Category Archives: book review

Thomas Hardy – Far from the madding crowd

28 Tuesday Oct 2008

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I have started a tradition I have kept up for two whole years of reading one Thomas Hardy novel a year. This year it was Far from the madding crowd, an early novel serialised then published in 1874.

Set in Hardy’s beloved Wessex, Bathsheba Everdene is pursued by three men. Gabriel Oak is a good hearted farmer who loses his farm and any chance of marrying her and becomes a shepherd on her farm.  Farmer Boldwood is a boring bachelor in his forties whose heart is brought to life by a Valentine Bathsheba sends as a joke. From thereon, she feels an obligation to him and it is tragic to see the trouble wrought by one careless action. Sergeant Troy is a dashing soldier who flatters and controls Bathsheba and makes her fall in love for the first time in her life.

It was the savage tragedy of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure which drew me to Hardy. He writes tragedy better than anyone else I have read. Madding Crowd is a minor tragedy, diluted with pastoral comedy. The comic aspects are interesting mainly from a cultural perspective, the exchanges of the farm workers in the pub on religion and life giving a picture of everyday nineteenth century life through Hardy’s eyes. But the mix is an uneasy one and left me dissatisfied.

The depth of feeling of those favourite works of mine is not there. Hardy doesn’t seem to care or know these characters as well as those in his later works.

Yet it deserves its reputation as an important novel. Bathsheba is a fascinating, nuanced character, especially for a woman character in the nineteenth century. She is not typecast as either pure or evil, but instead as a complex human being with contradictory drives between desire and obligation.

Sleeplessness in a house of mourning: Paul Auster’s Man in the dark

25 Thursday Sep 2008

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Paul Auster, Man in the dark, Faber : 2008. RRP: $29.95

After finishing my favourite author’s latest novel, I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s a slim novel of insomnia as seventy-two year old August Brill reports two of his strategies of dealing with his failure to fall asleep. Brill is living in a house of three generations of mourning, having recently lost his wife, while his daughter Miriam has been abandoned by her husband and the boyfriend of his grand-daughter, Katya has been killed in Iraq.

Brill’s first strategy is to tell the story of Owen Brick, a man summoned from our world to fight a war in an alternate world where the north-eastern states do not accept George W. Bush’s victory in the 2000 election. There was no 9/11 in this world and there is no war in Iraq, but there is instead a second civil war. The nightmarish war-torn America is perhaps a self-parodying indictment against Brill (and Auster) and all the other progressives who are certain that everything would have turned out better if only Bush hadn’t been president.

The story arc of Owen Brick is an engrossing one. Piece by piece he comes to understand more of the alternate world as he tries to escape his mission to assassinate the author of the war : August Brill. These sections are reminiscent of Auster’s lyrical post-apocalypse, In the country of last things. But in an unsatisfying move, Brill extinguishes the story quite suddenly, before Brick has a chance to reach Brill’s own home and confront him.

It’s this sense of a half-finished narrative within the novel that leads me to think Man in the dark is most comparable with Auster’s 2004 novel Oracle night, where a similar thing happens. Both seem deliberately unsatisfying.

Brill’s second strategy is to tell Katya (who can’t sleep either) the story of his marriage. It is a fascinating story, with obtuse parallels to Owen Brick’s story. Brill can now bring the wisdom of seventy-two years to analyse the way he lived as a younger man and the painful mistakes he made:

I’ve thought about this for years, and the only half-reasonable explanation I’ve ever come up with is that there’s something wrong with me, a flaw in the mechanism, a damaged part gumming up the works. I’m not talking about moral weakness. I’m talking about my mind, my mental makeup. I’m somewhat better now, I think, the problem seemed to diminish as I grew older, but back then, at thirty-five, thirty-eight, forty, I walked around with a feeling that my life had never truly belonged to me, that I had never truly inhabited myself, that I had never been real. And because I wasn’t real, I didn’t understand the effect I had on others, the damage I could cause, the hurt I could inflict on the people who loved me. (153)

Brill’s story manages to put Katya to sleep, leaving him to reflect in the last few pages of the novel on the horror of Katya’s boyfriend’s death. Perhaps it’s the shocking horror of the details of this that are actually the animating force behind the rest of the novel and its much slower horrors.

