Three Men in a Boat

This classic by Jerome K Jerome reads like nineteenth century stand up comedy. It’s very funny. It really does remind you of those books you pick up by comedians which are filled with little sketches. I’m sure Mr Jerome was very popular at parties, and down at his local.

Three men decide to go for a short trip up the Thames. Detailed (spurious) historical and geographical information is provided for each place they visit, but that’s not why you read it. You read it for the mishaps that happen and the nonsense that occurs to them. They gabble on about murdering landowners and singing comic songs on their grave (especially after being cheated out of a shilling by a man belonging to a society repudiating bread and jam), then go visiting a tavern with a big trout caught by every member of the village. I particularly like the flashbacks, such as the visit to the doctor in order to announce the presence of every illness apart from housemaid’s knee, or the little trip with the girlfriend (sorry, cousin) where they met up with some boatmen and all sang the chorus from Faust.

It is definitely reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse, although not quite as funny. It’s also a little older, I think. (Actually one funny part has him musing over whether one day in 2000 someone will treasure Victorian china the way they treasure other old bits and pieces – and of course we do.) It’s the kind of British comedy that you imagine propped up the nation during national crises from Crimea to the Blitz. Funny, simple, slightly odd. A good read.

The Education of Little Tree

I saw the film of this some years ago and had no idea it was a book, let alone a "classic American novel". It's by Forrest Carter, and it's about a Cherokee boy raised by his grandparents during the thirties. I can't quite tell whether it's meant for children or not; there's a lot of mention of "fornicatin'", but seeing his grandfather has no problem telling this to Little Tree, perhaps the implication is that children should be given uncensored tales. Anyway, apart from those occasional stories, it would be a good book to read aloud, because there's beautiful descriptions of the mountains, animals and plants of that part of the world.

Little Tree gets the education he needs; knowing what berries are fine to pick, how to trap an animal, and how to take only what he needs. He learns about the Cherokee Way, which is pretty much about being aware of being part of the life cycle and his part in it. It reads very much like a seventies book, which is what it is. I can understand why at the time it would have been taken to heart.

There's some interesting historical parts about what happened to the Cherokee people, for example the "trail of tears", and then it's mirrored in what happens to Little Tree; he's taken away from his grandparents because the authorities don't believe he's getting a good education. It's a clever piece of irony, especially as the "education" he gets in the orphanage ends up being administered with a cane. His grandparents do retrieve him, however, and he ends up living with them until they both pass away and he has to step out on his own.

It's an interesting story, even though the years haven't been kind to it; the lectures about the circle of life are too well known now to be particularly powerful. It's a well-executed novel and a good starting point for thinking about that particular place and time.

Tuesdays with Morrie

A dud, alas, but I've had a good run these last weeks so I shouldn't complain. Morrie himself seems to have been an interesting person, but Mitch Albom who spends the last few months of Morrie's life visiting him comes across as a complete idiot. He is astonished by the idea that we all must die. Astonished by the concept of materialism not being everything. He turns everything the old professor says into a series of bumper-sticker aphorisms (the book is very thin) as though the man's whole life can be summed up in a gasping, "be nice to each other". How depressing. Morrie (a sociology professor who led some experimental courses, protested in the sixties and so forth) died believing he'd never be forgotten. But I doubt he'd be all that happy with this book as his epitaph. It's Walden for very stupid people.

Bleak House

I have a war-time edition of this Dickens classic, which means that it's printed on very thin paper - so while it looks like a slim volume, it's actually nearly a thousand pages. Not only that, but it bursts with richness, in characters, plot twists, passionate language, humour and drama. It's more like a world than a book.

Basically, there's a law case, Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, which has been going on for generations. All these people get caught up in the case and their lives are ruined by uncertainty and bitterness, or by the avarice of others. Only those who choose to stay right out of it manage to salvage their lives.

It's told from two points of view; one is Esther, who is a companion to one of the Jarndyce wards, a woman who never knew her parents and who was born out of wedlock, but a woman universally loved because of her (overly unrealistic) kindness and thoughtfulness. Her sections are too sentimental for modern tastes. And then the narrator, Dickens, tells the rest of the story with his characteristic swings from irony to humour to pathos.

There are many memorable characters: Mrs Jellaby, who neglects her own family to worry about a mission in Africa; her daughter who marries a dance-master; cold, beautiful, tortured Mrs Deadlock and her oblivious husband who is obsessed with the Coodles and Doodles ruling England (I must say I found that passage hysterically funny); Jo, a poor waif who spends his whole life being told to "move on", with nowhere to go, and the terrifying villain of the piece, Mr Tulkinghorn who blackmails and threatens without compunction, causing death after death, until someone shoots him.

