Reading Challenge Episode 2: 30-21

So, following in my tradition of taking two weeks to come up with enough polysyllabic words with pseudo-intellectual overtones to fill a blog post, here we are with the second 'countdown' post at which we reach the outskirts of the top twenty. I will next, of course, be leaping backwards to maul the ten books I hated the most (so much hate), but until then we are still in classic countdown mode.

As a prelude to this post, I should warn you that a ridiculous number of absolutely iconic books make it into this group of ten, and if I'm ever going to attract haters to this blog it will be with this post. With that in mind, let us begin with a bit of seeming incongruity...

30) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Fie! What mockery is this? The master work of Salman Rushdie, hallowed author of Sam’s earliest adulthood, banish’d to the squalid throes of rank 30? A pox on thee!

Well, to explain this point, I have to resort to my old get-out-of-jail-free card, expectations. Those of you who read my 2011 movie countdown (hi, Mother) will remember that something with considerably low expectations going in is liable to climb modestly up in the rankings, while something with remarkably higher expectations is going to slip quite quickly and joltingly down the Vaseline-soaked ladder.  Midnight’s Children is the victim of such a cruel twist of fate.

As most of you will know, Rushdie was the first writer whom I truly loved; the first who got me reading avidly, who expanded my imagination and whose name I dropped at cocktail parties to try and blend in with the eastern-suburbs intelligentsia whom I call ‘people I’ve never met but will pretend to have for a blog post’. Starting out with the mind-blowingly brilliant Satanic Verses (yes, it’s brilliant; deal with it, Pakistan) I moved on to read every piece of Rushdie fiction out there, while always saving one work ‘til last – his master work, his ‘Booker of Booker’ winner that exemplifies everything he is as a writer.

I refer of course, to Midnight’s Children. But when I came to it, I found it fragmented, inconsistent and simply not all that absorbing. The magic realism that gripped my imagination and forced me to think of the bigger picture in The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh felt more like flights of fancy here. While there were moments of fluid narrative brilliance where my heart felt that he was building it to some sort of culmination that would blow my mind, the story would get derailed into a plot diversion that felt completely detaching. To me it didn’t seem to grow organically from one causal event to the next, but instead seemed more pastiche storytelling, all part of the same artwork but woven from completely different threads.

Overall, though, it wasn’t so much a bad read as that I’d built it up so much in my mind that it couldn’t possibly adhere to those expectations, whereas by stark contrast, Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet sounded like a dreary, try-hard piece of easy-reading drivel, but instead floored me with a crunching, solid literary left hook and has become my favourite of all his works.

With all that in mind, I gained a renewed appreciation for the significance and analogical aspects of Midnight’s Children from reading Rushdie’s essays on the book in his collected volume Imagined Homelands; while I wasn’t unconscious of the parallel storytelling of Saleem and the foundation of the Indian nation while I read the novel, reading about it through Rushdie’s essays gave me a richer understanding, and it’s possible that a re-read would be on the cards – if I did that sort of thing.

29) Animal Farm – George Orwell

And now we head back to that well of books left unread for years. Animal Farm was a book that I studied briefly in year 8, and when I say ‘studied’ I mean I read it in one night to impress my year 8 English teacher. And when I say ‘impress’ it was more that she had declared the day before that some of us might be able to knock it over in one night, and by that stage in life I hadn’t yet learned that being precocious, diligent and self-aggrandising doesn’t actually make you the most popular kid in school.

So what can I say about Animal Farm that hasn’t already been written? Very little of course, except that I personally reacted to it no doubt the way everybody does. It’s a very clever analogy couched in childlike narrative overtones, as well as a frustrating, disempowering fable. Approaching it as a 13-year-old (again, as most of us probably did), it gets the world-weariness ticking over early, and it’s one of the few occasions when you start to clamour for a happy ending after all the injustice that’s been dealt.

Naturally, though, by the time you get around to watching the terrible animated movie version - where the animals triumphantly rise up ‘again’ and crush the fascist pigs with their hooves and shit – the cynicism is now deeply internalised, and the ‘happy ending’ you were ‘craving’ feels crudely tacked on, but the moral of that happy ending becomes part of a bigger cycle. Revolution follows revolution, and dictatorship will supplant dictatorship; it’s how it happens in the real world and it serves as a reminder of why Animal Farm with its annoyingly curt and ambiguous ending is a timeless parable. It has that effect.