The novel finishes with Brill telling Miriam that the poet she is writing about, Rose Hawthorne, had one (and only one) good line: As the weird world rolls on.

If it sounds like it doesn’t all hang together, that’s because it doesn’t. In this novel Auster presents life as a bundle of narratives, some true, some imagined, some complete, some incomplete and all of them held together by the rather fragile and diverse unity of a person’s mind. Beyond this, I don’t get it. But neither could I put it down.

7/10

Sweet: the novel all Baptists should read

21 Sunday Sep 2008

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Tracy Ryan, Sweet, Fremantle Press: 2008.

Tracy Ryan’s third novel, Sweet, is the story of three women caught in the thrall of a manipulative pastor of a conservative Baptist church in the outer-suburbs of Perth circa 1986. The Reverend William King is a complex figure, genuinely caring but always controlling.

Cody is seventeen and has just lost her brother in a car accident. In her grief the church offers her a degree of purpose and meaning. Yet she seems to fall into Christianity, rather than converting through conviction. Soon, William is pressuring her to give her testimony in front of the church, the story of her conversion from the darkness of ‘Romanism’. But this story he is trying to impose on her doesn’t ring true; her nominally Roman Catholic background is neutral in her memory.

Kylie is a young mother whose husband Mick is frequently away shearing. Her Baptist neighbours take an interest in her and babysit her children; soon she finds herself sucked into the church. Mick is unimpressed by her heavy involvement and she is torn between the church and him.

Carol has been a Christian much longer and her story is about the disintegration of her externally perfect Baptist family. As problems with her daughter and husband arise, she begins to realise that life isn’t as simple as her faith has taught her.

Capturing the milieu

As someone born into this context of conservative Baptists in the 1980s, I can say that the novel has captured the milieu very well. The church services centre on the sermon where the pastor might rail against Catholics or make an altar call. There are missionary slide nights, and prayer meetings, and discussions about theology or ethics which always sound like the blind leading the blind, pooled ignorance as someone pulls out one Bible verse and another a different one.

Early in the novel, there is a cringe-inducing wedding scene, with the ‘Christians all huddling away from the drinks table with the cardboard wine casks’ (61). Good hearted Carol marches a scandalised church lady across the divide to give the bride a hug amongst the drinkers.

The women attend a group called ‘More Than Rubies’, a reference to the book of Proverbs where a good wife is said to be more precious than rubies. Amongst the women, the stifling of erroneous thinking and behaviour is achieved through gossip disguised as Christly concern and pressure, both subtle and overt.

The novel captures the cliches and language of Baptists too – Cody reflects on them never saying ‘bad luck’ or ‘good luck’, because nothing happens by chance. Kylie is censured for calling a baby an ‘old soul’ – because reincarnation is not true. We read about MKs and PKs – missionaries’ kids and pastors’ kids – the backbone of Baptist churches and always enjoying an unspoken respectability that converts do not have.

As the system begins to unravel for Cody, William asks her:

‘There’s not some kind of problem is there? I mean, in your walk with God.’
Walk with God. William was falling back on all the cliches, countering her worldly jargon with his own. Cody hated that. She preferred it when he talked to her like an ordinary person, without the verbiage. All the church women were full of it, as if they drew from the same phrase book: ‘I have to ask you this because the Lord laid it on my heart…’ ‘The Lord told me that…’ (293-294)

Depicting ‘faith’

Working as I do at what used to be the Baptist Theological College, the parts I liked reading the most were those set there as Cody is pushed by William into studying. As Cody grows in confidence, she challenges the blithe assumptions of some of the other students. She comes to this important insight into Baptists and their claim to read the Bible free of tradition:

Because they couldn’t see how their own traditions ‘gave’ them their way of reading Scripture. They thought they were so pure and free of ritual and tradition, but if you came in from the outside, it looked like nothing but. (262)

The novel’s depiction of ‘faith’ is a confronting one for evangelicals. The three women are a part of the church more out of loneliness than a strong conviction of the truth of the beliefs they take on board. ‘Faith’ in the novel is more a function of conformity to the system. The women want to be loved and accepted. They want the attention of the pastor and the approval of the other people in the system. There are a lot of people within evangelical churches for whom this will ring true.

For evangelicals, then, the novel offers a chance to see their faith explained in psychological and social terms. Of course, evangelicals will conclude that true faith is a response to the living God; but it is important to consider how the system gets in the way of God.

