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My Favourite Novels In 2010

14 Friday Jan 2011

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What a year of novels! I found at least five I loved.

This list does not include the big pile of novels I discarded. So all of these had some merit, or I wouldn’t have finished them.

1. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004), USA
It got even better this second time I read it, a novel which embodies grace and what it means to be alive. 10/10

2.  Freedom – Jonathan Franzen (2010), USA
It is a deeply perceptive novel. Franzen is smart and cynical, but he knows how to break my heart and then patch it up again with hope. He knows our inner worlds, and he also knows the outer political worlds. He seems to know everything. 10/10

3.  Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) , Brit
A devastating tale of a dystopian childhood and youth. I’m still waiting for the film to be released in Australia. 9/10

4.  Home, Marilynne Robinson (2008) USA
The companion to Gilead; some will find it ‘slow-burning’, others ‘boring’, but I came to love it. 9/10

5.  Journey Through Space – Toby Litt (2009) USA
A ship travelling to the nearest habitable planet at 1/10th light speed, taking generations to get there – what an amazing concept. Litt covers the span well and the civilisation of the ship comes to symbolize the behaviour of humanity broadly. It is bleak and sad, but also fascinating and compelling. 9/10

6. Cold Mountain [audiobook] – Charles Frazer, Charles (1997) USA
A cruel ending sours an incredibly rich and beautiful account of the dark days of the Civil War.  8/10

7.  On Beauty – Zadie Smith, (2005), Brit
An engrossing drama-comedy set around a university. She perceives the young and old well, it seems to me. 8/10

8.  Rabbit at rest – John Updike (1990) USA,
It was a perfect book last time I read it; what changed? 8/10

9.  Howards End – E.M. Forster (1910) Brit, 8/10

10. The Final Solution [audiobook] – Michael Chabon (2002)
Delightful, wise descriptions of life are what this novella are about, rather than the detective story. Missed crucial aspects listening on tape – like the fact the ‘old man’ is, of course, Sherlock Holmes! 8/10

11.    The Bell Jar [audiobook] – Sylvia Plath (1962) USA, 8/10

12.    Solar – Ian McEwan (2010) Brit, 7.5/10

13.    Unless – Carol Shields (2003) Canada, 7/10

14.    Oranges are not the only fruit – Jeannette Winterston (1985), Brit, 7/10

15.    The Reincarnation of Peter Proud – Max Ehrlich  USA (1974)
There is a satisfying narrative symmetry to The Reincarnation. It begins with Peter Proud’s recurring dream from his previous life of being drowned in a lake at night by a woman named Marcia, and it ends with this same woman drowning Peter in his current life.  The plot is well structured. Peter Proud has disturbing, recurring dreams of his past life. He seeks answers from a sleep researcher, a clairvoyant and a ‘psi-researcher’ in order to recover his past. But the break-through comes when he sees footage on television from the town where used to live, and eventually tracks it down. Once he’s discovered who he was, he has two tasks to juggle: he finds his daughter and wife (Marcia) from his previous life and learns as much information he can from them; and he re-enacts each of the recurring dreams, as the re-enactment has some sort of psychological healing effect on him – it stops coming back. 7/10

16.    The American – Henry James (1877) USA, 7/10

17.    In A Dry Season – Peter Robinson (1999) Brit, 6.5/10

18.    The Lovely Bones [audiobook] – Alice Sebold (2002) USA, 6.5/10

19.    Sunset Park – Paul Auster (2010) USA, 6/10

20.    A Personal Matter – Kenzaburo Oe (1964) Japan, 6/10

21.    That eye, the sky – Tim Winton (1986) Aust, 6/10

22.    The Three Evangelists – Fred Vargas (2006) France, 6/10

23.    So Much For That – Lionel Shriver (2010) USA, 5/10

Murdering Stepmothers – Anna Haebich (2010) Australia (Unrated)

When We Were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro, Brit (Unrated)

[Book review] Cold Mountain

18 Saturday Dec 2010

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Thirteen years after Charles Frazier’s American civil war novel was at the top of the bestseller list, I’ve finally read it. Or listened to it, actually. Frazier himself has been reading it to me in the car for several weeks now, and he has a beautiful voice, well suited to the story he has to tell.

In one strand of the story, I journeyed with Inman as he faced obstacle after obstacle on his way home to his fiancee, Ada. It had an episodic feel to it; no particular progression to the various encounters – they just happened, as he comes across friend and foe and in between. In the other strand of the story, Ada is helped to look after the farm she has inherited by the plucky Ruby. I loved Ada for her deep intelligence, impracticality and compassion.

[spoiler alert]

It’s a novel with the same kind of meditative beauty and innate violence as Cormac McCarthy’s work, but I thought Frazier’s world was a less cold one, that he had to give Ada and Inman the happy ending they deserved – that the reader deserves.

