Book Review: Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor

Read: March 2010
 

They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.  

The air is cold and vice-like, the sky a scouring steel-eyed blue, the trees bleached bone-white in the frosted light of the sun. We stand in a huddle by the bolted door.  

Prose this good – this sparingly, articulately, precisely composed – does not come along every day. Jon McGregor has long been considered one of finest lyrical novelists of his generation, and Even the Dogs is his best novel yet. Taut, controlled, uncomfortable, the prose grips you like a vice from the first sentence and doesn’t let go. At times the vividness of the winter-frozen air takes one's breath away. I will be shocked if it doesn’t carry away a major prize this year.

When he was alive, Robert Radcliffe was an obese and lonely alcoholic who hadn’t been outside his dilapidated flat in years. But he is dead now, found by two police officers putrefying amidst the broken glass and bottles and cans and blankets and clothes and car tyres on his living room floor. His skin is swollen and softening, an “oily pool of fluids spreading across the floor.”

Statutory procedures kick in. They take him away to a mortuary, conduct a post-mortem, hold an inquest, and cremate his rotten body. It is quick, efficient. More attention than Robert has received for years.

We gather together in the room, sitting, standing, leaning against the wall, and we wait. For the morning. For someone to come back. For something to happen.
Waiting is one thing we’re good at, as it happens.
We’ve had a lot of practice.
We’ve got the time.
We’ve got all the time in the world.

We follow the progress of his body through that nameless city, accompanied by a disembodied chorus of mourners who seem to have known him when he was alive. But who are they? They speak in an eerily inclusive first person plural voice, ghost-like and omniscient, drifting from one scene to another without the encumbrance of a physical form. Over five chapters we follow the corpse on it’s final journey, dipping into the past to understand how he came to this fate, assembling fragmentary portraits of Robert, and those friends of his now watching on.

These narratives flow like a film script. Montages, reminiscences, shots fading in and out of focus. We see Robert as a younger man, with his partner Yvonne, lovingly setting up home together, bathing their daughter. Life, love, sex. But things start to go wrong. Robert has undiagnosed headaches and takes to drinking. Yvonne leaves, taking Laura with her. Robert stays put, awaiting their return. At some point, others arrive: squatters, addicts, the disenfranchised. There is Danny, an inexperienced young heroin addict who first discovers the body and needs to find someone to tell. Heather, with a third eye tattooed on her ageing forehead. Mike, a paranoid schizophrenic Scouser. Steve, ex-army, alcoholic, never forgets to lay his socks out to dry. Ant, Ben, Jamesie, Maggie. And, of course, Laura. One by one they step into focus and we hear their stories from their point of view, fuelled by defiance, anger, resentment, hope, shame, gratitude, comradeship, obsession.

What emerges is a harsh and unflinching vision of life on the margins of society. Well-researched and – I’m told by those who know such things – impressively true to life, it is about addiction that leaves you shaking, diarrhetic, desperate for another fix. Addiction that consumes and contorts life to its satisfaction. Addiction full of earth shattering lows and orgasmic highs, each repeating themselves day in day out, month in month out, year in year out. It is an inherently human tale, told in the characters' own voices, unflinching in content or conclusion. Taking his queue from authors such as James Kelman and William Faulkner the dialect is contracted and ugly, yet perceptive and with internal cadences all of its own. There is no effort to shock, or explain. Only to understand. And perhaps bear witness.

There’s a haunting ethereal quality to the narrative, an urgent need driving it forward even as it swirls and loops about and jumps backwards and forwards, in and out of character. It is a book that is difficult to describe without accidentally putting readers off. So next time you are in a bookshop, pick it up and read the first couple of pages, and see what you think. The prose will get you, even if this review does not.

Indeed, so fine are the words within this short novel it seems inappropriate to mention the book as a physical product. Yet it is also one of the most beautiful books I have ever held. Published in a new 'bendyback' format that is halfway between hardback and paperback, and bound in a cloth jacket that contributes an almost three dimensional effect to the blooming yellow flowers sprouting against a slate-grey sky, Even The Dogs is an all-round beautiful book. The paper is thick and grainy, the typeface rich and resplendent and enticing to the eye.

