Like many readers, I was drawn to The Abstainer by McGuire’s striking 2016 Booker-longlisted North Water. I suspect I’m in a minority in preferring ThLike many readers, I was drawn to The Abstainer by McGuire’s striking 2016 Booker-longlisted North Water. I suspect I’m in a minority in preferring The Abstainer. It’s a quieter, less splashy, less Tarantinoesque novel, and I can see that it might look more conventional at first sight. I liked it a lot, though—I felt it had more emotional depth than North Water and that it was somehow more mature and less attention-seeking. The descriptive writing and the handling of dialogue is excellent in both books.
I also didn’t think The Abstainer actually was particularly conventional. It adopts a ‘genre fiction’ subject-matter (historical detective novel), with some potentially cliched aspects (world-weary ex-alcoholic cop pitted against faintly alter ego-ish nemesis), but it doesn’t follow the usual scripts in the way it develops. I felt McGuire was adopting a genre fiction mode as a vehicle for what is essentially a meditation on universal philosophical-existential topics: memory, personal and collective, and the ways in which it shapes identity; the psychology of revenge, again both personal and collective; the different ways in which we seek meaning in a cruel and indifferent world. The genre aspect is ultimately as much a red herring with McGuire as it is with Ishiguro, when the latter ventures into science fiction or Arthurian romance.
That’s not to say that the immediate, political thrillerish subject-matter of The Abstainer lacks interest. The novel opens with the hanging of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ in 1867, Fenian sympathisers executed for the killing of a policeman, and the bulk of the narrative is set in Manchester in the febrile atmosphere that follows this event. The interplay between the Fenians, the police informants, and the policemen themselves is handled in a taut, claustrophobic, morally ambiguous manner, and the period detail is vivid (I won’t forget a graphic depiction of the wholesome Victorian pastime of rat-baiting in a hurry).
The last third of the novel spins off into unpredictable territory, and I suspect how much you like it will depend a lot on how you experience this swerve. It’s an audacious move formally, to take you out of the setting that McGuire has created so meticulously, but for me it works. It gives the narrative something of the character of a ‘pilgrim’s progress’ and shifts it from the realist territory it first seemed to inhabit. The final chapter is still more of a departure—yet, again, I felt it worked, connecting with the underlying philosophical concerns of the novel, even as it shoots off into the near-void in narrative terms.
I’ll certainly be looking out for McGuire’s next novel. He’s already the finished item in terms of technical skill, but I feel he’s still questing in terms of his vision. He may yet be to hit his best form. ...more
Like many readers, I came to this book with high expectations, having loved Reservoir 13. Lean Fall Stand is not in the same league. I didn’t enjoy itLike many readers, I came to this book with high expectations, having loved Reservoir 13. Lean Fall Stand is not in the same league. I didn’t enjoy it at all; I finished it only out of bloody-mindedness and because it’s quite short.
McGregor’s latest novel is ambitiously themed, and a lot of research clearly went into its two rather unhappily yoked subjects, Antarctic exploration and the rehabilitation of stroke patients. I found myself wondering whether McGregor might have been better advised to address the second and dominant of these themes through a non-fiction genre of writing, like essay or reportage. The fiction he constructs here feels wisp-thin and purely instrumental to his thematic interests. None of the characters came off the page for me and the narration is oddly affectless, despite the powerful and distressing nature of the experiences he describes and the carefully orchestrated would-be emotional climax of the ending. One feature of the writing I found almost distasteful: McGregor’s writerly gusto in exploring the linguistic effects of aphasia: broken and misfiring stroke-speech of all kinds. There seems something self-indulgent to me in finding poetry in the speech patterns of people struck by an appalling affliction, which is what seemed to be going on here at times.
An unfortunate consequence of this disappointing reading experience is that I found myself retrospectively wondering whether Reservoir 13’s brilliance might have been some kind of fluke. Did the fragmentary, choral narration that worked so well in that novel mask a weakness with regard to traditional characterisation? Is the beautifully calibrated deadpan style McGregor wielded so effectively in Reservoir 13 in fact the only way he knows how to write?
I was introduced to Tessa Hadley’s novels by an English Literature professor friend, who spoke of them almost as a guilty pleasure. I can see why, in I was introduced to Tessa Hadley’s novels by an English Literature professor friend, who spoke of them almost as a guilty pleasure. I can see why, in a way. There’s something rather traditional and familiar about Hadley’s choices of narrative and setting (at least in my limited experience—Late in the Day is only the second of her novels that I’ve read), and her themes are also familiar: family dynamics, marriage dynamics, the effects of time on relationships—the classic matter of ‘domestic fiction’. It has to be said, though, that that the quality is superb, in terms of psychological perceptiveness and beautiful writing. I started Late in the Day feeling a little disengaged, but it drew me in inexorably as I read.
I think my initial disengagement with this novel had a lot to do with its setting, which can appear a little precious. The two couples whose convoluted friendships and loves form the basis for the narrative are formed by, respectively, an artist, a gallery owner, a floaty, flaky, former-beauty housewife, and the most improbable primary schoolteacher you’ve ever encountered (also a former poet and the son of a novelist). The teacher’s former wife is an actress; his son, a rock star; the gallery owner’s daughter, a sculptor. Even an old college friend who comes on as a bit-part player at times ‘reviewed films and was sometimes on telly’. The only token non-creative is one daughter, a civil servant ('fast-track', of course!), although we never hear a thing about her work.