But he doesn’t. Inman returns to Ada only to be shot down, almost randomly, a few pages from the end. I don’t think Frazier should have done that, not even if the source history he was vaguely working from demanded it. It undercuts the long journey toward reunion that forms the rest of his novel. We know McCarthy’s world is cruel; we expect it. But your world, it seemed a little kinder.

Yet there are antecedents. So many moments of chance, and of good luck falling Inman’s way; maybe Frazier was only trying to balance things out. At one point Frazier is shot and even shallowly buried. Later, another character is also shot and left for dead. Both of them survive. Despite all the driving power of chance in the narrative, moments like these stretch credibility.

Yet it is a beautiful book, rightly canonised, which has much to say about life, as well as telling a familiar yet beautiful story.

Sylvia Plath on tape

01 Monday Nov 2010

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This year we bought a car with a working tape player, and having played my Best of Leonard Cohen tape to death, I’ve started listening to books on tapes. The limited selection at the public library forces me to listen to things I might not have read in print, which is good. It also makes me realise how much driving I do, when I get through a nine hour audiobook in a bit over a week.

I finished Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar a couple of days ago, and I liked it a lot. Esther, the narrator, is far more spunky and interesting than I thought she would be. It’s a classic tale of adolescence; a comparison to Catcher in the Rye is inevitable but helpful. Bell Jar is set in 1953; Catcher in 1949; both are set in New York.  Esther (born 1934) and Holden (born 1933) must have nearly have crossed paths a few times in their lives. They might have really liked each other. They both end up in mental hospitals too.

It was strange to think Sylvia Plath was born the same year as my Granny: they are from different worlds, it wasn’t the same milieu, growing up in Eastern US and Perth. No hopes of college or poetry for my Granny. It’s as much about personalities, I guess.

The voice of the woman reading the tape was all wrong; she was old, and I hated it when she did men’s voices or foreign accents in this screwed up kind of voice.

How different is it, listening to a book versus reading it? You can’t control the speed – that’s significant; it keeps rolling on, regardless. My mind drifts and I miss things. I get through more, because I’m less likely to stop, fatigued by the page. But what about cognition?

An eerie thing, Esther surviving her suicide attempt to tell the story, and I feel there’s a kind of optimism to her life, but this feeling is tempered by the knowledge that Plath killed herself soon after the book was published.

[Book Review] Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

21 Tuesday Sep 2010

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Jonathan Franzen / Freedom (Fourth Estate 2010)

Let me fall over myself to be the next one to breathlessly call for the premature canonisation of this book. Franzen has written what might well be a masterpiece to sit neatly next to his previous masterpiece, 2001’s The Corrections. It is similar enough to satisfy all of us who wanted more of the same, and different enough to stand on its own as a major work.

It’s about a lot of things, but more than anything it is the novel of the marriage between Patty and Walter Berglund, and their attempt to live in the world of the noughties, more particularly the America of the noughties. At one crucial point Patty is reading War and Peace, and it’s a breaktakingly arrogant comparison for Franzen to invite, and yet one that is possibly justified. It doesn’t have the sweep of Tolstoy’s novel, but it spans the years and branches out to involve us deeply in the lives of secondary characters and make us care so much about them. And it has taken the pulse of a milieu so precisely, evoking what it’s meant to live in this crazy past decade, the Bush years, the Iraq War, the shadow of 9/11.

Patty has always lusted after Walter’s bad boy best-friend, Richard the alt-rocker. She has also set up her life in opposition to the ‘arty-farty’ New York bohemian lives of her family, and this is what drives her to excel at basketball and then marry Walter the Minnesotan environmental lawyer, disciplined, earnest and good. Walter’s problem is that he has always tried so hard to be good and despite succeeding splendidly at it, his life is not working out quite right. Patty is depressed and resentful, partly because he is so good, partly because their son Joey has abandoned her suffocating love and shacked up with the ‘white-trash’ girl next door. Adding to the pressure on Walter is the fact that he has taken up the cause of protecting an endangered species of bird and in doing so has ended up on the payroll of the very forces of greedy conservatives he set out to spend his life opposing.

The novel has a disorientating time structure and several shifts in narrative point of view. It starts out with a somewhat distant omniscient narrator relating the story of Walter and Patty through the 1990s, partly through the eyes of their neighbours, giving hints of much of the plot to be developed later on. Then we shift to Patty’s confession, written at the behest of her therapist in the early 2000s. She writes in the third person to distance herself a little, telling the story of her life as a kind of apology to Walter, calling it ‘Mistakes Were Made’. After this we have the actual core of the novel (just when we thought Patty’s confession might be that), a third person narration stretching from p.191-p.503 and telling the events of 2004, when everything comes to a head, through sections seen through both Walter’s eyes and those of his rebelling son Joey. There are two short epilogues, Patty’s conclusion to her confession written six years later, and then, giving the novel a symmetry, a third person narration rounding off Walter and Patty again told through the eyes of the neighbourhood.

