Tony Messenger - 2012 Long List - Skios - Michael Frayn

Kingsley Amis was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize (with “Ending Up” in 1974, “Jake’s Thing” in 1978 and finally winning the prize with “The Old Devils” in 1986), Frayn has been on the shortlist before with “Headlong” back in 1999. So a “masterful” exponent of farce is shortlisted more often than a new kid on the block? I suppose Frayn has further opportunity to make the list in future years.

“Skios” is farce, pure and simple farce. Mix in some scientific chaos theory mumbo jumbo but it reads very much like a stiff upper lip British comic farce from the 1970’s. This year we also had “The Yips” by Nicola Barker, a comic farce with intertwined characters set for the internet generation, and personally I found that novel had a lot more depth and pathos than Frayn’s latest offering.

Put simply we are on the Greek Island of Skios, and according to this novel the original home of Athena the Greek virgin Goddess of reason, intelligent activity, arts and literature. Of course she must be hidden as we have four intertwined (although they don’t know it) main characters Dr Norman Wilfred who has been hired by the gorgeous and ambitious Nikki to give the Annual Fred Toppler Foundation Lecture on “Innovation and Governance; the Promise of Scientometrics”, and Oliver Fox a playboy self-confidant womaniser who has arranged to meet a lady who he had previously met for a grand total of 5 minutes, Georgie, for a romantic rendezvous on the island of Skios.

Now things start to get a little complicated, Georgie is away on this interlude without telling her current partner Patrick, Oliver is using a villa, to meet Georgie, which is owned by friends of his ex-girlfriend (Annuka who has only recently thrown him out and whose luggage he is using). Georgie used to go to school with Nikki and she’s using their friendship as a cover for her “getaway”, Nikki is plotting to win control of the Foundation with her coup speaker and poor Dr Wilfred is just too busy on his mobile phone to realise someone has taken his luggage. Oliver pretends he is Norman, Norman ends up in a villa not the foundation, Georgie thinks Nikki is in Switzerland (“skiers” not “Skios”) and ends up in the same bed as Norman who she thinks is Oliver, Nikki thinks Oliver is Dr Norman Wilfred and is charmed, Oliver thinks he is Norman and on it goes.

She plainly wanted him to be Dr Wilfred, he could see. She would probably be disappointed later, of course, when he turned out not to have been Dr Wilfred after all. But later was later. The immediate priority was not to disappoint her now. In Any case, there was some truth in what he had said. He was not good at telling lies, and he never did. Not if he could manage without.

We also have Greek corrupt leaders, Russian magnates with clueless girlfriends, sheiks with impossibly long names, money laundering, about 30 episodes with mobile phones, drunk and tired journalists, inept security guards, twin? brother taxi drivers  and more. As a multi award winning playwright you can see this novel being firmly put upon a stage with people quickly moving in and out, ribald laughter from the stalls and oohhss and ahhhsss as we feel embarrassed at each and every wrong turn. But does it work as a novel? [SPOLIER ALERT] The one redeeming feature for myself was the chapter just short of the ending where the numerous plausible endings are put down, the explanation of seemingly random events and the causation of other events – the butterfly in Brazil flapping it’s wings causing weather events does rate a mention!!!!

All up a quick read, an enjoyable read but something I’d rather watch on a stage (and on a night where I’ve switched off a bit). So farce features twice on this year’s long list, so we must be in dark times if we are reduced to improbable, coincidental and quite simply absurd behaviour to take us away from the reality.

Cross posted at my blog.

Tony Messenger - 2012 Long List - Communion Town - Sam Thompson

‘We’re always telling ourselves the story of ourselves, every waking moment, as if nothing matters more. Isn’t that a selfish way to live? Shouldn’t we try and get outside that?’

This novel is subtitled “A City in Ten Chapters” and we want to know the secret of this city, we spend 278 pages (in my edition) wandering around lost in this city, wondering about ourselves will we be gratified, will the novel answer all the questions it has raised, if only for my own gratification.

