The Hours - Michael Cunningham

If Mrs Dalloway were a diamond it would be almost as big as the Ritz, priceless, and kept under lock and key in a national museum. Visitors would gape at it, experts celebrate it, soothsayers develop all sorts of legends around it. Most of all it would inspire awe in those who looked upon it, for no one could quite conceive of the gargantuan forces needed to bring about its creation. And yet, for all this immense beauty it would remain shut up in its case, impractical, and with grains of carbon imperfection at its core.

What Michael Cunningham does in The Hours is akin to the master jeweller who takes this unwieldy diamond and from it creates a series of smaller, perfectly crafted gems which sparkle in the light and can be placed within rings and pendants and worn in public for all to enjoy. His skill is in knowing exactly where to cut and where to shave so that none of the original beauty is lost. The result is a precious reworking of a great novel, simplified, purified, and with an engaging plot which augments, comments upon, and replies to the themes of Woolf’s original text.

The story unfolds through the interweaving narratives of three women whose lives are linked by and constantly refer back to Mrs Dalloway. It is the 1920s and having been forced to retreat from literary London after a breakdown, Mrs Woolf is tentatively beginning to write her new novel. Occasionally she catches a glimpse of inspiration, but fears it will fade like a dream the moment she wakes up. It is the 1940s and Mrs Brown is pregnant with her second child, savouring a few extra minutes in bed with her book before she has to go downstairs and play the role of wife and mother. And it is the end of the twentieth century and Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her New York apartment to buy flowers for the party she is throwing in honour of her friend Richard Brown, a celebrated poet who is dying of aids.

It is all of these three times at once, for life, like great literature, is timeless. The characters experience similar hopes and fears, similar passions and constraints, and, just occasionally, those moments of exquisite happiness which makes each of these books such a rare treat. What changes is the world around them: the material freedoms of different ages and the social mores which govern what one can and can’t be. As in Mrs Dalloway, the focus is on the beauty and wonder of individual moments, but more fundamentally than its predecessor, The Hours is about their transience, the irrevocable march of time which ensures that everything will ultimately fade and decay. On top of this Cunningham takes many of the sub-plots from Mrs Dalloway – privilege, parenting, homosexuality and mental illness – and looks at them through the lenses of different decades. What is impossible, almost unthinkable, in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s and hidden behind suburban façades in the 1940s is gloriously possible in the 1990s. This is most clearly the case when it comes to homosexuality. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa cherishes one moment in her life above all else, the kiss she shared with her friend Sally Seton. Here the inspiration for this passage comes from Woolf’s own life, and a simple sisterly kiss shared with her sister. This moment is developed through Mrs Brown stolen moment of solidarity with a sick neighbour, and then fully achieved in the New York of the 1990s, where instead of marrying Richard Dalloway, Clarissa is living happily with Sally.

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

The Hours is packed with these sorts of triptych moments, where biographical fact and classic fiction blur together to create something new. Special moments from Mrs Dalloway are revisited and updated; reflected upon in an atmosphere of nostalgic illumination which only serves to heighten their poignancy. By portraying Virginia Woolf, meticulously researched and brought to life, Cunningham is able to add to the mix an investigation on the nature of writing. Through his elegant, haunting prose, he explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader. While Mrs Woolf is shocked to discover that she can still think clearly and write capably, Mrs Brown is overwhelmed by the clarity of her expression and ascribes almost mythical significance to her words. And while Richard Brown is preparing to be honoured as one of the greatest living poets, he muses repeatedly on the impossibility of it all:

“What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something live and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

These moments of heartbreaking honesty are what make The Hours such a great read. For all the beauty of Woolf’s prose, it remains an acquired – and even then challenging – taste. Not so Michael Cunningham. He has a clarity of expression which is dreamy, emotive, and a joy to read. Where Mrs Dalloway is hard work, dense and over punctuated, The Hours is understated and with a beautifully lilting flow. What Michael Cunningham understands is that spectacular prose cannot be overdone. For a passage to shine with its full power it cannot be crowded with dense prose on all sides. Great art is about knowing where to stop – not layering the paint too thick, repeating the motif too often, or attacking the notes with too much bravado – and letting what is already created speak for itself. The Hours may owe its most powerful passages and images to Virginia Woolf’s literary genius, but in taking them out of the Mrs Dalloway context and making them the centrepiece of all which takes place, they become even more beautiful to the eye, like a single flower blossoming in the middle of a lawn.

