Review: ‘Wild Swans’ by Jung Chang
When I was at secondary school we had a lovely chemistry teacher who would cunningly arrange school trips to places that she really wanted to visit herself. She organised skiing trips to Canada and America which I happily ignored, but then when I was fourteen a letter went home about a proposed trip to China. My parents thought about it and decided that China wasn’t somewhere we would ever go on holiday as a family and so this was a great opportunity to visit an amazing country that I would never otherwise see. So few people responded that the tour company offered to run a longer trip for us visiting places that we wouldn’t be able to go if there had been a big party, and so I spent an incredible two weeks over the Easter holiday travelling around China by overnight sleeper train and (somewhat hair-raisingly) minibus, taking in as much as we could of the vast country in such a short space of time. Naturally, this was accompanied by a great many books on the subject, but at fourteen I hankered after stories of legendary emperors, warriors and concubines, and so Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang passed me by, being both too political and too recent to hold as much appeal. I’m not sure what made me pick it up now (I suspect it was because I was reorganising my shelves and it struck me as a book that was taking up quite a lot of space without having been tried and tested to see if it deserved that) but whatever it was, I’m glad I did.
Wild Swans chronicles the lives of three generations of the women of the author’s family, from 1909 to 1991. The book begins with her grandmother, who became a concubine to a local warlord at her father’s insistence. After the warlord’s death, she flees from his house where she has been forced to live with his other wives and concubines, taking with her her baby daughter, Jung Chang’s mother. In spite of family disapproval, she gets married to a Manchu doctor who gives everything up to live in poverty with her. Jung Chang’s mother grows up in an area of China which is under Japanese rule and the Chinese people are considered second class citizens. An intelligent girl, she is recruited by the Communist resistence and begins working towards a free, egalitarian China. She falls in love with a young Communist party member and they have several children, including Jung Chang herself, but each regime change, relocation or shift of opinion brings renewed suspicions, even for those as devoted to the cause as Chang’s parents and so she grows up amid the violence, intimidation and uncertainty of the Cultural Revolution.
This book blew me away with its scope, its attention to detail and the way that it made everything make sense. I had a vague notion of life in Communist China before reading Wild Swans but this book made me able to see how and why everything happened, the subtle shifts and insidious changes as well as the grand sweeping ones which lead to the situation in China being what it was.
As an outsider, I’ve only ever seen the end product, but Wild Swans makes it perfectly clear that Communism in China was a very positive thing when it set out. Its aims were clear, its systems logical and its demands for gender and social equality admirable. Given that Jung Chang has provided the reader with a context in which to set this by describing the story of her grandmother, sold by her father as a concubine for political and financial gain, the changes seem all the more attractive. This is where the book excels: although Chang talks about the political changes that take place, these are inextricably linked with the very personal, relateable stories of the lives of herself and her family. It transforms the political ideas and dictates from abstract notions into concrete things which have a real and immediate impact on the family. It’s all well and good to read about family members being split up as the party sends them to different locations, but it makes it real and heartbreaking to read about Chang’s elderly grandmother journeying across China, largely on foot, to be with her daughter only to be sent back to her home town almost immediately, or Chang’s mother miscarrying from the harsh journeying conditions because her husband refuses to favour her by letting her ride with him in his car as she is of a lower rank than he is.
Chang manages to describe a time that is very confusing politically and to convey that turmoil and uncertainty without once confusing me as a reader. Her prose is lucid and quite spare but very effective. Wild Swans is the perfect blend of the personal and the political and is an amazing testament to the powers of endurance and the integrity of all of Chang’s family, not just the women. It is at once a compelling story and a fascinating, insightful account of life in a time and place so different it’s like reading about another world.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. Published by Flamingo, 1993, pp. 696. Originally published in 1991.
