I tried to read Cloudstreet a few years ago. It didn’t end well – for me, or for Tim Winton, who I vowed to never read again. But then Breath won the Miles Franklin Award on Thursday, and people had been raving about it for the last year. So I finally caved in and bought it. Last copy at work, oh yeah. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, general public…
When Bruce Pike, a paramedic, is called out to a house where a young boy has hanged himself, the incident reminds him of his own experiences as a boy. And so the story moves to the incident, when Bruce was Pikelet, a young boy living in a tiny coastal town, infatuated with surfing. His teacher, Sando, urges him to surf higher and higher waves, and his friend, Loonie, taunts him at his inability to reach the heights he does. But as time passes, the relationships begin to fracture, and nothing remains the same.
Well, don’t I feel like an idiot right now. I’ve spent so long hating Winton that I couldn’t quite believe how brilliant this novel truly is. Every now and then, as you’re reading, you kind of sit back and just go, ‘Wow’. This is a novel by a man at the height of his powers, and they’re pretty impressive. This is a sombre novel, but instead of being weighed down by a constant sense of doom (as could easily have happened when writing a novel about self-harm and our inability to become better people), Breath seems to flow so easily and freely. Winton is a master of the English language, but more than that, I admire him because he is a master of the Australian language. No other writer I can think of can so beautifully write English so uniquely Australian. And it’s not that he draws attention to this fact – it’s just that no one else, not an American, not a Brit, not an Indian – could possibly hope to write such unique Australian writing. Hell, few other Australian novelists can do it. So it’s refreshing to see that someone can.
Other than the language, there’s a lot else in this novel that’s good. I liked Pikelet – he’s very much an everyman, someone who feels like he doesn’t belong where he is, and yet when he tries to do something extraordinary, he’s so scared, he pikes. No pun intended. His journey through the novel is something to which I think we can all relate. Similarly, we’ve all had a friend like Loonie – that one who you become friends with out of circumstance more than anything, and yet you’re never sure what the relationship exactly entails, particularly because your friend is a little dangerous. I think it would have been too easy to write this novel from Loonie’s point of view – the usual misunderstood child with no parents forced to rebel. But focusing on Pikelet makes it all the more interesting because, in comparison, he’s quite well off. Emotionally, that is. The boys’ relationship with Sando, then, is perfectly justified. Here’s a man, just old enough to be respected, but still young enough to be cool, who knows about a secret world of which you want to be a part. Perfect.
Having this triumvirate of characters as the focus tends to make this a very male novel, but that doesn’t mean the female characters are any less engaging. Eva, Sando’s wife, is broken, damaged and bitter, and thoroughly moody and unlikeable. But perhaps this is simply how Bruce the teenage boy remembers her – after all, we all think women are mysterious and confusing at that age (and still do). All this makes her wanting to sleep with Pikelet later more than confusing for him, but she is central to the plot and themes of the novel. When her past is slowly revealed, everything falls into place, and it all makes perfect sense.
I could end this review without mentioning the sea, but it would’t be proper to do so. Surfing is integral to the plot, indeed, the inner workings, of Breath. I couldn’t care less about surfing, but I love Winton writing about it and the sea. There’s such passion for it, so much respect and understanding, and it’s all done so beautifully, I love that it’s there.
I was disappointed when The Slap didn’t win the Miles Franklin Award this year. Before reading Breath, it certainly would have received my vote. Afterwards, I’m not so sure. I hate to be proved wrong, but here is proof that Tim Winton truly is one of our great novelists. This book is not epic, it’s not complex, it’s not long, but it is brilliant. The characters and place are so perfectly evoked, right from the beginning, you know you’re in the hands of a master who has written a novel that is mature, sombre, and a little bit fantastic.
Now that everyone’s going crazy over The Slap, I figured this was a good a time as any to finally finish off Tsiolkas’ backlist. Which is weird, ’cause this is his first novel, meaning I’ve pretty much done it backwards. There you go, though. This short novel was the perfect escape from my exams, which will be over in two days!
