Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

One the best things about blogging are the wonderful book recommendations I get from other readers and authors. Author Vestal McIntyre recommended I read Neel Mukherjee’s recent novel which I loved and reviewed. In turn, Neel recommended I read this short novel by Tiffany Murray and I loved it. A good eerie ghost story is a thrilling experience. Best savoured late at night when the house creaks and wind whistles outside heightening the atmosphere. The reader’s imagination hums with a sense of dread and the excitement of the forbidden. It’s like daring yourself to look under the bed or out of the window when all you can see in the dark glass is your own ghostly image reflected back at you. Tiffany Murray has created an innovative, thrilling tale worthy of the genre set in a stately English country house in the 1950s. Adolescent boy Dieter has inherited the enormous mansion as he is the only surviving Sugar of a long family line that has inhabited the Hall for hundreds of years. After his father’s tragic death the young boy moves into the dilapidated mansion with his German-born mother Lilia and his older half-sister Saskia. The family is poor and Lilia slowly sells off the contents of Sugar Hall so that they can sustain themselves. Meanwhile, lonesome Dieter happens upon a mysterious boy who engages him to play. Helpful neighbours including handyman John and well-born Juniper try to assist them into adjusting to the old fashioned lifestyle of being the proprietors of a great Hall. But threatening, creepy events make life uneasy for the family. They are unwittingly engaged in a tragic story that has haunted Sugar Hall for a long time.

This book is all about atmosphere and Murray is highly adept at making the air hum with tension through her precise prose style. One clever thing she does to introduce you to the hall is present a scene where Saskia is idling around the house singing. She is overheard by both Dieter and Lilia in other parts of the house. So while you read about their particular points of view you are also aware of Saskia lingering in the background and Dieter and Lilia’s humorous perspectives on her singing ability.  By presenting these different perspectives on a single incident it creates a kind of three-dimensionality in the reader’s imagination so it’s possible to spatially visualize a scene. It’s actually a technique Mukherjee skilfully employs at the beginning of his novel “The Lives of Others” as well.

Each chapter in “Sugar Hall” is preceded by images such as illustrations of moths (which are rife throughout the great house) or letters. This lends an air of authenticity to the text like a trail of clues leading you gradually to discover what’s really going on. Murray’s descriptive use of colours makes Sugar Hall come vividly alive. Many rooms in the stately home are colour coded in an edgy, intimidating way. For instance the library is a “garish red” which certainly doesn’t make a relaxing, contemplative environment for reading. In fact, each room seems to be super-saturated with a certain colour making for an odd, unsettling place to inhabit. My only tiny qualm is the one instance where Murray describes something as “lemon yellow.” I believe the past three novels I’ve read have all used this synesthesia-like combination and, to me, it feels like a sort of creative writing school staple which grates slightly rather than creating the sense association that is intended. Otherwise, the writing and rich descriptive phrases Murray creates feel wholly original.

Striking images populate the novel which created a lasting impression in my imagination. For instance, early on Dieter shows a fascination with certain words like glamour. He uses some of his mother’s lipstick to colour his lips and practices saying the word in the mirror. I’m not sure how deeply Murray intended the use of this word, but the etymology of the word glamour is that it is an alteration of the word grammar. It’s a meaningful association here as the boy Dieter encounters cannot speak at first. Grammar also derives from the Latin word grammatica which was used in the Middle Ages in association with scholarship of occult practices. Thus Dieter’s fascination with the word might act as a kind of talisman to summon unruly spirits. Of course, trying to read deeper into these things isn’t necessary to enjoy the original and memorable images that Murray creates.

Murray is also skilled at creating moments of high intimacy/sensuality. I don’t mean sexual necessarily. There is a physicality in the narrative which made me feel present and wholly in the moment. For instance, at one point John explains to the boy Dieter he has bad lungs and he invites the boy to listen to the rattle in his chest. In another scene Dieter cuts his finger and the boy he plays with takes the finger in his mouth to suck. Later Lilia goes swimming in a river and feels such a keen sense of liberation floating in the water out in the open. In a number of scenes like these I felt so present in the moment it was like I was experiencing the characters’ tangible reality.

Lilia sings the song "Hänschen klein" to herself

The children really dominate the story in the beginning of the book: curious-natured Dieter with his longing to rejoin the gang of kids he belonged to in London and flighty Saskia who tries to affect a posh voice, idolizes the murderess Ruth Ellis and longs to become an actress. But it’s Lilia and her complex back story which really develops as the novel proceeds. There are also some marginal characters which are equally as compelling. In particular there is a wonderfully distasteful and crotchety vicar named Ambrose who keeps a moth collection. He and his wife are described as having such an intense mutual contempt for each other I could imagine them having an anguished and tortured novel of their own.  

The story takes place in a time period where the deprivation and destruction that came from recent WWII is still being felt. The Hall represents a fading monument of privilege and the breakdown of colonialism. The lingering sin of long-abolished slavery demands recompense. These larger issues loom in the background, but really this is a story of a haunting that is handled with great delicacy and tact. In ghost stories time fluctuates, becomes circuitous and twisted. So the characters here are wrenched out of this particular point in the 50s. Their lively existence is turned to husks as dry and dead as pinned moths when confronted with the infinite echo chamber of the past found in Sugar Hall. This story is a thrill for the senses and an excellent read.

Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision at National Portrait Gallery London

I know you must be tired of hearing me rave about Virginia Woolf and her novel “The Waves” in particular. When the #ThisBook challenge came around asking people to name the book by a female author which most influenced them it was the one I instantly picked. I first discovered the novel at university (not a text on my syllabus) and have read it on many late nights. Walking to work through London on warm summer mornings listening to an audio recording of “The Waves” is one of my favourite things to do. The intensity of emotion, journey through the stages of life and inventive language have made an indelible impression upon me.

Virginia Woolf's Passport

So this morning I was thrilled to attend a preview of a major new exhibition focusing on Woolf at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibit is curated by Frances Spalding who has just published a tempting new biography of Woolf. It combines painted portraits of Woolf by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant & Roger Fry; photographs of Woolf by Beresford, Man Ray & McGregor who photographed Woolf for Vogue; intimate letters & diary entries to and from Woolf; and first editions of books by Woolf and other major Modernist writers. The collection creates a journey through Woolf’s life with moving insights including a haunting photo of Virginia at 13 in mourning dress for her recently deceased mother, copies of her first publications in the Stephen children’s ‘The Hyde Park Gate News’ & memoir about her father in a biography of him, photos of very young Virginia playing cricket in both 1886 & 1894, letters to Katherine Mansfield & Vita Sackville-West and a stately bust of the author by Stephen Tomlin. I particularly liked a mushy love letter written from Leonard to Virginia in 1912 while the couple were still courting.

1st edition of The Waves!

Family photo album

Announcement of engagement to Lytton Strachey with commentary "Ha! Ha!"

In addition to representations of Woolf and her work the exhibit also includes many photos of the family, authors and acquaintances most closely associated with her. There is a domineering photo of Sophie Farrell who was the Woolf’s cook immortalized in Virginia’s essay ‘The Cook.’ A photo of handsome & debonair elder brother Thoby Stephen who died at the young age of 26 gives an insight to Woolf’s novel “Jacob’s Room” and the character of Percival in “The Waves.” Chillingly there is a photo of Virginia with her step-brother George Duckworth – the man who Woolf famously derided as showing her unwanted “profuse, voluble affection” when she was young. There are a number of paintings by sister Vanessa Bell and other artists of the time demonstrating the comingling art, style and practice amongst the groups of writers at the time. A stark portrait of ‘The Memoir Club’ by Bell shows Virginia reading her work before a group of stately looking men. The grouping of these works of art and artefacts is a testament to how Woolf was both influenced by the artists of the time and a major influence upon others.

