Books of 2017 Part 2: 40-31

40) I’ll Take You There – Joyce Carol Oates

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This is a strange and somewhat disjointed narrative overall, but compellingly written. Oates begins with flourishing brush strokes, painting huge amounts of detail in her descriptions of a college campus and the sorority house that our narrator resides in. Piece by piece she reveals aspects of our narrator's past, her psychology and the strong, accurate pointillist detail suddenly gets rambly and unfocused as our narrator's mind gets cluttered and overwhelmed. There are three sections to the narrative, each one quite distinct and throughout, it's hard to get full traction on who she is - possibly not helped by the fact that she never gives her name - and the final sentence of the book actually gives a final little twist to the character and why she has been recording the memoir in first person. It's wonderful writing, but I was left a bit confused and unenlightened by the overall narrative arc. Is it semi-autobiographical? I feel like it has to be, to make any sense. Otherwise the lack of real elucidation would be seen as a weakness of the story rather than a sly trick. I'm a bit undecided but I was engrossed throughout.

39) Aiding and Abetting – Muriel Spark

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Trust Muriel Spark to take a bit of folklore and weave an interesting story around it. In this case she takes as her subject the character of Lord Lucan, who infamously accidentally murdered his children's nanny (thinking she was his wife) then tried to murder his wife before going on the run for the rest of his life. Spark introduces us to not one, but two Lord Lucans, who both visit a psychiatrist in Paris. The psychiatrist who becomes our protagonist is herself under an assumed identity to escape her own nefarious past as a religious con artist, and she suspects the two Lord Lucans (are either of them genuine? Which one?) are in league and trying to blackmail her. What ensues is a bit of a caper, as two old acquaintances of Lucan seek to hunt him down while the psychiatrist tries to escape her own past. At its heart this is a discussion about criminality in its various forms, the life of a criminal trying to escape their past, and the various degrees to which people will cover for their friends and others of their 'set'. It's a little vacuous towards the end, maybe, but it's otherwise very entertaining and quite intriguing.

38) Party Going – Henry Green

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So I finally finished my Henry Green book; I think I mentioned this book in last year’s writeup of Living, but I bought this three-novels-in-one package due to the first part, Loving, being part of TIME’s top 100 that I read a few years back. So after tackling Living last year, this finally polished it off. This is quite a fun read, definitely the least of the three in terms of its importance, though. It more like a Green sketch than a full-fledged story, with a Murdochean cast of characters who are stuck in a railway hotel when fog prevents their journey abroad. The reason it feels like a sketch is simply that it doesn’t draw out the characters quite as much as the other two Green novels in this volume, and feels more of a light portrait, raising questions then quite quickly answering them and not leaving much ambiguity. Because of the large cast of characters as well, none of them really go through as many vicissitudes as in his other work, they just go through some turns and come out the other side feeling clarity or possibly refreshed, rather than completely revolutionised. It's quite a light-hearted, curious but ultimately shallow sketch of rich people behaving badly under captivity.

37) As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

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So this is the last for me to read of what I'd consider ‘essential Faulkner’, for those who would have themselves an essential Faulkner list, and it's quite a relief. He just has a way of writing that somehow combines a bit too much southern drawl and lingo with a bit too much stream of consciousness and elusive modernism. This one is no exception but thankfully this, unlike some others, has a pretty clear plot and it's kind of an affecting one that also lends itself to some dark humour, which I always enjoy. I'd put this up with The Sound and the Fury in terms of my favourites, just because the tone of this is one that resonates well with me: the story is of the days up to and following the death of Addie Bundsen, and her family's mission to take her body miles down the road to bury her in Jefferson (MS?) as per her wishes. It's in many ways a southern Gothic novel, with the characters all having aspects of the grotesque, while having this strange sympathetic persona as well. I do find that Faulkner's prose takes me quite far out of the moment because it's so authorial and self-conscious, and this narrative is written in a very choppy way, with characters taking turns to tell the next part from their perspective. With some exceptions too, there's a fair similarity between them all so it feels like a clunky modernist device shoe-horned in rather than a really necessary way to give different aspects of the tale. I like the story, and I like the humour and I like the pathos, but I genuinely wish it were delivered in a more straightforward way, with a consistent voice and none of Faulkner's elusiveness. It just becomes an effort in reading and it could be more engaging. I guess Faulkner’s a writer who rewards closer reading, but also demands it.

