Books of 2019 Part 4: Bottom 14
41) The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick
Despite kicking off the bottom end of my list, this was a pretty interesting read. Mostly historically, though as it's very early Dick and introduces and explores a number of concepts that would become more central to his later work. The eponymous Jones is afflicted with a disorder whereby he sees exactly a year into the future, while the "Fedgov" authority struggles to maintain order in an uncertain world that is being apparently colonised by an amorphous alien life form. So Jones is actually called a "precog" in prolepsis to a concept that Dick - and the film adapters - would explore in far greater depth in Minority Report. But the intrigue in that there are primitive forms of lots of Dick concepts here is also its biggest weakness, in that there's quite a lot of interesting sci-fi questions being raised but none of them is really explored in great depth. There's questions of cult worship, intergalactic exploration and colonisation, alien invasion and of course predeterminism. It's obvious that the writer is a sharp observer of humanity and the limits of our capacity on earth, but he spreads his ideas pretty thinly here across a handful of fairly glib characters and haphazard plot jumping. It's still an interesting read though, and not just because of its place in early Dick lore, just not very polished.
42) Adam, One Afternoon - Italo Calvino
This was another collection of good, engaging stories from Calvino, and it felt a bit better curated than some of the other more haphazard collections I've read in recent memory. There's a thematic resemblance between a lot of these with common threads being woven, like class consciousness and the cognitive and habitual disconnect between the "haves" and the "have nots" as well as struggles between the poorer classes and the authorities charged with the task of maintaining the status quo. The best tales are in the middle here, replete with Calvino's signature irony and a great deal of surrealism as well. The best ones - Animal Wood, and Going to Headquarters - have traces of my favourite Calvino short story from the Cosmicomics (The Chase) without quite reaching its heights of sheer imagination and lateral reality. It's not a flawless read with a lot of the stories falling a bit flat and glib, but the explorations of his pet themes are heartfelt and amusing and at their best these are excellent entertainment.
43) The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
I don't know if I can really count this as a book either, since it's a forty-odd page short story appended in the same volume as The Third Man, as another example of Greene's work having been written for/adapted to the big screen. Still, this was a meaty and enjoyable short experience. The main character of Phillip is an intriguingly constructed portrait of naivety (what is it with naive protagonists called Phillip this year), mostly disguising itself in innocence for the purposes of the story, but unravelling later as completely guileless, ruining the pragmatism otherwise apparent in the situation. Greene introduces through this vehicle of naivety his usual moral concerns about the 'right thing' to do and how moral and legal justice should be served, but doesn't really qqqq (sorry, those four letters courtesy of my three-year-old) wrestle with them here. There's no time for that in the story, he just puts the ambivalence in plain sight and allows us to draw from it what we will, or simply be amused or bemused by the way it all pans out. I was largely amused, but that's just the cynic in me.
44) The Age of Magic - Ben Okri
I read this only in a couple of days because it's a pretty quickfire set of prose bursts that doesn't go deep into description or reflection, mainly because the whole thing is just description/reflection through strange plot points. It reminds me a bit of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) in that it's essentially a long dreamscape flitting in and out of reality and different colours and textures of fantasy and surrealism. There are two reasons it falls well short of Ishiguro's benchmark: beyond the fact that Okri writes a little more clunkily than Ishiguro (no offence intended; in my opinion almost everybody in the history of the world writes clunkily compared with Ishiguro), this is a shorter and therefore more shallow book, that doesn't explore the fantasy spaces it created to their full potential. But also it didn't quite have the grounding in reality: this whole thing is a bit of a magical realist landscape with the focus on magical rather than real, and as such it wasn't quite as immersive an experience. It ends up being an engaging and diverting read, but I find it less memorable because I can't hang any of my real life experiences or feelings onto it. So while I was moved while reading, it hasn't really stuck around in my memory or thoughts that long.
45) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
This was my first book of the year. I picked this up knowing the basic premise of the story from reading plot descriptions of the film adaptation: young girl dies and spends the story watching over the people she left behind. For some reason I wasn't actually prepared for the fairly graphic rape and murder in the first chapter, despite this. And it's a little weirdly structured as a book because of this, because as the inciting incident it's also very much the climax of the book's action: everything that precipitates from it becomes a 'coping with grief' melodrama. The sister Lindsey and her budding romance with the motorcycle-riding boy with a heart of gold and zero personality; the father and his fragile and unstable obsession with his dead daughter; the younger brother, the boy who the dead girl loved, the strange poet-artist waif girl who loved the dead girl. The story takes a number of different circuitous routes as the dead girl watches from the afterlife, and it largely just circles around itself without landing on a point. The fact that the mother leaves the family and moves across the other side of the country as her way of liberating herself both from her grief and the repression she felt in the life she was living... it becomes the ultimate crisis at the heart of this story, so the fact that it resolves by her coming back and resuming life with the family, well it just feels like a long, arduous, albeit interesting journey to wind up where you started and realise you hadn't actually gone that far. The whole death thing is an interesting framing device but I just don't really feel Sebold provoked all that much thought or really explored the themes in any immense depth. Just used it as a little thought experiment that isn't actually that novel anyway.