28) A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

This is a funny one, particularly regarding its ranking. The thing is I do kind of like everything about A Clockwork Orange, but the problem is I unapologetically let my own personal feelings creep into my rankings here, and Kubrick’s 1971 film holds a far dearer place in my heart than Burgess’ book ever could. Moreover, the fact that Burgess famously derided Kubrick’s adaptation – and resented the fact that this book was regarded as the most laudable and memorable thing he achieved in his illustrious career – makes me kind of personally dislike the bloke.

He is, though, a bit of a genius – as manifested in the innovation in language and purity of political conscience that he exudes in these pages. The anti-Skinnerian agenda that Burgess considered so important is predominant here, with more emphasis on the character of Mr Alexander, the subversive counter-culture he leads and the political propaganda he writes (which explains the bizarre title), all of which is virtually expunged from the film adaptation.

What is also expunged – and rightfully so, in this case – is the final chapter of this book, the ‘epilogue’ if you will in which Alex encounters one of his droogs years later and finds that they have both been assimilated into society as regular functioning people. While I’ve read Burgess-apologists couching the final chapter in far more flattering philosophical terms, it didn’t work for me. It’s an odd, extraneous and simpering final chapter that I believe undermines the dystopian and satirical ramifications of the rest of the tale – it almost makes it a story of wayward youth which we all go through, and just puts too neat a bookmark on an otherwise nightmarish fable of dehumanising totalitarianism.

Good book, but I maintain that the film is at least as good, and with its artistic ambiguities is simply less self-righteous.

27) Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis

Okay, so now I really feel like I’m going against everything I’ve ever stood for. An Amis makes the list? And isn’t right at the bottom? Hold on, I even READ an Amis?

Yes, the sad truth is that, although Lucky Jim perpetuates the Amis mentality that being a lying, cheating, cynical shit is all you need to be the hero of a book - and that being a generally decent, hard-working human being will probably make you a boring, hypocritical pariah for all of the Amis family’s childish gripes about the world – it also happens to be one of the most light-hearted books on the whole list.

The message, if it exists, seems to be that the establishment are twats, and dishonesty and sabotage are the only ways to survive in the world. In spite of that, though, it’s all a bit of a caper in this book and the ambiguities of our protagonist are such that the vicissitudes of his fortune leading up to the climax are at least amusing. I read the final chapter as hopelessly sarcastic, which made the book as a whole rather enjoyable, and I think Mr. Amis would be pleased with that interpretation, even if it weren’t what he intended.

As far as narratives of lives spiralling out of control go though, this is my middle of the road rank. The concept is handled with far more seriousness and gravitas in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara and we will cross that particular book later in the list.

26) Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Aaha. Now then. Steady there, internet people. I’m not attacking your beliefs; please don’t hurl that flaming garbage at me. Oh, look, that’s just childish. I needed those eyeballs for seeing.

In defending the lowly position that this paragon of frighteningly obsessive fandom occupies on this list, I have two main points to make. The first is slightly vague, and it is that I’m not really the sort of person who falls in love with mythologies. I’m not a stranger to them; I’ve studied a fair amount of medieval literature and poetry, and I read a fair bit of the fantasy genre in my formative years.  It’s easy to get sucked in while reading but for me, it’s just as easy to drop as soon as I’m done. As much as I appreciate the vivid depth and clarity with which Tolkien constructs his world, and the entertaining, high-stakes narrative that he weaves into this fabric, it’s just not enough to capture my undying love and devotion.

The second point I need to make is that I, like many people (many? Maybe; some, anyway), watched the whole Peter Jackson trilogy without having touched a volume of Tolkien’s work. Indeed, I only picked up these books about three months ago for the first time, and only then because they were on this list and because I’d run out of other things that I could access to read. 

The fact is, I think Lord of the Rings suffers from the reader already being familiar with the plot. Aside from the above-mentioned vivid and deft weaving of mythology, the plot itself is very episodic, and knowing what happens next dulls the exhilaration to a large extent. It also, as I mentioned in my write-up of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, increases impatience to reach the next stage of narrative. So when you’re dealing with 1500-odd pages, that impatience is rife throughout. Even though there are more than a few changes made in adapting these to the screen, they really didn’t stand out to me as divergent enough to make the books special. I think they would, if you really get engaged with the mythology and/or characters (eg. and cases-in-point, Treebeard, Faramir), but I didn’t. The plot was what really drives these for me, and so being familiar with it just dulled the impact.

