Matthew's Review - Mother's Milk - 2006 Shortlist

I've reviewed the three previous novels in the Patrick Melrose cycle at my blog.

'What else is there to do but read too much into things? What a poor, thin, dull world we'd live in we didn't. Besides, is it possible? There's always more meaning than we can lay our hands on,' says Patrick Melrose at the end of Mother's Milk, the fourth novel in the series by Edward St Aubyn. This is a particularly revealing quote from Patrick, who has spent the entire novel doing the same overly cruel self-analysis that marked the emergence of a more mature Patrick in the previous novel. In Mother's Milk, Patrick is married and has two children, both of whom he loves but mostly in the sense that he doesn't want to repeat the cycle of his upbringing.

The series of novels is often called a cycle in that each novel seems to wrap around similar themes while still dragging Patrick and his supporting cast through the inexorable march of time. However, the cycle can also be attributed to the generational divide among the cast. While every character has that same exceedingly witty voice, there exists a tension between each generation: a fear of repeating past mistakes, but inevitably making new ones. Eleanor, Patrick's mother, bristles at her posh upbringing and devotes her life to charity, but with mixed results and ultimately, failure at the hands of a New Age charlatan. Patrick bristles at the backlash to the posh upbringing by lavishly becoming a heroin addict and a drunk, wasting piles of money ruthlessly. His son, Robert, is an introvert, inheriting his father's gift for observation, but without the inhumanity that characterizes Patrick. Each member of the supporting cast seems uncomfortable in their social class, with the extreme rich engaging in an exaggerated performance, a hyper-rich pursuance.

Mother's Milk eschews the microscopic scale of the previous novels for a grander structure, in which St Aubyn picks up with the Melrose family every August for four years. In this way, St Aubyn accomplishes the entirety of the previous trilogy but in one novel. In an interview with the Guardian, St Aubyn remarks that this novel stands alone, apart from the trilogy. Not only does this show in the structure, but in the family. Mary, Robert and youngest son Thomas are introduced and sketched out over the course of the novel, but with mixed results. Mary is woefully under-defined, as her only characteristic seems to be a forced return to virginity after the birth of Thomas. She replaces her husband with her newest child, and does not have the skill to articulate exactly why. Thomas is only three at the end of the novel, and in typically St Aubyn fashion, is overly articulate and verbose for a three year old. He isn't really a character but a device for Patrick to resent and love. Robert fares the most out of the non-Patrick characters; he is insular and exceedingly observant about the world, but he matches this with a sense of humour and a sense of humanity. Not only is he able to pick up on social situations, but he is also perceptive of emotions, something his father lacks.

With each August, the situation between Eleanor and her son deteriorates. She bequeaths the familial vacation home in France to the New Age charlatan, and employs Patrick as a barrister to perform the legal requirements. Thus, one of the themes of the novels, Patrick becomes the instrument of his own disinheriting. As above, Patrick struggles against his new middle class position, and the French vacation home represents one of the last vestiges of the Melrose's opulent history, as well as one of Patrick few remaining happy memories of his childhood.

Mother's Milk is not a very good title euphonically speaking, but it does perfectly suit the themes of the novel: that which the mother sacrifices for her child, or lack there of. St Aubyn's maturity as a novelist is apparent in the expansion of scale and scope and the success therein. While the third novel in the trilogy capitalized on the emotional buildup from two other novels, Mother's Milk creates and sustains its own conflict and catharsis. It's devastating when Patrick lies awake frightened that he will fail his sons by dying early, and it's devastating when Robert mentally calculates the amount consumed from a bourbon bottle held by his father. The novel is quite an experience.

Unfortunately, all is not perfect. The opening sequences, which is almost exclusively through the point of view of Robert, is an attempt to portray the development of a baby's mind but with the same verbosity of St Aubyn's other focalized characters. It's somewhat off-putting and without any energy or forward momentum. The novel doesn't become interesting until the next section in which St Aubyn wisely expands his scope to include the rest of the cast.

