Book Review: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

‘I might be the villain of this story. Even now, It’s hard to tell.’

The Borrower is a bibliophiles dream: a warm, playful and erudite deconstruction of storytelling convention and celebration of adventures in reading. From the enigmatic and immediately engaging first line (above) through to its similarly capricious last line – ‘Let’s say that it does’ – Rebecca Makkai takes the reader by the hand and together you venture into the quirky realms of a tale which is at once both implausible and strangely emblematic.

Lucy Hull is a bookish children’s librarian in small town middle-America. She enjoys shaping children’s imaginations through stories, and delights in sneaking them books she thinks they should read behind the back of their overprotective parents. Yet outside of work she is a little bit lost: she never intended to come to Hannibal, Missouri, at all and now that she has, the rebellion against her father that precipitated it has lost some of its shine. She’s one of those lost twenty-something women, self –aware yet lost, that art finds endlessly compelling.

One morning, she arrives at the library to find her favourite patron – 10-year old Ian Drake: precocious, addicted to reading, and forced to attend weekly anti-gay classes run by Pastor Bob – hiding out having run away from home. He’s desperate for an accomplice and before she realises it, Lucy finds herself accidentally sort-of kidnapping him. Together, they set off on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to nowhere in particular, seeking an adventure like those they’ve read about in books.

Lucy is a borrower of all sorts: not just a librarian employed in the lending and borrowing of books, but an adult who has borrowed a child, and a woman who has borrowed her identity from elsewhere, be it the stories she has read in books, or those of immigration that she has inherited from her Russian father.

One of the things that comes across when reading The Borrower is how much fun Rebecca Makkai seems to have had in writing. (Or maybe that should be Lucy has had, since it is narrated in the first person, and intended as a book written in retrospect). The Borrower is sardonically witty and tricksy throughout, with set-pieces involving ferret shampoo and road trip songs providing frequently funny moment. Makkai delights in referencing and then playing with its influences and precedents. There are parallel’s drawn with Roald Dahl’s tales of childhood rebellion, adventure, and the importance of parents who make these possible – particularly Danny The Champion of the World and James and the Giant Peach - and the permissive whoever you are and wherever you come from undercurrent of L Frank Baum’s Oz books. This is a book for the National Trust’s 50 Things to Do Before you are 11¾ ethos: children being adventurous free from health and safety concerns and over-protective parents.

And yet there is a darker, troubling, side to these recollections. The spectacle of Lolita looms. Throughout, Lucy wrestles with the ethics of what she has done. She may not have inappropriate intentions toward Ian, yet she remains an adult who has run away with a child without his parent’s permission. And because, on the surface the situations are so different, it makes the echo of Humbert Humber’s claims at being (metaphorically at least) kidnapped by Lolita’s innocent beauty, all the more intriguing.

‘It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.’

There are weighty issues being considered here, but they are raised without being overly worthy and the moral questions posed by a narrator whom one cannot help but side with, even if you feel slightly uncomfortable for doing so. Perhaps it is because we recognise ourselves in her, in her uncertainty in herself, in her idealism, in her passion for books which emerges unscathed.

‘I do still believe that books can save you.’

Book Review: Matilda by Roald Dahl

Read: Multiple times, the most recent of which is October 2010
 

Last weekend I did something I haven’t done in years: I went away without packing a book. I didn’t mean to, and certainly wasn’t happy to find I had, but it gave me an opportunity to pick up something I wouldn’t have read at home. After carefully browsing the bookshelves where I was staying it came down to a battle between two quite different books: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and Matilda by Roald Dahl. Of Auster’s comprehensive folio, I have only read Mr Vertigo which I enjoyed without being bowled over by. However, it is one of the favourite books of a writer friend of mine and it has been in my to-read pile for at least two years. I read the first page, complete with her annotation (I love scrawled in books) and was bowled over by the immediacy with which it gripped me.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.”

What a stunning start. I could happily have continued reading and not stopped there. But for fairness sake I set it temporarily down to read a page of Matilda before making my choice. And I didn’t put it down until it was finished.

Matilda holds a special place in my heart. It is my favourite of Dahl's many books, and Dahl was my favourite author as a child. My first independent reading memory is of staying up late one night to finish it under the covers and I must have read it four or five times after that. Picking it up sent a shiver through my spine. I was shocked by just how good it was to be returning to Matilda after at least 15 and probably twenty years without reading it.

Mr and Mrs Wormwood are uncultured, crooked, neglectful parents who treat their children like a burden that has been unjustly thrust upon them. They spend their evenings eating TV dinners in front of the gogglebox, playing bingo and discussing how to make money. They are so self-interested they don’t even register their youngest daughter, Matilda, for school until she is five-and-a-half. They are vacuous, nasty, loathsome parents.

