Reading Challenge Episode 4: 20-11

So after another long hiatus, I've finally managed to put together another ten rants, this time largely loving and offering large cuddles to the authors they represent. There's not much more I can say by way of introduction, so here in no particular order except for numerical, is the first half of my top 20:

20) American Pastoral – Philip Roth

This was the first book I read in this challenge in the sense that it was the first one I read after I had determined this as my challenge. I knew very little about Philip Roth, except that he was always ‘in the way’ back in the day when I did nothing but browse for Rushdie in book shops. And well, here he is, 10 ahead of Rushdie on my list.

This is quite a difficult book in many ways: it starts off with a whole lot of reflective postulating on our unnamed narrator’s home town and gradually, very gradually, turns it into the story of one man from his high school: the sports captain-turned-captain of industry with everything going for him. It takes a long time to work around for this, as Roth introduces us bit by bit to his themes and his philosophy about the American dream.

It quite seamlessly transitions from reflections on the aura surrounding this high school sports god and local small-town hero to being a retelling of his life; in particular the events leading up to and following a terrorist attack that somehow involved his wayward daughter.

What the ironically-titled American Pastoral gives us is a violent clash of ideologies, where the aspirational American model, the hard-working captain of industry with his beauty-queen wife and loving family in the suburbs comes face to face with the modern Vietnam-war era of counter-culture and unrest. It’s a deeply troubling book, which raises a lot of bleak, cynical questions about the world entering the end of the twentieth century.

As someone who finds himself morphing more and more into that quiet, personally conservative family man from the suburbs, it’s also deeply affecting, and in spite of its – at times – prolix narrative, it’s a masterful piece of writing.

19) Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

Well I’m glad to say that this is the second-last of the ‘books I read ages and ages ago’ on this list, so essentially this is my second-favourite from the heady bygone era before I knew who Bakhtin was and when the idea of finishing a reading challenge like this would take far too much time away from playing Captain Comic 2 and jerking off to Cosmopolitan magazines.

Long-winded introductory paragraph over, I do love this book, but at the same time I’m so wary of how much it’s burrowed its way into the zeitgeist of our time, so there’s nothing particularly new or exciting that I have to say about it.

Suffice to summarise briefly: I love dystopias in literature, and this is without a doubt one of the sterling examples of the genre (one might say, the ‘Big Brother’ of them all, hurrh hurrh hurrh). Orwell’s nightmarish vision has maybe lost a little of its original sting but the brilliance of the book lies in the timeless and almost universal accessibility of its unsettling elements: the feeling of being watched, together with the fear of being muzzled and unable to express what you want to say. Mind control through behaviour control.

I’ve studied this book, too, three different times – in high school and in two different uni courses – and it’s true to say that I receive a renewed appreciation for it each time.

18) The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

Ah! Everybody breathes a sigh of relief. Finally, after spattering his previous, more bile-filled posts with side-swipes about how every author should write more like Graham Greene, here is Graham Greene finally making an appearance. And the funny thing is, this isn’t my favourite Graham Greene novel. And before you say anything, yes, I am trying to fool Google into ranking my blog higher on searches for Graham Greene, by trying to insert the phrase Graham Green as often as possible into a paraGraham Greenegraph.

Now I don’t actually know a lot about Graham Greene (Graham Greene!), or his background, but it’s fairly obvious from perusing just a couple of his volumes that one of his key meditations in life was on the struggle with faith, and Catholicism in particular. The Power and the Glory is the book that grapples with this dilemma in its most explicit terms.

It tells the story of a Mexican state where Catholicism is outlawed, and the undercover priest who is trying to evade the law, while at the same time evade his past catching up with him. The fascinating thing about the book is the way it weaves what is quite a rich and complex tale together with an intricate meditation on faith. As our priest (who I think is unnamed throughout, I can’t remember) travels from town to town, sheltered by members of the outlawed faith, he begins to grow more and more world-weary, cynical and wavering in his devotion to God.

While Greene’s final message is, albeit ambiguously, one of hope in the steadfastness of the Catholic faith – not a message I believe in, obviously – it makes for a very poignant and bittersweet conclusion. It’s a book that would definitely improve with a re-reading, too, as there’s a lot to take in on the first go.

17) Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

So we move from an English author addressing people grappling with the Catholic faith in the early twentieth century to… errr… yeah, more of the same. Where The Power and the Glory is not particularly English in its focus, Brideshead Revisited strikes me, quite frankly, as the most English book I’ve ever read. It has the quintessence of the mother country bursting from every page, set largely as it is around Oxford, London and various grand architectural marvels of the English countryside during the glory years before WWI.

Characters like Lord and Lady Marchmain, our narrator Charles’ cousin Jasper or the irritatingly stuffy and upright Brideshead himself (played marvellously in the TV adaptation by the great Simon Jones) are all so very vivid, and really get to the heart of the nostalgia that Waugh is evoking throughout the novel.

