Category: Book review

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Alex Michaelides pic
Screenwriter and novelist, Alex Michaelides

So, thrillers go like this.

The first plot points give intensely conflicting actions, like a wife expressing deep love for her husband, then a day later she is discovered with a gun in her hand and her husband tied to a chair with five shots into his face, his blood mixed with hers as it drips from her slashed wrists, but she stands comatosed, but alive, and refuses to speak.

Then the first person narrator, an authoritative figure like a lawyer, doctor, or detective tries to get the woman to speak and is determined to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery. There are no witnesses and the case seems cut and dried. He, and increasingly she these days, talks to people involved with the woman, and/or her journal, or long lost sister / lover / colleague, is discovered and details emerge about her history, her marriage, her family, her work colleagues which intermingle simultaneously with details of the narrator’s history, marriage, family, and work colleagues until a complicated web of possible motives, secrets, jealousies, and, of course, red herrings swim around your brain leading you to think, at various moments, ‘Oh, I know who did it!’ and then you are encouraged more in your beliefs and then suddenly they are dashed, or seemingly dashed, onto the rocks of evidence, only to emerge later as indeed a possibility, but maybe not.

Sometimes you are right and you’re left with a scraggy feeling of disappointment causing you to discard the book after ‘the end’, if you get that far, and to search for a different thriller writer.

Sometimes you are wrong and rarely, very rarely, you are hit over the head with the truth at the very moment of reading it, and you gasp.

The Silent Patient is one of those.

Alex Michaelides is a screenwriter of Greek-Cypriot/English extraction and lives in London. This is his first novel.

Adding to this mix of intrigue, and as a source of clues, are photo-realistic paintings – the woman, Alicia Berenson, is an artist; a Greek tragedy of love and resurrection by Euripides, Alcestis – the name of a Berenson self-portrait; and a secure psychiatric facility, The Grove, where our first-person narrator, Theo Faber, works and where Alicia is incarcerated.

At times the writing feels formulaic but it is, after all, a ‘No.1 New York Times Bestseller’ so you are warned. The film rights have been snapped up by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, as part of its next three year plan and is currently listed as ‘in development’.

I rarely read thrillers – generally, I don’t care who did it – but this one kept me reading and what I love about this book is that the very way it’s written is a clue to, not who did it, but what caused it to be done, and that it is not a simple first-person narrative: when you’ve read it you realise that what you’ve read is only possible because you’ve read it. Enough said. No spoilers here.

The language is simple and direct and the pages are very easily turned. I read this in two afternoons. It’s the perfect airport novel, great escapism, entertaining, and Mr. Michaelides is grinning all the way to the good life. Smart Alex!

You can buy this book in various formats here.

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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood pic
Canadian Writer, Margaret Atwood

Yes, this is a sequel to The HandMaid’s Tale (1985) but it is not a continuation of the story. The Testaments starts fifteen years after the story of Offred, the handmaid, and is a trio of narratives, the three (written) testaments: a young girl raised in Canada, a young girl raised in Gilead, and Aunt Lydia, the villainous trainer ‘Aunt’ in the original story; she is the only continuing character.

There was a 1990 movie of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Elizabeth McGovern, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and penned by Harold Pinter which was not a success (it only made 5 million back on its 13 million budget) but the television (streaming) version of the book which first aired in 2017 was a runaway success. Timing is everything, coming as it did in the wake of the #metoo movement.

I suspect it was the success of the television version that sparked Atwood, and/or her publishers, to embark on a ‘sequel’.

In a 2018 ad for Masterclass – an online teaching platform that Atwood signed up to teach creative writing – she says that all the bad things in The Handmaid’s Tale happened “in real life somewhere at some time … I didn’t make them up.” She also says that “as a writer, your goal is to keep your reader believing in your story even though both of you know it’s fiction.” I always knew The Testaments was fiction; I didn’t believe a word  of it.

There are three reasons why I think this is not a good book and the Booker Prize judges made a very big mistake.

