I noticed Melbourne University Press have a very cool tagline: ‘Books with spine’.
Cool tagline
06 Thu Mar 2008
Posted in books
Category Archives: books
Book review: The merry-go-round in the sea by Randolph Stow
24 Sun Feb 2008
Posted in book review, Western Australia
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.
Randolph Stow
02 Sat Feb 2008
Posted in authors, book review, reading
I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.
His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.
I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?
A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.
Book Review: Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg
09 Wed Jan 2008
Posted in book review, books
I remember Silverberg fondly from the days in my teens when I lived SF. He had ideas as good as Asimov but heaps more style and strong characters. I went back to him because it was late at night, I’d been reading a lot of theology and one of his books was sitting unread on my shelf.
In short
Kingdoms of the Wall is a competent SF novel that kept me reading but didn’t astound.
The Plot
Kingdoms of the Wall has an excellent setup: a massive mountain dominates the people who live at its bottom. Each year, the village sends up forty pilgrims to attempt to reach the summit and meet with the gods they believe live there. But only a couple ever return and these are either mad or silent. Yet still four thousand people compete each year for the privilege of being one of the pilgrims. The narrator, Poilar, is courageous and ambitious but not particularly intelligent. He wants to get to the summit and achieve glory without really knowing why. His best friend wants to discover the meaning of it all.The climb toward the summit is a perfect narrative device. Reading a narrative can be so easily construed as climbing toward a summit. I expected, like the inhabitants of the village that there might be something special at the top…
Spoiler Alert
…Alas the summit was disappointing. It’s exactly as you thought it might be : the gods are humans who landed here long ago.
Silverberg is such an accomplished SF writer and I could feel him writing this in automatic, at least with the end.
I’m not disappointed I read it; Silverberg took me on an enchanting journey through strange lands where pilgrims have left their quest for the summit and made their new homes.
6/10
Book review : Atonement by Ian McEwan
21 Fri Dec 2007
Posted in authors, book review
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Spoiler alert
Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal – the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction – and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.
Compelling narrative
The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.
McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia – both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.
Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.
Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia. What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?
What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?
What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?
There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.
In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.
In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.
An exploration of life and writing
Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999’ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.
But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.
Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.
Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life. Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.
Atonement part two – a reading report
17 Mon Dec 2007
Posted in book review
I’ve just finished re-reading part two of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Having got of prison early in exchange for enlisting, Robbie’s in the midst of wartorn France, with death and atrocities all around him. He’s retreating to the coast and trying to focus on Cecilia waiting for him across the channel.
It’s a strange juxtaposition after the single atrocity in the midst of the civilisation of the manor in the first section; McEwan never takes us quite where we expect.
Towards the end of the section is the key to the connection:
But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no-one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there wasn’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts… You killed no-one today? But how many did you leave to die?(261)
The tide of blood in war, the constant atrocities, drown out that one atrocity, that one event that changed everyone’s lives back at the manor. When we learn, later on, that it’s Briony writing this, the juxtaposition of her crime and the war might make us think her innocent by comparison. Or at least dilute the magnitude of what she did. (Of course, she can’t forgive herself that easily but she’d like to.)
I found this part less compelling, less insightful than the first part, but then the first part is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.
Atonement part one – a reading report
15 Sat Dec 2007
Posted in book review
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Spoiler alert
Few books make me feel so deeply as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve just finished re-reading the first part, and I’m devastated again.
As the party waits for Robbie to return and be arrested, we watch it through Briony’s eyes and it’s so very frustrating because I long to know about Cecilia’s rage at her note being shown around to everyone and her passion for Robbie. I long to know what Robbie is thinking. Such a heartbreaking scene: him coming out of the mist at dawn having found the lost boys, expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead this stony faced line of people waiting with angry hatred for him.
And in feeling so angry at Briony, we forget the worst sin committed here: Paul Marshall’s rape of Lola and then the cowardly warmongering snob’s silence as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. What an evil human being! This novel affects me so much that I hate him as I read, I hate the way he’s got between Cecilia and Robbie, the way he’s destroyed Robbie and Lola’s lives.
McEwan casts this villian so well by giving Marshall plausible pomposity and this delicious detail of him being the gleeful inventor of that disgusting counterfeit – compound chocolate – and his desire for war so that the demand for his chocolate increases.
McEwan is a writer who has such superb control and pacing. He knows how to create narrative hunger in the reader, and yet once he’s done this, he also knows the precise speed at which to release details to us to keep us enthralled and desperate for more.
Some people I respect a lot find the first part slow and boring. I wonder if this is because their experience of the world is too different to McEwan’s. For me, McEwan so precisely gets to the experience of being alive when he talks of his characters’ motivations and thoughts that I don’t mind if a perfectly ordinary day occurs. However, I also am always aware that some menacing event that’s about to change everyone’s lives is hanging in the air.
Re-reading Atonement
12 Wed Dec 2007
Tags
I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.
McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.
200 pages into Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind
30 Fri Nov 2007
Posted in book review
I wonder if my problem’s with the translation. I won’t ever know, because I never intend to learn Spanish.I like the themes of lost books, secret libraries and adolescence. I love this mysterious figure of an obscure failed novelist named Julian Carax, whom a handful of fans obsessively seek. The book feels like it belongs to the same family as some of my favourite books – Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, Nicholas Christopher’s A Trip to the Stars.
But I’m ambivalent about the writing. It constantly lapses into cliches and figures of speech. The characters seem to go around with smirks on their faces, making self-deprecating or ironic comments that aren’t even interesting. At one point the landlady keeps on saying ‘You’re a devil!’ in an affectionate way, and it grated on me.
It’s headed for a 7 out of 10.
I’ve given up reading David Copperfield
16 Fri Nov 2007
I could feel it coming for a while. My progress was slowing. Each page was becoming a mini-marathon in itself. I was forcing myself to pick it up again. And then, halfway through p. 283 in the Penguin Classics edition, I realised I didn’t have to do this any longer. I don’t have to pour another 60 hours into finishing this brick. I can just let it go.
So I just let it go.
It’s not that it’s an undeserving book. I understand why it’s so important. Indeed, I didn’t realise how astute Dickens is, I didn’t realise his knack for catching personality and mood.
It’s probably just that I’m a bad reader. I’m impatient. I like narrative drive. DC has little narrative drive. It ambles, it meanders.
Plus I’m having vision problems which make reading either a page or a computer screen difficult.
