesday 8 June.

Notable books: April 2011

1st April 2011 / / 4 Comments

It may be the first of April, but I’m not joking when I say that I am looking forward to the following books this month.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Company Man

Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers, was one of my favourite reads of last year, a really smart fusion of fantasy, horror and historical fiction. His new book is a tale of industrial corruption set in 1919, and I look forward to reading it very much.

John Boyne, The Thief of Time

A reissue of Boyne’s 2000 debut novel about an unageing man who has lived since the eighteenth century.

Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

A werewolf novel, yes, but one published by Canongate, who can usually be relied upon to have interesting books. True, this is pretty flimsy reasoning; but Canongate published an interesting vampire novel last year in The Radleys, so why not?

Sebastian Fitzek, Splinter

Sounds intriguing – a man loses his wife in a car crash, then finds her alive but with no idea who he is, just as he seems to be slipping out of (or losing his grip on) reality.

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman [link is to PDF extract]

I read an extract from this novel, about a dying journalist’s quest to find a missing cricketer, when I was going through the Waterstone’s 11 — and was absolutely blown away by the prose. There is no question that I’ll be reading this as soon as possible.

Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine [link is to PDF extract]

Another of the Watertsone’s 11 that I want to read, though this time it’s the concept (it features the ‘Directorate of the Extremely Improbable’) that attracts me most.

Paul Murray, An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Skippy Dies was one of the very best books I read last year, so I certainly want to read this, his 2003 debut, now being republished.

Monique Roffey, Sun Dog

Another new edition of a debut, this one from 2002. August Chalmin has an affinity with the weather, one day discovering frost on his arm…

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

This debut novel takes us to the 1980s of an alternate England in which secularists have been banished to an offshore island. I first heard about The Godless Boys when Wood was on a panel for Picador Day at Foyles last May, and now I get my chance to read it.

Ariana Franklin, Mistress of the Art of Death (2007)

31st March 2011 / / 2 Comments

Time now for my third and final book in the Great Transworld Crime Caper. I arranged my choices in reverse chronological order of setting, so we’ve gone from the present day to the Second World War, and now we head back to the twelfth century. Mistress of the Art of Death is the first of Ariana Franklin’s (a pseudonym of Diana Norman, who sadly died in January) mysteries featuring Adelia Aguilar, an anatomist from the medical school at Salerno. In 1171, the King of Sicily sends her, along with Simon Menahem of Naples, to investigate the brutal murder of a child in Cambridge. Blame for the killing is being placed on the city’s Jewish population – erroneously, believes Henry II, who has no wish to the revenue they provide placed in jeopardy, and so asked Sicily to send help. As the investigation progresses, the stakes only grow higher, as more bodies are found, and the danger grows closer to Adelia.

Franklin suggests in her afterword that ‘It is almost impossible to write a comprehensible story set in the twelfth century without being anachronistic, at least in part’. I suspect that is probably true, and almost certainly so with a detective story, which relies on the reader’s being able to follow the protagonist’s processes of thought and deduction. It’s telling that Franklin has made Adelia so clearly exceptional within the wider world of the book, both by profession (she risks being accused of witchcraft If her medical knowledge is discovered, so must pretend that her Saracen manservant Mansur is the doctor, and she his assistant) and by her outlook and attitudes. Adelia is a very engaging character, in part because she is such an outsider, and therefore placed in a similar position to the reader with regard to the setting – even more so than usual for a novel’s protagonist, she becomes our eyes (this also allows Franklin relatively unobtrusively to slip in ancillary historical detail). However, Adelia’s distance from her surroundings also means that she lacks empathy at times: when she learns that the parents of the murdered boy (who is now being venerated as a saint) are charging people to visit their cottage, her response is, ‘How shameful’ – but she’s soon made to realise that the family are acting out of desperation, not greed. Adelia Aguilar leaps off the page as a fully-rounded individual.

Indeed, it’s the protagonist who really carries the book for me; the mystery, I think, is less satisfying. The plot advances with a goodly number of twists and turns, but the way the murderer is revealed strikes me as short on impact, as I didn’t gain a sense of it being worked out on the page, as it were. The ending of the novel is interesting at first in the way it uses the conventions of twelfth-century society to create a problem – but the solution to that problem is pretty much a deus ex machina.

Though its plot didn’t quite work for me, Mistress of the Art of Death is still worth reading for the character of Adelia. There are three other books, and I’m interested to see if any have a mystery that’s as well realised as the protagonist.

Links
Transworld website about the book
Mistress of the Art of Death reviewed elsewhere: Novel Readings; A Fantastical Librarian; Alive on the Shelves; She Reads Novels.

