Book Review: 1Q84 (Book Three) by Haruki Murakami

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Human beings are, by design, not objective. Everything we do, from how we view the colour of the sky to whether we like or don’t like a film, is influenced by a conflation of factors that go together to make us who we are.

Our problem with objectivity is that our expectations of what something will be like tend to influence how we perceive it. There have been many names and studies given to this sort of tendency, perhaps the most notable being the placebo effect. If an individual expects a pill to relieve their headache, they are more likely to report a lessening of the headache whether the pill has anything in it or not. A review of studies on cough medicine recently concluded that around 85% of their effectiveness related to the placebo and only 15% to the active ingredient itself. Indeed, a doctor once told me that the majority of a doctor’s job is to convey an impression of capability while letting nature takes its course and makes the patient better.

I find the problem of expectations influencing my perception is most clearly displayed in reviewing books. What I take into a reading experience doesn’t necessarily determine whether I like a book or not, but it plays a considerable role in how I feel about it afterwards.

I went into 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) expecting to love it. Murakami has, for years, been my go to author, the writer I pick up after a boring reading experience, the one who reminds me just why I love reading. Add in the media-hype surrounding this release and the privilege of receiving a pre-publication proof and I couldn’t wait to get started. Yet those who read my review of the first two books might have noticed that no matter how I tried to dress it up with analysis of the sociological issues it raised, I really didn’t enjoy the book. The level of disappointment I felt was directly related to the excitement I took with me into the book.

And this in turn carried over into my expectations for 1Q84 (Book Three). Whereas I took a level of excitement with me into Book One and Book Two, I approached Book Three almost entirely unenthused by the prospect. And I still didn’t enjoy the book. Yet as the excitement with which I approached Book One and Book Two influenced how I subsequently wrote about it, the boredom with which I approached 1Q84 (Book Three) has similarly influenced my this review.

Looking as objectively as I am capable of being (still subjective, I know) 1Q84 is a poor novel. Book Three has a new translator (Philip Gabriel this time), but it is the same tired, bland, repetitive prose. There are chapters where first one character thinks things through in a way that tells the reader exactly what they had already surmised, only for another character to do exactly the same in the next chapter. It’s tedious. I would go as far as to say that every single passage of reflection in the entire book – they are easily distinguished by being italicised and in the first person – could have been cut. They add nothing whatsoever.

There are other developments in Book Three: a new character, a detective named Ushikawa, joins the narrative cast and injects some life into the plot for a while, but cannot rescue the sinking ship. Supporting characters also come into their own, particularly Tamaru who by virtue of not having passages of rumination is one of the most interesting and likable. Otherwise the plot drifts onwards, apparently rudderless, and towards an entirely predictable conclusion.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2009, Murakami said he started writing 1Q84 with two thoughts in his mind: that the book would be about a man and woman searching for each other, and that he’d make “this simple story as long and complicated as possible”.

It rather seems that, in striving for the novel to be as long and complicated as possible, Murakami forgot to consider mundane factors such as the narrative arc, character development, or whether there is any point to it being long and complicated. Proust often appears in conversations, as though Murakami wishes to counter people who criticise 1Q84 for being too long, but it is a false comparison. This is not Proustian prose.

And on the other end of the scale, the book within a book, Air Chrysalis, is often described as a short novel, perfectly formed and lyrically written. In that sense it is like the best of Murakami’s works. 1Q84 is the antithesis of this. It groans under all its unnecessary weight, and the reader does likewise.

It is a conversation in Book One to which I return to sum it all up. When discussing Air Chrysalis, the editor says to Tengo: “People are left in a pool of mysterious question marks…Readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness’.” Tengo promptly replies that, “If an author succeeded in writing a story ‘put together in an exceptionally interesting way’ that ‘carries the reader along to the very end’ who could possibly call such a writer ‘lazy’.”

I entirely agree with Tengo’s reply. But 1Q84 does not leave the reader with question marks. It answers everything at every step of the way and bores the reader by doing so. Nor is it put together in an exceptionally interesting way – it alternates between two and then three characters viewpoints as they don’t really try to solve a mystery – and neither does it carry the reader along to the very end. It is long and complicated. I had to force myself to keep turning the pages, less out of excitement than need for the closure of completing the journey.

1Q84 (Book Three) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056
1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) were published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070.

Book Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Read: October-November 2010 (not completed)


Reviewed for Borewrimo, a month in which I aim to experiment with the form and purpose of book reviewing by writing 50,000 words of book reviews as short stories.

She begins in a fit of exuberance.