However, despite this, St Aubyn's prose remains stellar and perceptive. His characters match the same astuteness that his prose has. It's gratifying to read characters who are not completely oblivious to the irony of their own situations. They operate as real people do, ones who can see the unfairness of life but laugh at the futility of observing that unfairness. Characters in a lot of other novels could never be so self-aware without touching on the border of metafiction as in St Aubyn's Mother's Milk. They read into everything because that's what people do.

Matthew's Review - The Stranger's Child

In 1913, George Sawle brings the young poet Cecil Valance to his home, called Two Acres. There, he meets Daphne Sawle, Beorge's younger sister. After a week, Cecil leaves, but not before writing Daphne a poem about Two Acres. Cecil joins the Army and promptly dies in action, and with his death, his poem takes on mythical proportions. The Stranger's Child tracks the history of this family, the history of the poem, and the social history of English from 1913 to 2008.

It's unfortunate for Julian Barnes that I read The Stranger's Child so quickly after A Sense of an Ending. Not only does Hollinghurst's novel have a larger canvas, with room for nuance and depth, but Hollinghurst benefits from a particularly refined style of prose, one without obvious signposts directing the reader's attention to important themes. Both novels are similar in terms of the macrocosm: both have a revelation in the final pages, both are about the intersection of memory and history, and both follow an aging cast through the years. A Sense of an Ending, however, uses the pretense of an older man looking backwards. The Stranger's Child, with its focus on the shifting perspective of the past, takes a provisional look at history. What is lost in memory is lost in history, Hollinghurst seems to say.

If it seems like a discredit to either to compare one grand social novel to a smaller shorter novel about one man, then it is simply in service of showing how out of step this year's Booker judges were. In purposefully selecting a "readable" novel (in this case, substitute "readable" for "brief"), the judges have left out of the short list a great novel. The Stranger's Child is irrefutably a fantastic novel, filled with gorgeous, nimble and deft prose, sharpyl drawn characters that change and grow with time, and huge lofty ambitions. This is a novel about the temporal aspect of art, the changing social landscape, and what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible. Only through the vale of time can something build meaning, which is an overly reductionist reading of his theory. None of these things are explicitly referenced in Hollinghurst's novel. Instead, he allows the story and semiotics to do the work, to allow the reader to understand what is being said about art and time. On top of this intellectual pursuit of art and knowledge, Hollinghurst engages in a social history of gays in England through the 20th century, building on what he did previously in The Line of Beauty.

The Stranger's Child is not merely an exercise in symbolism or social history, but also a deeply affecting portrait of socially unacceptable love throughout time. George and Cecil's dalliances in the woods at Two Acres are heartbreaking in that both of them will be required to marry of the opposite sex, and cannot engage in their affair openly. Hollinghurst returns to this pain in a tacit manner, allowing the heartbreak to filter through the mists of time thanks to the work of subsequent protagonists further into the novel. Hollinghurst employs similar tactics in this novel as in The Line of Beauty to naturalize the love affair as normalized. This is a fancy way of saying that The Stranger's Child remains a love story, despite its interest in grand themes of time and art.

Some famous author once said that there is a tendency to overpraise longer novels because of the sense of accomplishment accompanying the completion of the novel. A corollary of this is that there is an anxiety that "easy" means "less valuable". Using both of these axioms, one could argue that A Sense of An Ending is qualitatively superior to The Stranger's Child because it is succinct and a much more palatable read. I would completely disagree. The Stranger's Child is a monumental work of English fiction in part because of its wide canvas, its incorporation of a history of art and a social history, and because of its tricky structure. The Stranger's Child does more than Barnes' slight work because there is simply more room to work with, and has much more to say about the intersection of memory and history. Ultimately, Hollinghurst's novel says something complicated about the transformation of art through the ages whereas Barnes says something slight about the mysts of memory and the starkness of history. It helps that Hollinghurst's novel can be mapped into Hayden White's The Burden of History and Barnes' ideas can be dismissed as overly reductionist.

I cannot help but compare the two thanks to a similarity of theme and because they fit into the matrix of social novels that English writers seem to excel at. Suffice it to say, that even without Barnes' novel scuttling underneath the looming shadow of The Stranger's Child, I would have still loved Hollinghurst's novel. Of the Booker nominees I have read, this is surely the best and most deserving of the award. However, its exclusion from even the shortlist simply speaks the Booker's inability to remain relevant.