  1. Fiction is made up of three components: narrative, description, and dialogue. The Testaments is all narrative. This happened, then that happened, then this happened, with dialogue peppered through the narrative like herbs sprinkled on a salad. You don’t learn much from the dialogue. There is very little description. I suspect Atwood believed the images, the ‘look’ of the story and characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV version, would satisfy the reader’s need to ‘see’ it.
  2. So much of the detail of the times and life in Gilead are justified in the same sentence in which the detail is introduced. This is often necessary but it is a necessity that should only be used sparingly. Too much of it and it sounds lazy and clunky. We are told too much, when we should be shown. As a reader I had to ‘do’ virtually nothing. I fell asleep a lot.
  3. And what I believe to be the greatest sin: when the story is one of survival and escape from an evil or severe danger, which it is, we do not see the villains, the bad-guys – Commander Judd et al – get their comeuppance. It is a very unsatisfying read.

The Booker judges decided on a winner for 2019, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and why, of why, did they also announce Atwood’s book as a co-winner – it’s against the Booker rules, btw – when it is such an obviously commercial enterprise capitalising, not on the success of the 24-year-old original book but, on the 2017 TV version of that book? Maybe they thought the Booker needed the publicity. Atwood didn’t need a Booker; she already had one (for her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, in 2000) where as Evaristo did, but then had it diminished by having to share it.  Both author’s were kind and sanguine about their joint prize as one would expect.

If you enjoyed all or either of the versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, book, film, or TV series, leave this one alone: it adds nothing.

However, you can buy various editions of The Testaments here.

 

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Us by David Nicholls

David Nicholls pic
British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls.

I love this book. It’s rare to find a laugh-out-loud read these days, but this is one of them. It’s a first person narrative of Douglas Petersen, a bio-chemist, and a man who always just seems to miss out on being, cool, mainly because he just doesn’t know what cool is; he doesn’t get most things. That’s certainly what his son, Albie, would say although he probably wouldn’t be so kind. The third component of Us (2014) is Douglas’s wife Connie. She’s an artist and an ex-hippie and is definitely cool. She wakes him up one morning and tells him that she might want to leave him. They embark on a (possible) remedy: a Grand Tour of Europe, and drag a reluctant Albie along with them. This is the Us. This trio. However there is another narrative interspersed with the Grand Tour: how Douglas and Connie got together in the first place; and many more incidents of their life together. You get to know these three very well. It’s really a portrait of a marriage.

It’s divided into many small chapters, 180 in all, which in itself, propels the reading along; ‘I’ll just read the next chapter before I walk the dog’; ‘I’ll read this short one before I start dinner’; ‘Just one more, it’s short, before my afternoon jog.’ And why do you want to do this? Because you love Douglas. He’s a gem and he talks to you as if you’ve known him since kindergarten. Us became my very early morning read when a trip to the loo erased all efforts to go back to sleep. But, so I didn’t wake the sleeping one, I tried to curtail my laugh-out-loud to something like, laugh-in-loud, but stifling a laugh-out-loud made my body behave like a trampoline-in-use and the mattress was forced, of course, to follow suit, so allowing the sleeping one to sleep didn’t work. I was banned from reading Us in bed. But that’s OK; you can get through a short chapter while waiting for the jug to boil, during a TV channel promo, even while stirring the custard.

The key to the humour is Douglas himself. He doesn’t quite know what to say when staring at a painting (I like that blue bit.); he feels inadequate to say what he likes about a piece of music (It’s loud, isn’t it?); and contemporary dance (Do they have to throw themselves against a wall?); and books (Erotic realism? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?); and food (flaccid courgettes in a green-grey water sauce made from water.).

David Nicholls also has several screenwriting credits including Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ for the BBC in 2008,  Far from the Madding Crowd in 2015, and he wrote Patrick Melrose (2018), the television series based on the novels by Edward St Aubyn. He has penned several movies including the adaptations of his novels, Starter for Ten, and One Day. He also trained as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama but never quite made it in that field because, as he admitted, he wasn’t very good at the basic stuff, like standing still and moving from A to B. However he must have picked up some performance skills since his appearance at the recent North Cornwall Writer’s Festival had the audience in stitches as he read from his latest book, Sweet Sorrow, a passage devoted to the pitfalls of first-time kissing.

Us is currently being filmed in various location in Europe for the BBC. It stars Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves with a script by Nicholls. However, a release date has yet to bee announced.

He’s a busy man and novel writing has to be squeezed in between big budget movies and television drams; he’s written five novels, so, for me, four to go.

You can watch an interview with David Nicholls about this book, Us, here.

You can buy the ebook, or other formats, here where you can also ‘look inside’ before you buy.