Yet it remains the prose that make it the great book it is. Through his stunning command of poetic prose, Jon McGregor tells a story like a still life painting, a freeze-frame of living, breathing tissue as immediate and enthralling as if one were watching with one's own eyes. Anyone who liked his multi-award-winning debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, will be entranced by this book. It may not be comfortable reading, but the gurgling unease in the pit of one's stomach is proof of the visceral power of the novel. Even the Dogs is a sumptuous and engaging glimpse into the easily forgotten seams of society.

Bloomsbury, February 2010, 9780747599449, 208pp
 
9 out of 10

Book Review: Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I am re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On this final morning I’m taking a step into the bizarre with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Read: January 2008

Geek Love in one tweet-sized chunk:
Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family’, Geek Love is defined not by its freak-show setting, but the common humanity inherent within.

“'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets’, Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around, hypnotised with longing.”

Despite its freak show characters and setting, Geek Love is one of the most tender-hearted novels you could hope to read. It works because at no point is it sick, grotesque, tasteless or glibly shocking. Katherine Dunn’s talent is in making this very remarkable story feel like the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Because Geek Love is a novel about families, and individuals within families, and the crazy world which exists outside them.

Narrated by Olympia, a bald, hunchback, albino, dwarf, Geek Love tells the story of the Binewski family, and their rise to fame. For Al and Lil Binewski have grander plans than circus geeking for their Binewski Fabulon troupe. Together they hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show. So during each pregnancy Lil guzzles drugs and pesticides, douses herself in radiation, all in the hope of producing freaks compelling and original enough to keep the circus afloat. Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family,’ Lil gives birth to 5 living children, each fantastic in their own unique way. First out comes the limbless Arturo, Aqua Boy, megalomaniac, entertainer, preacher and eventually, cult leader. He is followed by the musically talented Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, beautiful and alluring and each as individual as they are united. The Lizard Girl comes third, green tinted and with one tail shaped leg but she dies suddenly and mysteriously aged 2. And then there is Olympia, unremarkable, unprofitable, who sleeps under the sink. Finally comes Fortunato, almost rejected for his apparent normality, he turns out to possess strange telekinetic powers and an angelic temperament. Led by this motley crew of performers, the circus grows beyond all recognition, raking in audiences in ever greater numbers.

But as within any family there are internal tensions, people pulling in opposite directions, and Arturo will not quit until the whole family is subjected to his twisted, power-crazed ways.

Most characters in novels act as personified ideas, or plot developers. It is rare to find a family whose entire dynamic just exists, naturally and without pretence. And it is all the more remarkable since the characters in question are, physically at least, far from the norm.

With a constantly evolving plot, complex and engaging characters and easily readable style, Geek Love is a book to become thoroughly engrossed in. The characters are as fabulously drawn as any I have read, equal even to those in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. They each inhabit their own skin and minds completely, think independently and diversely. You can almost picture their bodies in the shape of the words, living, breathing, dreaming, loving, hating. From the cold-hearted, vindictive sneer of Arturo to the loving honesty of Fortunato, the independent personalities of the twins and the unrequited love of Olympia, it is impossible not to love them all. Love them because in each of them lies that spark of recognisable complex humanity that is so rarely found in literature.

The whole basis of Geek Love is the inversion of society’s view of physical perfection. Despite their external differences the Binewski children do not grow up shunted, embarrassed or gawked at. They are treasured, worshipped, made special by their different forms. Al refers to them as his ‘rose garden’ his little ‘dreamlets’. They look down upon the ‘norms,’ pity all those whose bodies are unremarkable and whose lives are so much harder because of it. Indeed, their hierarchy is based upon the scale of abnormality, a scale in which Olympia is considered the lowest and Arturo the highest form of creation.

Geek Love doesn’t warn against judging character by its skin. It is not as simple as that. Rather it gets under that skin, into the life and mindset of its characters, rejecting the very notion of physical normality. Utterly original, it is a cult piece of literature which deserves to be read even more widely than it currently is.

8.5 out of 10

Book Review: Music for Torching - A.M. Homes

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On day 9 it is A.M. Homes's wonderfully nihilistic Music for Torching.

Read: July 2007

Music for Torching in one tweet-sized chunk:
A delirious vision of suburban life gone wrong. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life.