46) The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie
I picked this up as part of a redress to feeling like I was reading a lot of male authors, forgetting momentarily that I'd already read another Agatha Christie earlier in the year. This was kind of an interesting later-seeming Christie, in that it goes quite big in conception, and explores some deconstruction of crime fiction genre conventions. In particular, this crime is certainly not a contained, isolated one but a big series of attention-seeking murders that also follow a bizarrely arbitrary order (alphabetical). In terms of the classic "did you guess whodunnit", this subverts that or makes it bigger in the sense of it's not just whodunnit but also why and a bit of how (although the murder methods themselves are clear-cut, it's more about selection of victim). I certainly realised early on that at least one of the murders was not arbitrarily chosen although I, like many of the characters, guessed that it might be the B murder (as it feels different from the others) that was the deliberate one. Ultimately this book didn't quite click entirely for me because the scheme of the murderer is really quite excessively intricate and well-plotted. The dates, names, methods, times, to kill four separate people; but also not get seen and also have a fall-guy planned and manipulated and a whole back story for said fall-guy, it all ends up a bit too far-fetched in the end, especially combined with the fairly contrived premise of Poirot being sent taunting letters announcing the murders in advance. It's an enjoyable bit of farcical escapism, but little more than quite convoluted entertainment in the end.
47) Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau
I know nothing about Cocteau the novelist (nor even that he wrote novels), and for that matter not much about Cocteau the filmmaker. But this novel reads precisely as I'd expect coming from Cocteau the filmmaker. For someone whose films are so obviously laden with imagery, where there's little subtlety and not much room for character development beyond their plot arcs, this novel is exactly that kind of output. There's a small cast of characters here - Paul the supposedly invalid boy and his sister Elisabeth are orphaned and left with a seemingly endless pot of money when their mother passes, and various friends latch onto their obscene wealth and get caught up in a web of romantic intent and selfish jealousy. It's all in a restricted setting, mostly in one house, and the various characters all have their own wants and desires and motivations. But none of them has a voice; the dominant and ultimately solo voice here is that of Cocteau, with all of the narrative effort put into this rhapsodic eulogising of the human condition, all very poetic and flamboyant with a necessary touch of cynicism. The book itself and the machinations of the plot are not poorly handled but there's little in the way of subtlety or unspoken themes or character psychology. Whatever else Cocteau may have written, this feels exactly like the novel written by a heavy-handed filmmaker who is concerned about making visual poetry and art more than telling a story.
48) Foundation - Isaac Asimov
When I got this from the library, I didn't realise that it’s at least part three in a chronology (although unsure of publication dates) but knowing vaguely of Asimov’s “Foundation” series and feeling like it could be a leaping off point. I feel like it is, but partially because this isn’t really a standalone story but more a series of vignettes set centuries apart but all tied to the origin story that starts this book. Because of the unconnectedness, this has mixed success, with the stories being well constructed but some just taking longer to draw in my sympathies to the right characters and get caught up in their struggle. It also conspicuously stands as part of a broader narrative with no actual conclusion here, and feels like a writer with a few story ideas jotting them all down and then publishing them rather than giving me the suspense and immediacy to want to go and read more. It’s more an “if you really feel like reading more of these unconnected stories, maybe pick another up, but no pressure”. It’s otherwise got interesting things to say about humanity, politics, and the historical narrative we construct, but it touches on them mostly without a great deal of elaboration.
