Books of 2015 Part 4: 30-21

30) The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

#BaileysPrizeWinners

One of the latest books of the year, and I think the last of the Bailey’s Prize Winners to get into my hands.

It’s a slightly odd read this, knowing absolutely nothing about Barbara Kingsolver and her relationship to Mexico, given that she doesn’t exactly sound Mexican, yet the book relies so heavily on the country and on Ameri-Mexi relations. Moreover, it was interesting reading this in light of having earlier in the year read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a book of similar scope and theme but from a more obviously Latin-American writer.

Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable read. Set in Mexico and the US from the time of the Stalinist purges up to heavy McCarthyism, it follows an aspiring writer of mixed Ameri-Mexi descent from his humble beginnings mixing paint for Diego Rivera, to living and working with Rivera, Frida Kahlo and their friend-in-exile Leon Trotsky. The major events told during this section are similar to those depicted in the film Frida which I've seen, and although it felt a bit odd to verify the book’s historicity by comparing it with a film, it fit in with what I felt I already knew.

Following Trotsky’s assassination (woah, historical spoiler alert!), our protagonist moves to the US where he forges a very successful writing career but is then persistently and mercilessly dogged by the anti-communist witch-hunters and unable to shake off the relationships of his past.

What made the book a bit confusing to me was that it did have a bildungsroman quality to it, but in the second half just shifted gear to be a commentary and indictment of McCarthyism and the ability of the HUAC and their blacklist to besmirch and invalidate a person’s standing. And ultimately I found myself wondering what the point of the book really was? Was it a personal story, a memoir even? Or was it mostly a social commentary? The two halves of the book seemed to complement each other, but at the same time seemed so separate, with distinct agendas.

It was a good book, well-written and full of intrigue, but it didn't fully synthesise into a greater whole for me.

29) The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh

#TheWalrusWasPaul

There seems to be no end to Evelyn Waugh’s bibliography, which is a very good thing for me. There’s more to come on this list as well.

This is called something like “one of the most…significant works of the twentieth century” on its cover (at least of the edition I read), which is going more than a little too far because it’s really quite a silly jaunt, but silly in Evelyn Waugh’s universe transfers to delightfully witty and cynical as well.

This one tells the story of two adjoining cemeteries – one a high-class, all-the-fixings funeral service for the ennobled and wealthy, and the other a thoughtful but necessarily undervalued funeral service for pets – and the love triangle that embroils workers of both establishments.

There’s lots of class satire and humour about Ameri-Anglo relations (what is it with me and the prefix Ameri-?), and your standard Waugh characters committing acts of histrionic farce. Waugh’s strength in particular lies in his understanding of the straight man motif, the need to have a grounding force to underline the humour of the ridiculous, and it’s employed to its best here in the denouement.

It’s a very short, digestible read though, and certainly not one that I would really call ‘significant’ in any particular way.

28) The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu

#BookGroupReading

I tell a lie: I did attend a third book group meeting this year, and this was it. I believe this was chosen by Darv essentially by looking up “Sci-fi books that are popular” and just closing his eyes and pointing at the screen somewhere.

This was quite a happy accident, really, as this book is really very good. Set in China, it tells the story of a woman who, after witnessing her father being beaten to death in the name of communist party unity, decides to honour and continue his important work in the field of astrophysics. It skips forward a little disjointedly to a more present day and takes on far more dystopic and sinister themes, involving the search for extraterrestrial life and the value of the terrestrial kind.

It’s also interesting that this particular sci-fi is framed through the lens of communist China, not only because it provides a different perspective to what we’re usually given, but also because the values of communism and particularly the questioning of them factor strongly in its broader considerations.

There was one thing in particular that really annoyed me about this book: when I discovered during my reading of it that it was just book one of a trilogy, and I now have to wait for the rest of the series to be translated into English and released. Aside from that, my only other quibble was that a lot of the concepts presented were really very technical, and I found myself eye-skipping at times.

More often though, Liu’s prose is wonderfully descriptive, and at times just plain cinematic, and after I get through the translation of the rest of the trilogy, I sincerely hope someone will take on the challenge of adapting it to the screen.

27) Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

#NewAuthors

While a lot of these authors who I read for the first time this year have made me likely to seek out more, I kind of feel like one Maupin is probably enough for me. That’s not because I didn't enjoy this, but it just feels like a neatly encapsulated snapshot of what he’s about, and I'm just not sure I need any more.

This is a collection of stories set in and about San Francisco, kind of structured similarly to Joyce’s Dubliners, in that each story connects to the next, although in this the characters pretty much all become entangled, whereas in Joyce each story was connected to the previous and the next but not further.