So there's a murder mystery, there's the mystery of Esther's birth, there's the drama of court, there's people dying left right and centre, there's the suffering of the poor and the callousness of the rich; it's all pure Dickens. There's even a bit of obvious book-jumping; Thursday Next must have stepped in by mistake because Michael Jackson is referred to, completely gratutiously.

It's definitely not his best. It goes on and on. The recent BBC version dragged, even though it cut out a lot of characters in the hope of creating a more coherent story, but that didn't work. It's less of a book than a soap opera, but with the depth, richness, and power of Dickens. It's why most modern books seem so bland and flat; they haven't the guts to be angry the way he's angry or to laugh as loudly as he laughs.

When We Were Orphans

An absolutely brilliant novel by Kazuo Ishiguro; but then everything he writes is outstanding. This is his latest. It's the 1930's, and Christopher Banks has become a celebrated detective. He decides to go back to Shanghai, the place he grew up, to solve the most important case of his life; the kidnapping of his parents.

Of course, it's not so simple. Ishiguro really likes the device of the fallible narrator, and he makes it very clear within the first chapter that there's a significant difference between the way Banks sees himself and the way others see him. The entire idea of being a famous detective, standing between chaos and order, is a childish, romantic one; and that's Banks' whole life. He's simply continuing his childhood. His parents have been missing since he was a little boy, and yet he expects to find them hidden away comfortably a few houses away.

This is the main idea of the novel; the unrealistic idealism of that period, that everything could be solved easily, if people just understood the truth (actually, it's not just of that time - I think that's still a common fallacy). Banks' mother was an anti-opium campaigner, who believed that she could change things by simply making the truth clear. Sarah, Banks' friend, believes she can make a difference to the world by marrying the right person and pushing him along. The Japanese-Chinese war has begun, and Banks believes he is responsible for solving it.

I love Ishiguro's clear, down-to-earth writing style. Even though every character has his or her own voice, it's still undeniably Ishiguro. It's a very intimate style, and because it's first person, it's like someone sitting down and taking you into their confidence. I really enjoy his writing, and this is one of his best.

Nobel Prize for Literature

Orhan Pamuk just won it - goodio. He deserves it.

A Severed Wasp

This is Madeleine L'Engle's sequel to The Small Rain, and it was written forty years afterwards. Katherine is now an elderly woman, retired from performing. Her husband (she ended up marrying her piano teacher, Justin) has died, and while she's been living in France, she decides to move back to New York. She comes in contact with old friends, makes some new ones, and becomes part of a very ugly mystery.

Another fascinating book. It's almost all conversations, characters chatting about things that have happened as well as ideas and books and music and art. While the central character isn't religious, most of the surrounding ones are - most of the action is based in the NY Cathedral where L'Engle was writer-in-residence. At the same time, there's an enormous amount of discussion about sex, sexuality, fidelity. It's a really unusual book, and I have to wonder who she imagined her audience was.

A lot of the characters in it are from her other books, a lot of kids from her children's books grown up with kids of their own. They're all involved in either the arts or science, they're all wonderful musicians or amazing thinkers. They all have a vocation of sorts. You can see that's how L'Engle thinks, because that's the world she lived in. There's also a lot of ugliness, real ugliness, which she never shies away from, even though often it doesn't feel particularly realistic. And everyone, like in all her books, is verbose; you never have to guess at anyone's thoughts.

It definitely doesn't read like a picture of a real world, but it's her world, and it's a very very interesting one. She explains the mystery, but doesn't resolve many of the issues at the end of the story, and I like that. She creates characters who can't exist but you'd like them to. A fascinating read from a fascinating person.

The Small Rain

I must say, this is a very interesting book. It is actually Madeleine L’Engle’s very first novel, from the ‘40s, although it’s set in between the wars. It follows the life of a girl, Katherine, from about ten to twenty; her mother is a pianist, her father a composer and her aunt, who becomes her stepmother, is a famous actress. After a terrible car accident, her mother can no longer play; she dies a few years later from pneumonia after neglecting her health. Katherine who by this time has decided to also become a pianist, is sent to a Swiss boarding school by her father, and suffers there for a few years before returning to New York to study music seriously.

It’s very much a character study, based firmly in the world that L’Engle lived in at the time; she was acting and working in the theatre while knowing that she wanted to be a writer. It’s the sort of book that makes you ashamed of not working hard enough. Her usual fault, of making her children too knowing and too verbose, isn’t so apparent here because Katherine moves from childhood to adolescent and then adulthood fairly quickly. It’s a really interesting study of both Europe and the US during that period of time – a period with such a strange mix of freedom and propriety. She goes to a gay bar and is horrified; she has sex with a friend at seventeen and no one is shocked at all. There’s an enormous amount of drinking, which is something I’ve noticed in other books of that era, and movies too – they’ve always got a scotch in front of them. Because L’Engle is a strong Christian, there’s quite a few references to God and parts from the Bible, without any of the characters coming to any conclusions at all.