Ari is nineteen, not at university, and not in a job. He lives (sometimes) with his parents, and goes out at night to get wasted, stoned, and fucked. He’s not proud that his parents are Greek, but he doesn’t think of himself as Australian, either. He’s tired and frustrated with the world, but lusts after almost everyone he sees. His nights are full of clubs, parties, sex in club toilets, and his friends are just as gone as he is.
It’s interesting to plot Tsiolkas’ career as a writer, having now read everything. This novel is full of anger and frustration, and it’s nice to see that he’s calmed down a bit – though it’s clear that much of it still remains. While family relationships are vital in The Jesus Man and The Slap, here, they are simply degrading and unimportant. Ari seems to hate his parents, and the feelings are, though not fully returned, mutely mutual. There is this constant deconstruction of the family throughout Loaded – Ari’s parents are clearly no good, his friend Johnny’s dad sleeps in the same bed – and so young people are forced to look to each other for company. Well, each other, and gratuitous amounts of drugs.
This novel feels like one big trip. Not that I have any experience in this field. But still, I imagine were I to take drugs, my nights would be like two thirds of this novel. In fact, it’s not until you get to the final section that you realise all this crazy stuff that Ari gets up to takes place in the short space of one night. Insane! I actually lost count of how many people he got off with, and just how many pills he’d taken. Instead of plot, this novel reads more like a giant angry rant at the world, with Ari constantly telling us how shit his life is. But that’s ok – the writing is brilliant, and the novel has so much pent-up energy, it doesn’t feel particularly depressing. There’s so much feeling, so much – well, enthusiasm’s not the right word – fervour, maybe, that you can’t help being drawn into totally believing him to be correct. It’s damning indictment of modern society, but it’s all the better for it. There’s no wallowing in self-pity – just a reason to go out and get fucked.
Even though this novel is short, it packs quite a punch. There’s so much hatred and anger (and drugs) in here to fill a novel ten times its size. And yet, that’s what makes it so powerful. There’s little plot to speak of, the secondary characters are intresting, though uninspired, but Ari and his philosophy are genuinely enthralling. It’s amazing that one young man can find so much dislike for the world around him, but there you go. There is almost nothing he seems to find beauty in, and that’s what makes this novel so brilliant. It’s almost as though Tsiolkas has taken Eliot’s philosophy – the degradation and destruction of the modern world, where morality and humanity have been pushed into the dirt – to a contemporary audience. The story he tells is dirty, gritty, and altogether unpleasant, but it is brilliantly focused and on message. I think this may be my most favouritest Tsiolkas novel. That’ right, you heard it here first.
Also, sorry for the swearing in this post. I guess Tsiolkas will have that effect on you.
Sorry for the lateness in posting this – I have so much work to do for uni! But never fear, exams are over by the end of next week, and I can return to the wonderful world of not thinking. Since this book was lying around my room, taunting me to stop studying and get into it, I gave in. I’m really a very weak person…
As in his first novel, The Yacoubian Building, al Aswany gives us a large cast of characters, whose stories intertwine around the Medical Department of the University of Illinois. This is a story of the Egyptian experience in America, and so we have Egyptian students coming to study for their medical degrees, including Shaymaa, a veiled woman, who has trouble fitting into American society. There’s her neighbour, Tariq. There’s Danana, the leader of the Egyptian students, but a thoroughly unlikeable man with a wife wanting to escape. Then there’s the huge number of professors who turn out to have quite interesting lives, too.
I do love al Aswany’s ability to keep a hold on his giant cast of characters, without ever making us feel like the characters are not getting enough screen time. His structure is impeccable and the occassional meeting between them makes the novel gel together far more than it should. While there have been criticisms of his style as being too close to that of soap operas, I think this style actually works in his favour here. Yes, it is a little like a soap opera, but that is not an intrinsically bad thing.