It is impossible to say which I prefer: the elegant and rewarding Mrs Dalloway which can be peered at in awe through a microscope for hours on end, or The Hours, masterly crafted and perfectly paced. It all comes down to personal preference and I cannot recommend them each highly enough. Ultimately they are each better for the existence of the other. Each captures the beauty in individual moments and the fragility of time. There is one moment near the end of The Hours which sums it all up and captures perfectly that very human experience which they are each about.

“Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties;…we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”

9 out of 10

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Read: November 2005

How does he do it? Fitzgerald says more in one sentence than most authors manage in a lifetime. Not only is Fitzgerald able to capture the essence of complex ideas, or detailed descriptions in a few words, but he is a master storyteller. The Great Gatsby is a novel about the trappings of fame and glamour, about the seedy underbelly of ‘swinging’ American 1920’s high life, about incompatible love and wanting. This is a society magazine, 1920’s style. There are few ‘Great’ novels which appeal universally to everyone in one way or another. This is one of them. Read it now, you will not be disappointed.

8.5 out of 10

White Noise - Don Delillo

Jack Gladney is professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-hill. His colleague, Murray, runs a seminar on car crashes. Together, they discuss modern life with cinematic scope, everything from Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Hitler to supermarkets and death. But it is 1980’s America, consumerism is in overdrive and technology sings lullabies to convince us of its protection, all the while threatening to destroy everything. And when an airborne toxic event hits the town, the very present reality of death becomes startlingly obvious. It is a false alarm, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. And as they Jack and his wife, Babette, try and get their lives back on track, they begin to reveal their deepest fear – which of them will die first. Soon they are going to extreme lengths to cheat death, to escape that great inevitable which looms large and totally empty and eternal. So used to life being filled with waves and currents and white noise, the void of emptiness that is death terrifies them.

This is an astonishingly powerful, yet tender and funny novel in which Delillo turns his characteristically sparse style to the questions which rack all of us on those nights when we cannot sleep. There are few books which get so intimately, acerbically, surrounded by the static-like interference of modern life. In a funny and powerful manner, Delillo brings the nightmare in the closet out into the open, where we can all laugh aloud at death. Because, like the monster under the bed, it is all a whole lot less terrifying when you see it stood there, clothed in pathetic human flesh, before you.

The sanitisation of modern life, the crackle of static from the TV, bland labels in mind-numbing supermarkets, the spectre of nuclear destruction. Life, death, the universe. It is all here, in between the words, invisible as airborne particles, silent as electricity, flickering and clicking in a deafening swell of white noise all around us. If there were awards for reflecting subject matter in the style and atmosphere of a book, then White Noise would be up there with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace to claim the very highest prize.

8 out of 10

Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee

Read: December 2006

Cycling one day, Paul Rayment is hit by a careless young driver and after he ‘flew through the air with the greatest of ease’ finds his body maimed and his mind mired in the quicksand of regret. Nothing can lift his spirits until he employs a Croatian nurse and falls (absurdly) in love. When he succumbs to the myth that speaking ones love will transform his life, he finds himself leeching onto her surrogate family in the hope of rectifying his regrets. But when an elderly writer arrives to cast him as a character in her latest novel he is forced to listen to his conscience and analyse what is left of his disfigured life.

Coetzee loves getting into the minds of cantankerous old men whose staunch opposition to the mindset of the time leaves them adrift in a world they no longer see as their own. This is a typical Coetzee novel, full of his incisive analysis and evocative language; a good book, well worth reading.

5 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

Falling Man - Don Delillo

Read: April 2007

Falling Man opens amidst the chaos of 9/11 as Keith Neudecker stumbles dumbstruck away from the Twin Towers. He is in a daze, can barely comprehend that anything is out of the usual. He makes his way to his ex-wife’s house, to a life he knew before any of this happened. The novel follows Keith and the people around him as they struggle to understand an event that is beyond anyone’s power of comprehension.

Keith’s wife, Lianne, is still reeling from the death of her father almost twenty years before. Now she runs writing sessions for those with dementia and worries that her own mind is fading. Their child, Justin, searches the sky with binoculars for Bill Lawton (Bin Laden) who speaks in a monosyllabic language and is certain to return. Lianne’s mother and her art dealing lover Martin argue over the nature of God and jihad. And Keith himself can only begin to remember that crazy morning by meeting with a woman who was there as well.

All the while a street performer named Falling Man is performing stunts across New York, leaping from heights and hanging, frozen in the air, daring people to remember.

This is the world Don Delillo presents, a world which started long before 9/11 but whose consciousness was created in that fateful morning. If anyone should write a book about this subject then this is the man. With White Noise he expertly tackled the Cold War fear of nuclear fallout and death and now here he is tackling the modern paranoia: terrorism. He is a master of plotting the psyche of terror and this is every bit as good as White Noise. Falling Man is exactly what you wish for in a book, intelligent, witty and intensely poignant. Take this dialogue, could anyone else delineate that disbelief better?