49) The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
#ADickensAYear
This was a fairly long slog, to be honest. It's Dickens for a start, so the language is always a bit of a florid barrier. But the main issue here is that it's all a bit haphazard in the multiple short story narratives it tells and there's not a whole lot at stake. What makes Dickens his best is when he can use his florid language and archetypal character construction to elevate the drama at the right moments - so the sacrifice at the end of A Tale of Two Cities (my #27 book of 2014 and the first Dickens I ever read to kick off this yearly custom) for instance, or the revelation of Pip's benefactor in Great Expectations (my #4 book of 2017), those are some sublime moments of narrative pathos that have been earned with all the hard work from author (and frankly, reader too) upfront. There's no intent to make something like this here, as it's established as a series of light-hearted comic skits and doesn't attempt anything more than that. I'm conscious that as Dickens' first novel, there's a great deal of adept writing skill evident here from the outset; he still has some marvellous turns of phrase scattered throughout. But it's light, entertaining fare, broadly comedic and even farcical at times. It feels quite influential too, in that a number of the subplots here - particularly the Bardle Pickwick affair and trial - that would go on to become staples of 80s and 90s sitcoms: those awkward infuriating episodes of comedy where the whole plot would fall over if the two protagonists would just have an honest conversations without projecting so much subtext into each others' dialogue that isn't actually there. So it's admirable in the sense that it feels like early modern comedy, and there are definitely some amusing, entertaining parts that actually gave me a chuckle. But there are lots of side characters I don't care about at all, not to mention the fact that the main figures are not particularly drawn out to be fully-fleshed and sympathetic either (and we rely on Dickens' constant assurance of their being worthy, or likeable, rather than their actions and words doing the work for us). And ultimately there's just a lot to get through in this with only mixed success and no grand through-line to keep me interested. So while some episodes are more entertaining, as a whole work it felt long and hard work.
50) Goodbye, Vitamin - Rachel Khong
As with The ABC Murders, this was part of my little haul of female writers to redress a stretch of male-only reads, but the other reason I was drawn to this is because it was fairly short. And look, it's OK. But for a book about a daughter's year dealing with her Dad's progressing Alzheimer's, it ends up falling short on delivering the pathos I'd hoped for. It's told with this sort of relatable humour, but it also falls short on really being comedic. The style is a sort of jumping around diary of personal reflection and memories, which feels very trendy and 'now' but it doesn't really deliver much in the way of consistent themes, and doesn't manage to weave a larger more complex patchwork out of these smaller bits and pieces, so it ends up just feeling like a series of disconnected sketches. Moreover it feels a bit lazy that rather than drawing out interesting passages of our narrator's life in detail, it just offers short pithy observations and then moves on. The key failing is that it feels like it should be quite personal, almost like it's semi-autobiographical or a fictionalised version of a struggle that Khong has dealt with (especially as it's as much about her dealing with her relationship breakup as it is about her father's Alzheimers) but she never gives her protagonist much of a psychology; she has that annoying blank slate mentality in that she's mostly reactive to her circumstances and doesn't explore her own feelings in depth. It's an easy book to read, in that her voice is personable and pleasant but beyond being easy it's not very insightful or particularly humorous. I feel like there's potential in Khong as a writer, but in this book she never manages to bring it to its fullest.
51) The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
I honestly feel like I can copy and paste my thoughts for every H G Wells book into each new one, because although I keep reading them, they all have the same positives and negatives, and it’s in pretty stark contrast in this example. What he excels in is the speculative thinking, and the relating of that to interesting philosophical questions about humanity and the future. He’s also got a close attention to detail, so the descriptions here of the invading martians, their war machines and the red weed they propagate the earth with, they’re all quite vivid. But what he struggles with, to my mind, is storytelling. So the care he takes in describing the invaders, that’s good in a sense that it leaves nothing to the imagination, but it’s bad precisely because it leaves nothing to the imagination. He can’t show an invading force and allow the reader’s judgement to fill in the blanks, without telling us everything he needs us to know and which only some of it we actually need to. His narrative descriptions as well follow a line of telling us what everybody’s feeling, rather than painting a picture of the scene and letting us feel that ourselves. At least, that was my experience, like I was reading a technical journal throughout rather than a dramatic portrayal of an alien invasion. And as such, I didn’t feel very much emotional resonance at all despite my interest in the questions being posed. And that, ladies and gents, is pretty much word for word my review of every Wells books I’ve read, too. I'll see if you notice next time when I literally just copy and paste this.
52) Mama Tandoori - Ernest van der Kwast
This was another book I read mainly because it was short, but also because the blurbs and endorsements made it sound funny. I guess it’s a particular type of humour that doesn’t particularly appeal to me, because I can certainly see why people would be amused, but I just found van der Kwast’s abusive, incorrigible mother completely unpleasant to read. But the main question I was left with, in the end, was why was he writing this? The larger than life but also unsuited for living characters that populate his life remind me of Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle parents a bit, but Walls’ narrative had far more of a reconciling, cathartic tone as she grew up trying to come to terms with her parents. There is a slight realisation/catharsis later in this book later where Ernest discovers a kind of “what if” scenario that helps him sympathise further with his mother and father, but just structurally there wasn’t any foreshadowing of that direction, it just felt like a disconnected series of vignettes about his eccentric family with no guiding narrative. The pathos and humour was a bit distant because I wasn’t sure how Ernest felt about it all and therefore where he was taking his feelings by telling this story.
