Tag: literature

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.

“Took the end of the world to make us kings for a day”

21st April 2013 / / 3 Comments

Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (2012)

Why write about the end of the world? I suppose one of the attractions, for some writers at least, must be the capacity to strip the world back to its bare bones, and focus all on the subjects one wants to explore. These thoughts crossed my mind on reading Peter Heller’s first novel, because The Dog Stars leans so far towards certain issues that the book as a whole gets pushed out of shape.

It is the near future, after a vaguely defined pandemic  that did away with most of the people, and a side-order of climate change that (it seems) did away with much of the wildlife (Heller is sketchy on exactly what happened, but the point is that it was the end of the world). Our narrator, Hig, is one of the small number of humans who were immune to the sickness and are now eking out a living as best they can. Hig’s sole companions are Jasper, his ageing dog; a little Cessna aircraft that he nicknames the Beast; and Bruce Bangley, the only other human for miles around. There’s not much to be done beyond surviving, as other people invariably tend to be hostile, and hence need to be dealt with before they deal with HIg and Bangley. But the loneliness gets to Hig, and eventually he is driven to jump in the Beast to see what, or who, may be out there.

Hig’s narrative voice is what keeps The Dog Stars together: the spare, weary voice of someone resigned to the possibility that there may be nothing left worth saying, but who feels compelled to carry on speaking as it keeps the silence at bay. Hig feels guilty because he survived when his wife Melissa did not – and because he was the one who helped her through death’s door when she asked. In contrast with the much more hard-headed survivalist Bangley, Hig would be happiest just spending time fishing and flying; but Bangley’s disdain for such “Recreating” is hard to ignore. The gulf between the two men is underlined by a sequence where Hig attacks a drinks truck for its bounty and thinks he’s done well – until Bangley tears his pride to shreds by pointing out all his careless mistakes.

If the novel were just Hig, Bangley, and Hig’s introspection, I suspect that The Dog Stars would be a perfectly decent read. But there’s a world beyond them, and I’m with Nina Allan in thinking that Heller falters whenever he turns his focus towards that outer world. I’m willing to overlook the sketchy background, because the foreground interests me more (though it seems odd for hostility to be the norm amongst the survivors when there appears to be enough food and other natural resources to go round). But I can’t ignore the issues with plotting (the closing encounter is far too silly); or the way that Cima, the only living female character, is objectified and generally exists only to serve as an adjunct to Hig.

But perhaps my most nagging doubt over Heller’s book is the thought that it doesn’t really need its post-apocalyptic setting, and might even be better off without it. Hig remarks on the first page:

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water. (p. 3)

This is the sticking point: Hig pines for his wife and his trout. He’s not so completely self-absorbed that he dismisses the wider world; but his personal losses are far more important to him than any broader ones. As a result, the novel doesn’t feel nearly as emotionally invested in its end-of-the-world elements as it is in Hig’s personal reflections. Despite its flaws, The Dog Stars is not a bad portrait of someone coming to terms with loss and finding a way to move on. But add in everything else, and the book just unbalances.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts on this year’s Award.

The Wasp Factory: Reading Iain Banks

10th April 2013 / / 3 Comments

If ever there were an author whom I wanted to go back and read from the beginning, it’s Iain Banks. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, but have never felt that I knew his work as well as I’d have liked. After the shocking announcement of Banks’s terminal cancer last week, there was an enormous outpouring of appreciation for his books, on Twitter and elsewhere (just look at his guestbook). This has spurred me on to start investigating Banks’s oeuvre properly.

One initiative that came about in the wake of last week’s news was the BanksRead forum, set up by my fellow book bloggers Alan and Annabel for discussion of Iain Banks’s work. I expect I’ll chip in there periodically, but my personal reading project is for this blog: I plan to go through Banks’s books in order, at the rate of one a month (we’ll see how it goes, but that’s the plan for now) – which means it’s finally time for me to read The Wasp Factory.

I saw Iain Banks at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2009, discussing his then-latest novel, Transition. His typically exuberant manner was very much at odds with the serious tone of the interviewer. I was reminded of this while reading The Wasp Factory because I started wondering how Banks’s debut might have seemed on its first publication back in 1984, how different it must surely have been compared with the rest of the literary scene at that time.

The Wasp Factory is narrated by the teenage Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his father on a remote Scottish island, and has a penchant for killing animals in inventive ways (he also killed three of his relatives when he was younger, but insists that was “just a phase”). The attic of the Cauldhame house contains the titular Wasp Factory; we don’t find out exactly what the Factory is until late in the novel, but we do know that it speaks to him, is important to him – and we can guess that it’s not going to be pleasant. Most of the novel is an exploration of Frank’s life and world; but there is also the plot hook that Frank’s brother Eric has escaped from his hospital, and is heading back home; his telephone calls to Frank punctuate the novel as indications that a reckoning is on its way – and we can guess that that won’t be pleasant, either.

