Books of 2015 Part 3: 40-31

40) On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #HavingSaidThatIAcquiredThisOneForFreeOnlyThisYear #StillItMakesAChangeFrom1DJokes

This book was also an odd one, and one that didn't totally work for me. Obviously McEwan is another of those fairly beloved writers who feels out of place being down this low, but at the same time I'm getting to the stage now where I really did like all of the books ahead of it quite a lot, so it’s not so much there was anything particularly wrong with this, as much as everything else was really pretty great.

So while this has all of that delightful everyone-is-fucked cynicism that I enjoy so much in McEwan's work, the cynicism also seems a bit odd since the ‘inciting incident’ here felt so arbitrary, and the resulting drama a little over the top as a consequence.

It feels a bit truncated as well, because as the story of a promising young couple on their wedding night jumps backward to cover off their meeting and courtship,  I felt the past narrative was a little incomplete – I can’t remember in which direction, but I felt it leant more heavily on one character than the other, and I felt there could have been more.

This is very much a McEwan sucker punch in the same vein as The Comfort of Strangers, but I feel more could have been wrung from his dripping irony and misanthropy.

39) Symposium – Muriel Spark

#HarryMakesMyOvariesRumble

This was one of the last books I read this year, and was picked up in the library purely because I loved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie so much (see my book write-ups from three years ago) and I hadn’t, in fact, read any of Spark’s other works, of which there are quite a few.

This is of similarly digestible length as Miss Jean, but has sizeably more scope, being a menagerie of characters, all in attendance at a dinner party and with their various recent pasts and futures all being intermingled within the narrative. That is probably its biggest shortcoming, though, as the length really only allows a touch upon each of the characters, and while they’re as well drawn out as they can be, the whole narrative feels more than a little cluttered as a result.

I feel like this could really have been a magnificent and deliciously ironic story, except that Spark doesn't allow enough elbow room for everybody to have their turn in the limelight, and there isn't quite enough build-up of the tension to allow all the ironic coincidences that converge at the end to manifest their full brute force.

38) For the good of the cause – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

#NewAuthors #CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

The second Solzhenitsyn to make this list, which of course makes it the first-ranked, and also the first that I read, this year and ever. Wrap your brain around that one.

I’ve had this book on my shelf for what seems like forever – I think I bought it at a second-hand book store some years ago, thinking I should probably have some Solzhenitsyn to read, and then just ignored it until I found myself bereft of other reading material this year and picked it up. And I’m certainly the richer for it.

As with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and for all I know, all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, this is a fairly short work with limited vision, but a very competent one with a well-wrought sense of satire in it.

Set in a Soviet school, it tells the story of the instructors at said school and their past efforts in helping construct a new building into which to move their institution upon completion. The plot itself revolves around a visit by some regional party officials who set about reappropriating the completed building for other, more important party business.

It’s a real howl of bitter anger, but with a finely honed sense of the inner workings of bureaucracy so rather than coming across as petulant frustration it’s actually a very sober exploration in futility. At the same time, being as short as it is simply made me hunger for more, and I’m hoping out there (I’m yet to tackle The Gulag Archipelago) is a Solzhenitsyn book of more wide-reaching vision. 

37) A Death in the Family (My Struggle Book One) – Karl OveKnausgaard

#NewAuthors

Yes, the wheel of fortune has finally landed on me. It’s my turn to write up one of the most written-about and over-analysed books of the past twenty years. So hopefully I don’t blow my chance. *deep breath*

This book’s alright, innit! *pause for applause and adulation*

There’s really two aspects to this, the first in the My Struggle cycle, of which I've also read the second book (still to come in this write-up), but not the concluding third book. This is very much in the Proust camp of writing, with Knausgaard basically just reflecting and reminiscing on every little feeling and moment in a given timeframe, but particularly in this case those petinent to his relationship with his father and his father’s death. Therein lies the two disparate aspects: the hilariously, ridiculously mundane; and the surprisingly profound.

For the first, there are details that Knausgaard includes that I was just shaking my head at: for instance, when he is staying at the home of his brother, and his sister-in-law is explaining in some detail her method of making the particular pasta dish they’re eating, and I just couldn't for the life of me work out the value in including this in a memoir. But then it's all part of Knausgaard’s freewheeling style which can really catch you off guard, as he’ll slip seamlessly from some mundane bit of trivia into a really cutting insight into human nature, and in this way demonstrate how the mundane and routine can help us cope with avalanching grief and regret.