53) A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
This was a bit of a mistake to read, as I picked it up to see what else Mantel has written beyond her Thomas Cromwell chronicles of history brought to life. Unfortunately I didn't really look at what this was (in case the blurb spoiled MAJOR PLOT POINTS like the blurb of A Passage to India did) and it turned out to be more of exactly the same, but about the French revolution. Her documentarian aesthetic is really out in force here as she mixes historical documents and published materials with ordinary prose and, when the style feels more appropriate, dramatic dialogue form. The issue with this is that she gets bogged down in details throughout this long-winded account of the minutiae involved in a tumultuous time, where instability and large political forces should dictate rapid-fire change and action. But instead of allowing the speed of these events to dictate a more active pace she concerns herself with the quotidian activities of minor historical figures and all the conversations in intricate pointillist detail. I found that by the time of Bring Up the Bodies in particular she'd sharpened her writing a fair bit so the pace of the events as we know them dictated the pace of the story and the authorial licence to draw the full picture is used more efficiently. The fact is there is an utterly compelling narrative hidden here underneath all the bloated longueurs. There are times when she draws entertaining comedy and even farce out of the situation of amateurs floundering around at the mercy of history, and the tragic climax of the book is completely compelling. It just feels like a bit of a shame that she can't be more efficient in telling these details; more of a focused psychological narrative, less of the lurid soap-opera dramas. Just clean up the unnecessary exposition and you have a compelling human drama. Because it's already there, along with about half a book that needn't accompany it.
54) Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
I feel bad about having this book at the bottom of the pile, since I only read it because my wife wanted to read it, did, and recommended I read it as well (although, in retrospect, I think it was more so we could discuss and agree on its shortcomings). But the truth is this book ended up annoying me more than it really should have. I know I should assess it purely on its own merits, but the fact is this isn't a book that rewards you with extra details after watching the film adaptation. More importantly, the movie improved this story and the characters in more than a dozen ways. Kwan obviously has good first-hand insight into the world of rich extravagance in Singapore and among the Singapore Chinese community, so he's at his strongest when making commentary on that, on the classist nature of the society, and the interplay between traditional Chinese values (that can be potentially classist anyway) and the new-world snobbishness that emerges from great wealth and privilege. But that commentary was also in the film, while his frequent longueurs naming brands and designers and describing decor and furnishings, well that's just not really my thing although I can appreciate them in their finery in visual form (again, a la the film). The key weakness though is that Kwan doesn't write good or interesting female characters. Rachel is the only figure who's consistent between both versions, mainly because she's the relatable 'fish out of water' conduit into this world, and I think Kwan channels a lot of his own personal shock and awe through her. But Astrid in the book is a weak and fairly pitiful damsel in distress type, who has none of the pragmatic capabilities given to her in the film. She also felt like far more of a sideplot in the book because she doesn't really integrate as much with the wedding party and its festivities (in one way because the film dispensed with the character of Sophie, who is Rachel's comforter at the bachelorette weekend, and cleverly used Astrid for that role instead - this works a lot better with Astrid as a cunning pragmatist), so it felt like a subplot shoehorned in to deal so heavily with Astrid and her husband's infidelity. But the main annoyance here is Eleanor. Firstly there's the fact that the best scene in the film (I don't need to mention what it is because everybody who's seen the film should agree on it) is not in this book, but mainly because there'd be no place for it here. In the book Eleanor is a superficial, petty and ultimately pointless character. She doesn't hold any influence on other characters here, and is not central to any of the conflict. Sure, her entire story arc is trying to break up Nick and Rachel, but her motivations are at best unclear, and at worst just bitchy and petty. In the film they make her a principled, consistent and believable character whose conflict with Rachel is far more nuanced, practical and complex. In the book she's just an older and less believable version of the young catty spoiled girls like Francesca and Mandy. And I found this really lazy characterising. I can see why you'd read this in isolation and feel there's plenty of fodder for a hit movie. But the film only diverges from this in ways that make the story, the relationships and the social commentary significantly better. Apart from that, it offers the same basic story and themes but the book doesn't explore them in anywhere near as interesting a depth as the film. I am conscious I'd be less annoyed at this if I didn't read this after seeing the film, but realistically I can also sense that this really wouldn't be my sort of thing on its own anyway. In that hypothetical scenario where I read this first, rather than being annoyed at the poorly written characters like Eleanor and Astrid, I'd still just find them pointless and shallow. The film just served to starkly define how superficial Kwan's cast is, and how his writing is focused far more on the wealth porn than on the more interesting cultural clash and observations on the nature of family.
