Bears of England - Mick Jackson

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: September 2009

Bears of England in one Tweet-sized chunk:
Bears of England is a feast of fabricated mythology, 8 quirky tales of England and the maligned bears who lived alongside (and sometimes underneath) it.

“In the days before electric light and oil lamps the night imposed its own abysmal tyranny, and daylight’s surrender was measured out in strict division. Sunset gave way to Twilight, just as Evening preceded Candle-Time. Bedtime was hope’s last bastion. Beyond that, there was nothing but Dead of Night…

Filled to the brim with every sort of ignorance and superstition, no Englishman would dare venture out at Dead of Night, for fear of being swallowed up by it. Every door was locked and bolted, and remained so right through those awful hours, until deliverance finally arrived at first cock-crow. Prior to that, every scratch and scrape, every rattle of leaf was thought to be the work of some demon, some twisted malevolence out among the trees. And in the villagers’ imagination that evil found its more common incarnation in the form of Spirit Bears.”

Bears of England is a veritable feast of fabricated mythological history. It is about the England we all imagine to have once existed, (full of warm ale pubs and windy moors, mysterious happenings and small village communities) and the maligned beasts who lived along-side – and sometimes underneath – it. The relationship begins with the Spirit Bears of the above passage, whose nocturnal escapades so terrify villagers that they resort to offering a living sacrifice to placate them. And in subsequent chapters this fear leads to short lived idolisation, followed swiftly by vilification, mistreatment, persecution, and slavery. There are the Sin Eating Bears of Early English life who “partake of bread and ale before a house in mourning, and in so doing, take on the sins of the departed prior to their Judgement Day.” Then we have the baited bears and circus bears kept hostage and forced to perform for the enjoyment of their human masters; the Civilian Bears who manage to live unnoticed alongside us; the Sewer Bears imprisoned under Victorian London to keep the excrement flowing out into the Thames. It is no wonder that one by one they escape the drudgery for years of deep hibernation. And then the rousing finale…which you will have to read for yourself!

Indeed, rather than read what I think of this wonderfully strange imaginary bestiary, why not make up your own mind instead? You can listen to Mick Jackson reading from the second chapter, Sin Eating Bears, at Guardian Books. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/26/bears-of-england-mick-jackson)? It’s a far better use of the next fifteen minutes than reading my prattle.

(But for those who have already listened to it, I will continue…)

I first came across Mick Jackson about eighteen months ago, and he has since become one of my very favourite authors. His debut novel, Underground Man ranks right up there with Waterland by Graham Swift in the pantheon of great short-listed titles not to have gone on to win the Booker Prize. It is a charmingly eccentric tale of an ageing English aristocrat obsessed with his own mortality and his slow slide into madness. Subsequent novel, Five Boys, and collection of short stories, Ten Sorry Tales, have confirmed his cult status as the most enjoyably peculiar writers around.

Bears of England is no different. It is a veritable cornucopia of delightful one-liners and playfully dark imagery. Reading it is like looking at life in a cracked mirror: everything is there but nothing feels quite real. It is familiar though, as though these are half forgotten folk tales passed down through the ages. They have the essence of Victorian ghost stories read around a fire in a cold living room in the depths of winter. You know it is all fictional yet cannot help believing every word.

This is partly due to the beautiful illustrations by David Roberts which really bring the stories to life. His bears are giant beasts with long sharp claws and small uncertain eyes which seem to remember all that has happened before and await with resignation whatever is to come next. There is a fabulous two page spread towards the end, which sees hundreds of these bears crossing the landscape in the dead of night. It is really quite beautiful.

The only possible criticism that can be levelled at is is that Bears of England is a little too short. It is the canapé of the literary world: very enjoyable, very moreish, but you can’t help wish there was a little more of it. Just five or six more stories to flesh it out, so that you could enjoy reading a little longer. £12.99 is quite expensive too, for so short a book.

Yet it is equally possible that it is this brevity which makes Bears of England so enjoyable. The fact that you can read one or two of the stories on a twenty minute bus ride and still have time to look out of the window is refreshing. They are snippets, little more than quirky anecdotes really. Yet they are rewarding and enjoyable to read. Enticing even. I spent months eagerly awaiting its release, and a further month while Amazon traced my lost shipment, but when finally it arrived, it lived up to all my expectations. I love Mick Jackson, I loved this book, and I’m sure you will too.

7.5 out of 10

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

Taking us underground into the subterranean World War One tunnels in which it is set, this novel gives us a first hand view of the unimaginable battle raging just below the surface. In Sebastian Faulks trusted way, Birdsong is set on the cusp of transformation, comparing the rural and traditional with the modern technological world and studying how people coped with this startling transformation in their external lives. This is a flawed love story, but one which resonates underground when all the lights have gone out. I would advise everyone to buy this book, regardless of their literary taste. You will find few novels so brimming with humanity, in all its forms.

