Reading Challenge 2013 Part 3: 30-21

And into the top 30 we go (as if that's a thing)...

30) The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron

One of the things I’ve tended to do with this reading challenge, particularly this year, is go into these books with a complete blank slate. With some books that’s obviously impossible since I’ve seen the films, and with most of them it was a really good way to go in (there’s a book coming up later in this post that was totally ruined for me, we’ll get to that).

With The Confessions of Nat Turner, though, I feel like maybe some prior knowledge going in would have been a good thing, because it’s a book with quite troubling subject matter, dealt with fairly unflinchingly and with a certain amount of bloodthirstiness.

Of course, not knowing going in can be extremely effective, if the book is written in a way to shock and provoke (as other books later to come most definitely are). But there’s something clinical and detached, written as it is in the form of a ‘confession’ or at least a ‘memoir’ of someone who’s already committed atrocious deeds, and wants to set the record straight.

The deeds in question here involve the organised uprising by a group of black slaves in the deep south and the systematic slaughter of white families – women, children, just indiscriminate murder. The thing that kept it a little hollow for me was that there’s this whole mystery all the way through surrounding the fact that Nat himself, although the brains and driving force behind the uprising, only confessed to one actual murder, and the revelation of why ‘only one’ doesn’t really also cover why ‘that one in particular’, and I had really hoped for more closure on that subject.

It’s undoubtedly a powerful book nonetheless, but I feel in this case had I gone in with some prior knowledge I may have appreciated Styron’s writing a bit more rather than being so swept up with the ambivalent storyline which is not resolved to my great satisfaction.

29) Under the Net – Iris Murdoch

So… what’s that now, scorekeeper? Yep, it’s up to four on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally. Although I’m a little more hesitant to apply that label to this book – primarily because it doesn’t really apply, but also because I tended to object to so many of these type of books because they took themselves so damn seriously.

Not so with Murdoch’s debut novel, which suffers from the directionless of other works in this genre I made up, but overall is an amusingly chaotic, even anarchic, romp through London, over a couple of days’ shenanigoats.

The fact is that nobody is trying to ‘find themselves’ here, although perhaps there are certain revelations brought about through the aimless wandering. This cuts both ways, because I questioned throughout my reading, and since my reading, what profound impact such a light and ridiculous story had on the literary world that would merit its spot on TIME’s list.

While questioning that is a mutually exclusive issue with ‘did I enjoy it?’, the two things can still go hand in hand, because while I did enjoy this – and with no qualifications, either, I just enjoyed it – I couldn’t help but find it just a bit silly, undisciplined at times and, ultimately, aimless. The harsh truth is if I’d been reading this because a friend told me it was ‘rollicking good fun, old sport”, firstly I’d ask why I was suddenly friends with a British public school student from the 20s, and secondly I’d probably put in far higher on the ‘rollicking good fun, old sport’ pedestal than I do on the ‘greatest 100 novels since 1925’ pedestal.

28) Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

This is a difficult one to write about, to be honest. Primarily because it was one of the first (if not the first) book I read this year, and in all honesty nothing overly dramatic or shocking happens, nothing which would make it really glare out in your memory.

The other difficulty is that I have some mixed feelings about a book of this nature making it onto the top 100 books published in English. There’s just something very post-colonial about an African writer writing about Africa, but in English. Don’t get me wrong, Achebe spins a very good yarn and, as I sit in a computer chair in my suburban home in twenty-first century Sydney, gives an interesting portrayal of life in an African village, particularly one faced with the threat of colonialism and modernisation.

But I can’t help being left, after reading it, feeling that if this is the best book written in English about the African ‘experience’ then surely we must just be missing a shitload of books just as good if not better written in Swahili? It’s not fair or logical in any way, I know, to judge this book by its relative prominence among other hypothetical books that may or may not exist and that I didn't bother finding out if they did or did not exist, but ultimately I can’t help but think thoughts like that, and they leave me feeling a little cold.

Whatever this book may not be, it is a solidly written fable that gives English readers an interesting perspective on the merits of globalisation, one that I enjoyed well enough. But I remain unconvinced about its inherent greatness.

27) Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

So here we have another of these ‘film adaptations I actually haven’t seen yet’ novels, because in spite of my love for Sam Mendes (and Kate Winslet, of course) I haven’t yet subjected myself to this particular adaptation. In fact, I considered borrowing this book during last year’s challenge, but decided against it on account of my being unsure how my delicate frame of mind at the time would handle it.