Despite kicking off the bottom end of my list, this was a pretty interesting read. Mostly historically, though as it's very early Dick and introduces and explores a number of concepts that would become more central to his later work. The eponymous Jones is afflicted with a disorder whereby he sees exactly a year into the future, while the "Fedgov" authority struggles to maintain order in an uncertain world that is being apparently colonised by an amorphous alien life form. So Jones is actually called a "precog" in prolepsis to a concept that Dick - and the film adapters - would explore in far greater depth in Minority Report. But the intrigue in that there are primitive forms of lots of Dick concepts here is also its biggest weakness, in that there's quite a lot of interesting sci-fi questions being raised but none of them is really explored in great depth. There's questions of cult worship, intergalactic exploration and colonisation, alien invasion and of course predeterminism. It's obvious that the writer is a sharp observer of humanity and the limits of our capacity on earth, but he spreads his ideas pretty thinly here across a handful of fairly glib characters and haphazard plot jumping. It's still an interesting read though, and not just because of its place in early Dick lore, just not very polished.
42) Adam, One Afternoon - Italo Calvino
This was another collection of good, engaging stories from Calvino, and it felt a bit better curated than some of the other more haphazard collections I've read in recent memory. There's a thematic resemblance between a lot of these with common threads being woven, like class consciousness and the cognitive and habitual disconnect between the "haves" and the "have nots" as well as struggles between the poorer classes and the authorities charged with the task of maintaining the status quo. The best tales are in the middle here, replete with Calvino's signature irony and a great deal of surrealism as well. The best ones - Animal Wood, and Going to Headquarters - have traces of my favourite Calvino short story from the Cosmicomics (The Chase) without quite reaching its heights of sheer imagination and lateral reality. It's not a flawless read with a lot of the stories falling a bit flat and glib, but the explorations of his pet themes are heartfelt and amusing and at their best these are excellent entertainment.
43) The Fallen Idol - Graham Greene
I don't know if I can really count this as a book either, since it's a forty-odd page short story appended in the same volume as The Third Man, as another example of Greene's work having been written for/adapted to the big screen. Still, this was a meaty and enjoyable short experience. The main character of Phillip is an intriguingly constructed portrait of naivety (what is it with naive protagonists called Phillip this year), mostly disguising itself in innocence for the purposes of the story, but unravelling later as completely guileless, ruining the pragmatism otherwise apparent in the situation. Greene introduces through this vehicle of naivety his usual moral concerns about the 'right thing' to do and how moral and legal justice should be served, but doesn't really qqqq (sorry, those four letters courtesy of my three-year-old) wrestle with them here. There's no time for that in the story, he just puts the ambivalence in plain sight and allows us to draw from it what we will, or simply be amused or bemused by the way it all pans out. I was largely amused, but that's just the cynic in me.
44) The Age of Magic - Ben Okri
I read this only in a couple of days because it's a pretty quickfire set of prose bursts that doesn't go deep into description or reflection, mainly because the whole thing is just description/reflection through strange plot points. It reminds me a bit of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) in that it's essentially a long dreamscape flitting in and out of reality and different colours and textures of fantasy and surrealism. There are two reasons it falls well short of Ishiguro's benchmark: beyond the fact that Okri writes a little more clunkily than Ishiguro (no offence intended; in my opinion almost everybody in the history of the world writes clunkily compared with Ishiguro), this is a shorter and therefore more shallow book, that doesn't explore the fantasy spaces it created to their full potential. But also it didn't quite have the grounding in reality: this whole thing is a bit of a magical realist landscape with the focus on magical rather than real, and as such it wasn't quite as immersive an experience. It ends up being an engaging and diverting read, but I find it less memorable because I can't hang any of my real life experiences or feelings onto it. So while I was moved while reading, it hasn't really stuck around in my memory or thoughts that long.
45) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
This was my first book of the year. I picked this up knowing the basic premise of the story from reading plot descriptions of the film adaptation: young girl dies and spends the story watching over the people she left behind. For some reason I wasn't actually prepared for the fairly graphic rape and murder in the first chapter, despite this. And it's a little weirdly structured as a book because of this, because as the inciting incident it's also very much the climax of the book's action: everything that precipitates from it becomes a 'coping with grief' melodrama. The sister Lindsey and her budding romance with the motorcycle-riding boy with a heart of gold and zero personality; the father and his fragile and unstable obsession with his dead daughter; the younger brother, the boy who the dead girl loved, the strange poet-artist waif girl who loved the dead girl. The story takes a number of different circuitous routes as the dead girl watches from the afterlife, and it largely just circles around itself without landing on a point. The fact that the mother leaves the family and moves across the other side of the country as her way of liberating herself both from her grief and the repression she felt in the life she was living... it becomes the ultimate crisis at the heart of this story, so the fact that it resolves by her coming back and resuming life with the family, well it just feels like a long, arduous, albeit interesting journey to wind up where you started and realise you hadn't actually gone that far. The whole death thing is an interesting framing device but I just don't really feel Sebold provoked all that much thought or really explored the themes in any immense depth. Just used it as a little thought experiment that isn't actually that novel anyway.
