Book Review: Mister B Gone by Clive Barker

‘Burn this book,’ our narrator orders at the start of Clive Barker’s 2007 novel (actually, it’s surely a novella). ‘Don’t look at another word.’

Part of me thinks I probably should have taken this advice.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy parts of Mister B. Gone. It follows minor demon, Jakabok Botch who escapes from the 9^th circle of hell and ends up in fourteenth century Europe on a series of escapades, which culminate a century later at the birth of the Gutenberg printing press.

I have to be honest, I was quite worried at first. Botch narrates his tale in first person and spends an awful lot of time going on and on at the reader, persuading then threatening them to burn the book in their hands. Then he lets slip, ‘Yeah, I’m a demon.’ Hmmm.

Anyway, I clearly didn’t burn it. Instead I read on and was quite captivated by the scenes in hell (pissy demon parents and ‘parasite-infested wastelands’ of rubbish dumps) as well as glimpses into mediaeval Europe.

But that’s the problem—we only get glimpses. The central bromance between Jakabok and his demon pal Quitoon is barely developed. Their adventures, which cover 100 years, are paraphrased in a few pages.

It reminded me a lot of Marlow’s Dr Faustus—the buddy bromance between Mephastophilis and Faustus, their dastardly hi-jinks, the raging battle between supernatural forces of good and evil…even down to Faustus’ terrified offer to ‘burn [his] books’ if he might be spared damnation.

Mister B. Gone feels way too rushed, which is a shame. Barker is a skilled and intriguing writer, but this felt like a quirky concept which would have been served better as a short story (and in fact doesn’t it re-explore ideas from the title story from Books of Blood?).

Reading List 2017

The Lonely - Andrew Michael Hurley

Mister B. Gone - Clive Barker

Strange Bodies - Marcel Theroux

Reading List 2016

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

Shakespeare: the World as a Stage - Bill Bryson

The Water Knife - Paulo Bacigalupi

The Girl with all the Gifts - M R Carey

The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (re-read)

American Psycho  - Bret Easton Ellis (re-read)

We are Called to Rise - Laura McBride

One of Us - Asne Seierstad

The Fellowship of the Ring - Tolkien (re-read)

The Two Towers - Tolkien (re-read)

The Return of the King - Tolkien (re-read)

Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel

A Walk in  the Woods - Bill Bryson

The Girls - Emma Cline

Slade House - David Mitchell

The Abortionist's Daughter - Elizabeth Hyde

The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

IT - Stephen King (re-read)

Here are the Young Men - Rob Doyle

Fatherland - Robert Harris

Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh

Nocturnal Animals - Austin Wright

His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet Page

The End of the World Running Club - Adrian J Walker


So my favourite new reads were definitely The Sisters Brothers, Station Eleven and His Bloody Project.

Book Review: The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

The world as we know it is flooded, drowned, and very very soggy. In Kirsty Logan’s debut novel, she gives us a future (presumably) where dry land is in short supply and those who live on it (landlockers) have the upper hand in social status.

That’s unless you’re a dampling, with the sea in your veins, fish stew on your breath, and webbed toes. The Gracekeepers partly follows the Circus Excalibur, a small crew of performers who float nomadically across the ocean, exchanging performances for food. They’re all face paint, hair dye and glitter, a gender-bending troupe constantly reinventing itself in each performance.

We learn about a number of characters in this fanciful world. There’s North, the young woman who dances with a bear in a dangerous pirouette of death and rebirth for the punters. Red Gold (Jarrow), the Circus Ringmaster and owner who is blind to some harsh truths. Avalon, his bitchy wife who wants to rise through the social ranks. And Callanish, a mysterious gracekeeper who spends her time administering rites for the dead by starving small birds in cages over the sea.

