Books of 2022 Part 2: 20-11

20) Hard Times - Charles Dickens

My one Dickens a year, came across this in my local library and realised it was new to me and I knew nothing about it. I can, having read it, kind of see why. It's definitely lower-tier Dickens, and the main reason it's lower-tier Dickens is that it has quite a lot in common with upper-tier Dickens or plenty of analogues I can draw to other stories that are more successful. Well, curiously the main machinations of the plot have most in common with the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood that I read last year. And I'd put Drood in the upper-tier of Dickens, at least in the sense that I was quite gripped by the story and sympathetic with all of the characters, and found it deflating to find it unresolved but also tantalising to think of how rich the completed product may have been. Hard Times shares in common with it an unhappy marriage/engagement, a central 'crime' with an obvious suspect who suspiciously leaves town and has always had suspicions cast on him. Where this becomes lesser is simply in how successfully Dickens draws out the story and engages with these characters. The latter in particular is frankly threadbare here; it's all framed around the two characters of Thomas Gradgrind and his friend Josiah Bounderby who are intricately painted as men of complete sense, in that they don't allow for flights of fancy or imagination and stick always to facts. Dickens' fascination with this upfront only really pays off when one of the characters finds himself confronted with 'feelings' that don't reconcile themselves easily with cold, hard logic - and this character ends up probably the most sympathetic of the cast here. The trouble is that there's too much of a diversion in the middle to deal with the side characters (or rather one of which who becomes central) and it's easy to lose track of the trajectory of the story and where the stakes lie. By the time the story reaches its crisis point, some characters come back in who were prominent early on but I'd frankly forgotten existed and suddenly I'm supposed to have a deep understanding of their sensibility and why they interact with others in certain ways. There ultimately are really only two characters who are properly drawn - Gradgrind and Bounderby - while all the drama happens to other characters who are only really painted superficially, and it's hard to feel their crises and conflicts deeply enough to care. In particular the main character who becomes the villain of the piece (without spoiling too much, the person who actually commits the crime) it's hard to understand their motivations, as their personality and circumstances are told mainly through hearsay from other characters rather than interactions they themselves have. Basically they are the Edwin Drood of this piece, while Stephen Blackpool - the man suspected of the crime so heavily that it's obvious to the reader he's innocent, since we understand drama - is the equivalent of Neville Landless, but we spend far less time in Stephen's company than we do in Neville's in Drood and besides being unfortunately mistreated is otherwise not sympathetic on his own terms. Overall basically reading this book only made me appreciate Drood all the more, feeling like Dickens was building on what he'd done before it and making something that was both a compelling mystery and a compelling human drama. This is both of those things - a mystery and a human drama - but without being compelling.

19) Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins

I picked this up on one of my jaunts to the 'youth' section of my local library after I discovered it existed and contained a lot of these sequels and books that I've been wanting to read out of curiosity for a while but would never actually fork out for. It follows Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in terms of my acquisitions therefrom, and I mention that because the premise and structure of the two books have quite a bit in common. In both cases they're stories about adolescent angst set against the backdrop of fatal competitions where other characters will eventually die. And I make the comparison beyond it being apt, in the sense that I found this a lot more stressful a read than Goblet of Fire. A big part of the reason is that Collins' writing feels more subtle and hence compelling than Rowling's, even though both suffer from the YA affliction of needing to spell things out too much (which is of course completely audience appropriate and it's me who's the wrong audience, but it just bothers me a bit as I'm reading). But I also found this more stressful because I just care about these characters more, and the world-building is more detailed and dark and oppressive. What's maybe a bit odd is that when Katniss finds out she's having to enter the arena again, the reading became less stressful because the stakes within the realm of the Hunger Games arena are much clearer, whereas in the dystopian outside world it's unclear where the next attack and oppression will come from. More importantly and more as a criticism though, the whole book became stressful frankly because Katniss is so irritatingly naive and oblivious to the whole Mockingjay resistance symbol; it's fine at the beginning when she's reasonably ignorant and kept in her little victors' cotton wool, but when she's explicitly told about the symbol and its meaning and significance for her she somehow still fails to recognise its meaning and significance as it pertains to her. It's part of the whole Katniss-being-too-pure-for-this-broken-world thing I know, but it gave the book and her character an irritating Hamlet-esque air of indecisiveness where it was plainly obvious to me what she should be doing. I did feel this volume of the story ended a bit abruptly, like the denouement came about with an air of haste, but by this point obviously we know that there's going to be a third and final part to the story so it's not a deal breaker. Despite the various stressors I found throughout the read, it was undoubtedly page-turning and exciting, and a big reason for that was that Collins makes me care about all of these characters and what happens to them.

