Marie's Review of HELIOPOLIS, by James Scudamore

Heliopolis, by James Scudamore. Published 2010 by Europa Editions. Paperback.

Heliopolis is the story of a boy and his city; Ludo, the boy, and São Paulo, the city, exist in a sense because of each other. Ludo is the child of a cook for a wealthy family; according to family lore, Rebecca, the matriarch, found Ludo and his mother in a favela, or slum, where Rebecca was doing charity work. She recognized Ludo's mother's talent and brought her to work for her husband and daughter. Rebecca and her husband, a wealthy supermarket baron, raised Ludo alongside their daughter Melissa, with whom Ludo, now in his twenties and working in an ad agency, is having an affair.

Scudamore alternates between the past and the present as Ludo navigates the city and the drastic class and economic differences that define it and the people who live there. Ludo's adoptive family represents the ultra-rich upper class inhabiting isolated gated communities protected by armed guards or bullet-proof high-rises; relaxing in obscene luxury but afraid to walk the streets, they live in gilded prisons. Meanwhile the poor teem in filthy, inescapable poverty that drives them to desperation and marks them indelibly as outcasts.

Ludo represents the middle ground, neither rich nor poor; a child of the slums raised among the rich, he's derided by both and accepted by neither. The city of São Paulo is as much a character as any person in the book, and Scudamore describes its streets and buildings and squares like something out of science fiction or dystopia. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and the novel is arresting and heartstopping at the same time, a suspenseful literary page-turner about class and identity and the way one defines the other. Scudamore sets up several mysteries at the beginning and my only quibble with the book is the way they peter out by the end; otherwise though, Heliopolis is an engrossing, smartly written character study of a young man and the city that made him who he is.



Click for my interview with James Scudamore.

Matthew's Review - Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a good novel, but I woudn't say great. I would also say it's deserving of its Longlist status. 

Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950's Ireland, where there are no jobs and no visible future. At the behest of her fashionable sister, Eilis leaves her village for Brooklyn, where she gets a job in a department store, studies to become a bookkeeper, and eventually falls in love. When tragedy strikes back home, Eilis must figure out what to do about her new and old life.

Tóibín's prose is very sparse and very distant. He lets us into the protagonist's head a little, but not enough that we understand the decisions that she makes. We get the bare minimum of motivation.

The sparseness of the prose extends to descriptions and such. Tóibín barely sketches the physical shapes of his cast. It forces the attention of the reader onto the events and the significance of said events.

Brooklyn is a good novel. I wouldn't say a great novel. What's missing from creating a great experience is a sense of scale. At no point was I ever transported to 1950's New York; Tóibín doesn't sustain immersion. However, I was enthralled the entire time. I was more interested in "what happens" rather than "what's going on".

A lot of the serious literary stuff is all between the lines. There are a few instances where we are treated to a glimpse into Eilis' head, but it's not fully truthful. The book grasps for greatness at these moments, but they are too far and between.

I enjoyed Brooklyn, and read it in one sitting. I thought it was an enjoyable experience, but too focused on plot than serious significance. On the whole, a good read, slight but good.

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

Jake is a widower and a retired architect living in Lincolnshire. He has Alzheimers, so we can't actually be sure that he's a widower, or otherwise bereaved. In The Wilderness, we encounter Jake as an impermanent glue that holds fragments of story together, and we encounter his family and loved ones through these fragments.

The Wilderness gives an impression of Alzheimers as a no-man's land: a place where there is a forever sliding scale between fiction and fact, a scale that pitches dramatically from this side to that; a place where black holes appear from nowhere, swallowing details - swallowing people and inventing others, throwing holes into the middle of stories, and shifting the order of things; it's a place where chronolgy and relations become fluid and changeable.

The Wilderness was mesmorising and frustrating in equal measure. Jake reports significants events and relates people through a series of 'reminiscences', though the same people and events keep appearing in different guises. The characters, that give the impression of being well rounded, become flattened and two dimensional in their portrayal as recurring motifs. The notion of boiling something down to its essence is played with very successfully, and Jake lays out his life as in a family album - select images, with fragments of story attached - something that we all know changes with perspective and age.

To avoid sentimentalising the disease is a remarkable achievement, and the result is a stunningly visual but cold book. It does ask a really interesting question about our emotional response to Alzheimers, and that is how can one grieve for something they don't know they have lost? Though I don't think The Wilderness is a classic, I do find the effect or recurring motifs haunting - and I can't forget Jake's daughter saying about the cherries: 'Jape, I want to pick them, Jape'.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

The protagonist in Brooklyn is a young Irish woman called Eilis, who leaves Ireland to go to America for work. The reader follows Eilis as she takes her first uncertain steps into her newly established life and begins to embrace independence. Eilis' settled lifestyle is shattered on the death of a family member, and Eilis learn much about herself in her return to Ireland.