The city is a mystery when you notice it’s full of sunken side streets falling away from you beside river and canal, by yellow and pink brick terraces, in September for instance under castles of foliage, in deep light. Someone approaches and you’re sure you recognise him, you’ve met just once, and not long ago, but he vanishes away down one of those streets and you miss him. You feel you owe an apology. And it only gets deeper, the riddle of it, as years go by and the special creatures stay exactly the same, just as they were when Stephen went with them. The modulation of names and faces makes no difference at all.

The cover of my novel has a review snippet from Tash Aw “A strange remarkable work”, well I concur, this novel is strange, very strange. More like ten short stories all on the same theme of the city, with different voices, different tenses, different eras, first person, and third person, missing characters, choruses and probably more. We have tales that ring of Sam Spade, ones that are lifted straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (with a consulting detective and his sidekick – the sidekick narrating that chapter), others that are gothic and others that are drenched in heartache but also horror.

As you know I don’t like to put spoilers in my reviews but in this case I could probably point out the whole novel and it wouldn’t spoil it in any way as I must admit (it is my failing here) I just didn’t get it. Initially I thought it was being structured as a growing metropolis may be having an architectural theme, or slowly constructing a whole, later I thought it was all going to lead to a common theme as Colum McCann did brilliantly in “Let The Great World Spin”, even later still I thought it was probably a mixture of unconnected tales as would happen in a city, where your paths may never cross another individual. I still don’t know what this was, it is set in the past (maybe), the future (probably), the present (unlikely) and the disparate sections have minimal linking themes (maybe the “don’t go out at night” theme was common). We even have a “memory city” within the city:

And does our discipline not have a special affinity with the ancient practice of the memory house, for where does the detective live, if not in a memory city, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and symbols? Does she not, in her mind, walk the street at all times, in search of the meanings concealed there?

Yes this is a novel of codes and symbols, you could go back and reread it numerous times to search for the meanings concealed there, you could probably work out the literary references each chapter represents and then come to some conclusive whole. Personally I enjoyed a lot of the quotes, the language and the concept, pity is it didn’t reach the heights I thought were there, hate to say it but this is no David Mitchell, nor did it leave me with a sense of wanting more. 

Cross posted at my blog.

Laura's Review - Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry

They continued to cope, poorly, with the excretions and secretions of their stepfather's body, moving from revulsion to pity to anger, and back to revulsion. They were bewildered, and indignant, that a human creature of blood and bone, so efficient in good health, could suddenly become so messy. Neither Nariman's age nor his previous illnesses had served to warn them. Sometimes they took it personally, as though their stepfather had reduced himself to this state to harass them. And by nightfall, the air was again fraught with tension, thick with reproaches spoken and silent. (p 68)

Nariman Vakeel is an elderly, retired English professor suffering from Parkinson's Disease. He lives in the family home -- ironically named Chateau Felicity -- with his middle-aged step-children, Jal and Coomy. Nariman married their mother Yasmin when Jal and Coomy were children, after his family forbid him to marry his true love, Lucy. He raised them along with a younger half-sister, Roxana. Coomy is filled with resentment; everyone else walks on eggshells to avoid her bitterness. Jal feigns obliviousness, tinkering with his hearing aid when tempers flare.

When Nariman falls while out on a walk, Jal and Coomy are quickly overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for him. Coomy wastes no time tricking Roxana into taking him in. Roxana and her family live in a smaller flat and struggle to make ends meet, but they are blessed with a more positive outlook on life. Even Roxana's young sons take things in stride:

The balcony door framed the scene: nine-year-old happily feeding seventy-nine. And then it struck her like a revelation -- of what, she could not say. Hidden by the screen of damp clothes, she watched, clutching Yezad's shirt in her hands. She felt she was witnessing something almost sacred, and her eyes refused to relinquish the previous moment, for she knew instinctively that it would become a memory to cherish, to recall in difficult times when she needed strength. (p. 98)

But as weeks pass, the strain takes its toll on everyone. Coomy takes dramatic steps to keep up the illusion she is unable to care for Nariman. Jal is silently complicit. Roxana tries, in vain, to stretch Yezad's salary to cover the cost of Nariman's medication. And Yezad responds to the financial strain through a series of progressively destructive acts aimed at improving their financial situation. Eventually they hit rock bottom in ways both inevitable and shocking, and are then faced with the challenge of rebuilding what they hold most dear.