Review: ‘The Prince of Mist’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Usually, I never go anywhere without a book, but on the recent bank holiday Monday I inexplicably found myself in Bournemouth with three and a half hours to kill before that evening’s Bellowhead concert and no book with which to attack them. It’s probably because I travel everywhere by train so I’m used to needing at least one book (although best to have two in case of delays), but on this particular occasion the Old English Thorn and I had driven to our destination and so I found myself in the unusual situation of being bookless. What could we possibly do under the circumstances but buy something to read? Unperturbed, we headed to the nearest Waterstones to pick up something to fortify us for the next few hours while we waited for our concert to begin, and emerged with the first two books of Brent Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy and The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Zafon’s first book to be published in English, The Shadow of the Wind, was one of my favourite books that I read last year. I’d picked it up from the university campus Waterstones (long since closed) back in my first year and it had remained unread on my shelves for the next five years, but as The Prince of Mist was needed for immediate emergency reading thankfully it was spared such a fate.
The Prince of Mist tells the story of Max and his family who move from the city to a sleepy seaside town in order to avoid the effects of the war. Max and his elder sister Alicia soon make friends with Roland, a local boy who shows them around and takes them diving by the wreck of an old cargo ship. However, though the town is quiet the Carver family house is full of mystery and has a tragic past. The statues in the walled garden seem to move, a strange cat adopts the family and voices can be heard in the walls. Then disaster strikes, causing Max and Alicia to be left alone in the house to face the enigmatic Prince of Mist.
One of the things that I remember about The Shadow of the Wind is how well Zafon conjures up atmosphere, and The Prince of Mist continues that; although it is a young adult book and a very swift read it is gripping and immersive. The contrast between the quiet, unthreatening setting where Max cycles around on his own, buys sticky buns from the bakery and ‘gossip moved at the speed of boredom‘ (p. 140) and the chilling atmosphere which accompanies the main action of the story is cleverly achieved. The supernatural elements seem even more eerie because of the stark way in which they stand out against the cheerful little town which Max’s father has specifically (and ironically) chosen as somewhere to keep his family safe.
Although this is the third of Zafon’s books to be translated into English, it was his first novel in Spanish, and it lacks some of the polish of The Shadow of the Wind (although this may partially be because of the different target audience). There are several aspects of the novel which would benefit from a clearer, more defined explanation. Amongst other things, I wanted to know why the statues in Max’s garden kept moving and what was the significance of that beyond general menace. I enjoy a bit of supernatural ambiguity in novels like this, but in The Prince of Mist it felt less like deliberate concealment for dramatic effect and more like things which just weren’t explained. Apparently this is the first book in a trilogy, so I can only hope that some of these things are expanded more fully in the later books. Nonetheless, Zafon writes a compelling story and I shall be continuing to collect them as they are translated into English.
The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves. Published by Phoenix, 2011, pp. 213. Originally published in 2006.
June Summary
Every month I claim that this will be the one when I finally get up to date with reviews, but I think it’s finally time to admit that I am a very, very long way behind now. However, I’m considering this a positive thing as the time is looming near when I’m not going to have time to devour books at quite the rate I usually do as my time is monopolised by moving house and wedding and honeymoon things. With any luck, I’ll be able to keep scheduling reviews to pop up while I’m away so you won’t even know I’m gone.
Yet again, June has seen me busily sorting out wedding things; every time I think we’ve got it all done someone thinks of something else that we need to organise. On top of that, we’ve been battling against the church beaurocracy which is making things unnecessarily difficult for us for a number of reasons, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed and holding our thumbs that it all works out.
June has been a mixed month for books, there being a fairly even spread of books that were great, books I really enjoyed and books that were just ok. As in May, I only managed 13 books this month, totalling 3,968 pages. Although I read some pretty chunky ones, this was balanced out with some much smaller volumes in between, averaging out at 305 pages per book. This month I read:
- Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg
- Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss
- Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham
- Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey*
- Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter
- Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson
- Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov
- The Pleasures of English Food by Alan Davidson
- The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret C. Sullivan
- Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy
- The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn
Rather surprisingly, the best book I read this month was the first one: Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg. I picked it up expecting something light and entertaining, but while it was definitely entertaining it was actually rather insightful and the narrative voice of Daisy Fay is just captivating. I also really enjoyed Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey although that was no surprise as I’ve read it before in 2009. It’s a huge, sweeping fantasy book set in a world which is an alternative middle ages Europe and I found it just as absorbing on the second reading as it was on the first.