It’s funny that in the introduction she says it’s “very much a first novel”; actually I think it’s a lot better than some of her later books. Camilla, for example, is very similar to this book, though written for YA: this is a far better book. She keeps her dark edge through most of her books, and as an adolescent I found it too grim, but it works for this one. Again, she has a very, very distinctive voice, although I couldn’t exactly say what makes it hers; it’s clear, lyrical, thoughtful. Her characters are over-introspective, usually, and too easily able to put their thoughts into words; but I suppose you have to do that in a novel, and the digresses on Chekhov and Shakespeare are fascinating. Obviously a very interesting person, to have created such an interesting book.

A Shield of Coolest Air

Another fantastic novel by Marion Molteno. I can’t believe that I heard she had to self-publish her books, first, before they were picked up by these fairly small speciality presses. They’re so good!

This one focuses on Somalia; it was written in 1992, set before that, so it’s a Somalia before the Americans and the UN peacekeepers, the horror which most of us think about when we hear that word. It’s just before it, though; a government of oppression and torture, perhaps the same government that is in place at the moment. Not sure. Anyway, Hassan is half Somali, half British, and lives in London, working for a Refugees Advocacy group. His father is put into prison in Somalia and there’s nothing he can do. His cousins come over as refugees and there’s nothing he can do. All he can do is try to use his lawyer’s skills to advocate for other people.

Rachel is from South Africa, and has to leave with her three children when her husband, a photographer, is arrested there. He’s released, they all travel to London, and he pretty much abandons her there. It takes her a while to find out how to live in that world. She eventually makes friends with a few other mums from the local primary school, and that’s how she gets involved with some of the issues for refugees and Somalia. She ends up going to the Refugees Advocacy place to get information for a Somali friend, and that’s how she and Hassan meet.

It’s a really well-written story about human beings; their race, their background, everything else is secondary, they’re human beings first. It’s told in limited third person, swapping between Rachel and Hassan, and has a lovely gentle style which never distances the reader. The title is from a Somali poem, and there are quotations from about twenty others scattered throughout the story. It’s a beautiful way to be introduced to a culture which most people know only from war-stories. This is a war story, too; but it focuses on the people in it rather than the conflict itself.

Wuthering High

This book by Cara Lockwood is really weird, but I like weird. The cover looks like pornography - yes, it's a book about a school, so I suppose it's appropriate that there's a girl in the uniform on the front, but still . .. It's one of those teen stories with masses of pop culture references, with that particular teen voice which Meg Cabot favours, and with a lot of humour. The weird part is that the school is staffed by a dead Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway (amongst others), and that a fellow student named Heathcliff has decided to take care of Miranda (the main character), which you'd think would make her top ten list of things she'd hope never to happen in her lifetime.

It's a very odd mix of "don't take drugs/bad boys want to rape you/be honest with your parents" and literary references. It's funny, entertaining enough, clever, but strange. The school's chapel is devoted to Shakespeare; punishment for talking back is being bound and gagged; and on the last page of the book is a community announcement advising readers to go and get AIDS tested. I'm not quite sure how books like this get published, but I'm all for experimental literature, even when it doesn't exactly work.

The Nicest Girl in the School

This is a hundred year old novel by Angela Brazil, a thick old tome I picked up at the Bilpin markets. Basically, Patty happily goes off to school where she struggles to find friends, copes with a little bullying, refuses anything “underhand” like passing notes, cheating on her Latin, or telling tales, and eventually saves her nasty cousin from drowning. In the end, she gets voted the Nicest Girl in the School.

It’s funny to read something like this after reading the previous school story. A hundred years has certainly changed things, although the language of the two books isn’t too far apart. There’s a mention of sex on practically every page of the Bard School book, let alone drugs and violence (and rock n’ roll); in this book, the excitement is when the Patty removes the ladder from the roof after naughty girls climb up there, or when the nasty cousin admits publicly that she used a crib for her Caesar.

There’s certainly some interesting bits historically – there’s pictures of their school uniform, there’s a chapter about their “crazes” (stamp collecting, autograph albums, pressed flowers – all of which remind me of my primary school days), and there’s even a mention of the ancient method of CPR. But this book is too boring for reprint. Her later books, which star princesses, twins separated at birth, and an Italian heir to the family fortune, have been reprinted, because they’re a bit more exciting and less pious. Evidently influenced by her competition, Enid Blyton (whose books are funnier) and Elinor M Brent-Dyer (whose characters are so well-drawn you want them to be your best friends), amongst others. I don’t know what would happen if Patty met Miranda; I fear that Miranda would find it easy to corrupt her by waving good chocolate and ipods in front of her face – so long as she didn’t suggest cheating at Latin.