Matilda is different. She likes to read rather than watch TV and possesses intelligence bordering on genius. She can do mental arithmetic as quick as a calculator and spell words that most can only dream of. But when she finally gets to school she encounters a head teacher who makes her parents look almost bearable: a former hammer thrower named Miss Trunchbull. Trunchbull is a child-hating bully with a penchant for grabbing children by the hair and hurling them as far as she can. It is rumoured that she even has a punishment cupboard called The Chokey which is lined with glass and nails so children have to stand perfectly straight while confined. But when Matilda starts to find she has special powers, she concocts a plan to help her stricken teacher Miss Honey and punish the Trunchbull once and for all.

Roald Dahl writes a child’s fantasy perspective sumptuously, complete with the terrors of being small and the dreams of impacting on the big world around you. His characters – with their Dickensian names like Miss Trunchbull (rotten) and Miss Honey (lovely) – and the illustrations by Quentin Blake are broadly drawn caricatures we read with a child’s sense of uncomfortable awe. We make visceral, immediate judgements of them which never change, even as we see their humanity emerging around the black and white of their actions.

As a child I identified with Matilda, not because I was a genius or had horrible parents or scary teachers, but because we each loved reading. She reads every book in the children’s section of her local library by the time she is four and then graduates to grown-up classics which she reads with equal voracity. I wanted to be her, genius and speed reading and all. She is mature beyond her years, caring, considerate and generous. She has a well developed sense of morality, a wicked sense of mischief, and is able to do things that the many various gorwn-ups she comes across cannot.

The fact is, I still love Matilda and I still want to be her.

Matilda is a bibliophiles dream, an unfettered celebration of the joys of reading and a typical Dahl rejection of cold technology in favour of vivid imagination. However, the biggest surprise I had on reading Matilda again is that it didn’t inspire me to read the classic novels Matilda does. Early in the adventure, Dahl lists some of the books she has read, including Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Kim, The Invisible Man and The Grapes of Wrath. But as a child I read none of these. I really don’t know why. But what a wonderful context in which to discover such books, and what a resource this is for young readers wanting to move into grown-up literature. Indeed, what a wonderful resource this is for a sometime book blogger like me who has only read five of the fourteen books listed! It appears I have some reading to do…

But before then, I must go back and read The New York Trilogy.

10 out of 10

My Reading Mojo

This was written as a response to an article on Vulpes Libris charting the evolution of someone's reading habits over the years. I found it fascinating and decided to do the same...

Up until about age 14 I read all the time. It started with reading with my dad at bedtime to practice my reading but soon I had proved that I could read and got to sit back while he read to me. We read all sorts of environmentally friendly children's adventure books: the likes of Michael Morpurgo, the Greenwatch series, books about whaling by someone with the surname Smith. I remember regularly reading late into the night, particularly Matilda by Roald Dahl which I must have read 4 or 5 times. I read to escape, not because my childhood was hard but because the other worlds in those books were so fantastically exciting. The books helped me understand the world, learn what it was I most valued, and ultimately have a mighty great time doing it.

My big Eureka! moment also came with Lord of the Rings when I was 10 or 11. I had started it with my dad but soon the one chapter a night got too slow for me so I began taking it to school and reading on wet lunch breaks and the like. I flew though the last 400 pages or so and loved every single minute of it.

This sort of thing continued for the first year or two of secondary school before being overtaken by computer games (football management games proved the death of reading for me) and staring inanely at sport on the TV. I wasn't a particularly sociable teenager so it wasn't girls or alcohol which was responsible for this, probably just the overriding sense that reading wasn't the cool thing to be doing. Still, I had a 25 minute train journey to school every morning which had to be filled with something and I occasionally read during this (Christian Jacques Ramses series and a few others) but reading was more to fill time than anything else.

During GCSE's and A-Levels revision I read my set texts again and again. I must have read Lord of the Flies and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence 4 or 5 times so that come the exams I loved them in an intellectual sense even if I didn't in an emotional sense. And all this enforced reading took its toll. When it came to university I didn't want to be told to read any more classics so I applied to study history.

A month before I started university I was sitting around home quite bored and decided to give Harry Potter a go. 6 days later I had read the first 4 books in a haze of adventurous excitement and for the next year or two everything I read was overshadowed by love of those books. Not that I remember successfully reading much else, other than a complete re-reading of Lord of the Rings, that is. I had a tough time personally and remember going to the campus bookshop one morning when I hadn't been able to sleep all night and buying the boxset which I then went back to my room and read one after the other again in about 8 days. I would read fansites and get breathlessly excited just discussing what might happen next, watched the movies slightly obsessively, and even used to buy the candy. (Yes, I was 19 or 20 at the time!)