18) The Queen of the Night - Alexander Chee

Picked this up for completely unknown reasons now (I was in a rush due to having Polly with me) and baulked a bit at the size of it but gave myself permission to abandon it and I think that freedom helped me become determined to finish it instead. One thing about this book, as soon as I learned in reading it that it was about a famous opera singer, I knew that I had to read the story as if I was reading the plot synopsis of an opera. Chee does say in his acknowledgements that he based his main character on the lead soprano part in The Magic Flute but I’m not familiar enough with opera to get any actual plot parallels. I did though accept a certain amount of melodrama, and a fair bit of suspension of disbelief necessary to absorb the story. There are some annoying obfuscations Chee employs that do make it hard to grasp at times; some of his descriptions are elusive and told in a roundabout way that when I comprehend them they feel obviously like dramatic flourishes that may make sense in a performance but feel too elaborate in prose fiction. The early parts of the story also jumped around in time a bit too much; there’s quite a lot of different parts to the story, and the fact that this is a combination of bildungsroman with picaresque along with the fact that he starts near the ‘end’ of her story and then goes back to the beginning to explain how we got here, it’s all a bit too much crammed in at first. It wasn’t until towards the end of the retrospective part that I really got on board with what was going on. But the dovetailing of both these observations (the melodrama and the density) for me comes into play with the central mystery presentedast the beginning: I figured out the answer long before Lillian herself does, mainly because the plot twist feels so well suited to an opera libretto and because she spends so much time alluding to this future event that she’ll get to eventually but knowing that it’s the one part of her narrative that feels casually observed. So one suspects there’s something she’s not telling us, or that she doesn’t actually know for sure. But some difficulties aside, it is a grand and epic narrative befitting of the dramatic flair Chee employs, and the vicissitudes of Lilian’s fate can be quite compelling, even though at the end of the day I felt a bit exhausted with quite how epic the story was, and just how many vicissitudes she had to endure.