The Booker winner has just been announced and it comes as a complete surprise to her. She shouldn’t be surprised – she’s never once accurately predicted the winner – but she is. It was the only one she thought couldn’t possibly win.
Inevitably, she is delighted: it feels like a personal gift from the judges. Yesterday she would never have considered reading it; now she cannot wait to start.

She jogs home through crisply deserted streets. Stars visible in the clear autumn sky, cars keeping watch over the deserted urban landscape. Her head buzzes from too much elderflower cider and socialising. She cannot wait to be alone with that book in her hands. It is the lover she longs to undress.

As she takes it gently from the bag her nails trace its pages. She is ready for a life-changing experience.

***

Sometimes it is difficult to stay awake.

It becomes apparent after only a few short pages that this is not to be the literary panacea she imagined. It’s clunky in her hands and on her mind. They do not move gracefully together as lovers should, but fumble against each other without connection or intimacy.

Days later, she wonders why she started this. She should be more discerning, more circumspect. She should take other people’s advice and test the water first: read a page or two first, see whether the plot synopsis draws her in. Had she done so it would never have come to this. There were warning signs blazoned across the inside jacket: an overly long blurb that seemed to be attempting the exaggerated absurd without managing to make even the corner of her mouth twitch into a smile.

Had she only read page 100 she would have found this passage, so convoluted it sums up everything she comes to dislike about the book, and never read any further.

“Finkler, as it happened, was well aware of his old friend’s sons and felt warmly disposed to them, not impossibly because he was Treslove’s rival in fatherhood and unclehood as well as in everything else, and wanted to be seen to be making up to the boys for what their real father hadn’t given them. Making up the them and giving them a higher standard to judge by. Alf was the one he knew better, on account of an incident at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne – the gist of it being that Finkler had calculated on the Grand being a reliably romantic and discreet place to take a woman for a Friday night and Saturday morning – seagulls outside the windows and the other guests being too old to be able to place him or to do anything about it if they had – but he hadn’t calculated on finding Alf playing the piano during dinner.”

But that is not her way. She is all or nothing. A book is a projection of who she might be rather than who she is. She is interested in the story of why she has picked up a book perhaps more than the book itself. And so she finds herself in situations like this: stretched out in bed in the company of three aging men who neither excite, make her laugh, or even elicit sympathy.

The Finker Question is middle-aged male literature at its worst, a tawdry affair comprising little more than ambivalent sex and an absurd attempt by the protagonist Julian Teslove to manufacture a Jewish identity for himself. It is a biting satire about Jewishness – The Finkler Question of the title being Treslove’s private way of saying The Jewish Question – and society’s obsession with stereotyping certain groups with certain traits, but it’s too absurd to be meaningful and too flippant to find amusing.

Enjoying a leisurely walk home late one night, Julian Treslove is attacked, shoved against a shop window and mugged. Shocked by this unprovoked violence, his shame is further exacerbated by the discovery that his assailant is female. But as the days pass by he becomes troubled by another element of the attack. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he is sure she called him a Jew. A Jew! Could this have been a mistakenly anti-Semitic attack? He finds himself associating this violence with the violence he feels Jews must have suffered throughout history, and comes to identify with them.

Two things trouble her about this premise. Firstly, she cannot help but feel that the shock engendered by the mugger being a woman is symptomatic of the insipid maleness of the entire book. This makes her uneasy and ostracises her, not as a woman but as a human being who doesn’t understand the need to categorise men and women so starkly.

The second thing that troubles her is more practical: she knows nothing about Jewishness. Other than references to global political issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict she feels herself swimming against the tide. On every page, she imagines there to be some kind of Jewish joke being made, or else some subtle Jewish commentary, but it goes over her head. For all she can see, it is essentially about Treslove’s desire to find belonging in an otherwise disassociated life. In an intellectual sort of way, he’s sympathetic, as are his recently widowed friends. But it goes no further than this. She cannot care for them, cannot even whip-up disinterest.

She doesn’t hate it. She certainly doesn’t love it. But ambivalence is the worst response one can have to a book. She can barely be bothered to pick it up. Night after night she lies cradling it in her hands. Night after night she falls asleep mid-sentence. On not one of the twenty-four nights that she tosses and turns does she manage more than fifteen pages before drifting into peaceful sleep. Most nights it is more like five.

She tells herself:
“I’m overworked. By the time I get to bed I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s not the book. It’s me.”

She also tells herself:
“If reading were easy then it wouldn’t be so rewarding.”