Matthew's Review - The Sense of an Ending

On the back of the hardcover, just above in the ISBN barcode, in the tiniest font, the book helpfully tells you that this is "Literary Fiction". Not just "fiction" but "Literary". This separates The Sense of an Ending from the rest of the unwashed masses of fiction, the novels without ambition to be about things. Certainly, Julian Barnes' Booker Prize-winning novel is about things. The first paragraph announces these great big themes of time and memory, alerting the reader that this is a Great Work of Fiction about Great Themes.

While this sounds facetious or dismissive, The Sense of an Ending is a readable novel. It helps that its length is easily manageable in one or two sittings. The best compliment I can pay this novel is that at 150 pages, it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Its brief length should not distract from the novel's lofty ambitions of theme.

Every novel should aspire to be something other than a ripping good yarn. This is particularly a factor in what differentiates a novel from a story: it does something new. The Sense of an Ending has great aspirations for telling a story about memory, ageing, and history wrapped up in a man's self-centered and average life. Tony Webster, the protagonist, pontificates endlessly about his own history, repeating the compulsion to pick over memories ad infinitum. Memories come to light after being forgotten for forty years, and then eventually, new history comes to light, changing how he perceives everything.

One can see that The Sense of an Ending wants to be a big novel packaged into a shorter more accessible work. It is the novel's compulsion to be literary that makes this story seem less. If there was ever a novel that felt like pure artifice, here it is. The reader can feel Barnes hovering over every sentence, filling it to the brim with meaning and symbolism, until the rather short novel topples over from the author's ambitions to be taken seriously. There is just so much material in this novel that pertains to the classical goals of high art that the story positively suffocates.

Anytime the story threatens to get interesting, Tony/Barnes derails it with long paragraphs about the fickleness of memory, or aphoristic language about old age. This is a novel where each sentence is designed to be the epigraph in another novel. This is not a compliment.

It might appear that I disliked, or even hated, the novel. Far from it. I enjoyed it for what it was, which was a rather simple and cleverly structured novel about history and memory and where the two should meet (again, another theme announced constantly with aphorisms). What prevented me from thoroughly appreciating the novel was the author's unsteady and forced hand, a presence wholly unwelcome. The story, characters, and theme should have done all the work, rather than the author or his arsenal of aphorisms.

[Cross-posted from my blog]

Matthew's Review - Offshore

On the river Thames, there lives a collection of people in houseboats. There's Richard, married to Laura. There's Maurice, a male prostitute. There's Nenna, a single mother of two. There's Willis, an artist. They all reach a crisis, and deal with it.

I hated this book. Hated it. I wasn't sure at any point if this was a comedy or a tragedy. The tone is so off putting that I struggled to finish a 140 page novel.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the author, introduces a sizable cast, considering the book's short length, and she only bothers to develop maybe two or three of them. The characters are mostly interchangeable, especially in voice. Every single person seems to have the same stilted distant dialogue, with oddly formal vocabulary, including the eleven year old. But even the eleven year old can be switched with the male prostitute, and the results are the same.

I know what the book is about: people living in between worlds, the land and the sea, their divided selves. It's not good when the exceedingly helpful dust jacket does all the thematic heavy lifting. Only at a couple points does Fitzgerald allude to her thesis - no, allude isn't the word for it. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that when Fitzgerald mentions her theme, she points to it with neon signs.

I think the major problem of this book, the one from which all other complaints stem, is the novel's length. It's either too short or too long. If Fitzgerald had written another 100 pages, and drawn her characters out a little more, I probably would have liked it better. Conversely, if this novel had been trimmed to short story length, I would have no doubt loved it for its minimalism. But Fitzgerald tries to have it both ways, striving for minimalism, but complicating it with detail.

I hated Offshore. I thought the tone was so off putting as to make the novel interminable, an amazing feat for a 140 page novel. I hated the interchangeable characters. I hated the forced themes. I'm not even convinced Fitzgerald even said anything relevant about the duality of her own cast. I will not be reading another novel by her.

Looking at the novels shortlisted in 1979, I can see why the Booker Prize was awarded to this slight, disposable volume: there were no alternatives.

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.