36) Marcovaldo – Italo Calvino

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It took me a while to get into this, because the first couple of stories don't quite convey Calvino's wild imagination; plus the contemporary, everyday setting seems like a confined space for him to operate in. But a series of really excellent bits of satire of late twentieth century consumerism - starting with "The Moon and Gnac", about the bottom four letters of a neon sign advertising a cognac brand that outshines the night sky - gain some great momentum. His opening disclaimer that some of the stories are set in the Italy of neo-realist cinema helped me to acquaint myself with the settings and imagine Marcovaldo, the protagonist of the stories, as an impoverished de Sica character. There's a lot of really Calvino-esque savage irony about the big corporations and their various effects on ordinary people. The stories that don't have that satirical element - even those with humorous irony - are less successful, but in its best moments this can compete with the best moments of the Cosmicomics.

35) Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne

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This is an honest, good old-fashioned adventure story. My first time reading Verne and I'd have to describe his writing style as serviceable. I find him in many ways superior to the similarly minded H G Wells, simply because his characters here (with the exception of the preternaturally reliable Icelandic guide Hans) are both scientifically minded, so the action and dialogue are all rooted in scientific theory, while the action as they go down is all centred around their observations and taking note and arguing over theories about gravitation and geology, and so forth. At times it certainly feels a bit academic given how fantastical and far-fetched is the premise itself, although the action scenes are effective in keeping me engaged. It feels like Verne maybe ran out of imaginative steam at one point as well, because it feels like there’s more in the premise to explore but instead he finds an escape route (oh you better believe that pun was intended) and takes it quite quickly. There's definitely some interesting ideas and interesting descriptions (I was more nostalgic for Iceland though than completely engaged in the centre of the earth) but I don't know if it really explored all the ideas it could have and, like a lot of Wells that I’ve read, it fell a bit short.

34) Lost in a Good Book – Jasper Fforde

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More madcap fun from Fforde. It starts out intriguingly, with a whole lot of different storylines that follow on from The Eyre Affair (my #24 book of 2015), and it wasn't long before I started wondering what, ultimately, would turn out to be the plot here. Is it Thursday's internal affairs issues? The repeated plot to kill her? Something to do with her uncle's retirement? The trouble with the new, arguably improved, ending of Jane Eyre? It's both all and none of these, as it takes a couple of weird hairpin turns - first her husband is 'eradicated' from existence, then she is apprenticed to the enforcement of order & plot in the world of fiction under Miss Havisham (yes, that Miss Havisham). And, in short, the whole book becomes a bit of a hot mess about halfway through. As it turns out, part of the reason is that Fforde has no interest in tying up loose ends in this book; it's all part of an ongoing world and franchise creation, so only one of the plots (oh, I forgot to mention, the world is also going to end in a few days) is resolved by the end, and even the conclusion of that story isn't especially conclusive. it's fun, it's wildly imaginative, there are plenty of wry meta- literary and intertextual jokes (I'm so glad I'd read Great Expectations before this, as it would otherwise be completely spoiled for me), but it's an annoyingly convoluted read that feels unsatisfying because there's just too many story threads and not one feels like it's run its course. I know I'm meant to want to pick up the next in the series now, but I just wish he could have been more judicious in his plot construction so that some of those periphery threads didn't feel as intrusive and didn't muddle the faltering central plot.

33) The Idea of Perfection – Kate Grenville

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I don't really get the idea of this book. There's a certain sweetness to it, I guess, in some ways, but the sweetness that it has feels kind of assumed rather than earned. For one thing, the central relationship here, between two cityfolk sent to a small regional town for separate jobs, seems to centre around the personalities of awkwardness vs guardedness, and their connection feels like it's based on an inability to communicate. As such I kind of enjoyed the unassuming, unlikely connection that they make but I didn't ever really feel I understood their characters, and I didn't really get any depth to them. But then really the key character here really isn't a person but the small country town of Karakarook, the townspeople, how they interact and differ and how they all form a very tight community despite their differences. The subplot romance felt to me quite cynical and I also struggled to find closure in it as it didn't really grow into anything laudable, or for that matter, romantic. And in all honesty apart from it being part of the whole small town with no secrets and maybe a bit of the narrative of the ‘outsider’, it felt like a bit of an extraneous sideline that didn't need to be there. I feel like Grenville, despite her humanity, has a quite inefficient writing style, with a whole lot of description and elaboration that doesn't really serve an extrinsic purpose. I feel a lot like the sweetness exists purely in the plot itself and the way it's all told seems quite impersonal in the end.