She always finishes books. In her entire life she can only think of only three she has stopped before the end. And one of those was only because another book came along that she wanted to read more. Only this year she ploughed through 200 mind-numbingly dull pages of Gone with the Wind to find she could no-longer put it down. The memory of this keeps her returning to Treslove night after night in the hope that love will blossom from disinterest.

She reminds herself that it is only by finishing the book that she is able to say whether she liked it or not. It is only by reading the final word that she can make sense of what has preceded it. And yet. Doesn’t that suggest that reading should be utilitarian? Doesn’t that create the impression that reading is about the end rather than the means, thus denying the tenet she holds most dearly: reading for the enjoyment of reading.

She should stop and read something else. But she cannot let go. To stop feels like denying herself the chance to understand, to square the circle and make sense of it all.

So she ploughs on.

***

Her life has not been without trauma. She spent her teenage years watching on as others fell in and out of love, getting close to people she longed to know. Once, aged fourteen she joined a group of bullies in the homophobic abuse a lapsed friend. The memory of that day will never be forgotten. Another time she opened up to her parents and now cannot get over how vulnerable she feels around them, how much their caring eyes haunt her. And then of course, earlier this year, she found out she probably couldn’t have children.
Perhaps none of these equates to the trauma of being mugged by a woman, or suspecting it to be an anti-Semitic attack. She could not say. But her reaction to everything that takes place in The Finkler Question can be summed up in the shrug of her too heavy shoulders.

And then, one day, she finds she no longer cares. Like a tired elastic band her patience has been stretched too thin and breaks without whiplash. She doesn’t pick it up again

That it saps her love of reading until there is nothing left for a while feels like the biggest trauma of all. For weeks she does not start another book, finds herself doing anything but making time for reading.
It is not the books fault and neither is it hers. Sometimes relationships don’t work out the way we wish them to.

Next time, she says, I’ll be more careful about what I choose to read.

But what one month of disappointment destroyed, it takes barely 10 minutes in a bookshop to rebuild. And before she knows it, she’s careering off into another relationship without a care in the world.

The Finkler Question is published by Bloomsbury (307pp, ISBN: 9781408808870, £18.99)

Book Review: The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Read: April 2010

The Lessons in one Tweet-sized chunk:
An uncomfrotably familiar tale of youth, and how the lessons in life often come too late. 

“We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.”…

“Why would we do that?”…

“Because our lives are over, James. This is it. The end. We will never have a time like this again.”

These words, spoken by the erratic Mark Winters as his university course draws to a close, sum up one of the attitudes Naomi Alderman seeks to dispel in The Lessons: the pervasive and destructive notion that one’s university years constitute ‘the best days of your life.’ That saying, and all that it encompasses, is the raven perched perpetually upon a chamber door screeching “never more” at the characters, and as its words grow louder, so the desperate mania drives them on, tension building, towards something ominous.

James is a first year student at one of Oxford’s illustrious colleges. His older sister has told him how to get the most from Oxford but now that he is there he feels isolated and falling behind the pack. And when he injures his knee slipping on a patch of ice he finds that he can no longer keep up. Oxford, it seems, has broken him in one semester.

But things change for James when he meets Jess, a warm and generous girl who seems to like him. She introduces him to the wealthy and charismatic Mark Winters and his bright world of decadence, parties and love affairs quashes the blankness enveloping James. Together with Jess and a few others, James moves out of the college dorm and into Mark’s crumbling Georgian mansion, to share his charmed life. There they reside, a small group of close friends living on food delivered from Fortnum and Mason. But no matter how hard they seek to hide from it in the sequestered grandeur of that hidden house, life eventually catches up and when university ends they find that all their studying and parties have not prepared them for the difficulties of adult life.

The Lessons begins with a wonderfully vivid image of waste and excess, in which a feast has been cast into a swimming pool, with the greens and reds of a panettone’s crystilised fruit dissolving in the water. And throughout, there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen, that all the wealth and excess, all the stretched taut tensions will result in tragedy. Without being particularly sexual, it is full of with desire laden undercurrents that make it intensely erotic, and keep the reader turning the page compulsively.
There is a sense that Naomi Alderman, who received her first degree from Oxford, has experiences to exorcise from her time there, delusions about Oxford to challenge, and this comes through into the prose.

“What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile.”