Al Aswany uses his novel as a social commentary, and there are a lot of things he wants to talk about here. Perhaps the most important is religion, and the way Islam affects the people of Egypt, and whether it is actually a good thing for them. There is brief mention of the Copts – the Christians in Egypt, and when one of the Egyptian students (a Muslim) falls in love with a Jewish American woman, there are some nice moments, though the relationship is doomed, and there does seem to be some kind of implication that a Muslim and a Jew could never really fall in love because of the history. For all of these characters, religion is their downfall – many of them are hypocritical about their faith, and in the end, these people’s lives are deeply affected, and not usually in a good way. Tied into this, then, is the question of Egypt’s political system – there’s a lot of criticism of the current Egyptian president, and the way he runs the country. Many of the students are too scared to even think about questioning the state, and they live in fear of their leader, Danana.
Structurally, and tonally, this book is a lot like The Yacoubian Building. There are a whole load of characters tenuously connected, providing a vast tapestry on which al Aswany can make his points. Alas, though, I think this works better in The Yacoubian Building. Chicago feels like a retread, with al Aswany trying to recreate the magic of quirky characters in serious situations, but the characters ultimately begin to blend into one another, and their ventures were done better in the first go.
To be honest, I can’t even remember why I picked this novel up in the first place. I suspect it was because it had been shortlisted for the Booker in 2001, and as you may or may not know, my theory is that the shortlist for the Booker always provides more interesting than the eventual winner. 2001 was the year True History of the Kelly Gang won, and number9dream, as well as Atonement, were also shortlisted. Clearly a good year, then.
Alice Valentine is dying a slow death. Her son Alec has been looking after her, but he has finally called for reinforcements in the shape of his brother, Larry, who is currently living in the States, his acting career failed and ended. As the three come together again, questions of life and death become more and more important. At the same time, László Lázár, a Hungarian playwright (whose play is being translated by Alec), is remembering his own life in Hungary, and is slowly caught up in a new revolution.
With four main characters, you can run the risk of having some fade into the background – the worry of overcrowding suddenly turns into a realisation that you haven’t given enough page-time to one of your own characters. I think Miller has, alas, fallen into this trap a little. Two of his characters – Larry and László – are enough to carry an entire novel on their own, and so fill their respective pages with a warmth and interest that remains sustained throughout the entire novel. Alice is, let’s be fair, on her death bed, so we don’t expect anything too taxing from her, though the passages we see from her point of view when she is still strong enough are beautifully done – making her downfall that little bit more tragic than it already is. This leaves us with Alec, who does seem to fade into the background a little as a result of these other three, strong characters – an ironic occurrence, considering he is certainly the weakest member of the Valentine family, being totally unable to deal with his mother’s slow demise. Arguably, though, he has seen the whole thing, so this is perhaps understandable.
Indeed, László’s parts are so strong, there are times I wished Miller had taken his story out of the novel and given it its own room to breathe. But, then I read the ending, and I finally realised why he had given us these two stories side by side, moving in sync. This book is disturbingly obsessed with death, with degradation, with people who are in quite dark places. It’s not a happy read. But instead of wallowing in its own “grittiness”, Miller’s prose style allows the themes and ideas to come out without feeling like you are reading an “important” weighty tome, and I think that this balance ensures this novel doesn’t become unreadably bleak. The juxtaposition of these two things – plot and style – are just a part of a larger comparison Miller is trying to make here, too. Watch out, I’m about to spoil the ending – I can’t talk about this book without a mention of it, I’m afraid.
It’s not until the final pages that the concurrent storyline structure Miller chooses to use finally makes sense. Here, Alec, arguably the weakest character, finally finds strength – while never explicitly stated, it is implied he murders his mother, but very much out of compassion, after a nasty accident she has. It is not something he has exactly premeditated, and can almost be seen as euthanasia – at the very least, it is a highly compassionate act. Similarly, though, László is finally able to let go of his guilt from the past, and save a friend about to commit suicide. The acts are, arguably, polar opposites – one murder, one salvation – and yet, there is a beautiful symmetry about having these side by side. Both are acts of extreme compassion, and require great strength on behalf of the people enacting them, yet they have vastly different outcomes. I’m not sure I’m making much sense here, but I really liked it.