32) The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith

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I picked this up on a whim; or rather, on a whim I was looking for bestselling 'popcorn' type books, so I was actually looking through Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, etc. but I didn't really know where to start with them (Clancy's most iconic film adaptations weren't there), but this one seemed like a nice obvious choice. I know this is particularly popular among my Mother and her tea set so I'll need to be careful in how I phrase that this book was rubbish, since she's the only reader of my blog. No, I am joking, it's not rubbish. What it is though is very populist and digestible. Firstly there's a niceness and a wholesomeness to all of this. Having said that, it's not like Mma Ramotswe inhabits a universe where bad stuff doesn't happen; this book contains murder, rape, domestic abuse, so it acknowledges bad things happening but never dwells on them, which is a very digestible way of reading about things so you can feel like you’re in the real world but just a particular real world that’s easy to handle and inhabit. Generally, too, it's all stuff that happened in the past, with the outlook now bright and full of the wisdom that comes with experience so it almost makes rape, domestic abuse into an optimistic thing since after it’s all happened everybody becomes a stronger and wiser person. It's also digestible because it's essentially a collection of short detective stories, so you don't need to give it full attention to follow twists and turns; each mystery is solved promptly and satisfactorily in a half-hour prime time story length. And the one continuous storyline and the bigger, less comical and digestible crime that runs through the book (spoiler alert) ends up being wrapped up in a very nice, wholesome way where the good people thrive and the bad people get punished but also punished in a non-vengeful, wholesome kind of way. It is enjoyable though, so even though I look on it as clearly devourable by the masses and thus simplistic, it's undeniably entertaining, it's fun, and it's uplifting as well. So I don't begrudge this anything (except for maybe the very end, which seems like a strange and abrupt character turn and I don't really agree with where it goes; it feels like a cop to populism and it could have been as uplifting without that particular outcome) and I'm pleased t   o have read it, but I do like to be challenged a bit more in my reading so I won't be rushing to get more Alexander McCall Smith.

31) Minority Report – Philip K Dick

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This book – and this is a criticism of the editors/publishers and marketing team in particular, not the author - gives a quite explicit, unmistakeable impression that Minority Report is one long novel, despite it being a short story and this book being a collection thereof: there's no mention of any other stories anywhere on the cover, and the entire blurb is entirely and explicitly about the story of Minority Report. The first clue comes from the contents page, but even then the story titles could well be chapter titles. Anyway, it's a minor annoyance but it definitely felt like I had been duped a bit, when the entire story of Minority Report finished and suddenly I was in a different world. I also was a bit shaken by it, since I know the film so well and the story here launched so quickly into the heart of a slightly different story; I felt it had a lot of development to go through and the pace was so fast – since it only had 40 pages to run rather than the 200 that the book cover and blurb made me expect. Anyway, that out of the way, there's plenty of good stories here. The collection also contains We Will Remember it for You Wholesale, the basis for Total Recall (I didn’t read that far down the contents page or it would have clicked for me earlier that this wasn’t a novel), which is also very entertaining, and for a first time read I enjoyed War Game, a story about a team of toy testers who investigate alien constructions to ensure they're safe/suitable for earth children. Some of them have a better world than others, and I also feel like Dick's imagination and mise-en-scene is far better than his writing generally, and even in some cases his science (there are far more mentions of 'tape' in these stories than even now resembles reality at all). Stories like What the Dead Man Said had potential but I felt the story leapt ahead clumsily with gaps in the plot filled with really clunky exposition-via-internal monologue, while Oh to be a Blobel feels like a really awkward attempt at a sci-fi comedy. His characters and dialogue are all just tools, so the success ultimately just comes down to how engaging the machinations of the plot are. And while Minority Report - the film - made countless improvements on both the plot twists and the world/mechanics of the story itself, I also feel it's the most successful and philosophically intriguing of the worlds created here, although editorially the volume is well book-ended with the two well-known and engaging premises. I wouldn't say I can easily imagine film adaptations of many of the others (according to the Goodreads link, three have been adapted although I'm unsure what the third is).