Category: The Blog

Doctor Paul C O’Rourke is a dentist in New York whose life is sent upside down when a website, an email address, a twitter account and a facebook page are all set up in his name propounding the history and tenets of the Ulms. The Ulm aren’t just a religion, they are a people, a race that claims to be more persecuted than the Jews whose religious book, the Cantaveticles, includes an older version of the Biblical Job.

At first, Paul is outraged. He is an atheist who deplores all but the communal trappings of religion. But he has spent his life trying to belong, especially since his father’s suicide, and a religion that claims doubt as its binding principle, a religion that is also a family – all of them genetically linked to the original line of Ulms from the time of the Old Testament – is an appealing prospect. So far, the closest he has come to a family’s embrace, outside of his love for the Red Sox, is through the families of his respective girlfriends. He shares this desperation to belong with the leader of the newly formed Ulm and their online exchange moves from outrage to intrigue.

I suspect I missed the point of this novel. Though there were many moments when a comment would tickle my mind, or the witty and meticulous depiction of isolation and loneliness in the midst of a metropolis moved me to world-weary empathy, I simply wasn’t gripped. This is an interesting book about the god-hole we are all said to harbour within us, about what lengths people will go to in order to belong including fighting against those who don’t, but it remains ungrounded for me. Paul is himself too disconnected to give this roughshod ride through Catholicism, Judaism and Ulmism emotional punch. However, as I say, I think it may simply be that the novel didn’t speak to me as it will or does to others. I’d swap The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth into the shortlist for the Man Booker and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour back out onto the longlist. But if dental hygiene and a longing to belong are your bag, do read this and disagree with me.

Next week I’m reading The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, followed by The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

Orfeo is the story of Peter Els’ lifelong love of music as his means to understand the code of life beyond that of humanity into the distant past and the alien future. A clarinettist whose father wanted him to be a chemist, Peter falls in love with a cellist who argues his musical brilliance is too good to be thrown away on a life of chemistry and yet by the end of his life, retired and isolated Peter returns to the chemical building blocks of life and tries, instead of teasing music from life, to put music into DNA. Unsurprisingly, his homemade biochemistry alerts the authorities. They see the manipulation of bacteria as a possible terrorist threat. His reaction is to flea, hoping for some final recompense for a life lived without considering the full consequences.

There is so much of this novel that I wanted to love. I enjoy descriptions of music, I embrace the need to find something that coheres for one moment an endless bafflement at life. And yet. And yet there was something eerie about this book as if, like a melody too often played, I had heard it before, its echo an earworm that niggled at me and forced me to read at lightening speed partly through frustration – what was this sound I had heard before? – but also a little through boredom – when would it end? That was what triggered my epiphany. The reason this book couldn’t leap from the Man Booker long list to the short list was that the story of the American male life-crisis has started to tire even those invested with the power of awards. I think this is what the Great American Novel has become: a man in later years on one last pilgrimage – one that he sees will undoubtedly fail – to apologise for his selfishness, his absence, his inability to do the daily work of living with others; the account of a deeply flawed man whom we are nonetheless meant to pity because he meant well. Well I’ve read it and burned the t-shirt.

I’m not saying that this isn’t a well-written and interesting novel. I’m not saying I don’t embrace many of the themes and understand an aging attitude to the reasons for, and efforts of, creativity, but I just wish the novel had stepped beyond a vision of itself as an addition to a genre that needs to get over itself. I also wonder if the title was too easily arrived at and not fought for. Yes, there are those who say Orfeo, or Orpheus, brought medicine to men, so Peter’s scientific tinkering has a mythical mirror, but what about the descent into hell or the love of young boys or his inability not to look back (Peter does do a lot of looking back but I think he gains rather than loses from the experience)? I wonder if I’ve missed some parallels.

