Books of 2017 Part 5: Bottom 11

51) Travesties – Tom Stoppard

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I read this as a short, light read because Bec refers to it as one of her favourite plays. I can’t help but feel that her own experience, of seeing it performed live before reading it, enhanced her enjoyment of it. For one thing, Stoppard is incredibly prescriptive about the stage directions and leaves very little in the script to chance or the artistic interpretation of the director, which means that performance-by-performance would be pretty close to Stoppard’s original vision, but in reading alone there’s a great deal of work that you have to do to envision it. I also feel it would be very much more fun in performance than its intrinsic fun here, because it's quite chaotic and haphazard on the page. There are some amusing jokes and some amusing post-modern intertextuality, at the expense of dadaism, Bolshevism and Joycean nonsense, all of which I'm a fan of (the mocking thereof I mean) but ultimately this felt quite abrupt, and I'm unsure what the real point of it was, because the 'story' seemed so threadbare and flimsy.

52) How to Be Both – Ali Smith

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This is a weird read. It's engaging enough, but I really struggle to work out the point of it. For one thing, it's two stories that share a flimsy and ultimately pointless connection, spanning about seven centuries of time. The first part is the story of a preternaturally talented painter in Italian renaissance times, commissioned to paint a fresco by the newly ordained duke, and his dissatisfaction with his pay. It's a rambling and directionless story, not helped by the jumping about in time and the reversion to stream of consciousness. Then it (to me at least) abruptly leaps ahead to the story of a 16-year-old girl in Cambridge, coming to terms with the premature death of her mother (who once took her to Italy to see a painting by the painter in the first part - that's the only tangible link between the two stories). It feels like there's some decent observations here, about grief and family, about doing what's expected or choosing to subvert that, but I find the whole loosely-connected completely-disparate stories thing quite a lazy narrative device, and I'm frequently disappointed by their authors not doing enough to synthesise the parts into a far larger exploration of themes across narrative universes. David Mitchell provided the most overt but even flimsiest use of this device in Cloud Atlas, and Ali Smith disappointed me here too. It seems like a simpler task to do here too, but she creates a tentative thematic connection at best, and ultimately both stories - which end up feeling like two stories rather than two parts of one story - just pulled up short.

53) Excession – Iain M Banks

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I feel that Banks has an astounding imagination but his weakness is character, and I really felt it for most of this book, as we're introduced to so many individual characters and protagonists and the narrative flits quite sporadically between them. With so many in the cast, none of them are particularly well defined except by what they do and how they influence the plot (which is very convoluted anyway). As such I felt a lot of it really passing me by in the way that Gibson’s Neuromancer (My #45 book of 2013) did - which is not what I expect from an engaging writer like Banks, even in full spaceships-with-consciousness sci-fi mode. The last quarter or so of the book, when it reaches its culmination and revelation, I guess is far more engaging, and the characters that have generally just been insubstantial names on a page became more relatable because of how they confront the circumstances. But I do feel a lot of this could have been greatly pared down or characters just better drawn out, because otherwise the construction of the narrative is imaginative and certainly curious if not engaging.

54) The Island of Dr Moreau – H G Wells

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Typical Wells stuff; this possibly might have been more interesting to read if I didn't know most of the premise upfront. The fact that I know the premise means any sense of suspense or surprise is removed. And as with The Invisible Man (My #54 book of 2015), I feel like Wells doesn't fully explicate or explore the philosophical ramifications of what Moreau is doing - besides the disturbing inhumanity of the fact that he’s knowingly inflicting pain on living creatures. I feel like it's a short and somewhat sharp story that could be quite affecting the first time around, but it's a bit of a blip on the emotional radar. The last couple of pages, after Prendick returns to civilisation and reflects on the animal nature of some corners of humanity, is probably the best passage in the book, and really could have been foreshadowed and explored more in the preceding prose.