Music for Torching is a huge blazing fire of a novel, consuming the vagaries of suburban family life like dry timber. Vitriolic, nihilistic, neurotic, it is a novel of scandalous normality, of impotence in the face of life. At times it reads like Revolutionary Road for the late twentieth century, there is that same trapped sense of powerlessness, that same longing for more, that same pressure to conform. I can’t remember when I was last so utterly hooked on a book within the first five pages.

Paul and Elaine’s marriage is burning out of control, they are isolated and atomised and horrified by what they have become. We first met them in a short story in The Safety of Objects when they enjoyed a hallucinogenic refrain from family pressures smoking crack while their children were away. Looking back on it in this book, they remember that as a moment of almost unimaginable happiness, as though it was the last time they felt united and whole. Now their nihilistic tendencies are tearing their household apart. In between passionless sex they bicker and nag, have affairs and wish they could make their lives good again. Their only pleasures involves dinner parties with their friends when they can bask in the impression of neighbourhood contentment.

The pressure is building, something has to give.

One night Elaine cannot face cooking. Paul offers to Barbecue. Egged on by their inanimate lives Elaine kicks over the barbecue setting the house on fire. Feeling deliciously liberated they get in the car and go for a meal with the children. But the house is not burnt to the ground, only gutted. Denied the cataclysmic freedom of total destruction Elaine and Paul can only try to rebuild, both the house and their fractured selves.

What ensues is a dark and claustrophobic journey through the frenzied minds of a couple desperately trying to recreate the image of family happiness. Cue all manor of sexual affairs, not to mention a crack team of house cleaners in space suits and the ubiquitous school hostage situation. But no matter how good and honest their intentions Paul and Elaine are never quite able to get hold of themselves, and bring everything back to how it should be. And normality is sucking them into a false sense of security.

Homes has a vibrant and to-the-point style of prose which makes her writing incredibly warm and inviting. Her characters are well conceived and brilliantly realised, flawed and infuriatingly lovable at the same time. She is concise and her vocabulary is exact; reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald in her ability to say a lot with few words. She is a very good writer and this is a very good book.

Music for Torching is a delirious technicolor vision of suburban life gone wrong. The Times review probably describes it best: “Homes doesn’t so much critique suburban American life as shoot it, stab it, chuck it in the boot of her car and drive it into a lake.” The exhilaration contained within these pages is difficult to diffuse, it is a glorious fire-cracker of a book and you are going to love it.

8.5 out of 10

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 7 it is a chance to relive Everything is Illuminated.

Read: January 2008

Everything is Illuminated in one tweet-sized chunk:

Vast in scope and iridescent in execution, not to mention fearlessly inventive, Everything is Illuminated left me wondering when I would read a novel quite this good again.

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Any novel which takes its title from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut, Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel that engages the reader throughout, eliciting an emotional response of one sort or another on almost every page.

The plot is multifarious, but essentially follows a character named Jonathan as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and speaking English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

Brought together by Foer's amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, Everything is Illuminated is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy.

Indeed it is the relationship between humour and tragedy that sums up all that takes place. Not only does humour make it possible to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

What begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and the characters are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

A celebration of the writing process throughout, each of the characters takes up their pen to try and shed light upon the experiences of the past, and it is the process of writing which makes them stare right at it, to understand their lives through the process of writing them. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescent, fearlessly inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. It is a book which gets under your skin and they are characters you take to heart. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”

10 out of 10

Book Review: Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 6 I revisit Netherland, a book that was met with barely contained hyperbole on publication, but controversially excluded from the Booker shortlist and seems to have subsequently faded from memory.

Read: August 2008

Netherland in one tweet-sized chunk:

Beautifully written, astutely observed, Netherland is the best zeitgeist novel of recent years.

Every so often a book comes along which is so well written, which feels so perfectly relevant to today, that you cannot believe you haven’t read it before. Netherland is just such a book. Hailed as the first great post-9/11 novel and being compared favourably with The Great Gatsby for its portrayal of the American Dream it is a novel about striving for more without being quite sure what it is you want more of. Although I would take issue with pigeonholing it as either a 9/11 novel, or one solely about America, there is no doubt that Netherland is one of the best books I have read this year.

Hans van den Broek is a Dutch investment banker living in New York, who seeks solace from his failing marriage in the form of cricket. It is the months after 9/11, and his wife Rachel decides to return to the apparent safety of London, taking their young son Jake with her. Hans is unable to see that his marriage is in trouble: he is distant, emotionally reserved, rational to a fault. He stays in America, commuting to London to see his son every couple of weekends, but otherwise living in the chaotic Chelsea Hotel and continuing to accrue wealth without effort or enjoyment.