17) A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta - Paul Theroux

After enjoying and being quite enthralled with Theroux’s “The Mosquito Coast” last year, I found that the library has quite a few of his books and picked this one largely at random. It ends up being another great confirmation of Theroux as a writer largely at odds with my experience and expectations – in mostly good ways. In essence this is a hard-boiled detective story: the overcrowded, stinking hot, fetid underbelly of Calcutta serving as an exotic but clichéd genre backdrop to his narrator’s investigation of a crime. But there are a number of left turns that Theroux throws in that make it significantly more than that. While the initial crime investigation runs through the whole narrative, the book becomes mostly – entirely, even - about his obsession with Mrs Unger, the woman who asks him to investigate the crime. Mrs Unger is a larger-than-life figure, a former acolyte of Mother Theresa who ostensibly outdoes the famous nun for true charitable works, helping without begging for donations where Mother Theresa encouraged suffering. Because of its singular focus, not on the titular crime but on her, the narrative becomes weirdly horny, and the narrator starts chapter after chapter rhapsodising about Mrs Unger, canonising her while also fetishizing her, and the writing is at times heavy-handed and obsessed itself. But of course being a crime story, there comes a point where Mrs Unger is revealed to in fact be a femme fatale of sorts, and his obsession with her becomes the classic plot point of the weak horny male blinded to the truth. But there are also very strange nuggets hidden in this story. In particular for one scene, our narrator - who is a fictional travel writer like Theroux himself - is introduced to none other than Paul Theroux, the famous travel writer. They talk, our unnamed narrator finds Theroux amusingly obnoxious and insincere, they part, and Theroux disappears and is hardly mentioned again. Now why did he write himself into his book for one scene? I have multiple theories, one of which is that his appearance in his own story is an apotropaic charm against accusations that this could be based on real events, i.e. Theroux is saying “yes I know the narrator is a travel writer, but it’s not me. See? There I am! We’re in the same room together!” and the other two theories I can’t really expound without spoilers while all three seem equally likely but also remain periphery to the narrative (sidenote: I really wish I’d written down my other two theories because they were more interesting but I can’t personally remember them now). There’s another plot point where a character makes a grand revelation about themselves and it also feels like a major turning point but it also seemingly lacks relevance to me. There is a potential ‘thematic’ connection to the big plot twist ending but I feel it’s a long bow to draw. Anyway, the point I want to make about these incongruities is that while the book itself is not extraordinary, there’s something compellingly unusual about Theroux’s writing n that he includes these turning points without any clear meaning but is also happy to leave their meaning ambiguous. And that’s strange, because he’s not an ambiguous writer; indeed there are few details in descriptions or inner monologues that he leaves off the page. But he is an oblique, and an enigmatic writer, for these foibles, and it’s those that make this more than a genre piece and more than a bit of post-colonial Indian travelogue.

16) Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

Picked this up having really been moved by The Perks of Being a Wallflower a few years ago. This, firstly, has a far more wieldy and also more apt and descriptive title, so it’s a step up there. But also this is a hell of a hefty read. The first impressions are that this is really effective, creepy horror. The opening ‘section’ of the book (not the prologue, which is also effectively creepy) tells of Christopher and his devoted single mother who escape from her abusive ex-boyfriend and move to a small Pennsylvanian town, then Christopher gets lost in the local woods for six days and has no memory of what went on there. It’s mysterious, it’s dark, and it introduces us perfectly to the dynamics between the two of them and the town perfectly. Christopher functions a little differently, but his Mother is always his shining light, while the eccentric character of the town is a bit of a complication. Now what becomes apparent following this is unfortunately a bit of a derivative sense. There’s no doubt an obvious Stephen King influence here. It’s unclear to me the nuanced differences between small town Pennsylvania and small town Maine, but the ‘everybody in town has a mysterious secret’ trope is well wrung here. But then the story structure also began to coalesce too perfectly into a parallel with the Netflix series Stranger Things (at least the first season of which I’ve seen). The ragtag bunch of misfit kids, one of whom has visited a mysterious parallel universe and comes back haunted but with mysterious powers, the devoted mother, the bully kids at school, and of course the nice handsome sheriff who’s the most morally upright figure in the town. I couldn’t help but picture David Harbour whenever the sheriff character appears here. But all of that does become a sidenote when the horror really begins to manifest, and though Chbosky is an adroit and tantalising writer, he really succumbs too heavily to his ultimate vision here. There’s definitely some effective creeps, and catharsis, and a well-drawn battle between good and evil here. But long as this book is, there’s a point about two hundred odd pages from the end, where there’s a kind of twist - more a shift in perspective - yet the leadup to this point was all of the dramatic climax you needed. So when this ‘twist’ of sorts happens and I realised I was still a long way to the end, it brought it home just how brutal and relentless the mounting crises and conflicts are. It just became an endless string of calamities and misfortunes with every page bringing a new cataclysmic or apocalyptic scenario with everything hinging on one character’s decision. So by the end, my captivated interest became more one of battered subservience where I needed to finish the book to have served my mission’s purpose. And what’s frustrating about all of this is that it could have been so much more effective, and pointed – particularly the religious analogy that he bashes us over the head with by the end – if he’d just stopped indulging his whims, or indulged them a little less. The same story with 30% of its twists and revelations and story arcs would have been the masterpiece that Emma Watson’s quote proclaims this on the cover, and it could have been playing at the very top of my year-end list. Instead it’s a bloated and overly cynical indictment of humanity at its worst, and I found it hard to really believe its emotional message when I’m so bludgeoned with it.

15) Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss

Catie lent this book to Bec essentially, because Bec in a moment of inconsistency thought she should try reading stuff. But instead this book, among loans, just sat around our house gathering dust until I found myself without new books to read so I made the borrowing it worthwhile instead. It’s a curious book, and a curious coincidence that without any intention it’s the closest analogue I’ve found to The Mosquito Coast, which I read last year and thought I’d never read a book quite like it. This also tells the story of a father with a singular obsession, and the effect that has on his family and the people around him. Like Theroux’s book, this is also written in first person from the perspective of his child, in this case the teenaged Sylvie who is forced to go on a camping expedition with her parents and a small group of “practical archaeology” students as they basically LARP as ancient Britons in the midlands. Where this pales in comparison to Theroux’s book is largely a more blurred focus. Rather than zeroing in on the eccentric character of Sylvie’s father, Moss makes this more a coming of age story where Sylvie’s frightened subservience to her overbearing father approaches an asymptote. But in doing so there are attempts at making the conflict bifurcate several times: rather than just being child vs parent it also becomes about men vs women, as well as a dichotomy between working class and privilege and a Gaskellian north vs south contrast as well. Sylvie’s father is less of a mercurial figure and has a more simplistic single-mindedness. If you go back to my writeup last year, Moss’ father figure is, throughout, quite like Allie Fox in the latter stages of the book where I started to lose interest. It’s not that he isn’t a curious character, but he felt a lot more predictable due to being more shallowly drawn, and the enjoyably strange vicissitudes of the plot became more left-field and byzantine, less organically grown from those curious foundations that a more three-dimensional antagonist could have developed. I’m glad to have read a similarly exotic narrative but I feel that The Mosquito Coast was the more compelling and the more fascinatingly ambiguous read within a similar kind of setting.

14) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon

Yes, you can finally tick me off the list, there are no more people on earth who have not read this book. So there’s not much more I can say about this that you haven’t heard at your weekly “let’s talk about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” meetings, but suffice to say I quite enjoyed this. It’s certainly a unique book from a unique perspective, and for the most part Christopher’s autistic tics and awkward explanations gave me frequent chuckles. But ‘enjoy’ is a funny word; as much as there’s a sense of ironic amusement inherent by Haddon’s adopting this voice and trying to point out the inconsistencies and general hypocrisies of neurotypical society, it’s also kind of unsettling. I felt a certain sense of guilt reading this, knowing firstly that it’s not actually a memoir from an autistic teenager but feeling like it’s a neurotypical person’s approximation thereof, but also the laughs I experienced felt a little off-key, like I didn’t know to laugh or cry at certain points but opted for the easier option of laughing. Regardless of Haddon’s intent though I found the story to be adroitly humanistic. He adopts this voice less to say “here is what autism feels like” as much as to put a pure and unfiltered lens on people who are trying their best, even when they fail miserably. It’s less Christopher’s story itself and more that of Christopher’s Dad and Mum, who are both the heroes and the villains of the narrative in much the same way as Christopher is both their purest joy and greatest curse. I did enjoy the turn the story takes when it becomes less a detective story and becomes more of a quest, and the climax of the detective story was quite poignant and heartbreakingly told. It did however lead to the only false point to me though, which was: I really felt Christopher should have sought out Siobhan for help. He dismisses this idea too hastily, and his reasoning (that she’s a teacher and therefore not a friend or family) didn’t seem overly logical or, paradoxically,  what he’d come up with even irrationally thinking in the moment. But it rang false for me because I feel that Siobhan would have been kind and understanding both of his quandary and precisely why Christopher now feared his father, and she would as a trained professional (whom he obviously trusts) have been the best person to deal with the situation. But because Haddon is set on turning it into an awkward reunion with Christopher’s mother, he dismisses it too readily in order to set his chosen course as the inevitable one. It felt like a glaring plot hole because he could have easily covered it anyway since Christopher goes to seek Siobhan purely to ask how to get to the train station anyway - and then stops because his Father’s van is parked outside. Like he could have written it as Christopher seeking out Siobhan for more general help, but then panicking at the sight of the van and realising his mother is the only other option. That just makes more sense to me and would not leave what seems like a big hole of illogic in what is otherwise a quirkily logical, honest and utterly relatable story of dealing with people who operate differently.