It is a deeply perceptive novel. Franzen is smart and cynical, but he knows how to break my heart and then patch it up again with hope. He knows our inner worlds, and he also knows the outer political worlds. He seems to know everything.

10/10

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, second reflections

15 Wednesday Sep 2010

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I don’t re-read many novels, but I felt compelled to re-read Gilead after reading its companion novel, Home. I gave it 8/10 in January last year, but this time, I have recorded it as a 10/10. (Marilynne may wish to put this on the back cover of future reprints, but given she has every second reviewer around the world saying it is a masterpiece, she may not need my commendation.) And indeed, I don’t feel able to add to the wonderful reviewing and criticism already written about Gilead. It is a beautiful novel about living, dying, race and America. And faith. Here are some quotes I took from it.

“When this old sanctuary is full of silence and prayer, every book Karl Barth will ever write would not be a feather in the scales against it from the point of view of profundity, and I would not believe in Barth’s own authenticity if I did not also believe he would know and recognize the truth of that, and honor it, too.” (p.197)

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. (p.236)

But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true. While I was at seminary I read every book he had ever mentioned and every book I thought he might have read, if I could put my hand on it and it wasn’t in German… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. (p.142)
– I found this particularly interesting. He’s reflecting on how his brother became an atheist while he carried on his father and grandfather’s business of being a preacher. Where does faith come from? Where does a worldview come from? To what extent is it a product of the books you read?

I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time…. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. (p.104)

[Book Review] Home: Slow-burning and Wise

16 Monday Aug 2010

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HomeHome by Marilynne Robinson (2008)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Home is a novel about what happens after the prodigal son returns to his father’s house. The setting is the small American town of Gilead and the year is 1956. The father is the frail old Reverend Boughton and his prodigal son is Jack, the alcoholic youngest son who abandoned a girl with a baby in his youth and hasn’t been home in twenty years. The jealous older brother of Jesus’ parable is transformed into the youngest daughter of the family, Glory. She is not jealous, either, but loving to her troubled brother, having returned home after being used for money by a no good ‘fiance’ for years.

It is a slow moving, unadorned novel, and the impatient reader won’t enjoy it or even finish it. Its pleasures are subtle ones, exact prose and slow burning, wise drama as Jack and Glory look warily and wearily for redemption in their own ways and as their father’s health deteriorates.

The characters have a sense of space in their lives, and this gives me another strange pleasure. Jack and Glory find themselves in a quiet town, in a quiet home with no particular commitments anywhere. They live in a kind of long school holiday, filling in their time with gardening, board-games and cooking. They aren’t particularly happy, yet I find myself slightly envying them.

The novel’s relationship to Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead (2004), is significant. Gilead is set in the same town at the same time, narrated by Boughton’s oldest friend, the Reverend John Ames. Gilead is a tale of generations, as Ames looks back on his father and grandfather and forward to his young son. Home is also about family, but is horizontal – a single nuclear family and its aftermath, rather than generations. The overlapping of characters and events between the novels is fascinating. I’m going straight back to re-read Gilead while it’s all fresh in my head.

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[Book Review] Howards End

21 Monday Jun 2010

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In volume one of his published journals, as an opinionated undergraduate, the great British novelist John Fowles comments on reading E.M. Forster’s Howards End that it’s as if reading a book by a passionless, fussy rabbit. I’m not sure quite what he meant by that; if I was going to find literary ancestors for John Fowles, E.M. Forster would surely be one.  Howards End is about three families representing three different classes – the intelligentsia, the business class and the working class – and the terribly complicated mess of a love-triangle they get themselves into. Well, it’s not exactly a ‘love triangle’; it’s way too complicated for that. But Forster is writing about Britain and about authenticity in 1910, just as Fowles was writing about these same things in Britain in 1960s. I see them both as such representatively British writers.

Howards End was consistently surprising, the narrator would suddenly veer up to a state of omniscience and pass interesting comments on the state of the country or the nature of someone’s soul. Or to say that what happened next was too full of boring details to relate. It’s an interventionist narrator of an interesting sort, with thoughtful things to contribute. I don’t think too many novels are written like this any more (maybe not enough in any era?), which dare to ask what’s it all about, and not even from a narrowly existential angle, but from a wide angle social perspective.

But I find myself battling to know what else to write about the book, and I wonder if that’s part of what Fowles was talking about. I wasn’t compelled, as much as I was interested and impressed.

I’ve never seen the film from the 1990s and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

RIP Randolph Stow

31 Monday May 2010

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I just read the sad news of the death of one of WA’s finest novelists, Randolph Stow. He was 74 and living in England.