The exhibit provides insights into Woolf’s recurring mental illness as well as her strong political views (not often commented on in relation to her highly stylized writing). In the commentary provided in the text accompanying the exhibit there is also a sense of Woolf self-consciously creating her image as a writer. From early photos of (an already mature looking) Virginia at 20 with her domineering nose to Gisèle Freund’s photographs of Woolf elegantly dressed and poised with cigarette holder, there is a sense of Woolf presenting herself as a highly serious artist and intellectual. It was an image of someone you would feel intimidated about approaching, but this fantastic exhibit gives her fans access behind that forbidding façade. It traces the trajectory of her life, influences which informed her writing and development as an artist. Go see it!

Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision is on at National Portrait Gallery from July 10- October 26.  

An Encyclopaedia of Myself by Jonathan Meades

For several decades, Jonathan Meades has been a well-established writer, cultural critic of primarily food & architecture and broadcaster in Britain. He has such a distinct clear-cut voice in his writing that makes his personality come vibrantly alive. The experience of reading his autobiography was akin to meeting a man in a pub and listening to the story of his life while he wildly gesticulates with a pint in his hand and breathes tangy alcohol-infused fumes directly in my face. That is to say, he is very blunt in his opinions....

Read my full review on Shiny New Books here: http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/non-fiction02/an-encyclopaedia-of-myself-by-jonathan-meades/

The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson

How do ordinary people survive in their native city after losing a war? The familiar civilization they've known all their lives has crumbled and must slowly be rebuilt brick by brick. People either give into despair or use their ingenuity to adapt and survive. In the aftermath of WWII, Berlin was jointly occupied by the Allied powers. American, British, French and Soviet forces patrol the city. Food is scarce, many buildings are partially-demolished and a thriving black market arises where cigarettes take the place of currency. Kasper Meier is a man in his early 50s. His age is somewhat immaterial as the effects of war have prematurely aged everyone: “In Berlin, a face full of lines carved out by dirt, fear and exhaustion didn’t tell you anything about someone’s age anymore.” Kasper has learned to navigate this devastated city landscape by bartering to obtain tins of ham or whatever foodstuff he can obtain in order to feed himself and his elderly father. He tries to keep a low profile and he has a good reason for doing so because he’s gay. Homosexuality was still criminalized after the fall of the Nazis and even those who were “gay Holocaust” survivors faced being re-imprisoned if they continued to engage in homosexual activity and their names were kept on a list of sex offenders. But Kasper has obtained a reputation for being well-connected and able to obtain information. This is when he’s approached by a mysterious woman named Eva who needs his help to find a British pilot. From this encounter Kasper is unwittingly drawn into a complex and suspenseful plot of revenge and murder.

1945 Berlin is a city rife with suspicion and paranoia. It’s haunted by the devastating consequences that war has brought to it and the people left behind (both German citizens and soldiers in the Allied forces) painfully mourn the loss of their loved ones and the life they led before. The end of winter doesn’t bring with it the hope of renewal. Rather it’s a city where “the warmth of spring had begun, in places, to bring back the smell of buried death that had plagued the city the previous summer – a sweet rotten fragrance carried on the searching gusts of April wind.” This season which traditionally brings with it the promise of new birth instead awakens the spectre of all that was lost. A group of skilfully written characters are plagued by difficult painful memories and the bleak reality of a ruined city. The most powerful character is Kasper himself who forges ahead despite images of his lost lover Phillip reverberating in his mind. He shies from talking about the past or the reason why he was scarred during the war (losing one of his eyes). Whenever he is asked about his eye he deflects the question by producing a comic answer such as: “Hindenburg did it with his Pickelhaube when I pulled his moustache.” He carefully continues to hide his sexuality from his elderly father and fears being exposed if he doesn’t assist Eva and her enigmatic employer. As the story progresses, Eva’s tale takes on a greater degree of complexity and the full terror of her difficult past comes out in a highly dramatic scene. Here “her hatred overwhelmed her and she let it come and she enjoyed it like biting down on an aching tooth.” The intensity with which this scene is composed is made all the more powerful from the outflow of bitter feelings which have been carefully concealed by her character for so long.

“As the sky darkened, the rough castellations at the tops of the buildings became silhouettes and, if the destruction below them wasn’t so total, they might have appeared like melancholy ruins in the haze of a Casper David Friedrich painting.”

Before the war, Kaspar used to run a bar which from small descriptions I gather was a sort of low-key version of Christopher Isherwood’s famous cabaret portrayed in “Goodbye to Berlin.” The story in this novel follows a similarly colourful cast of characters who have been trodden down, but still retain their flair. It’s interesting coming to this novel after having read Audrey Magee’s novel “The Undertaking” earlier this year. Before reading either of these books I can’t remember having encountered any stories of post-war German life (Magee’s book partly follows a woman’s story throughout the war and after). Something both novels deal with is the rape of women in the city following the occupation from Allied forces. In his novel, Fergusson explores how rape isn’t a side-effect of war, but an active instrument used in the systematic way a nation is defeated. But for all the misery, betrayal and horror that comes with war, “The Spring of Kasper Meier” shows the surprising resilience of individuals as well as their ability to believe in the good of humanity and rely on each other for support after achieving a hard-won trust. Ben Fergusson has produced a really impressive debut novel that deserves to be read.

Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant

Towards the end of Linda Grant’s new novel, the narrator Adele asks her friend “How do we get people so wrong… when we are so intensely curious about them?” This is the question which seems to have plagued her entire life after losing her friend Evie while at university. There is a central mystery which is literally about what really happened to Evie upstairs after the narrator’s birthday party on one fateful night. Adele pieces together what might have occurred through meeting with various people involved when she is an adult. But more than this is the question at the heart of this novel of trying to understand Evie’s essential being and how Adele’s love and fascination for her friend can’t be put to rest because she will always remain obscured by the narrative of history. In this way the novel resonates with how our consciousness attaches itself to certain individuals we fall in love with. There is a wonderment to them which grips our imagination. We want to assimilate aspects of their identity to our own, know everything about them, revel in their contradictions and make their story a part of our own individual narratives.

The novel is moreover a coming of age story about how Adele learns early on certain life lessons from her fascinating con-artist father and his flamboyant gay artist friend Yankel Fishoff. Although the father’s story is a tragic one, it has the vivid excitement and delinquent pleasure I felt when reading Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “My Heart Laid Bare” about a family of con-artists. Adele understands from her father and Yankel that you have to craft a story about yourself and decorate your identity if you are going to stand out and get what you want from life. But she also learns certain things, specifically to do with gender that she will later question: “From my father I learned that when men were around there was more of everything, more luxury and abundance, and that women had to learn forbearance in the face of their big appetites, and manage the domestic economy.” These gender roles are ripe for dissection and the formation of a self-consciously feminist movement which Adele witnesses at university.

When Adele arrives there she really asserts herself as an individual, but only as a sort of transparency through which we learn of the colourful people she befriends and encounters. As readers our knowledge of how Adele appears from the outside comes from reactions by friends later in her life who recount that Adele was always slightly removed picking at the rips in her jeans, rather intimidating and haughty. Grant acknowledges that identity is never something stable and “That is what we are, reflections of reflections. We think all the time about what we sound like and how we appear.” We try to project a certain image of how we want to be perceived and simultaneously other people perceive us as something else. The two perspectives are not often in sync.