The Last Unicorn

I first discovered Peter S Beagle in Iraq, when I borrowed Giant Bones, a set of short stories with a really funny, distinctive voice. Alas, this book doesn’t hold up to that one. It starts out really well, with a unicorn going off to find some other unicorns. There’s actually a rather eerie conversation with a butterfly (which would be a challenge to write!) and then a fascinating segment in a freak show. But then it goes downhill, getting more and more derivative. It’s funny that fantasy which seems such an original genre actually has no qualms about borrowing left right and centre. There’s Robin Hood, and the Waste Land, and the cursed kingdom, and then – which is his biggest mistake – he turns the unicorn into a girl and makes the prince fall in love with her. You can’t believe in that relationship, you can’t want that relationship, and you just wait for it to finish. Oh, and the end? Very reminiscent of “The Little White Horse”.

It made a big hit when it was published in 1968, but what was original then, in language and in plot, is commonplace now, and now people do it better. The magician guy is always making jokes not only at his own expense but at the genre’s expense – that’s what every television character does today. There’s some lyrical moments, but it descends into sentimentality. It’s a fairy-story, but he doesn’t keep the simplicity of a fairy-tale’s structure and so it collapses. Pretty, but insubstantial, which is a pity.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter

This novel by Kim Edwards was actually pretty good. It abandons the clipped modern style which I’ve come to loathe and uses something a bit more lyrical, even if it’s closer to Anita Shreve than not. There’s some nice imagery and some kindness towards the reader, I think, and it’s told well, so that you want to keep reading until the finish.

Basically, a doctor delivers his wife’s twins at his own clinic, and ends up giving away his newborn daughter with Down syndrome, telling his wife that she had died, while only the boy, Paul, lived. He lives his whole life with this secret, while their life falls apart because of it. Meanwhile, his nurse, rather than putting the girl, Phoebe, into an institution, takes her home and raises her. Her life is transformed by this decision.

It’s a good way of showing how a split-second choice – to have an ordinary or an extraordinary life – can have such consequences. Sure, it’s simplistic to a certain extent (bad doctor gets punished, good nurse gets rewarded), but by showing every struggle, every continued choice, each moment when the secret could have been told and life could have been redeemed, Edwards makes it believable. It’s interesting historically, because she covers the early civil rights movements to allow children with Down syndrome into schools and jobs (it’s set between 60’s to 90’s), and also the change for women over that period, with the doctor’s wife, Norah, changing from housewife to career woman out of desperation. She also doesn’t make the nurse perfect – she has difficulty accepting Phoebe’s adulthood, for one thing, and the nurse too bears some of the responsibility for the secret.

I quite like the fact that there’s no easy redemption at the end. When they do meet, they meet with the awareness of all that’s been lost. The relationship between the doctor and his wife is never the same again; they end up divorcing. The relationship between the doctor and his son is never easy. There is some resolution when the doctor finally accepts his loss – not just the loss of his daughter but of his sister, whose childhood sufferings prompted the doctor’s decision – and when Norah and Paul finally get to meet Phoebe. But the outcome of that early decision can never be overcome, and that’s what makes the story interesting.

A Language in Common

Hiphip, Amazon things have arrived and with it this book by Marion Molteno. It's a set of short stories based on her experiences as an ESL worker with women from the Indian subcontinent living in South London. Interesting for me, because I was always the stranger living with women in India and B'desh - so it's a different viewpoint where they're the fish out of water.

I really enjoy her quiet, friendly style. She notices details without ever distancing the reader. While these stories are fiction, she is in it herself as a character, which again makes it closer to the reader.

There's stories about racism, domestic violence, raising children, changing, having to change despite oneself. And she makes such a clever choice by opening the collection with a section about a guy, an old Indian man, and then moving on from there to women, like opening a wider world.

One of the most interesting stories deals with the writer's trip to India and her visit to a persecuted minority group there, to which one of her London friend belongs. Again there's this sense of limited understanding opening up in the face of experience. Which is perfect, because that's what cross-cultural experience is all about.

The Aleph

I picked up another set of short stories by Borges in the bookshop. It has some of the same stories as the book below, but also contains some interesting things; there’s something on the death of JFK, there’s quite a few reworks of Latin American history, and there’s Borges talking about Borges.

Everything is both dreamlike and matter of fact. He knows how to set up the ideas and symbols without having to explain them to the reader. One of the things which I find fascinating is how, in almost every story, the narrator – even when he doesn’t appear – is one of the most important characters in the story. It’s supposed to be about someone else, but it never is; it’s always the person talking to you. Which is so brilliant, because that’s true; a retold story is still always about the person telling it to you, a dream about strangers is still really a dream about you.

Whenever I read his work I start thinking about the writers he reminds me of, and they’re basically a list of my favourite writers – Jostein Gaarder, Michael Ondaatje, Pasternak even. He knows how to write, they know how to write, and considering how much I’ve whinged in the entries below, that is a good thing.