Having said that, I’m sure a more musical individual would find much more in Orfeo and would embrace Peter as the tragic hero Richard Powers no doubt intends him to be. Of course, in many ways, his fall also hints at a wider tragedy being played out by America itself and that is interesting, but I wish this were a fresh take, a view from a different perspective, not the same old whinings of a man regretting single-mindedness but the song as it may be taken on by the next generation. That would be a new breed of Great American novel.

Next week I’m reading Ali Smith’s How to Be Both.

The narrator of The Wake, Buccmaster, is a free landowner in the Fens at the time of the Norman invasion in 1066. His sons are taken by the war; his wife is raped and burned in her own house; his land is burned and left to grow wild. Buccmaster is left with nothing but a sense of vengeance and so he wanders into the fens and woods caught in the madness of war. Taking his grandfather’s sword, which his grandfather claimed came from the old English God of welder’s himself, Buccmaster seeks men who will follow him and fight against all foreigners of land and belief.

As the novel progresses the history of Buccmaster’s private battle, in which he and his father and sister clashed over beliefs in old English gods or Christ, reveals Buccmaster as a dangerous man whose religious beliefs take him to the edge of sanity.

I enjoyed Buccmaster’s tale immensely. Though it took some effort to immerse myself in the shadow prose of Old and modern English, it was worth it. There were moments of great beauty. The mystery of an untamed land rich in nature’s powers was brilliantly created by this pseudo-language, providing us with an opaque veil through which old England could be spied upon: ‘there is a sceat a sceat of light that is between this world and others and that sum times and in sum places this sceat is thynne and can be seen through. on this daeg in this ham the sceat was thynne and scriffran in the light wind and through it i colde see all that the world triewely was beyond this small place of small men and deorc and strong and of great beuty and fear was what i saw’

Despite the poetry of such moments, religious fanaticism is one of the novel’s most frightening themes, intentionally or not. For Buccmaster becomes a man made mad by belief and the old gods, powerfully rendered as they are, are weakened by the way in which he acts upon their behalf. This becomes a great question within the novel: did Kingsnorth intend to undermine the gods he resurrects? Why? In some ways I am reminded of old hagiographies (later in chronological time but no less mystical), of the recorded visions of saints like Margery Kempe and Hildegard of Bingen. Buccmaster is writing down his own visions, visions of the old gods of England who, through him, will ride again and make England strong. I suppose it is therefore inevitable that his account is masterful in its mythologizing of Buccmaster’s own life and experience, but this did sometimes feel at odds with the point of view of the narrative. I am not an old English scholar though, and cannot be sure how fixed such a thing as point of view would have been and in many ways it feels important to be able to see through Buccmaster’s reinvention of his past.

Regardless of your reading of his communion with the old gods, Buccmaster’s tale does bring old England alive, does pose live questions about our history and the recurrence of war and religion. I might have enjoyed a novel about the documented green man, Hereward, a leader of the resistance against the French invasion, but perhaps it would have catered more to a straight-forward contemporary account of historical interest rather than a dreamlike revisiting of the narrative frameworks of the past that allows for a more interesting review of our own time because we see it afresh, as if walking out of dense forest into the clearing.

The Wake is a fascinating, ingenious novel, which though perhaps a little arrogant, is brave and unwavering its singularity and vision. I’m not surprised it has been left off the short list for this year’s Man Booker; this is not a crowd-pleaser of a book, this is a genuinely interesting novel breathing new life into old myths. For me, The Wake takes magical realism into the realm of history, blowing open our contemporary, dry take on the world around us.

Next week I’ll be reading Orfeo, by Richard Powers, another book on the long list of the 2014 Man Booker prize that didn’t make it to the short list. The following week I will be reading How to be both by Ali Smith. I plan to end this year of reading and reviewing a book a week as I began, decided for myself who I feel should win the Man Booker. A list of my favourite books of the year will also follow in October. Feel free to comment, disagree, or suggest new books for me to read.