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Rough Music by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale Pic
British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall and plays the cello, modern and baroque.

I first read this book decades ago and then in 2016 I discovered Patrick Gale again with Notes from an Exhibition (2007) and have remained a fan.

Rough Music (2000), like several of Gale’s novels, has a double narrative, same characters, same location, different times.

Julian a small boy, son of simple parents John and Frances, is taken on an idyllic beachside holiday in Cornwall with those parents, John and Francis. The widower, Bill, a writer, and child, Skip, of John’s sister arrive from America and cause passions and the status quo to collide.

Decades later, Julian is a grown man, a successful bookshop owner, and he returns to Cornwall for a holiday with his now ageing parents; his mother with early onset dementia, to the same beach and even, possibly, to the same house. The catalyst of drama and entertainment is that he has been having an affaire with his brother-in-law, Sandy, which began on the evening of Sandy’s buck’s party and has continued through Sandy’s years of happy marriage and the birth of his two sons to Julian’s sister, Poppy, and right up to the action of the story. No one, not Poppy or his parents, know about this. While on this holiday he meets Roly, an artist and drop-out, and he can see a possible exit from this family deception if only he can orchestrate it in time.

Some of the names of these characters change between narratives so don’t be put off by this. All will be revealed.

Each story is told in alternating chapters rendering the climax of both in close proximity to each other. A double whammy for the reader.

Gale is at his best with family relationships and spends time painting them in all their complex layers of expectation, disappointment, and flowering moments of joy. He is a wise writer, or perhaps just acutely observant.

Family life:

The only real difference was children. He had never appreciated until now how much emotional clamour, interference almost, the presence of children set up, saving a relationship from listening to itself.

How children can get in the way:

‘Ma.’ ‘What?’ ‘Leave the door open this time.’ The open door was sobering, like having a dressing-gowned child bearing mutely indignant witness from the room’s corner.

Ageing:

It was as though the only acceptable way to face old age was in a spirit of glassy contemplation and composure, to become a fund of quaint old stories (so long as one did not repeat them too often), a calm old lap on which babies might be placed and an undemanding extra presence at a dining table.

Self awareness:

Perhaps John had been right and her surliness was simply muffled sorrow.

…flirting was a kind of knife sharpening for marriage.

And humour:

Tell me what you’re thinking. Trust me. I’m a novelist.

Sometimes while reading one can feel a ‘little jump’: when you read something that can chip ever so slightly at your suspension of disbelief but for the sake of the story, and your own enjoyment, you accept it, go with it. I think we readers do this a lot. It’s only after you put the book down, days or weeks later or when you’re telling someone about the book, that you may realise that, yes, that something doesn’t quite gel, some plot point or character trait doesn’t quite fit with what has been set up for us to accept. Don’t let this colour your view of the work or the writer adversely. It is caused, I believe, by us readers assuming that the universe of the book is exactly the universe of the reader; but this may not be the case. Of course, some books are written in a universe completely alien to the reader, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings for example, but most books we assume are written in our own universe. As readers we will give ourselves far more enjoyment and commitment if we let the story be what it is and not what we might want it to be, even down to the small details of the narrative and characters.

If you know and like Gale’s work you have probably read this, if not then this, along with A Perfectly Good Man (2012), two of his best, are a good way to begin your Gale adventure.

I continue my quest to read and write about all of Gale’s work and having surmised that it is only during the winter that he writes, in the spring and summer he is far too busy (festivals, garden, cello, cooking …) these seasons give me time to catch up. He is so prolific: two books every three years on average. His last Take Nothing With You came out in 2018; I’m expecting a new one next year. No pressure Patrick!

You can buy the book in various formats here.

 

 

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Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd Jones, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Olga_Tokarczuk_pic
Polish writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk (t’ KAR chook) won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2018 and the 2018 Booker International Prize for her novel Flights

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2009) was finally published in English in 2019.

It is about an old woman, Janina Duszejko – she doesn’t like her first name and prefers to be addressed as Mrs. Duszejko – who lives alone on a high wind-swept plateau in the south-west of Poland, close to the border with the Czech Republic.