The London these people inhabit is relentlessly middle-class (apart from one slightly caricatural pub-owning couple, parents of one of the wives). It’s also relentlessly white, to the extent that the only migrants in the novel are the parakeets we see ‘slicing across the stillness’ of a street at one point (although the teacher-poet is second-generation Czech).
Not to carp, though–Hampstead intellectuals are people too, and there’s no reason why we wouldn’t be interested in their sensibilities as much as anyone else’s, especially since they’re so meticulously and insightfully described. There was a lot that I liked in this novel in terms of the characterisation. I particularly admired the gallery owner character, Zachary, a foil for his more self-indulgent friends throughout much of the novel, and the artist character, Christine, was also well realised and unobvious. I wasn’t surprised to read in an interview with Hadley in The Guardian that she put a lot of how she felt about her own writing into her account of Christine’s relationship with her work.
Hadley is very attentive to the visual arts in general—one of the things I enjoyed about the novel. The passage I enjoyed most in the book as a whole was a stunning evocation of a visit to Tiepolo’s Scuola Grande dei Carmini, one of my favourite Venetian sites. The novel also introduced me to two twentieth-century artists I didn’t know and was pleased to learn about, Felice Casorati and James Cowie—both ‘figure-painters’, as Hadley puts it, at a time when figurative art was distinctly unfashionable. There may be a lesson there about Hadley’s own determination to write about what she wants to write about, without too much care for the fashions of the day....more
Ishiguro continues his inspired ‘march through the genres’ with Klara and the Sun, following the Tolkeinesque Arthurian fantasy of The Buried Giant wiIshiguro continues his inspired ‘march through the genres’ with Klara and the Sun, following the Tolkeinesque Arthurian fantasy of The Buried Giant with an equally poised and distinctive take on sci-fi android fiction. As ever with Ishiguro, the adoption of a genre is purely instrumental, enabling a new angle on his constant thematic preconception: what used to be called ‘the human condition’—the subtle knot of feeling, perception, knowledge, and memory that makes us man (or, in this case, a robotic ‘artificial friend’).
One of the most interesting formal features of Klara and the Sun is the literal mode of seeing of its android heroine. In moments of emotional tension, whether her own or those of the humans around her, her vision tessellates into ‘boxes’, brilliantly described in a kind of literary cubism:
‘Klara’, the Mother said in a firmer voice, and suddenly she’d become partitioned into many boxes …. In several of the boxes her eyes were narrow, while in others they were wide open and large. In one box there was room only for a single staring eyeball.
The element of surrealism and defamiliarization is reminiscent of The Unconsoled, though it is combined here with an emotional pathos more reminiscent of Never Let Me Go. To anyone who loves his work, this self-reference and recycling is part of the fascination of Ishiguro’s oeuvre. He has created a wonderfully tight, medieval-style textual microcosm or ‘book of the world’, in which signs in each individual novel point towards a larger meaning in the whole.
A delicate, whimsical, and faintly surreal humour is a further unifying feature of Ishiguro’s work, which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. In this novel, it is most apparent in Klara’s slightly off-kilter linguistic usage—a reminder of her android status, at moments when her intense (synthetic) humanity might lead us to forget it. I loved the scenes when she was threading her way by car through a distinctly New York-like city with her human ‘family’, registering familiar sites under an unfamiliar linguistic guise. ‘Umbrella couples appeared … there were undershirt men on their front steps talking … a dog lead woman went past … there was an anti-parking sign’. I loved this. The devil really is in the detail, and I found this language-play more resonant as an attempt to think through what artificial intelligence might mean than the slightly clunky philosophical reflections on what it means to be human that occasionally punctuate this text.
Half-way through reading this painfully short novella (I wanted more!) it started to occur to me that it reminded me of Hoffmann’s Tales—an earlier, highly literary and similarly wry and quirky experiment in genre fiction. I revisited Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and the similarities struck me, to the extent that I wonder whether this was a conscious subtext (the name Klara for the protagonist could be a sign).
That’s just one example of how much a novel like this layers and pixellates in the reader’s mind. I’m sure it will continue to resonate in my memory for some time. When I think back to Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Us, which I read a few years ago, and which visits some of the same thematic territory as Klara, it reminds me of how much Ishiguro has left his former, same-generation UK novelists—for the most part—in the dust....more
I had been looking forward to this much-praised novel, as the premise sounded intriguing, but I lost interest progressively and gave up around a thirdI had been looking forward to this much-praised novel, as the premise sounded intriguing, but I lost interest progressively and gave up around a third of the way through. The opening was actually rather haunting, with the town of Mallard ("more idea than place"), inhabited by uncannily light-skinned "coloured" people, and I was vaguely reminded of William Melvin Kelley's brilliant A Different Drummer. This nothing like as original, though, and I felt it had a slightly "writing by numbers" feel to it, which you quite often get with authors who have been through the MFA mill. ...more
NVK is the first attempt at genre fiction (of a kind) by the literary novelist Rupert Thomson, who has repackaged himself for the purpose with the splNVK is the first attempt at genre fiction (of a kind) by the literary novelist Rupert Thomson, who has repackaged himself for the purpose with the splendidly hokey pseudonym, Temple Drake. It was Thomson’s authorship that enticed me to read the novel, rather than what I could glean of the conception or plot. I’ve always been intrigued by the phenomenon of the “doubled author,” especially when the doubling crosses the literary / genre divide, as with John Banville / Benjamin Black.