Sweet is a compelling novel. It kept me reading and thinking. The prose is smooth and unintrusive yet filled with flashes of beauty. The structure effectively balances and interweaves the stories of the three women connected by William King. It is at once an engrossing drama of broad interest and yet also an important portrait of the evangelical world, a world rarely depicted in literature.

Book review: The post-birthday world / Lionel Shriver (2007)

12 Saturday Jul 2008

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Irina McGovern, expatriate American illustrator in London, is tempted to kiss Ramsey Acton, a passionate snooker player. The narrative splits in two, one strand following a life in which she does kiss him, and one following her as she stays with her long term ‘safe’ partner, Lawrence Trainer.

At 515 pages, it’s a long novel, and despite covering almost a decade from the mid-nineties, it doesn’t feel epic in a way that would justify that length. Instead, at times, the narrative seems to lack direction as we follow the minutaie of Irina’s life in its two manifestations. Perhaps a brave enough editor could have convinced Shriver to pare and focus it.

Yet it’s a novel which in detail contains so much brilliant insight into the fabric of everyday life and relationships. Shriver is wise, thoughtful and interesting. She describes so well what it’s like to stay at a hotel, cook dinner, go shopping, attend an award ceremony.

As you might expect, Irina’s two lives contain (sometimes unexpected) parallels (and contrasts). So, for example, in one chapter she will rail against the routine of everyday life, while in the other she will reflect on how great they are. In one chapter, Ramsey will buy her mother a car; in its parallel, Lawrence buys Irina a car. It’s a device which is interesting yet sometimes contrived. My biggest disappoinment – SPOILER ALERT – is that the final chapter has her two lives converging at Ramsey’s funeral; in both she ends up back with Lawrence, even though in one she left him and in the other he ends up leaving her.

My  favourite part of the book are the two children’s books which Irina creates in her two parallel lives, each book reflecting an aspect of the novel we are reading. In one, a young boy becomes a snooker player and always wonders what he could have been if he stayed at school. In the other, a boy gives up a blossoming friendship to be loyal to his best friend, only to have his best friend leave him for the third boy. The intertextuality and dramatic irony are delightful, as well as the vividness with which Shriver creates these cryptobooks.

7.5/10

A penchant for dissatisfaction and Lionel Shriver’s brilliance

01 Tuesday Jul 2008

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I will need to elaborate on Lionel Shriver’s brilliance at some time. She’s about the most quotable writer I’ve ever read. After being very impressed by We need to talk about Kevin, Post-birthday world has lines on almost every page that I feel like writing down. She has this acute insight into the details of life, and it’s this which can truly set a writer apart.

Not just the details either – an ability to observe and describe emotional states. To see what we all experience but don’t realise.

A couple of weeks ago she wrote an excellent column about her father for the Guardian where she talks of their mutual penchant for dissatisfaction – ‘great when you’re young; at 80, it’s self-destructive’. How true. How disturbing. (Maybe it’s half my problem. I need to get over the dissatisfaction that drove me through my teens and early twenties. Because IT DOESN’T WORK when you hit late twenties.)

I wonder how her father feels about her writing so candidly about him while he’s still alive. Ten years ago I would have written with this openness. Maybe even five years ago. But I’ve become much more guarded the last few years.

I don’t think she’s candid out of naivety, like I was. I genuinely thought that if I was open and honest to the world, they’d repay me with my kindness. Then I met some formidable people who taught me otherwise.

I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver’s father because he’s a theology scholar. One of these few places where my polarity of interests – theology and literature – meet, besides in me.

Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella

03 Tuesday Jun 2008

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I recently finished Tracy Ryan’s Jazz Tango, a fascinating novel about what happens after the fairtytale wedding of a working class girl to her ‘prince’, a member of the elite Oxbridge set. What I liked best about Tracy’s novel was its capturing of the patterns of thought, the strayness and whimsy of our minds. We read everything Jas, the protagonist is thinking, from the banal to the profound, and it’s the juxtaposition of these which is so compelling. All our best thoughts are embedded in mundane situations, whether it’s social awkwardness in a cafe or being stuck in traffic. The novel deliberately invokes the spirit of the great women modernists, and carries on their tradition of stream of consciousness, something which makes me glad. (All these great movements of the past which are not fashionable any more… horrible thing, we could do with a few more attempts at Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses.)