“He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”
“Because it has to be.”
“It has to be,” he said.
“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”
“But only the first one.”
“Only the first,” she said.
“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

Falling Man is caught in the crossfire between remembering and forgetting, it is a hazy, snapshot view of the lives that 9/11 shaped. It is written in a distorted, confused manner, with shifts in character and plot and time. This makes it difficult to follow, hard to understand, but then, nothing about the subject is easy. There are those with dementia who can’t help forgetting and the rest of the people who can’t help remembering, those stumbling out of the grey dust of 9/11 and those who are inevitably falling into the grey mist of memory loss.

This is the mirage into which Delillo watches everything merge into uncertainty. The Twin Towers emerge from a still life painting, Keith struggles to tell what is live action and what is a replay in the sport on TV, religious belief leads to disbelief and vice versa, and Keith enters the world of professional Poker playing, desperate to recreate the Friday night game he enjoyed with friends before all of this happened.

You must read this book. Don Delillo has mapped the psychological fallout of 9/11 more superbly than I imagined possible.

7.5 out of 10

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Read: September 2007

Ah, that most capricious of customers: the classic. The very idea can conjure up the image of dark alleyways, men in top hats and overcoats, enticingly dusty smells and dark oil painting covers. There are some which you pick up and can’t believe you never read them before. The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein and Catch-22 are three classics I received in such rapturous delight. For these wonderful books, the word classic barely does them justice. They are so much more than just a word, they are whole, complete works of fiction to which I will always be drawn.

And then there are the others, the ones you read and know you are reading a classic which thousands of people have loved, and you can tell its crammed with really great ideas, but for you it doesn’t quite do it. Sadly for me, Crime and Punishment found its way into the latter of these two categories. It tells the story of Rodion Romanych, a young student with a Napoleon complex who has fallen on hard times but dreams of a glorious future, both for himself and his fellow mankind. Feeling wronged by misfortune his thoughts begin to turn towards the good he could do were he in possession of the requisite finances. He writes essays on morality and justice, arguing that it is just for a man of genius to transgress moral law if it will ultimately benefit humanity. He posits that the test of this genius is the ability to transgress moral laws and not feel guilty, to be wholly focused on the grander scale. To this end he begins to plot the perfect crime, the murder and robbery of a horrible old pawnbroker, universally hated by all. So begins Crime and Punishment, a book of great scope and plot and a powerful study of a psychology in turmoil. It is an investigation into the grand ideas so prevalent across nineteenth century society: the social implications of rampant capitalism, the crossover between morality and legality, and the growth of psychology as a means of explaining mans actions.

Crime and Punishment unfolds slowly as the author lays out his message through the intermeshing of the various characters. Dostoyevsky has been described as an author for whom an idea is always rooted in human skin, that no idea is removed from its very intimate human bondage. That is never more prevalent than here, where much of the story is told in miniature tales, single chapter stories in which supporting characters appear to share their story, then leave almost as quickly as they arrived. This method of telling the story is incredibly seductive, it draws you into a world you feel is almost boundless and encourages you to involve yourself within it.

All the while I was aware I was reading a really great novel. But I was bored. The whole premise of Crime and Punishment has been done better elsewhere. Take Albert Camus’ The Outsider, or Kafka’s The Trial if you are interested in the psychology of crime and the nature of punishment. There are some startlingly good characters here, each with a really fascinating story to tell and the chapters in which they espouse their tales are brilliant examples of secondary characterisation. But then there are long, long passages in Raskolnikov’s life in which we trudge around like his shadow in the sludgy snow and wait for something of interest to take place. All the while growing cold and tired. A third could be cut from it just like that. There are no superfluous plot lines but there are many flabby periods when I just wanted to get back into something interesting.

Although Raskolnikov develops into a rounded and really powerful character and his mentality is intriguing at times, there is something about his ‘woe is me’ attitude which really gets on my nerves. Like the snivelling little creatures that populate many of Gogol’s short stories and Dostoyevsky’s own Notes from Underground I found the most powerful impression he engendered was not sympathy but disgust. Pathetic disgust for a man who expects the world to unfurl before him without any effort. And even though this impression was diluted as the novel progressed to the point where he had become partially interesting his is still a story of unmentionable blandness. Perhaps this is the point, but it doesn’t make for great reading.