At the newish (un-named) university the administration’s “plan was to defeat ideology with a quiet, humane liberalism of human right, equality and a spirit of public service.” However, she and her friends spend this formative period of 1970s Britain exploring evolving ideologies as they collectively discuss and appropriate kinds of feminism, Trotskyism, homosexuality and Freudian ideas. It’s a period of intellectual fervour and inventive experimentation which the narrator later claims to be “a now-discredited decade.” Yet the passion and excitement of the group of intelligent individuals described groping their way through this jungle of ideas makes them all really come alive.

The next two sections of the novel take us into Adele’s adult life where she lingers on reflections about university, uncovering what happened to her friend Evie and catching up with how her companions turned out. Some of her friends hold fast to the principles formulated during that vital time of young adulthood and others find themselves turning completely against what they once so fervently stood for. Adele’s personality asserts itself as she carries on a tumultuous and doomed affair with Evie’s brother. Although she knows it’s an insensible coupling she makes the beautiful observation that “You can be completely axed to the ground by love, that’s the only explanation. You’re down to your roots.” Later on, her blunt observations about motherhood give witness to what aren’t often acknowledged emotions: “Having a child pushed me sheer away from the centre of my own life into a corner of it and I resented it. I was outraged.” It’s a sharp observation about the indignation a woman can feel at having to sacrifice certain freedoms to take on the identity of being a mother. Rather than offer a neat account of life’s cycle, we are aware that Adele is a person in active rebellion against it and all the loose ends life leaves. What comes through in Grant’s narrative is a sincere desire to understand - not compose a traditional story arch. Rather, the themes “Upstairs at the Party” explores percolate in the background as the narrator gropes for truth through a retrospective survey of what is the noisy train-rattle and messy pile-up of life.  

For instance, during the university years Evie confesses that her mother was once raped. The information is met with an almost stunned silence from the other girls. The story of the mother’s rape is presented more fully later in the novel. This time the truth of it is seen through the lens of history as if the fact of it was too much of an aberration for them to take in at that early tender age – despite their active desire for women to have an unimpeded truth-telling voice. Adele tracks down a diary account of the rape which is initially transcribed, but which Adele then interrupts and summarizes. She does this for practical purposes to cut out superfluous detail, but also to be able to state plainly what happened where the mother couldn’t bring herself to articulate the stark injustice of what was done to her. The reader is made aware of the way the mother’s stifled voice later impacted her daughter and the way stories can be skewed by the values of the time period in which they are told. 

This is a novel concerned with the nature of story telling – all the inventive power, overriding pleasure and sly danger of it. In recounting the accumulation of details about her own life Adele finds that “A story was building and as with all stories, it was better in the telling than the living.” As narrator, she is in the position to tell it like she saw it and uncover what happened by interviewing those involved, but filter the details through her own system of values. Although she seems to be striving for some kind of transparency Grant reminds us “That is the power of stories, never forget: they make the truth.” One such story that is evidently imbued with Adele’s own values is when she relates how her friend Bobby died from having Aids. While mourning his loss she observes: “There had to have been a point, when everyone knew about Aids, when he could have said, ‘Stop, enough.’” She is angry that he didn’t change his sexual behaviour or take as many precautions as were necessary to protect himself from contracting the disease. This judgement rides dangerously close to inhibiting Bobby’s personal freedom and doesn’t engage with the complicated sexual politics that surround the advent of Aids. As well as wanting him to have lived a full healthy life, she wanted the narrative of her life to include him. Bobby’s choice to take certain risks over-ruled her ability to carry on her story with him in it. From Adele’s perspective, all that Bobby demonstrated in his actions were recklessness. I’m guessing Bobby wouldn’t have seen it that way.

Grant’s writing is a pleasure to read because it can be so focused and precise. She has an excellent ability to sum up complicated concepts in short pithy sentences. For instance, she writes “And we are animals with the heads of men.” This instantly conjures ideas about how we are really ruled by baser instincts although we always feign an image of civility. At other times her descriptive powers cast images in the mind that are strikingly vivid and gruesome: “Some people have a smile like a watermelon slice.” Sometimes the plain truth of her writing speaks so much more about the complicated dynamics of relationships than any specific story ever could: “The back of the head of someone you have slept with is one of the most familiar parts of their body.” The author has a talented ability for wielding language to create poignant flashes of recognition in the reader’s mind. It’s interesting that the author frames the novel as having been inspired by a particular time in her own life, yet didn’t want to compose an autobiographical account. I suspect that this is because Grant probably shares the sentiments of her narrator who states “I do not care for the current fad for misery memoirs. I don’t want to hear about your hard times.” By creating a great work of fiction, Grant is also able to artfully construct a tale open to an expansive sense of understanding and many interpretations that nonfiction doesn’t necessarily allow. “Upstairs at the Party” is the kind of novel where you want to flip back to the first page once you’ve finished the last in order to discover what layers of meaning you might have missed on the first time around.

Virago Press have created a fun Pinterest board of images inspired by quotes and themes from the novel: http://www.pinterest.com/littlebrownuk/upstairs-at-the-party/

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Sometimes the books you read can feel too abstracted from real life to have much impact. Even if it’s an engrossing read, you can close the book and think ‘Well, it’s just a collection of clever ideas.’ But when I was finishing reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” last week the meaning was made horrifically clear to me after an incident near my workplace on Thursday. I came back to my office block to discover the doorway surrounded by police tape and an ambulance parked out front. Paramedics were assisting a man on the ground who was covered in blood. A colleague of mine was outside and told me what had happened. Only shortly before I arrived someone across the street was surrounded by a group of young men who stabbed him repeatedly in what must have been a planned attack. The man on the ground was taken away in the ambulance and all that was left was a single torn sneaker and a large puddle of blood colouring the cement and tarmac red. An article by the Evening Standard last year reported that there are on average over 400 knife crimes in London per month which end in injury or death. The mentality of small groups who believe themselves apart from larger society can create their own rules with no common morality. The horrific violence that appears in “Lord of the Flies” is actually all around us.

I first read “Lord of the Flies” back in high school. What I was particularly conscious of when reading it this time was the small shifts of power play occurring between the boys. Ralph’s emergence as the nominated leader is accepted so totally at first, but gradually his authority slips away as his confidence wavers and Jack’s enthusiasm for the hunt grows. As a teenager the balance of power seemed to me totally natural. Those that are loud and exert power control the group. Of course, the boys want to chase down the pigs and gut them. Of course, Piggy is immediately betrayed by Ralph and mocked for his body size, his asthma, his intellectual prowess and social awkwardness. It’s what makes it such an ideal and easily-digested read for teenagers. This is the reality of school life where children segment themselves into groups based on superficial qualities like beauty or strength or charisma. Those that are easy targets become the butt of the joke. Those that are powerless hang about at the sides as helpless and innumerable as the “Littluns.” The key figure that emerged for me reading it this time was Roger. At first he appears as “a slight, furtive boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy.” This description immediately endeared me to him. Yet, it’s he who emerges as the most “beastly” of all instigating violence against the other boys and savouring the mad rush of it all. More than any of the others, he seems to me to most represent the common man. Civilization reigns in all his worst impulses, but when it disintegrates totally he feels completely released from any kind of moral constraints. Roger felt to me to be the one capable of really making his own choice and what he chooses is unapologetic barbarity.