7.5 out of 10

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Read: January 2007

Like a fellow Bloomsbury publishing sensation, this is a book about magic. But while Harry Potter’s magical world is glitzy, exciting and full of dramatic wand waving, the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is dark, dour and academic. It is a startling achievement to produce such a wonderfully unique view of magic. Susanna Clarke has littered this book with wonderful settings, original ideas and a gloriously imaginative plot. It is just a shame that she is not a great writer. The prose is languid, uninspiring and clunky, the characters two-dimensional and the novel about 500 pages too long.

It is rare to read a book which has such a clearly wonderful idea and it is testament to the brilliance of the authors imagination that she was able to make it feel like a dark, gothic library full of shimmering ghosts and half remembered history. This is a good book, just not a well written one.


6 out of 10

Engelby - Sebastian Faulks

Read: April 2007

Engleby is one of the most uncomfortable books I have read in a long time. Partly because it is impossible to believe it is a Sebastian Faulks novel, and partly because of it's subject matter. For you see, the Sebastian Faulks of Birdsong ilk has now written a satirical contemporary 'Diary of a Madman'. It is so difficult to reconcile these two styles that you are never entirely certain whether it is all a gimmick.

The novel follows Michael ‘Toilet’ Engleby through the course of his life: from poor upbringing, through boarding school bullying and University obsession to successful Fleet Street Journalism. But as Mike’s mind begins to unravel, so too does the plot, as Mike slowly gives away the terrifying reality of what may have happened.

Engleby, in many respects, seems to have been written as the British answer to American Psycho. In fact, Engleby should really have the subtitle of British Psycho. The progress of Faulks latest offering so markedly reflects Bret Easton Ellis famous liturgy of eighties American consumerism that it is disconcerting. It is a rehash, both in the focus on a self-deluding insanity of the main character and the way in which the story is told. As with American Psycho there is an inescapable sense that nothing taking place is real. Walk on parts for Jeffrey Archer, Ken Livingston and Margaret Thatcher only exaggerate the sense that this is all taking place in the mind of a madman. In each the character is sustained by alcohol and drugs, discusses pop music ad nauseum and finds his opinions increasingly important.

What differences there are stem from the differences in the cultural target of the satire. The national stereotypes portrayed are used in each to satirise the dominant view of society. Where the American Psycho (Patrick Bateman) is brash and boastful, Engleby is shy and retiring. Where Bateman is driven by perverted misogyny and greed, Engleby is oddly asexual and almost ashamed by material possessions. Where Bateman is absorbed in the 1980’s sham, Engleby is mildly disgusted by it all, all of life. While Bateman finds power in the cultural mainstream, Engleby is obsessed with big ideas and complex philosophical concepts. Where Bateman swears, Engleby finds foul language slightly distasteful. Where Bateman is ‘created’ by his privileged upbringing, Engleby’s psychosis seems to stem from his boarding school traumas. These national stereotypes serve to highlight the target of the satire, the purpose of the book.

‘Engleby’ is a complete transformation of genre for Sebastian Faulks. You have to applaud him for the bravery and bravado with which he has burst from his niche. The problem is that it is not a great book.

The main problem with ‘Engleby’ is that Faulks is not satisfied with his new direction, is not able to end the book where it should end. No, in fine literary style he has to explain Engleby’s condition to us, assuage any uneasiness in the reader by making it all smooth at the end. This lack of editorial guts turns what would otherwise be an awkward but absorbing novel into a sham expose on modern life. It is as though with one hand he is making an interesting point on the fine line between sanity and insanity in modern hypocritical Britain, and with the other easing any disconcerting thoughts by making sure we know it all turns out fine in the end. The reader is left with conflicting emotions and intellectual stagnation. This flaccid purposeless ending is what makes this such a bad book.

On the plus side, there is a complex, slowly unwinding plot about which you always suspect the ending but cannot help but read on captivated until it is happening before you. There are points of startling exactitude, little observations which demonstrate the author's keen eye. The prose is succinct and deliberate and he suceeds in drawing disparate strands together in a complex and interweaving plot. Were it to end on page 269 'Engelby' would be a fascinating read. But it is those final three chapters, the psychoanalysis of a personality disorder which ruins everything proceeding it.

There is a point, early on, in which Engleby disdainfully lambastes a series of artist's ‘late works’ as “another way of saying feeble work”. You have to wonder whether that is what 'Engelby' is.

I hope that in five years we will look back on this as one of those examples of a writer successfully jumping out of their box and dazzling the world with their dexterity. Sadly, I fear the critics may just have a field day

4 out of 10

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

Read: October 2007

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I hovered, unseen above the events taking place, deliciously voyeuristic, as the vines crept closer and the night began to wane. An orange glow flickered on the sea breeze and all too soon I realised I was dreaming.