Logan’s prose is tightly controlled, dreamy and magical. To call this a dystopia doesn’t seem right somehow, instead The Gracekeepers brings to mind the magic realism of Angela Carter. But there’s not really much more beyond the descriptive language. The characters seem underwritten, with a multitude of gaps left unexplored (I’m still not really sure what happened between Callanish and her mother). Perhaps this is deliberate and I’m not saying we have to know everything, but the effect kept me oddly distanced and unengaged with the story. Threads are woven loosely and then abandoned. This effect is exacerbated by the structure; early on alternating third person chapters from North and Callanish’s perspective are established, before suddenly a hotchpotch of other views butt in, often for only one chapter. It’s disorientating.

There are some arresting passages of prose however. A scene where North dives deep into the ocean and finds a drowned city, for example, or her relationship with the bear. Logan seems indebted to Shakespearean themes, motifs and theatre too—her clowns are surely incarnations of the Shakespearean fool, inciting rebellion against the upper classes while simultaneously acting as scapegoat for society’s ills. The acrobats are male/female, brother/sister, husband/wife, and they seem to swap between all these roles, bringing to mind the gender play of Twelfth Night. The term ‘damplings’ perhaps suggests the ‘groundings’ of early modern theatre audiences. And of course, you can’t help but think Exit, pursued by a bear… 

But these motifs all seem a little bit forced and a little bit too self-aware, while the clowns’ potential is never fully realised. They just kind of slope around in the background, leaving glitter and eyeliner over the bedsheets. The ending, when it comes, feels rushed and certainly not as apocalyptic as it promised to be, although Logan does a good job of creating pathos (you’ll guess what happens).

The Gracekeepers is an odd little fairytale which is definitely worth reading, but just don’t expect a huge amount of depth. Like any good circus performance, it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Book Review: Life after Life by Kate Atkinson

If you could live your life again, would you? If you could magically go back, would you change all the crappy things, all the things which ended up a bit, well, pear-shaped? Where would you even start? With that dodgy perm? That fish course? A spouse? Or perhaps you’d go big – really big. Why not change the course of history? Why not assassinate Hitler?

Kate Atkinson’s latest novel plays with these ideas. Its heroine, Ursula Todd, is born in 1910 to middle class parents and into a world on the cusp of change. However Ursula is stuck in some sort of Groundhog Day scenario, doomed (or gifted?) to repeat events again and again in slightly (or enormously) different permutations. So our first Ursula dies at birth, strangled by the umbilical cord. The second Ursula survives a bit longer, until the Grim Reaper once again steps in. And again. And again.

In fact the whole novel is populated by a myriad of Ursulas. Each time she dies, she’s reborn and lives her life again in a slightly different way. So one Ursula survives the Blitz only to die a sad lonely death in a squalid flat, while another is killed during the bombings. Another spends the war in Germany, hanging out with Eva Braun. One is killed by a backstreet abortion while still a teenager. Sometimes she finds it hard to work out how to avoid her fate; the influenza pandemic in 1918 takes a few goes to get through successfully. Each Ursula seems to become a little bit more aware of her past lives, if only through a strange feeling or what her mother, Sylvie, explains as déjà vu.

If this all sounds a bit like season 5 of Lost make no mistake, Life after Life is primarily a family saga. This is comfortable ground for Atkinson, it’s what she does best; 1995’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum follows its protagonist Ruby Lennox, as well as the four generations of women behind her and Life after Life has a similar feel. The minutia of everyday life jostles against the novel’s expansiveness and we’re reminded of the duplicity of time.

Atkinson’s structure will keep you flicking the pages back and forth continually to check and double check. But once you get into the rhythm the stop/start narrative feels more natural. There’s still a lot of piecing together for the reader though – you might say Life after Life is a puzzle to be solved. How will Ursula get it right?