Additionally this month I’ve enjoyed American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which was good but not as good as I wanted it to be; I returned to Winifred Holtby’s Yorkshire in Anderby Wold which shows the beginning of the themes and ideas which are so beautifully expressed in South Riding; I continued watching the antics of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia which was delightful, if not my favourite of the series; and, although I don’t think he’s ever likely to become a favourite author, I conquered my fear of Thomas Hardy by reading his Wessex Tales. The short story format and very pretty Folio Society edition that I read might have helped with that last one.
As in any month, there were some books which I found less appealing. In fact, it was a month of disappointing follow up books as three of the duff books were by authors that I’ve really enjoyed in the past. The Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss was nowhere near as entertaining as his previous novels about the camp, roguish spy Lucifer Box; Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham was rather a let down after how much I liked my first book of his, Up at the Villa; and I loved Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin last year but the sequel Penguin Lost unfortunately left me cold. The top of the list of shame is The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn, a historical novel about Catherine Parr but written in a bizarrely modern idiom. I couldn’t get into it at all, and it’s saved me buying any of her other books, some of which had seemed quite tempting before so at least it’s done a service to the TBR pile.
Speaking of the TBR pile, I’ve been really rather restrained (for me) in my book buying this month: just 13 new books have found their way into the house, 4 of which I’ve since read. I was given a copy of Virago’s reissue of Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby at the Virago Book Club meeting discussing South Riding and I started reading that almost as soon as I got it. I bought Living Dolls by Natasha Walter from Amazon and read it immediately, in anticipation of last night’s Virago Book Club event with the author. Swiftly after that, I bought Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey (also from Amazon) to act as a sort of reading antidote for Walter’s book. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami came from Amazon in anticipation of a new book club which is being started up near where I work. Sadly I can’t make the first meeting, but it’s introduced me to a really interesting new-to-me author as I think I’ve benefitted in the long run.
Then there’s the books that I haven’t yet got round to reading. I purchased Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons from Amazon as I want to read it quite soon after reading the terrible House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb, which it satirises, so the original is still fresh in my mind. From one of the second hand book shops along Charing Cross Road I have picked up The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby, as the more I read of her the more I want to read; New York Mosaic by Isabel Bolton which I’d never heard of but looks rather interesting; and Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell, who I didn’t know wrote anything other than medieval scholarship until I spotted this little novel. From charity shops for the princely sum of £1 each I bought Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo (a Spanish novel of 18th century France), The Stone Boudoir by Theresa Maggio (a book about the little villages in Sicily that tourists never visit) and My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin (a Virago; need I say more?). The bargain of the month has to be a brand new hardback copy of Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil which I loved, which I snapped up for a mere 49p in The Works. It’s too heavy for train reading but I can’t wait till I have time to pick it up.
Review: ‘The House at Riverton’ by Kate Morton
As you might have guessed from the enormous delay between finishing this book and a review actually appearing here, I’ve been rather busy recently. What with emergency dentist appointments, being ill, making wedding invitations and all the familycommitments which inevitably accompany a slew of bank holidays, I’ve been rushing hither and yon with very little time for reading (or indeed reviewing). I needed something light to read that wouldn’t be too difficult to pick up and put down again in the little bits of time I could snatch for reading, but I didn’t want to abandon my April aim of reading some chunkier books. I’ve had Kate Morton’s first two novels sat on my shelves since last year when the posters for her third book The Distant Hours first made me aware of this writer, and at nearly 600 pages of what promised to be an entertaining but untaxing English-country-house-with-a-secret novel book number one fit the bill rather nicely. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to dive into The House at Riverton.
The House at Riverton is the story of Grace, once a housemaid at Riverton and later lady’s maid to Hannah Hartford. Now an elderly lady, she finds herself looking back on her life and the memories of the tragedies that she has tried to forget for so long begin to surface, in part prompted by a visit from a filmmaker who is directing a film about the goings on at Riverton. But only Grace is left who knows what really happened.