In her youth she was an engineer, built bridges in Syria, had an affaire with a Protestant, but shared her bed with a Catholic, and now teachers English one day a week to 12 year olds. She believes in astrology; that Animals have reasoning and seek Vengeance ; and writes essays to magazines about the fascinating connection between Astrology and TV programming. But she has Ailments, a vivid imagination and raw emotions just below the surface where the pain of her Ailments live – simple nouns like Ailments and Folly are capitalised, like in the works of William Blake, from where the title comes. She has Theories, including why people find other people attractive, but some not, about almost everything; why magpies need lots of bathes, why foxes run in straight lines, and why Evolution is not about adaptation but about Beauty. And buys clothes too big for her, she likes the freedom. A vivid Dreamer of her dead family – her Mother and Grandmother appear to her in her boiler room dressed and ready for church – and a believer in a planet crossing an invisible point that causes two red fruits to fall from a wild rose bush. She cries easily.

She tends to the houses abandoned by their owners in the winter and wants to write her autobiography. She calls people, not by their given names but by what they suggest: Oddball, Dizzy, Dig Foot, Good News, and Black Coat. She finds words like ‘priority’, ‘cadaver’, and ‘cohabitee’ ugly and hideous.

The story opens with a death, a strange death, and is followed by three others; all victims are hunters and Mrs. Duszejko is certain the deaths are deliberately caused by Animals, deer, foxes, and boars, in retribution for the regular slaughter of their relatives by these criminals. And she sets out to prove it.

Her neighbours call her that crazy old woman.

The story is told in the first person, from the mouth of this crazy old woman. This allows for Tokarczuk’s theme, society’s disdain for the marginalised, their fear of the other but never is this message didactic; it is told with humour, irony, and a lightness of touch. The writing is adventurous, unexpected, insightful, (“Are you religious?” “Yes.” “What?” “An atheist.”), and a joy to read, and, in the end, it is about how there is really nothing called evil, it doesn’t exist; there is just need, sometimes misguided, overwrought, and out of all proportion, but need nonetheless.

The Stars and the Planets are Right about everything, except us humans sometimes get in the way and always for selfish reasons. As Mrs. Duszejko says, “The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.”

Here is a telephone interview with Olga Tokarczuk about her Nobel Prize win. She took the call while driving in a car in Germany.

You can listen to Tocarczuk talk about writing and Poland (with English Sub-titles) here.

You can buy the Kindle, and other editions here. Also on this Australian Amazon site you can ‘look inside’ and sample some of the text before you buy.

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Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry pic
Irish writer, Kevin Barry

Get up, groan, write a bit, moan, eat breakfast, write some more, cycle my bike through the Sligo hills, make up country songs as I pedal along, sing them, have lunch, have a nap, groan, moan, write a small bit more, cook dinner, feed wifey, open a bottle, or several, slump, sleep.

I don’t quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability – that’s the area of interest for me.
♠♠♠
The style of Kevin Barry’s Night Train to Tangier (2019) feels like a play because it was originally conceived as one; but that was not what gave me pause when I read about him and this, his new book; it was the (many times) mention of Samuel Beckett and his play Waiting for Godot, and I thought, “Uh oh!” Vladimir and Estragon sit and wait under a dead tree for Godot who never comes. Maurice Hearn and Charles Redmond sit and wait in a ferry terminal for Dilly, Maurice’s missing daughter who never comes, maybe, maybe not.
These two guys are Irish drug dealers who made a shit load of money when they were younger, loved the same woman – since deceased, and now quite can’t get their old mojo back, although they try by intimidating and threatening strangers. You wouldn’t want to meet them in a back alley. It maybe that Dilly doesn’t want to be found. No spoilers here.

The conversation is sometimes repetitive, but the language is glorious, lyrical, and adventurous:

 

Charlie Redmond? The face somehow has an antique look, like a court player’s, medieval, a man who’d strum his lute for you. In some meadowsweet lair. Hot, adulterous eyes and again a shabby suit, but dapper shoes in a rusted-orange tone, a pair of suede-finish creepers that whisper of brothels, also a handsome green corduroy neck-tie. Also stomach trouble, bags like graves beneath the eyes, and soul trouble.

 

The pages are formatted with large gaps of white between sentences. One reviewer wrote, “The blank spaces that Barry inserts between paragraphs, the empty gaps in the text, seem to signify accumulated pain.” That’s kind. I’m of a more cynical bent; they seem to me to be the editor’s doing: if you’ve decided to print it between hard covers, you need more pages.