And herein lies one of the problems. There doesn't really seem to be any point to Ursula’s varying lives. When her mother sends her to see a shrink, the doctor suggests she’s being reincarnated. But each Ursula doesn't necessarily improve things – in fact often one aspect will be made better but another is then sacrificed and worsened. And of course we have to mention Hitler. I'm honestly not plot spoiling to mention this – the very first chapter has Ursula attempting (or succeeding?) in assassinating the Fuhrer, but if this is one of the incarnations of Ursula or a flash forward to a later one is unclear (she points the gun at him, his guards point their guns at her, then ‘darkness falls’ – the code in the novel for her death/rebirth). The ending of the novel is very ambiguous too, and whilst this isn't something I’d normally complain about, in this case I was left feeling, well, unsatisfied.

It’s clever structurally – there’s no doubt about that. But Atkinson throws us a red herring. The first half of the novel has a clear rhythm and alternating timeline which goes something like this:

1.    Ursula lives her life then dies (we move through the years)

2.     We return to the day she was born and find out a little bit more about the events of this day (we move through the hours of this particular day in 1910)

1.     Ursula lives her life a bit further then dies

2.     We return to the day she was born…

Understandably I thought we were moving towards some big reveal about the family, some dark secret of Sylvie’s we’d learn on that day in 1910 (I was sure she’d been dallying with the farm boy George) but in the second half Atkinson simply abandons this structure, instead focussing on Ursula’s numerous lives, which were all starting to merge into one bleak and depressing blur of death and misery.

This really is a novel of two halves. For me, the first half was fantastic. Atkinson tells the story through a variety of characters (not just Ursula) so we learn about her parents, Sylvie and Hugh, and the family dynamic. It’s absolutely evocative in its depiction of a pre-Lapsarian England teetering on the brink of the First World War. The Todds live (aptly) in Fox Corner, a Forsterian country house where the children play outside during long hot summers and the family sip lemonade together on the lawn. Atkinson perfectly encapsulates the moment and it’s all the more poignant because of our knowledge. We know the future – we know 1914 is just around the corner and that Hitler will rise to absolute power in 1933. Fox Corner is the safe hideaway before the 20^th century picks up speed, an idyllic space now lost forever. But even this sanctuary is threatened. A paedophile lurks just outside the boundaries, preying on the local children.

Later the other characters slip out of view and it’s all about Ursula, which I think is a shame as Sylvie interested me – there was so much more to learn. And then there’s the grim scenes of war torn London during the Blitz. These really are horrific. This hellish dystopia makes Fox Corner a distant rose-tinted memory and I don’t think Ursula ever really recovers from it.

Perhaps Ursula’s conversations with her shrink give us the biggest clue about how to understand Life after Life. She suggests life is a palimpsest – a series of overlays, a document erased and written over, erased and written over. In this case Ursula’s eventual idea to kill Hitler isn't the best idea or even the culmination of a series of lives and learning, it’s simply another idea, one of many. And after each life path variation there’ll be another. There’s no real closure at the end of Life after Life, no definitive Ursula and no absolute truth. Ursula’s role seems to be just to bear witness to events and history. Atkinson’s novel is intriguing, moving and somewhat flawed, but it’ll keep you hooked right up to its ambiguous ending.

Reading List 2014

Ender's Game - Scott Orson Card (seriously, why does everyone rave about this?)

Dark Places - Gillian Flynn (a crime page turner I enjoyed)

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut (witty end of the world satire)

Before I Go to Sleep - S J Watson (really not my thing. Don't know what came over me)

Life after Life - Kate Atkinson (clever clever book. Too clever? Does it actually have anything to say?)

Into the Woods - John Yorke (not redesigning the wheel but an interesting read nonetheless)

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro (I really couldn't recommend this to anyone. Sorry!)

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders - Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (absolutely fascinating!)