Seven Penguin authors

25th March 2011 / / 10 Comments

Earlier this week, Penguin Books held a reading event with seven of their authors, each on their first or second novels. A bunch of bloggers and friends gathered at the Union Club in the heart of London to hear about some new books – and it was a very enjoyable evening.

First up was Joe Dunthorne, whose debut novel, Submarine, has just been made into a film. He read an extract from Wild Abandon, about young Albert, who is convinced the world will end in 2012. Attempting to dispel his fears, the boy’s mother persuades Albert to imagine a conversation with his sixteen-year-old self, thereby reassuring himself there is life beyond a couple of years hence. But the plan doesn’t quite work out as Albert’s mum intended… The conversation that Dunthorne read out was very funny, and I’m sure I’ll be checking out Wild Abandon when it’s published in August, and perhaps also Submarine before then.

Luke Williams’ The Echo Chamber (due in May) was already on my radar because it has the sort of crossover speculative premise (the life of a woman with preternatural abilities of hearing) that particularly appeals to me. I’m not sure how well I can judge from the opening extract Williams read here just what The Echo Chamber will be like as a whole (and he did say that the novel goes through a number of styles as it progresses), but it is still a novel I want to investigate.

The next author was Jean Kwok, whose novel Girl in Translation concerns Kimberly Chang, who moves with her family from Hong Kong to a squalid apartment in Brooklyn, and finds herself caught between the worlds of great achievement at school, and working in a factory at night to help make ends meet. Kwok told how she drew significantly on her own life experiences for the novel, which sounds an interesting story.

I’ve been meaning to read God’s Own Country, the first novel by Ross Raisin – a fellow native of West Yorkshire – for some time now. I will get around to it – honest. Tonight, Raisin was reading from his forthcoming book, Waterline (to be published in July), which is set amongst the shipyards of Glasgow. As it’s written partly in dialect, Raisin said, it didn’t sound right in his natural voice; so he affected a Glaswegian accent to read his extract. How good he was, I’m in no position to judge; but the extract itself was nicely atmospheric, and bodes well for the whole novel. I’ll probably read God’s Own Country first, though.

On now to Rebecca Hunt, whose novel Mr Chartwell was the only one of the seven featured writers’ that I’d already read. Essentially it’s the story of Churchill’s Black Dog of depression come to life, well worth a look. Hunt was an excellent reader; had I not known about the novel already, the strength of her reading alone would have made me want to seek it out.

Helen Gordon’s debut, Landfall – about an art journalist reassessing her life when she moves temporarily back to the suburbs – is not published until October, so it was quite a treat to hear an excerpt of it so early on. The snapshot Gordon read was a conversation between the protagonist and her daughter during a car journey; again, I’m not sure how much of a sense of the wider novel I have from this, but it was a nicely observed extract and I am intrigued.

The final author to read was Hisham Matar, a Booker nominee for his first novel, In the Country of Men. He read an excerpt from his newly-published second book, Anatomy of a Disappearance, which concerns a boy dealing with the disappearance of his father. Matar’s description was vivid, and left me wanting to read more. A fine conclusion to a strong set of readings.

Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark (2002)

21st March 2011 / / 2 Comments

Speed of Dark is the story of Lou Arrendale, an autistic man working for a pharmaceutical company. Lou is part of a division staffed by autistic people, who were employed because they are also remarkably skilled in spotting patterns (Lou’s division works with data, but exactly what they do is neither explored much nor, for that matter, particularly relevant to the novel). Pattern is perhaps the greatest source of pleasure in Lou’s life, as his two main interests are also pattern-based: classical music and fencing, which he practises at a class every Wednesday night (Lou’s facility with fencing stems from his ability to recognise the patterns in his opponents’ moves). Lou harbours feelings for Marjory, another member of his fencing group, though he isn’t sure whether those feelings are reciprocated.

Several developments threaten to disrupt Lou’s lifestyle, however. A series of attacks on his car by a person who apparently knows his weekly routine leads Lou to consider that someone he thought was a friend may in fact be an enemy. A new boss at the company, Gene Crenshaw, sees Lou’s division as a drain on resources (even though their productivity speaks for itself), and seeks to remove the special privileges (such as the private gym) which help them to focus their minds on work. Potentially the most far-reaching of all, though, is that Crenshaw also wishes to put the autistic staff through an experimental treatment which promises to ‘cure’ their autism – but what effect would that have on their personal identity?