Then, one Saturday afternoon at a cricket match, Hans comes across Chuck Ramkissoon, a verbose and driven umpire and businessman, who has grand plans for cricket in America. Chuck is a Gatsby-esque American hero; constantly striving to make something of himself, full of entrepreneurial determination and guile. Somehow, Chuck draws Hans into his schemes and soon, the two men have formed an unlikely, and somewhat shaky, friendship. On the one hand you have the wealthy Hans, who travels backwards and forwards between New York and London, and for whom America a nice idea to console his marital strife; on the other there is Chuck, a driven, dynamic immigrant, ever eager to find some sort of belonging in a country which represents possibly his only hope. He dreams a glorious future for cricket, a sport which he sees as instructional, the solution to many of America’s most pressing issues.

“All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket…What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive…It has a moral angle. ... I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

His idea is simple: to build a cricket stadium on a disused New York runway, found a cricket club, and host international, multi-million dollar matches there. Crazy? Perhaps. But his ideas bare remarkable resemblance to those of Sir Allen Stanford, the billionaire whose winner-takes-all Twenty20 matches between England and the West Indies had, at their heart, much the same intention: to cash in on an untapped market by bringing the sport back to America.

But in many senses, this plot is irrelevant. There are some beautiful descriptions of cricket, but this is not a book about cricket. Similarly it is set in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not a book about that fateful morning or how it has affected the world. Nor is it specifically about the breakdown of a marriage. Rather, Netherland is about all these things and how they weave together in one man’s life. It is one of those supreme achievements which seems able to characterise something about our world which is not often captured, and to do so with such clarity of thought and simplicity of prose that it is a joy to become lost in its crisp pages. Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland, to Irish and Turkish parentage, raised in Holland, educated in England, and now lives in New York. This sort of cosmopolitanism shines through his writing. Like Jane Austen, O’Neill is a master of astute observation. The world he writes about is a world I recognise intimately, he captures a certain Zeitgeist fabulously. When Hans reminisces about first meeting Rachel, he describes them as having “courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically.” At another point he characterises English summers as like a Russian doll: largest of all you have “the summer of the great heatwave,” (2003) and from there they grow smaller and smaller down to “the summer of Monty Panesar and, smallest of all perhaps, the summer of Wayne Rooney’s foot.”

But where some contemporary novels can feel glib and forced, here O’Neill writes so eloquently that you feel your life reflected back on the page. At one point, sat alone in New York moping over the collapse of his marriage, Hans uses Google Maps to focus in on his son’s residence, spotting the paddling pool in the back garden, but unable to make out any more amidst the “depthless” pixels. It is a moment of simple beauty. Another comes during a scene in the New York blackout, where life seems to hang frozen in the air, halfway between apocalypse and invincibility. This is a fragile book, with real heart at its centre.

And this is no more so the case than where it reflects 9/11. Joseph O’Neill understands something important about the events of that morning: that grandiose words are incapable of capturing them. Just as Don Delillo did in Falling Man, O’Neill does not seek to explain or resort to hyperbole. Instead, he is happy to cast 9/11 as an event which affected a great many people in lots of unexpected ways, but which did not transform the world in the ways that people often conceive. As Hans observes near the end:

“Not that long ago, at yet another gathering of familiars, our host, an old friend of Rachel’s named Matt, makes some remarks about Tony Blair and his catastrophic association with George W. Bush, whom Matt describes as the embodiment of a distinctly American strain of stupidity and fear. On this side of the Atlantic, this is a commonplace judgement, so commonplace, in fact, as to be of no real interest.”

This book laughs at the sort of exaggerated, reactionary anti-Americanism which seeped across the world in the Bush years. But it is not pro-Bush, or pro-American either. It is not pro anything. It is simply a book that seeks to represent the world as it is, not as we want it to be, or fear that it may become. And I am not sure I have read a book which is more packed with witty little observations that reflect the contemporary world more accurately than Joseph O’Neill does in Netherland.