46) The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie
I picked this up as part of a redress to feeling like I was reading a lot of male authors, forgetting momentarily that I'd already read another Agatha Christie earlier in the year. This was kind of an interesting later-seeming Christie, in that it goes quite big in conception, and explores some deconstruction of crime fiction genre conventions. In particular, this crime is certainly not a contained, isolated one but a big series of attention-seeking murders that also follow a bizarrely arbitrary order (alphabetical). In terms of the classic "did you guess whodunnit", this subverts that or makes it bigger in the sense of it's not just whodunnit but also why and a bit of how (although the murder methods themselves are clear-cut, it's more about selection of victim). I certainly realised early on that at least one of the murders was not arbitrarily chosen although I, like many of the characters, guessed that it might be the B murder (as it feels different from the others) that was the deliberate one. Ultimately this book didn't quite click entirely for me because the scheme of the murderer is really quite excessively intricate and well-plotted. The dates, names, methods, times, to kill four separate people; but also not get seen and also have a fall-guy planned and manipulated and a whole back story for said fall-guy, it all ends up a bit too far-fetched in the end, especially combined with the fairly contrived premise of Poirot being sent taunting letters announcing the murders in advance. It's an enjoyable bit of farcical escapism, but little more than quite convoluted entertainment in the end.
47) Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau
I know nothing about Cocteau the novelist (nor even that he wrote novels), and for that matter not much about Cocteau the filmmaker. But this novel reads precisely as I'd expect coming from Cocteau the filmmaker. For someone whose films are so obviously laden with imagery, where there's little subtlety and not much room for character development beyond their plot arcs, this novel is exactly that kind of output. There's a small cast of characters here - Paul the supposedly invalid boy and his sister Elisabeth are orphaned and left with a seemingly endless pot of money when their mother passes, and various friends latch onto their obscene wealth and get caught up in a web of romantic intent and selfish jealousy. It's all in a restricted setting, mostly in one house, and the various characters all have their own wants and desires and motivations. But none of them has a voice; the dominant and ultimately solo voice here is that of Cocteau, with all of the narrative effort put into this rhapsodic eulogising of the human condition, all very poetic and flamboyant with a necessary touch of cynicism. The book itself and the machinations of the plot are not poorly handled but there's little in the way of subtlety or unspoken themes or character psychology. Whatever else Cocteau may have written, this feels exactly like the novel written by a heavy-handed filmmaker who is concerned about making visual poetry and art more than telling a story.
48) Foundation - Isaac Asimov
When I got this from the library, I didn't realise that it’s at least part three in a chronology (although unsure of publication dates) but knowing vaguely of Asimov’s “Foundation” series and feeling like it could be a leaping off point. I feel like it is, but partially because this isn’t really a standalone story but more a series of vignettes set centuries apart but all tied to the origin story that starts this book. Because of the unconnectedness, this has mixed success, with the stories being well constructed but some just taking longer to draw in my sympathies to the right characters and get caught up in their struggle. It also conspicuously stands as part of a broader narrative with no actual conclusion here, and feels like a writer with a few story ideas jotting them all down and then publishing them rather than giving me the suspense and immediacy to want to go and read more. It’s more an “if you really feel like reading more of these unconnected stories, maybe pick another up, but no pressure”. It’s otherwise got interesting things to say about humanity, politics, and the historical narrative we construct, but it touches on them mostly without a great deal of elaboration.