Almost all of the reviews for this book have been glowing, and it’s been long listed for the this year’s Booker Prize. However, I was disappointed. There are three elements of novel writing: description, dialogue, and narrative. Barry’s descriptions are poetic, imaginative, and surprising. He’s at his best with description (like the quote above). Dialogue? Well, firstly, his dialogue isn’t punctuated. That’s OK: dialogue usually sounds like dialogue, but sometimes it doesn’t and I don’t appreciate having to go back and check. Narrative? I found it shallow and, again, I had to go back a page or two and take another run at it to find out exactly where we were. Contemporary readers have to do more work, I know, but I don’t appreciate feeling left behind; it stops the reader being enthralled, and enthralled is where all readers want to be; and by enthralled I mean forgetting that your reading.

For this reader, Night Boat to Tangier is about parents and parenting, and how we usually get it wrong, or this from Dilly’s mother,

The fear of turning into our parents, she said, is what turns us into our fucking parents. 

I have to admit that it did grow on me a little but not enough to send me racing for his previous works, City of Bohane (2011) and Beatlebone (2015), both lauded and prize-studded.

You can buy the ebook, and other formats, here, and you can ‘look inside’ before you buy, or hear what sounds like Kevin Barry reading from the text.

 

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The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells

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Swiss-German writer Benedict Wells; real name, Benedict von Schirach

Marcel Proust’s monumental – 7 volume – novel, certainly the longest, and arguably the best novel ever written,  À la Recherche du temps perdu, sometimes translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past was the first to use memory as a novelistic tool. It appeared in English in 1922, the year of Proust’s death, and helped to change the way literary novels were written; its stream of consciousness technique was revolutionary at the time but still remains today as an author’s story-telling option: the Northern Ireland writer Anna Burn used it for novel Milkman, her 2018 Booker Prize winner.

Benedict Wells’  novel, The End of Loneliness (2016) is a contemporary product of how memory can ‘write’ a novel. Jules Moreau, the first person narrator, wakes up in hospital and tries to remember how he got there, but memory isn’t linear, it jumps around like a rabbit in a cage. He even draws it for us:

The End of Loneliness Memory Map

It is the story of three siblings who loose their parents when they are all very young and are sent to boarding school where they slowly drift apart, geographically, emotionally, and intellectually. Their lives seemed pre-ordained but the tragedy sets them adrift leaving them, and the reader, wondering what would their lives have been like if the accident had not happened. It is also a love story that runs parallel to Jules’s memory of the siblings’ separation and their slow and difficult return to each other.

Although an author’s dreams can sow the seeds of fiction, using dreams, real or fictional, as the basis for plot decisions, I believe is a lazy option for a writer. One reviewer warns that this ‘may irk the critical’. However, Wells keeps the writer’s interest with slight, but intriguing, references to some event in the future:

‘… all this had nothing to do with what happened later.’

But the real star of the show is memory. Only twice, before the end, does the narrative return to the present: Jules lying in a hospital bed, where his children are mentioned. Children? There’s been no mention of children. This is another reference to the ‘future’ which pricks the writer’s curiosity and adds to the page-turning momentum.

In contemporary literary fiction relationships and character are far more important than plot; but the set up – an injured man with plenty of hospital time remembering his past to understand who he is and why he is there – is credible and neat, and although the prose is straight-forward the emotional pull is strong which has a lot to do with Well’s talent. The word ‘tear-jerker’ has been used, too much I think, in many reviews of this book.

Although it is his fourth novel it’s a book that Wells had to write; it was stuck in his head for seven years but then, following its publication and success, his head was free to write the novels he wants to write. I look forward to those.

Wells changed his name to remain free from his famous family and chose ‘Wells’ from his writing mentor, John Irving’s hero Homer Wells in his novel Cider House Rules (1985).

Here is an interview, in German with English sub-titles, with Wells when he won the European Prize for Literature in 2016 for The End of Loneliness; and you can watch another interview with Wells, in English, when the book was translated into French, here.

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Neither Here nor There by Bill Bryson

or   How to write a ‘Hugely Funny’ Travel Book.

Bill Bryson
Anglo-American non-fiction writer, Bill Bryson: born 1951.

Step one: Choose a common phrase like, There and Back to See How Far it is, Head you Off at the Pass, It’s a Long Way to ……, you get the idea, and make it your title.

Step two: Collect anecdotes of your coming of age (COA).