This is a tricky book to review. I enjoyed it and found the story engaging and the conclusion pleasing. I raced through it in the time it usually takes to read a books half this size, which is impressive considering the numerous distractions that the book was up against. Morton conjures up the changing eras well, reflecting the huge shifts in priorities, ideas and societal norms from the pre war years, through the Great War and into the roaring twenties. Her writing has that sense of nostalgia which always makes me temporarily wish I could live inside the novel, despite that fact that a) I would miss modern technology too much and b) cleraly I would have been a servant, not a fine lady with a country house. It is an entertaining read and, all in all, a promising debut novel. However, I had several problems with The House at Riverton which prevented me from finding it a really great book, and it is much easier to put my finger on what these niggles were than on what makes it such a good read, so this is going to come off as a somewhat negative review when I actually really liked the book, I’m looking forward to reading The Forgotten Garden and would reccommend it to people looking for a quick, absorbing read. It’s a conundrum.
The book starts out with, in my opinion, a huge mistake. It opens thus:
Last November I had a nightmare.
It was 1924 and I was at Riverton again. (p. 3)
Naturally, this instantly brings to mind the famous opening line of what is the quintessential English-country-house-with-a-dark-secret novel, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The conscious mimicing of such a well known beginning creates a certain set of expectations which, unfortunately, The House at Riverton never quite lives up to. Yes, it’s a novel in the same genre and yes, it’s good, but Rebecca it isn’t. Which is a shame, because I don’t think I’d have been quite as disappointed by the novel not quite being what I had hoped if it hadn’t encouraged me itself to set my hopes so high.
Kate Morton writes a good story, but I didn’t necessarily feel that she had it entirely under control at all times. I’m all for layers in a novel, but here there are were so many strands of mystery and so many Dark Secrets that sometimes it becomes difficult to feel any specific anxiety about any of them. A Dark Secret will be hinted at, but then abandoned as Morton focuses on one of the other aspects of the book or a different Dark Secret, and while her writing is sufficiently skilful that this is never confusing, it dissipates much of the tension which might have been created. Instead of worrying about all of these things I found myself unable to worry over much about any of them most of the time. I felt a vague sense of impending doom thanks to the numerous explicit statements that doom was indeed impending (I really hope this is something that improves; subtelty is key in conjouring up the sort of atmosphere which makes the best gothic country house novels) but I feel the story might have benefitted from a sharper focus to the doom at times.
I also found Morton’s writing style to be not entirely to my tastes. She has a fondness for using lots of short sentences (it is quite rare for a sentence to have more than two clauses), many of which are predicate sentences which lack a subject for the verb. She is particularly keen on the single sentence paragraph, usually used at the end of a section or chapter to emphasise the aformentioned impending doom, such as ‘But by then the seed was sown‘ (p. 318). All of these have their place and can be incredibly effective when employed judiciously, but having the majority of the writing in this style feels jerky and stilted. I personally would have preferred it had some of these odd little sentences been joined together to make the writing flow more elegantly. The book is saved, however, by having lots of dialogue which Morton writes extremely well and believeably, and so I only had to wade through the stop-start short sentences occasionally rather than continuously.
My final niggle was the abandoning of the first person narrator when it became inconvenient for the story. On the whole, I think that the use of Grace as a mouthpiece was excellent: as a servant she is well placed to observe what goes on and people happily talk in front of her (though admittedly I don’t think it would have been quite as free as in the novel) but she is still removed from most of the direct action and so provides an outside perspective for the reader. This works well for most of the novel, but later the stroy develops in such a way that Grace cannot always be present watching and listening to important events and so these sections are related in the third person. Morton partially works around this by having Grace explain that other people later told her what happened, but the descriptions of what happened and how people felt and thought are too detailed for this to be believeable. While I understand the need to work around the limitations of a first person narrator, I wish it could have been accomplished in a different way which hadn’t made me feel as though the author was taking over Grace’s story for a bit and then giving it back to her when it was convenient.
I think that’s the most negative sounding review I’ve ever written for a book to which I’ve given four stars, but these are small things which just prevent the book from achieving its full potential. I can’t wait to read more of Kate Morton to see if experience has improved on any of these things, but even if not, I bet I’ll still really enjoy the book.
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton. Published by Pan, 2007, pp. 599. First published in 2006.