That summer I had the reading, and life experience (I met the wonderful woman who later became my wife), which changed me. Having found another amazing fantasy world through Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and found intellectual, post-modernist, adult fiction which made my mind swim with ideas.

I would talk with Megan about the books we liked for hours. She had been a complete bibliophile as a child and read all the classics which I hadn't so she was like a beacon of the person I wanted to become. She opened my mind to all sorts of new reading possibilities and I hungrily devoured them. But as university got closer to the end, and then through my masters, I found that I was reading too many history texts to think about fiction. The longer this went on, the more I looked forward to finishing with education so that I could read for pleasure once more. For about 6 months I spent my time planning what I would read when I had free choice once more.

And then, the day I handed in my masters dissertation I sat in the union bar and looked out the window to see that Waterstone's was seeking temporary booksellers. I applied, was interviewed, was not chosen. Not at first anyway. But after the first, second, and possibly third candidates turned it down they offered it to me and I jumped at the opportunity.

The 4 years I spent at Waterstone's were a veritable roller-coaster of literary discovery. Being surrounded everyday by so many wonderful books is an experience I shall never forget. But it ended in February of this year when I got a new office job and since then my reading mojo has definitely taken a downturn. This saddens me greatly, but I don't know to get it back.

Whether at the very heart of my life or simmering quietly on the back burner, reading has always been at the heart of my life and it is something I am incredibly grateful for.

Influential Authors

Tough one, this.

I take the idea from Shelf Life. Which authors have influenced my thoughts on books, or writing. They are not necessarily my favourite writers, or those I most admire, but those who have influenced me in some way or another.

Over the years many authors have moulded and shaped my mind as a reader, and often radically transformed what I think about when I think about writing (haha, see what I did there?) Here are just a few of them.

1. Russell Hoban - Taught me that the only limit to writing is the extent of our imagination.
2. Haruki Murakami - Demonstrated how Magical Realism, well done, can express emotional upheaval through metaphor far more effectively than any amount of weeping realism ever has.
   He has also become my 'go-to' writer. Whenever I have become stuck with a book and struggled or not enjoyed finishing it, I go back to a Murakami novel and remember exactly why I love fiction.
3. Milan Kundera - Offered my first foray into fearsomely intelligent, intellectual writing. Enlivened my mind to the possibilities of what a novel can do.
4. Roald Dahl - Helped my fall in love with storybooks. I remember staying up late at night, huddled under the covers, when I was only about 7, desperately scrabbling through Matilda, totally unable to put it down.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings was the first adult book I read to myself, when I was 10 years old. I started off reading it with my Dad but got bored of waiting for our evening reading so decided to read it on my own and from then on I never looked back.
6. J.M. Coetzee - Demonstrated that great writing does not have to be complex or fancy, that what is most important is creating an atmosphere and telling a story and that the simpler you do that the better. Also demonstrates how unappetising sex scenes can be in fiction.
7. Charles Palliser - Reminded me that for all the great ideas you have, the story will always be paramount. If a reader cannot put a book down then that is the greatest achievement you can ever hope for.
8. Don Delillo - Offers a masterclass in the simplicity of good dialogue.
9. Toni Morrison - Taught me that you cannot judge a writer by their agent! No matter how infuriating, rude, or disrespectful an agent/publicist might be bears no correlation with how charming, and amusing the writer will be.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro - Showed me that writing is best when an author has the confidence to let their characters and events speak for themselves. That authorial commentary is best left to an absolute minimum.
11. Olga Grushin - HER STYLE IS DECEPTIVELY LIKE MINE! Gave me a sense that perhaps I can be a good writer.
12. Iris Murdoch - Ah, the unreliable narrator. Showed just how much you can do in the first person even if the narrator is delusional, confused and utterly unreliable.
13. Salman Rushdie - Where to begin? Inspires with every sentence. Demonstrates how mythology can bring a novel alive and create a colour palate of vivid imagination which works in counterpoint to the main plot. His lively, jumpy, excitable prose is an absolute pleasure to read. And he ties together ancient mythology with contemporary culture in a way few authors can.
14. Stephane Audeguy - Merges biography with fiction and fiction with biography in a way I have not seen done by anyone else.
15. Michelle De Kretser, Martin Amis and many others. How unbelievably unreadable and turgid some work can be. This is a very good lesson to learn.
16. Charlotte Bronte - The power of the narrator to carry a plot on their shoulders alone. If you have a great narrative, then I will read on forever, no matter what is happening in the plot.
17. G.K. Chesterton - The king of witty thoughts on writing. Argues that the simpler the prose is, the more you can convey. Less is definitely more.