NVK pitches itself in genre terms as supernatural / horror, but you shouldn’t let that put you off if fear isn’t your thing. No one is going to be sleeping with the light on after reading this book. It strikes its camp on the Hoffmanesque terrain of the uncanny than anything more gory or ghoulish. It’s as much an analysis of trauma and its psychological effects as anything (something that may come out of Thomson’s own past, from the sound of his memoir This Party’s Got to Stop).
One thing I liked about the novel—apart from the delicately drawn, wary erotic and psychological skirmishing between the two protagonists—was its setting in contemporary Shanghai. I haven’t been to the city and so can’t judge its authenticity, but Thomson’s portrait was certainly vivid and compelling, suspended between a sleek, globalized modernity and stranger, older, crustier substrates. That, and the novel’s highly refined, allusive style, make it very pleasurable reading. Thomson’s writing is as beautiful as I had remembered it from his historical novel Secrecy, which I read a few years ago.
Looking back at my review of Secrecy, I notice that I commented that it seemed to rather lose its way towards the end, after a strong start. I felt the same about NVK. It fades out in the last stretch, rather than sustaining your attention to the end, as you might expect especially in genre fiction. Thomson reminds me a little in that regard of Andrew Miller, another British writer of around the same generation, who is a similarly immaculate stylist and a memorable crafter of striking fictional worlds, but whose novels tend to fall out of shape before the end. ...more
I’m not normally someone to complain about over-long books (Trollope’s 800-odd pager The Way We Live Now, was one of my favourite reads of last year).I’m not normally someone to complain about over-long books (Trollope’s 800-odd pager The Way We Live Now, was one of my favourite reads of last year). I did feel at times, though, that The Mirror and the Light dragged, in a way I didn’t find with Mantel’s previous novels in this series—and not because the novel was less meticulously written or richly imagined than its predecessors. In many ways, in fact, I felt that the stylistic quality and consistency was better in The Mirror and the Light than in the second novel of the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies.
I’m not sure history (i.e. the period from 1536-40) did Mantel many favours in this third part of the trilogy. Some of the most vivid characters of the first two parts are dead by the start of TMATL (Wolsey, More, Anne Boleyn), and the narrative arc of the final part is less clear-cut. Much of what could have been the most compelling action, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace, takes place offstage, while Cromwell remains in and around London. Similarly, the promising antagonist figure of Reginald Pole is absent in Italy for the whole of the book.
Mantel seemed to me to be suffering quite a bit, as novelist, from the intractability of her subject matter. In the absence of any very compelling action during much of the book, she plunges back, via Cromwell’s inner monologue, to episodes from his past—his rough-edged boyhood in Putney, his formative years in Italy and Antwerp, memories of his wife and daughters, and his time in the service of Wolsey.
In some ways this technique works, providing an elegiac texture to a book that the reader knows is recounting Cromwell’s last years (even though the character does not realise it himself). In other ways, however, I felt the book was mining territory already well covered in the previous novels, so it felt rather like a greatest-hits compendium of Mantel’s Cromwell at points. There were no new characters in TMATL who struck me as particularly memorable, although it was certainly fun to revisit some old favourites (especially, for me, the suave, wily Imperial ambassador Chapuys, and the car crash that is Henry VIII by this point).
I realise I’m in a minority, to judge from this site, in not seeing this novel as quite simply a masterpiece. I think that has a lot to do with moral, or ideological, factors. Mantel makes no bones about her Protestant sympathies (and corresponding antipathy to Catholicism) in surveying this slice of English history. I found this bias quite alienating when I was reading Bring Up the Bodies, and it bothered me at points in TMATL as well. The dissolution of the monasteries, for example, is presented by and large in TMATL as a ‘progressive’ development, putting an end to a culture of superstition and corruption. The deaths of Catholics like the Charterhouse monks of London, barbarically executed in 1537, or Thomas Marshall, abbot of Colchester, hanged in 1539, are passed over very lightly in the novel. Catholic aristocrats like the Poles and the Courtneys are portrayed in a notably unsympathetic way.
This would all be fine if the novel encouraged us to see this bias as a function of Cromwell’s own prejudices and ideological commitments--but that’s not really the case. We are encouraged to identify with Cromwell throughout, and he is given enough attractive and ‘modern’ characteristics to serve as the reader’s obvious proxy within a culturally very alien world. There’s no real ‘non-Cromwell’ space in the novel from which we might take a perspective on Cromwell’s thoughts and values. Mantel’s narrative voice and Cromwell’s focalising inner monologue effectively overlap.
Thinking of Cromwell’s ‘modernity’, one thing that struck me half-way through the novel and which I then couldn’t get out of my mind afterwards, is how little inflected by Christianity his voice really is. We hear a reasonable amount about how committed Cromwell is to the Gospel and especially to Tyndale’s initiative of making the Bible available in English. At points, Mantel seems almost to flirt with the notion that this is the principal driver of Cromwell’s actions, although she is too realistic not to portray him also as driven by ambition and gain. Yet, in the entire three-part series, I barely remember a scene in which Cromwell thinks in a sustained way about grace or salvation or any theological issue. We hear more about his recollections of the Florentine game of calcio than about his relationship with God. I intuitively feel that this was not the true inner life of sixteenth-century Christians, of any theological stripe. Religion was woven into the weft of their patterns of thought and feeling in ways we can only begin to suspect....more
I liked this book initially, as the writing is strong, and I was intrigued by a mention I saw somewhere that it was inspired by a true story. In fact,I liked this book initially, as the writing is strong, and I was intrigued by a mention I saw somewhere that it was inspired by a true story. In fact, the story that inspired it (that of Andrew Bogle, a witness in the fascinating Tichborne case in the 1860s) only offers a very loose historical connection, and the narrative of the novel is entirely invented.