Step thee: rack your brain for your pubescent sexual fantasies (PSF).

Step four: make a list of your own foibles (SD = self-deprecation).

Step five: have handy anecdotes from other trips to the same places  (SP).

Step six: if you’re an American living in Britain, collect phrase and stories that put down the Yanks or the Brits. (OPD = own put downs).

Step seven: collect puts downs of a nerd that gets put down a lot by your targeted audience, like the Irish, the Mormons, the Kiwis, etc. (NPD = nerd put downs)

Step eight: you’ll also need some RPD’s – racial put downs.

So, let’s begin.

Chapter One. Of course, you start with a journey. However, if the journey is a little boring you can always rely on a PSF:

I fanaticised about “…finding myself seated next to a panting young beauty being sent by her father against her wishes to the Lausanne Institute for Nymphomaniacal Disorders, who would turn to me somewhere over the mid-Atlantic and say, ‘Forgive me, but would it be alright if I sat on your face for a while?”

and you can then tack on an NPD which has OPD overtones:

“In the event my seatmate turned out to be an acned string-bean with Buddy Holly glasses and a line-up of ball-point pens clipped into a protective plastic case in his shirt pocket.”

But if you find yourself on an inspirational roll you can continue this novel scenario:

“I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.

‘Have you found Jesus?’ he said suddenly.

‘Uh, no, it’s a quarter,’ I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart.”

It’s important to understand that such ‘stories’ don’t necessarily need to come from the trip you are now writing about, nor do they necessarily need to have happened at all. Let’s call it comedic license.

And of course, when in Germany, it’s likely that funny incidents are few and far between but there’s always a good PSF to come to your aid:

“I had only signed up for German [as a boy] because it was taught by a walking wet dream named Miss Webster, who had the most magnificent breasts and buttocks that adhered to her skirt like melons in shrink-wrap.”

Or, as in his few pages on Cologne, he begins with an RPD about the woman running the statin café who ignored him because he ignored her:

“This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well, actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is up there with it.”

He then segues into an SP about a previous visit to Cologne when he stayed in a cheap hotel and read soft-porn magazines that other guests had left behind. He then contemplates the massive cathedral and comments on its size with a little OPD:

“You can understand why it took 700 years to build – and that was with German workers. In Britain they would still be digging the foundations.”

Without any nicer things to say about Cologne Bryson indulges in a reminiscence about flying on a 747, and regaling the reader with the lack of American know-how of audio electronics – a bit of ODP – and praising the Japanese “for filling my life with convenient items like a wristwatch that can store telephone numbers, calculate my overdraft and time my morning egg” – a sort of reverse RDP. He then cuts short his Cologne stay when he spies a non-stop porno cinema in the train station, which one would’ve thought would’ve given Mr Bryson an extra beat of his heart but it instead caused him to high-tail it out of Cologne and head for, ironically, Amsterdam.

His stay in Hamburg is similar: he complains about the ugliness of the prostitutes, the smallness and expense of his carpet-less hotel room, the sex-shops – “nothing compared to those in Amsterdam” – although he does praise their ingenuity when it comes to manufacturing and promoting sex dolls. He indulges in a little RDP, ODP, SP and then tops it off with a lengthy analysis of why beautiful and stylish German women don’t shave their armpits; like “a Brillo pad hanging there. I know some people think it’s earthy, but so are turnips …”

Oh, and he also hates dogs.

It seems that Mr Bryson understands well his potential readership: the kind of travellers that other travellers try to avoid.

However, after reading the dense prose of our human stains in the stories by Tsiolkas, a house-brick sized Moorhouse about mores, political and sexual, in Canberra in the 1950’s, and the ethereal beginnings of literary modernism in Joyce, I thought I needed something light.

Neither Here nor There (1992) is entertaining-ish, undemanding, diverting, and completely forgettable, but don’t let it inform you about Europe.

Access to all 46 formats and editions you can find here.

by Categories: Book review, Creativity, How to write fiction, Humour, Literary criticism, Non-fiction, Travel WritingTags: , , , , , Leave a comment

My Brother’s Name is Jessica by John Boyne

John Boyne pic
Irish writer, John Boyne.

Earlier this year John  Boyne found himself in the middle of a media storm about his new book, My Brother’s Name is Jessica. The transgender community, especially on twitter, went for him fiercely: the title itself was considered offensive.