If you want to truly understand what I’m trying to say, go out and read Oxygen. It took me a while to get into it, but once it got going, I really had trouble stopping. Miller’s work is something that I will definitely be taking a closer look at in the future.
You know it’s not a good day for your wallet when your place of employment has a 3 for 2 offer on Vintage Classics. Seriously, Random House must love me. Anyhoo, On the Black Hill stood out for one main reason – it has a kick-ass cover. That’s right, people, judging a book totally on its cover. Metaphors and idioms can go to hell. But, is the old saying right?
Benjamin and Lewis Jones are twins born at the turn of the twentieth century. They are born on a small farm in the Welsh countryside, to an English mother and Welsh father. As they grow up, they begin to realise that they are closer than usual twins, leading to some friction between the two. Benjamin wants to stay on the farm and look after his brother, while Lewis wants to leave the farm, get married, and lead a life. After Benjamin’s disasterous involvement with the First World War, the two remain on the farm for the rest of their lives, blissfully unaware of what else is going on.
I love the concept of two characters living out their lives through the twentieth century, seeing everythingas it passes them. But that’s really not what the novel is about. It’s surprisingly timeless, and I don’t mean that in a “classicly timeless” kind of way. I mean that time itself is mysteriously absent, and the passage of time in the narrative is strangely fractured. The first half of the novel deals with about 20-25 years of the twins’ lives, while the next half is dedicated to the other 50 years, much of which is skipped over in a few paragraphs. It makes for a strangely jumpy plot, and one that relies on us being interested in the minuitae of the lives of the people who live in the same village as the twins, and their descendents’ actions and so forth.
For an arguably character based novel, there’s surprisingly little development of the two main characters. Both Benjamin and Lewis remain fairly two dimensional and, apart from a few incidents that give us differences between the two, the twins themselves remain quite similar. There’s a lovely scene about two thirds of the way through the novel, where a German physchologist has come to visit the twins, and is doing a study on how twins live with each other. In her interview with Lewis, reveals that he wishes he could change it all, and actually leave his brother and the farm. But the time has passed, he is now well into his fifties, and cannot. Benjamin’s character pieces come far earlier in the novel, and his dealings with the army during the First World War are really quite well done. After that, though, he simply becomes the clingy brother, the one who loves his twin unconditionally forever. But apart from this, the novel is very plot driven. Not that this is a bad thing, but it doesn’t sit comfortably with what the book ostensibly wants to do – which, I assume, is to explore the close relationship of thes brothers. If plot, then, is what Chatwin wanted to focus on, I would have liked to see him place the twins in the face of more historical events, maybe live out the twentieth century through the events that defined what the century became.
So, it doesn’t really work as a character piece, and it doesn’t really work as plot. Does the cover lie, then? Not totally. The book, despite its shortcomings, is enjoyable enough. I certainly didn’t begrudge my time reading it. But, that was about it. It didn’t move me, it didn’t give me a eureka moment, and it didn’t exactly take off. It’s a very average novel – stuck between its ambition, and the failed way in which Chatwin tries to pull this ambition off.
Publishing imprints are strange beasts – for some people they mean nothing, but for others (usually obsessive, like myself), they are vitally important. And they really are, I think. While they may not always get it right, publishers usually publish books in certain imprints depending on where they want to pitch it to the market. HarperCollins’ new imprint, Blue Door, has not even released its first book yet, but if The Hungry Ghosts is anything to go by, I’ll be keeping an eye out.
The Safford family are one of the most important families in British-occupied Hong Kong. Their daughter, Alice, is an unruly child who is always getting into trouble. What her family does not realise, though, is that the reason for this is that she is haunted by a hungry ghost – a 12 year old Chinese girl raped and murdered some twenty years before. As Alice’s life rapidly spirals out of control, more ghosts come to her, and she must try and stop them taking over her life before it is too late.