At the same time, he really doesn't get fully out of first gear in this book, and that doesn't happen until book two, the far superior and further-reaching A Man In Love. This is obviously a necessary introduction, but it spins its wheels in the doldrums for far too long to stand up on its own merit.

36) Arthur and George – Julian Barnes

#Sigh #Insert1DJokeHere

My reading of this book was completely unrelated to the serialisation that appeared on the ABC around August/September this year (and which I didn't watch), but it was a coincidence that having picked this up randomly very early in the year it later came on everybody’s radars in a different way.

Telling the story of the Wyrley Ripper mystery, a series of horrific cattle slaughters in a small English village, and the abuse and persecution of Indian-English doctor George Edalji, who is accused of the crimes. The corresponding Arthur of the title refers to the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, although this fact is not really elucidated until quite deep into the story. We’re simply told in parallel of the lives of two men, Arthur and George, from different backgrounds and different levels of privilege, who cross paths when Arthur is contacted for help regarding the Ripper case and George's treatment by the local law enforcement.

It’s kind of an unsettling read, dealing as it does with quite ugly racial prejudice and cruel systemic corruption, and at the same time has an  uncomfortable sense of ‘unending’ (I’m just going to pause, quietly here, while the more erudite of you get the very intentional pun there, and lend me a suitable ovation) in which the real Wyrley Ripper is never  unmasked, and we only get an inconclusive sense that George is finally allowed to carry on with his quiet life.

Despite the cruelty and cynicism though – of both of these Barnes has a very keen sense, like his friend Ian McEwan – at its heart this is a  sweet story of friendship, of a man stepping down from a sheltered existence to muck in and help the downtrodden. As mentioned though, there’s not a lot that’s ultimately resolved, and Conan Doyle’s willingness to help out is cast in a somewhat unflattering and self-righteous light. Perhaps the sweetest part of an otherwise very sour tale, though, is the  portrait of Conan Doyle as a man seeking to get more fulfilment from life than just being  the creator of a quirky detective character. Speaking of whom…

35) The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

Yes, it’s one of those curious circumstances that happen sometimes with Jez’s sorting program. There’s almost no connection whatsoever style-wise or content-wise between the previous entry and this, it’s just a bizarre coincidence that a book about Arthur Conan Doyle is just pipped at the post by a book by Arthur Conan Doyle.

There’s not a whole lot to deconstruct with this one. It’s got some good moments of gothic horror and a nice page-turning sense of mystery, but ultimately it’s just a jolly good lark.

I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes a couple of years ago, and they’re all, in their own way, jolly good larks, but when you have a fully-realised mystery like this, with a truly ambitious and malevolent villain and an intricately devised plot for our cluey hero to sink his teeth into, it just magnifies the fun many times over.

Like I said, not much to deconstruct, but very good value.

34) The Road Home – Rose Tremain

#BaileysPrizeWinners

This is a fairly sweet examination of the immigrant experience. The story of Lev, an émigré from a never-named eastern European country (actually it kind of annoyed me that Tremain didn't bother at least giving it a fictional name) who moves to England to try and make money to support his family back home.

Lev is an ambivalent character. In one sense he’s fairly one-dimensional: his goal is to support his family and that’s his driving motivation throughout. But at various points throughout the book, he just makes decisions and does things that are so unexpected, it just raised the possibility that I don’t really understand him, despite spending so much of the book inside his head.

Tremain’s other most interesting point is in the examination of the characters around him, and how they react both positively and negatively to Lev – including a woman whom he meets on the journey over and on whom he calls for help at various points. In one sense it reminded me of Ellison's Invisible Man in the way certain people seek to fulfill their own agendas through their use of this foreigner, but at the same time they’re also well-drawn characters in their own right with flawed humanity, and the whole makes for a fairly richly detailed pastiche.

The only trouble I really had with it was that it left me in the end feeling a little cold, and as though I’d gotten to know this guy so well and yet not know him at the same time. I wanted to feel his joys and miseries more acutely than I ended up doing; in the final analysis it’s like I'm looking at his life through a telescope rather than really living it with him.