The Quick - Lauren Owen (some quite evocative parts lost their impact in the OTT plot)

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (INCREDIBLY disappointing)

Doctor Sleep - Stephen King ('twas okay. Not exactly a return to form but not a turkey either)

What Dies in Summer - Tom Wright (quite enjoyed some parts of this but it felt underdeveloped)

Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert (preferred it to Dune. Very dark and fatalistic)

Pompeii - Robert Harris (I shamelessly enjoyed this. Painstakingly researched, has the nod from Mary Beard and does what it says on the tin)

The Shock of the Fall - Nathan Filer (it had its moments)

Drive - James Sallis (hard boiled pulpy LA low lifes)

The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell (LOVED IT - ALL OF IT)

California - Edan Lepucki (a couple struggle with dystopian living. Some quite cool bits but went off at the end)

She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West (non-fiction so unusual for me. Explores the case from the courtroom)

Book Review: Why I love...Moby Dick

A while back I decided to re-read those books on my top book list.  First up was Moby Dick.

Highlighters are my friends

There’s something irresistible about Herman Melville’s 1851 opus, Moby Dick; a novel of monstrous proportions that lurches from high seas rollicking adventure to natural history to existential debate to political satire to etymology lesson like a green sailor yet to find his sea-legs.

From its famous first line ‘Call me Ishmael’ (in which out narrator is introduced) you might expect to become very well acquainted with our guide. But after 680 or so pages we end up knowing surprisingly little about him.  Despite a lengthy set-up in which Ishmael visits Natucket, selects his whaling ship and becomes very good friends with Queequeg (a friendly cannibal who carries around shrunken heads) we kind of lose sight of him as he slips from the narrative. 

Instead Melville embarks on detailed chapters on cetacean anatomy, philosophy, the grisly reality of whaling and of course Ahab – all without a single “I” in sight.  When Ishmael does pop up again it takes a moment to remember who he is.  And then there’s the genre and style of Moby Dick.  It’s a mashed-up tapestry of prose, poetry and drama.  We actually get monologues from Ahab, Starbuck and Stubb plus chapters made up entirely of script complete with stage directions and asides, breaking any remaining illusion of Ishmael actually owning this story.  It’s all very grandiose, Shakespearean, self-aware and also surprisingly modern; there’s just so many voices vying to be heard. 

And what about the ending?  After pages and pages (and pages) Moby Dick pulls Ahab down to a watery grave, along with the Pequod and all her crew (bar Ishmael) in just a few brief sentences.  It’s certainly a strange beast of a novel, but one that’s magnetic in its dramatic urgency.

At the centre of this watery maelstrom is Ahab’s obsession with hunting down the infamous white whale, Moby Dick, who chomped his leg off in an earlier encounter.  The crew may have thought they were off to see the world and gain their fortune in blubber, but soon they’re locked in a fatalistic journey to the depths of mania and madness.  Like the wiped out North American tribe the Pequod is named for, the ship is doomed and Ahab is the devil’s own.  One of my favourite scenes shows the crew working feverishly through the night burning the carcass of a whale in the try-works.

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

The Pequod hurtles towards her doom, the lives of her crew tied to Ahab’s infernal purpose – it’s all pretty epic.  Even worse is the sinister Fedallah, a creepy Parsee who Ahab smuggled aboard.  Fedallah spends most of his time literally hanging around in Ahab’s shadow so he doesn't cast one (clearly also of the devil) and prophesying an ominous future.

But Ahab isn't just a cut-out monomaniac.  Melville gives his captain Shakespearean tragic depths as we see both the extent of his hubris as well as the tantalising possibility of deliverance through Starbuck.  I'm a little bit in love with Starbuck.  Ahab’s first mate, he’s in between a rock and err...another bigger rock as he tries to follow his master while battling with the knowledge that Ahab is completely bonkers and will get them all killed.  There’s a great passage when he hovers outside the captain’s door, questioning whether to murder him.  Of course he can’t.

‘Oh my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! […] why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! Let us fly these deadly waters! Let us home!  Wife and child too are Starbuck’s […] this instant let me alter the course! […] See, see! The boy’s face from the window!  The boy’s hand on the hill!’

Nice try Starbuck.

However Ahab’s having none of it.  ‘This whole act’s immutably decreed,’ he tells poor Starbuck, ‘‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.’