It took me a while to get into this novel, though I can’t exactly pinpoint the reason for this. When it finally clicked for me, though, I read about three quarters of it in one afternoon. I wonder if the thing that was putting me off was the way the story was told. Each chapter is told from an alternating viewpoint, and many of the chapters are told by incidental characters. This doesn’t mean the story is fragmented – far from it, considering these chapters are very sequential, and we often get the same event told from different points of view. To some extent, Berry does this quite well, and some of the voices are quite distinctive, particularly the Ghost and Myrtle (Alice’s mother), but many of the incidental and more peripheral main characters do tend to blend into one another.
Yet, this fragmented view is a neat trick in a book that centres itself as a family saga. Despite the literary fireworks surrounding some of the magical realism facets, being able to tell a family saga from the point of the view of the entire family is a good idea. To set it against the British occupation of Hong Kong (going all the way up to the handover in 1997) is also a good plan – Berry is clearly writing to her strengths, but the Saffords are clearly very ‘British’, if you get my meaning. They have servants, Ralph (the father) works for the Governor, Myrtle is the perfect socialite in English circles, their children are bundled off to the motherland for a proper education, and it’s all just a little bit colonial. Which makes their inevitable fall tie in quite nicely to the eventual fall of the Safford family, though it is interesting to see that Harry (the son) is actually the one to make it out moderately sane, considering his less than happy childhood.
What makes this book quite unique, though, are the magical realist parts of the novel, Inspired by the Chinese festival Yue Lan, this book takes a simple concept from Chinese Buddhism, and spins an entire novel around it. I like the concept of hungry ghosts – spirits of people and beings that refuse to move on, and instead attach themselves to unsuspecting humans, ruining their lives. These things are clearly dangerous creatures, and as Alice acquires more and more of them, she is weighed down by guilt and depression, forcing her to resort to desperate measures. Thinking of these ghosts, I can see that maybe Berry uses them as a metaphor for something else – Alice is an unwanted child and is subject to all kinds of callous and careless treatment, particular from her mother, who is out to make Alice’s life as difficult as possible. Not on purpose, mind, but she has such contempt and such little patience for Alice’s ways, she takes it out on Alice herself. Perhaps, then, we can see the ghosts she carries as guilt over this childhood, perhaps she feels somewhat responsible for the way she was treated. Either way, these ghosts are causing Alice a great depression, and it is thoroughly believeable – the lead ghost is a malevolent, childish creature that I personally felt little sympathy for. This makes the ending a little hard to swallow, though I think I can see what Berry was trying to do.
If this is the kind of novel Blue Door are going to be publishing regularly, I’d keep a look out. I promise this isn’t a plug for them (even though I keep mentioning them), but this novel is quite good. There are certainly some things that don’t quite fit in, but this is Berry’s first attempt, and I’m very interested to see what she does next.
I read Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize winner, The Line of Beauty, because I wanted to see what people thought was better than David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. And while I still think Mitchell is better, I did enjoy The Line of Beauty. So seeing The Folding Star in a second-hand bookshop for cheap was an easy decision to make.
Edward Manners is a thirty-something tutor who goes to Belgium to teach two very different young boys – Luc Altidore and Marcel Echevin. Unfortunately, Edward falls desperately in love with Luc, making teaching him a problem. At the same time, he is employed to work with Marcel’s father, Paul, on a catalogue of an obscure artist, Orst. As each facet of his life slowly draw together, Edward’s obsession with Luc causes more problems than he could possibly imagine, and reveal secrets he couldn’t dream of.