As it turns out, my fears were completely ungrounded. This riotous, rip-roaring rib-tickler of a romp…why does every clichéd word about entertaining capers start with ‘r’… uhhh yes, it’s depressing. It’s a bored, yet plaintive, kind of depressing, that laments the mid-life crisis even as it lampoons it.

There’s a lot in this book that obviously hits close to home for me, as I sit in my lounge chair in the suburbs while my wife dreams of emigrating overseas for a while, and yet it finds itself rather in the middle of my list by the rather odd virtue of its not being quite as soul-wrenching as I’d anticipated.

While there is much to this book in terms of exploring themes of depression and suburban restlessness, I think the arc of the narrative, in terms of building up tension to the point of implosion, driving towards that “oh my God” reveal is such that it can only be read as intentionally soul-destroying.

And yet I could find myself still at arm’s length from the pathos, and appreciated its writing more than I was haunted by its drama. The obvious comparison with last year’s list is Updike’s Rabbit, Run, a book which is still yet to defog my mind, but its big climax – and its aftermath - was far more soul-crushing than this. I don’t know, maybe I just have no soul left to destroy.

26) The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

So here we are, and it’s number 2 on the ‘I saw the film adaptation first’ scoreboard, slowly catching up on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’. Although now I’m at it, chalk up one, with this, on the ‘mix of old and young people wandering around desperately trying to find a job/money/dignity’ scoreboard.

I’m looking at the DVD case of the film adaptation as I write this (yes I can type without looking at the keyboard, how unoewaaucw!) and, in spite of the fact that I love everything Henry Fonda ever made (except Peter and Jane), I can’t admit to being a huge fan of the movie.

I think that did hinder my subsequent enjoyment of this book to some extent, since not only was I aware of plot points coming up, but those same plot points didn’t really do much for me the first time around.

Having said that, the book does help you appreciate certain things a lot better than the film adaptation: for instance, as with A Clockwork Orange, what the sweet fuck does the title mean? But together with that, Steinbeck’s commentary on the plight of the poor and the angry, subversive mood, is far more evocative - to me, at least - than any of the talky action.

I still didn’t adore it, but I did get significantly more out of this than the film.

25) A Passage to India – E M Forster

So here’s a protip to anyone who’s ever thought about writing the blurb of a book, a film, or basically anything whose suspense and ultimate impact might be based on an episodic and temporal unravelling of facts: don’t ruin the entire fucking plot in your blurb. It seems like a fairly simple premise, but whoever wrote the blurb for the Popular Penguins edition (yes, I’m not above naming and shaming) of A Passage to India or, while we’re on the topic, the blurb for the Paramount Collection DVD edition of Sunset Boulevard (incidentally, I’m actually still confused as to why the revelation that – SUNSET BOULEVARD SPOILER ALERT - Norma’s butler is her first husband is actually such a dramatic moment, since the blurb had ruined it for me in such a matter-of-fact way) seem to have aced the class in blurb writing at the University of Utter Stupidity.

So, rant aside (I’m still mouth-foamingly furious, though), A Passage to India was a very cynical read, but a cynical read in a lot of good ways, because it’s largely a critical indictment of the British settlement in India, and there are only a smattering of things about which I would happily be more cynical.

It is, however, really very cynical, beginning as it does in a light-hearted and well-mannered mood of British civility and then turning on a head (or does it? No spoilers here, of course) to a sense of howling injustice (or does it?), and ending with a dreadfully hopeless sense of lack of achievement (or does it?).

I’ve never really engaged with any of Forster’s writing, and this was actually no exception, although the story and corollary social critique of A Passage to India endeared and ameliorated it greatly in my eyes. It could even have been higher on my list, if huge amounts of the plot weren’t prematurely jizzed down my throat by the worst blurb writer since Henry “he bakes them into a pie!” Carey. Wow, what an arch joke to finish on. Good luck researching/decoding that.

24) The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Well I think this is actually the last one, but notch up number 5 on that by-now infamous scoreboard that we’ve all grown to loath. Being the last one of course makes this the highest-ranked of the lot, and it’s funny that it is.

Firstly, what this lacks that all the other YPWAATTFT stories has is a sense of location. On The Road takes us back and forth across America, while The Sun Also Rises has its Spanish trattorias and bullfighting arenas. I can’t remember where The Moviegoer is set, but wherever it is it’s fairly non-descript and unmemorable.