Read in 2013, there’s still power in the vividness of The Wasp Factory’s violence (hiding a snake in his younger brother Paul’s artificial leg is just one example of what Frank gets up to); but I find myself thinking that I can’t make it “new”. I wish I’d read this book when I was younger, because I wonder what I would have thought of it. It strikes me as the kind of novel that, if read at the right age or in the right context, could change a person.

The edition of The Wasp Factory that I read comes with an introduction by Banks (dated 2008) in which he says that he thought of himself (as I believe he still does) as a science fiction writer first and foremost, even as he was writing The Wasp Factory: “The island could be envisaged as a planet, Frank…almost as an alien”. That kind of sensibility – a desire to confront and explore strangeness – is apparent all the way through the novel: Frank has his own personal geography for the island (with locations named after significant moments in his life) and his own way of looking at the world; there’s a gap of understanding for the reader to bridge, just as with a science fiction story.

Frank’s world may be unknown to the reader, but Banks also shows how much Frank doesn’t know about himself, how much he’s trapped in his own belief system. The protagonist is keen to deride Eric as an oddball, but is at the same time unaware of how idiiosyncractic his own thought and behaviour patterns are. Frank is not even as much the lord and master of his own domain as he thinks he is, as revealed by the closing twist.

Ah yes, the twist. I already knew what that was, because an audience member at the Cheltenham talk blithely gave it away in her question (“Hope that doesn’t spoil it for anyone!” cried the author). I didn’t mind – I’m not so bothered about knowing endings these days as I used to be – and it did let me see how Banks builds up towards the revelation. But, as I discovered, I actually only knew half the twist, and it led to some oddly dissonant moments when I tried to apply what I thought I knew to what I was reading. Of course there’s part of me that’s curious to know how I’d have reacted if I’d known nothing about the ending; but I don’t wonder about this as much as I do the original reception – I find the journey of the novel more powerful than the destination.

So, now I’ve read The Wasp Factory, what is my sense of the start of Banks’s career? From this remove, his debut feels like a prelude, but one with the promise of great things to come. I believe that the next two novels, Walking on Glass and The Bridge, are among Banks’s most highly regarded works; I’m glad to have embarked on this project, and am excited about its next stages.

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2013: The Shortlist

4th April 2013 / / 5 Comments

You can’t predict the Clarke Award, though you can try. Whatever anyone may have predicted, it almost certainly won’t have been the actual shortlist, which was announced this morning:

  • Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
  • Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
  • Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
  • The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
  • Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
  • 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

(Links above go to my reviews.)

In the end, I guessed four correctly – though, as Nina Allan points out, the two books I missed have given the actual shortlist a rather different shape. I have also read four of these novels already; so I can say with some certainty that, on its own terms, this is a good shortlist featuring some strong works.

Still, there is no getting away from the fact that this an all-male shortlist, the Clarke’s first since 1988. As Niall Harrison says, this is something that was probably bound to happen sooner or later. There’s been a chronic lack of science fiction by women published by UK genre imprints these last few years; if you look at this year’s Clarke submissions, the titles by women tend to be borderline fantasy (such as G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen), YA (such as Juliana Baggott’s Pure) or mainstream-published (such as Juli Zeh’s The Method) – all categories which are far more hit-and-miss in terms of their shortlisting chances than (say) a Tricia Sullivan or a Gwyneth Jones (neither of whom, I believe, has a UK publishing contract at the moment). When we look for genre sf among this year’s submissions, we’re looking at something like Madeline Ashby’s vN, which is simply not a good book – and, if you don’t have strong core-genre candidate titles, there’s more likelihood that the fringe titles with more hit-and-miss chances will – well, miss.

This situation should change next year, as there’s a substantially larger amount of genre sf by women being published in the UK in 2013 (Niall has a good list in his post). So, what of the books actually shortlisted this year?

For me, the shortlist falls interestingly into two halves. First, there are three genre titles – the Beckett, MacLeod and Robinson. It is notable that these books also featured on the shortlist for the (popular-vote) BSFA Award; and notable in turn that the Clarke omits the other two BSFA nominees – no M. John Harrison, no Adam Roberts. So there is a sense in which this side of the shortlist is playing it safe to an extent; Robinson, Beckett and MacLeod are all good writers who are serious about their work and the possibilities of science fiction (and I think two nominees of theirs that I’ve read deserve their places on the shortlist) – but all write firmly within the core of genre.