Review: ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
You might remember that back in April my random number generator selected The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for my TBR Lucky Dip book that month. I know April seems a long time ago now, but this book has finally worked its way to the top of my review queue.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes comprises twelve short stories chronicling the escapades of Sherlock Holmes, as told by Dr John Watson. Although the scenarios are all very different, each follows the same formula: a client comes to visit Holmes, usually with Watson conveniently there too, in a degree of agitation and bringing news of a seemingly impossible mystery. Holmes then makes deductions and conducts cursory investigations, usually while leaving the reader and the hapless Watson mostly in the dark, before everything is revealed to work out exactly as he suspects all along.
This is an enjoyable collection of short stories. Although I appreciate that arrogance and intellectual superiority are an integral part of the character of Sherlock Holmes and one of the main factors contributing to his appeal, I found this much less irritating in the short story format than he can sometimes become in the longer novels. Because the narratives are shorter, there is no time for quite as much opaqueness and so many meaningful silences; instead, they race entertainingly from knotty problem through speedy investigation to brilliant revelation. Impressed as I am by Sherlock Holmes after reading this volume, I am far more impressed with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for inventing such a variety of different situations and mysteries for his fictional detective to solve.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Published by Penguin, 2007, pp. 365. Originally published in serial, 1891-1892.
Review: ‘Alexander’s Bridge’ by Willa Cather
When you come across the name of an author that you’re certain you’re going to love, how do you decide where to start with reading their work? With the exception of books which have a series order which I will always follow religiously I have never consciously decided to read an author’s work in any particular order. But when I found Alexander’s Bridge in my hands and turned it over to read on the back cover that it was Willa Cather’s first novel I thought it might be interesting to start at the very beginning (for it is, as Julie Andrews teaches us, a very good place to start).
Alexander’s Bridge tells the story of Bartley Alexander, an American engineer famed for building bridges. He lives a perfect life in Boston with his loving, supportive wife Winifred. However, his life starts to unravel when business takes him to London and he meets Hilda Burgoyne, an Irish actress with whom he had been in love when he was younger. He begins to question how happy he really is and soon finds himself divided in two and under the terrible strain of leading a double life.
It seems that I picked a particularly interesting author for my reading in order experiment, as Cather later distanced herself from this first novel of hers, saying that it ‘does not deal with the kind of subject matter in which I now find myself most at home‘ (p. v) and that:
The difference in quality in the two books is an illustration of the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own. Everything is new to the young writer, and everything seems equally personal. That which is outside his deepest experience, which he observes and studies, often seems more vital than that which he knows well, because he regards it with all the excitement of discovery. (p. v)
She continues: ‘The writer, at the beginning of his career, is often more interested in his discoveries about his art than in the homely truths which have been about him from his cradle.’ (p. vi) Certainly, this book was not what I was expecting from what I have heard about Cather’s later and more famous works. Alexander’s Bridge has quite an urban focus, which I hadn’t anticipated, and the way that it develops puts me in mind more of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence than what I had been awaiting from Cather. The plot does feel a little strained at times, and this may well be because she is trying to mimic other literature than to write her own, although equally it may reflect the tensions between the characters, echoed in the bridges that Alexander builds.
However, I do not agree that this makes Alexander’s Bridge a book filled with ‘youthful vanities and gaudy extravagances’ (p. vii) as Cather terms these early works of a writer; although the plot is somewhat lacking there are moments in the writing of quiet introspection and deep beauty. For all it feels as though she is writing someone else’s plot, she still does so from her own perspective and with her own perceptive vocabulary, allowing the emotions of her characters to shine through in a way that is instantly understandable. Take, for instance, her description of Bartley Alexander’s thoughts as he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his perfect life:
His existence was becoming a network of great and little details. He had expected that success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought him only power that was in itself another kind of restraint. He had always meant to keep his personal liberty at all costs… He happened to be a engaged in a work of public utility, but he was not willing to become a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honours and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of the middle life which confronted him — of that he was afraid. It was like being buried alive. (pp. 49-50)
Moments like this one make the novel worth reading, despite the disappointing storyline. It shows a thoughtfulness, an insight and an awareness of humanity which hopefully develops into something really special in her later works. I can’t wait to continue on my journey through Cather.
Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather. Published by Virago, 1990, pp. 176. Originally published in 1912.