It’s enjoyable enough as a yarn (I read it on a long-distance flight, and it served to while away the time), but it’s one of those novels that doesn’t really have any idea where it’s headed. The first section, set on a plantation in Barbados in the 1820s, is probably the strongest, with the protagonist, a young enslaved boy, finding a shred of hope within the graphically-described brutality of his life when he becomes the servant and companion of an affable English milordi with an obsession with hot air ballooning.
After that, though, the plot spirals off into ever-greater implausibility, and some of the later characters introduced, such as the scientist Goff and his spiky, love-interest daughter, didn’t leap off the page for me. I felt the narrative was rather pulled out of shape by the author’s desire to yoke in material from her reading on Victorian scientific culture, in addition to her fundamental concern with race and the history of slavery. In that regard, it rather reminded me Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, another much-praised bestseller that I found strikingly well written but ultimately disappointing, and which similarly dissolved into episodic meandering towards the end....more
I’m not quite sure I was ever the target constituency of this novel, although it was a perfectly pleasant read. I was attracted to it mainly by the ItI’m not quite sure I was ever the target constituency of this novel, although it was a perfectly pleasant read. I was attracted to it mainly by the Italian connection suggested by the title; and also by the publisher’s description, which emphasizes the novel’s opening setting, in 1950s Rome.
The novel has strengths, as an honest exploration of the consequences of having an overachieving or over-charismatic parent. The protagonist, “Pinch” (Charles Bavinsky) is the son of a famous and over-bearing father, a famous mid-20th century painter, somewhere between Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon (if you can imagine such a thing). Charles grows up the dutiful son in his father’s shadow: an etiolated, yellowing plant, never quite able to define or enjoy his own life.
Rachman is famous for his The Imperfectionsts (2010), and his writing is certainly competent, and more than that at points. I enjoyed this novel most when Charles’s monstrous father “Bear” Bavinsky was on scene, charging headlong through the novel’s delicate affective undergrowth like a greedy, needy, cunning, cold-eyed-charming wild boar. There are some genuinely good psychological insights to be had along the way about the way in which people of this kind operate (I have unfortunately known a few). I was reminded of Aldous Huxley’s magnificent, flawed artist figure John Bidley in Point Counter-Point.
As for the rest … although I could see the value of placing Pinch front and center, he couldn’t quite sustain the attention he was given: and the novel’s artistic themes (“what is artistic value?” “who defines it?”) were not quite compelling or original enough in themselves to see you through all the melodrama and cranky plot-driven action towards the end. However, there’s a sediment of good, sincere writing in this novel, which is probably what will remain with me. (view spoiler)[(Pinch’s early death from cancer was well treated, and quite powerful, in an understated way). (hide spoiler)]
This is a book to approach, ideally, without reading a single review or any advance publicity, if you want to get the full effect of the twist in the This is a book to approach, ideally, without reading a single review or any advance publicity, if you want to get the full effect of the twist in the first chapter. Even if you don’t have that advantage (I didn’t), it’s an intriguing and thought-provoking read, although less weighty and compelling than Harris’s Dreyfus-themed An Officer and a Spy (2013)—now a film by Polanski—and perhaps also less elegant and finished than his Vatican-themed Conclave (2016).
By pure chance, I read The Second Sleep directly after Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and I was struck by Harris’s very knowing use of Hardy’s literary utopia-dystopia of Wessex as a setting. (Hardy is also alluded to in one of Harris’s epigraphs, a wonderful quotation from The Mayor of Casterbridge about the remains of buried Roman soldiers coming to light in the Wessex countryside—a passage that intersects in all kinds of rich ways with the themes of The Second Sleep.) Thinking about these themes—history, layering, place, memory, and the discovery of secrets that are perhaps better left hidden—makes me realize how dense and evocative Harris’s novel is. I can imagine it working well as a companion read to Ishiguro’s splendid The Buried Giant, which is a high compliment in my book.
The Second Sleep is also a complete rampant page-turner of a thriller, from around half-way through, after a slowish initial build. Like some other readers on this site, I felt rather lukewarm about the ending, but that didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the whole....more
I enjoyed this elegant, oblique, deadpan short novel, my first sampling from the Booker Prize longlist this year. The title and the premise are shamelI enjoyed this elegant, oblique, deadpan short novel, my first sampling from the Booker Prize longlist this year. The title and the premise are shamelessly attention-grabbing, rather in the manner of Leïla Slimani’s overrated Lullaby, but this is a subtler and more convincing work. I liked the way in which Brathwaite represents the relationship between the two contrasting sister protagonists, beautiful, insouciant, murderous Ayoola, and conscientious, protective Korede. You start by accepting the viewpoint of Korede, the novel’s focalizer, but faint suspicions of her reliability begin to creep in, and you start asking yourself how the story would look if narrated by Ayoola.
Another thing I enjoyed in the story was the treatment of Korede’s hospital workplace, with its hierarchies and rivalries. Her wistful crush on a handsome doctor, Tade (who you just somehow know is fated to fall into the path of Ayoola) is very nicely drawn, with an appealing comic edge. Braithwaite seems interested in flirting with and half-parodying all kinds of genres—everything from crime thriller and psychological thriller to domestic abuse drama and doctor-nurse romance. The result seems a little light for a Booker Prize candidate, but I’m glad to have been introduced to Braithwaite, whose debut novel this is. I’ll certainly seek out her next. ...more
Mrs Osmond is a curious exercise in upmarket fan fiction: a flat-footed continuation of a narrative intentionally left suspended, and an ill-judged atMrs Osmond is a curious exercise in upmarket fan fiction: a flat-footed continuation of a narrative intentionally left suspended, and an ill-judged attempt to go stylistically head to head with one of the most honed and distinctive novelistic voices of all time.