Another problem, as with many works of Russian literature, lies in the translation. Even with an award winning translation such as this one, much of the lyricism is lost so we are left with the story and ideas Dostoyevsky intended, but without the expressive and poetic prose in which it was originally written. And although I noticed a slight difference between this translation and another by Sidney Monas, it was not enough to change the essential chunkiness of any Russian translation. It is in the language that I believe a real classic is borne and I believe this language would have kept me enthralled through the long journeys in Raskolnikov’s mind, but shorn of much poetry I found it a struggle to finish.

I suspect I may re-read Crime and Punishment in the future and wonder how I could ever have written such drivel about a great work. For when that day comes, I shall just say sorry.


6.5 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

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: February 2008

9/11 changed everything for nine-year-old Oskar Schell. He went to school in the morning only to return home soon after, alone, to discover his father's last messages from the World Trade Centre on the answerphone. And then nothing. He never saw his father again. Unsurprinsingly, he has ‘heavy boots’ all the time now. He is scared of tall buildings, the subway, men with beards, and boats. He doesn’t want to get over the event, and refuses to let his mother get over it either. He gives himself little bruises to punish himself for his fathers absence. Then Oskar finds a strange key hidden inside an envelope in a blue vase in his father’s wardrobe and begins a quest to discover which of New Yorks 162 million locks it opens. His only clue is the word ‘Black’ written on the envelope he found the key in. Oskar’s quest takes him across the whole of New York, into the lives of strangers who guide him along the way, and bit by bit he begins to uncover a family mystery that stretches back more than fifty years.

Interlocking with this story there are secondary narratives, alternate plots which slowly tie together to build an overall picture of Oskar’s family. These narratives follow the lives of Oskar’s paternal grandparents who, having survived the Dresdon bombings in 1944, try to rebuild their life in America. In a series of letters their story is told, full of unspoken love and unspoken need and unspoken events which never could have happened. Except they did. And like a movie composed of short films, these three stories converge around themes and places, by saying so little they convey so much.

But there is a problem. Jonathan Safran Foer’s second outing is frought with every problem that gives rise to the phrase ‘difficult second novel.’ Where his debut, Everything is Illuminated, seemed at times to invent a whole new method of writing the novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tries to rehash it, to reproduce what has already been successful. You have the same disrupted, scrapbook narrative, similar characters in search of historical truth who discover something about themselves in the process of investigation of the past, disfigured language which conveys so much in such an unusual manner.

As with Everything is Illuminated, it is written with multiple viewpoints, crisscrossing and overlapping and eventually tying into each other in unpredictable ways. However, unlike Everything is Illuminated, I did not feel that the secondary stories here lived up to the main plot. Foer seems to be trying too hard to create something original, to make it all as quirky as possible. But for about half the book I was unsure which of their letters were written by who, and who they were written to. The periods were confusing, did not engross me in the novel. I was always waiting to return to Oskar's quest. And although the parallels that these passages were trying to make are integral to the novel as a whole – the cataclysmic impact of a destructive event, the way it changes you forever, the power of love to survive in some shape or form no matter what – their story itself did not hold my attention in the way that Oskar’s did.

And you know the biggest problem with this book? It is that it is still pretty damn good. A whole lot better than most books published. With a vast array of characters and different narratives, Foer has perhaps created the first multimedia novel. It is almost as though you step into the novel itself: through a series of photos you see the things Oskar sees, there are blank pages, pages with just a few words on, pages when the writing grows so small with so much to fit in and so little space that it begins to overlap itself. At the end Oskar even creates a flipbook mirage of time flowing backwards, an inversion of Lyle Owerko's shot of the Falling Man, falling up from the street, back into the safety of the building. In that way, he says, “we would have been safe.”

The spectrum of the catastrophe of 9/11 looms large throughout, but it is not necessarily a book about that cataclysmic morning. At no point does it deal with the politics or wider issues of the event but focuses rather on the effect it has had on delightful young Oskar. It is a book about family history and the Second World War, about one child’s refusal to let the memory of his dead father die within him.

The characterisation is absolutely first class. Oskar is a thoroughly likeable young man for whom the reader develops an almost familial bond with: you want to protect him, and make his world better again. His constant need to give himself little bruises, to invent things that will make the world better, his overwhelming sadness, the tenderness he shows to those he meets, it is all heartbreakingly sad. He is also very funny, charming and full of little titbits of interesting information. He takes pictures of things he sees to stick in a scrapbook called ‘Things That Happened To Me.’ He even carries a calling card with him:

“Oskar Schell
Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist, collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memoirabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things.”

Similarly in his 103 year-old-neighbour Mr. Black, Foer creates a character who seems almost the personification of the twentieth century with his career as a war correspondent, rolodex of famous figures reduced to one word descriptions - ‘husband,’ ‘son,’ ‘money,’ or, most often, ‘war’ – and conflict between career and home life.

