Books of 2016 Part 3: 30-21

30. The Shipping News – Annie Proulx

#Library

This is quite a charming portrait of an idiosyncratic small town (Killick Claw, Newfoundland) and its small towny characters doing small towny things. At the end of it I was a little mystified as to the point of it though; it’s mostly just a mix of odd anecdotes, with a little causality between them but that are otherwise unconnected (except in a small towny way). I also found the characters somewhat stock and also somewhat blank, yet ultimately likeable. The thing that probably distanced me a bit too far is that Proulx's prose like this. No verbs in sentence. Sometimes no subject. Gets annoying. It didn't amaze me, but it was a perfectly sound story and an enjoyable read. Note I haven’t seen the film adaptation of this, so this wasn’t one of those occasions of going back to the source material.

29. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel GarcíaMárquez

#Borrowed

This is a funny one to sort, because the last page gave me chills – so in terms of recency effect I should be better disposed to this. But throughout the rest of the novel, Márquez is so ambiguous and elusive, even. The characters are somewhat ambivalent, and all driven by such disparate forces that seem to be quite flighty. At its heart it's just a dissection of love, but very much a particularly Latin, hot-blooded kind of love (probably connected with machismo, which we will get to again in a few books). The prose is dense yet free-flowing, so it really requires close attention. The rewards are there though as it’s peppered throughout with sly jokes. It’s interesting to look back at Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (op cit, my number 1 book of 2014) in light of this because the plot structure of both is very similar but where this is heartfelt, philosophical, and poetic, that other book was cynical, dry, ruthlessly sardonic. So naturally I loved the other more, even in its own surrealism there's something so vibrantly beating. This is a very well-written and beautiful book, but just not quite speaking to me.

28. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

#BookGroup

This was a much beloved book among our book group cohorts but it left me quite mixed. It took a long time to get into, because with its choppy, episodic narrative, and skipping backwards and forwards in time it's hard to discern the plot, at least in the sense of feeling where it's going. Then you get used to the choppy record-skipping nature, and in its place Atkinson launches into a long story passage which seems to drag because you haven't yet gotten a grip on the characters or their story. That all said, while it took me a while, I grew to enjoy the conceit of the story (our main protagonist has an ability to revert in time to avoid circumstances that lead to her death) quite a lot. I was particularly engaged with the idea, as it’s depicted generally as being about simply avoiding situations, rather than acting with different agency, which I think is an interesting statement. And apart from the conceit, the only real narrative arc involves the protagonist Ursula’s journey (across space and time) from an indeterministic character believing only in free will and choice (a dialogue between her and Eva Braun regarding their mutual acquaintance Adolf: “Eva: ‘he’s always been a politician. He was born a politician’ No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become”) to espousing a more fatalistic viewpoint, apparently once she’s finally decided herself what the right path through history is (later in the book, she says “amor fati… It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose”). But all my closer-than-usual reading aside, the story overall was a bit haphazard and dragged a bit just for bringing out a philosophical and thought-provoking framing device.

27. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

#Library

The final book I read this year, and the only one that I’m writing up live into this blog, because I didn’t have time between finishing it and starting these posts to write my notes. This was a heavy-going but ultimately very fascinating read, about a devout Baptist minister who takes his wife and four daughters on a mission to the Congo and the resultant dissolution of the family unit when the culture and nature of Africa butts heads with their westernised belief in changing or taking ownership. The heteroglossia of Kingsolver’s narrative, told as it is by each of the females of the family in turn, is an interesting device but it gives maybe a bit too much psychology and less narrative, to the point where it does feel a little too long at times. The character of the father viewed through these lenses is also intriguing as it devolves from respect or blind faith to complete disdain and disbelief as he digs his heels further and further into the mud. The latter chapters after they all go their separate ways feel like a completely separate story and they get a little self-indulgent as a sort of sequence of narrative essays on why colonisation is wrong (which has otherwise been aptly demonstrated already), but with the multi-faceted perspective it’s still an interesting, well-rounded read.

26. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene

#Library

This has a curiously similar premise to Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (for those who don’t remember, my number 72 book of last year [out of 72 books]). Curious, because while it seemed a fairly high concept story, which then took itself in the most clumsily facile soap operatic directions, it was also published many, many years after this was. So despite being a shit book, it wasn't even a pioneering premise. Here, a group of Paraguayan terrorists attempt to kidnap the American ambassador to Argentina and mistakenly instead capture an alcoholic honorary British consul, and as such are unable to work the same level of political pressure as they'd hoped. In Greene's hands you know you can trust the story to be not only not trite and facile, but even compelling and interesting. Our central character here is a half-English doctor who becomes an accomplice of the kidnappers in order to get his own Paraguayan father sprung from prison. He embodies Greene's key theme of interest here: the contrast between South American male machismo (see above) and the English reserve, both forces of which are at play for him internally. Greene is also making a cursory return to South American Catholicism, and a lapsed priest, so covering similar territory to The Power and the Glory. I don't think his Catholic explorations are as fully-fleshed out here as in his greatest works, nor is the machismo really elucidated in a big way – just discussed among the characters - but as with any Greene story, the themes can ultimately be sidelined to telling a compelling narrative of internal and external conflict.

25. Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens

#BookShelf #OneDickensPerYear

It seems to me that in Dickens' world - or at least the world of this book - there are no shades of character. People are either entirely good nature and charity or they are completely miserly and selfish. There is undoubtedly something seductive about this from a narrative point of view: you want to keep reading in the hopes of seeing the villains get their comeuppance and the heroes their deliverance. But it does mean that upon first meeting a villain vs hero we know everything we need to know about them and their character won't develop beyond that, they're either one of us (good) or one of them (evil). The most interesting character in this book is therefore probably Mrs Nickleby, because she's all goodness at heart, but is so naïve and foolish that she ends up enabling the bad guys on more than one occasion. The good/evil dichotomy has an almost fantastical quality which brings to mind the fact that Ralph Nickleby as chief antagonist has a very similar story arc to another prototypical villain, that of Saruman in Lord of the Rings. He begins powerful, and insofar as this story goes, he has an early choice between following the righteous path and the path of malevolence, and chooses wrongly. He then becomes an all-powerful mighty force for evil, but as the heroes continue to foil his wicked schemes and his grasp on power diminishes he resorts to increasingly desperate, spiteful and petty schemes for revenge before his final humiliation. I did have issues with this book, though: Smike's death is an irritating narrative convenience, basically because his presence creates an unbalance in the number of eligible male/female suitors in the piece, so with him disposed of everybody’s free to marry their beloved. Some story threads seem completely peripheral and maybe redundant, since the book could ultimately have been shorter and I’d have been OK with that. It was also an undeniable slog to get through, as is all Dickens and why I only read one a year. Having said that, there were lots of characters here, but because of Dickens’ plainness of speaking and distinctive naming, I didn't really need the character list for reference.

24. A Father's Story – Lionel Dahmer

#BookShelf

So I bought this memoir from Jeffrey Dahmer’s father as a carefree graduate who was going through a phase of fascination with serial killers and Dahmer in particular, and on a recommendation from my honours supervisor. It then took a while to arrive and I’d somewhat moved on. So then I had the amazingly sensationally intelligent and rational idea to pick it up and read it with a 4-month old son at home. While this has coverage of Dahmer's pathology similar to Brian Masters’ The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, it's also just a horrifying account of how it was to raise a perfectly ordinary child who turned into an inhuman monster - and learning, confronting and having to accept that truth (again, not good reading when you have a perfectly ordinary 4-month-old son at home). More than the obvious though, Lionel's account is a very warts-and-all confession, as he tries to examine his own shortcomings as a father, and ultimately confronts the fact that many of the impulses and dark thoughts in Jeffrey's psychology had their equivalents in his own, and but for a different choice here and there he could have gone to a similarly dark place, or possibly if he’d realised it earlier, Jeffrey and all his victims could have been saved. It's a fascinating narrative, due to the nature of the unreliable narrator. Lionel is not shy, nor does he make excuses for Jeffrey or himself, but you can't help but wonder at times if there are certain points of view that are put forward more than others and facts that might be omitted due to his own trying to make personal sense of the events. I trust him as a narrator but it's all told with a great deal of hindsight. Intriguingly he, like Masters, views Jeffrey's hernia operation as a young boy as a 'turning point' in his heretofore innocent life, but Lionel sees it only as a crux, whereas Masters viewed it in his summary as entirely the inciting incident. We'll never really get to the very bottom of what caused Jeffrey Dahmer, as his particular psychology feels so unprecedented, but Lionel lays bare the clearest picture of how naiveté and analytical detachment can be the most dangerous enablers, and the whole memoir acts as a chilling warning of how the most unlikely things could happen to anyone.