The final quarter of the book takes on such a rapidly increasing velocity and power, that I was awed by the way Golding could write such carefully controlled scenes containing so much action and many characters. Using only a few short lines he conjured in my imagination a scene so completely that I could really feel the full panic and burning heat of the crisis taking place. In the lines “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now – and the ship had gone” there is the loss of a possibility for rescue but also the loss of something crucial that holds the boys’ shaky conception of government together. There is such a tragic inevitability to everything that takes place, yet there is the abiding sense of hope held mistily in Ralph’s mind which is shared by the reader. There is the hope that governance will return and the individual will no longer have to bear the brunt of decision making. Simply following the rules is so much more preferable than taking the initiative to galvanize a group of people into organizing themselves into civil behaviour. Though Ralph tries his hardest, he recognizes his own limitations and it becomes clear his authority is as fragile as the conch he uses to assert his voice. There is also the hope that people’s better nature will come through eventually – like the hope that the sun won’t ever burn your back. “Lord of the Flies” is a book I could write about endlessly as it’s laden with intricate symbols and metaphors and layers of meaning. But as I return to work each day and pass the stained tarmac outside my office it feels like a book that is all too frighteningly real.

Island Reading

Recently I spent a week on Kastellorizo, a tiny Greek island in the Mediterranean that is only five square miles of rocky land populated mostly by goats. The primary bit is a small bay which has a cluster of hotels, restaurants and cafes near which you can sit at tables on the water’s edge to watch fish and turtles swimming by while drinking retsina and reading. It was a wonderful break and I really needed some quiet offline disconnected time. I think being liberated from the internet, email, twitter and phones is good for the soul sometimes. Since I work two jobs over six days a week, I can sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed. But I’m also aware how lucky and privileged I am to be able to go to such a peaceful, beautiful location.

Since I was on an isolated island I thought I’d stay on theme with my reading and devour only island fiction. My first point of call had to be “Robinson Crusoe” which I had never read before and it’s my first time reading Daniel Defoe. I was expecting a tale which is part adventure and part meditative exercise about the state of aloneness. But I found it to be more a mash-up between Thoreau’s “Walden” and an imperialism travelogue. Crusoe is easy to identify with at first as he shrugs off his parents’ expectations and yearns to sail the seas. He’s aware of the perils and admits “I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our own Destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our Eyes open.” Good reason is easily shaken off when we want to plunge headlong into life. Even after severe seasickness, near-ship wrecks and a two year bout of slavery he suffers through after being captured by Turkish Moors, Crusoe still longs to set out on a ship and ride the seas again. Having escaped from slavery, he tries to evade being captured again by sailing down the coast of Africa in a small boat. All the while he’s apprehensive of the wild animals and “natives” he fears might be cannibals on shore. When he does encounter some Africans they are welcoming and give him a number of supplies. His small escape boat is finally taken up by a Portuguese ship which carries him to Africa. The captain of the ship buys some of the goods he’s procured and assists him in setting up a tobacco plantation in Brazil. After setting up this promising enterprise he desires to set out to sea again.

This is where I really started to take issue with Crusoe as he decides to sail again because he wants to profit from the African slave trade. Having spent two years as a slave himself and experiencing the kindness of the Africans he encountered on their shorelines, did he learn nothing about common humanity? Crusoe himself admits that: “a certain Stupidity of Soul, without Desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil, had entirely overwhelm’d me, and I was all that the most hardened, unthinking, wicked Creature among our common Sailors, can be supposed to be, not having the least Sense, either of the Fear of God in Danger, or of Thankfulness in God in Deliverances.” However, his guilt isn’t over the enterprise he tries to embark on, but the fact that he still can’t settle down as per his father’s wishes. Therefore I could only feel a sense of satisfaction when his ship encounters a storm and he must painfully drag himself on the shores of a Caribbean island.

Goats playing peekaboo

The narrative of the story takes a strange turn here as he enumerates the way he gradually settles himself on the island building shelter from tools he salvages from his ship, eating goats and turtles he finds on the island and accidentally grows then actively cultivates barley and rice. Being on Kastellorizo really helped the novel come alive at this point since there are goats scattered all over the hills and turtles swimming in the bay. All this business in the novel of setting up shop alone on the island is good, but Defoe then strangely switches the narrative to a journal format within which he repeats almost everything about settling on the island that he already listed. It became somewhat repetitive.

Years pass by and gradually Crusoe takes on a more philosophical attitude. Instead of raging against the limitations of his situation he finds some contentment in the bare necessities he does have. This is when he really starts to sound Thoreau-like: “That all the good Things of this World, are no further good to us, than they are for our Use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more.” The narrative also slightly mirrors that of Walden as he becomes somewhat obsessed with enumerating his belongings and taking stock of what he has. As time goes on, he also acquires a very pious attitude as he unfortunately salvaged a bible from the ship which he takes to reading and ingesting. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but, as can often happen, he takes ideas from the bible and develops a rather ‘holier than thou’ attitude while picking and choosing teaching that suit him while discarding others. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he didn’t have these “teachings” from the bible, but had to reason out and devise a system of principles about life all on his own.

The island is visited several times by cannibals who come with bound victims that they murder and then consume. Crusoe struggles with his conscience about what to do and whether to intervene. He’s repulsed and thinks to attack, but worries about being captured himself or invaded by many more cannibals. For a while, he has a sympathetic attitude towards them reasoning that they are merely getting their sustenance from human flesh in the same way he does from goats. Only when one of the intended victims begins to escape does Crusoe offer some assistance. He helps kill the cannibals pursuing the escapee and takes him back to his shelter. This man who is a cannibal himself is the famed character Friday. Being grateful for helping save him from his enemies Friday immediately pledges everlasting servitude to Crusoe – demonstrating this by laying his head upon the ground and placing Crusoe’s foot over it. At least, that’s how Crusoe interprets it.

Crusoe teaches Friday to speak English and about the Christian sense of God. They work together on the island for over thirty years, but all the while it’s very clear that Crusoe is the master and Friday the servant. Of course, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about the assumptions about this relationship and the multi-layered colonial and racial implications of it. Crusoe was aided in his escape from slavery by a Portuguese captain but felt no desire to serve him. Yet, he assumes that he can turn Friday into a servant or Defoe naturally felt it was correct to write Friday as submissive to Crusoe without ever desiring his own freedom or a life apart from Crusoe. Defore writes Friday pathetically despairing at the idea of returning to his community or ever leaving his service to Crusoe. You could argue that their relationship on the island is symbiotic and they rely on each other. But what really troubles me about the tale is that for all Crusoe’s moralizing he never questions the injustice of slavery. Is this simply because it was a novel first published in 1719 when questioning such assumptions could not even be imagined? Like in Thomas More’s “Utopia” could a conception of paradise exist or society, even a society of two people on an island, thrive without there being slavery? The story is deeply problematic and becomes all the more uncomfortable because it feels like Friday never becomes a fully developed character in his own right.