33) The Man Within – Graham Greene

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #HavingSaidThatIAcquiredThisOneForFreeThisYearAsWell

Another ripping Greene yarn and, I think, altogether a more compelling one than The Quiet American, hence its inclusion in the higher echelons of this list (such as it is).

This one sees a young man hiding out with a hermit woman in a forest after betraying his former gang friends to the authorities, knowing full well they’re on his tracks. Besides just being a typical Greene suspense-thriller, this intermingles with some of his favourite themes of courage, grace and redemption.

It’s also a heartfelt love story, as the young man sets out to prove himself worthy of the unexpected affections of his saviour, while she sets out to save his life without really knowing why. The love story is actually the least successful part of the narrative, but it helps to drive the story along, and draw out the pivotal conflicts throughout.

At the heart of it though, I found the story intriguing and the ultimate redemption very affecting.

32) We are all completely beside ourselves – Karen JoyFowler

#BookGroupReading

This was one of very few book group choices this year; I feel like I only attended two meetings including the one that Bec and I chose and hosted.

Basically a large part of this book’s effectiveness revolves around a particular plot twist that’s up there with Luke’s father being Chewbacca in the new Star Wars film, so I’ll opt not to spoil it in this review (although I’d be quite interested to see how people react to the book knowing the twist ahead of time).

The other thing to say about this twist is that it's revealed kind of matter-of-factly about a third (?) of the way through, and the remainder is all more straightforward story-telling - as the first third would have also been, had Fowler not been trying deliberately to obfuscate the issue. I guess that’s where I took the only real exception I had to it, which is that it relies a little too heavily on this artifice, and everything else consequently gets pushed into the background. Kind of like how I genuinely don’t remember anything at all that happens in The Usual Suspects except oh my god it was him! It was him all along! Wait, there was a movie here?

Notwithstanding the leaning on the author’s trickery, the book is amusing, sweetly humane yet a tiny bit on the preachy side as well. It’s a fairly easy read that falls into what I might call book awards-bait, in that it’s a well-paced page-turner that has hints of intellectualism strewn around. I quite enjoy books like this, don’t get me wrong, but if they don’t really reach me personally – as this didn’t – then it becomes merely enjoyable fare.

31) Kafka on the shore – Haruki Murakami

#BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint #AlsoHarryStylesIsHotOrWhatever

When I picked this up from the library, Bec sort of looked at it and said “This is one of his famous books, right? We should probably read this.” And I was like “Yeah, that’s why I got it.” True story. And hence the particular hashtag, even though I didn't include that as one of my four overarching categories, it fit best here, although I've been using it in tandem with #NewAuthors and Murakami is far from a new acquaintance of mine.

I think I say this every time, but after my first couple of Murakamis (After Dark and Norwegian Wood), I’d felt unfulfilled, knowing how much people respond to his humanism and his surrealistic flourishes in equal measure, and the two with which I’d begun fell exclusively in only one of those camps each, without the border being straddled.

So Kafka on the Shore is far more emblematic of Murakami’s general ethos, being a story of a couple of otherwise-promising misfits, bejewelled with pathetic human fallibility, and their parallel journeys through a surreal semi-dreamscape that borders on the horrific.

To be honest I didn’t really enjoy the whole switching back and forth between the two characters’ stories, particularly as they never actually dovetailed – not so explicitly, anyway – and the denouement of the story felt a little underwhelming, too. Perhaps it just fell too much into surrealism, with Murakami offering no real answers or reasons for some of the more bizarre happenings.

I was also a little put off by the too-oblique references to Franz Kafka, which I obviously expected from the title. I think he’s only explicitly referenced once or twice, although there is a less overt reference later on to the famous story of Kafka’s friend Max Brod refusing to fulfil Kafka’s dying wish to have his unfinished manuscripts burned. This swims fairly uncomfortably in a typical Murakami sea of popular cultural and intertextual references that have varying degrees of success.

I also felt the story ended a bit with the status quo being restored, and it all seemed neat, and yet horribly messed up at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the book, but I was hoping for some more exposition; it just left me feeling, again, unfulfilled with my Murakami fix. I felt there was more symmetry and resolution in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki that I read last year, and I would continue to point to that as my favourite of his works, even though that seems to be an unpopular opinion.