23. The Hours – Michael Cunningham

#Library

This book feels like ‘award bait’ in the way that the film adaptation, which I saw when it was all the rage in 2002, was such Oscars bait. But this is actually much better than the film (which I also liked, but in that Oscars baity way that you forget it as soon as it doesn’t win very much), in that there's so much internally going on that can’t be captured in film. It feels like the film was just a visualisation that would be best appreciated by those who had already read the book. There's an odd asymmetry to these stories; the link of "Mrs Dalloway" is kind of tenuous, but then there's the link of suicide, which does in some sense happen in each. More pertinent and stimulating though is the common theme of queer identity throughout the ages. We go from Virginia Woolf and her decision to invoke a repressed lesbian desire in Mrs Dalloway, to Laura Brown and her need to repress her desire for her neighbour in order to be a good housewife and mother, to modern-day New York and Clarissa Vaughan (AKA “Mrs Dalloway”) where people are lauded - lionised, even - for the suffering they go through in coming to terms with their sexuality. Although the link is tenuous, the story is quite evocative (more so Brown and Vaughan than Woolf, who is used more as a narrative device than an especially engaging character, to my mind). Anyway, I liked this more than I expected, and found it far more interesting than the film.

22. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

#BookShelf 

Yes, I finally succumbed. To be honest I was more embarrassed reading this populist trash on the train than I would be reading “101 tips for overcoming incontinence” by Felicia D’Nera. It's hard to admit, but even going in with all my defences up, looking to find flaws, it's hard not to get swept up by it. The fact is, it's shamelessly manipulative, the way it keeps hammering home the idea of Katniss as an underdog, the way "District 12" is repeatedly said with derision and all the flashbacks to home and family. Yet after the training sequence, when she's given a score of 11 even I felt myself just getting a tingle of excitement, so even though I knew I was being manipulated, it still works. Far be it from me to criticise the writer of one of the best-selling, popularly and critically acclaimed series of the last 20 years too, but as a devotee of dystopias I felt a trick was missed here by using first person narrative, firstly because the past-tense first person is itself a spoiler: yes you don’t know the circumstances under which Katniss will survive, but she logically must. It does feel too, to my non-YA-reading eyes, a bit too YA, as we're supposed to identify with and see the world through the eyes of this teenage girl, but I was quite interested in more of the world than I got from this narrow lens and wanted to know what was going on in the capital and in the viewing audience from a more omniscient narrator. I might get that if I get to the sequels (and understand whether I’m supposed to be #TeamJacob or #TeamObiWan) but I did feel it was just a shortcoming of an otherwise really engaging and entertaining read. Obviously at #22 I’m still not a full convert, but I have to admit that this book was actually a gift to Bec, who hasn’t read it, and I found myself joining the cohorts of people recommending she read it, because I do think she would enjoy it as a devotee of kickass heroines.

21. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo

#Library

A short, sharp, and dreamy work from DeLillo. Possibly his most surreal book too; the whole narrative explores a pair of relationships with communication/dialogue that is stilted at best and full of complete non sequiturs at worst. But there's also a vivid sense of unreality, where our titular body artist merges her internal and external realities - or does she? It's not clear. The internalised prose is very vivid and descriptive, and feels actually quite Didionesque - only there's also a sweet sentimentality to the work rather than it being a repressed nightmare, which is frankly as out of character for DeLillo as it would be from Didion. I was left a little bit puzzled in the end, but in a wonderful way where I’ve been deeply engrossed in everything I’ve read but there’s still plenty more to deconstruct. It's an ambiguous and really quite poetic work and the best from DeLillo I've read for a long time.