Then there are Oskar’s parents, the absent presences who haunt the book. His mother, who appears only briefly, sometimes neglectful, sometimes like a great masterminding schemer. And you never get a chance to know who she is. She exists in the words of other characters, has no voice of her own, no life away from what the other characters see. She is the unwitnessed victim of 9/11, the widowed spouse, unable to get on with her life. She is fascinating because we never know her, she is a blank canvas, could be almost anything in the world and the reader would have no idea.

And finally, last but not least, Thomas Schell – both the father and the son. It is nice to see a positive portrayal of a father in literature. Too much media seems to present fathers as always out at work, or uncommunicative, or boring. It is such a pleasure to read about the adventures of the father and his son, his creativity and inspiration, his caring and nurturing. And I loved the story of the Sixth Borough. It is when Safran Foer steps into this sort of fantastical fable that he is at his most intriguing, he has the story telling capabilities of Salman Rushdie and the inventiveness of a Russell Hoban.

Foer certainly has a way with words. He is a great communicator, consummately able to convey exactly what he is trying to say. There is one great moment of description, one moment I loved, so exact is the image it creates.

“It was silent and still and I couldn’t see my own hands in the darkness. One hundred planes flew overhead, massive heavy planes, pushing through the night like one hundred whales through water.”

The passage comes just as Dresden is about to be flattened during World War 2, and Oskar’s grandfather is trying to find his childhood sweetheart. That image of bombs as huge whales, the sky as thick as an oily, sluggish sea. Somehow that seems to sum up the entire novel: the huge truth of it all emerging from something almost invisible, until it is there in your face, extremely loud incredibly close, and there is nothing you can do to escape it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close confirms Jonathan Safran Foer as a prodigious talent, as a writer who can make you laugh, cry and think in the same sentence and who is not afraid to push the boundaries of narrative to create something fascinatingly original. His multimedia approach to story-telling makes the book come alive in a way few novels do, and being able to see exactly what Oskar sees allows the reader to step into his mind in a very intimate way. Already Foer has a style which is all his own. I will excitedly look forward to the publication of his third book with an air of expectancy reserved for very few select authors. I just hope that he does not try to write the same book for the rest of his career.

8 out of 10

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Read: February 2008

Oscar is a fat, Sci-Fi fanatic, Dominican immigrant living in New Jersey. Spends his days writing epic space opera novels, playing RPG’s, and reading comic books. Couldn’t get a girlfriend if his life depended upon it. And Oscar is a hapless romantic, a “passionate enamorao who [falls] in love easily and deeply.” And repeatedly. Unrequitedly.

And when you are born a fat nerd into a Dominican immigrant family whose community image basis itself on “Atomic Level G” pulling powers, a macho culture where sex is a status symbol, it all combines to make life rather difficult. "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of colour in a contemporary US ghetto."

Then one night at college Oscar goes to a party dressed as Doctor Who. Oh dear Oscar. He looks like a “fat homo Oscar Wilde” – Wilde pronounced in a Dominican accent becomes Wao and a nickname is born. “And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.” Dude had his own superhero identity, just without the powers. Or the respect. Or the women.

And when you have all these problems the last thing you need is a family curse looming over you. But such is the family lot. Ever since Oscar’s grandfather made a drunken joke about the Domincan dictator Trujillo, the family have careered from catastrophe to catastrophe. They are burdened with a first rate fukú – “It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since” – and it shows no sign of skipping a generation. With occasional appearances from a golden eyed mongoose and a man with no face, the Cabral family, and Oscar in particular, fight against the fukú with all their might, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, that their fate is not already determined. But it is all to no avail. “No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.” And now it has its grips on Oscar and it seems that there is nothing he can do to get his life back.

So while the narrative travels back into the family history of the Cabral’s, two questions hang over poor, lovable Oscar Wao: how will his brief wondrous life come to an end? And will he will ever fulfil his hearts desire and finally get his end away?

In a family epic to end all family epics, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao traces the Cabral family through the ages. From Oscar and his loving runaway sister Lola, through their beautiful, wasted mother Beli and their grandfather, Abelard, who brought the fukú of Trujillo upon the family. It is a tale which encompasses both the turbulent history of the Dominican Republic, and the experience of the immigrant Diaspora. In the epigraph Diaz quotes Derek Walcott on the experience of immigration: “either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” And this is perhaps the crux of the book. Through the Cabral’s we tour a distilled version of Dominican history over the past 50 years: from the draconian dictatorship of ‘El Jeffe’ Trujillo – “Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor” – to the everyday of its people. The Cabral’s are nobody’s, emigrants from their homeland, seekers of the better life abroad. But they are also representative of the nation, perhaps, in their struggles and joys, their adventures and outlooks, there diaspora. For this is, above all else, about the immigrant experience. About the insidiousness of the ‘other,’ the experience of being different.