I put off reading this book for some time, thinking it might strike too close to home. My father has Parkinson's, and last year a medical incident set in motion a series of events culminating in my parents' long-overdue move to a continuous care retirement community. Family Matters was indeed painful to read, although I could distance myself from it because the Vakeel family's situation was very different from mine. And yet there are valuable messages in this book about the importance of family, and living for today, that are still with me days after finishing the book.

Athena's Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)

This was a clever and well written book. It was ambitious and unique.

It took me awhile to read this book. It was on my Kindle so I often forgot I had it and it didn't give me incentive to read it in time like my library books. The other reason I would forget about this book is the different narratives from this book. It is very well written and I liked it more than other books that had this kind of style such as Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. It does mean that once you get comfortable with one chapter's story, it changes and you have to start all over again.

It took to reading the sixth and final narrative in the middle of the book that I realized what Mitchell was doing. At that point, I had to finish the book. It became gripping and I really liked the every changing structure and tone.

For the full review of the book and the movie, please click here to see it on my blog.

Athena's Review: The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)

This was a different and strange short novel. Nick Hornby was reading more Muriel Spark in his last compilation noting her ability satisfy with her short novels. Having read The Prime of Miss Brodie, I decided why not.

I started this in the queue to get my passport renewed and it was appropriate because it is about a woman who takes a journey to Italy on a mission. Early on in this story, the reader knows the outcome of Lise the protagonist so there is a certain amount of mystery, suspense and tension on how she gets to the ending.

The story was published in 1970 and the events and even Lise reflect the 1960's. The book has a dark, violent and cruel ending. It is not precise and does not give you a sense of closure, but it's memorable with its unique protagonist and Spark's writing.

I was quite surprised by how dark it was. I was less surprised by the derangement exhibited by the protagonist because I am learning that delusion is a feature of Spark's characters. Characters in the novel seem to talk at each other than with each other.

This is a story where I didn't relate to anyone or any concept, but I did like the writing and found the plot provocative and the characters odd. I won't likely forget Lise for awhile. I'm not surprised this was shortlisted for the Lost Booker Prize as it seems like a Booker story too.

Originally posted on my blog Aquatique.

Laura's Review - The Patrick Melrose Novels, by Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels is a 680-page omnibus of four works by Edward St. Aubyn, originally published between 1992 and 2005: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk. A fifth novel, At Last, was published in 2012. Each book covers a period in Patrick's life, often only a day or two, spread out over four decades.

In Never Mind, Patrick is five years old and living in France with his British father and American mother. This tightly written novella tells you all you need to know about David and Eleanor Melrose, and it's not pretty. David is an overbearing, sadistic man; Eleanor and Patrick are victims of his cruelty. Towards the end of the novella, something unthinkable happens, and you know Patrick will be scarred for life. In the following books you can see Patrick trying, mostly in vain, to move beyond this childhood trauma. In Bad News, 22-year-old Patrick has taken to drugs and is constantly in search of his next hit. By age 30, in Some Hope, he has given up drugs (or has he?), and is making an effort to address long-term psychological issues. 

Have you seen the amazing "Up" documentary series? Bear with me, there's a point to this digression. In the documentaries, director Michael Apted visits the same group of British-born people every 7 years, beginning at age 7 (the latest installment, 56 Up, was released in 2012 and will soon arrive in US cinemas -- see it if you can). The Patrick Melrose Novels share a similar premise, taken from the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Like the documentaries, each novel gives us a glimpse into Patrick's life at a point in time. We know little about the intervening period. But the events in Never Mind are like a thread woven through Patrick's life, influencing everything he says and does, and the man he becomes.