I understand though, fanboys and fangirls, that you will probably want to make no dulling of impact vis-à-vis my skull and sharp objects hurled in its direction, in retaliation for this write-up. Just relax, we’re all friends here.

25) Beloved – Toni Morrison

Dear me, a lot of beloved (no pun intended) icons of literature being splayed across this post, aren’t there?

I picked up Beloved at a second-hand book store, in the early stages of this actually being a reading challenge, because it seemed like something I wouldn’t read otherwise. It also happens to be on every single list of the “greatest books of any time period ever”, “greatest books by anyone who’s ever lived”, or “greatest things in history or ever likely to exist in the future” on the internet. So expectations were pretty high.

Half an annoyingly patchy and obfuscating book later, I was willing to give up the idiots who make lists on the internet (I mean, what sort of idiot...) for useless morons without an iota of taste. The funny thing about Beloved, though is that the final third or so of the book is absolutely outstanding. Emotionally powerful and jarring, with a profound Gothic undertone and a heartbreaking ambivalence for the flaws of humanity (I refuse to use the term ‘human condition’). But for the majority of the book, although one or two very vague hints are dropped of the ‘thing Sethe did’, it otherwise just seems like your run-of-the-mill narrative about the plight of Black people in society today – remember I mentioned there were more of these books to come.

What really could have helped my own engagement with the story (at least) is more foreshadowing of the chilling final act which is ultimately the unravelling of a mystery I really wasn’t full aware of. The gothic underpinnings of the denouement are not really present in the early stages, and the classic narrative technique of prolepsis is what would have grabbed and kept my attention from the first page. It’s possible that my attention span was just lacklustre at the time, and it’s highly likely that I will absolutely love this upon a re-reading, but first time around it was a fair amount of tedium interrupted by a huge dramatic wake-up call of a finale.

24) White Noise – Don DeLillo

This is the most recent title I read, indeed the one with which I finished the challenge. Before outlining my particular gripes (and gripes there shall be) with the book, I’ll explain why I chose to finish my reading challenge with this one. Don DeLillo is an author I consider myself fairly familiar with – at least relative to most of the other authors represented here – and as with other writers whose other works were familiar to me, it was disappointing to find a title I hadn’t read make TIME’s list, ahead of those I had read. But I felt safe in DeLillo’s hands, so decided to leave this one until last.

My gripe with this book, though, is not a gripe with the book at all but a gripe with the fact that this made the list ahead of Underworld. I know that for some reason people seem to remember White Noise as DeLillo’s big stand-out work, but aside from it being classically understated, reflective and existential as is his wont, it just didn’t have the depth of penetrating humanity or the breadth of vision vis-à-vis twentieth century America as the later, and lengthier, novel.

Perhaps I’m more drawn to New York-focussed narratives than the Midwest, or more sweeping visions than narrower, more personal ones, but in this meditative look at ageing, death, mental illness and natural disaster, I discovered little more than depression and anxious rumination. It had a lot to say about humanity and society, and yet didn’t say all that it could have. The small ‘every-town’ focus provides a little snapshot of Americana, but again, Underworld painted a wide-ranging and brilliantly colourful tableau vivant not only of America but of the whole western world during the cold war.

Having read DeLillo’s slightly amateurish, unfocussed first novel Americana, it’s obvious that White Noise marks the point where a brilliant writer finally found his voice. But while White Noise can be held up as this particular milestone, there is no demarcation in Underworld: it’s the unrivalled product of a prodigious artist who knows his craft backwards.

I apologise to White Noise (because one totally apologises to books) for using my entire write-up to sing the praises of its younger brother, but the bare truth is this: White Noise is a great book, but Underworld is twice the book it will ever be. To me, anyway.

23) Herzog – Saul Bellow

Oddly enough, following directly on from the last book read in my reading challenge, a ruminative meditation on mortality and mental deterioration by an Italian-or-Jewish demigod of American literature, we have this, the second-last book read in my reading challenge, a ruminative meditation on mortality and mental deterioration by... Yeah, you get the idea.

I’m not very familiar with Jewish literature (by ‘not very familiar’ I mean ‘completely, insultingly ignorant’), and so this was my first foray into the literary mores associated with the Jew in contemporary society. I don’t think that this opinion is anti-Semitic, although I’m wary of it sounding a bit like saying “all Asian people look alike”, to note that the tone and substance of Herzog reminded me quite a lot of a monologue from a Woody Allen film. There’s something very kindred about Bellow’s neurotic, introspective Moses Herzog as he stumbles, emotionally-stunted, from one failed relationship to the next, and say, Alvy Singer from Annie Hall.

