Books of 2014 Part 2: 40-31

*Insert preamble here*

40) Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

#AustralianBooks

So one of my (very) unofficial challenges this year was to read a bit more Australian literature, more specifically books from the Aussie canon – I’m not going to read books just because they’re Australian, but if they’re highly influential and well-regarded then fair enough. I say “(very) unofficial” because it was never laid down as any sort of challenge, but rather in browsing my local library shelves I was drawn to quite a few of these as ‘books I should probably read’.

So Cloudstreet, Tim Winton’s seminal 1991 look at suburban life in mid-century Australia, has been something that people have nagged me with for years, most notably my mother, who seems to consider it un-Australian not to have read and loved this. Well, label me un-Australian because I have to admit I didn’t love this.

Winton certainly has a vivid imagination for characters and personalities, and his depiction of the vicissitudes of fortune that befall the Lamb and Pickles families are drawn out with a constant eye on their own foibles and quirks. It’s basically a family saga, set against the backdrop of the creation of a modern country and modern national identity. Yes, it all sounds loftily ambitious, and in truth I think it largely achieves its ambitions.

Nonetheless, I can’t say I loved it. It just seemed overly long, and plodding at times, and very very episodic. It seemed as well almost too convenient that Winton had this huge cast of dysfunctional characters to pull from, so the ‘story’ –as much as a haphazard narrative like this can claim – can be drawn out without a visible endpoint. In short I think I just tired very early of what is otherwise a finely-crafted and valuable novel.

39) Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

#BookshelfCatchUp

Another of my ‘catching up on books from my bookshelf’ pick, we’ve had this book since I bought it for Bec for our first (paper) anniversary, and she’s since read it and I haven’t. Obviously, since you’re reading this, you’ve probably read my blog before (Hi, Mother!) so you’re aware that I loved Franzen’s first book, The Corrections, and had it in my top 5 two years ago.

I should clarify that I actually didn’t love The Corrections as much, or embrace it as fully, as most people did. So when it came to Freedom, which is significantly more fragmented and impersonal, it was no surprise when it failed to deliver the same delight.

I don’t want to turn this writeup into a spreadsheet outlining the ways in which The Corrections is superior (although that would be fun for all concerned), but in short Freedom seems to me to have too many principal characters, too much self-importance, not enough coherence to fully flesh out what its ultimate themes and purpose are.

But more basically than even that, it just didn’t have enough laughs. Franzen retains his light-humoured and reflective style here but the book just feels very serious and, in making the obvious - and already even in this review too numerous - comparison to his earlier work, just lacks that savage irony that lampoons Midwest America. It’s perhaps savage at times, but there’s not enough irony. Won’t somebody please think about the irony?

38) Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

This one had been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. This, or The Virgin Suicides, I really could have handled either to expose myself to Eugenides (beyond seeing the film adaptation of the latter), but this one just happened to be on the library shelf recently while I was browsing.

It’s a brave and inventive narrative, certainly – a bildungsroman about a child born with hybrid male/female genitalia, raised as a girl and then self-identified as male in adulthood. While I call it a bildungsroman, it isn’t entirely that, either, because Eugenides over-stretches in some ways to make this both that and a family saga at the same time.

While there’s a palpable entertainment throughout all of his imaginative story-weaving, I felt like starting the narrative off when the protagonist’s grandparents were growing up in Greece – and then following them step by step through courtship, emigration to America, child-rearing, and the parents’ generation, riots in Detroit, and so on – somewhat unnecessary.

He attempts to draw a causal link, namely that a particular quirk of his grandparents’ courtship sparked off a sequence of events that led to his biological abnormality, and yet there are clearly superfluous details. The fact that his Grandmother got a job teaching the Black Panthers how to rear silkworms, for example, actually has nothing to do with his birth or anatomy. That’s not to say it’s uninteresting, but I just found the book weirdly segmented, and could almost have been told in two separate volumes – here is the story of Cal(liope) and his identity crisis, and here is a separate story, of Cal’s parents and grandparents.

I enjoyed the book well enough, but it just seemed a really glaring misstep (if not quite error) of judgement.

37) The Gathering – Anne Enright

#BookerPrizeWinners

Funny story: when this book was awarded the Booker in 2007, I immediately went out and bought myself Enright’s earlier novel The Hat My Father Wore. Not so much ‘immediately’ as it was in a second-hand book sale and due to the hype surrounding The Gathering, I picked it up – and then never bothered picking up the actual book that had piqued my interest until this year and my Booker Prize semi-challenge.

So one could describe this book as like a ‘book adaptation of the Thomas Vinterberg film Festen’, if one were a complete twat, but one’s twattishness aside, one could notice the very loosely similar premises: namely that they both tell the story of a dysfunctional family reunion, and the gradual unravelling of truths about the damage wreaked by traumatic childhood events.