The Cave is a novel of many stories. It is the story of an ageing man, Cipriano Algor, finding new love even as his livelihood is threatened. It is a story about families and the development of intimate human relationships. It is the story of the pioneer, seeking a new life away from what once was home. It is the story of technology against tradition, power against the individual, capitalist totalitarianism and revolution. It is a story where the true philosophers are found in all classes and seem more likely to evolve in those whose brains are still active in their fingers, working with the very substance from which we derive; in this case potters and clay. And the list could go on.  Offering a review of the novel would therefore much deplete the ground Saramago tries to cover.

Whilst the unfolding of the characters lives is rendered beautifully, carefully expressing the multiple ways in which people in close relationships communicate through even the most simple of phrases, there is a veiled fear of technology that muddies the waters of Saramago’s ultimate argument in which the cave is shown to be the creation of the Centre who use consumerism to lure more and more citizens under their carefully veiled totalitarian rule. His argument is appealing. The further humans are drawn into the world of advertisements, of wanting for wanting’s sake, of security from the natural world, of simulated experience, the further they are from interacting with the real or natural world and the more they rely upon that simulated world. My only issue is with the terms natural and artificial. Whilst the power dynamics of Saramago’s Centre remain true to comparable corporations in real life, not all ‘artificial’ developments can necessarily be considered bad. I mean, where would we stop? Is Saramago suggesting that anything that doesn’t involve hard physical labour is potentially threatening? I don’t think so, but perhaps there will be a time when a break with modern developments is required. Perhaps consumerism has already bound us to a life in which we stare at a wall of shadows.

That of course is the heart of the novel: Plato’s cave. Deep within the walls of the growing Centre the truth of the prison they are building and developing day by day is uncovered. But when dangerous secrets are redefined as propaganda, the truth is something only a few can see.

In some ways the denouement of The Cave happens rather quickly. How Cipriano Algor’s family gets to the Centre has more page weight than any potential escape. However, the build up to the Centre allows for the development of all the other narratives about creation, love, and the delicate nature of what it means to be a human being. The story of Found, the dog Cipriano finds sleeping in the old kennel in the yard, is central to an exploration of being. Found’s instinct and thought form a huge part of what it is to be human, a bestial nobility that stands in the face of the Centre and its no pet rule, that offers a notion of man as part of the whole of nature, not something that stands outside it.

Ultimately, The Cave is a beautiful and complex novel that pokes holes in our unconscious acceptance of modern life. I thoroughly recommend it.

Next week I’ll be reading The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, followed by Orfeo by Richard Powers.

On the long list for the Man Booker 2014, We are all completely beside ourselves is a book that is hard to talk about without ruining some of its own device. The novel is narrated by Rosemary who is struggling to tell her own story by telling the story of her family who involve her, from the earliest months of her life, in a research project into the differences between ourselves and our closest animal relatives. The results of this project and its multiple complications change all of their lives irrevocably.

Rosemary used to be a talker and her father’s advice to tell stories from the middle, to save himself from having to listen for too long, is a useful directive through which the narrative can develop without drawing attention to the natures of all of the characters involved. We are meant to be entering the story with as little bias as possible, allowing us to unravel the familiar narrative of family dysfunction – parents whose seemingly intentionally damaging decisions take children years to comprehend, often when it is too late to remake their lives in the light of new discovery – to make an unusual story ordinary. In some ways the narrative succeeds too well at this. I wanted to be forced to further question my views on animal intelligence. Then again I might not be the person at whom the narrative may be aimed, I already believe humans are far too quick to judge other animals on human terms rather than their own.

Whilst I devoured We are all completely beside ourselves, embracing its storyline with increasing interest, finding the characters believable and compelling, in the end the novel didn’t go far enough for me. I wanted to be pushed further into the non-human animal mind. I wanted to further explore that alternative perspective. Perhaps, again that’s the point, but as I wasn’t engaged enough on an emotional level either, I didn’t feel as if I’d undergone Rosemary’s connection to the non-human animal mind and so for me the book is a good book, a page-turning book, but not a book I expect to see on the short list for the Man Booker. However, I’d be happy to hear from those who think the failing to engage was my own…

Next week I’m reading J by Howard Jacobson followed by The Cave by Jose Saramago. Keep the comments and suggestions coming.