There are of course, though, merits and idiosyncracies all of their own. The parallel tone that I noted to myself during the early stages disappeared quite quickly as Bellow’s narrative got far deeper into the business of self-analysis, and became far more of a parable of modern social isolation. While Herzog is neurotic, and comically unfortunate (like most Allen characters), his reflections on life, literature and politics are acute and finely honed, and his towering mental faculties make him seem at times more like a classic tragic hero than the everyday mensch he wants to be.

Bellow’s intellectualism is far more challenging and precarious than the light-hearted whimsy of Allen, and as such I don’t think he can be fully appreciated with just one read-through. What’s more, the story is pointedly, truncated, and the whole ‘tragic hero’ misfortune left me feeling a little emotionally hollow. Other than that it was highly engaging and enjoyable.

22) Possession – A.S. Byatt

If you are actually reading this, there’s quite a good chance that you are Catie, and therefore blindly incensed and rampaging about whatever space you are occupying, setting things on fire in extreme fury at Possession only being #22 on my list. For those of you who aren’t Catie, though (Hi, Mother), I will need to set the scene a little here.

Coupled with the fact that Possession was a recommendation from Catie (and the book she loves to toss out recommendations for) and loaned by her, it also happens to be a crystallisation in book form of everything she loves and holds dear: academia and literary scholasticism, archaeology, romantic poetry and fairytales. It would be like, for me, if Rushdie took the celebrity satire, magic realism, Gothic tropes, Loki and Georges Dumézil references from The Ground Beneath her Feet and supplanted it into a speculative dystopia. It’s so much Catie’s ideal book that as I read it, I kept thinking “Hmmm, that’s quite interesting. I bet Catie would love that bit.”

This, of course, dulled my own personal engagement with the novel, although only slightly. A lot of it comes down to personal preference.

I was really fascinated by this book and it’s really quite an astounding achievement, particularly with reference to what Bakhtin called heteroglossia, the ability of the author to adopt different types of speech for different characters or purposes. Given the span of time, narrative focus and literary forms that Byatt uses here, to be perfectly honest there were times when I really started to doubt whether I was reading fiction, or the actual documentation of a literary mystery being investigated and unravelled.

Astounding though the book is, it’s still chock full of poetry, fairytale imagery, and corpse exhumations (together at last), none of which are really the key elements that make me want to jump naked into a hot tub with a book – in the sexual -and-yet-completely-metaphorical sense.

21) Lord of the Flies – William Golding

So rounding out the non-top-20 portion of my reading challenge, we have the book that everyone in the world has read, and of which nobody needs to hear my opinion. Truth is, in spite of this book being quite a revelation to me when I read it some 8-to-15 years after the age when people usually read it (I was roughly 26/27), I’m still a bit surprised at how high it is on the list.

It’s a rough read for the most part, holding up an uncomfortably dark-side mirror to ourselves and cast in the shadow of innocent unfortunate youth. As a whole it doesn’t really leave you feeling like hugging random strangers on the street, or donating half your life savings to UNICEF.

It does, though, keep you reading in spite of the uncomfortable subject matter, and contains so much iconic imagery there’s no need to repeat here. I’m not averse to a little bit of discomfort in reading, particularly in the service of self-examination, but what sets Lord of the Flies apart from books whose uncomfortable moments and interactions just become unpleasant (and I’ve mentioned a few, above this) is its characterisation.

Not only do we relate with Ralph as the ordinary kid who’s trying to do his best in a trying situation, but there is also a very clearly identifiable picture drawn of Jack, who takes up the dictatorial position in stark opposition and organises his own society around the principle that might is right. It’s not something we want to agree with, but his motivations are organic and transparent, and that’s the power of Golding’s storytelling.

The ending, too, is something that really stuck with me, and it’s that to which I can attribute its high(ish) rank here. I love a good ambivalent ending at the best of times, particularly one that doesn’t also include ambivalence’s meddling cousin ambiguity. The ending here is clear-cut, satisfying and final, and yet leaves you so deliriously pondering what comes next. 

Anyway, so that's my second countdown. In the next exciting instalment, I will be tossing linguistic knives at many, many beloved writers and works. You won't want to miss it.