55) The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

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This is a very weird read, as well as a frustrating and unsatisfying one. Vonnegut obviously writes in one style, which is irreverent and caustically satirical, and while this is no exception and is quite successful, it also just misses the gravitas that Breakfast of Champions (My #17 of 2015) or Slaughterhouse-Five (My #14 of 2012) has. The main issue is a lack of identification with the characters. The protagonist, Malachi Constant, is not only a very unsympathetic figure (which is entirely the point) but fairly early on, his memory is erased and his personality hitherto becomes irrelevant. More to the point, he effectively has no agency since the whole point of the story is that his life is manipulated and controlled by a second figure, Niles Winston Rumfoord, who by virtue of a cosmic accident, experiences time simultaneously rather than linearly. Therefore we already know everything that will happen to our protagonist, and everything he does is controlled or manipulated by Rumfoord. The trouble is we don't really get any glimpses of Rumfoord's psychology or motivations until the very end of the book, and so I felt very cast adrift throughout as it's not at all clear what the point of it all is. Vonnegut's world building here is very haphazard, and I feel like there's a fair bit of redundant storyline that could have either been dispensed with, or expanded upon quite considerably to flesh out the characters and the universe a lot more, and make the final denouement far more effective than simply tying up a lot of very loose and very convoluted plot strings. There's always a certain fatalism and nihilism to Vonnegut's writing, that nothing matters and there is no higher purpose, but here it's perhaps both its most stark and most blunt iteration, so much so that the machinations of the plot felt like a giant trick, and at the end of it I just felt a bit cheated. Some fine wit throughout but an over-ambitious and unfulfilling read.

56) The Power House – John Buchan

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Thought I might read some John Buchan (beyond seeing Hitchcock’s adaptation of The 39 Steps), but this feels like an odd first choice. What I gleaned from the introduction (which effectively starts with the phrase "congratulations reader, you've chosen Buchan's worst novel") this was sort of a late-career work that's less esteemed. The main thing I got from this is it feels like the sort of thing Conservatives read for escapism. Our hero here is a very upper-crust Barrister, Eton and Oxford-educated (but of course) who wanders around investigating an anarchist spy conspiracy because one of his old chums is caught up in it and in danger. He's the type of character that an old Tory would want to read about - heroic but stoic, with a big touch of that old nostalgic charm and whimsy. It's ultimately a bit of harmless escapist fun, but the narrative did kind of feel a bit comically stodgy and toffee-nosed in the way he just casually drops knowing comments to his readers like "you know those rococo early Georgian rooms of *insert fancy hotel here*" as if he's speaking exclusively to other twits in his set. This felt self-conscious as soon as I noticed it and it ultimately just added a bit of puffery to what's ultimately a bit insubstantial and inconsequential anyway.

57) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – J K Rowling

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I gave up on this, and reading the whole series (though my ambition to do the latter was never high) a long time ago, so it's a slight cheat to count this as one of my books this year when all I did was pick it up from where I’d left it, and finish the latter and more interesting bits. But look, the film adaptation of this is the weakest asset in the entire franchise and universe so it took a lot to pick this up again because I really didn't care. The whole Lockhart subplot and Harry's sophomoric issues just feel tired, so it really needs the last 50 pages, with the mystery unravelling and his encounter with Tom Riddle to save it. I think it's generally regarded as the weakest (and Chris Columbus of course is the weakest of all directors ever) so I'm not saying anything innovative by saying it’s the weakest film or the weakest book in the series, but yeah honestly the series almost felt now like it was already getting a bit tired, and it needed something to light the fire underneath it again. It does too much of repeating the same motifs of the first book without adding nearly enough to the mythology. I think the greatest value this book serves is to underline how reinvigorating the premise and execution of Prisoner of Azkaban is.

58) Youth – J M Coetzee

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Bit of an odd one, this; it feels like the lion’s share of Coetzee's writing here is framing questions that our protagonist is posing, without ever really answering them. In many ways I felt it was possibly semi-autobiographical, but one that's still ongoing, like an unfinished journey of self-discovery. Our protagonist first wants nothing except to escape from South Africa to the mythological metropolis that is London, where he hopes to inspire his poetry. But then his poetry takes a backseat to the necessities of life: work, money, putting food on the table. He makes clumsy attempt after clumsy attempt to follow his poetic idols, questioning whether poverty and misery are necessary for creating art, but ultimately our drab, uninspiring hero fails in art because he's dull and lacking in passion. I think Coetzee writes a bit inefficiently; a lot of his sentences are needlessly long and elaborate, and because we're ultimately left with an inconclusive story and a whole lot of unanswered questions, I found it was in the end quite a dawdling tale. There's some intrigue there in the disconnect between art and the quotidian, but it's not a ground-breaking work on any of its themes.