By the time we get to Mother's Milk, Patrick is 40, married, with children. He's a devoted father with stable employment. You might think he's living the dream, right? Well, no. Patrick's aging mother has pretty much disinherited him by making increasingly irresponsible decisions about her estate. Patrick's well-being teeters on a precipice; not surprisingly, we see some backsliding into destructive behaviors. The scars from Never Mind have never healed.

When I picked up this book my original intention was to read the first novella and return to the others later. Instead I found myself drawn into Patrick's story, despite the fact that nearly every character is unlikable in the extreme. The writing is harsh and direct; St Aubyn doesn't sugar coat the situation in any way. It was all so unpleasant! And yet something kept me coming back for the next installment, hoping to see Patrick in a better place with each passing decade. I did have one quibble with the writing, however. Mother's Milk is told largely through the thoughts, words and deeds of Patrick's very young sons. Their voices didn't ring true; I've never met a preschooler who could think or speak in such a sophisticated way.  

Mother's Milk was nominated for the 2006 Booker Prize, and because of that I nearly made the mistake of reading it as a standalone novel. I don't think you can appreciate it unless you've read the three previous books. Perhaps the Booker judges were recognizing a body of work more than an individual novel?



Cross-posted from my blog

Karen's Review: Possession 1990

When a writer dies, should their private lives die with them? Or should they become the  possessions of academics and enthusiasts, to be collected, catalogued and analysed like laboratory specimens. Possession in all its manifestations — physical, spiritual, emotional — is the focus of  A S Byatt’s 1990 Booker winning novel. The more you read it, the more forms of possession become apparent: legal ownership of correspondence and creative work; obsession with words; control of one’s history;  exertion of influence; emotional disturbance.

The first example comes only a few pages into the story when a postgraduate researcher uncovers some letters which hint at a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. He steals them and also hides his discovery from his boss. Instead he teams up with another academic Maud Bailey, who has devoted years to dissecting LaMotte’s work. Together they embark on a quest to discover the truth, piecing the story together from a vast array of sources, including letters, journal entries and field trips to Yorkshire and France.

But they are not the only ones in pursuit. From across the Atlantic come Professor Leonora Stern, an avid feminist who is possessed by LaMotte’s supposed lesbian tendencies and Mortimer Cropper, a scholar-collector who is hell-bent on acquiring everything once owned by Ash and shipping it to the USA.  In the background there is Cropper’s arch rival Professor James Blackadder, editor of Ash’s Complete Works who is determined to preserve all of Ash’s work in England. Ranged against them all is the determination of Ash’s widow to preserve her husband’s secret. What ensues is a cross between the tradition of the romance adventure with its battle between good and bad and the tradition of a mystery story where the characters have to follow a trail of clues to find the solution.

Byatt skillfully weaves these (or to use Byatt’s own description of ‘a piece of knitting’)  into two parallel stories. The painful Victorian love story of Ash and LaMotte, retold through their poems and letters, has its counterpoint in the present-day story of Mitchell and Bailey, whose academic partnership slowly grows into love. Their stories are intertwined so objects from one era reappear in the other — a Victorian jet brooch that Maud wears for example —  and the two pairs of lovers share similar behaviours; so Roland’s admiration for Maud’s hair parallels Ash’s fascination with LaMotte’s tresses.

A S Byatt

Byatt’s versatility as a writer is evident in the multiple narrative styles found in Possession. She wrote all the poems herself, a task which required her to adopt different voices and styles for each of her Victorian poets – so successful was she that many readers apparently believed Ash and La Motte were real. Her publishers were not so convinced, fearing that  readers would find the the inclusion of so many poems too intrusive and a distraction from the mystery story.