And I can’t help but feel that that’s not a bad thing, because it means the emphasis is instead on the people, and their sense of directionless wandering through life is explored more prosaically than incidentally. Having said that, I can’t remember that much about the characters either, but there was an interestingly ambiguous and somewhat cagey relational byplay amongst them. It dealt very subtly, but deftly, with depression and mental illness, as well as touching upon that sense of restlessness that everyone else tried to capture in these meandering narratives, but somehow failed to evoke for me.

The other odd thing is that this book didn’t do a great deal to me while I was reading it, but when I’d finished and I looked back on it, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d enjoyed it. And unlike all the other YPWAATTFT stories it made me think, and my thoughts didn’t inevitably lead to “Eh…”

23) Dog Soldiers – Robert Stone

I’m not sure what genre you would fit Dog Soldiers into, and yet it feels more than any other on this list like genre fiction.

I guess ultimately it’s a kind of post-war psychodrama, but it has most of the hallmarks of a Coen brothers thriller – a hapless hero in way over his head, scheming and plotting around a big ‘score’, and the naïve simple folk who get caught up in the maelstrom. Oh and (spoiler alert) practically everyone in the book dies.

But more than just the fitting it into ‘types’ of stories, what makes me think of this as very genre fiction-y is the fact that it’s a real page-turner: not because it ends each page with “And then something terrible happened! Turn the page to find out what it was…” but because the story and its cast of characters are so vividly written. However sophisticated a writer Robert Stone is – I haven’t read any of his other stuff but there’s a pulp fiction sense to his bibliography – he certainly has a very clear vision of what he’s trying to convey, so he constructs the post-Vietnam time and place and sense of corruption very nicely.

In the end though, I can only get so much out of a book like this, so it was an enjoyable read while it lasted.

22) The Recognitions – William Gaddis

This book was a little bit of a disappointment to me, to be honest. For much of this year I’d been avoiding reading or buying it, knowing that as a big fat bastard of a post-modern book from one of the most notoriously difficult writers of the twentieth century, that it would be a big bang finish if I saved it until last. As it happened, the copy of this that I ordered arrived when I accidentally finished my previous book on the train into work, so I started it on the way home and hence didn’t save it to last.

It most certainly is a difficult read, but not as difficult as I’d thought. It has a great number of interesting and thought-provoking things to say about what is art, the value we place on provenance and authenticity, and how seductive imitations can be. But beyond having some interesting thoughts on this occasionally, it wasn’t really worked into any particularly grand, sweeping story, which it certainly had the scope to do.

In fact, I think its greatest shortcoming is that it was actually too easy a read. Ultimately it felt like just an extremely long story, with lots of diverse characters who, in post-modern fashion, were different and yet all the same. The dialogue was witty, the New York social critique mostly biting, the parody of the art world bemusing.

There were also a number of interesting questions that it left me with, which I won't go into here, but that make it sort of ripe for a reread sometime, to resolve them.

But it nevertheless felt surprisingly a bit shallow: it didn’t have Infinite Jest’s or Gravity’s Rainbow’s epic vision of life’s chaotic mystery that makes you ponder humanity even as you just read the story. Artistic critique with a few big highlights, yes, but it just left my expectations disappointed.

21) The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen

Just outside the top 20, and a book that could very easily have cracked it. This book could almost be thought of as Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret for grown-ups, without all the chatter about periods and basically a completely different book in every way. Except that it deals with a young girl, unsure of her place in the world, coming to terms with love and life. Mostly love, in this case, or more importantly, the fact that love is a disease worse and more painful than syphilis.

It’s kind of funny in a sense, because it feels like a heartfelt, bittersweet but tender story, and yet there feels to be infinitely more cynicism in here than in your average David Lynch film. It was actually quite an angry, embittered read in some ways, but told in a delicate and somewhat poetic way.

I guess what made me angry about the book was how deftly it manages to fuse the concepts of ‘simplicity’ and ‘credulous naïveté’, so that the innocent and trusting Portia is so frequently made to drink long and hard from the bitter cup of betrayal, thinking she’s instead going to be imbibing some of that sweet, sweet love juice.

Ummm…

So anyway, I think Death of the Heart drops out of my top 20 of this year purely because it felt quite mean-spirited, and I felt there could have been more of a sense of redemption at the end of it, rather than making one feel quite so ill-at-ease with humanity. There is a book still to come that I feel deals with many of the same themes, yet manages to redeem one’s world view without being overly saccharine, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think Death of the Heart is very good, but weirdly unsatisfying.

So I'll leave you now until the next thrilling instalment of this countdown, in which we careen into the exciting world of my top 20 books of this year's challenge.