Review: ‘Our Tragic Universe’ by Scarlett Thomas
Every week, W. H. Smith’s offers one relatively recent paperback title for only £2.99 when you buy the Times newspaper and, if it’s a book that looks interesting, I tend to take advantage of the offer. I’m not sure why, as inevitably I then read the book and completely ignore the newspaper, thus making it not quite such a good deal, but somehow that always seems besides the point when faced with a shiny new book that I want to investigate. It was this offer which lead to me buying The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas several years ago. I’d never heard of the author or the book before, but I was irresistibly drawn in by the combination of literary theory and weird science that it promised. Although her books are a long way outside of my usual comfort zone (the chief feature of which is a nice, linear plot) I find her writing addictive and so I was eagerly awaiting the paperback publication of her most recent novel Our Tragic Universe when I was spared having to buy a copy by winning a free review copy from LibraryThing.
As Our Tragic Universe is a book about storyless stories, providing a plot summary is next to impossible so I’m going to cheat and use the one from the back of the book this time:
It Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever. But who would want that? Certainly not Meg, a bright spark trapped in a hopeless relationship. But if she can work out the connection between a wild beast on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe, she might just find a way out.
Thomas’ novels that I’ve read have never been about the plot so much as they have the ideas contained within it and this one, if you couldn’t already tell from that blurb, is no exception. In fact, Our Tragic Universe takes this even further by having probably the most plot elements of any of her books so far, none of which really come to anything. There is Meg’s friend Libby’s unhappy relationship in which she vacillates between her lover and her long term partner, which remains unresolved as the novel draws to a close. Meg’s own humdrum relationship with her boyfriend, Christopher, which might be a major point in any other book, is a non-issue even after she leaves him in order to concentrate on her work. Events just sort of take place on the sidelines rather than being important in any way.
Character is similarly unimportant, the most distinctive character in the entire book being Meg’s dog Bess (surely one of the most appealing and lifelike dogs in literature), although an honourable mention goes to Christopher’s brother Josh. It is interesting that these are both secondary characters however, and none of the people that one might expect to be significant and well developed are particularly distinguishable.
The important part of Our Tragic Universe is the bizarre theories and philosophies that it contains. With Thomas’ books it is impossible to say at what point unlikely fact becomes improbably theory and improbable theory becomes crazy fiction, but frankly I never care because it’s all so confusing and fascinating at the same time. In this particular instance, the theory is that at the end of the universe there will be so much energy compressed into such a small space that it will be used to create a new universe in which everyone who has ever lived will exist eternally. This leads on to questions about the point of existence and the nature of reality and, as in The End of Mr. Y, these theories somehow end up being linked to literature and fiction, what it is and what it does:
In Newman’s never-ending universe there’d be time to write an infinite amount of novels, and even finish reading all the books I’d ever begun, and all the books I’d never begun. But who’d care about fiction any more? We only need fiction because we die.
Later on, Meg and a friend debate the comparative merits of unpredictable storyless stories over familiar, formulaic fiction:
You should read Aristotle again, because he tells you not just how to write those bottle-of-oil stories, but proper, meaningful tragedies. And yes, they’re predictable too, sort of. But he says that one of the key things the writer has to do is to make the person who hears or reads the story feel astonished, even though the story itself has a formula and is written in accordance with cause and effect. It’s a great art to make someone surprised to see the picture, and even more surprised when they realise they had all the pieces all along.
This is a rather apt quotation as, abstract as this novel is, it does feel a bit as though Scarlett Thomas essentially writes the same book over and over again, possibly for the very reason that it is the ideas which drive her books rather than the more usual forces of plot and character. All of the narrators feel as though they are variations on Thomas herself (the author gave up smoking while writing this book and ate a lot of clementines instead, so naturally Meg does the same) and you could replace the name ‘Meg’ with the name ‘Ariel’ in this book and it would slot quite happily into The End of Mr. Y without there being any jarring character differences. However, strangely, I don’t mind this at all. Because, as these books don’t feel as though they’re written for plot and characters, I don’t read them for those things. I read them for the wonderful, imaginative, crazy ideas that Thomas has and that she continues to experiment with and expand with each of her books that I encounter. These never fail to surprise, for all the reader has the pieces all along.
Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas. Published by Canongate, 2011, pp. 428. Originally published in 2010.