Mya Nunnaly, a poet, wrote an open letter to Boyne which includes,

You {John} write that “however, a friend of mine, born a boy, came out as transgender in his early 20s and over the last few years has been both struggling with and embracing his new identity.” HER new identity, John. HER early 20s.

As I understand it, the moment a boy (say) reveals that he believes he is a girl it is incumbent of everyone to treat her with respect and use her name and the appropriate pronoun. In fact I should’ve written ‘the moment a boy (say) reveals that she believes she is a girl…’

It may have caused less offence had the title been, My Sister’s Name was Jason.

The other issue was the use of the word cis. The word originally was, and is, used in molecular science but has been adopted by the transgender community as the opposite of trans. I am a cis man because I live as the gender of my birth. Most people are of cis-gender. Transgender are people who don’t live as the gender of their birth. Boyne inflamed the debate even further by publicly writing in the Irish Times on April 13, 2019, a piece entitled, Why I support trans rights but reject the word ‘cis. However, a word, when given an opposite, is strengthened. If our language only had the word ‘tall’ and its opposite was simply ‘not tall’ anyone who was ‘not tall’ would, I believe, feel left out, thought about in the negative, disrespected; but having their own word, ‘short’ gives both words equal standing, equal weight, and therefore gives equal respect.

I often feel that if the word ‘black’ in American society was able to be used as the equal opposite of the word ‘white’, which is the correct use, and not as ‘less than’ the word ‘white’ race relations in the US would be a lot healthier.

I see the word ‘cis’ as just another adjective to describe me. If I was in a group discussion about international politics with people of different nationalities it would be appropriate to begin my opinion with, ‘Well, as an Australian caucasian man I think ……’; similarly, if I was in a group discussion about diet with people who were either vegans, pescatarians, or omnivores it would be appropriate to begin my opinion with ‘Well, as a meat-eater I think …; and if I was in a group discussion about gender with a group that included trans people it would be appropriate to begin my opinion with ‘Well, as a cis man I think…’ It is just another adjective to use appropriately when necessary.

However, the focus is not on Jason/Jessica but on her younger brother, Sam, who represents Boyne’s chosen audience:  young cis readers. This is his sixth book for young readers, the most successful being The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). Sam tells it as he sees it: Boyne has chosen Sam as the first-person narrator. The language is clear and simple and a lot of what goes on around him he doesn’t fully understand. This background is heightened by his parent’s work: his mother is a cabinet minister, Secretary of State, eye-ing off the Prime Ministership, with his father as her Chief of Staff. The stakes are high and the media are always lurking in the bushes. 

The title is clear and  basically foretells the story. It is actually a quote from the text; a text narrated by a cis boy who like other cis people don’t understand trans people and sometimes get it wrong, particularly with language. As one trans journo put it in Boyne’s defence … he’s on our side; he’s waving our flag, he just got it upside down.  

“In writing My Brother’s Name is Jessica my hope is that children and young adults—particularly ones who are perhaps not already familiar with transgender issues—will come to this book and start to understand that anyone struggling with these issues needs support and compassion, not judgment. I have tried to write the best novel that I can. I might have succeeded or I might have failed, but I stand by it. I welcome debate and am interested in people’s views on this subject. I do not believe that the trans community bears any relationship to, or any responsibility for the abuse I have received online. I stand 100% behind all trans people, I respect them as brave pioneers, I applaud their determination to live authentic lives despite the abuse they also receive, and I will always do so.”                                                                                                                    John Boyne

You can watch a youtube interview with John Boyne about this book here.
You can buy the kindle edition, and others if you choose, here. 

 

by Categories: Book review, British LiteratureTags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Falconer by John Cheever

John-Cheever-pic
American short story writer and novelist (1912 – 1982), the ‘Chekov of the suburbs.’

John  Cheever was not a very nice man; or, to be kinder, a very complicated man. His wife. Mary,  hardly spoke to him – she had good season, he disliked homosexuals but was one himself – one lover, a student, lived with the family for a while; but he also had a short affair with Hope Lange, and he was an alcoholic until 1973; his daughter describing him as a father said, “he was a nightmare”. He was a snob and feared shame; and while terrified of his sexuality he wrote “if I could express myself erotically I would come alive.” He and his wife certainly hurt each other but they didn’t see that as a reason to break up a family. He craved the safety of domestic life but it made him ‘blissfully unhappy’.