In fact, towards the end of the story he is merely a comic figure. Once Crusoe is able to depart the island with Friday there is a very tedious account of Crusoe reaping large profits that he’s accrued from the plantation he left in Brazil and how he distributes this money to various people in a dreary number of pages like reading from an accountant’s record book. After this there is a bizarre and hurried story about his journey from Portugal to England and attempting to cross the Pyrenees in a snowstorm with ravenous wolves and bears chasing their party. Their guide is attacked by a wolf and bleeding on the ground. Friday takes this opportunity to play a prank on a bear passing by who he taunts and draws up into a tree. Climbing out on a branch the bear comes after him but Friday bounces so as to make the bear appear to “dance” as it attempts to cling to the branch. This makes all the men laugh and, presumably, it’s meant to be funny for the reader as well. But this is all we’re given about Friday’s life after the island since, of course, he wants to continue serving Crusoe without pay. Hilariously, amidst his quick post-island summary, Crusoe also recounts in two short sentences how he takes a wife who bears him three children and dies. Such a dismissive account seems apt for a novel which is so unconcerned with women. I read that Defoe wrote a sequel to “Robinson Crusoe” where the marriage is further developed but I really don’t feel compelled to seek it out. 

It might have been this aspect of the story that partially inspired JM Coetzee to write his novel “Foe” which is an alternative version to the Crusoe story, but from a woman’s perspective. I also read this while on staying on Kastellorizo. The novel is narrated by Susan, a woman who washes up on Crusoe’s island and lives for a time with Crusoe and Friday before they are all rescued. Crusoe dies on the journey back to England. Most of the book is about Susan’s attempts to get Daniel Defoe to write the story of their time on the island hoping it will become a big seller and help her escape poverty. There are many crucial differences between Susan’s story and the one which Defoe ultimately wrote and which we in the real world know. One being that Friday is physically mute because his tongue was cut out (by slavers or Crusoe himself we never actually know). Coetzee might be saying by this that Friday’s story is one which can’t be told and that his story is in fact much more interesting than Crusoe’s. He notes: “On the sorrows of Friday… a story entire of itself might be built; whereas from the indifference of Cruso there is little to be squeezed.” This and all the other differing details symbolize the difficulty of the existing text of “Robinson Crusoe” with its imperial ideas and problematic issues about slavery. It’s an interesting play on the original and Coetzee is a compelling writer to read, but my lasting impression of the short novel “Foe” is that it is more an intellectual exercise than an impactful story.

The last third of the book is mostly a debate about the nature of storytelling between Susan and Defoe. Some of this was very interesting as it explores where the self exists within the written work. I was particularly taken with how Defoe concedes: “In every story there is silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.” As if behind all the stories we tell there are underlying ideologies which aren’t spelled out specifically, but which we must try to define with language if we’re to be truthful to our ideas. Susan sees Defoe as the master of language she needs to tell her story in a way the public will find palatable. But Defoe wants Susan to tell her own story and they try and fail to get Friday to tell his in writing. It left me with quite a sombre feeling about the succession of knowledge by those who control the power over those who cannot impart their experience.

I read a couple of other island novels while away, but I’ll deal with those in separate blog posts if I can since this entry is already so long. Spending time on Kastellorizo gave me time for some inward quiet contemplation. The state of being on an island is that of taking on a circumscribed state of mind and becoming hyperaware of the isolated self. It is, of course, possible to feel very alone in a big city but you are constantly aware that you are amongst the great mechanical process of society. It’s so easy to defer one’s goals and excuse your own lack of accomplishments because of the impediments of being lost in the greater system of civilization. Whereas, being physically on an island all that exists is your own agency. In “Foe” Coetzee writes that “the danger of island life, the danger of which Cruso said never a word, was the danger of abiding sleep.” Alone on an island you know there is no expectation or need to do anything but meet your own basic needs. You can sleep your life away. Who would know? It’s interesting that sometimes we need the expectations of others or what we believe in our minds to be the expectations of other people to prompt us to industriously use our time. Maybe nobody will ever read this blog entry of mine. But would I bother writing this blog if I didn’t think there was the possibility it might be read? The potential that someone might come across our footprint in the sand (to steal a famous image from “Crusoe”) might be the only impetus a person can have to not drift into endless slumber.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

Can there be anything more frightening than losing touch with who you are? “Elizabeth is Missing” is narrated by Maud, an elderly woman who sometimes forgets the names of things, what's happening around her and who people are. In the space of a single page where she only moves from one room to another she can have completely lost track of what was happening a few sentences before. When the symptoms of dementia become more acute she sometimes becomes dangerously lost and doesn't remember her own daughter Helen who helps assist her in her daily life alongside some other carers. Through Maud's eyes we see the world as disorientating, jumbled, frustrating and terrifying. Time becomes circuitous. Certain triggers pull her into the past. For instance, contact with a written letter or a craving for apples draws Maud back into memories of post-wartime Britain and her family life. Her sister Sukey disappeared and left indelible marks on the lives of her parents, Sukey’s husband and a lodger in the house. Maud’s  great respect for her older sister led her as a teenager to emulate her in dress and spend intense periods of time with Sukey’s husband. Being haunted by her loss, Maud practices a curious blend of envy and mourning which flows through the span of her life to the present day. I admire the complexity of a line like this which shows the way Maud’s reasoning works: “I'm always frowning in my memory, so no wonder my brow has set that way.” Time flows back and forth so that the past intrudes upon Maud’s present in a way that could be disorientating but is carefully controlled by the author. I felt deep empathy for Maud’s struggle, but wasn’t lost myself with what was happening in the story.

In the present, Maud is consumed with worry for her friend Elizabeth who has also gone missing. This loss sticks in her consciousness and she obsessively tries to track down details of where Elizabeth might be. We’re aware that the people around her understand what’s happened to Elizabeth, but they’ve presumably become so weary of Maud’s enquiries they don’t bother to tell her the truth anymore because she instantly forgets it and insists Elizabeth is missing again. On a narrative level this makes a very clever mystery since as readers we feel the intense frustration of not knowing what happened to Elizabeth alongside Maud, but we’re trapped in her perspective. Maud has a jumble of paper scraps she keeps in her pockets which she uses to help aid in her search, but more often than not she finds them even more confusing. This is a device which is similarly employed in the movie ‘Momento’ with a character who has short-term memory loss so tries to write things down as clues to lead him in the right direction. But in this novel the act feels much more human and tragic as the disease Maud suffers from effects so many elderly people.

What really grounded me in Maud’s perspective was the way the physical world affected her. Healey has a way of describing Maud’s sensory experience so that what is tangibly real in the present like a handful of rich earthy soil in the palm of her hand becomes everything because that is all Maud can be certain of in that moment. It’s both emotionally touching and makes the fictional world so much more vividly real in the reader’s mind. Gradually as the mysterious story of Maud, Sukey and Elizabeth unfolds small things like a tin of peaches or a cracked compact mirror take on an accumulating significance that immerses us fully in Maud’s worldview. In time, Maud’s actions which appear erratic and pointless to the people around her become deeply meaningful to the reader. We’re also aware of the off-handed cruelty that can be inflicted on someone vulnerable who is suffering from the disease such as a sadistic care-worker who tries to verbally terrify Maud or a mocking neighbor. Other times Maud is treated with extreme sensitivity and kindness by others, especially her daughter and granddaughter. However, most people take for granted that Maud must not be capable of comprehending what other people are thinking. But Maud is highly sensitive to people’s reactions to her. She’s aware that people are amused or frustrated by her confusion through subtle reactions and facial expressions, but she’s powerless to prevent herself from breaking through the black walls of forgetfulness surrounding her. Despite all this sounding very grim, Emma Healey maintains a lightness in her narrative that made my intimate acquaintance with Maud strangely comforting. This book is a bridge to another generation as well as to someone who is sadly trapped in a cloud of confusion. There is a tenderness for the central character here so real it made me wish I could hold Maud’s hand and take her to the shop for more tinned peaches. 