Review: ‘Wedding Tiers’ by Trisha Ashley
A while ago, I spent a very unpleasant morning paying my dentist a great deal of money to cause me a great deal of pain. What I thought would be a simple (hah!) wisdom tooth extraction ended up as a surgical procedure, complete with opening my gums, shaving bits of bone off my jaw, and finally stitching me back together again. Curse you, parents, for your horrible tooth genetics! I spent the weekend afterwards drifting in and out of sleep thanks to some very strong painkillers, so I needed to select a book I could read without it mattering that I might suddenly fall asleep as I would be able to pick it up again without any confusion when I woke up again. I needed something uncomplicated and familiar, which didn’t make any demands on me as a painkiller-addled reader but which was still entertaining. With this in mind, I decided it was high time to dig into the pile of wedding related chick lit that I’ve accumulated and Wedding Tiers by Trisha Ashley was the one that I selected in my hour of need.
Josie Gray is a thirty-something woman living an idyllic life in the small Lancashire village of Neatslake. She lives in her grandmother’s old cottage with her childhood sweetheart, Ben, growing and trading for as much of their produce as possible, and supplementing their income with Josie’s weird wedding cakes, her column for the cult magazine Skint Old Northern Woman and Ben’s occasional artwork sales. When Josie’s oldest friend Libby returns to the village and decides to launch a wedding business in the nearby manor house, Josie becomes drawn in to help. However, Ben is spending more and more time in London and soon it transpires that he has been less than honest with Josie, leaving her disillusioned. She vows never to believe in love again, but photographer Noah Sephton seems determined to change her mind.
There are no surprises in this book but, to be honest, I didn’t expect any. The plot was formulaic but then it usually is in this type of book, and that was exactly why I read it when I wasn’t feeling up to much mental exertion. It’s a book which just requires to relax and enjoy being entertained. Because entertaining it is, for all I knew what would hapen before I opened the book. Ashley may follow a preordained plot, but the setting in which she chooses to place it is rather lovely. I enjoyed reading about Josie’s homely life in the country with her chickens, her bartering and her gardening. Her kitchen activities, making jams and wines and various cakes and biscuits are particularly appealing and the recipes at the back of the book make this aspect of the novel seem particularly real and important, enabling the reader to follow suit if they so choose. Baking is something that I love doing, given half a chance, so I was able to relate to that and it engaged my interest.
The society surrounding Josie is also rather sweet and pleasant to read about. The secondary characters all have individual personalities, from the three eccentric Grace sisters who knit, crochet and embroider for all they’re worth to womanising soap star Rob to Josie’s loyal uncle Harry who takes great delight in outliving his friends. Although none of them are particularly realistic, they add colour and interest to the story.
If Josie herself were any more dense she would have her own gravitational pull. Even if this hadn’t been the sort of novel in which it is a truth universally acknowledged that the seemingly perfect boyfriend with whom the heroine begins the book will turn out to be an utter bastard by the halfway mark, I could have guessed that Ben was having an affair long before Josie does. In fact, she never does manage to guess, despite a number of hints to that effect which are as subtle as being hit with a brick, and eventually has to be told. Later on in the novel she proves equally dim when new romantic opportunities present themselves. Had she not been such a likeable character for other reasons she would have been very annoying, but as it stands she is saved by her sweetness and by the charm and wit she displays in the excerpts from her magazine column which begin each chapter.
I’m not exactly sure what Ashley was trying to add by introducing a subplot of potential incest. It doesn’t add tension because this is clearly the sort of pastel covered book in which everything works out for the best and no one gets hurt (except ex-boyfriends, who get what they deserve, naturally), it isn’t treated sensitively and seems to be a sort of throwaway plot device which is resolved so quickly and effortlessly that it seems pretty pointless. In fact, I found it rather distasteful and an incongruously serious subject for such a fluffy novel.
Incest aside, I rather enjoyed the distraction from dental pain provided by this light, fun, quick read. It’s a good, solid example of the genre and a pleasant way to spend a lazy afternoon when you don’t want to think too much.
Wedding Tiers by Trisha Ashley. Published by Avon, 2009,pp. 414. First edition.