Brooklyn is a beautiful novel, masterfully written and both subtle and emotionally complex. Though Eilis is measured, thoughtful and a meticulous observer, she's also vulnerable, unsure and homesick and her emotional state is written so suggestively and implicitly as to allow the reader ample room to inhabit and explore the character.

Brooklyn offers the reader all the complexity of the notion of coming of age and fulfilling expectations, whilst providing a gentle narrative that drives the story. The masterstroke is dealt in Eilis suddenly becoming bereaved just as she is beginning to come to terms with America as home. Eilis' reaction to her bereavement is subtle, neither overplayed nor overstated and yet clearly shaking the very foundations of her life. Her devastation is played out through uncharacteristic behaviour and a seeming powerlessness after such a willful accommodation of a new home and the building of a new life.

A highly emotive and incredibly touching novel that is easy to get inside, though wrapped up in such a way that it's hard to stay inside. Wonderful.

Heliopolis by James Scudamore

Heliopolis is a very readable story about Ludo, a man in his late twenties, who was rescued from a 'favela' (slum or shanty town) when he was a baby. Ludo's escape was facilitated by a rich family who hire his mother as a live-in cook on their weekend home, an out-of-town farm. Ludo grows up on the farm adoring his mother's culinary skills and being able to taste the sublest of emotions through her food (in this way it was reminiscent of Midnight's Children). Ludo's best friend is Melissa, the daughter of the family, with whom he develops a dependency and an illicit affair. Ludo moves to the city with the family as he reaches adolescence in order to improve his education, and there he meets the weekday 'Ludo' and Melissa's future husband.

Ludo revisits key moments of his past as a way of illuminating his present, a life consisting of average performance at a job he hates, an unhealthy relationship with Melissa, who uses him as a bed fellow when it suits her, and the consistent consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and other toxic substances. A marketing campaign for a budget supermarket aimed at the favelas brings Ludo's disappointment with himself to a head as he tastes the life he narrowly escaped and discovers the identity of his hitherto unknown father.

Heliopolis is an engaging and swift read. Though I never fully sympathised with Ludo, I understood his reaction to the cage he built around himself as a result of the many favours bestowed upon him by his benefactors. Heliopolis contains interesting details that enrich the city that Ludo inhabits, with its colourful favelas and almost total segregation between the rich and the poor (indeed, the rich largely get around by helicopter, evading the need to set foot in the city, jumping from one helipad to the next). The helplessness and resignation exuded from Ludo until the end of the novel, and the pallor of the present compared with the colour of the past prevent this being a great novel, but it's certainly worth the few hours it takes to read.

Me, Cheeta by James Lever

What Lever achieves with this novel is a total buy-in to the concept of a famous Hollywood chimpanzee writing an autobiography, and this is also the point of endearment in a story that shows a character who is shallow, erascible, sarcastic, egotistical and deluded. There's a surprisingly sentimental passage towards the end of the book that totally took me by surprise, which was a wonderful example of Cheeta's humanity and his ability to love.

The 'golden era' of Hollywood is not something I'm familiar with, so many of the slanderous jokes about Hollywood's leading ladies and men (containing a humourous play on the notion of Alphas throughout the book) simply passed me by. I'm not really into satire, and as the founding premise of this book, it was never going to be one of my favourites.

In summary (because there's not much else I can say about it) the parody of the autobiography is pulled of with such bravado and conviction that it gets a thumbs up, but the satirical view of the 'halcyon days' of Hollywood is rather thin and wearing, and gets an almost inevitable thumbs down.

2009 Longlist Announced

Drum roll ... below, the 2009 Longlist. According to the Booker Prize website, the list includes "two former winners, four past-shortlisted writers, three first-time novelists and a span of styles and themes that make this an outstandingly rich fictional mix."

If you've read any of these, feel free to post your reviews or weigh in with comments!

• The Children's Book by AS Byatt
• Summertime by JM Coetzee
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
• How to paint a dead Man by Sarah Hall
• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
• Me Cheeta by James Lever
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
• Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin
• Heliopolis by James Scudamore
• Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
• Love and Summer by William Trevor
• The Little Stranger Sarah Waters