Obsession is a big word that we tend to throw around a lot to describe people who have more than a passing interest in something. This novel, however, totally redefines what it means to be obsessed by something. Edward’s attraction to Luc is not just a passing interest, a “Oh, he’s cute” kind of way – this is fully blown obsession, bordering on stalking. Edward’s behaviour towards other people is affected by his total love for Luc, to the point where he drives away another man who truly loves him, but cannot deal with the fact that Edward is always thinking about Luc. Not that simple love triangles are the point of the novel. Edward is an intelligent man, but when he thinks about Luc (which is pretty often), he becomes weak and pathetic, like a small child in a lolly shop.
The things he does to fulfil this obsession are many and various, but I particularly like his trick of stealing Luc’s dirty underwear. Nothing weird about that at all. Right? And I suppose that’s an important part of the novel – the question of what we are driven to do when we are in love with someone, someone who more often than not is not in love with us. This is nicely mirrored with Luc’s two best friends, Patrick and Sybille, one of whom is attracted to Luc, but this is the whole mystery of the novel, so I won’t spoil it for you. Actually, yes I will. Look away now if you don’t want to know… It is Sybille who is attracted to Luc, but Luc wants Patrick. And so, really, Edward’s attraction is completely justified (something that is left unanswered until the end of novel), which begs the question, what would have happened had Edward acted on his urges earlier? I like the mirroring at the end of the novel with Marcel’s father, Paul, having been in exactly the same situation as Luc when he was 17 – almost as a justification that Edward’s love and lust for Luc is not something to be seen as dirty or illegal, but as something that can truly be wonderful.
One thing that cannot be forgotten is the swathes of information Hollinghurst provides us with about his fictional artist, Orst. I genuinely thought he was a real artist, there was so much detail in his biography, but apparently not. It does take one away from the main plot of the novel, but there’s so much else going on, why not have a fictional artist haunting your pages? It also gives Paul Echevin his own obsession – a man who could have been so much more than he is, slaving away at a catalogue of an artist who is not even considered major. While he is not a character we inherently pity, there is a sense of sadness around him, especially with his family, and so seeing the end result of obsession is a nice touch.
This is a very sexy book. Not in that I find it attractive, but the novel does teem with pent up sexual energy, mainly from Edward, and sx is very much a vital part of what it is talking about – lust, obsession, desires. The fact that Hollinghurst is labelled as a “gay writer” is not an issue here – what he is writing is a universal human condition. Edward Manners is a man who lives with his obsessions, and yet never truly finds peace with them.
I’ve been at work a bit more than usual lately, so I’ve had a lot of time to read at work. So instead of reading what I should be reading, I picked something off the shelves that just came out. I really enjoyed Carroll’s previous novel, The Time We Have Taken, and people kept telling me to read his other stuff, so what better place to start than with the latest?
Catherine and Daniel have escaped their small English village for a bit of private time in an abandoned property on the outskirts. Unfortunately for them, so have Emily Hale and her friend, Tom Eliot. This autumn afternoon in 1934 sets up events that bring Catherine, a young eighteen year old, with the world ahead of her, and Miss Hale, a woman in her thirties, still waiting for true love to come to her, together. And so Catherine will discover what she truly has with Daniel, what it is to wait for an entire lifetime for something that will never come, and what it can do to you.
This is a short novel, but I think it works well that way. While Carroll’s writing is beautiful, and very much a joy to read, for me, there’s a finite amount of nice prose I can take before it gets in the way of what’s actually going on. Fortunately, Carroll manages to get the mix right, and so I can sit back and enjoy the way he writes, as well as what he is actually trying to tell me. And what he is trying to tell me is also very good.
The mirroring of Catherine and Daniel with Emily and Tom is clearly no accident. One couple at the beginning of their love for each other (and obviously very much in love) juxtaposed with one couple who have had to live through so much that they can barely be called a couple any more. As such, we really focus on Emily as a way of investigating this theme. T.S. Eliot (for that is who Tom is) remains in the sidelines, and while his influence penetrates every sentence of the novel, it is Emily who is deeply affected by their inability to ever be together. The first scene manages to capture the whole novel in a moment – Tom and Emily, so close to finally understanding one another, only to be interrupted by the next young couple – is perfectly captured, and reminded me of Ian McEwan at his best (that’s a good thing).