Matthew's Review - Skippy Dies

Here's a book on the 2010 Longlist that I thought should've gone further than that point.

Skippy Dies is set in Seabrook, a prestigious and expensive boarding school in Ireland. The story follows a group of friends in their second year, Skippy and Ruprecht mostly, as they navigate the murky waters of adolescence, girls, history, M-Theory, and Robert Graves. There's also Howard, a former student, now history teacher who is stuck on auto-pilot, until a beautiful substitute teacher arrives and messes up his life.

One thing that always pulls me out of a book is a jarring unrealistic character voice. This happens all the time with American TV shows, where 20 year old men are writing scripts starring teenage girls. It's extremely difficult to pull that off, so it's especially impressive when Paul Murray seems to "get" all the voices in this book.

He absolutely nails the modern teenager, with their never-ending stream of sarcasm and irony, obsession over sex, and their ever-present awkwardness. The boys are so cynical, or at least, present a cynical facade, so it's all the more heartbreaking and authentic when Murray shows the boys as... well, boys.

While at its surface, Skippy Dies is a 660 page boarding school comedy, there also exists darker things below. Murray doesn't turn away from more adult themes such as death and the First World War, especially when Howard, the depressed and stuck history teacher, discovers the memoir of Robert Graves.

In this giant book, Murray mixes into the big pot: Graves' The White Goddess, string theory, time travel, Irish history, and a whole bunch of Edwardian poets. But at no point is it ever boring. Murray skips around the cast with a deft hand, leaving us always wanting more.

I was reminded a lot of reading big American novels, modern ones I mean, where authors such as Franzen and his legion of imitators, try to cram everything they can, including misunderstood science to give a newer sense of imagery and counterpoint. Murray tends to write in that expansive showy way that Franzen et al. write in and it tends to work most of the time.

What doesn't work in Skippy Dies is that there's just a little bit too much to be had here. Not that I was ever bored, but I felt a bit of a trim may not have been a bad thing, especially in the last third of the book. Once Skippy has died, Ruprecht goes on a quest which uses dodgey Victorian science and music. It's clever how Murray ties a lot of the themes together in the big climactic memorial concert, but that doesn't mean it isn't a little tedious to get to the point.

Other than the last third needing an edit, I thought Skippy Dies was fantastic. It's alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking, and it always feels very authentic, even when Murray writing in the voice of teenagers, a notoriously hard group to pin down. While it may be a big novel, on a grand scale, Murray keeps it consistently great with a well drawn cast and a deft ear for dialogue. Very good!

Matthew's Review - Troubles - 1970

I had the opportunity to read J. G. Farrell's Booker-Prize winning novel, The Siege of Krishnapur, and the overall opinion was favorable. Now that Farrell has posthumously won the coveted Lost Booker Prize, I went to the trouble of tracking down a copy of the novel in question. Ha ha ha. Here's my review.

Major Brendan Archer has been discharged from the military after the Great War, and has found himself engaged to a girl he doesn't really know, living in a grand hotel in Ireland, and when he arrives, he's astonished to find the hotel falling apart, with the owners and guests doing likewise.

Troubles is a rather disjointed novel, not quite as funny as Siege, and not quite as cutting either. The satirical elements aren't biting enough, and the elegiac parts not quite sentimental enough. Farrell is aiming for a very stern position on the ignorance of the British Empire, and he sort of hits the mark, but not strong enough.

Part of what makes this almost great but not quite novel is that it's far too long. Troubles could have been halved, and it would have worked so much better. Often, I felt a scene could have been trimmed or excised entirely, while still getting the point across.

The absolute highlight of the novel comes at the end, when the owner of the hotel decides to throw one last grand ball, and the insane situations that come from it are masterfully hilarious, and pace breathless. It's a fantastic sequence, and one of the best party scenes in a novel that I've ever read.

Just like in Siege, Farrell's prose is crisp and clear, his sense of description excellent, and his dialogue true enough. If I hadn't been so impressed with Siege, I would have called Farrell an acceptable and satisfactory storyteller, rather than a true artistic genius that some critics are calling him.