Oxford does not fare well. Yet one of Alderman’s greatest achievements in The Lessons is that even with the very vivid descriptions that bring Oxford to life, she manages to convey a more universal depiction of university. The student’s attitudes, the mentality of newly won freedom clung to lest it evaporate in thin air. At times I felt that she was writing the words I had felt but not articulated, and this was incredibly powerful.
Just as Oxford’s spires loom large over the characters, two celebrated novels dominate The Lessons: Brideshead Revisited which has become almost a caricature of Oxford, and The Secret History, a tale of power and self-destruction in a similar closely knit group of students. With the former, there are a number of close plot and character resemblances.  James and Mark are essentially Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, and their homosexual undertone is brought into the foreground. Like Charles, James is a passive character, drawn to the powerful Flyte-like Mark, a troubled character for whom a wealthy and privileged upbringing has resulted in a dangerous lack of self control. His Catholicism, which he clings to fervently, has given him a world view of glorious suffering, of saviour and sacrifice which is reflected in his relationships with the surrogate family he gathers around him.

It is this surrogate family that most recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The characters of Jess, Emmanuella, Fran, Simon, James and Mark bear resemblance to those in The Secret History as does the texture of their interaction. Their group dynamics are familiar; there is an atmosphere in which independence and freedom are careering dangerously out of control. And, just as in The Secret History, the narrator is driven by an obsession with beauty. “Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot,” mentions James, as he thinks back not only to Oxford, but the lustre of wealth that so beguiled him. Like Richard in The Secret History, his fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” and each of them, drawn to a picturesque, emotive world they never dreamed of belonging to, sacrifices much of their selves in the process.

Yet while the resemblance to both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History is apparent, the latter is a slightly false one, for the characters in The Lessons pale in comparison to The Secret History. Emmanuella, particularly, seems lost to plot and narrative, but Fran, Simon and most frustratingly of all, Jess, lack a voice of their own. Of course, to a certain extent this is due to James’s obsession with Mark which prevents him seeing anyone else as a real person, but it is frustrating, nonetheless. They are massively undercooked, cardboard cut-outs to stand in the sidelines and tell us something about Mark and James, rather than fully rounded characters. James is a blank slate who seeks out a strong personality in whose reflection he can define himself. He’s similar, in many ways, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, with Mark playing the life of the party Gatsby-esque hero. But neither fully convinces. James is too blank, and Mark’s appeal is not always clear to the reader. Most of the time he comes across as a foolish rich boy without respect for anyone around him.

Similarly, while the roughly fifteen year scope of The Lessons is a virtue that allows it to introduce wider themes of university and life, the plot is not dense enough to surround the reader within it, and the narrative too short so that the tension and austere sense of place that builds up within the first half at Oxford gradually dissipates thereafter.

For this reason The Lessons is inherently flawed. The weak characters let it down and I felt it tailed off towards the end. It’s one of those novels that flatters to deceive, and as such doesn’t quite achieve all that it sets out to. Yet despite this, there is an ominous sense of impending doom which, combined with a well judged portrayal of the expectations of life which are contained within universities, make it a compelling and readable novel in which the lesson, in the end, is one of self discovery.

“What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.
But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.
The man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.”

7 out of 10

Viking, April 2010, 9780670916290, 280pp

This book is one of six Summer Reads chosen by Writers’ Centre Norwich this summer. For more information see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: The Widow's Tale - Mick Jackson

Read: January 2010

The Widow's Tale in  one tweet-sized chunk:
Refreshingly modest, The Widow's Tale takes you on a pilgrimage along the Norfolk coast with a wonderfully irascible narrator you cannot help but love.

Over Easter, Megan and I took a trip to the Norfolk coast, to Cromer and Wells and then back down through Walsingham to our beautiful medieval city of Norwich. Along the way we stopped off at a second hand book sale in a village hall in Cley, and another in a tiny village whose name I cannot now remember. The sky was hazy and grey, intermittently switching between spitting rain and long periods when the sun threatened to break through but never quite did. The early spring air carried a chill, blowing in off the North Sea. We had a lovely day, but what most enthralled me was catching a glimpse of the Norfolk of literature: horizons stretching for miles on end, liminal spaces in which it is unclear where sky ends and land begins. The landscapes of W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and now Mick Jackson. This is a place inextricably linked to memory, and forgetting. Getting lost, and finding oneself.

Although I first read The Widow’s Tale over New Year, it was only while travelling through the landscape that underpins it – the north Norfolk coast – that I came to understand just how important location is to the novel’s atmosphere. More than a backdrop, it plays the role of a second character, a refrain against which the widow’s journey can be balanced and understood.