I picked this novel up after finishing The Portrait of a Lady, and, at a very basic level, I can understand Banville’s necromantic impulse. If you love a book, you want more of it—the very impulse that fuels the ever-growing industry of Pride & Prejudice spinoffs. “While visiting Lambton with the Gardiners, Elizabeth is mistaken for Miss Darcy and kidnapped along with Mr Darcy …” (I didn’t make that one up, by the way: it actually exists!)
In an interview I read, in an online journal, Banville pitches Mrs Osmond as a feminist rereading of The Portrait of a Lady. The basis of this claim is presumably his introduction of a “New Woman” theme via an invented character, Miss Janeway (or remixed, maybe, rather than invented, from a few characters in The Bostonians: Miss Birdseye, with a dash of Olive Chancellor and Mary Prance). Banville may also have intended us to read some kind of new feminist agency in the way in which Isabel Archer (or Isabel Osmond now) negotiates the icy wastes of her ruinous marriage to Gilbert Osmond and his partner in scheming, Madame Merle.
One thing that I think makes this book fail is Banville’s fundamental uncertainty about what he’s doing. At points, it seems as if he wants to inject into his sequel some of the things that James elides in his narrative, such as the fact that a “lady” such as Isabel depended on having a servant, or servants, around constantly, in order to move through life with the smoothness and airiness that she does. Banville introduces a lady’s maid, Elise Staines, to remind us that people like Elsie handled the logistics of travel and food and lodging and communications—and, indeed, of just about everything—for their spoilt patrons, so that they could get on with living their supersubtle, Jamesian inner lives.
This is not a bad idea, but Elsie never really emerges to the status of a real character; and, in fact, the way Banville treats her is really quite patronizing and clichéd (she is a kind of rough diamond type: hard on the outside, melting as a jelly on the inside, and helplessly adoring of Isabel). Elsewhere, Banville’s attempts to update James with an injection of contemporary political consciousness are winched in even more crudely. There’s a moment where Gilbert Osmond reminds his wife of all those who have suffered to raise up the fortune she inherited from Mr Touchett:
“The railroad–ah. Think of the hundreds, the thousands, of Chinese coolies whose backs were broken in the laying down of those relentless tracks, think of the labourers who fled from famine in Ireland only to die of malnutrition in the sweltering western deserts; think of the tribes of Redskins who were slaughtered …”
All useful and valid reminders … but, given to Gilbert Osmond, of all people? Anyone less political and less empathetic towards others can hardly be imagined, within James’s initial vision of the character, which Banville essentially maintains.
Then there’s the issue of style … Banville attempts a kind of homage to James by writing the entire novel in a pastiche of the latter’s reflective, meandering style. It’s an arduous, if not an impossible, task to pull off, and I found Banville’s attempt quite superficial, even annoying. He imitates James’s obliquities and mannerisms diligently enough, but it’s not close enough to the model to make you marvel at the uncanniness of it, and not different enough to revivify James’s style or transform it or fully reinhabit it with a twenty-first century consciousness. There are also some cringe-inducing anachronisms and errors, such as when an obsequious hotel manager in Rome addresses Isabel in Italian using the familiar second-person singular.
I read a few reviews of the novel when I finished it to see how others judged Banville’s approximation, and it was interesting to see how critics differed. Edmund White, writing in The Guardian, describes Banville’s style as a “superb pastiche”—but, then, it’s pretty obvious from his review that White isn't a great fan of James. Charles Finch, in the New Yorker, I found far more acute in his observations. I loved this insight, in particular: “James uses his long sentences to talk himself further into their beginnings, or sometimes out of them, into second and third and fourth layers of thought. But Banville seems to mistake this for mere elongation.”
At points in my reading of Machines Like Me, I toyed with the idea that Ian McEwan was experimenting with a daring novelistic conceit. Could it be truAt points in my reading of Machines Like Me, I toyed with the idea that Ian McEwan was experimenting with a daring novelistic conceit. Could it be true that he was deliberately constructing a lame and lackluster plot involving two of the most unengaging characters I have encountered in fiction in order to insinuate that human beings are overrated as narrative subjects and it wouldn’t be much of a loss if we were all replaced by robots?
Unfortunately, I think I’m wrong about this hidden agenda, although it’s true that McEwan’s wistful, haiku-spouting android Adam is the most interesting figure in the novel by some distance. His roommates, or owners, Charlie and Miranda, signally fail to come off the page for me. Charlie is a thirty-something, directionless dreamer, with a ragbag of intellectual interests (anthropology, quantum physics, robotics), which McEwan uses as hooks on which to trail extensive info dumps from his research for the novel. Miranda is a wispy, twenty-something oblique object of desire, whose Shakespearean name allows McEwan to tap into resonances about brave new worlds and uncomfortable relations with enslaved sprites.
That is pretty much your lot in terms of characters, apart from a few one or two-scene wonders. The best moments in the novel arise from the creepiness and ambiguity of Adam’s mechanical humanity; and I wish that McEwan had trusted more to the interest of that theme. Instead, we get a half-hearted suspense plot based around secrets and lies from Miranda’s past, incorporating what I found to be an astonishingly crass treatment of rape. That killed what little life there was left for me in the novel, and I found it hard to limp through to the end.