The characters are all what we might now call typical Frisco ‘types’ but I suspect this book, and Maupin generally, had a fair bit to do with the creation of them. It’s interesting to look at this book as quite pioneering, coming out post Harvey Milk but still feeling very modern and cosmopolitan for the time.

It’s funny and fairly provocative, and I think holds interest in being somewhat of a forerunner to things like Sex and the City and Queer as Folk. But I do feel like any more Maupin now might feel like it’s treading more familiar ground, and this is a nice bite-size portion.

26) May We Be Forgiven – A.M.Homes

#BaileysPrizeWinners

Oh, this one was really a heartbreaker, and appearing as it does just outside the top 25 seems so fittingly miserable a place for it, given that at times I considered this a potential number one book of the year.

The fact is, it starts out so completely brilliantly. Franzenesque (in a good way rather than a Franzsplaining way), only much darker. We are presented with two brothers – one starts an affair with the other’s wife, and the other then catches them in the act, and impulsively, yet calmly, robotically, bashes her head in with a bedside lamp, sending her into a coma.

Delightful, right? It’s really quite horrifying, and yet Homes dances adeptly over the grotesque details with a bizarre, darkly comical and surreal brush that hits all the right notes to have me spellbound.

But then following this brilliant beginning, and actually quite inexplicably, it steadily brightens and humanises to the point of becoming uncomfortably saccharine and soap opera-esque. It has that Paul Auster feeling of being an examination of how many ways people can affect your life, and starts to seem emotionally facile even as it starts to get implausibly convoluted.

It’s still an entertaining read, but it really started to lose track of itself, with pointless literary references: a throwaway to Lolita, and the doctor character who just does doctor things but for no reason is called Faustus. There’s also a recurrent appearance, and I'm not sure why, of Don DeLillo as a character and motivating force in the book. And it’s a small thing, but I feel like Homes’ treatment of DeLillo strikes the wrong note in that I suspect it’s meant to be comical: she can either call him ‘Don’ and make it amusingly over-familiar, or ‘Don DeLillo’ each time and make herself feel comically starstruck. But instead it’s always ‘DeLillo’ and it seems weirdly technical.

The other thing – and here I'm going to start questioning the Baileys Prize principles – is that this was my first taste of Baileys Prize winners, and it’s a book mostly about men, and men raising children. And while my understanding is the Baileys Prize really is quite arbitrarily ‘the best book that happens to have been written by a woman in English’, I feel like there could be more to it than that, that the scope of the award could somehow reward or highlight female writers who take on, rather than perpetuate, the patriarchy in any way.

Having said that, the odd thing about Homes’ first person narration here is it didn’t actually sound like an authentic male voice, it sounded like it was being filtered through another medium. I know not everyone has the capacity of Iris Murdoch to embody the male psyche, but then why not write third-person? This book wouldn’t have lost much.

I sincerely apologise to A.M. Homes for ranting so much within this review. I really wanted to appreciate this book more, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it just left me so unsatisfied and with an excess of critical bile to excrete.

25) My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin

#NewAuthors #AustralianAuthorsIGuess

This write-up will be considerably shorter than the previous one. The end.

Oh, well since I have more airtime, I might as well write more.

It seemed a suitable follow-up to my enjoyment of The True History of the Kelly Gang last year to try and read more Australian literary icons, and books very much about Australia, and this stood out as a sore blindspot for me.

As Henry Lawson writes in his preface, although the manuscript was sent to him from one ‘Miles Franklin’, the book is quite nakedly coming from a feminine voice, not simply through the fact that the first person narrator is a young female, but also just the particular vocal flourishes and descriptions feel so subtle in a way that a male writer wouldn't bother with – particularly in descriptions of Australian landscapes and rural farmsteads. You know my old description of all Australian literature as ‘paddocks and cattle’, well it’s not out of place here, but in actuality is far more poetically and interestingly rendered.

Franklin’s heroine Sybylla is the real highlight of this piece – headstrong and volatile, she’s both magnetic and strangely uneasy to read, as her fractious nature becomes both an intrigue to those around her and a curse that haunts her life and her ambitions.

I found the book ended a little too soon, and while I really should read the follow-up My Career goes Bung before passing judgement on its abrupt conclusion, I’m aware that the follow-up was written much later in life, so I feel it’s not hasty to think of it just a little incomplete, as so many might have done upon its release. But that little thorn aside, it’s a jaunty and amusing read.

24) The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

#Ummmm

Speaking of jaunty, wow. What an odd little person Jasper Fforde is.

Starting in a dystopian reality where various special police units investigate crimes too abstract for the regular force, The Eyre Affair takes us through a bizarre terrorist manhunt where time barely exists and the borders between fiction and reality exist even less.