If you like plot-based novels, then this is possibly not the novel for you. While the plot description appears to offer a murder mystery centring on the discovery of Chuck Ramkissoon’s body in a New York canal, in reality there is no mystery. This is a book about one man, and his life. Despite the strange meanderings of Hans’ narrative, I was quite happy to follow where he led, to dip in and out of the multiple stories at his whim, to wait patiently while the slowly unfolding events played out. Within two pages I knew I was going to love it. And if, perhaps, there is a little too much of the male mid-life crisis literary prose here then so what? It is so brilliantly written that it could have been about alien addiction to sherbet for all I cared. I just wanted to sit back and enjoy the fantastic prose, with its gentle rhythms, astute observation, and understated characters.

Perhaps Netherland is not the ‘Great American Novel’ it has been cracked up to be. After all, it does not seem to be pre-eminently concerned with America. It is a global book, a Western book at least. But so much more than that, it is a great novel about people and places and experiences, and how they interact with our mindsets at the time. You have to read Netherland; it is, quite simply, brilliant.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Underground Man - Mick Jackson

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

As day 5 ticks into day 6 I revisit one of the most charming books I have had the pleasure to read: Underground Man by Mick Jackson.

Read: June 2008

The Underground Man in one tweet-sized chunk

A book to fall in love with and remind you how great literature can be.

"As a young man I imagined growing old would be something like the feeling one has at the close of a long and satisfying day: a not unpleasant lassitude, always remedied by a good night’s sleep. But I now know it to be the gradual revelation of one’s body as nothing more than a bag of unshakeable aches. Old age is but the reduced capacity of a failing machine. Even my sleep – that beautiful oblivion always relied upon for replenishment – now seems to founder, has somehow lost its step. My fingers and toes are cold the whole year round, as if my fire is slowly going out."

The Underground Man is one of those uncomplicated, absolutely charming novels which you wish you could read all the time. Mick Jackson writes with the brevity and technical acumen of a literary master like J.M. Coetzee, and the warm-hearted sensitivity of a loved childhood author such as Michael Morpurgo. It is an absolutely fantastic novel.

An old, reclusive Duke has just completed the construction of a series of tunnels under his vast estate. For what purpose, he is not entirely sure. Probably because he has never felt entirely comfortable around people. He is inordinately wealthy but getting on in years, without an heir to take over the estate when he passes. Many of the staff he has lived with throughout his life are beginning to get a little old as well. It is all rather depressing. And yet his imagination appears to know no bounds. As he searches for an explanation for the malaise that seems to be engulfing him he begins to retreat further and further underground, into the heart of his family estate, and the memories which dwell there. A strange young boy seems to be floating around him, and there are memories which demand to be noticed.
 

Loosly based on the life of the 5th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck who really did build a network of tunnels under his estate, Jackson brings the Duke's eccentric mind dazzlingly to life. He ponders how apple trees work, whether his insides are colour-coded, what happens to all the huge whale bones at the bottom of the ocean. He is lovable, thoroughly original and oh so sympathetic. One can't help but love him. Indeed, I can’t think of a character I have wanted to take under my wing and care for more than the Duke.

There is virtually no plot, just the delightfully eccentric and amusing mind of the Duke, as he dallies through life and slowly descends into madness. I've never met anyone who has anything bad to say about this book. It is one of the best Booker shortlisted books I have ever read. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Road - Cormac McCarthy

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day two it is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Read: October 2007

The Road in one Tweet-sized chunk:

Sparse, understated. The Road is everything good in modern fiction.

They are nameless. The man and his son. But they are us all. Walking The Road because it is the only way they can go. Alone. Heading for the coast. A post-apocalyptic world enshrouding them. Ransacked. Gutted. Ash rain tumbling from the grey blanket that was once called the sky. Perpetual gloom.

It is always there. The threat. From armed cannibalistic gangs, from hunger, from loss of hope. Horror assaulting the eyes behind every corner. And the sun no more to be seen. “He looked at the sky out of old habit but there was nothing to see.”

Polluted. Now the earth is expunging life from itself. But they keep walking the road south, fleeing the winter they know they cannot survive. Sometimes he remembers the before, but those memories are fading. And he will not let himself dream. The boy never even knew the before. But he knows plenty about life.

“He turned and looked. He looked like he had been crying.

Just tell me.

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We’re starving now.

You said we weren’t.

I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.

But we wouldn’t?

No. We wouldn’t.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay.”