Junot Diaz’s use of polyglot language is fantastic. He combines as much Dominican slang and dialect as you could possibly fit into an English language novel with the sort of sci-fi references usually reserved for Games Workshop on a Saturday afternoon. It is an immigrant nerd novel set amid a macho Latino community whose love of sex is so completely unfulfilled in its hero. Rarely do you read a novel and know you will not read another like it this year. Already voted by Time Magazine and the New York Magazine as the best book of 2007 it has been greeted with the same rapturous praise this side of the Atlantic. And you can see why. The prose is faultless: fast paced, insightful, concise, and with a touch of the wondrous to boot. Junot Diaz unquestionably has a very bright future.

Eleven years in the writing, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is worth the wait. It is both a mature and well planned novel and a stylish, contemporary soaked, romp through cultures you would never have imagined could mix. Anyone who can read will find something to enjoy in this writing. Junot Diaz has a created a book with something special in it, perhaps you could call it the Wao factor.


8 out of 10

Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

Read: May 2008

It is reported that Oscar and Lucinda was awarded the 1988 Booker after the judges deliberated for only thirty minutes. Whether or not that is the case, there is no doubt that Peter Carey’s vast story of undeclared, slow burning love is one of the most popular Booker winners of all time. And you can see why. It is one of those novels that I can imagine every writer wishes they could have written. Just ask Angela Carter who is quoted on the back admitting that it fills her with “wild, savage envy.” And, though not in any way a celebrated author, I am of the same opinion.

Oscar and Lucinda is impressively vast, impeccably pitched, subtle and well written. The story is that of the relationship between a young, awkward, bashful, clergyman, Oscar Hopkins, and an Australian heiress with money and independence and not much else, Lucinda Leplastrier. Despite being born half the world apart; one in a quiet Devon village, the other on a farm in the Australian outback, the two are made for each other. Both are inveterate gamblers, “one obsessive, the other compulsive – incapable of winning at the game of love.” When Oscar decides to seek self mortifying missionary work in Australia his sea journey coincides with Lucinda’s return from a glass factory tour and they discover, hidden in each other, the vice of gambling.

But neither is schooled in the international language of love, they are young and uncertain, unable to express themselves and mired in self doubt. And when their addictions lead them to social ostracism, they each gamble everything on a grandiose monument to their love, and each of their lives is transformed forever.

It is the 1860’s, Australia is being violently colonised. The industrial revolution is in full swing. From sleepy Devon to an Oxford seminary, glass factories to backstreet gambling holes, grand sea journeys to treks through uncharted Aboriginal land, Oscar and Lucinda takes us on a journey of exploration into a newly emerging world, complete with its opportunity and brutality.

Reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro in the understatement of the events, Oscar and Lucinda is a fabulously detailed epic novel. Where most authors would stick with one thematic hook to build the novel around, Carey finds three: religion, glass and gambling. Not a natural combination, but one which works superbly. They each support each other, repeatedly extending the metaphors and ideas of the novel as a whole. For example, the complexity of glass: it is both strong and fragile, transparent and yet distorting, practical and magical. And religion which purports to be unquestionable and yet is mired in uncertainty, fragile belief and discord.

Oscar and Lucinda is a novel of rarely rivalled richness, which feels so close to life you can almost touch it. Populated with rounded, characters and underpinned with enthralling themes, this is a book to completely immerse yourself in.

However, despite all this, Oscar and Lucinda does have its limitations. It is dense and capricious, like a squirming eel it is almost impossible to pin down. Each of the title characters is quiet, emotionally withdrawn and unremarkable – to the point whereby even the most remarkable events seem somehow slightly bland. The book is also populated with many characters who walk in and out, just as you feel that you are getting into the lives and characters of Oscar or Lucinda, along comes another character and the narrative moves away from them again. The intimacy is repeatedly broken, the tension is built up only by the tragedy of their unspoken love. And at times this gets incredibly tiresome.

Furthermore, and this is more of a personal problem, I believe that just as everyone has their own individual writing style, so too do they have their own inner reading cadence, some lyrical phrasings which please them, and others which don’t. For some reason, Salman Rushdie’s prose delights me, whereas the flow of sentences here does not rhythmically work inside my head. I find Peter Carey’s short sentences troublesome, almost caustic, and because of this is could not fall in love with this book.

Nonetheless, Oscar and Lucinda is a veritable feast of thematic exuberance and character fallibility. It is a novel to delight in, one that almost everyone who reads it seems to fall in love with.