I didn’t find them distracting so much as tedious. I’m not a fan of poetry which relies on my knowledge of myths and legends, nor do I enjoy poems which use over-blown language. Both Ash and LaMotte were guilty on both counts – many of their poems were just so dire I skipped them. Nor did I appreciate the long, and frankly often very tedious, passages in the letters between these two poets in which they discussed layers of meaning in Nordic myths. If this is how writers in their era talked to each other, I can’t imagine I’d enjoy spending much time in their company. Was Byatt making fun of them in the same way she  ridiculed the academic world for its dogged pursuit of apparently trivial knowledge? I still wasn’t sure by the time I finished reading.

I can’t say that reading Possession was a deeply enjoyable experience. I admired Byatt’s command of language and her ability to tell a story but never felt her contemporary characters came alive in the same way as the Victorians did or that the inclusion of so much poetry really enhanced the book.

Tony Messenger - 2012 Shortlist - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

I must admit, gardening is not really my thing, I do appreciate a beautiful garden and I have seen a number of Japanese gardens in my time, obviously without fully appreciating the abstract message being conveyed. This novel is a contemplative one, hence the week or so since I finished it before getting to this review. It was a slow read, only due to the fact that I was letting it slowly sink in, as I’m sure Tan Twan Eng intended.

Set in Malaya in the mountains we have our narrator Yun Ling Teoh returning to the gardens of the evening mist to relive her story of being apprenticed to Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Judge Teoh is a former war criminals prosecutor who had spent time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, where her sister perished. She despises the Japanese for those atrocities but at the same time her story of her relationship with Aritomo and her wish of building a garden for her sister’s memory is slowly drip fed to us. Her time working Aritomo’s garden (Yugiri) and her relationship with the gardener and the locals is revealed slowly through the mists of her recollections.

At each turn in the path, Aritomo drew my attention to an arrangement of rocks, an unusual sculpture, or a stone lantern. They looked as if they had been lying there on the beds of moss and ferns for centuries. ‘These objects signal to the traveller that he is entering another layer of his journey,’ he said. ‘They tell him to stop and gather his thoughts, to savour the view.’

And our story unfolds in this manner, long winding passages with detailed descriptions of leaves, or clouds and then the occasional blooming of Judge Teoh’s story, we as readers have entered another layer of our journey. Although you could simply follow the narrative plot here this is a multi layered novel one that slowly encompasses “the art of setting stones” and a miniature view of a much broader landscape. We do have tea ceremonies, Buddhist references, raked sand to represent various elements, holes in hedges to focus your attention and more. All sub plots to the main story by our  narrator, who is losing her memory but revealing her story to us at the same time. A story which contains local terrorists, tea growers, tribes who harvest bat nests (for soup), kamikaze pilots and a mystery of hidden Japanese war wealth.

Despite my fears of a CT attack, I enjoyed living on my own again, in these mountains where the breath of trees turned to mists, where the mists entered the clouds and fell to earth again as rain, where the rain was absorbed by the roots deep in the earth and drawn out as vapour again by the leaves a hundred feet above the ground. The days here opened from beyond one set of mountains and ended behind another, and I came to think of Yugiri as a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and sunset.

This is a beautifully styled novel and as I mentioned before one that I allowed to slowly sink into my conscience. Judge Teoh’s life and the journey through war camps, through varied relationships and her attachment to Japanese gardens as well as woodblock prints and tattoo was not a journey I could quickly skim through. Personally I could understand frustration at a number of reader’s hands and if Japanese gardens, meditation and slow awareness is not your think then this would probably infuriate you no end.

Overall a very enjoyable novel which taught me a great deal about Japanese gardening, post war Malaya as well as narrative style. A worthy inclusion to the Booker Shortlist.

Cross posted at my blog.

Marie C. Reviews Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Published 2004 by Random House.