Tracy and her husband John Kinsella have a fascinating blog called Mutually Said : Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist. John, like me, is a big fan of Philip K. Dick and has some fascinating comments on PKD in a recent post.

Here and there and everywhere.

20 Sunday Apr 2008

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First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone – I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century – that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

 

Book review : The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

20 Thursday Mar 2008

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David Zimmer’s life collapses when his two sons and his wife die in a plane crash. He finds, if not meaning, then at least something to do, by writing a book about the silent films of forgotten star, Hector Mann. Hector Mann disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s, and is presumed long dead, but now in the 1980s Zimmer gets a letter from his wife, saying that Mann is alive but ailing  in New Mexico and would like to meet Zimmer before he dies.

I first read this book four years ago, and didn’t enjoy it as much as this time. I thought it was too derivative of his other work then, but now I think it’s brilliant with subtle intertextuality.

David Zimmer was Marco Stanley Fogg’s friend in my favourite Auster book, Moon Palace. I would like more than anything to read the continuing adventures of Fogg. This will have to do for now. One tantalising reference to the events of that book is the fact that Zimmer named one of his sons ‘Marco’. No more is said than this, but it put a smile on my face.

The rest of the intertextuality is only now being revealed. Auster published this novel in 2002, but it contains references to works he has completed since. [Spoiler alert] In New Mexico, Mann has spent years making films no-one else is allowed to see, films which his wife will destroy on his death. One of them has the title Travels in the Scriptorium; another, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The first, of course, is the title of Auster’s 2007 novel; the second of the film he released this year.

Zimmer gives us a scene by scene breakdown of The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the only secret film of Mann’s he gets to see before they are destroyed. I’ll find it interesting to compare with the ‘real’ film of that name.

The threat of the destruction of these amazing secret films makes the whole novel feels like a tragedy at times. Auster reveals something in me, because I managed to feel like the novel had a happy ending when the films might be saved at the end, even after the sad death of Alma, Freida, Hector and possibly David.

9/10

Book review: The Innocent by Ian McEwan

08 Saturday Mar 2008

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Graham Greene-ish. A 25 year old British man who has lived with his parents up until now is sent to work on a secret tunnel in 1950s Berlin, a joint project between the British and Americans. He falls in love with a divorced German woman who introduces him to sex and love. Their relationship is threatened first when he rapes her (having tasted power and wanting more of it) and again when her ex-husband turns up and he feels pressured to be the strong man he has never been.

The prose only sometimes achieves the clarity and beauty which make McEwan one of my favourite writers. But I see in this novel interesting roots for later themes or scenes – Leonard rehearses a letter in much the way Robbie does in Atonement; the descriptions of Berlin resonate with those in Black Dogs; the couple have not so a disastrous wedding night as in Chesil Beach, but a disastrous engagement night for completely different reasons which still manage to tear the couple apart. Indeed, the ending of the novel is – SPOILER ALERT – quite similar to Chesil Beach.

7/10

Book review: The merry-go-round in the sea by Randolph Stow

24 Sunday Feb 2008

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Published in 1965, The merry-go-round in the sea is a superb novel. It manages to be both simple and complicated in its themes and prose.

Rob Coram is six at the beginning of World War Two when his favourite cousin, Rick, goes off to war. The novel follows them both over the next eight years, as Rob grows in his awareness of the world and Rick comes home depressed and restless.

I’ve read few novels which have evoked the landscape so well as this one. Stow manages to describe all the smells and sounds and sights and perceptions of the Geraldton town and countryside, and reproduce them as a precocious child would sense them. His prose is both precise and poetic.

As a coming of age novel, it works well too. Stow shows how the passage of time alters Rob’s perception of the world, captured well in the title. Rob thinks that the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round and he’d like to one day swim out to and play in it. He clings onto the belief even when his mother tells him it is not so. A few years later he manages to swim there with his friend and can look back with a bittersweetness at his old innocence.

But it’s also about Rick growing up, or refusing to grow up; coming home from the war and realising that he can’t settle down into what he sees as the suffocation of the suburbs.

As well as this, it’s a novel about family, a large and extended family which has stayed close and has its own web of folklore and custom.

One thing it’s not is a page turner. The prose is so pristine and the scenes so self-contained that it didn’t have a strong narrative drive for me.