Book Review: 84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff

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

On day 8 it is the correspondence between a New York writer and London bookseller that make up 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.

Read: November 2008

84 Charing Cross Road in tweet-sized chunk:

A book lovers dream, 84 Charing Cross Road chronicles one of the most enduring long-distance friendships to be found in literature.

When Helene Hanff sat down at her typewriter on October 5th, 1949 and typed off a purchase order to a small antiquarian bookshop in London, little could she know that she was about to be drawn into an intercontinental friendship that would last decades and chronicle both her life, and the lives of those she corresponded with. But that is what happened. The ensuing friendship between herself – a free-spirited and self-educated New York writer with ‘an antiquarian taste in books’ – and Frank Doel – a reserved bookseller in post-war Britain – was to last for more than twenty years, and capture much of their different personalities, as well as the character of their cities, separated by a wide ocean, and a common language.

Their relationship catches something of the age. It is 1949 and Britain is still recovering from war, with rationing and reconstruction the order of the day, and stoic survival the dominant mood. Frank Doel embodies the Britain of strict social and moral codes, stiff upper lip professionalism, and courteous detachment. Against this Helene is fiery and abrasive, a no-nonsense New Yorker full of witty sarcasm and little respect for personal boundaries. She sees Frank as delightfully representative of a romantic literary past in which John Donne attends Trinity College, Samuel Pepys is chased around the bedroom by his wife brandishing a red-hot poker, and books are printed in beautifully bound, gold edged hardbacks.

Theirs is a deep friendship, but not the love story some suggest. For Helene the love affair is with ‘the England of English literature’ which Frank so helpfully lays out for her, while to him she is an taste of excitement from across the Atlantic, brash and fun in a way post war Britain was not. This intercontinental friendship is charming. You read along enraptured; aware of how privileged you are to be granted such intimate insight into two lives, adopting their friendship almost as if it were your own. You smile along with Helene when she is sent into ecstasy by the arrival of a first edition of John Newman’s Idea of a University, and with Frank when a parcel of tinned food (near impossible to get due to rationing) arrives at the bookshop. When she asks him to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he responds by asking her to ‘give a few cheers for THE SPURS’. She vents with fury at the destruction of a book used for packaging, and he travels to sales disbanding once great estates to see if he can find any good books in their libraries.

For a books aficionado, this is an absolute joy. There is so much to learn about classic literature, the lives of great writers, and the history of the book trade. Helene Hanff’s self-taught learning is impressive. At one point she describes her early readings, and the way she consumed the annuls of literature one step at a time, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, to Arther Quiller-Couch’s lectures, to The Bible. This is a book chock full of life and energy and perfect characterisation.

And yet between the lines there is so much sadness. Time passes silently, with so much happening in each of their lives that is never spoken about. Invisibly, they grow older and have adventures and experiences we never hear about, tragic events strike, time passes; life goes on away from our prying eyes. At times months and even years go by without a letter, what happens in these years a mystery. It is difficult not to wish for so much more than the 99 pages. The more you read, the more you want to read, and all this life lived between the lines on the page is so close and yet so utterly unreachable that you yearn for more.

But the passage of time is reassuring as well, for time does not pass for Helene and Frank. Outside their correspondence, the world continues to turn, but nothing affects their camaraderie. Like the English literature whose history they are each so steeped in, they remain untouched, and when you finish the last letter, one of the joys is that they remain before you for a long time, like long lost friends who you will never forget. And in this beautiful Virago celebration edition, we also get The Duchess of Bloomsbury, a diary of Helene's eventual trip to London in promotion of 84 Charing Cross Road. It offers a beautiful counterpoint to the longing of her correspondence, and a fascinating portrait of the real London, warts and all, even through the eyes of a lifelong anglophile such as Helene. I love 84 Charing Cross Road, it is a wonderfully enchanting book and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

9 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

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