Ahab is created in the mould of Shakespearean tragic hero – flawed and doomed to follow his purpose to the end.  He reminds me a bit of Macbeth in V.vii when he’s outmanoeuvred and knows he’s heading for a sticky ending.  ‘They have tied me to the stake,’ Macbeth says, ‘I cannot fly / But, bearlike, I must fight the course.’  There’s something strangely impressive about a man who will always stand by his decisions and actions, even when they’re clearly insane. 

Noah's not bothered about Ahab's troubles

Other Shakespearean motifs abound in Moby Dick too, such as little Pip, the cabin boy who goes overboard.  When he’s picked up later he’s lost his mind through a mixture of pure terror and transcendental experience in the open empty waters: knowing God.  Not surprisingly he ends up living in Ahab’s cabin (the crazies stick together), reminiscent of Lear’s fool, poor Tom.

It’s no wonder that Khan Noonien Singh liberally quotes and adapts Moby Dick throughout STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) – another reason I love this book.  Reading through Moby Dick and finding passages used in Star Trek is like looking in the pocket of a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in a while and finding a twenty (and it’s also one of the many reasons why the new reboot just isn't, well, real Star Trek….).  Like Ahab and his whale, Khan is obsessed with getting his revenge on Kirk and he will sacrifice anything and everyone to get it (there’s a great Moby Dick reference in STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT too concerning Picard and the Borg). 

In epic vengeful situations nothing beats a bit of Ahab:

Khan: ‘He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round Perdition's flames before I give him up!'

Ahab: He tasks me; he heaps me […] and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up!’

Or when Khan borrows some of Ahab’s exact words from the end of the novel, as he also faces destruction:

Ahab: ‘Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!’

And then there’s Moby Dick: Ahab’s nemesis and the epicentre of his rage.  The fact the whale is white makes it even more horrific; ‘an ‘elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood’.  Ahab believes Moby Dick is the source of all evil.  Yet at the same time Moby Dick is almost sublime – beautiful in its ghastliness and capable of bringing you closer to God – if you can actually figure out the divine workings going on.  The sailors dissect other whales they've killed, trying to pin down the essence of “whale-ness” but it’s something they can’t find or explain.  The white whale becomes a site where meanings multiply and collapse.  The ultimate mystery, Moby Dick sinks from view, Ahab trapped forever in its jaws (as you can see Melville brings out the grandiose in anyone).

Best Moby Dick Quotes

‘Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!’

‘He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.’

‘Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.’

Moby Dick goes with…

• Shakespeare (Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Hamlet) for epic language, motifs and tragedy

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov for obsession

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad for madness and the insane quest

• Beloved by Toni Morrison for a darkly destructive and obsessive relationship

Book Review: Family Album by Penelope Lively

‘Read some Penelope Lively!’ my friend insisted time and time again.  I must admit I did resist.  I’d recently decided I couldn’t stand Ian McEwan anymore and I was worried that another decidedly white middle class read might send me over the edge.  But when I found a copy of Family Album (Moon Tiger is my friend’s recommendation) in a charity shop in Wells it was clearly a message from the great bookseller in the cosmos.

Family Album (2009) charts the story of a Victorian (or Edwardian – it seems to vary) house; it’s a gargantuan structure with a myriad of floors and rooms (it actually has parlours!) and is called Allersmead (surely a better title?).  And in this house live the Harper family: mum Alison, dad Charles, kids Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger and Clare, plus the au pair Ingrid.  Alison’s a real ‘70s homemaker – all shapeless smocks and hair buns, cooking like there’s no tomorrow, insistent on the importance of a happy family life.  The book starts with one of the older girls (Gina) and her trip back home with the new boyfriend who’s enchanted by this retro childhood home and Alison’s ideals.  But it soon becomes clear that Alison’s view of their Waltons-like existence doesn’t quite marry up with everyone else’s.