In spite of these criticisms, I still had an overall enjoyable time reading Troubles. I thought it was funny and pointed, even if it didn't reach paroxysms of hilarity or biting satire. Farrell was an impressive storyteller, and I will continue to read his novels, despite the slight disappointment with this novel. The last available novel by him that I can get my hands on is The Singapore Grip, the finale of his so-called Empire Trilogy.

Matthew's Review - Sacred Hunger - 1992

After immediately finishing Rites of Passage, a novel about a long sea journey, I decided it would be wise to start another novel about a long sea journey, this time, an even longer journey and novel! I picked up Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, joint winner of the 1992 Booker Prize, and after what seems like an eternity, I finished it.

Sacred Hunger is primarily concerned with the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century, personified by two cousins, one the son of the ship owner who enjoys a life of privilege and stays in England, and the other, a disgraced surgeon seeking to debase himself by joining the ship. For most of the novel, we follow their different paths, in stunning detail, as the surgeon and the ship pick up slaves in Africa. However, things change irrevocably when a storm blows the ship off course, and the crew mutiny. We pick up the two cousins' stories a decade later and they finally meet in circumstances no one could predict.

As aforementioned, the detail is stunning. Unsworth has clearly done a massive amount of research. This novel is a masterclass in historical fiction. Paramount to this, Sacred Hunger is obviously a postcolonial novel, at once looking back and rewriting history, but there is no easy conclusion that Unsworth comes to.

The sacred hunger of the title is greed, greed justified by social standing, government, economic systems, and civilization itself, it seems. Unsworth dismantles the justification with the last third of the novel, but never making any monochromatic conclusions. There is no way to discuss this without spoiling this last third of the novel, which I will not do.

Suffice it so say that Unsworth's novel is never easy in terms of morality, but it is always easy and enjoyable to read. Sacred Hunger doesn't drown the reader in archaic and period language, and the author never embarks on long passages as pastiches from 18th century novels, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

The novel does also function as a gripping adventure story. Even with all the theme and metaphor mired in murky morality, the novel remains exciting for most of its length. This is a very hard balancing act and Unsworth pulls it off mostly.

However the novel isn't perfect. For most of the novel I found the cousin who stayed in England to be more interesting than the cousin on the ship, or rather, the main character on the main thrust of the plot. I liked the thread of the ship, but certainly Unsworth's depiction of capitalism and greed in London was more captivating (pun not intended). The ship's thread suffers from too many characters and too many deaths, and the best part of the journey, the mutiny, is relayed by flashback and reminisces, robbing it of impact.

Sacred Hunger, despite these qualms, is a great historical novel, and one that should be taught alongside other postcolonial novels. It is rich in period detail, rich in theme and character, and never takes the easy way out of its exceedingly difficult and sticky moral situations.

Matthew's Review - Rites of Passage - 1980

I fully confess to have only read Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Apparently he's written a bunch of novels that wallow in obscurity with contemporary readers. Luckily, he won the Booker Prize in 1980 for the first part of his "To the Ends of the Earth" trilogy, called Rites of Passage, which means I had the honour of reading it.

Edmund Talbot is a well-connected man of the upper class, who has been given a government job in Australia. On his long sea journey to this new career, he keeps a journal of what happens on the ship. He encounters sailors, officers, the brutish captain who harbours a hatred for another passenger, a parson. Talbot gets involved as a mediator when the parson gets ridiculously drunk and makes a fool of himself. However, that is not the full story in the slightest.

A common theme in my reviews of Bookers is the prevalence of the theme of class, and Rites of Passage is no exception. In fact, one important line of the book is that "class is the language of the British". This novel is steeped in concepts of class and where the boundaries are.

Talbot is sort of aristocratic, but lowers himself to patronize the common sailors in order to learn more about them. An officer, Summers, who is a corporate ladder climber takes advantage of this in order to further his career.

Many of the interactions between Talbot and Summers have a distinct subtext of who belongs to which class, who was born into it, and who fought to move up. This is by far the most interesting aspect of the novel.

The central plot, however, is not terribly captivating. At its core, Rites of Passage features a mystery of what happened to the parson. One doesn't realize that this is a mystery until Talbot finds the parson's journal, and the narrative shifts to the parson's point of view. At this point, we see the same events but from another perspective, highlighting everything Talbot has missed in his self-centred upper class way.