Sparse, understated. The Road is everything good in modern fiction. It may be bleak and desolate but through the gloom come little chinks of lights: it is life affirming, redemptive. You can taste the ash in the water, feel the gloom and almost reach out and touch the boys terror. It is immediate, visceral, omnipresent.

The Road warrants every acolade accorded it. It will undoubtedly become a global classic.

9 out of 10

Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris.

Read: on a train back from Edinburgh - August 2009

Keep the Aspidistra Flying in one tweet-sized chunk:
Bitingly satirical, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is packed with ideas but let down by its infuriating narrator.

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes… He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.”

George Orwell wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1934/35 while working at a bookshop in Hampstead and it was published in April 1936, just a few months before he left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It is a novel of its time, capturing something of the ideological conflict, sociological concern, and economic distrust which so characterised the 1930s.

The story is of Gordon Comstock, a copywriter with an advertising agency who walks out of his ‘good job’ – “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” as he terms it – to embark on a long, deliberate and painful slide into penury. Disgusted with the money obsession he sees all around him, and frustrated by the social constraints which are interlinked with this, Gordon takes a position as a poorly paid bookseller and eagerly begins his new life as a poet.

Already the author of one “sneaky little foolscap octavo” which can now be found lining the remainder shelves of bookshops all across London, he is unbowed and feels his magnum opus, London Pleasures, swelling inside him. Lines rise unbidden, he scribbles furiously, determined to stick it to all those that have ever stood in his way. This will be his revenge on all those pathetic ancestors who whittled away the family fortune leaving him to work for a living rather than pursue his muse.

“Outside, all was bleak and wintry. A tram, like a raucous swan of steel, glided groaning over the cobbles, and in its wake the wind swept a debris of trampled leaves. The twigs of the elm tree were swirling, straining eastward. The poster that advertised Q.T. Sauce was torn at the edge; a ribbon of paper fluttered fitfully like a tiny pennant. In the side street too, to the right, the naked poplars that lined the pavement bowed sharply as the wind caught them. A nasty raw wind. There was a threatening note in it as it swept over; the first growl of winter’s anger. Two lines of a poem struggled for birth in Gordon’s mind.”

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a book of conflict between the internal and external, between who Gordon wants to be, and what the world makes him into. What he finds in his painful descent through London is that no matter how miserable life is being a slave to money, it is infinitely worse without any at all. Poverty does not free him from expectation and responsibility; it does not give him the ability to do whatever he wants. It chains him to doing nothing.

This is a biting piece of realist satire targeted against those who put literary pretension above economic reality, those who romanticise poverty, and those Raskolnikovian protagonists who expect the world to fall at their feet yet never do anything for themselves. It is a bleak, uncomfortable novel, whose satire is inherent rather than demonstrative and which rarely elicits so much as a chuckle from the reader. Gordon is frustrating in a pull-your-hair-out-just-to-feel-something sort of way. As events progress he grows ever more listless and depressed. His obstinate determination to follow his renunciation of the money game through to its conclusion, whatever that may be, makes for painful reading. He is incredibly fortunate – a good education, talent, friends willing to go out of their way to help him, a sister who puts his wellbeing before her own, and a former colleague named Rosemary whom he loves and who, inexplicably, seems to feel the same about him – yet can only see his own petty misfortune. He is too proud to ask for help, to do so would be to embrace failure.

One of the reasons Orwell has become so universally popular is that his style is at once readable and poetic, to the point yet visually stimulating. He has an exceptional eye for descriptive prose, both in regard to his characters and the settings they inhabit. Just as Dickens often reflected the nature of his characters through their names, so Orwell does through their bodies. Gordon is a typical small and frail man with a chip on his shoulders. He worries that no-one is really paying attention to him, that life would be different were he taller, wealthier, more gregarious. He wants to be seen, celebrated, respected. Elsewhere, those interested in money above all else are fat and gluttonous, and those of the upper class tall and thin and elegant. Orwell treats all those characters who pass under his microscope with a sort of loving yet laconic disdain, like that of an especially critical parent. There is a great phrase where he describes a fat man as “[filling] his trousers as though he [has] been melted and then poured into them”, and there are plenty more of these witty physical descriptions.