I used to think that my great hero Stephen Fry’s persona and comportment were basically just taken from Oscar Wilde (with a bit of Wodehouse thrown in) but while reading this it struck me that there is so much more Evelyn Waugh in him. In fact, there’s a quote often attributed to Fry about being able to throw off physical bullies by threatening to get an erection which is basically just a paraphrase of one of the characters in Brideshead.

However, more than just a lush evocation of Englishness and nostalgia, what Brideshead Revisited  is more trenchantly and affectingly is a heartbreaking love story, and a loss of innocence story, from the idylls of early adulthood into the degeneration of middle age which is mirrored by characters and nation alike.

It also presents us with two very thought-provoking manifestations of people wrestling with Catholicism: the younger Flyte sibling of the Brideshead clan, Sebastian, who reacts with accelerating turmoil to his family’s piety and his sister Julia, who so badly wants to rebel and renounce her faith but can’t quite escape her ingrained Catholic guilt. It’s emotionally powerful, affecting, and all captured with a beautifully austere and evocative narrative.

16) The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

Anyone who knew that there was a Margaret Atwood book on TIME’s list would have to know this one was coming somewhere in the top 20. It’s actually surprisingly low, since I love pretty much everything she writes.

So while this book is a brilliant, deeply probing book about femininity, intellectualism, societal and familial expectations – Atwood explores all of these things with her characteristic aplomb – it falls victim to both the disappointment of expectations that befell Midnight’s Children and the unfavourable comparison to its sibling book that White Noise suffered.

The Blind Assassin certainly didn’t disappoint me on any particular level, but there was a great sense when I picked it up that since this made the list and The Handmaid’s Tale (in my view a landmark book and a pure masterpiece) didn’t, this one had to be something mind-blowingly brilliant.

I would have a hard time denying this book’s brilliance, but it didn’t go so far as to blow my mind. Of course I’m more inclined towards Atwood’s dystopian visions like Oryx and Crake and the afore-mentioned Handmaid’s Tale, and this falls far more in the domestic, socially embedded satirical milieu that she seems to vacillate towards. More than that, though, it suffered a little from seeming more personal, so I was more inclined simply to despise the character of Richard, and Iris’ father for their phallocentric tendencies than I was to ponder on the inherent injustices as a mirror to society as a whole.

It’s a stylistic thing, really, and while it’s a gripping, thought-provoking memoir, it still has that slight arms-length remove from my own personal sphere that prevents me from truly being immersed. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as a phallocentric reader myself but sometimes even the best books about the female experience can’t quite leap that hurdle for me. And I will offer in defence two books that rank higher on this list and are still to come.

15) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

No, this isn’t one of those books I’m offering in defence, although thankfully it is another female writer (they are outnumbered, let me be upfront about that). This book was, probably contrary to the experience of most, not something I read a long time ago during my formative years but rather one of the later books I read as part of this challenge. In the same ilk as The Great Gatsby, it fell into ‘books I may as well read since I own them’ but, since I had seen the film adaptation already, I was reluctant.

Ill-founded indeed was that reluctance, as this book is not only a fantastic read, but with such a radically different focus from the film, coming to the book second actually adds to the enjoyment of the experience - or at least it did for me.

In adapting to film of course, they condensed a lot of the more peripheral parts of the story, so the intrigue around Boo Radley and the piece-by-piece attainment of a more worldly understanding that affects Scout throughout the book (which is far more Scout-centric than the film, too) are lessened and Atticus is cast as a more classically heroic figure, rather than the flawed yet laudable curmudgeon he is here.

What surprised me most about the experience of reading this, though, was the fact that even having seen the film and being well aware of where the story was going, I actually found reading this totally absorbing and suspenseful – more suspenseful even than the film. Again it comes down to Lee’s brilliant framing of the book around Scout’s perspective, and the dramatic irony evoked as she looks in her child-like way at the grave and epidemic injustice running through her part of the world.

Having said all that, I can’t deny I was infuriated that the book gave me no useful tips on killing mockingbirds. I vow never to read a book again.

14) Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut

Sorry to disappoint you, Internet, but I won’t be giving you more bait for your Sam murderhook with this one.

This book was on my to-read list for an obscenely long time, being ranked as it is number 1 on every single book list ever made on the Internet, but for some reason every time I encountered it in a book shop, or even in a library, the blurb just didn't sell itself very well. I finally took the time to read it as part of this challenge, because it seemed like a prerequisite for the bare minimum qualification to do a write-up like this.

The funny thing was, as much as I resisted it due to its universally beloved nature (I apparently take after my Father in assuming that anything that everyone loves must be rubbish), I just couldn't hate it. In fact, Reader, I loved it, which after the fact should have been obvious, since I even enjoyed Vonnegut’s universally loathed novel Player Piano.