13) The Dark Tower - Stephen King

This one has been a long time coming after reading books 5 and 6 in the series a couple of years ago: I’ve been keeping an eye out for it at my local library, assuming no library could possibly have books 1-6 and not 7, the conclusion. But when I finally actually searched for it in the catalogue and found out they do in fact have everything except the conclusion, I bit the bullet and ordered myself a copy. Now, was this book worth it? Was it a fitting finale to this epic adventure? Yes, and no. Firstly, I read on some internet thread a discussion of these books where people basically agreed that the series drops off in quality greatly after book three. I wholeheartedly disagree mainly because I think book 5 - Wolves of the Calla - is arguably my favourite, up there with books 1 and 2 due to its perfect fusionof the science-fiction and western tropes and making of them a story that’s real and pulsing with life and hearty characters. But I would agree that book 6 - Song of Susannah – was certainly the weakest. But it wasn’t until reading this that I realised why: it’s really just a stopgap. It finishes on three different cliffhangers with the characters spread across worlds and each facing a life-or-death moment. So this book feels a bit clumsy in that first, King has to finish off all the separate storylines from the previous book (He also had to do this in book 4 to conclude a cliffhanger from book 3). But the issue here is that this book really needs to be about the final quest to the tower, and nothing else, and I feel book 6 would have been a more powerful bit of storytelling if it had reached the conclusion of its plot and left that final quest for this book. There are two more new plot points introduced here, both involving our ka-tet saving the world in various ways, which also get concluded fairly quickly, albeit dramatically, before the final quest actually begins. Now here’s the thing: Roland’s final quest for the dark tower begins after several story climaxes have already happened in the same book. And it feels, therefore, incredibly anti-climactic. The world is saved, people have died, people have moved on and been redeemed. There is even talk about ka, the murky concept of fate and fatalism imbuing these books, having run its course. So what’s at stake in Roland’s final push becomes unclear. It feels personal, but no longer has any gravity or drama to it. Which would be fine, except it’s still about half of the entire book’s length. Now King is a gifted storyteller, and he peppers the final march with trademark horrors that are imaginative and page-turning in and of themselves, but they feel like sideshow entertainment where the compulsion of the overarching story is no longer there. So in the end, I found this book periodically exciting but actually somewhat dull. Both in the sense of boring but also in the sense that it had no point anymore and nothing to get under my skin. The final conclusion and epilogue and so forth, all nicely told and it neatly wraps everything up - as much as the full climaxes here were a little short and quick for my liking - but there’s a good 100 pages that just could have been expunged here as they didn’t draw us towards that conclusion and didn’t serve any grander purpose beyond their own as diversions. I feel King succumbed to self-indulgence and entertained himself with his go-to crutches when he could have been just as dramatic yet significantly more efficient here.