The most immediately striking aspect of Speed of Dark is its narrative voice: there are some third-person sections, but most of the novel is narrated by Lou in the first person, and Elizabeth Moon has done a remarkable job of creating his worldview. Lou’s narration is a little stiff and formal, a tone well-suited to the literal logicalness of his thought processes; one of his key character traits is his difficulty grasping the nuances of language used by non-autistic people:

He stands there, looking at me. He does not say anything for a moment, then he says, ‘Well, be seeing you,’ and turns away. Of course he will be seeing me; we live in the same building. I think this means he does not want to walk back inside with me. I do not know why he could not just say that, if that is what he means. (p. 147)

One of the great strengths of Moon’s telling is how easy she makes it for the reader to see things from Lou’s viewpoint; I think it’s crucial to the overall affect of the novel that we don’t have to work hard to reach Lou, because it makes all the clearer what is at stake for him. The whole issue of the experimental treatment is not clear-cut, because there are genuine losses and gains to be made. If Lou undergoes the procedure, he doesn’t know whether he will truly be the same person – will he still enjoy the same things, have the same insights (into people as well as pattern), feel the same about Marjory? Yet, by the same token, could the treatment bring about new interests, new insights, new feelings? Lou’s condition brings with it both advantages and limitations, and Moon shows the difficult choice he has to make between the two.

Given the moral complexity of this aspect of Speed of Dark, I find it a little disappointing that there isn’t the same complexity on show when it comes to the character of Gene Crenshaw. In his opposition to the autistic employees and their amenities, Crenshaw simply has no legitimate argument – the value of their work to the company is clear, and far outweighs the cost of the aids provided for them; not to mention the reputational risk and the tax breaks that would be lost if Lou’s division were dismantled. It’s a little jarring not to have the same level of nuance here as elsewhere in the book. But there is an interesting undercurrent suggesting that Crenshaw is not all that different from Lou underneath – both share an intense focus, for example, though Crenshaw would use his destructively – and a subplot examining the morality of a behavioural-correction chip for criminals in comparison with the treatment proposed for Lou and his colleagues. Moon’s novel certainly leaves one with a great deal to think about.

The title of Speed of Dark comes from Lou’s repeated wondering of whether, given that light has a speed, dark also has one; he reasons that it would be faster, as light is always chasing behind dark. Lou further equates darkness to ignorance and light to knowledge, which is then represented in the novel by both the ignorance of the likes of Crenshaw; but also as Lou’s own ignorance of himself and who he might be. If we interpret Lou’s dilemma over the treatment as representing any decision of whether to make a major life-change, Speed of Dark ultimately gives us cause to reflect how far we might want to sweep away the dark if faced with such a choice.

Links
Two reviews of Speed of Dark at Infinity Plus, by John Grant and Adam Roberts.
Elizabeth Moon’s website

Richard Powers, Generosity (2009)

18th March 2011 / / 4 Comments

Russell Stone is a washed-up writer making ends meet by teaching a ‘Journal and Journey’ class to a group of art students at a Chicago college. One member of that group stands out because of her remarkable personality: Thassadit Amzwar is a young woman from Algeria who is apparently happy all the time; nothing seems to bother her, and people are naturally attracted to her sunny disposition. Even after everything she has experienced in her life, Thassa remains in perpetual good humour; Russell speaks to Candace Weld, one of the college’s counsellors, who can only conclude that nothing is wrong, and Thassa is just a naturally happy person. At the same time, we read about Thomas Kurton, a biotechnologist with an evangelical zeal for his work in the field of genetics. Kurton’s current project is to isolate the genetic basis for happiness; when he hears about Thassa, he invites her to participate in his study – and soon she becomes public knowledge.

Generosity has a number of concerns, but the one that’s most prominent to me is stories. The novel is full of then: the creative nonfiction taught by Russell makes a story out of one’s life; media reporting makes a story out of science; science itself makes a story out of the stuff of the universe. The characters are presented to us through filters of story: we first encounter Thomas Kurton as a talking head in a science documentary; and there are frequent asides from the narrator (whose identity is unclear; it may be Richard Powers himself, or perhaps Russell Stone, or the science broadcaster Tonia Schiff, or someone else entirely) which emphasise the fictional nature of what we’re reading. The effect of this is to suggest that reality is mutable: our conceptions of the world change with the telling, and there is no escaping the web of story, however much we might think otherwise (some of the most effective passages in the book show this in action, describing the spread of information in an age when the boundary between public and private has all but dissolved).

This leads into another of Generosity’s main themes, which has to do with the ethics of science and its reporting. Powers is more concerned with dramatising questions than providing answers, and paints a complex picture: is it unethical for Thassa to profit from her genes, if it means that she can improve her family’s lot to a degree that would otherwise be impossible? When Kurton makes a song and dance in the media over his company’s research, is he feeding the flames of hype, or just doing what he has to do to get noticed in that day and age? Such issues never quite lose their shades of grey in the book, as characters are shown to both benefit and lose out from the choices they make.