That comparison mostly aside, Enright’s family is dysfunctional but lacks the venomous sting of Vinterberg’s, and are a diverse bunch of flawed, but ultimately rational and even endearing creatures.

The reason I keep returning to this comparison is, I guess, to illustrate my nonchalant feelings towards this book. There’s a bittersweet, nostalgic tone to Enright’s prose, but having seen Festen only a couple of years before this (and I should add into the mix last year’s screen adaptation of August, Osage County) , I couldn’t help but want for more acrimony and melodrama. There almost seems an elliptical quality to The Gathering, which has hints of trauma, evidence of trauma, but no real results or incidence of trauma.

It’s not to say that I need something rammed down my throat (we’ll get to ramming things down my throat later (not literally, I mean. Honestly, you people)), but it just felt to me more subtle, more lightly painted than it needed to be.

36) The Sunset Limited – Cormac McCarthy

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

One of the last books I read this year, and a funny one to write up or rank, simply because it’s not a novel at all but a play. I didn’t fully grasp this concept when I got it off the shelf, reading that the cover calls it “A Novel in Dramatic Form”, a nomenclature which I would call “A Load of Complete Wank”. At the same time I was willing to believe that perhaps it took the story structure of a novel and transposed it stylistically into drama, but no, it’s a conversation between two characters. Other things that call themselves “plays” rather more aptly than “Novels in Dramatic Form” have scope and vision far more novelistic than this – Hamlet, or Mother Courage for two examples.

That pure marketing rant aside, this was nevertheless a very stimulating –and easy – read. The two interlocutors here are known simply as “Black” and “White”, referring to their respective races but also cheekily alluding to the conversation that they have about whether the world can be seen in such terms of black and... well, you get the idea, I don’t need to finish that sentence so I’ll just self-consciously write an unfeasibly large number of words instead of just writing the one word that would have logically concluded the sentence.

After a chance encounter at a train station where White intended to throw himself in front of a train, Black takes him back to his apartment in a poor black neighbourhood to discuss the meaning and sanctity of life. It’s as suitably deep and contemplative as the themes would suggest, but there is also an amusing nonchalance about the macabre throughout. But then what else should you expect from McCarthy?

There is one line that I think exemplifies what I would call “McCarthyism” or perhaps “Literary McCarthyism” to distinguish it from communist witch-hunts, and why this book feels like McCarthy:

Black: ...not too long ago I had a friend to get run down by a taxicab.

White: Was he killed?

Black: I hope so. We buried him.

Although that one sticks out in my memory, there are many more such laconic moments throughout that keep you well engaged as a reader. It’s these moments, perhaps, that make it just that bit more engaging to read than your average bit of writing designed to be performed on stage.

35) Last Orders – Graham Swift

#BookerPrizeWinners

So I remember when Fred Schepisi’s film adaptation of this book came out, for some reason I was really excited about seeing it (Well, the ‘some reason(s)’ were Michael Caine and Ray Winstone). Then I never saw it. But now I’ve read the book, and can safely say the casting in this film I haven’t seen doesn’t sound terrible (although not quite as perfect as another bit of casting that I haven’t seen in action and to which we will return later).

A melancholic tale of four friends travelling across England in a car to scatter their recently-departed friend’s ashes, Last Orders is told in back-and-forth between the past and the present as it tells the history of the men’s friendship, the way their small businesses scratched each other’s backs or the people themselves would occasionally take out a knife and stick it in.

A comparison must be drawn between this and Kingsley Amis’ 1986 Booker Winner, The Old Devils, but I can clear that comparison in one fell swoop: this shits on Amis. It shits on Amis not only because I refuse to surrender my bitterness that The Old Devils beat out The Handmaid’s Tale - in my opinion indisputably one of the greatest books written in the second half of the twentieth century - but because there is significantly more emotional punch to this story. Both tell tales of friendship and betrayal among common English folk who like to share a pint and a yarn, and both paint the portraits of ambivalent characters, flawed but ultimately sympathetic.

However, the men of Last Orders are all far more sympathetic, and without meaning to be tautological, pathetic as well in the sense of ‘evoking pathos’. They’re tragic figures, well drawn and mercilessly honest.

The perspective of the story, and the fact that the narrative, late in the book, is co-opted by the widow of the dead man, seemed a bit confused though. In this case it felt like Swift decided late in the piece to put the widow's viewpoint forward, and had no other way of doing it than suddenly introducing this concept. It felt like him writing himself out of a hole.

That aside though, it was an enjoyable bittersweet narrative.

34) The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

#BookerPrizeWinners

I first got interested in Julian Barnes after hearing him read out a short story on TIME Magazine’s Fiction podcast, because his voice is just wonderfully, languidly British. This, of course, doesn’t necessarily translate to writing ability though, so frankly it was probably three years between hearing that voice and picking up this, my first of his books.