For there is no returning to Manderley, you cannot unread the books you have read. Such a shame since Rebecca is a novel to delight in endlessly, there is so much left unsaid, so much more you want to discover. It is a masterpiece of atmospheric storytelling and quietly creepy imagery. The simplicity of its narrative style is matched by a fast paced and exciting plot which is never quite what you expect it to be. Rebecca is, in short, a fabulous novel, so enthralling it will enshroud you like a vast curtain flapping in the evening breeze.

The narrator and protagonist – whose first name we never know - begins the novel in Monte Carlo working as a companion to a stubborn old lady with pretensions of grandeur. There she meets Max de Winter, owner of one of the most beautiful estates in England, a man whose legendary wife Rebecca recently drowned in a boating accident. When he suddenly proposes she is shocked and delighted, liberated from her tedious companion and whisked away on a brief honeymoon in Italy. But all too soon they return to Manderley and the new Mrs de Winter is confronted by the haunting spectre of Rebecca whose memory resides in every single brick and blade of grass in the entire estate. Rebecca, whose grip on Manderley was absolute when she was alive seems to have maintained all of her dominance even in death. Rebecca the enigma, whose mystery seems almost as great as her personality. Servants compare the new Mrs de Winter with Rebecca, house guests are constantly judging her, and all the while Max is growing more and more withdrawn. Despite her best efforts the hauntingly perfect beauty of Manderley gradually grows stronger, and with it comes the realisation that she can never compete with the memory of a dead woman.

But there are secrets surrounding Rebecca, and it is only a matter of time before they begin to float to the surface. This is a fabulous novel, the perfect combination of beautiful imagery, exciting plot and fantastic characters. Read it now.


9 out of 10

Spies - Michael Frayn

Read: November 2007

“Everything is as it was; and everything has changed.”

It is summertime, and an unknown scent awakens in Stephen memories of his youth. And when he discovers that the smell is Liguster, or ordinary English privet, Stephen is unable to ignore the flood of recollections about a particular summer when the simplicity of his childhood was curtailed by a series of events whose results still trouble him today. So begins Michael Frayn’s Whitbread Novel of the year winning book Spies, which investigates the lives of Stephen and his best friend Keith as their summer games uncover a secret which touches a nerve right at the heart of their community.

Stephen and Keith are average young boys growing up during wartime Britain with its rationing and its blackouts and its bomb damage. Whenever they get a free moment between homework and dinner and chores they play together in the neighbourhood, concocting grand schemes with which to make their mark on the world. But then, one day out of nowhere, Keith utters six words which change everything: "my mother is a German spy." And what begins as a childhood detective game quickly becomes caught up in mysteries which they soon realise may have been better left undiscovered. Because some things cannot be unlearned, just like childhood can never be renewed.

With Spies, Micahel Frayn collected the 2002 Whitbread novel of the year award only to be pipped to the overall book of the year prize by his wife Claire Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys. And you can see why he won the award, Spies is the sort of book which often wins literary prizes: a novel which is at once technically exceptional, carefully considered, deceptively simple and which rewards re-reading. The story is both simpler and infinitely more complex than either Stephen or the reader can ever hope to conceive, and the personal twist at the end is quietly evocative of everything that has gone before: undramatic, and yet earth shattering, like a bomb exploding underground. At 233 pages it is a small, perfectly contained, firecracker of a novel which everyone I know loved.

But I did not. Is there something I missed growing up? I don't remember any of these moments of discovery that you find littered around literature; those deeply disquieting discoveries through which the world is revealed to be so much more, and less, than you ever imagined. It is that notion that childhood was always leading somewhere, like a yellow brick road culminating in the adult here and now. But it was not like that, at least for me. Childhood was small, self contained and eternal, a way of thinking and seeing the world which slowly ebbed away to be replaced imperceptibly with a different concept of the world built by a thousand tiny events.

It seems to me that novels about childhood discovery are limited by one major obstacle: they are written by adults. Adults who have grown into adults, who no longer think like a child and as such impose adult order onto events which held only randomness, and chaos. But maybe that is just me.

And anyway, the point of this novel is that it is the story of the now elderly Stephen as he struggles to understand what his childhood self thought of the events at the time. And he repeatedly comes across barriers to understanding, both related to the fading of his memories and the transience of growing up.

There is virtually nothing to criticise Spies for. It is well written and intriguing and the mystery is complex, well conceived with much left unsaid. But I found it slightly empty of the greatness other had proclaimed for it, a good book without being exceptional. Nonetheless it is well worth reading, if for nothing else than to learn exactly how to contain, plan, structure and set a novel.