Listen to an excellent interview with Healey about this novel from You Wrote the Book!:

I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

Anyone who loves reading knows that language can connect two people across divides as wide as continents, political systems, genders and centuries. The commonalities we discover when there is a chime of understanding can make us feel less alone. Suddenly, the words on the page feel more alive than the physical world we inhabit. That’s the experience of Iona in this novel. She’s a young translator living in a tiny apartment above London’s Chapel Market in Islington. Having long separated herself from the remote Scottish island she grew up on, Iona is content with working on translation jobs she’s been commissioned to write and occasionally bringing home sexual partners for a brief fling before showing them the door. One day she takes a job translating a jumble of Chinese letters and diaries that an editor Jonathan was handed while on a business trip. Slowly Iona begins to untangle the story of Jian and Mu, a Chinese couple who are separated but who maintain a strained correspondence over multiple counties. As Iona becomes more engrossed in the translation she has a “feeling that her own life has abandoned her.” The journey of this couple isn’t just a painful love story, but encapsulates the ideological divide for a new generation of Chinese citizens.

Jian is an artist/punk musician who feels guilty that he didn’t perish with his fellow students in the ‘89 Tiananmen Square massacre. He tries to find domestic harmony with poet/performer Mu, but they have different views about being political engaged. With Jian’s commitment to making a statement and fostering societal change he writes a manifesto that leads to him becoming separated from his love and cast out of his native country. As Iona continues with her translation she becomes desperate to know what became of these two passionate complex individuals and uncover the secrets which lead all the way up to the highest echelons of Chinese political power. Their story is one which could easily have disappeared with the attempts at censorship from the Chinese government and general Western indifference to the plight of refugees and immigrants. Iona is committed to making their story known.

The accounts switch between Iona’s experiences in 2013 and letters and diary entries between the Chinese couple over about two decades. Interspersed with the narrative are images of the Chinese text Iona is translating as well as occasional photographs or album covers. Letters are also reproduced in the text including (hilariously) an exchange between Jian and Queen Elizabeth. I find it really effective in a novel like this when photographs and documents can make the detective work of a mystery feel more tangibly real. It’s especially relevant for “I Am China” as the novel is particularly concerned with the question of translation. Even though I can’t read Chinese it’s interesting to see the characters on the page in a particular handwriting accompanied by Iona’s multiple translations of possible meanings. It lays bare the intersection between two cultures and frames of mind to find common understanding. The author describes that “it’s like Iona is building this bridge again, through her reading, her translation.” The place where two minds meet is through the cipher of language. When there are differences in language it must be modulated to most closely match the original author’s meaning rather than necessarily give a literal translation of the words.

Travel naturally makes people contemplate questions of identity as they are out of their natural environment and suddenly immersed in a culture whose values and way of life are different from their own. Thus when Jian and Mu travel through countries as different as America, the UK, France, Switzerland and Greece they become highly conscious of their sense of being. They question what it means to be Chinese and how that national identity melds with their own understanding of themselves. One issue is the way in which the political ideology of the collective filters into the Chinese citizen’s sense of identity which is very different from a Western sensibility more founded in individualism:  “Perhaps it is possible to live without yourself in China, but not in the West. Unless one invents oneself.” Equally Iona begins to lose her “self” when becoming immersed in the couple’s most private thoughts. The author uses this as an opportunity to ponder the philosophical question of identity: “To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call ‘you.’ How strange to be in time and space with something called a ‘character.’” The degree to which the “self” is malleable depends on the strength of one’s own character. When this is challenged or intruded upon by opinions of others that core of being wavers and identity forms anew.

Xiaolu Guo is a writer highly interested in the intersection between the personal and the political. Her story documents different strategies one can take when wanting to challenge the structures of power one lives under. It traces the path of the immigrant with the accompanying feelings of intense isolation and the fragile hope of love carried over long periods of time and through foreign lands. It’s moving to see how her characters mature and become more conscious of what is most essential in life. She also testifies to how the weight of ideology can crush the lives of individuals in the single-mindedness of its overbearing logic. She questions “Do ideologies die as people die? I hope so, for the sake of peace.” The resounding effect of “I Am China” is a longing for connection and understanding that cuts through the dogmatic principles of any ideology that curtails individual freedom. It’s a moving and deeply-engaging read.

Read an excellent interview with Xiaolu Guo about the origins of her new novel and her documentary work: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/30/xiaolu-guo-communist-china-interview

Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Winner Prediction

I attended the readings by the authors shortlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction tonight at the Southbank Centre. Each author gave excellent readings as did the actor Charles Dance who stood in for Donna Tartt. Most authors got the chance to discuss the inspiration or process that went into writing their novels. I don't know why the event was only an hour long. It could have easily gone on twice as long to give everyone the chance to really talk in more depth about the brilliant variety of novels competing for the prize. Nevertheless, the readings and brief questions gave a good taste of each book. It was particularly pleasing to hear questions from the audience directed primarily at Eimear McBride as I assumed most of the questions would go to the more well-known authors. One man asked her if she was influenced by Robert Frost's poetry as he thought he detected hints of his style in her writing to which she hilariously replied, "No, never read him. Sorry."

So, who will win tomorrow?

Truthfully, I loved reading all the novels and I'd be happy for any of them to take the prize. Part of me really wants to cheer for both Eimear McBride and Audrey Magee as I think both books would benefit the most from the prize in terms of getting a bigger readership (which both books really deserve.) I haven't looked at any sales figures but I'm guessing the other four novels have sold a lot more copies than these two first time novelists. Also, thinking about which book I'd most like to read again it would be Eimear McBride's "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" as I think I would discover a lot of things I missed the first time. However, in terms of sheer enjoyment of reading and intelligence I think Ngozi's "Americanah" is my favourite. But I've decided I'm going with McBride to win - because I think that's the way the judges will go. 

The Quick by Lauren Owen & The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

Sometimes I start reading a book and after fifty or so pages I put it down. This could be for any number of reasons. I might not be in the mood for whatever subject or style the book is covering. Or the writing might not be very good. Or it just might not be speaking to me at that point in time. Usually I’ll put these books aside and won’t bother writing on this blog about them. They might be for someone else. I’d rather spend time writing about books that are really worthwhile and that I want to recommend. However, in the case of these two books I became very frustrated. I think both authors are good writers or have the potential to be good writers, but they make some unfortunate choices in these novels which make them unsuccessful on the whole. I also wanted to offer up a different perspective on books I’ve been reading so it doesn’t come across like I love everything I read.

In the case of “The Quick” the novel begins fantastically. It’s Victorian England and two children are practically left on their own in a dilapidated country estate. They spend their time playing games and exploring the library. It’s beautifully told completely immersing you in the strange spooky environment these curious children find themselves in. I was hooked. Then it moves further in time and takes an unexpected twisted when the boy turns into a young man first taking up residence in London. I was less convinced by this but stuck with it. Then an infamous twist comes along. I was thrown way out of the story, but kept going until half way through the book. To be clear, I’m not opposed to the supernatural. Unfortunately, the author relies on tedious genre elements and doesn’t do anything inventive enough to carry her characters through a plot that feels suspenseful or compelling. Owen is clearly a talented writer, but I think she made a major misstep and should have continued writing a whole novel about the first section.