Coming from a single child family myself, some parts of their life did read a bit like a horror story to me.  The named mugs, the hordes of children on a treasure hunt, the enforced family picnics, the lack of privacy.  I started empathising with poor dad Charles, hiding in his study and keeping out of everyone’s way.  And then there’s the strange live-in au pair Ingrid who came over from Scandinavia in the sepia toned ‘70s, never to return.  Instead way past the time the kids have left (well most of them – the one failure, Paul, keeps on coming back) she’s still there, saying things like ‘I am thinking you would like a nice cup of tea now’.  Of course, there’s a mystery here.  We know this from the blurb on the back (‘and one particular devastating secret of which no one speaks…”) however you’ll guess it by page 30.  But here’s what Lively does so well – she reveals it early on too!  Phew.  I thought I was going to have to read the whole thing and act surprised at the end.  So this got me thinking – maybe it’s another secret – and there is one surrounding Charles…

Some parts of this read are a little clichéd.  I mean, the statuesque Scandinavian au pair with the long blonde hair, the protective earth mother and the distant father all seem familiar.  And despite the back cover’s tempting whiff of a hidden scandal there is no shocking revelation.  But what’s really compelling here is Lively’s style; she effortlessly segues between past and present, action and memory, and between characters.  One minute we’re listening to an omniscient narrator charting the history of the house before 1914, the next we’re in Alison, or Paul, or Gina’s psyche – sometimes in first, sometimes in third person.  But it never jars.  Instead we’re given a fluid exploration of family, memory and perception that’s always immensely readable.

Reading 2012

A Game of Thrones - George R R Martin (loved it!)

Children of Men - PD James (I was expecting to love it, but found it strangely disappointing)

Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck (can't believe I hadn't read this before. Bit miserable ain't it? Dead mice, dead dogs, dead puppies, dead women...)

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (a re-read for work)

A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller (another re-read for work)

A Clash of Kings - George RR Martin (I still love it!)

Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller (enjoyed this)

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy (cinematic prose)

Night of the Iguana - Tennessee Williams (sultry, seedy and um, lizardy)

A Storm of Swords - George RR Martin (I was reading this for bloody weeks. Need a break!)

White Oleander - Janet Fitch (don't be sucked in by the poetic prose - it's just chick lit)

Home - Toni Morrison (a bit underwhelming)

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver (pretty dire)

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (a re-read. Enjoyable but typical Banks - great premise and build up but shame about the ending)

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner (absolutely brilliant)

Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor (weirdly I read this after As I Lay Dying - which it's directly influenced by. I quite enjoyed a lot of it, but sometimes it seemed a bit forced)

Brick Lane - Monica Ali (couldn't finish it. Page 178).

The Song of Achilles - Madeleine Miller (essentially a romance genre novel wrapped up in a bit of Homer. Quite disposable)

Oedipus the King - Sophocles, trans. Robert Bagg (a more modern translation. Jarred in a few places. I'd also prefer a bit more gloomy melancholia)

Just My Type: A Book about Fonts - Simon Gafield (loved it! Who doesn't love a good font/typeface?)

The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood (quite fun but a little forced in places)

Much Ado About Nothing (a re-read for work)

The Lacuna - Barabara Kingsolver (I found this a bit of a drag in places but some of the American history was quite interesting - McCarthy era red witch-hunts)

A Feast for Crows - George R R Martin (a bit slow in places and missing loads of characters.  Definitely the weakest of the bunch so far)

Family Album - Penelope Lively (my first by her. Terribly middle class but quite enjoyable. Not sure there really was an awful dark family secret though)

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (a re-read. She's still one of my favourite writers)

22.11.63 - Stephen King (seriously is this for real? YAWN)

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (yeah this was quite fun)

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates (despite some really moving parts didn't grab me as much as I thought it would)

Reading List 2011

The Wind Up Girl - Paulo Bacigalupi (REALLY enjoyed this! Future calorie-punk)

Reservation Road - John Burnham Schwartz (Interesting idea, not sure the execution totally worked)

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (Forward thinking with some really beautiful descriptions in there)

The Passage - Justin Cronin (I was reading this for weeks!)