Also important to the novel is its temporal setting (how pretentious am I!). Setting it between the war, in the autumn of 1934, perfectly captures the feel of the story – it could not have existed anywhere else. Autumn is a season of death and disappearances, but it is also ironically beautiful. There’s something almost ethereal about the moment of beauty that only lasts a moment (very Japanese, that), and I think that’s what Carroll’s getting at. The “lost life” is that of Emily Hale – the life she could have had staring right at her, but she is clearly unable to have that life, and so she cannot have any other either. She cannot settle for anything other than what she thinks she should have. She becomes almost bitter and pathetic about the whole thing, but you see she is very much in love with the man she obsesses over. When Catherine sees this, though, she is awakened to the fact that what she has with Daniel may not last (especially considering he is moving to Europe for a year), and her coming to terms with that is very sensible.
The opening and closing scenes of this novel are its strength. They are beautiful situations, with sympathetic characters, and though provoking meditations on lost love and lost opportunities. It does get a little muddy in the middle, but I think this is because it is very easy to get lost in Carroll’s prose and lose where you are with the characters and plot. Not a bad thing, but something to watch out for.
One of the many perks of working in a bookshop is being able to read books before they come out. Publishers like to send us things that they hope we’ll like, so that we can start selling the book as soon as it comes out. Pretty wily, those publishers. Anyway, a lot of the time, they send us crap – reading copies of good books never seem to come my way. But, I’d read Rhubarb, Silvey’s first novel, and thought it was pretty good. So I figured, why not?
Charlie Bucktin is woken up late on enight by someone tapping on his window – Jasper Jones, the town punching bag needs his help. He leads Charlie to the body of a dead girl – a girl that Jasper was very close to. Convincing Charlie that hiding the body is for the best, they must try to keep this secret between the two of them, as the formal investigation into the girl’s disappearance begins. As this is taking place, though, Charlie realises he is falling in love with the dead girl’s sister.
Regular readers of this blog (do they even exist?) will be aware of my intense dislike of books that endow their teenage characters with amazing powers of deduction well beyond their years. And, alas, to a certain extent, Silvey falls into this trap. Charlie is supposed to be thirteen, but he seems pretty switched on for that age. I think if he’d been about sixteen, I wouldn’t have minded quite so much. However, this minor niggle is more than made up for by the fact that the entire book is totally awesome. And yes, I’m channelling valley girl tonight.
I love this book. Just throwing it out there. One of the most refreshing and genuinely good books I’ve read in a long time. Charlie is great. He’s just so normal. There’s nothing special about him – he doesn’t get girls, he writes in his spare time, he fights with his parents, and he and his best friend get up to all sorts of mischief. I think Silvey has done a brilliant job in creating this character, and finding the perfect setting for him to live in. I don’t think Charlie Bucktin could live in today’s society – and so 1963 country town is the best place for him. This era gives Silvey some interesting material to work with – most notably, the fact that Charlie’s best friend is Vietnamese makes for some interesting tension between the Lu family and the rest of the town. It’s interesting to see parallels between Jeffrey’s father keeping his job at the local mine while others lose theirs, and what goes on today. This racism is not a big part of the novel, but it’s a good one nonetheless. Not the racism, but the treatment of it. You know what I mean.