All of the novel is written in pseudo-nineteenth century language, without archaic spelling, thank heavens, but Golding makes it believable. What he doesn't do is make characters very believable. Most of the passengers on the ship get one or two scenes, and not developed in any meaningful way. Plot strands are picked up and left behind.

Golding may be critic-proof for Lord of the Flies, but Rites of Passage is not. This is a good book, but suffers from some glaring problems, such as a loose plot that doesn't get gel until the last ten pages. That's asking a lot of a reader. However, the concepts of class that Golding plays with has rich depth. I liked this, but I certainly didn't love it.

Matthew's Review - The Siege of Krishnapur - 1973

My library has a queue for J. G. Farrell's Troubles, which won the Lost Booker Prize this month, so I decided to give his novel The Siege of Krishnapur a try.

Set during the sepoy rebellion in 1857 in British-occupied India, this is the story of a bunch of upper class English idiots as they attempt to defend their cantonment against a never-ending assault by the sepoys. The siege lasts over three months, and slowly and methodically Farrell describes the English descent into starvation, class-obliteration, madness for some, disease and death for many.

This is a brutally anti-Empire novel. I have never read another book that absolutely excoriates the idea of the British Empire. Farrell's anger and bitterness about the perceived superiority of the British is so clear and forthright, but never cloying or annoying. In fact, this is a tremendously funny novel.

It can be read in a number of ways: as an adventure novel, a kind of boy's adventure in which the gallant and dashing English triumph in the end, or, more likely, it can be read as a anti-colonialism text, heavy with symbolism and meaning.

Both ways of reading the text are hugely entertaining. I had such a great time reading this book. I kept regaling my girlfriend with bits from the text, including the amazing sequence with the two dueling physicians over the proper treatment of cholera, or the fight scene at the end of the novel in which a aristocratic fop, using a violin, battles a giant Indian with a giant sabre.

Even with all of the symbolism and dissection of the psyche, Farrell never lets the novel get boring. Rather, this is a very exciting and rip-roaring adventure. It's like a Pynchon-esque pastiche of pulp stories.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a tremendous novel: witty, comic, engaging, exciting, and hugely entertaining. I absolutely adored this novel. I was sad to finish the book, but at the same time I was desperate to find out the fate of the cast. I am very excited to read Farrell's other novels in his so-called Empire Trilogy. I expect to find the same wit and bitterness and be entertained by it.

Matthew's Review - Last Orders - 1996

Last Orders, by Graham Swift, received a bit of flak from the critics over its use of the structure from Faulkner's masterpiece As I Lay Dying. To me, that doesn't seem fair considering this novel stands on its own, and familiarity with Faulkner's work is absolutely not required.

Jack Dodds has passed away from cancer, and his final request, to his best friends, most of them war veterans, is to have his ashes scattered into the sea. His three friends and his adopted son undertake a roadtrip to Margate from London to do this. Along the way, they reminisce and celebrate the good times and the bad.

The Faulkner connection is that each chapter is first person stream of consciousness narration, getting right inside the head of the specific narrator. In the modernist sense, this means it goes backwards and forwards in chronology, which can make the first thirty pages or so confusing, as the reader's hand isn't held by the author.

Luckily, Swift makes each character real and breathing. You never doubt the authenticity of them for a moment. This sustains the emotional realism of the novel. It's very multifaceted, with numerous asides and flashbacks detailing everybody's lives, never in a painstaking or compulsive manner, always organic to the overall story.

If there was a criticism to be leveled at this book, it's that it feels slight, or airy. When Swift reaches for moments of thematic depth, the best he can do is a statement on the benefits of eternal friendship, or a platitude of a similar nature. There's no sweeping epic theme of death like which pervades the spiritual inspiration As I Lay Dying. Rather, Last Orders is a simple novel of friendship. This isn't necessarily bad, just slight.

Last Orders is a good novel, filled with realistic characters and an excellent use of stream-of-consciousness narration. But I would not say that this novel can be elevated to the heights of Faulkner or Woolf. It's better than what sits on most bookstore shelves, anyway.