The Sense of an Ending is a fairly easy read, and it was one of the first Booker Prize winners I got through this year. It’s short, it follows one character through one story, but nevertheless draws this story, of delving into an incident into his past and trying to uncover the meaning and secret behind it, into a complex web that is surprisingly suspenseful.

Or at least, for part of the time. The real weakness of this story is that it gets itself stuck irrevocably in the doldrums of its own heavy-handedness. It could end about a dozen times as our narrator continues to harass the person at the centre of his past misdemeanour and repeatedly gets told “You just don’t understand”. Cue next time he tries to harass her and tries to uncover a deeper truth, and again is told “You just don’t understand”. This just keeps recurring until he finally, and completely, ‘understands’ and uncovers the actual truth of his actions.

But by this stage my interest had started to flag, so what is supposed to be a crushing, brutally devastating finale just feels like bludgeoning the face of an already dead body. It’s actually a really well-written, and like I said, suspenseful story, but an inch more succinctness and a yard of subtlety would have driven its point home far more effectively than, it turns out, is repeatedly driving its point home again and again and again. And again.

33) The Sea – John Banville

#BookerPrizeWinners

Another of the Booker Prize Winners, and not to be – although easily – confused with Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, which I also read this year. The thing that actually struck me first was that the two very similarly-named books also have a very similar focus/concern. Both deal with aged artistic types (art historian here, theatre director there) looking back over their life and past loves.

I found The Sea quite affectingly written, and found its slightly dreamy tone of reminiscence both moving and slightly haunting. But the really funny thing is, apart from my own enjoyment of the book, I actually can’t remember anything else about it, or what it was about.

Usually that would count as a huge strike against it, and when I do my bottom 14 write-up we will get to books that just fall through the cracks from lack of memorability, but I have to give Banville credit: he certainly doesn’t write memorable characters or plots littered with huge, explosive checkpoints to anchor your recollection, but he does write intriguing, evocative prose that can be quite moving at least as long as you’re still reading it.

I’m actually genuinely embarrassed that I can’t recall this; I could jog my memory with Wikipedia or something, but I really think this struggle to recall sums up my thoughts on the book nicely. I remember it was good, and that’s all.

32) Staying On – Paul Scott

#BookerPrizeWinners

Okay so we’re four in a row here for Booker Prize winners. Well, there were quite a lot of them.

An interesting book from an English writer, Staying On tells of the experience of an English colonial couple who decide to ‘stay on’ after India’s independence in the 40s, and I can only assume manages accurately to depict the experience of many in that situation.

It’s a good story, but told in a somewhat clumsy way, starting with the ‘end’ and then flashing back to the start and working our way forwards again to our starting point. Admittedly this is an oft-used technique, but I feel like it was unnecessary here. That kind of prolepsis works well, I think, when the ‘ending’ is somewhat of a mystery, or an interesting turn from where the retrospection seems to be going, so while the specifics of what happens here are not detailed at first, there isn’t quite enough shock value for the technique to flourish.

In short I think the story is at times very amusing (as the wife of the couple imagines herself addressing a friend of an old colonial acquaintance in long soliloquys), certainly well-written and also quite sweet and moving. But it could have actually been more powerful if I didn’t know where it was going. Knowing the ending didn’t make me keep guessing, it just imbued it all with an air of fatalism. Perhaps that, indeed, is the point, but I enjoyed the story enough to feel I would have loved it more on its own, without any authorial interference and manipulation.

31) The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga

#BookerPrizeWinners

OK, five in a row. And for a change of scenery we return to India now, and a book I came to with low expectations. Bec had read it a couple of years earlier and didn’t much care for it, which is probably a good way to go in.

But I think her not caring for it was perhaps less a testimony to the book’s quality than it was about her own expectations, because this book really does seem to defy assumptions as far as Booker Prize Winners go, and also what I personally have come to expect from Indian literature.

It’s a gangster novel, really, but having not read any gangster novels I can’t really draw out the comparison, but it’s also a book written with a poison quill on the subject of poverty and the Indian caste system. In that sense it’s probably similar to Vikas Swarup’s Q&A (i.e. Slumdog Millionaire), which I haven’t read, but the fact that there exists out there another book in similar vein didn’t stop my surprise at its unrelentingly dark humour and savage tone.

What is enjoyable about this book is the way it brutally satirises two sides of modern Indian life: the outdated concept of the teleological caste system –one born into poverty is destined to remain in poverty – as well as the emerging economic powerhouse India, the entrepreneurial India that is happy to co-opt a big chunk of the running costs of business titans in the western world.

Our protagonist – the self-titles White Tiger - is one of the more memorable characters of the last ten years, but his sociopathic lack of empathy left me feeling a bit hollow by the end. Of course that’s the point, but I found myself unable to fully embrace the book as a result. It’s an interesting read but an unsettling one as well.