6.5 out of 10

The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton

Read: May 2008

In a review on Waterstone's.com, my esteemed former colleague Henry Coningsby (writing what is probably the best sentence I have read on that site) claims that “the mind of G.K. Chesterton is perhaps best compared to an ocean of champagne: there is vastness, there is effervescence - and, if you're not used to it, the effect can be quite overpowering.” I am delighted to report that after only one chapter of this glorious book I was thoroughly, inexplicably, wonderfully, light-headedly, drunk. The Man Who Was Thursday plots the adventures of Gabriel Syme, a poet and policeman who goes undercover in the Central European Council of Anarchists. But once he has taken up the role of Thursday on that secret council, he begins to discover that he is not, as he first imagined himself to be, alone amongst enemies. It is all rather more complicated than that. And, in the course of a wild, time bending journey across London and northern France to prevent an anarchistic bombing, the black and white forces of order and disorder come together in battle, with the result that those opposing, black and white forces become a whole lot more grey. Chesterton has made much of the fact that he subtitled this novel A Nightmare. He likes to play the jester, to support the notion that this book is something like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a weird and wacky journey through a masked world of uncertainty, whose culmination is waking up once more to a world of nature, and of hope, and peace. He wrote it at a time when he suffered depression and it is almost as though he is writing himself happy again. But there is too much here to sum it up simply as a nightmare. The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the most all-encompassing novels I have read. If it is a nightmare, then at the same time it is a blissful daydream and a deep, restful sleep. And probably all the levels of wakefulness as well. It is a riotously funny and enthralling, farcical adventure and at the same time a book with more ideas bristling about than hairs protruding from an old English Gentleman’s ears. The real characters in this book are not Syme and his fellow council members, but the ideas they debate. Moral anarchy, nihilism, the moral ambiguity of force and many others are thoroughly turned over, and all in only 200 pages. And the ideas are not only intelligent, they are hilarious. There are even reports that reading this book is prescribed by psychiatrists for the treatment of depression! I can see why; it certainly made me laugh out loud, and could, I suspect, have renewed my faith in mankind amidst even the roughest of times. Take this dialogue from the first chapter: “’Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.’ ‘There again,’ said Syme irritably, ‘what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be seasick...Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It's mere vomiting...It is things going right...that is poetical!’” And so much of it is like this: quick witted, inteligent, thought provoking. I thought I had worked out the plot from about half-way, and in one sense I had. But then it went on and on, the ideas are mind boggling, and all taken to a level further than any other book I have ever read. With every page the plot twists and turns; from secret underground lairs, and seafront battles, to elephant chases across London and hot air balloons over the shires. With all the ideas bubbling around in my brain I was light-headed, amazed, enchanted. I sat there nodding along with Gabriel Syme’s witty repost, his very British Gentlemanly style, and eccentricities, and concerns. And the result of all this? I am disorientated, still trying to work through everything in my mind. I am overpowered by Chesterton’s wit, his love of ideas, his thick satirical pen. Like an English turn-of-the-century Castch-22 this is a riotous novel I cannot wait to re-read. And I am not sure if one is meant to agree so completely with Syme’s world-view – perhaps Chesterton is laughing at me from wherever he now is – but I have not felt my own thoughts represented on paper so clearly for an awfully long time. It is almost impossible to write a review of this book. It is too good to pin down with normal words. You must read it yourself to see what I mean. It is as Jonathan Lethem writes in the Modern Library Classics edition introduction, “How do you autopsy a somersault? G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the great stunts ever performed in literary space, one still unfurling anytime you glance at it”. It has been said that Chesterton is “the master who left no masterpiece.” I cannot comment on any of his other work, but if this is not a masterpiece, then I don’t know what is. 9.5 out of 10

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

Read: June 2008
Like a thickly growing forest, The Bloody Chamber is almost impenetrably dense: you read a line, read it again, read it a third time and still feel yourself thoroughly lost. You look around and feel the moon looming full overhead, hear voices in the darkness around you. The Bloody Chamber takes you into the darkest corners of the forest and the highest ramparts of the castle, where lust is violent, retribution bloody, love passionate, and nobody can hear you scream. In the Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter re-imagines some of our most familiar fairy tales, imbuing them sensuously and seductively with modern significance. Like a werewolf creeping up behind you, the fairy tales of our lore are given fresh twists you will not see coming. I particularly enjoyed the humour of Puss-in-Boots, but each of the tales is intriguing. You have Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, vampires, werewolves, all retold in language that is dark, gothic, erotic, funny, tragic and thought provoking. They are not just retold fairy tales with a feminist twist (although that they are), but are fabulously embodied, immediate and powerful pieces of writing. These tales are old, as old as time, and they read like that. Carter holds a mirror up to our wildest desires and most terrifying nightmares to produce a series of rich tales the like of which you will not read anywhere else.


6.5 out of 10