One especially peculiar feature of this generally peculiar novel is its counterfactual 1980s historical setting. This is a 1980s in which Britain loses the Falkland War rather than winning it; Tony Benn becomes Prime Minister; Alan Turing poignantly lives on as a grand old man, etc., etc. etc. Otherwise, this is a 1980s that pretty much maps onto the present (or present / future) in terms of technological developments, presumably so that McEwan doesn’t have the inconvenience of having to imagine himself back into a pre-internet world. I found it hard to see any point in this historical tinkering, except that it allows a few rather heavy-handed digs at the present (Benn plans to take the UK out of the European Economic Community, ignoring the 1975 entry referendum, on the grounds that “only … tyrannies decided policies by plebiscite”).
I found myself wondering as I finished this whether the success of McEwan’s scintillating previous novel Nutshell (2016) left him feeling that he had to follow up with something equally high-concept. It’s a shame, if so. The Children Act (2014) was a far more traditional and less tricksy novel than either Nutshell or Machines Like Me, and I felt it was one of McEwan’s best for some time....more
I picked up Snap out of curiosity, seeing that a crime novel had made it onto the Booker Prize longlist. I imagined that that it must be truly exceptiI picked up Snap out of curiosity, seeing that a crime novel had made it onto the Booker Prize longlist. I imagined that that it must be truly exceptional and genre-transcending—perhaps, that a new Patricia Highsmith had dawned.
Having read it, I find the selection incomprehensible. I don’t read a great deal of crime fiction, but I have read some good examples of the genre (Kate Atkinson and Ian Rankin for the police procedural type; Nicci French and Babara Vine for the more psychological thriller sub-species), and I know how strong the writing and characterization in these books can be, as well as the plotting. I’m actually quite sympathetic to the notion that the literary fiction / genre fiction divide can be over-rigid, certainly when it is given its usual evaluative spin. I have read literary novels that are far more inept than the best genre fiction (including some that have featured on previous Booker Prize shortlists).
Snap seems to me quite poor, though, both as a crime novel and as a novel in general. It’s completely unthrilling, for one thing. I didn’t experience a single moment of suspense in reading it—something even quite low-grade crime fiction can generally guarantee you. It also features coincidences that would make Wilkie Collins blush, and some ludicrous implausibilities (a murder is carried out with a super-deluxe, customized, diamond-studded knife and the detectives don’t attempt to trace it as part of their investigation?)
Some of this preposterousness may be intentional. It’s possible that Belinda Bauer is attempting to bend the rules of the genre in the direction of a kind of soft-centered crime fantasy; the main subtexts alluded to—apart from Stephen King’s It, which I don’t know—are fairy tales, vampire stories, and Oliver Twist (there’s a high urchin quotient in Snap). I can’t believe that the tiredness of the characterization is intentional, however, nor the slackness of the writing. Here’s a detective hard at work: He turned off the engine and just sat—his brain bulging with a million permutations. Here’s a tense piece of action: It was a good lock, and the brace was not long, but leverage and grunting won out, and the lock popped with a click. It was then a simple matter to lift the catch on the door.
I note that Val McDermid is on the Booker panel this year, and she was presumably responsible for this egregious selection. (She features on the cover of Bauer’s novel, praising it as “the best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time.”) I can understand why she might have wanted to see a thriller on the longlist for political reasons, but I do think this selection will have harmed her cause, rather than advancing it. It’s not at all a good advertisement for the genre....more
Can reading too many classics ruin you for lighter fare? I picked up The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle as a kind of palate cleanser, after an outsCan reading too many classics ruin you for lighter fare? I picked up The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle as a kind of palate cleanser, after an outstanding run of nineteenth-century classical novels (Margaret Oliphant’s Hester; George Gissing’s The Whirlpool; Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton.) Seven Deaths is an ingeniously plotted book—Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day—and I started it with the expectation that it would be an enjoyable page-turner. It just died on me, however, around a third of the way in; the writing felt too clunky, and the characterization too paper-thin....more
Andrew Miller is a compelling wordsmith, and for that reason he is on my list of authors whose novels I read “automatically.” Now We Shall Be EntirelyAndrew Miller is a compelling wordsmith, and for that reason he is on my list of authors whose novels I read “automatically.” Now We Shall Be Entirely Free has many virtues--beautiful writing, interesting, quirky historical setting, a certain interest in narrative momentum—along with a killer vice, a rather light hand with historical verisimilitude, which ultimately problematizes the novel for me.
Writing this review, I looked back over my previous reviews of Miller’s novels, and I was interested to see how ambivalent I had been right down the path. I liked Oxygen and Pure; I really liked his earlier Ingenious Pain; I felt The Crossing, his last novel, was a breakthrough. With NWSBEF, I am back in ambivalent terrain.
There are certain similarities to The Crossing—a character who somehow goes beyond, off the end of the known world, and a lot of sea-faring fabulousness, and wondrously ethereal descriptions of water and sky. Miller has plunged here back into his usual pre-1900 settings, however—researched fairly thoroughly (I loved the long section on an avant-garde eye hospital in Glasgow), but chosen also with an eye to relevance to the contemporary world.
The novel’s Peninsular Wars setting was something that attracted me to it (I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s evocation of that period in The Trumpet Major). The wars of 1808-15 in the Iberian peninsula were an important episode within the Napoleonic wars generally, but historical recollection of them on the whole is not especially strong.