High Rise - JG Ballard (That '60s architectural dream of streets in the sky meets Cabrini Green; modern life is rubbish when all there is to eat is barbecued pet dog)

Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland (Just read the first 70 pages and you'll be fine)


The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas (It's like Neighbours on coke, and with more sex)

Lustrum - Robert Harris (I'm literally OBSESSED with Roman history)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (Hey, I loved this! So much so I read it in a day)

The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker (Enjoyed about 30% of it, the rest needed a severe edit)

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman (My first Kindle read! A re-telling of the Jesus myth with some interesting changes)

A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Seriously the most amazing book I've read in ages


The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Don't know why everyone raves about this. I found it contrived and full of one dimensional characters)

Zoo City - Lauren Beukes (Liked the setting and the animal spirits as punishment.  Not so sure about the hard to follow thriller plot and bizarre finale)

Small Island - Andrea Levy (This is a potential set text for A level so thought I'd check it out. Enjoyable period details and had a good hook. The outdated attitudes are quite unsettling though! Worth a look)

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Part 1 - blossoming sexuality in the early '80s; Part 2 - hedonism and Maggie T; Part 3 - the party's DEFINITELY over)

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss (loneliness, some funny bits, interesting divisions, some confusion but hey ho)


Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - (a re-visit for me as I'm teaching it.  I love this book ; it's so playful and varied, plus it gets better when you read it again)

The Secret History - Donna Tartt (another re-read. I love this book!)

Quarantine - Jim Crace (I really didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I found the shifting narrative perspective a bit distancing)

Tamburlaine Must Die - Louise Welch (This has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, literally. It was a fun quick read - kind of a literary romp)

Year of the Flood (Follow up to Oryx and Crake. Loved it - although I preferred Oryx and Crake a bit more. It did lose a bit of pacing at the end)

One Day - David Nicholls (Not my usual genre, but I was drawn in by the structure. Immensely readable, but some of the dialogue and characterisation really did start to grate. Loved the late '80 and '90s references though!)

Sophie's Choice - William Styron (God this was hard-going: Nazis, porn and sexism)

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (Ironically, I felt let down)

The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien (I used to read this every September, but stopped about 10 years ago. Surprised myself by how much I'm enjoying it again!)

The Two Towers - JRR Tolkien (I still can't decide which is my favourite - although I guess that's kind of a pointless thing to think about as Tolkien didn't want them broken up anyway)

The Return of the King - JRR Tolkien (And my marathon is over. I had fun.)

Book Review: Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz

Reservation Road is about the aftermath of a horrific incident; Ethan and Grace Learner's young son Josh is killed one summer night in a hit and run.  However the driver isn't just a faceless figure that disappears into the night.  Instead we get to know him through a first person narrative.  It turns out the Learners know the killer too.  Dwight is a divorced mess of a lawyer who's still obsessed with his ex wife and has violent tendancies.  His ex wife taught Josh piano.  Josh was a gifted piano player - a trait which seems employed to increase the poignancy; Josh had so much to lose.

I wanted to read this book because of Schwartz's narrative stance.  He uses alternating perspectives: Ethan, Grace and Dwight.  So we get three perspectives on the horrible event and see how it alters everything, including the Learners' marriage.  However rather oddly we get a first person narration for the boys (father Ethan and killer Dwight) but a third person for Grace.  I have no idea why.  Perhaps it's to show her emotional distance?  I found her quite hard to connect with, but she's zoned out and in shock so I guess this makes sense.  Or perhaps Schwartz felt he couldn't write from a feminine perspective?  Whatever the reason I found it quite disconcerting, like I wasn't getting the whole picture.  There wasn't really much to differentiate Ethan and Dwight's voice either.