49) The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
#ADickensAYear
This was a fairly long slog, to be honest. It's Dickens for a start, so the language is always a bit of a florid barrier. But the main issue here is that it's all a bit haphazard in the multiple short story narratives it tells and there's not a whole lot at stake. What makes Dickens his best is when he can use his florid language and archetypal character construction to elevate the drama at the right moments - so the sacrifice at the end of A Tale of Two Cities (my #27 book of 2014 and the first Dickens I ever read to kick off this yearly custom) for instance, or the revelation of Pip's benefactor in Great Expectations (my #4 book of 2017), those are some sublime moments of narrative pathos that have been earned with all the hard work from author (and frankly, reader too) upfront. There's no intent to make something like this here, as it's established as a series of light-hearted comic skits and doesn't attempt anything more than that. I'm conscious that as Dickens' first novel, there's a great deal of adept writing skill evident here from the outset; he still has some marvellous turns of phrase scattered throughout. But it's light, entertaining fare, broadly comedic and even farcical at times. It feels quite influential too, in that a number of the subplots here - particularly the Bardle Pickwick affair and trial - that would go on to become staples of 80s and 90s sitcoms: those awkward infuriating episodes of comedy where the whole plot would fall over if the two protagonists would just have an honest conversations without projecting so much subtext into each others' dialogue that isn't actually there. So it's admirable in the sense that it feels like early modern comedy, and there are definitely some amusing, entertaining parts that actually gave me a chuckle. But there are lots of side characters I don't care about at all, not to mention the fact that the main figures are not particularly drawn out to be fully-fleshed and sympathetic either (and we rely on Dickens' constant assurance of their being worthy, or likeable, rather than their actions and words doing the work for us). And ultimately there's just a lot to get through in this with only mixed success and no grand through-line to keep me interested. So while some episodes are more entertaining, as a whole work it felt long and hard work.
50) Goodbye, Vitamin - Rachel Khong
As with The ABC Murders, this was part of my little haul of female writers to redress a stretch of male-only reads, but the other reason I was drawn to this is because it was fairly short. And look, it's OK. But for a book about a daughter's year dealing with her Dad's progressing Alzheimer's, it ends up falling short on delivering the pathos I'd hoped for. It's told with this sort of relatable humour, but it also falls short on really being comedic. The style is a sort of jumping around diary of personal reflection and memories, which feels very trendy and 'now' but it doesn't really deliver much in the way of consistent themes, and doesn't manage to weave a larger more complex patchwork out of these smaller bits and pieces, so it ends up just feeling like a series of disconnected sketches. Moreover it feels a bit lazy that rather than drawing out interesting passages of our narrator's life in detail, it just offers short pithy observations and then moves on. The key failing is that it feels like it should be quite personal, almost like it's semi-autobiographical or a fictionalised version of a struggle that Khong has dealt with (especially as it's as much about her dealing with her relationship breakup as it is about her father's Alzheimers) but she never gives her protagonist much of a psychology; she has that annoying blank slate mentality in that she's mostly reactive to her circumstances and doesn't explore her own feelings in depth. It's an easy book to read, in that her voice is personable and pleasant but beyond being easy it's not very insightful or particularly humorous. I feel like there's potential in Khong as a writer, but in this book she never manages to bring it to its fullest.
51) The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
I honestly feel like I can copy and paste my thoughts for every H G Wells book into each new one, because although I keep reading them, they all have the same positives and negatives, and it’s in pretty stark contrast in this example. What he excels in is the speculative thinking, and the relating of that to interesting philosophical questions about humanity and the future. He’s also got a close attention to detail, so the descriptions here of the invading martians, their war machines and the red weed they propagate the earth with, they’re all quite vivid. But what he struggles with, to my mind, is storytelling. So the care he takes in describing the invaders, that’s good in a sense that it leaves nothing to the imagination, but it’s bad precisely because it leaves nothing to the imagination. He can’t show an invading force and allow the reader’s judgement to fill in the blanks, without telling us everything he needs us to know and which only some of it we actually need to. His narrative descriptions as well follow a line of telling us what everybody’s feeling, rather than painting a picture of the scene and letting us feel that ourselves. At least, that was my experience, like I was reading a technical journal throughout rather than a dramatic portrayal of an alien invasion. And as such, I didn’t feel very much emotional resonance at all despite my interest in the questions being posed. And that, ladies and gents, is pretty much word for word my review of every Wells books I’ve read, too. I'll see if you notice next time when I literally just copy and paste this.
52) Mama Tandoori - Ernest van der Kwast
This was another book I read mainly because it was short, but also because the blurbs and endorsements made it sound funny. I guess it’s a particular type of humour that doesn’t particularly appeal to me, because I can certainly see why people would be amused, but I just found van der Kwast’s abusive, incorrigible mother completely unpleasant to read. But the main question I was left with, in the end, was why was he writing this? The larger than life but also unsuited for living characters that populate his life remind me of Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle parents a bit, but Walls’ narrative had far more of a reconciling, cathartic tone as she grew up trying to come to terms with her parents. There is a slight realisation/catharsis later in this book later where Ernest discovers a kind of “what if” scenario that helps him sympathise further with his mother and father, but just structurally there wasn’t any foreshadowing of that direction, it just felt like a disconnected series of vignettes about his eccentric family with no guiding narrative. The pathos and humour was a bit distant because I wasn’t sure how Ernest felt about it all and therefore where he was taking his feelings by telling this story.