This is so striking to me because the other three shortlisted novels are all non-genre – an unusually high proportion for the Clarke, especially in recent years. There’s also an interesting range of flavours amongst them. It’s nice to see Harkaway getting some Clarke recognition after he missed out with The Gone-Away World; he’s a distinctive and significant new voice in contemporary fiction, I think. I’m pleased that Nod is on the list, because it hasn’t had much attention from the sf community as yet, and I think it’s an intriguing book that could have good cross-over appeal. I don’t know much about the Heller, but it looks like the most traditionally “mainstream” Clarke nominee, and I didn’t have it down as a contender.

Finally, my plans for blogging the shortlist: though I’ve read four of the titles, I have reviewed only three – I never got around to writing up Dark Eden. I’ll be concentrating on reading and reviewing the two unfamiliar titles,which are 2312 and The Dog Stars; if time allows, I will go back to Dark Eden. But I’m fully intending to have at least read all six titles by the announcement of the winner on 1 May.

Bookish travels

2nd April 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been away these last few days, and now it’s time for a catch-up. Last week was the third annual Penguin General Bloggers’ Evening, when a bunch of book bloggers and vloggers gathered together at Foyles in London to hear eight of Penguin’s authors read from their latest books.

My favourite reading of the night came from Bernardine Evaristo, who read a hilarious passage from her forthcoming novel Mr Loverman. This was one of those rare occasions when a single short reading was enough to make me want to read everything an author had written – Evaristo was that good. It was also a pleasure to hear Mohsin Hamid read from How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia; I liked the book anyway, but Hamid was an excellent reader who brought it to life for me once again.

Other highlights from the evening included James Robertson’s ominous extract from The Professor of Truth; Jonathan Coe’s amusing scene from Expo 58; and Joanna Rossiter reading the opening of The Sea Change, a book that I already wanted to read, and am now looking forward to reading even more.

***

Then, at the weekend, it was off to Bradford for this year’s Eastercon. It was good to catch up with people like Kev McVeigh and Ian Sales; to have a proper chat with Nina Allan and Chris Priest; and to meet new people, such as Anne Sudworth (who paints the most wonderful pictures) and Stephanie Saulter (whose debut novel Gemsigns sounds interesting).

I was particularly pleased to take part in the “Best Books of 2012” panel, where a group of us recommended some favourite reads from last year. I went for Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo; Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles; and Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass – and I was able to sneak in a bonus mention of Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child during the audience questions. I picked up a couple of recommendations myself from the rest of the panel: I’ve read Frances Hardinge before, but her latest sounds interesting; and I’m coming to think I should try something by Chuck Wendig.

The BSFA Awards were also announced during the weekend:

  • Best Novel: Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
  • Best Short Fiction: ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ by Ian Sales
  • Best Non-Fiction: The World SF Blog, edited by Lavie Tidhar
  • Best Artwork: Cover of Jack Glass, by Blacksheep

That’s a fine list of winners, a real vote of confidence in people who are concerned for the vitality of science fiction.

Now Eastercon is over for another year, and it’s back to reading (for the time being – I’ll be at the World Fantasy Convention this autumn, for instance). Now my attention turns to the Clarke Award, whose shortlist is announced in a couple of days. And it goes on…

Bookmunch’d: Alejandro Zambra and Sayed Kashua

28th March 2013 / / 2 Comments

Two recent reviews from Bookmunch:

Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2011/3)

Chile, 1985: as the neighbourhood gathers to shelter from an earthquake, a nine-year-old boy strikes up a sort of friendship with Claudia, the twelve-year-old niece of his neighbour Raúl. Claudia asks the boy to keep an eye on her uncle, and so he does – soon discovering that Raúl has frequent rendezvous with a mysterious woman. But no sooner has the boy prepared to reveal all to Claudia than she relieves him of his duties, and moves away.

This narrative then breaks off, and we meet a (similarly nameless) writer in the present day, who is apparently writing the noel we have been reading. He’s struggling to find his place in life, beset by a nagging feeling that his parents wrote the novel of the world, leaving his generation as “secondary characters”. The doubts and tensions raised by this feeling work their way into the writer’s novel, and this project becomes his focus – if he can get the novel right, maybe life will follow. We then return to the ‘fiction’ as, twenty years on, the boy-turned-man meets Claudia once more, and learns the truth.

Alejandro Zambra’s third novel (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) thus sets up a parallel between its two storylines. The young boy’s inability to grasp the realities behind adult interactions is nicely handled (as in the scene where he sees his father and Raúl talking about what he assumes to be “solitude”, but is presumably “solidarity”), as is his older self’s reaction to learning what was really going on in his childhood. But the two sides of the novel don’t quite seem to gel: the writer storyline doesn’t reach as far into its themes, which unbalances the book as a whole.

Any Cop? It’s a mixed bag. One half of the novel is good, but the other doesn’t quite match up to it.