7 out of 10

Youth - J.M. Coetzee

Read: June 2008

Following his critically acclaimed childhood biography, Boyhood, Coetzee returns to the realms of fictionalised biography to chronicle his, well, youth. We find John in the middle of university, trying to reconcile his instinctive appreciation for the simplicity of maths with his yearning to be a poet. He is surrounded by youth, can imagine nothing outside it. In the best traditions of literature, he is the young man who dreams of being great but knows not where to begin, who sees life being lived all around him but has no idea how to be involved in it. As with Milan Kundera’s young poet Jaromil, life is always elsewhere, to be chased down and lived to the very fullest extent. Women are at best a mystery to him, he is socially uncomfortable and introverted. He wants to get away from the scenes of his childhood, but is not sure where exactly to go. Paris is the bohemian capital of poetic youth, but he speaks no French. So he opts for London, and heads off on a grand adventure, his chance to turn life into art.

It is the 1960’s, the worlds’ youth is living life to its fullest, finding colour and joy in creativity and free love. But in London, John just finds more of himself. He gets a job working as a computer programmer for IBM and is soon living a bland life of monotony with everyone else. He has a few loveless affairs which fail to inspire passion but otherwise lives an increasingly lonely life. But silently, almost impossibly for this genre of novel, young John is beginning to grow up.

Youth takes its title from Joseph Conrad’s great novella of romantic wonder and youth which ends with the immortal phrase: ‘Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour – of youth.’ And this is exactly what we have presented here: the transience of youth. There is not the comic satire of Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, nor the striving of a Dostoyevskyan character, or the raging anger of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but what there is, is the possibility of future, of a life outside the absurdity of youth. As the novel draws to a close, things begin to work themselves out for John. He finds a job that he is relatively good at and from which he can gain some simple satisfaction, discovers he is pretty good at cricket, and has other talents of which he never suspected. He stops thinking that there is only one way to be a great poet, that he must live exactly like Flaubert or Pound in order to write great works. In short, he comes to realise that life cannot be lived prescriptively, cannot be worried about forever: after a while, you just have to get on with it.

This does not mean that he is suddenly talking mortgage prices and local schools. It is less specific than that. He is just growing up, evolving into his adult self. No longer fighting the world but letting it come to him. And what a pleasure these subtle changes are. Youth is one of the most focused portrayals of the temporary mindset of youth that you are likely to read. Like all Coetzee’s work, it is impeccably imagined, intelligent, graceful, and sparse. Poetic youth may be old literary ground, but Coetzee manages to say something original, something which has been long overdue saying. As a work of fiction Youth is engrossing, well characterised, and involving. As a biography of one of our greatest living authors, it demonstrates a clarity of self awareness which is both rare and a delight.

Coetzee is currently finishing off a sequel to Youth, for publication sometime in 2009 or 2010. I cannot wait to join John once more, to see how mature adulthood will find him. If it is anywhere near as perceptive as this, then it promises to be a very great work indeed.


7.5 out of 10

Review: The Lost Dog - Michele de Kretser

Read: August 2008

The Lost Dog provides one of the best lessons in writing one could hope to find. If there is ever a book you can hand to a creative writing student and say: “this is what happens when you try to be profound at the expense of writing a story. This is what happens when you let florid, pretentious prose marry complex plot lines without thought to what the reader wants to read.” If there is one lesson to learn from this book it is this: less is most definitely more. As G.K. Chesterton so wisely put it: “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

Tom Loxley is a childless divorcee, an insipid, self-absorbed scholar trying to finish his book on Henry James. And when his dog goes missing, he is plunged into a quandary of self analysis which leads to lots of grand sounding thoughts and few real self-discoveries. His mother is growing old and infirm, and he must confront the steady march of time. It is all very clichéd. I hate it when people criticise the ‘literary’ novel, but reading this book I can see why they do. I like books where not much happens, where there is a meditation on life and art and other metaphysical concepts, but this is just boring. 

Having lost his dog, Tom is cast back seven months, to reminisce upon the time when he walked into an art gallery and met the mysterious artist, Nelly Zhang. Soon he is visiting Nelly in her ramshackle warehouse home-come-studio, and becoming increasingly fascinated with both Nelly, and her art. The two fall in love and, fast forward seven months, search wildly for the eponymous lost dog. Confused? So was I. Especially since, interspersed with these two plots, there are many others. There is Tom’s bland childhood in India; the unremarkable search for said dog; a mystery surrounding the end of Nelly’s marriage; the invincible march of old-age upon Tom’s octogenarian mother; an investigation into the connections between art and life. The Lost Dog reads like an over-knotted shoelace; just when you think you are about to get into one of the plots, you find it densely tangled in another. And with the possible exception of the mystery surrounding Nelly’s marriage (which occasionally threatens to develop into a full-blown story but is repeatedly tugged back into the mundanity of the other plots) none of these seems to lead anywhere. The knot is impenetrable.