“The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” also begins very well. Two quirky characters pass a day working in a used bookshop barely selling anything. The protagonist Tooly, who owns the bookshop, tries not to let her chatty loopy colleague get on her nerves while she attempts to read a biography about Anne Boleyn. It’s an excellent set up and I would have loved to read a novel mostly set here. The book then carries on to mine through Tooly’s past and the reasons that led her to this place. I wouldn’t have minded the author leaping around the past, but much of the language and persistent literary references come across as pretentious. Again, I think this book had a lot of potential and the author is talented, but he gets in the way of himself too often. I could only read half of the book before the style became too much for me.

I’ve read positive reviews for both of these books and it’s only because they’ve been so lauded elsewhere that I feel like they can take this kind of criticism. I would gladly try reading another book by these authors as I’m sure they are capable of great writing.

Have you read either of these books?

Did you like them? I’d love to hear arguments as to why they worked for you.

 Are there other books you’ve tried reading recently which had great potential or that have been really hyped, but didn’t work for you?

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

It feels fortuitous that I happened to read Lahiri’s “The Lowland” directly before beginning Neel Mukherjee’s magisterial family epic “The Lives of Others.” Before last week, to shamefully admit my ignorance, I didn’t know about the left wing/communist revolts which took place in Bengal in the late 1960s. In both these novels this movement plays a prominent role. While Lahiri deals primarily with the reverberating effects of one son’s involvement in the uprising long after the event, Mukherjee’s novel delves into the thick of it over those crucial few years at the end of that decade. These are two very different novels, but in some ways Mukerjee’s novel works as sort of an inverted mirror to Lahiri’s book when considering issues of emotional and physical proximity within families. Lahiri’s novel features a large family house which stands virtually empty after expectations that it will be passed on from progenitor to progenitor are spoiled when it’s abandoned by the two sons. Mukherjee’s novel also has a large house at its centre which is filled to the brim with a squabbling family (except one notably absent son) none of who seem able to escape from each other. There are many floors to the house which are inhabited by different generations of the Ghosh family many of whose status and socio-economic position within the family varies wildly from person to person. Over the course of this large, ambitious and brilliant novel we become very familiar with each idiosyncratic family member, the servants who dwell within the house and the idealistic son who left to join a revolution.

Personally, I love a good immersive family epic such as Marquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Oates' “Bellefleur” or Ann-Marie MacDonald's “Fall on Your Knees.” I saw Mukherjee in conversation at the Southbank Centre earlier this week (he's fascinating to listen to in person and very articulate about writing) and he said that one of the greatest literary inspirations for this novel is Mann's Buddenbrooks (which is a book I sadly haven't read yet.) When I first opened the book and saw a family tree charted out I felt excited at the prospect of getting sunk into a family drama. The Ghosh family is certainly filled with drama. The great patriarch of the family Prafullanath was cut out of his own father's lucrative business and became a self-made man building a paper manufacturing empire. His imperial wife Charubala rules over her five children who grow to become very different individuals, many with children of their own. Like in many families who expect the eldest son to take the reigns of the family business, the Ghosh's son Adinath would rather pursue his own interests than fitting into a slot his father has devised for him. The second son Priyo tries to organize his father's various factories but is distracted by his own hidden sexual interests. Sister Chhaya is a fantastically bitter woman who often sees herself in opposition to the world because of her dark skin and crossed eyes. “Chhaya carried tales, not all of which were innocent. She got a thrill out of poisoning people’s minds and playing them off against each other.” She crafts ways to dominate, humiliate and control those around her. Fourth son Bholanath uses his influence at one of his father's factories to support a burgeoning literary group with devastating financial consequences. Youngest son Somnath has a wilful sadistic side and meets a surprising fate. This group of children combined with the individual wives of the sons, their children and the various servants who work in the house create a raucous symphony of conflicting aspirations and values. I could write a lot about each of these fascinating characters, but you need to dive into the intricate plot to fully understand them all. There are also many more characters, many of whom are the type to fall between the cracks of society such as a “mad” mathematics professor Ashish Ray who roams the streets overcome by a darkness in his mind. You can see why Mukherjee requires such a long novel to fully do all his characters justice.

It's Adinath and his wife Sandhya's eldest son Supratik who breaks from this over-flowing home and demands his own narrative which is written in the first person. His story is slotted between chapters which feature the rest of the family and describes his time becoming involved in the communist party, working on back-breaking jobs in rural areas and getting involved with terrorist activities. The age-old conflict of parents who want their children to establish a secure future in the family and carry their values clashes against the child's idealistic views of the world. At one point Sandhya confronts her son stating: “The rile of the world is to look after your family, your elders, your children, and see that you do the best you can for them all the time.” To which Supratik, mimicking the ideology he's read about, replies: “Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the family is the primary unit of exploitation?” Supratik believes in sacrificing oneself for the greater good over carrying on his family's legacy. It breaks Sandhya that she loses her son so totally. The mysterious process by which children grow to diverge from their parents' intimate embrace is handled so skilfully by the author. The refrain for any helpless parent who witnesses the long process of their child turning into a stranger is summed up with this question asked at one point in the narrative: “Did one ever know the mind and soul and personality of one’s child, even little segments of them?”

One of the difficult duties of any great writer is to describe the way in which language itself isn't able to sufficiently serve the characters he portrays. There are intricacies of emotion experienced which can't be expressed other than in the actions of the character and their surrounding environment. Through the spaces between sentences we glean an understanding about truth which can't be described with words, but which is most definitely there. At one point in the narrative a character “felt himself fall into the gap between feelings and their articulation in language.” Mukherjee captures his characters moving through their particular time and space grappling with sensations which can't be expressed, but which impact upon the way they negotiate with the world and each other. One quote I love in particular is from a scene where Chhaya confronts her mother Charubala about the fact of her own ugliness.

“Were love, compassion, pity expressible? How? Charubala certainly did not know. Love and affection were not particular instances of their manifestations, but rather the entire world one moved around in, an atmosphere. How could you isolate something so brutally flat and one-dimensional, such as words, from a kind of sky, which was intangible, both there and not there?”

Charubala finds herself unable to console her child the way she wishes because the complexity of her feeling and love cannot be so simply conveyed. Language has a way of sometimes failing when we most need it. That Mukherjee is able to show this while also conveying a density of emotion that draws you into the character's experience is a powerful accomplishment.

“The Lives of Others” contains a wealth of detail that resurrects a very specific time and place where huge swaths of people found themselves in desperate circumstances and their way of life in upheaval. Mukherjee elucidates the complex political movements of the time by framing them within one particular family's story in a way that challenges the way you think but is fully accessible, informative and beautifully written. The startling and brutal opening section of the novel acts as a bleak reminder of what's really at stake throughout the rest of the book. The fortunes of families can fall so drastically that they can be obliterated completely. The Ghosh family's dramatic downfall captures the complexity of these few years of life in Bengal and makes for an enthralling richly-layered story that I fully sank into.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

What is it that holds families together? A string of individuals tied to one another through the happenstance of being blood relations. For many the bond and ability to rely on one another is assumed. Yet there are disruptions in life and personal tragedies which can create schisms in the family tree - the reverberations of which can be felt for generations. This is the break in relations that Jhumpa Lahiri traces in her novel “The Lowland” where a family is followed over a period of some fifty years. Relations are held so tentatively over time, some bonding and forming unexpectedly close ties while other wither and become so distant as to make their connection virtually non-existent. So much so that at one point it’s remarked in regards to one nomadic family member that “They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.” Beginning with the story of two brothers in Calcutta, the novel follows how they grow to be very different individuals. After a tragic occurrence associated with the Naxalite movement (guerrilla groups of Communists formed in 1960s India) the family is split apart by grief and secrecy. The novel is set both in India and America where different family members settle. Time is shown to corrode the family bonds for some who feel its painful length creating irrevocable emotional division while others are held in a kind of limbo of feeling unable to break out of the fragility of a suspended moment.