I’ve often wondered what happened to Stow, why he stopped writing (or at least publishing). His career served as a kind of parable for me – it didn’t matter how well you did, things might still not work out right. He had published several award winning novels by the age of thirty and seemed unstoppable. And yet he published nothing in the last twenty-six years of his life. I tried several times to get into his final novel, The Suburbs of Hell, but I couldn’t, for some reason. Sorry, Randolph.

Over the last few years, I have kept on meaning to read more of his work. Merry-Go-Round In the Sea is surely one of the best Australian novels ever written, one of the great novels about childhood.

I have an obscure connection to Randolph: family legend has it that his mother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time in the 1960s. I don’t even know why, and I don’t know if it’s true.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/mp/7317959/wa-author-dies-in-england/

[Book Review] Lionel Shriver’s Take on Death and Money

24 Monday May 2010

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So Much For That, Lionel Shriver (2010)

Lionel Shriver’s new novel is getting mixed reviews. It will inevitably be compared unfavourably with her most successful novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, a comparison she’ll be living down for the rest of her life.

I finished it on Saturday, and think it’s a flawed, overly long and harrowing read, but also compelling and insightful. The main character is Shep Knacker, who sold off his business ten years ago with the intention of moving to a third world country and living cheaply off the proceeds for the rest of his life. Right when he decides to make an ultimatum to his wife Glynis – come with me or I’ll go by myself – she reveals she has mesothelioma. Shep is a good man, and abandons his hope of his ‘Afterlife’ to care for his wife. Her treatment absorbs all his money, even with the health insurance provided by the job he hates.

Until its rather dissonant, almost comic ending, it is an unrelentingly bleak novel, the sort of story to make you wonder what the point of life is. Not only is the treatment futile and awful, but the supporting characters are Shep’s best friend Jackson and his wife Helen with their daughter who has a rare degenerative disease which makes her life a constant miserable trial. Shriver constantly indulges Jackson’s rants about the state of America. They become repetitive and spin the novel out a long way, and they’re also a little annoying – he is not as articulate as Shriver writing in her own voice in her very interesting newspaper columns and doesn’t hold as nuanced opinions. Yet it is also a book filled with insights into money, work, marriage and conduct of life.

In Lionel’s apparent act of revenge against her Presbyterian theologian father, Shep’s Presbyterian minister father loses his faith in God at the end of his life. I hate to think what Donald Shriver thinks of that. Or maybe he and Lionel can laugh about it. (I doubt it.) It stung me reading that; imagine losing one’s faith in the face of death? It would make a lot of your life feel wasted, particularly in his – or my – case.

There are too many secondary characters who are too nasty or too selfish – Shep’s boss, his sister, ‘s family. Subtley is really important in dealing with such heavy subjects, and this novel has very little subtlety. But it does have a compulsive narrative – I wanted to know what was going to happen and I cared about the characters, even and especially as the book enveloped me in the dread-filled fog of death.

[Book review] Never Let Me Go: the Illusions of an Enchanted Childhood

16 Friday Apr 2010

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) is about the illusions of the strange, enchanted world of childhood and the loss of innocence that growing up involves. It’s also a love triangle. The backdrop is an alternative present where science and ethics took a different turn, but it could mislead readers to label it science fiction. The novel it reminds me of most is Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; both are subtle, emotionally engaging literary dystopias, and in both the world of the narrator is only gradually revealed.

At one point in the novel, Kathy, the narrator, explains how she and the other children growing up in Hailsham, a special boarding school, are told things without being told things. Their teachers mention words and concepts about the children’s fate – ‘donations’ ‘completions’ ‘carers’ – a year or two before they explain them. By the time the teachers explain these things a little more – and nothing is ever explained clearly – the children have already normalised the words, so they feel they already know what they’re being told.

This goes some way to explaining why the children don’t fight against their fate; it also explains Ishiguro’s narrative method. Our realisations as readers come in a similar way to the children’s knowledge – the strange euphemisms for what is going on begin to play at our minds, until we’re not surprised when the horrific truths do become apparent. It kept me turning pages and tense, and also frustrated – ‘I just want to know what’s going on!’. Of course, that’s probably exactly how Ishiguro wanted me to feel.

It is a poignant novel told in Kathy’s vulnerable voice, looking back at her life at age 31, and, in particular, her best friends Tommy and Ruth. Ishiguro could have made her bitter and angry or determined to escape her fate. Instead, her grateful, sentimental tone makes the novel a brilliant one: it is so unsettling. We the readers are horrified at the injustice she faces, while she is quite calm about it.

As much as anything, it is a novel about mortality: the plight of Kathy and her friends and the way they live in the face of death is a kind of parable for our lives. You might come away from the novel wanting to appreciate your life more, and if you do Ishiguro has achieved something important.

9/10