Miller portrays a soldier returning from those wars with what we would now recognize as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He may, or may not, have committed some atrocity in the war which he has chosen to banish to the far reaches of his mind. A state-sponsored assassin may, or may not, be coming on his path with a nebulous task of vengeance. The thriller nonsense that unspools from this plotline is relatively engaging, but I’m not sure this element of suspense was entirely necessary to keep me reading. The delicacy of Miller’s descriptions—of shimmering Hebridean landscapes, of the complex, elegant emotional universes of his lightly sketched protagonists—are enough to continue to engage us without something so crude as a “he’s coming after yer” plot.
As for the verisimilitude issue, Miller focuses on British troops’ atrocities in the retreat to La Coruna in 1809, taking his cue from a letter of the commander, John Moore, who described British troops’ behaviour as “infamous beyond belief”. It is not hard to believe that atrocities against civilians happened, but whether they would have been processed the way that they are in this novel seems highly unlikely to me. This breach of realism vitiated the whole novel for me--as an engagement with history, at least....more
This was my first look at the novelist whom Gaby Wood (the Booker Prize Foundation’s literary director) somewhat rashly labeled “this generation’s VirThis was my first look at the novelist whom Gaby Wood (the Booker Prize Foundation’s literary director) somewhat rashly labeled “this generation’s Virginia Woolf.” I wasn’t particularly convinced, although Samantha Harvey’s writing is certainly well crafted stylistically—as one might hope from someone who earns her living as a writing tutor (she teaches on an MA program in Creative Writing at Bath Spa).
Although The Western Wind is set in late fifteenth-century Somerset, Harvey isn’t a habitué of historical fiction. In an interview I read, she talks of having happened on her historical setting “by accident,” led by the theme she wanted to explore, that of confession. The chief character of the book is the parish priest of the hapless village of Oakham, about to be swallowed up for its pasture lands by a hungry monastery nearby. Shortly before Lent in 1491, the wealthiest man in the village vanishes overnight, presumed drowned; and the local dean, sent in to investigate the possible murder, incentivizes every parishioner to confess.
I am probably not the ideal reader for this kind of uncommitted historical novel, which wanders into its historical setting in the spirit of a tourist, takes a few selfies, and gets out. There are many historical solecisms. Harvey has her priest protagonist, John Reve, relish his modish new confessional box on the “Italian” model, disregarding the fact that confessional boxes weren’t introduced for another seventy years, and Italy, as a unified entity, barely existed outside the pages of Ptolemy at this time. We also hear of people being avid for sugar in their tea in the 1490s, when tea is first recorded in England in around 1650. More problematically, Harvey portrays a priest who seems unaware of the theological status of suicide in this period as a mortal sin.
These lapses grated on me, as did the similarly anachronistic feel of some of the language (“feisty” indeed!) I found myself constantly propelled out of the narrative as a result, into some tetchy, pedantic place outside it. That was a shame, since Reve is an engaging and nuanced character initially, and he has many of the makings of a good voice. I wanted to be more immersed than I was.
Another thing that impeded my pleasure was the over-intrusive nature of some of the parallels Harvey would like to have us make with modern Britain. Thinking about the British Isles’ relation with “Europe” (meaning continental Europe, not a usage anyone in this period would have recognized), Reve muses Only somebody with a mind like a rock could go on with the idea that we on our little island are separate from those others … Our little land is flecked with foreignness, the Lord wants our colourful mingling. It is bad enough having to live with Brexit in reality, without having to relive it in fifteenth-century proxy form.
My patience was already running thin because of this, but Harvey’s tricksy temporal structure (we go backwards in time, across four days) finished this novel for me—and perhaps for the author too. As twist piles on twist, and the novel defies us to look back to the beginning and try to make sense of its narrative logic, I had a feeling that Harvey was flagging as much as I was as reader. Even the writing was getting laxer by the end....more
Lincoln In the Bardo has been extravagantly praised, and it won the Booker Prize last year, beating one of the best contemporary novels I have read foLincoln In the Bardo has been extravagantly praised, and it won the Booker Prize last year, beating one of the best contemporary novels I have read for some years, Reservoir 13. I approached it on this basis with fairly high expectations, and I was surprised by how little I liked it. It’s very formally flashy and look-at-me, in a way that detracted (for me, at least) from the pathos and philosophical depth for which it seems to be striving; and there were aspects of it that made me feel positively queasy, especially its treatment of slavery and race.
I imagine everyone reading this review will know the book’s basic premise. It takes a historical incident, the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie, in 1862, at the height of the Civil War, and weaves a postmortem morality play around it. The novel is set in Oak Hill cemetery, where Willie is laid to rest, and Lincoln goes to mourn him. The characters are a chorus of in-denial dead souls, clinging on to a precarious afterlife, which will end when they accept the fact of their death.
The term “Bardo” derives from Buddhism, and describes a transitional state between death and reincarnation, but Saunders’s eschatology is more eclectic than this would suggest. We get flashes of Dantean contrappasso, as when a huntsman is confronted by a heap of his dead animal victims, whom he has to coax back into life, while a cleric who is one of the principal characters hints that a full-on Last Judgment scenario may await us after death. Different hells seem to be reserved for war criminals and those guilty of child abuse or murder. Dead children are subject to a special, perverse set of rules, which serve as the basis for the novel’s thin plot.
I found myself thinking a lot about Dante as I read this novel, feeling nostalgic for the miraculous concision with which he conjures the human presence and moral essence of his souls through the physical language of their spirit bodies and their voices and silences. Saunders attempts the same, but far more diffusely, and in a cruder, more caricatural fashion. None of his dead souls came to life for me on the page.