In Colm Tóibín’s essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (2012) his chapter on Cheever is entitled, New Ways to Make Your Family’s Life  a Misery. That chapter was well-thumbed while writing this post.

He loved fame. If you are a famous musician, you can play something; if you’re a movie star, you can give them an autograph; but if you’re a writer, as Cheever’s son Federico put it, “Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That’s the goodies you get.”

“I would like to live in a world,” Cheever wrote, “where there are no homosexuals but I suppose Paradise is thronged with them.”

Before he died he wrote to his son “What I wanted to tell you is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I’d tell you that, because sooner or later somebody’s going to tell you and I’d just as soon it came from me.” “I don’t mind Daddy, if you don’t mind.” In 1991 the New Yorker and Knopf paid 1.2 million dollars for the rights to publish the journals. Mary Cheever did not read them.

Cheever’s most famous story is The Swimmer (1964): a man ‘swims’ home via all the swimming pools from where he had been lounging beside one, to his. He is well regarded by his neighbours along the way but as he ‘swims’ closer to home the mood gets darker and the context more surreal. Is this really happening? When he gets there his house is empty. It was made into a film in 1968 starring Burt Lancaster. It was unsuccessful, but since has garnered a cult status. It was also the acting debut of comedienne Joan Rivers and the compositional debut of composer Marvin Hamlisch.

*

Many years ago my partner (now husband) and I had a boat: an old wooden cruiser. We took two friends motoring on Broken Bay one weekend and had a meal at Cottage Point Inn. We moored the boat rather grandly right in front of the restaurant; had a wonderful long lunch; too many bottles of wine; and returned to the boat only to find that it wouldn’t start. One of our guests, Julian, a vet, pulled up the floor hatch, climbed into the engine cavity and with a small implement borrowed from a neighbouring boat (far more grand, far more impressive) and a teaspoon from our cutlery drawer, got the engine going. What impressed me most, and has stayed with me all this time, was the feeling of Julian’s self-confidence, ease, and complete understanding of what he was doing. That same feeling returned while reading this book.

Falconer got Cheever on the cover of Newsweek with the title, A Great American Novel in 1977. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his next published work, his collected Stories.

Falconer, on the surface is a crime/punishment/redemption story: Ezekiel Farragut, an academic and drug addict kills his brother, although he admits hitting him with a fire iron, he says his brother was drunk and he fell and hit his head on the hearth; he has a “profound”  love affair with a fellow inmate and then escapes, posing as a corpse, and understands he’s a better man.

The third-person narrator self-references once …

… but at the time at which I’m writing, leg irons were still used …

This is rare, as if the narrator is a character, Cheever we suspect, but it need not be. If a third-person narrator self-references too much, he becomes a first-person narrator.

His wife, Marcia, visits him in prison

Farragut stepped into this no man’s land and came on hard, as if he had been catapulted into the visit by mere circumstance. ‘Hello darling’ he exclaimed as he had exclaimed ‘Hello darling’ at trains, boats, airports, the foot of the highway, journey’s end; but in the past he would have worked out a timetable, aimed at the soonest possible sexual consummation.

and as they talk,

Out the window he could see some underwear and fatigues hung out to dry. They moved in the breeze as if this movement – like the movements of ants, bees, and geese – had some polar ordination.

The narrator relates Farragut’s anecdotes about his relationship with his wife: their back story …

… he thought that perhaps a bag of fox grapes may do the trick. He was scrupulous about the sexual magic of tools.

He means ‘tools’ in the sense of ‘gifts’, but uses the word ‘tools’; it darkly colours the image with cynicism and says more about Cheever than about Farragut.

Contradictions are scattered through the text like peppercorns in a stew; light and shade, good and bad, right and wrong, innocence and guilt, ‘superficial and fortuitous’, masculine and feminine …

He had been called a bitch by a woman he deeply loved and he had always kept this possibility in mind. 

Most of the text is a stream of consciousness, a re-emerging writing style, as noted in the Booker Prize 2018 winner, Milkman by Anna Burns;  but I’ll leave the last word to Tóibín.

“If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language.”                                                                                                                         Colm Tóibín.

You can read Joan Didion’s review of Falconer in the New York Times, March 6, 1977, here.

You can buy the Kindle edition here.

 

 

 

 

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