It’s perhaps a little too offbeat and quirky for me to love all that much, but I defy anybody not to have at least a little fun with it (Usually I would add here ‘even me’, but obviously I did have a little fun with it). I feel it would perhaps be most appreciated by those familiar with Jane Eyre, and while I've watched the Michael Fassbender-Mia Wasikowska vehicle, and read Jean Rhys’ argument to it, Wide Sargasso Sea, I’m not familiar enough to fully absorb any of the more parodical references to it.

I must confess as well, I found the romantic denouement a little twee, but at the same time it felt necessary. I shouldn’t really expect anything with any great profundity from such a flighty fantasy.

23) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K Dick

#HarryNeedsAHaircut

Firstly, I want to say that Philip K Dick’s strength really isn't in titles. I've probably said that before, but this title is an absolute trainwreck.

Fortunately, however, the book is not. This was my second foray into Dick (oh, get your head out of the gutter, Mother), and while I didn't enjoy my first taste of Dick (Ubik, which inexplicably made it onto TIME’s top 100 list and was my third- or fourth-lowest of my first book write-up), my second taste of Dick was far more palatable and stimulating.

Obviously, I was coming to this novel from a post-Blade Runner viewpoint, so it’s impossible to examine this entirely on its own merit. However, I found it’s actually beneficial to read this after the movie. It evokes the same sense of questioning reality and consciousness, and holds many of the same opinions about humanity and its future. It actually brought out many of the same emotional responses as I had to Blade Runner and where there were differences, they didn't bother me.

The main difference is that there is explicit engagement here with our actual conception of ourselves as human through the principles of “mercerism”. While in the film, the philosophy of creating humanoid replicas with their own consciousness and memory is explored, the book made me realise how much actual humans are almost sidelines in the film. In the book, what is humanity and a look at what it’s become is provocatively explored and criticised.

The climax of the book and the climax of the film are two very different things, too, but neither is more nor less successful or interesting; there is less 'action' here and it's all dispensed with quickly, but the lingering questions remain. At the same time, if I'd read this before seeing the movie I can imagine being floored by Roy Batty's dying soliloquy, even though it comes from nowhere specific in the book. 

I genuinely enjoyed poring over this particular manifestation of Dick’s, and I'm definitely now interested in more Dick.

22) The Book and the Brotherhood – Iris Murdoch

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #ReadAllTheMurdoch #IrisIMeanNotRupert

So after snatching the coveted number one spot last year, Iris Murdoch became for me basically my go-to person whenever books were on offer. Basically my philosophy at book sales and second-hand stores this year has been “Buy ALL the Murdoch!” which translates roughly to, I read two this year and have another sitting on my shelf for 2016.

This is one of her later works, and there are touches of a little tiredness in its conceit, about a group of ageing intellectuals coming to terms with their intermingled relationships and lives à la Swift’s Last Orders or Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils. There are times when this borders on soap opera and a few of the characters seem a little stock and lacking in Murdoch’s surreal brush strokes.

However, Murdoch is at her enigmatic best in depicting the pivotal (if not exactly central) character of Crimond, who has been charged by all the other characters to write his philosophical magnum opus that, due to his undoubted brilliance, they have all agreed to fund no matter how long it takes. Crimond is a polarising, misanthropic figure, to whom others react invariably with either repulsion or overwhelming attraction.

But Crimond also features in the most fascinating exploration here: while the whole thing is a bit chaotic trying to draw out themes of friendship and coming to terms with death. Crimond as the intellectual giant here has the egotistical and solitary world-weariness of one too bored with humanity to care a jot about life. So Murdoch’s most poignant touch is in making Crimond seemingly immortal – while everybody else struggles to come to terms with their own mortality, Crimond yearns, in vain, for nothing more than to shuffle it off.

Not just because all (Iris) Murdoch is worth reading, this is worth reading.

21) Thank you, Jeeves – P.G.Wodehouse

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #NewAuthors

I hadn’t read this one. That’s the trouble with Wodehouse, isn’t it?

It’s probably no surprise that something that appeals so strongly to Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie that they made a series of it would also appeal to me. And appeal it did.

This is, like apparently a fair few books I've read this year, just a large amount of silly fun. And as with Evelyn Waugh (another great influence on our Mr Fry), Wodehouse employs the straight man technique to great effect here, chiefly in the guise of the unflappable Jeeves who betrays little to no surprise or emotion to all the farcical nonsense going on around him.

And farcical nonsense is all that’s really going on here. It’s nothing earth-shattering by any means, and I can see it not really floating everybody’s boat, but I probably laughed through this book more than at anything else I read this year. This kind of dry humour and absurdity are just my kind of thing.