Cloud Atlas is a weird and intriguing book. Encompassing large ranges of time and space, and arranged in a matryoshka-doll format, it's composed of a series of short stories that nestle inside each other, connected in ways subtle and overt. The stories also represent different literary styles, and show evolution in the human condition as well as in language and expression.

The first story, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," which begins and ends the book, is a historical fiction about a man and his adventures in New Zealand of the early colonial period (I think). The next is an epistolary tale set in the early 20th century, then a crime story, then a first-person contemporary narrative, then a futuristic dystopia, then a far-future post-apocalypse. The stories go 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1 and each first part ends on a cliffhanger that the second part picks up immediately where the first part leaves off.

And how are they connected? That's for you to find out when you read it. I picked it up because it's been selling like crazy at the bookstore, and I wanted to be able to talk to my customers about it and recommend what to read next when they come back. I can do that now, and I'm glad that I read it. And I really enjoyed it. It's heavier lifting in literary terms than I'd been doing for a while, and it felt good to read a hard book again- a change from the fluffy crime fiction and homeworky new releases I read too much of. The stories are delightful, and a couple are quite wonderful. I particularly enjoyed the dystopic "Orison of Somni-451," about the rebellion of a sentient robot, and "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish," a flat-out hilarious adventure of what happens to an elderly and particularly myopic publisher when he runs afoul of some thugs.

I'd recommend Cloud Atlas to readers not afraid of doing that heavy lifting but I'll say I found the book a lot more accessible than I thought it would be. If you're wondering if you should read it, I say give it a shot. Stretch yourself if it's not normally your thing, and just try it. You might even like it. "'Catch you all next time.'" Luisa is going. "'It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.'" Just like the book.

Marie C. Reviews In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut

In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgut. Published 2010 by Europa Editions.

"There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it's a long way from home."

I've been reading Roger Ebert's memoir Life Itself lately, and Ebert describes his early days as a film critic and his education in the art of film- time spent visiting sets, talking to stars and directors, etc., learning how to understand and evaluate a film on technical grounds. But in the end, what he had to talk about was what did the film do to him. It's something I'm trying to think about more consciously as I read and review books. What did this book do to me?

In a Strange Room scarred me. Composed of three almost independent novellas, Galgut tells the story of an itinerant South African man named Damon and his travels in Africa and India with various companions. Each of the three chapters is titled after Damon's role in relation to these companions. In one, he's a follower, trailing behind a vain and self-contained German who poses more and more difficult physical challenges as the mens' amiable relationship breaks down. In the second, Damon is the admirer of a man who is part of a boisterous group of tourists he encounters in a neighboring country and follows all the way to Amsterdam. But it's the final story that will haunt me. Here, Damon is companion and caretaker to the mercurial and volatile Anna, mentally ill and suicidal. His time with her, in India, is horrific- a nightmare that challenges his endurance, his patience, his love and his sense of himself.

The first two chapters are luminous, moody and full of description; the third is all action and plot until it quiets down after the maelstrom in India ends and Damon returns to South Africa alone. When I picked it up to start the third chapter, I didn't expect to be unable to put it down. I picked In a Strange Room as my first Europa of 2013 because I'm on a bit of a South Africa bender right now, but most of the book takes place elsewhere. And Galgut has several lovely passages on the traveler's state of mind, the particular kind of alienation and impermanence peculiar to the wanderer:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are....Things happen only once and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

And in writing. Damon is always alone, even though he is almost always in the company of others. He is alone in crowds, on bus rides and at checkpoints, and most particularly he is alone with Anna, locked in her disease and her manias. Her voracious need fills every available space, every nook and cranny of Damon's consciousness as he struggles to care for her. Her needs give his life a purpose, at least for a time. But it can't go on like this forever.

What a beautiful, heartbreaking book, a study on solitude and relationships and how to coexist with others and the world and sit apart at the same time.

It's my first book for the 2013 Europa Challenge and I loved it! I published this review on the Europa Challenge site and on my blog.