Sayed Kashua, Exposure (2010/2)

Exposure is the story (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg) of two unnamed Arab citizens of Israel, both living in Jerusalem. One is a successful lawyer, who has made his wealth working on behalf of resident Arabs who are not citizens; his status gives him an informal, but valuable authority:

Without [Israeli Arab professionals]who would represent the residents of east Jerusalem and the surrounding villages in the Hebrew-speaking courts and tax authorities…Many of the locals preferred to be represented by someone who was a citizen of the state of Israel… Somehow, in the eyes of the locals, the Arab citizens of Israel were considered to be half-Jewish.

One day, on a whim, he buys a novel from the second-hand book store, and finds tucked inside it a love letter, unmistakably in his wife’s handwriting. The volume is inscribed “Yonatan”, and the lawyer becomes consumed with the question of who this unknown suitor might be.

Sayed Kashua’s second protagonist has been rather less lucky in life: he’s a social worker, whom we first meet as he’s burying the 28-year-old Yonatan. We discover that Yonatan had been in a coma, and the social worker had taken on the job of minding him at night – a thankless task, but also a relatively straightforward source of income that the social worker welcomed. Looking after Yonatan also gave him something else: the opportunity to assume the Jewish man’s identity when registering on a photography course.

Exposure works best as a study of identity, and how it may be used and abused. Both protagonists operate at the boundary between Arab and Jewish identities: the lawyer acts as an intermediary between the two; the social worker becomes able to cross from one to the other. The comatose Yonatan becomes an anonymous canvas on which both men can project an identity: the lawyer creates a target for his jealous hatred, while social worker reinvents himself.

Kashua’s novel is not quite so successful in terms of plot, though. There are a couple of coincidences too many for it to satisfy as a mystery; and when the two men’s stories finally converge, it doesn’t seem to add much. Whatever the destination, though, the journey is worth it.

Any Cop?: As a study of character and issues, certainly; as a mystery story, less so.

“To leverage is to be immortal”

25th March 2013 / / 7 Comments

Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)

It’s been a good few years since I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but I can still recall the experience quite vividly. What lingers most in my memory, though, more so than any details of the plot, is the way it is told: that measured, reasonable voice telling its story to a stranger at a Lahore café. Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is also framed as a text directly addressed to someone, but the roles are reversed: the teller is the anonymous figure, and the addressee is the protagonist. Hamid’s marvellous control of voice remains, however.

Hamid’s unnamed protagonist, the ‘you’ of the novel, is a boy born into poverty who, from the first, is presented as someone who wants to get on in life:

Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been taken away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you’ve never in your life seen any of these things. (p. 4)

He has a general desire for something that he cannot name, but it’s something beyond the life’s basic needs. He does indeed get there eventually, through hard work and no small amount of pragmatism: the boy’s background denies him access to the little privileges that would make university life smoother, so he gains power by joining a political group – and leaves again when the time is right; later, he spots a business opportunity in the shape of bottled water, and it is with this that he ultimately makes his fortune.

Pragmatism, it seems to me, is a theme running through the entire book; at various levels, we see characters doing what they need to make the best of their situation. When the boy is born, his father is at first reluctant to move the family from the village to the city, but is eventually persuaded that it’s the thing to do. A video retailer has equipment in the back for making bespoke pirate DVDs, as he finds it’s the best way to meet the demands of his customers. As more and more people take advantage of good fortune, there has emerged “a hypertrophying middle class, bulging from the otherwise scrawny body of the population like a teenager’s overdeveloped bicep” (p. 150).

There’s a certain sense of unease about that image I’ve just quoted, and it’s one of several points in Hamid’s novel to give a feeling that not all is rosy. The text is framed as being a self-help book, but its narrator is quick to point out the limitations of such books. The terms ‘filthy rich’ and ‘rising Asia’ are used so repetitively that they start to lose real meaning – suggesting, perhaps, that there’s no such thing as an easy fortune, and that maybe ‘rising Asia’ isn’t necessarily rising for everyone. And, for all that he eventually gains, there’s a sense that the boy never quite has what he truly wants.

What he wants is represented by a pretty girl he first meets as a teenager, and again at various points during their lives, when she has become a model, and afterwards (whatever her age, she is always ‘the pretty girl’ to him). It’s not (quite) that he wants her for a lover and she’s unattainable – they sleep together more than once, but that doesn’t blossom into a relationship – it’s that she symbolises a different path in life, one where he might have followed his heart rather than pursuing wealth. The tension of conflicting goals is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of his life.

Hamid’s use of the second person, and his keeping the protagonist essentially anonymous, despite taking us through the man’s life results in an interesting effect, as the character is by turns brought closer to us and pushed further away. But the prose, and the brisk pace the author sets, make the events of his protagonist’s life leap from the page. We end up with a whirlwind tour of a society, refracted through the experience of one individual. So that’s another Mohsin Hamid novel I can’t imagine forgetting.

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