This is a book which is complex for complexities sake, over-written for the sake of pretension. Tom doesn’t go shopping, he strolls “along packed aisles” marvelling “at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire.” In a garden he encounters box hedges that contain “the kind of roses whose icy perfection was impervious to common rain.” When he sees sodden fields, they resemble “a bitch who has whelped too often.”

At one point, de Kretser has Tom ruminate that: “What he missed in images…was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.”

How odd then that The Lost Dog seems to have absolutely no consistent sense of either plot development, or time. Perhaps that is the point: that art and stories are different beasts. If so, this is a perfect demonstration of that. Even though the chapters are split into days of the week, there is no linear plot whatsoever. Because of the shifting time of the various plots, it isn’t even clear when Tom is searching for the dog, and when other things in his life are happening. I was about halfway through when I realised there was a seven month shift in time between some of the events. And in the past the dog is barely mentioned and clearly not a cornerstone of his life.

And this is the biggest problem: the dog is not a character in itself, but rather a literary metaphor. It is this which I found most frustrating. How are we supposed to sympathise with the loss of Tom’s dog when it doesn’t even have a name? The absent canine is referred to simply as “the dog.” Tom professes to suffer greatly from the dogs disappearance, but he doesn’t seem to have developed any sort of relationship with the dog before this. In his eyes, it isn’t even worthy of a name.

I could write for hours on what I found annoying in The Lost Dog, but Sam Jordison, writing for the Guardian’s Booker Prize blog, sums it up well:

“There are more annoyances. First: an overuse of colons. Coupled with incredibly short sentences. Full of portent. But signifying what? Nothing.
Sometimes: the problem is compounded in painfully short paragraphs.
Sometimes: another crime. Certain words are clumsily – painfully – repeated and twisted all up into oddly ungrammatical sentences.”

At one point Tom refers to his youth as “odorous, unhygienic and refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.” He need not limit himself to his youth, his pseudo middle-age crisis, in my mind, cannot be disposed of with decent haste either.

It is not all bad. There are some wonderful observations. At one point Nelly argues “doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’” But these are lost amid the knot of confusion and banality. 

A.S. Byatt has written that, “whatever the literary equivalent of perfect pitch it, Michele de Kretser has it.” On this evidence she performs month long operatic works, and it is too tiring to sit and listen.

Disgrace - J.M.Coetzee

Rightfully regarded as the best Commonwealth novel of the 20 years, Disgrace tells the story of a white academic and his long, self-imposed, fall from grace in post-apartheid South Africa. Having spent years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie finds himself outdated and old, no longer representative of the world him. Feeling increasingly resentful, he has an impulsive affair with a student but when it turns sour he is denounced and brought before an employment tribunal. Obstinate to the end, he refuses to repent publicly, preferring to retire and make himself a martyr for all that has been and passed.

Hoping that a spell of fresh air and honest work will silence the disquieting sense of loss which is beginning to engulf him he retreats to stay with his daughter on a ranch in the heart of the wilderness. But when they are victims of a vicious attack David comes to realise that age is not something which can be fought forever, that time waits for no man. This is a story about growing old disgracefully, about being left behind by history and finding oneself completely isolated in your home country. It is a journey into the modern Africa, and the very real heart of darkness which resides there. Through the relationship between Lurie and his daughter we see the terrible impossibility of white life in modern, black, South Africa.

It is fascinating to live the other side of the headlines and see the rollover legacy of post-apartheid political correctness. Along with Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, Disgrace is a novel which simply resonates South Africa. Between them they are almost like a conversation being shouted across the years, separated by the history of the apartheid. It is a conversation about South Africa and its people, the terrible impossibility and the hesitant optimism, a country torn apart by years of racial tension which cannot be remedied simply by the abolition of privilege. The fault lines run much deeper than that.

Disgrace is beautifully written, quietly understated, elegiac and evocative. With its unique and powerful narrative and sense of untamed regret in untameable conditions it is one of the most beautiful books I have read. Take this phrase, how can writing achieve such simple magnitude?

“He sighs. The young in one another’s arms, heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out.”

I read Disgrace in one joyful afternoon which I will always treasure and strive to recreate. Beautiful snippets, little moments when life seems all at once in harmony. Like great novels they do not come along often and when they do, one must treasure them, for they are more valuable than gold.

9.5 out of 10