Review: ‘Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons’ by Gerald Durrell
Evidently I was feeling in an avian mood when I read this book, as I followed Patrick Suskind’s The Pigeon with another book featuring pigeons: this time it was Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons by Gerald Durrell. Not deliberate, I swear. Gerald Durrell is one of my favourite authors to turn to when I want to read something entertaining and well-written but not particularly mentally taxing. He writes just the sort of light-hearted books that I was in need of when some rather painful dental problems arose, and this title seemed the most appealing at the time.
In this particular volume of Durrell’s memoirs of his journeys he travels to Mauritius with the dual aim of educating a Mauritian student in the conservation of the local wildlife and catching some of the more endangered species to take back to his Jersey zoo to start breeding programmes. It sees him and his companions encountering marijuana growers in the high forests and scrambling around on exposed rocky islands chasing after skinks, all told with Durrell’s characteristic humour and flair for recounting anecdotes.
This isn’t my favourite of Durrell’s books that I’ve read so far, probably because it seems to focus more on the zoological aspects of Durrell’s expedition than some of his other books. Although Durrell’s animal stories are wonderful, it’s his descriptions of human antics that accompany them which I enjoy the most and I think the balance between the two isn’t as even in Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons as in others, particularly his Corfu stories.
Nonetheless, it remains an entertaining book, not least because of some worrying illustrations of Gerald Durrell in the sort of terrifyingly short shorts worn only by teenage girls and British men of a certain age when on holiday in hot countries where they think no one will notice. Dodgy clothing choices aside, his stories never fail to elicit a chuckle. His account of chasing skinks over Round Island is a joy to read, and he is able to characterise animals in an unfailingly vivid and comic manner. Take for example his description of some monkeys:
We rounded one corner and came unexpectedly upon a troop of eight Macaque monkeys, sitting at the side of the road, their piggy eyes and air of untrustworthy arrogance making them look exactly like a board meeting of one of the less reliable consortiums in the City of London.
Although it may not have been my favourite of his memoirs, Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons has reaffirmed Gerald Durrell’s place in my heart and on my bookshelf as a sure writer for a cheering book.
Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons by Gerald Durrell. Published by Fontana, 1979, pp. 157. Originally published in 1977.
Review: ‘The Pigeon’ by Patrick Suskind
Patrick Suskind is an author better known for his book Perfume (one which I have on my shelves but have not yet managed to read). Although I’m trying not to buy books by authors I already have on the TBR pile unless it’s for the cause of completing a series, I found myself unable to resist this tiny hardback Bloomsbury Classic edition of The Pigeon when I spotted it for less than £1 in one of the Charing Cross Road book shops. My guilt at buying it was assuaged somewhat by reading it from start to finish on the train home, so it was never really added to the TBR pile. It may be a short book, but it’s a rather peculiar one.
The Pigeon tells the story of one day in the life of Jonathan Noel, a man whose existence is ordered to a fault. He lost his parents when he was much younger during the war when he and his sister went into hiding, later went into the army and then moved to Paris where he took a small room and a job as a bank security guard, both of which he has held for twenty years at the beginning of the story. He is content because of rather than in spite of his solitary, regimented existence, until the day when he opens his door in the morning to find a pigeon sitting outside. Unable to follow his routine, Jonathan finds himself thrown into chaos as he is forced to leave his sanctuary of order and face the outside world.
The story begins in a way that instantly establishes Jonathan’s character:
At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again — other than death some day. And that was perfectly alright with him. For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life.
This may seem hyperbolic, but is in fact perfectly in keeping with his reaction to the ominously named ‘pigeon affair’. The seemingly harmless occurrence jolts him out of his secure and ordered regime, and Suskind does an excellent job of showing Johnathan’s deteriorating mental state as his thoughts and actions become increasingly frantic, and fairly mundane occurrences assume augmented significance in his mind.
I don’t want to say any more, as I think this is a book best discovered for oneself, but I definitely recommend it as an effective short story. Lots of reviews compare it to Kafka and Poe, but as I’m not really familiar with either of these writers I can’t agree or disagree. Perhaps I should become familiar with them if this story is anything to go by.
The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, translated from the German by Alfred A. Knopf. Published by Bloomsbury, 1995, pp. 124. Originally published in 1987.