One respect in which Saunders’s Inferno-cum-Purgatorio resembles Dante’s is in the high percentage of page space afforded to white males. The three principal characters among the dead souls all fall into this category, as do Lincoln and his son, and a cemetery guard who is another of the privileged voices. A group of black souls are encountered half way through, but they seem to serve merely as a way of delineating a series of possible responses to the trauma of enslavement; none is given the space to develop as a character, even in the rudimentary way that the main figures do. Female souls are similarly thin on the ground, and they tend to be described mainly in third-person terms.
Towards the novel’s Lincoln-worshipping (and slightly preachy) conclusion, one of the former slaves, Havens, (view spoiler)[“enters” Lincoln in spirit and fuses with him, enjoining him to help his fellow African-Americans (I began to feel afraid, occupying someone so accomplished. And yet, I was comfortable in there. And suddenly wanted him to know me. My life. To know us. Our lot.) (hide spoiler)] I found this entire passage uncomfortable, and I am surprised that Saunders has not been called more what seemed to me a complacent exercise in cultural appropriation,(view spoiler)[ with a white champion of emancipation literally incorporating a black voice. (hide spoiler)] It made the novel end on a very bad note for me.
Flavour-of-the-month novels, especially thrillerish ones, are often a “fast food” experience for me; I read them to satisfy a passing craving, but I lFlavour-of-the-month novels, especially thrillerish ones, are often a “fast food” experience for me; I read them to satisfy a passing craving, but I lose interest after the first couple of bites.
I felt that about the best-selling, much-touted Lullaby. It’s a Gone Girl-type domestic psychokiller novel, but I didn’t actually think it was as good as Gone Girl, Prix Goncourt or no Prix Goncourt. Leïla Slimani’s prose may sing in French, but it’s only serviceable in the English translation I read. The characterization is flimsy and a little clichéd, and Slimani’s treatment of her sociological theme (the novel centers on the complex, charged relationship between nannies and parents, or, more particularly, nannies and mothers) didn’t seem startlingly insightful to me. I found myself wondering, rather meanly, how much Slimani’s attractive profile (young, strikingly good-looking, and from an interesting—Franco-Moroccan—ethnic background) contributed to the novel’s success.
Aspiring fiction-writers are beaten around the head these days with injunctions to grab the reader’s attention in the opening lines, and Lullaby certainly does that (“The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.”) There’s no risk of a spoiler in giving away that the nanny done it; the novel is loosely based on the real-life 2012 case of Yoselyn Ortega, who stabbed her well-heeled Upper West Side employers’ two youngest children to death in a bath tub, before non-fatally stabbing herself. The luridness of the subject matter no doubt also contributed to the novel’s high profile, but I didn’t feel Slimani’s novel succeeded in answering the questions a case like that raises. The transformation of Slimani’s nanny figure, Louise, from Mary Poppins into Medea didn’t work for me psychologically, and I never really felt her life from within.
When I think of Peter Stamm’s novels—I have read quite a few over the years—what remains of them for me is less their plots or characters or themes thWhen I think of Peter Stamm’s novels—I have read quite a few over the years—what remains of them for me is less their plots or characters or themes than a certain, distinctive atmosphere or mood. Stamm turns a cool, distanced eye on human life and human relationships, focusing mainly on capturing states of anomie and disquiet. His tense, austere prose is a perfect fit with this subject-matter, and the result can be aesthetically satisfying, in a poised, stark, minimalist way.
To the Back of Beyond attempts something quite ambitious, and I’m not sure it entirely succeeds. The plot is very simple. On the evening of their return from a holiday in Spain, Thomas, a Swiss accountant, leaves his wife and young family and wanders away, seemingly with no intention of ever returning. The narrative subsequently follows two threads, those of the fleeing Thomas and his abandoned wife Astrid. Two thirds of the way through the novel, a dramatic event happens, which changes the status and character of the two threads completely, although Stamm handles this crux with such obliquity that it may take you a while to figure out what has happened.
Stamm gives us little or explanation of the reason for Thomas’s decision to vanish from his life, except that suggestively encapsulated in the first sentence.
By day you hardly noticed the hedge that separated the yard from that of the neighbors, it just seemed to merge into the general greenness, but once the sun went down and the shadows started to lengthen, it loomed there like an insuperable wall, until all light was gone from the garden and the lawn lay in shadow, an area of darkness from which there was no escape.
We also have a later—rare—reflection from Thomas on his relationship with Astrid (most of the time, during his flight through the suburbs of urban Switzerland to the Alps, he functions as a blank observer, an unreflecting camera eye.)
He pictured himself lying in bed next to Astrid, not touching, but he could feel her warmth and heaviness, as though the two of them were two stars, held by mutual gravity, orbiting round and round each other, without ever getting closer.
Astrid is a little less opaque than Thomas as a character, and we are given a little more access to her emotions and thoughts, but her response to this extraordinary life drama still seems curiously muffled. In particular, she lacks the anger others expect her to feel towards Thomas. It is left to the detective who works on the case, Patrick Ruf—the only other figure in the book, besides Astrid and Thomas, to rise to anything like the status of a character—to express what the reader is likely to be feeling: “you just don’t do something like that.”
In the last third of the novel, after the narrative crisis mentioned above, Stamm attempts to recast this tale of everyday existentialist folk into a kind of strange, remote, (view spoiler)[post mortem (hide spoiler)] love story. This is what I meant when I called the novel ambitious. It didn’t work for me, although I was sufficiently intrigued by the novel’s ghostly plot twist to follow it through to the end....more
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