It took me some time to get to this much-lauded novel which has been nominated for multiple prestigious prizes. Something about reading the summary of it and hearing the author give a reading didn’t capture my imagination. But I’m really glad to have read it now as it’s a highly intelligent, well-constructed novel that has stirred a lot of emotions in me. It took some time to get into it as for some time it felt as if the author were only reeling off information rather than weaving the details of a particular time and place into the lives of her original characters. But as I grew to understand the distinct lives she evoked and their points of view the book took hold of me. It carried me on this family’s journey as their relations splinter apart.

Lahiri raises questions about our sense of place and belonging. Quite often when we don’t feel at home we set out into the world to make a home of our own. Such is the case for one character who moves to a small, sparsely-populated part of America and feels “He didn’t belong, but perhaps it didn’t matter. He wanted to tell her that he had been waiting all his life to find Rhode Island. That it was here, in this minute but majestic corner of the world, that he could breathe.” Finding a space in the world where we can assert our own individuality can release us from the constraints and expectations of family life. Lahiri elegantly describes this process is necessary for a person to fully come into themselves, but also creates a loss felt from breaking a lineage of tradition and sours the expectations of parents.

There is a complex portrait of the way time and expectation filter into the next generation in this novel. For a new mother “there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby’s lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood.” Children can give an individual a sense of possibility, especially for a future that’s been marred by the entanglements of personal disappointment. However, rather than emboldening someone to charge forth and clear a safe path for their progeny “The Lowland” shows that children can sometimes only serve as unwanted and empty vessels of hope for a parent. Lahiri observes that “Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren’t the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.” What the author goes on to show in her story is that loss and tragedy can create a scupper in the desire for time’s progression and a family’s continuation. When this is the case it can lead to nothing more than total self-reliance and isolation. Throughout the novel a large family home in India built to serve a residence for multiple generations gradually is left empty of those it was built for – a potent symbol of a failed vision of the future.

Interestingly, Lahiri notes the way the internet has drastically altered the way we relate to each other and creates a virtual level playing field. “A revolutionary concept, already taken for granted. Citizens of the Internet dwell free from hierarchy.” Yet, she is mindful of the way it’s another plain that can be a mental projection for all our expectations and can fall short of these. “Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.” The internet can kindle and re-forge personal connections and eagerly yield swaths of data. But it’s always through a particular perspective and will always have limitations.

“The Lowland” had the unusual ability of pulling me into its story and making me care deeply about the fate of its characters without my even realizing it. This is an effect caused from finely polished prose that draw you through the day to day details of characters’ lives while providing brief glimmers of deep emotion. This forms a bond to the protagonists which sneaks up on you. The book builds to a scene from a particular character’s perspective which was left out of the beginning to create a heart-breaking effect. Lahiri is a novelist with such an assured sense of style, clear thinking and far-reaching sympathy.

Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent

It’s been a long time since a novel’s beginning has arrested my attention as instantly as “Unravelling Oliver.” The opening scene is narrated by a man named Oliver who is standing over his wife Alice. He’s just punched her. It’s terrifying being immediately thrown into the consciousness of a man that’s committed such a violent, cowardly act. His motives remain mysterious and the rest of this short, powerful novel goes on to explain who Oliver is, what he’s hiding and why he has beaten his wife. The chapters flip between the perspectives of Oliver and a group of people who have been associated with him throughout his life to compose a portrait of a man who has committed monstrous acts. While it at no point suggests he should be forgiven for his crimes, the novel conveys a logical path that has led to his selfish acts. The story is skilfully arranged to reveal information slowly with the limited perspective of characters relating different pieces of the puzzle. They don’t always fully appreciate the gravity of the information they hold. I love it when books so cleverly help the reader to understand a story better than the characters involved. It makes for a really gripping read.

There is something almost Dickensian about the story here of a man born in difficult circumstances and emotionally neglected. Through his cunning he achieves fame and fortune, but experiences a downfall from grace when confronted with the truth of his past. Where this novel deviates from that kind of Dickensian structure is that the main protagonist commits an act so heinous it’s excruciatingly hard to feel empathy for him – whereas we can do nothing but feel totally on the side of Great Expectation’s poor little Pip. Because of Oliver’s hard upbringing and fear of being rejected, he feels it necessary to always hide himself and maintain a certain emotion distance from everyone. He remarks at one point: “Friends are just people who remind you of your failings.” The novel conveys that when this man became emotionally isolated from those around him his sympathy floundered and he becomes prone to acting out of total selfishness. This is borne out of a legacy of shame.

Something that really impressed me was how this novel dealt with many kinds of unconventional relationships. There is the fascinating regal French character named Veronique who bears a son in unusual circumstances. A rather self centred actress named Moya thinks herself rather coy in the way she pursues multiple men, but whose motives are much more obvious than she realizes. A repressed gay man named Michael establishes a kinship with Veronique who helps him on the path to self-acceptance and finding a flourishing relationship. Also Oliver and his wife Alice don’t have a traditional partnership. It’s commented that “You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person.” Of course, this makes for an unstable foundation on which to build a long term relationship. Loving a person for being the person they really are is very different from loving someone as you’d like them to be.

It is striking that although the novel ventures into narrating the point of view of many different characters (in one chapter it even daringly invokes the voice of Alice’s mentally disabled brother Eugene) it never represents the perspective of Alice herself. This is somewhat out of practicality. After Alice is severely beaten she enters into a coma so has no voice to comment. However, I did at some times yearn for her point of view. It’s only natural to want to hear the perspective of the abused over the abuser. But, as I neared the end of the book, it struck me as right that Oliver’s confession coupled with the accounts of people associated with him was necessary for accomplishing the powerful effect that Nugent makes. The novel wouldn’t have worked otherwise.

Despite the seriousness and sadness of many scenes in this novel, it is handled with a light touch so it doesn’t become too grim or ponderous. There are lots of endearingly human and humorous moments. At one point there is even a funny instance of the author poking fun at her own heritage when French Veronique remarks “Always with the Irish, there is the drama!” Nugent also has quite a thought-provoking take on issues of race and heritage in the story she’s constructed. The issues raised left me pondering the meaning of the ending and wishing I had someone to discuss it with immediately. The book is effectively a series of monologues which isn’t surprising given the author’s theatre background; the different dramatic voices form a complete complex narrative. This is an extremely compelling and accomplished first novel and I hope Nugent continues to write more in the future.

Watch a chilling trailer for the book with the opening chapter being read here:

12 "Classics" I'm ashamed I haven't read

The other day I was talking with someone about "classic" books and I couldn't help feeling guilty at some books that I still haven't read. Yes, there will always be books considered "must reads" that I haven't yet got to, but that doesn't stop me from feeling bad about missing some. Here are some great books I haven't yet read. Some authors like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Mann and Agatha Christie I haven't read anything by. Should any become a really urgent reading priority because my life can't possibly be complete without having experienced it?

Do you have any "classics" you feel guilty to have missed?