The tale itself is a pretty straight forward one: a recently widowed woman leaves her house in London, packing a few things into a bag, and starts driving. Up the M11, on to the A11, through Norwich and on to the coast where she rents a cottage in a small village. It is winter and the cottage is tiny and cold. She’s not sure, but thinks she might be having a bit of a breakdown. She finds herself crying at the smallest things, cutting the power cord on the television, drinking more gin and tonic than she probably should. She’s not sleeping very well either. And it is the landscape that best explains her mindset.

I think that’s why I first fell for this part of East Anglia. You have the sense of so much sky above you. So much space. Which can be a bit overwhelming. One feels exposed, somehow – vulnerable. But the saltmarshes, which are actually a good deal greener than their name suggests, take the edge of the bleakness. They give it a kindness…Winter suits this landscape.

One could add that the Widow suits winter. And this landscape suits the Widow. Her emotions are raw, she is in mourning not just for her husband of forty years but the end of her life as she has come to know it. She is a little bit wild at the moment, but with kindness and vulnerability not far beneath the surface. We are not surprised to learn that their marriage had its share of problems, or that there seems to be a reason that she has come here of all places. Yet for all this association with landscape, it is a case of the setting making the character, rather than the other way around. The Widow’s Tale is primarily a character study, a one-woman piece in which everything exists to elucidate her mentality. After years of cohabitation, it seems, the Widow is finally getting the chance to be a little selfish.

She is a wonderfully irascible narrator with a deliciously acerbic sense of humour. Staunch, defiant, yet genuinely fascinated to find herself driven by emotions she is not in control of. She documents her travails as though surprised they are happening to her. This makes for an oddly hilarious novel. The comedy stemming not from the outlandish actions of our erstwhile narrator, but the idiosyncrasies of her situation and the warmth of her response to it.

Losing one’s husband is a complete bummer. But let’s look on the bright side. I’ve actually lost a little weight. Oh, there’s loss of all sorts going on around here.

She is full of witty little asides. Like the old Duke in Jackson’s Booker shortlisted debut, The Underground Man, she is on the edge, tipping variously between slight madness and profound sanity. She is wilful and belligerent and impossible not to like. Jackson has always been a darkly comic novelist even while writing about serious subjects, and this is his drollest yet. As with The Underground Man the result is a strangely compulsive page-turner. She is entrancing and Jackson writers well from the first person. adeptly navigating the nuances of raw emotion and bereavement, allowing her to wander aimlessly in search of whatever it is she needs to resume her life.

It is surely not a coincidence that Jackson titled this The Widow’s Tale, and like the band of pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so to the Widow is on her own kind of pilgrimage. Although she is far from religiously minded, her journey follows the tradition of pilgrimage as a means of recharging one’s batteries, of finding oneself and making sense of things. And at the heart of the novel she comes to Walsingham, a place of pilgrimage since the 11th century where she spends some time hoping to find inner peace.  What she most needs, it seems, is belief in the impossible truism that life goes on.

It’s an odd sort of word. Widow. I keep trying it on for size – widow’s weeds…widow’s walk…widow-woman – but I can’t say I’m especially enamoured. Rather vainly, I don’t consider myself sufficiently wizened. On the other hand, widowhood – that period of indefinable length which I have apparently now entered – sounds rather inviting. It conjures up a black cape or cloak, with a good-sized hood on it. Like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Actually, I think I’d look pretty good, wending my way across the windswept marshes. Although, all the billowing material would be bound to slow you down.

She may play around with the concept of being an old crone dressed in black, but the fact is that, like many widows, she’s only in her early sixties, with plenty of life left. She just needs to work out what that life might be. Through her, we are presented with a rarely heard voice and a rarely discussed life-adventure. Her voice is well researched and imagined, her journey an enthralling one. I read it in a single sitting.

Jackson recently told Richard Lea in The Guardian that he’s more interested in giving readers the type of read they want than winning literary prizes. And that is evident here, though many readers might wish for a few more sub-plots, save a slightly unconvincing love-affair. At times this sparsity of plot can feel a little lightweight. The Widow’s Tale is as far from the literary novel as it is the high-octane blockbuster. It is a self contained little tale, yet one which manages to make one smile at the same time.

For me, the landscape of the book is a pocket-guide to places on my doorstep, the little towns and villages I can visit on any given weekend. There are many more adventures to have in the footprints of this Widow. But the great thing about literature is that you don’t always need to visit in person. Just open the cover and you’ll find yourself walking the cold saltmarshes of the Norfolk coast in the wake of our charming heroin.


Faber and Faber, April 2010,  9780571206230, 246pp


7.5 out of 10

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