12) Today Will Be Different - Maria Semple

Picked this one up obviously because I enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette a couple of years ago, and from the cover design through to the comedy of cringe and the cast of flawed but human characters, this book really rehashes a lot of the same themes and ideas. It also shares in common an innovative approach to storytelling, with a variety of intermissions here including the entire existing text of our protagonist Eleanor’s planned graphic novel based on her and her sister’s upbringing. What makes this worthy though is very much the same as what made Bernadette so compelling: that Semple is above all a very empathetic observer of human irrationality, but also she’s just an extremely funny writer. This story predominantly takes place in one day in a similar vein to Ulysses: Eleanor Flood sets out on this day determined to make a difference in her life, do things better, the little things that will set her life back on the right track. Of course things don’t go to plan and Semple again demonstrates her adeptness at conjuring up narrative maelstroms where characters’ decisions and irrationalities all conflagrate in a glorious crescendo of chaos. I feel like beyond painting Eleanor as a hectic mess, Semple’s real conduit or even her muse here is Eleanor’s son Timby (named after a typo in a text message), a boy at the awkward cusp of exploring his sexual and gender identity in real terms who accompanies his mother on all her misadventures on this day, and takes all the absurdities of adulthood in with his innocent but ultimately cutting curiosity. There were many laugh out loud moments for me - usually precipitated by an observation or incisive question from Timby - that made this very enjoyable to read even while it explores very similar ground to her previous work. The middle section here is the only part that didn’t quite work for me, even though this flashback section is narratively adroit taking part in a brief respite from the haphazard vicissitudes Eleanor involves herself in during this day and manages to fill in all of the gaps that part one has left in its wake. It felt a little bit forced at times, especially regarding the fascination with this character Bucky, and why he held such interest and curiosity when he just seemed like an absolute fucking tool to me, both in terms of his presence in the narrative (like, as a tool to drive the narrative) and as a person. I felt it could have been laid in better earlier to build up better, whereas instead it was a bit rushed and therefore its treatment a bit shallow. Overall despite not advancing Semple into new areas of storytelling, cultural milieux or character types, she demonstrates that she has a deep well of wit and pathos, and can be sturdily relied on for funny, zany and ultimately very relatable human comedy.

11) Rites of Passage - William Golding

Among other books, this has been on my to-read list for a while just because it's one of the Booker prize winners I couldn't get my hands on a few years ago when I tried to read as many Booker prize winners as possible. I've also been fairly curious about this because I know of William Golding as the writer of Lord of the Flies and never hear about any of his other books except this one because it won the Booker (and apparently he was quite prolific in his life, so it's actually a bit odd that people only really know one of his books. He's like Anthony Burgess in that respect I guess). So this book felt a little boring and possibly stifling for a while. Structurally it reminds me a lot of Moby Dick at the outset, in that it's a first-person narrative of life aboard a ship - in this case a migrant passenger vessel bound for Australia during colonial times - but what made it more stifling was basically that the narrator of the story, Edmund Talbot, is generally an unpleasantly supercilious presence to have to keep company with for the entirety. But the book does open up other perspectives, and what's probably more important is that Talbot isn't accidentally an obnoxious presence like I find Nick Carraway for example, in fact his obnoxiousness is a very pivotal plot point and a large part of his narrative involves him coming to terms with his arrogance in a way that he personally finds quite sobering and even confronting. Without getting into plot details, the twist and the intrigue revolves around his relationship with a fellow passenger, the clergyman James Colley, when Colley encounters some misadventures with the crew of the ship. In exploring the goings on both from Talbot's and Colley's perspective, Golding weaves some very interesting commentary on social structures in places where civilisation takes on different forms - in this case the isolated hierarchy of a ship. Talbot is used as the synecdoche of the upper classes, representing as he does his 'Godfather' who is not named but is well known to everyone on board the ship as a well-respected peer of the realm back in England, while more obviously there is class commentary around the working class seamen who comprise the majority of bodies on the ship. Of particular interest though, I feel that Golding is making a more subtle point about colonialism generally, and the misguided folly of attempting to transplant existing social hierarchies to new places where different civilisations already exist. In the case of this tale, they never actually reach Australia (I mean, the book ends before they do, I don't mean they sink halfway), but the ways in which this idea plays out in this floating petri dish makes a lot of intriguing and challenging points about what is generally esteemed and in turn expected from people of different social status, and what happens when the pillars that hold up such societal structures are removed or even just reconfigured.