Slaughterhouse 5 is another of those novels that takes a childlike, playful narrative and uses it to cut to the core of what is quite painful subject matter: war; destruction; death. Our protagonist Billy Pilgrim is not quite all there in the head, and jolts jarringly between different eras of time and space, from his youth in war-stricken Germany to his successful old age as a family man, to his brief sojourn on an extra-terrestrial world after being abducted by aliens.

I’m told that the internet seems to think all of the things told about actually happened, but I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s all part of his traumatic hallucination, and this reading to me gives a far more deeply affecting pathos. It is, though, testament to the book’s quality and Vonnegut’s skill as a writer that the ambiguity exists, and it is certainly a richer book for it.

13) The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

So, in defence of my not hating all books on female interiority, I present exhibit A.

This could be called, in some ways, the book that launched my reading challenge, as it was while reading this book that I came across TIME’s list, and due to the coincidental reading of books from the list I’d lately been doing, decided to adopt the challenge.

Lessing’s masterpiece is similar in many ways to Saul Bellow’s Herzog which I wrote about above: both deal with people of an academic sensibility approaching the autumn years of life and trying to stave off losing their mind by partaking in writing. Where Moses Herzog  wrote letters which he never sent to dead philosophers, academics and public figures, Lessing’s protagonist Anna Wulf writes in her four (five) different-coloured notebooks, each one representing a different aspect of her life.

What The Golden Notebook also manages to achieve is an amazing kind of distillation of male-female interaction, with seemingly every possible relationship played out somehow in Anna’s parade of male companions. Each one offers her something different, and she in turn reacts differently and offers them something different herself. All of these relationships are set against the yardstick of Anna’s best friend’s ex-husband, the prototypical male Richard (apparently Richard is a good name for misogynistic husbands): successful, ambitious, ego-driven and conservative.

 Lessing also finds time in all of this though to draw an anti-war narrative, a heartbreaking mother-son relationship and a highly informative and absorbing feminist treatise. I found the book quite enlightening, but it also just kept me going back by having such a captivating story, even while the structure remained so fractured.

12) Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin

This book is a slight aberration on this list, basically because it doesn’t fall within any of my particular niches. It’s another book that falls within that examination of black people in society today, coupled with an emphatic religious overtone; but the fact is it’s just a magnificent read.

Semi-autobiographical, it tells the story of John – a stand-in for the author himself – who is raised by his mother and his preacher step-father Gabriel, a strict but hypocritical disciplinarian who exacts severe retribution for the transgressions he sees everywhere. The set-up in itself sounds a little familiar, but where Baldwin takes the book is what sets it well apart.

The odd structure of the book is split into two parts: the first seems to be an ordinary narrative of suburban family life and it seems to be heading in that direction, but the second part, ‘Prayers of the Saints’ takes place all in one evening session of their Pentecostal church as members of the church enter and sit down to meditate on their own private prayers. Baldwin takes us inside each of their heads, exploring their psyches, their past sins and through them their present shortcomings and potential futures.

In the midst of this, there is a catalytic religious event, which leads every person present into a sort of revelation of the about-turn that fate seems to have taken, and the different lives that will be led from then on. I’m being vague for no reason since it wouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to explain what happens, but at the same time, to put in words what happens sort of diminishes the power of Baldwin’s writing.

It’s not a book about things that happen but about the way people interact with themselves and with God, and it’s absolutely mesmerising throughout.

11) The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

Again, anybody knowing that there was Pynchon on TIME’s list would know it would feature somewhere near the top.

The Crying of Lot 49 I have affectionately referred to as Pynchon-lite: it’s got all the Pynchon trademarks of a central mystery, an eclectic cavalcade of bizarre characters, and an overriding narrative sense that the reader is purely there to enjoy the ride, but all in a convenient, easy-to-digest 100 pages.

This is not to suggest that Crying is easy to read. It’s classic post-modernist stuff, and if you think you’re going to get a tidy story with all the ends neatly tied up at the end, you’re mistaken. But  it’s still quite impressive how Pynchon manages to condense all the craziness that must go on in his brain into such a short package, and still wring a lot of fascinating quirky fun out of it as well.

The one drawback, which lets this drop happily outside the top 10, is that same condensed form; with all the strange cavernous depths and highs that Pynchon drags us through, after 100 pages I just want more.

And if you, too, voluptuous reader, want more, then you're in luck, since there is obviously still one more blog post to go in my reading challenge wrap-up. Hopefully I won't be too busy stuffing my face with Turducken and drinking myself into the silly season this week to complete my write-up and finally get down to the business of my top 10. Since I hate so many great writers and beloved novels, it must surely be a subject of great fascination to discover the 10 books I actually loved the most from this challenge.