59) Incompetence – Rob Grant

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This is a bit of harmless fun, with some really funny moments that are typical Rob Grant. It has some real Grant-esque sort of ranting anger at the system (from what I’ve gleaned from all my Red Dwarf fandom, Grant was the angry, bitter part of the Grant Naylor partnership) and it's really more speculative satire about the politics of Europe and the fetishisation of stupidity than it is any sort of sci-fi (even though there's a sort of "novel set in the future" sense to it). There are times when his writing is really lazy though, where he clearly wants to get to the next plot point without having to expend effort so he’ll just glibly jump to the denouement of a convoluted sequence in a sentence or two, and yet there's this interminable 40-odd page action sequence of our protagonist jumping onto a moving train and trying to get into a locked carriage. Amusing non-payoff to it in the end, but it's clear there are things Grant wanted to write about and things he didn't, and the whole thing is quite hit and miss as a result for me, since there are similarly things I care about reading and things I care less about.

60) Emma – Jane Austen

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I felt I needed to read another Austen, as I'd only read one up to this point, and this seemed obvious simply because I hadn't actually gone through the story before in any form, and pretty much all I knew about the story was the plot of Clueless. Also I was warned against reading this by my friend Julz (who studied this/Clueless in year 12), and I can see why it would be hated to study. Basically it's quite a boring book. I know it's effectively a comedy, and the interest in the story comes from so many misunderstandings and mistaken affection and so forth, but it really dragged simply because there's no conflict, and no drama. I think maybe there just aren't any particularly engaging characters, either. I mean there's the loquacious miss Bates, and the supercilious Mrs Elton later, but apart from them everybody is varying amounts of charming and well-mannered and sensible and what it's really missing is an engaging antagonist. Pride & Prejudice has a number of them, including probably one of my favourite characters Miss Bingley, and it's engaging because the conflict and the drama and the stakes feel so high (since it’s not just about love and marriage, but about social disgrace and impending poverty). There are no stakes whatsoever in this book, and I feel it could have been a lot shorter, with a couple of the characters and their trajectories being ultimately unnecessary for the final resolutions. Like Mr/Mrs Elton really don't need to be so prominent, nor do Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. It just seems like a long, long portrait of mild-mannered rich people. Doesn't sound very entertaining when you put it like that, and it's not.

61) The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts – Louis de Bernières

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I didn't realise until I'd almost finished this that it was de Bernières' debut novel, but it shows. Where Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (My #45 book of 2016 – yes apparently I’m not much of a LdB fan) had a good coherence and structure to its storyline even while the author meandered off the main plot quite a lot, this is completely and over-ambitiously haphazard. The title in itself is complete nonsense, as Don Emmanuel's nether parts hardly even figure into the story, and the 'war,' such as it is, is just one part of this large multi-tendrilled splat of different storylines. There are other problems with it but the main thing is that, apart from a black-and-white distinction between very on-the-nose irreproachably good and irredeemably evil people, there's really no discernible protagonists rather than a cast of various people. And de Bernières just loves to draw it out into larger geopolitical narratives and explorations, but in doing so throughout just helps to lose the focus of what could have been a serviceable narrative about the little guys bringing down the corrupt military machine. Instead there’s pointless ornamental diversions into international diplomacy, alchemy experimentation, and of course sex escapades and the fetishisation of violence. And this is where de Bernières loses my sympathy entirely. In Señor Vivo the violence was graphic and deeply unsettling, particularly as it was juxtaposed with this light-hearted, tongue in cheek magical realism. But here it seems relentlessly brutal and pornographic, where you can sense the author enjoying the excruciating detailing of these barbaric acts, all so that he can wreak a similarly barbaric revenge on the perpetrators at the end (well, not including 50 sprawling pages of unnecessary afterthought resolution), which acts are of course understandable and justified because they're done by the 'good guys' against the 'bad guys'. It's just an incoherent and largely amoral stream of waffle that wants to be bigger than it ends up being, where it could have focused more intimately on the psychology of its core characters and made for a lightly cynical satire (which it is, unsuccessfully, as well as a whole bunch of other unrelated unsuccessful things).