Matthew's Review - Moon Tiger - 1987

The best part about the Booker Prize challenge is reading authors or books I would have never thought to read, and then being pleasantly surprised. In regards to my progress, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is probably the best example of this experience.

In her seventies, and lying on her death bed, Claudia reminisces and wants to write a history of the world. An auto-didactic historian by trade, Claudia understands the futility of pinning down any one event, or chronology of events, in an objective and absolute manner. Rather, Claudia sees history as a kaleidoscope, ever changing and moving, refractive and reflective.

In the first chapter, Claudia sets out all the themes and important memories, like an overture to a symphony. From there, the structure of the book is chaotic and modernist, seemingly moving from one memory to another without any direction. However, this is not the case.

We're treated to past memories of her and her brother's childhood, their all-too intimate relationship, his marriage to a boring woman, her on-and-off partnership with a cold career man, her child and her inability to connect emotionally with the child.

This all comes to a head, thematically speaking, to the middle section of the book, in which Claudia is a war correspondent in Cairo during Rommel's push. She meets Tom Southern, a dashing soldier, whom she falls in love with desperately.

Once we realize the full extent of this affair, everything that we've read already takes on a different light, and what comes after, as well.

Lively's prose is strong and she makes Claudia's voice very strong and memorable. However, that's not what makes this novel so good. It's Lively's post-modern touch that elevates Moon Tiger.

Some memories are presented from different perspectives, such as an important episode in which Claudia and her brother are searching for fossils in the rocks. First from Claudia the child, and then from her brother as a child. This enforces the theme of history's relativity, and the kaleidoscope.

Fortunately, the trickery never seems like showing off, or indulgent. It is consistently in service of the story, and of Claudia's personal history.

This is a masterful novel, and one of the best examples of post-modernism done correctly. The reader never feels left out of the fun, and the story's emotional core is not manipulative. Lively's control over time and pacing is unbelievable. Moon Tiger seems to me like one of the best of the Bookers. It's intelligent, witty, deeply thematic, and one could spend ages between its covers. Highly recommended.

Matthew's Review - The Blind Assassin - 2000

The only Margaret Atwood I had ever read was for university, and I hadn't been terribly impressed. When I saw Atwood's name on the Booker list I had trepidations. However, The Blind Assassin defied my expectations in a great way.

The Blind Assassin is comprised of two alternating stories. The first is the recollections and memories of Iris Chase, whose sister, Laura, mysteriously died in an automobile accident and left behind a manuscript which Iris then published posthumously. The manuscript, "The Blind Assassin", being the second story. Iris' story charts her and her sister's early childhood, adolescence, and eventually, Iris' unhappy marriage to a wealthy industrialist in Canada between the two Wars.

The fictional story is nested within another story. "The Blind Assassin" in the novel is a roman à clef based on a man named Alex Thomas whom the sisters have an uneasy and mysterious relationship. In the story, the fictional version of Alex, tells a fantastic science fiction tale to the fictional version of Laura.

This is certainly a postmodern novel, made up stories about stories. It's also a tremendous and successful work, with the alternating voices are written in two different, beautiful voices with gorgeous and supple prose. The plot strand set in reality is a long social history and social development of the two girls set between the Wars, and of Canada's adolescence as a country. Conversely, the story-within-the-story is never boring and nested with symbols and images that reflect and echo all the way to the "top" story. The execution of this trick is absolutely masterful.

Luckily, Atwood isn't interested in postmodern trickery for the sake of it. Everything has been put in its place for a specific reason, and the payoff at the end is amazing. Without going into spoilers, the end of the novel ties the two stories together in an interesting and unexpected way, and the story nested within the fictional book pays off as well.

All the symbols come together to contribute to Atwood's overarching themes of her oeuvre, of the power of the written word, of the gender roles assigned by society, and the power to rewrite history.

Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a wonderful novel, one that I would surely consider one of the best Canadian novels ever written. The prose is pure poetry, the stories epic and engaging, the characters very real, and the structure intricate. I would wholeheartedly recommend this novel as one of the best of the Booker, and I would recommend this to anybody interested in fine literature.

If interested, there are more Booker reviews by Matthew at this link which goes to my blog a lay of the land. Thanks for reading.