53) A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
This was a bit of a mistake to read, as I picked it up to see what else Mantel has written beyond her Thomas Cromwell chronicles of history brought to life. Unfortunately I didn't really look at what this was (in case the blurb spoiled MAJOR PLOT POINTS like the blurb of A Passage to India did) and it turned out to be more of exactly the same, but about the French revolution. Her documentarian aesthetic is really out in force here as she mixes historical documents and published materials with ordinary prose and, when the style feels more appropriate, dramatic dialogue form. The issue with this is that she gets bogged down in details throughout this long-winded account of the minutiae involved in a tumultuous time, where instability and large political forces should dictate rapid-fire change and action. But instead of allowing the speed of these events to dictate a more active pace she concerns herself with the quotidian activities of minor historical figures and all the conversations in intricate pointillist detail. I found that by the time of Bring Up the Bodies in particular she'd sharpened her writing a fair bit so the pace of the events as we know them dictated the pace of the story and the authorial licence to draw the full picture is used more efficiently. The fact is there is an utterly compelling narrative hidden here underneath all the bloated longueurs. There are times when she draws entertaining comedy and even farce out of the situation of amateurs floundering around at the mercy of history, and the tragic climax of the book is completely compelling. It just feels like a bit of a shame that she can't be more efficient in telling these details; more of a focused psychological narrative, less of the lurid soap-opera dramas. Just clean up the unnecessary exposition and you have a compelling human drama. Because it's already there, along with about half a book that needn't accompany it.
54) Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
I feel bad about having this book at the bottom of the pile, since I only read it because my wife wanted to read it, did, and recommended I read it as well (although, in retrospect, I think it was more so we could discuss and agree on its shortcomings). But the truth is this book ended up annoying me more than it really should have. I know I should assess it purely on its own merits, but the fact is this isn't a book that rewards you with extra details after watching the film adaptation. More importantly, the movie improved this story and the characters in more than a dozen ways. Kwan obviously has good first-hand insight into the world of rich extravagance in Singapore and among the Singapore Chinese community, so he's at his strongest when making commentary on that, on the classist nature of the society, and the interplay between traditional Chinese values (that can be potentially classist anyway) and the new-world snobbishness that emerges from great wealth and privilege. But that commentary was also in the film, while his frequent longueurs naming brands and designers and describing decor and furnishings, well that's just not really my thing although I can appreciate them in their finery in visual form (again, a la the film). The key weakness though is that Kwan doesn't write good or interesting female characters. Rachel is the only figure who's consistent between both versions, mainly because she's the relatable 'fish out of water' conduit into this world, and I think Kwan channels a lot of his own personal shock and awe through her. But Astrid in the book is a weak and fairly pitiful damsel in distress type, who has none of the pragmatic capabilities given to her in the film. She also felt like far more of a sideplot in the book because she doesn't really integrate as much with the wedding party and its festivities (in one way because the film dispensed with the character of Sophie, who is Rachel's comforter at the bachelorette weekend, and cleverly used Astrid for that role instead - this works a lot better with Astrid as a cunning pragmatist), so it felt like a subplot shoehorned in to deal so heavily with Astrid and her husband's infidelity. But the main annoyance here is Eleanor. Firstly there's the fact that the best scene in the film (I don't need to mention what it is because everybody who's seen the film should agree on it) is not in this book, but mainly because there'd be no place for it here. In the book Eleanor is a superficial, petty and ultimately pointless character. She doesn't hold any influence on other characters here, and is not central to any of the conflict. Sure, her entire story arc is trying to break up Nick and Rachel, but her motivations are at best unclear, and at worst just bitchy and petty. In the film they make her a principled, consistent and believable character whose conflict with Rachel is far more nuanced, practical and complex. In the book she's just an older and less believable version of the young catty spoiled girls like Francesca and Mandy. And I found this really lazy characterising. I can see why you'd read this in isolation and feel there's plenty of fodder for a hit movie. But the film only diverges from this in ways that make the story, the relationships and the social commentary significantly better. Apart from that, it offers the same basic story and themes but the book doesn't explore them in anywhere near as interesting a depth as the film. I am conscious I'd be less annoyed at this if I didn't read this after seeing the film, but realistically I can also sense that this really wouldn't be my sort of thing on its own anyway. In that hypothetical scenario where I read this first, rather than being annoyed at the poorly written characters like Eleanor and Astrid, I'd still just find them pointless and shallow. The film just served to starkly define how superficial Kwan's cast is, and how his writing is focused far more on the wealth porn than on the more interesting cultural clash and observations on the nature of family.
posted by Sean's Beard at 1:52 PM
1 Comments:
Glad to see that 'abusive, incorrigible mother's are completely unpleasant to read.
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