I’m very fond of Magnus Mills’ work and when I found The Restraint of Beasts, his first novel, in a second hand bookshop, I was excited. I wondered what his first novel would be like and the title was promising.

The narrator is an English fencer working for a Scottish firm specialising in high tensile fencing. The novel opens with him being made foreman of a team of two almost inseparable Scots. Tam and Richie, both motivated by beer, survive on an endless system of subs and loans that dwindles their coming month’s wages. Unlike the narrator, they have no thoughts of extending their career beyond fencing. It doesn’t take long for the reader to extrapolate wider meanings for the term beasts.

The team is put together for a job in England, but before they can go they first have to fix a job they have supposedly just finished: Mr McCrindle’s fence has gone slack; not a very good start (something that gets said a lot). When they get to England they fall under the stronghold of the Hall Brothers who seem to be in charge of all the beasts from pigs to men. Before long they are working for the Hall Brothers on a seven foot high, high tensile electric fence with no gates. They wonder how you get anything out and I wonder how you get anything in. What is the fence for? Why are Hall Brothers workers all men fed only on Hall Brothers’ meat? What does it really mean to win the school dinners contract? Why is it so easy to bury the mistakes of a labourer (you’ll see what I mean)?

I enjoyed The Restraint of Beasts but in the end too much was left unexplored for my tastes. Whilst I understand that Mills is contemplating the nature of contract working, extrapolating out from one closed nit community to the workings of society in general, and that the worker doesn’t need to see the big picture to complete his job whose boundaries are as clear as the fences he’s building, I’m surprised there isn’t more conjecture on the narrator’s part. He likes to imagine he is a little higher up the food chain than Tam and Richie. Perhaps if the novel had been a little longer I would have had many more questions answered, but perhaps the book would then no longer have been the dance Mills intended. I wanted the novel to step further into the unspoken surreal edge that hovers around the story, crackling with the electric tension of the fence its main characters are busy building. I wanted more allegory and Mills went for more mystery.

The Restraint of Beasts is an intriguing book, but if I were to recommend a novel by Magnus Mills, I would recommend Three To See The King. That’s a book that does more of what I had hoped The Restraint of Beasts was working up to. Nevertheless, The Restraint of Beasts has a bleak humour that raises a rye smile about the economies of contract working and its implications for the restraints we place around ourselves.

Next week, I’m reading We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, followed by J by Howard Jacobson.

Though The Fifth Child is definitely dated by its lack of politically correct language, a lack central to the issues of the novel however, I ate this book up with frightening relish. David and Harriet are an unusually ordinary couple who long for domesticity, a large welcoming family home and lots of children. Their fifth child presents a challenge that rocks the foundations of everything they thought they stood for.

I couldn’t get enough of this family and the extended relations that brought class, education, money and disability into the mix. There were so many brilliantly evoked scenes where the unspoken bristled and that strange tense acceptance of family relationships, regardless of their faults that brews under the bottle cap waiting to explode, sat cleverly beneath surface discussion. It’s a very well observed book full of the complexities of relationships and family decision-making. The blame, shame, anger, resentment and exhaustion make for compelling reading. This is the book we should have been discussing in relation to the difficulties of loving an emotionally distant, unloving and violent child, not We Need To Talk About Kevin. But perhaps this novel has been forgotten, lost to the ravages of political correctness and to welcome psychiatric developments. Certainly the situation would provoke different handling in 2014 and I did find it difficult to listen to the mother describing her fifth child as a genetic throw back – though of course the expression of how people actually feel should never be censored and finding it difficult is a reaction the book certainly intends – and the care home he is sent to does anything but care for its charges. The issues, however, of how a family meets and deals with difference are fascinating and relevant. The novel is riddled with parenting dilemmas all crying out for discussion. Read it and lets have some of those discussions. I wonder, when the mother says she has given birth to a monster, if it possible to be more controversial?