It’s not just Charlie that makes this book so good – the supporting characters have a life of their own. Jeffrey is another amazing creation, and his endless enthusiasm for, among other things, cricket is a vital part of the novel. One particular sequence involving a (strangely gripping) game of cricket allows Jeffrey to be a character in his own right, while still allowing Charlie to simmer in the background. Similarly, Eliza, Charlie’s love interest is sufficiently cute and the such to make the two of them perfect together. Special mentions also to Charlie’s parents, who bring new meaning to the word dysfunctional. Charlie’s mum is nuts – I particularly liked her forms of punishment, and was constantly thankful that my own mother was never cruel enough to make me dig a hole and then fill it. Oddly enough, the titular Jasper Jones doesn’t feature that heavily in the novel, though I suppose it is him who causes the chain of events that form the plot, so I gues he’s allowed to be the title…
The strength of this novel really is the cast of characters that make it so likeable and accessible. The mystery plotline is interesting enough, but (and I’m not trying to sound facetious here, promise) I did work out what happened about halfway through. But that’s ok. Similarly, the Jones family mystery was, a little bit interesting. That’s not the point of the novel. It’s these characters, and how they react to the changing world around them. Whether they survive, change, or sink, is what we are interested in. Silvey proves he isn’t just a one-book kind of guy with this novel, and hopefully, it’ll see him gain some much deserved coverage.
And so my slight obsession with Albanian literature continues. Well, I say Albanian – I really mean Ismail Kadare. I don’t know what it is about him that I keep coming back to, but his writing combined with the really pretty Vintage Classics covers of some of his novels just makes me go back for more.
An Italian general has been sent on a mission. He must go to Albania and collect the bones of all the fallen soldiers from the Second World War. Tagging along with him is a military priest and a local expert. Over the two years that it takes them to complete this mammoth task, all sorts of memories of the past begin to surface that many people have tried to forget for the last twenty years. Memories of Italian mistreatment of the Albanian population, and diaries of the deceased Italian soldiers provide a fascinating insight into what life is like in an occupied country – from both sides.
I love the central concept that this novel weaves itself around. I love the idea of someone going back to collect the bones of the dead (hence the title of the novel) and being forced to relive events that he is desperately trying to forget. I love that he is going to a country that was occupied by his own army not twenty years ago. I think this is a really clever way of writing a war novel, and I think what Kadare does best is to not blame either side for what went on. Or, at least, I didn’t read any blame. What makes this novel even better is that it is told from the Italian point of view.
Kadare could have quite easily have taken the Albanian side, and given us an Italian general who is narky and insensitive, but instead, he has given us a character who feels old, tired, frustrated with what he is doing and the way he is going about it. His attempts to befriend the Albanians, who are still (quite rightly) bitter about the war, are lovely to see from his side, and the stonewalling he gets from the other side is frustratingly predictable. But in a good way – this smaller token of reconciliation is no doubt meant to represent relations between the two countries, and to see Albania being portrayed as the people unwilling to move on is more interesting than the predictable inevitability of making Italy the bad guys. Albania itself is not characterised as a particularly nice place. Most of the descriptions of the landscape paint it as bleak and uninviting – especially since the novel focuses much of its time on the general doing his job in the winter, in mountains and backwaters that inspire dreariness and grayness.
For me, the best parts of the novel were the flashbacks to the war itself – the highlight of this being a diary of a deserter who lives out his life on an Albanian farm. There’s something so beautiful and elegiac about the whole thing, you just want to read it forever. And that, I think, is where the novel’s main weakness is. I would have much rather seen Kadare focus more on the flashbacks and diaries than the present day, mainly because I think his writing is much better in these sections. He brings some kind of balance and thought into what he is writing here, and it makes for some really unique war reading. Not that he condones what is going on – these diaries are far more personal than the political machinations of what was going on around them. Much like the general in the present day, Kadare chooses to focus on the personal rather than the national. There are some other really nice touches – the story of the whorehouse in the small Albanian village is perfectly pitched, as is the old woman at the wedding at the end. The German general, another man here to collect the bones of his dead, is another nice character, though it would have been nice to see him a bit more in the novel – he becomes vitally important at the end, though he is not set up as being so in the main body.
There is a reason Ismail Kadare was able to break out of the shudder-inducing genre of “world literature” and become a respected author in his own right, and this novel encapsulates it. His ability to paint characters who are placed in situations that are universal, and does not have to rely on making Albania, or its history, the backbone of every novel he writes, so that people read it to feel intelligent and well-read. Hopefully, people read this book because it is a very good novel, not just because “that guy’s from Albania”.