I’ve been thinking about the characterisation in Generosity for some time, particularly that of Thassa. For one so charismatic with by definition an extraordinary personality, she comes across on the page as remarkably unremarkable – I never felt Thassa’s charisma when reading about her. At first, I considered this a problem, because generally I want to experience characters’ traits, rather than just read about them. But now I tend to think it’s a way of showing how this aspect of her character can be a space that other people fill in their own way; there’s a striking scene where Thassa makes an impassioned speech that spreads all over the internet, but we witness its detail only through the online reactions and imitations. Of the other characters, I found the depiction of Russell Stone particularly vivid; in some ways, he is the opposite of Thassa – where her personality faces naturally outwards, his turns inwards (when we first meet him on the train to work, Russell is described as being ‘dressed for being overlooked’). Over the course of the novel, Powers traces the (fairly complex) development of Russell’s character, as he becomes less withdrawn, but without shaking off his doubts.

Generosity leaves one with much to think about in a variety of areas, from ethical issues in science to the effects on people of being caught up in scientific change; from the place of story in the world to the effects of contemporary communication methods. Recommended.

Elsewhere
Richard Powers website
Generosity reviewed elsewhere: Paul Kincaid for Strange Horizons; Just William’s Luck; Word Travels; David Loftus for the California Literary Review.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country (2011)

11th March 2011 / / 8 Comments

Nat Segnit frames his debut novel as a walking guide by one Graham Underhill, a guide notable for the extent to which its fictional author’s personal life intrudes on the text. In the very first chapter/ramble, we learn how Underhill met his second wife, Sunita Bhattacahrya – fifteen years his junior – at Malvern Library, where he gallantly offered to pay her overdue fines; and so it continues. As the novel progresses, we discover under just how much strain the couple’s marriage was – not that Graham seemed to notice – until eventually Sunita goes missing, and the rambler turns searcher, setting out to look for her.

The voice of Graham Underhill as revealed in his guides is well-meaning but overly earnest and long-winded, with a tendency to digress into a personal anecdote or some less-than-relevant piece of trivia; one soon begins to see why Sunita might have begun to tire of him.  Much of the humour in Segnit’s book comes from the incongruous juxtaposition of the rambler’s-guide and novelistic idioms, and Graham’s apparent inability to take a hint; even as early as the second chapter, when Sunita announces, ‘I’ve had enough,’ there’s an undercurrent which suggests she is not just talking about this particular ramble – yet Graham can’t see this or any of the other signs which become increasingly plain to the reader.

Amusing as all this is, it would wear pretty thin over the course of an entire novel if that were all there was to it – particularly as it’s intrinsic to the book’s affect that Graham’s narration tries one’s patience at times – but what carries Pub Walks in Underhill Country home for me is how Segnit uses its very structure as a means of characterisation. Graham’s framing of episodes from his life as walking routes can be seen as his attempt to impose order on the world; this is ‘Underhill country’, after all, and rambling is the fulcrum of his life. As the pages turn by and the life Graham knows falls apart, his insistence on retaining the stylistic conventions he has established – the maps, the trivia, noting the character and strength of every beer he samples along the way – stops feeling like an amusing joke and starts to seem increasingly desperate, the action of a man grasping for any kind of stability. Still, in later chapters, Graham‘s narration becomes more and more straightforwardly novelistic (his control of the world slips); by the end, the distinction between life and pub walk comes to the verge of collapsing altogether, with the result that…

Well, it depends on what kind of man Graham Underhill is. He comes across as a bumbling, rather naive, ultimately rather tragic figure; but then again, our impression of Graham is filtered through both his subjectivity and the structures of the rambling-guide format. There are enough hints peppered throughout that weren’t not seeing everything of the real Underhill, and that a darker interpretation of the novel might be valid. Pub Walks in Underhill Country could have been too one-note and gimmicky, but touches like that ambiguity transform it into something far richer.

Yet Pub Walks is more than a fine read – it’s also an intriguing start to a literary career, because it makes one excited to read whatever Segnit writes next, whilst leaving a sense that he could go in just about any direction. Start reading him now, I’d say.

Links
Scotsman interview with Nat Segnit
Pub Walks in Underhill Country reviewed elsewhere: Tom at A Common Reader; Alfred Hickling for The Guardian.

Joyce Cary, ‘Umaru’ (1950)

6th March 2011 / / 2 Comments

The white Britsih officer commanding a detachment of black soldiers in Cameroon finds more in common with his sergeant than he had imagined. I quite liked the telling of this story, but didn’t, to be honest, find it particularly affecting. At five pages, I think ‘Umaru’ is too short for me to gain a proper impression of Cary’s work; but he has another, longer, piece later in the anthology, which may facilitate that.

Rating: ***

Archives

Browse posts by author, original language of book, or post category

© 2024 David's Book World

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

%d