Yet for all the fluid prose it is the society itself which provides most fodder for thought. Set in what Marx would have understood as the final phase of Capitalism, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fascinating and utterly unfamiliar portrayal of a social milieu now almost totally defunct. An aspidistra (for those like me who had no idea) is a hardy house plant popular in the Victorian era but which had fallen out of fashion by the 1930s, becoming a lower class pretention of wealth, a reflection of the “mangy, lower-class decency” Gordon is desperate to avoid. As he walks the streets of London he sees them in almost every window he passes, a sort of symbol for the aspirational rather than revolutionary working classes.

“There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”

This is a society in which there appears to be a genuine battle of ideas between socialism and capitalism, an age in which it is only clear in hindsight which direction history will take. What struck me while reading was a sense of what we have lost in the last seventy-odd years. When did we grow so used to consumerism that we stopped questioning its relevancy? When did the desire for something new and the money to purchase it become so central to our lives? What I realised with some sadness was that I have never known a time when the simplistic slogans and garish stereotypes of advertising haven’t been present all around me. I cannot conceive what life without marketing would be like. Gordon, it seems, can. And he doesn’t like the world as it is becoming. Orwell is careful not to let his own politics influence the direction or inflection of what takes place, but just being present in such an environment really brought home to me how completely that element of thought has disappeared. I like to consider myself a socialist, yet that is in a modern liberal context rather than this. The ideas of Gordon and some of his friends are as alien to me as feudal agrarianism would be. It reminded me of my grandfather, John Ruddock, who was a founding member of a communist leaning actors organisation, and made me wonder what he, and all those others like him, would make of the world of today? What would Orwell think?

I hope this does not come across as me romanticising a past time for that is not the aim. Some of the descriptions of the mental and physical realities of poverty are incredibly moving. Before long, Gordon has slipped into a listless and depressed malaise. He cannot afford a drink in a pub with friends, or to go to the cinema. His only pleasure becomes an illicit cup of tea in his cold room before crawling into bed. He is too cold to write anymore, and when he tries all he sees is the faults of what is already written. He edits, endlessly, but never composes. When finally he earns some money through poetry he is so drunk on potential that it brings nothing but further misery.

Like 1984 and Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is hard-hitting social satire rather than political programme. Gordon rejects socialism just as heartily as he does consumerism, and the only obviously socialist characters are middle or upper class young men with good intentions but who remain oblivious to the realities of the poor. This is not a book to turn anyone communist. But in portraying a society in which debate and discussion appears rife, Orwell gives today’s reader a chance to appraise the world of today in a different light. Doing so reminded me of things I have forgotten to see.

Yet it is often considered one of Orwell’s weaker novels. Partly this is due to the changes to some of the slogans that his publishers imposed at the last minute for fear of litigation, partly because Orwell disowned it later in life, considering it a writing exercise which he had only published because he needed the money. But it is also because, although blessed with the same tight and visual prose that makes much of Orwell’s oeuvre so readable, it is not in the same league as his later works. There are elements of biography to much of what takes place, and although Orwell does not speak through Gordon, anyone familiar with Down and Out in Paris and London will note that the descriptions of life on the streets and poverty come from personal experience.

Between it’s infuriating narrator and bleak demeanour, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not a book to fall in love with. Not for me anyway. Rather the significance of it lies in its portrayal of a forgotten era in history, one I didn’t realise had so completely disappeared until I delved inside. This is probably a better book to review than it is to read.

6.5 out of 10

The Outsider - Albert Camus

Read: November 2006

Ah, there is no punishment like the social pressure to conform. No condemnation greater than that reserved for outsiders who fail to live up to our social norms of expected behaviour.

Following the death of his mother, Meursault appals everyone by showing no trace of sadness. He refuses to feign mourning and instead plans a day trip to the beach. But when he commits a random act of uncharacteristic violence, a baffled society jumps on the chance to punish him and the machinery of the law cranks into gear.

At his trial Meursault refuses to repent, shows no remorse or guilt, even when it could save his life. Soon it becomes clear that it is not the crime he has committed that Meursault is being punished for, but his very refusal to play the game, his very status as an outsider. His greatest crime is not murder, nor refusal to repent, but feeling nothing at the death of his mother, a crime no-one can understand or ever forgive.

Camus brilliantly elucidates the nature of moral and mob justice. This is a novel which resonates long after you have finished it. One of the classic twentieth century novels, up there with Kafka’s The Trial and Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveller. Read it now.


8 out of 10