Books of 2016 Part 2: 40-31

40. A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami

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Typical surreal Murakami stuff; a weird kind of book for sure, but one that is sort of engaging through its elliptical mysteriousness - through what it isn't saying - but it only gets really good once it's effectively all over, and even then we're left with plenty of mystery. I still feel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the most effective combination of Murakami's surrealism and his interest in personal reckoning. Here our narrator, dispensing with names (at one point there is a dialogue about his disdain for names) and having a cloudy past, is a little too detached to affect the emotional side of the narrative, and the only drawcard is the slightly bizarre narrative whereby he is searching remote Hokkaido for a non-existent sheep that commandeers people's bodies and brains for its own purposes. It's all maybe a bit too weird, without enough grounding in reality, and I think the choice of sheep as the driving part of the narrative seems quite arbitrary, when it doesn't follow any great sheep-like trajectory or imagery. It's a diverting read but ultimately a bit hollow as well.

39. 'Salem's Lot – Stephen King

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So this was my second taste of King; after not particularly caring for Cujo last year I decided to give another of his better-known works a go, and it did pay off. This is a much Better book than Cujo: a more complete horror story and more in the niche that King is known for (Cujo, for all its gore, could just be retitled "a series of unfortunate events"). Character is a huge weakness for King, there are no interesting individuals and everybody exists purely to service the plot. What he does write well though is small-town New England. The town of Jerusalem's Lot is the main character here; the gossip, the mistrust of outsiders, the automatism of daily life that due to its stubbornness in accepting diversion or change is doomed to - almost literally - cannibalise itself. The book didn't out and out ‘scare’ me - I got more neck shivers from the opening chapter of Cujo in fact, which is an outlier from the rest of the story in being downright creepy - but it’s an effectively told thriller all the same.

38. Living – Henry Green

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Henry Green is a really curious writer. His style is distinctly his own, but it also just has a guttural working-class dialect quality to it, with its liberal dropping of consonants and casual nicknaming of characters and the very rare, seemingly random application of articles (definite or otherwise). It really takes a while to wrap your head around this, as well as the motley crew populating the book. Once it hits its strides though, like Loving (his TIME entry and the reason I have this as it’s part two of a collection of three novels), it’s an upstairs-downstairs chronicle of sorts, this time of an iron foundry in the midlands. There really is a very down-to-earth affability about it, as his upstairs supervisors and foundry owners live in their trivial little bubbles and play with the livelihoods of those working under them, while all the grunts on the floor struggle to get by and live in gentle resentment of the privileged few. It's not a free-flowing read, but there's something very poignant and thoughtful shining through the grimey workaday world Green paints.

37. Armageddon in Retrospect – Kurt Vonnegut

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I have to admit I do like how Vonnegut writes, but I wonder if I'll reach a stage in my life when he no longer does it for me – and in fact if I’ll look back on my enjoyment of his work as a ‘phase’ in my life. This smattering collage of Vonnegut offcuts and snippets is really only going to work if you also enjoy the way he writes, because the stories are quite similar, or cover very similar themes: Dresden, the end of the war, and things that happen in war that you can only live to regret. The best tales in here are those that diverge from this norm a bit, but generally they're all interesting, thoughtful and of course entertaining. I’ll continue to seek out Vonnegut until I turn old and no longer ‘get’ him – perhaps.

36. The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro

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Pretty rare for me to read a book so contemporaneously, and I picked this up on the back end of the whole controversy where Ishiguro belittled the fantasy genre after using its tropes for this novel. In truth I feel like Ishiguro was trapped in genre for a large part of the book; no real Ishiguroan language flair but every aspect of the story is inserted in the service of generic tropes. It also didn't really work for me as fantasy; it seemed like a standard adventure story with some fantastical elements. Knowing that there is a dark mystery underlying this, it’s less subtle about the dark mystery than Never Let Me Go, so it doesn’t have quite the same impact, nor does it trap you with a big reveal. At the same time, reading it as fantasy I found it a particularly engaging example of a genre I don’t love, as it uses the tropes to raise a philosophical question - and a cruelly cynical one at that - about the nature of community. The final chapter, once the fantasy narrative is over, is beautiful: nostalgic and meditative melancholy. It’s like Ishiguro is free from the fetters of the genre and he can write with his usual thoughtful panache once liberated. It makes for a big peak end from an otherwise fine, but not outstanding, book.

35. The Last Thing He Wanted – Joan Didion

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Didion's coy, mysterious style takes a long time to get into. Once I did, in this case, I was definitely in for the ride. At the same time, she remains coy, teasing out details piecemeal and it remains honestly a little infuriating. It's a good story, though, about an unknown 'incident' in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra affair and the woman who plays a mysterious central role in it. It's well told, but Didion’s writing takes centre stage a bit self-consciously and a different writer may have made the story come to life a bit more – even if they couldn’t engage me as well with the elliptical mystery. I found it exciting, at times funny, and ultimately heart-breaking, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of Didion.

34. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

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This is one of a few novels I read this year based on my appreciation of the film adaptations. To be honest, I don't remember that much about the film, but I feel it suffers from what I would call the ‘Hazlitt’ syndrome (Sorry I can’t just toss that term I just invented off casually, I’ll need to explain. This is after the critic William Hazlitt’s postulation that King Lear loses all its power when it’s performed; that you can’t properly capture the overwhelming ‘superflux’ of tragedy in Shakespeare’s writing in any visual or dramatic form): there's definitely a taste of ‘superflux’ in this messy, complex tragedy that can't translate to simple passive entertainment. What’s most intriguing about this book is the narratorial voice: it’s an unnamed "we", the boys of the neighbourhood who speak collectively even while individual boys are named.  It gives it all the tinge of suburbia and gossip that it relies so heavily on. While that’s effective, it’s all hearsay and little psychology. I feel like the lack of psychology vis à vis the Lisbon sisters is important for leaving the mystery of their collective suicide (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the fucking title) linger, but I would have liked more understanding of other characters: the boys, why were they so fixated on the Lisbon sisters? What drove the Lisbon parents' bizarre decision making and reactions? An engaging story, but not fully  engaging with the overarching themes as a result.

33. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Even though I’m removed by a hundred years of language evolution (or devolution amirite?) [yes my use of the neologism ‘amirite’ is deliberate here, stop distracting me], I find Hawthorne a very engaging writer. And that's essential here, because the overall substance of this narrative is kind of dull. His narrator has that hopeless lack of agency that so often infuriates me, only here it works because his (via Hawthorne) narrative is very eloquent and, while not concise, it's very clear and relatable in the feelings he expresses. It also brings me back to my old confusion about what a "romance" is, because it concerns itself with the whole transcendentalist (‘romantic’) return to a simpler (Utopian, is mentioned at one point) existence on the land, yet it eventually turns into a very anthropocentric tale of love, betrayal and tragedy. And so where's the ‘romance’? Is it ironic or is it part of that evolution of language? It seems to me like the core theme here is not a return to nature or even an attempt to embrace nature which cannot be tamed (à la the romantic poets) but rather an attempt to embrace nature that is interfered with by the fact that people suck. Is that a romance? I don't know. The structure of the narrative and prose are the key benefits to this work, but the story itself is fairly familiar and not too exciting. I quite enjoyed reading this but I don't feel overly enlightened at the back end of it.

32. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch

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This, like Murdoch books generally, but similar to The Book and the Brotherhood (my number 22 book of 2015) and An Accidental Man (my number ?? of 2016 – wait and see) is a big ensemble piece, with loads of characters with their own story arcs. The main difference is that in Accidental, a lot of the plot rested on the idea of gossip and methods of communication, so it sort of worked by using cocktail party chatter and letters as narrative framing devices. Here I feel it's too crowded, and Murdoch would have fared better by cutting out or cutting dramatically down the narratives of a bunch of peripheral characters - Barbie, Theo, Paula/Eric, etc. and instead focused on Ducane, the suicide investigation and the Kate/Jessica love triangle. It's a quibble though, because I always feel in safe hands with Murdoch that she will deliver engaging, relatable characters, implausible situations and a lot of comic irony about the way people live and treat each other. The fact is though, she works best when peripheral characters are kept on the periphery and the main narrative has a sharper focus - as in The Sea, The Sea (my number 1 book of 2014) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (my number 5 book of 2015). It just loses its ability to bite hard when there's just so much going on.

31. A Hologram for the King – Dave Eggers

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Bec originally got this from the library because she enjoyed Eggers’ The Circle more than me, and eventually I picked it up to read. I liked it more than The Circle but I had a sort of hate-hate relationship with the latter (in the sense that I hated it, but hated the fact that I hated it). This is various flavours of narrative. The relationship between our protagonist Alan and his young Saudi driver-cum-local-guide Yousef reminded me a lot of the driver-narrator relationship in Everything is Illuminated. Then the whole underlying story, of Alan and his young colleagues waiting for an audience with the Saudi King to demonstrate their IT credentials, could feasibly be called "Waiting for Abdullah", while the reminiscences of past mistakes, self-reflection of a self-aggrandising (but not self-unaware) loser is very Franzenesque. Yet the whole thing has just a culture clash tragicomic kind of vibe. What’s more, with Eggers’ unpolished style behind the page, it feels a bit rushed at the end, like Eggers was spinning this interminable Kafkaesque plot, and would have been perfectly happy to have kept spinning this whole fish-out-of-water American salesman in Saudi Arabia story, and his missteps. But instead he opts to suddenly wrap it up in a way that's kind of upsetting but also just inevitable. He does leave the narrative inconclusive, but it still felt sort of rushed through.