Next week I’m reading The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills, followed by We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.

Reading The Lost Horizon is a bit like being transported into a grown-up version of a boy’s adventure story. There is a touch of Conrad, a feeling of Greene. It’s all secrets, conspiracies, the aftermath of war and how that impacts upon a person.

Told within the framework of two school friends speaking of another, the narrator tells his friend’s account of Conway’s story. Rutherford met Conway on a ship. Conway had lost his memory but Rutherford’s memory of him reawakens Conway to himself and allows him to tell Rutherford his unusual tale.

Conway was being evacuated from Baskul to Peshwar but his plane was high-jacked and crashed somewhere in the Tibetan mountains. The surviving passengers were met by an old monk who takes them to the hidden valley and monastery of Shangri-la under the beautiful shadow of the Blue Moon Mountain. As their stay at Shangri-la is prolonged, Conway begins to unravel the mystery of this hidden vision of utopia.

I’m not sure if I would embrace the moderate lifestyle of Shangri-la but it is exciting to believe there could be secret places unbound by poverty, hunger and war, carefully maintaining human achievement without the fierce bias of self-defence.

The Lost Horizon is a clear-headed account of human nature and endeavour that combines mystery, ambition and adventure. The handed down nature of the story beautifully conveys the development of myth making The Lost Horizon a great telling of a great story.

Next week I’m reading The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, followed by The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler which has been longlisted for the Man Booker. I look forward to more of your comments and reading suggestions.

Stoner is a novel of a life, a supposedly unremarkable life whose telling shows the beauty of a quiet every day lived in love. The protagonist, William Stoner, is the son of a farmer who is the first in his family to go up to university to study agriculture and make more of their arid patch of land. Whilst there, Stoner discovers literature and never turns back. He becomes a literature professor, turning away from worldly pursuits in favour of the academic. The careful turn of words earns his love and passion in a way that occasionally lives in his personal life. He never amounts to anything but a teacher academically and his marriage is a difficult one, but there is such beauty in this life of principle that none of these things matter. To live, to love to live, even for a little, is enough.

Stoner is a beautiful novel that stands in the face of the Great American Novel and calmly, gently, with delicate precision, sticks its fingers up and asks what really matters. Brilliant. I don’t want to say more than that because I urge you to read it for yourself.

Next week I’m reading The Lost Horizon by James Hilton, followed by The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing and The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. Do keep your comments and suggestions coming.

Set in rural Ireland after the housing bubble burst, The Spinning Heart takes individual voices and blends them into a story of loss and despondency. The stories spin around the heart in Bobby Mahon’s childhood home, around living hearts that struggle to push through hardened arteries or nervous dispositions, around the family, the hearth that is the true heart of generations grown on father’s anger, God’s anger, or on motherly cowardice or resentment. There isn’t a tale that escapes some kind of family cruelty, every person trying their best to make it one day more.

The craft the novel displays is artful and well-conceived, though I would argue at times a little sentimental. Bobby Mahon is the local hero against whom other men measure themselves and Donal Ryan allows the law of tragedy that rips through lives with an unfounded chaos, driving men mad, to tear up this community with Bobby as their scapegoat. Someone has to pay for the scams of the boom years. It can’t be the man who made off with everyone’s money because he is long gone. The desire to kill one’s father becomes enough to condemn Bobby, and over it all hangs the question of what now. Amidst the chaos what really matters?

The Spinning Heart is a beautiful, powerful novel and deserving winner of the Guardian First Novel Award last year, but it wasn’t quite for me. I’m not sure if it was Bobby’s father’s dead voice that lost me, or simply my corresponding despondency in the face of the well-described listlessness of recession. I read the novel almost as if it were a dream that is all too easy to wake from. That may say more about me than the novel. There can be no doubt this is a novel worth reading, it’s just simply not my favourite so far this year.

Next week I’ll be reading Stoner by John Williams, followed by The Lost Horizon by James Hilton and The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Please do comment and send in suggestions for future reading.