I think it dipped at the end.  I won't give it away but it wasn't really what I expected and didn't feel true to the rest of the book.  But I still enjoyed it; there are some really evocative pieces suggesting the seasons, passage of time and memories and we do get a glimpse of grief.  Bit of a strange one though.  There's a film of it apparently, but I haven't seen it yet.

Book Review: The Stand by Stephen King

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Stephen King.  He has a special place on my bookshelf as he was one of the first writers I really got into when I was around eleven or so, (plus we share the same birthday!).  I devoured pretty much all his stuff up until about 1995.  I think it was Needful Things (1991) which broke the spell for me.  Hundreds of pages leading up to the most ridiculous, Deus ex Machina ending ever.  But every now and then I have another bash at a Stephen King, just for old time’s sake.  In recent years I’ve tried Insomnia (94), Cell (06), Just After Sunset (08), Dreamcatcher (01).  They were all, without exception, complete turkeys.

The way I see it, the early ’90s were the turning point for King.  Before then, his books were quite addictive: good pacing, in depth characterisation, unsettling and (often) a decent ending (not always though - endings are definitely his weak point.  King is really an ideas man.  You get the sense that he has so many and sometimes just doesn’t know what to do with them once he gets to the end).  After that, I don’t know what happened really.  Maybe it’s something to do with his prolific nature, his fame and status and his lack of a good editor.  Who’s going to really edit a King book these days?  He’s a bestseller, regardless of how unwieldy and bloated his novels become.  He can do what he wants.

So whilst searching around on my bookshelf for something to read which wasn’t too taxing in the Christmas wallowing period, I thought I’d re-read an older one and see how it holds up under scrutiny.  I decided to go for The Stand (78/90) - the reworked 1990 edition of course!  I last read this on holiday in Mallorca with my family; I was probably twelve-ish.  At the time I loved it.  But would I still love it?  And how would it, ahem, stand up to scrutiny?

Pretty well actually.  First I noticed loads of literary references which I simply didn’t get aged twelve.  King is an intelligent bookish man; he majored in literature and I’ve read interviews where he explains how he struggled for years with his desire to be seen as a ‘literary’ writer yet he produced pulp fiction.  But it’s all here: Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, The Scarlet Letter, and um…The Lord of the Rings.  The influence of Tolkien is really obvious throughout, but hey, we all love a good quest of good vs evil don’t we?
What King is really good at is characterisation.  Backstory is dropped in with subtlety and we actually care about (well most) of the characters.  Except Frannie.  God she’s annoying.  I would say his female characters are actually less convincing here (and there’s fewer of them anyway).  The pacing keeps us engaged throughout - even at the ending.  Here’s something to note - a King book which doesn’t have a lousy ending!

True there are areas of style which could do with tightening up and some inconsistencies, but overall it lived up to my memory’s recommendation.  It linked in with his Dark Tower series too.  For some reason I managed to bypass these and have been picking at them every now and then for the past six months.  And I loved the reference to Christine.  Of course that’s nothing new - King is uber intertextual and that appeals to my slightly geeky nature.  But one thing I would say is some parts of the narrative are actually quite experimental (for mainstream fiction).  Stream of consciousness, second person voice, present tense, interspersed diary entries…

I think you could really compare The Stand to Cell to see how far he’s changed (for the worse).  Both have an apocalyptic theme.  But whereas The Stand, despite the horror/fantastical elements remains firmly rooted in reality and character, Cell descends into farce.  The Stand takes small steps and remains wholly believable and true, whereas Cell just made me laugh.  Zombie type creatures created by mobile phones, who are in fact, batteries, who recharge by listening to M.O.R?  Eh?  Instantly forgettable characters, who I care about even less when one dies?  Yup.  I kind of remember some weird levitation thing happening at the end too.  Cell is a cash-cow, plain and simple.  The Stand is the real deal.

Book Review: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Adiga pulls no punches in his first novel which explores the haves and the have-nots, the Lightness and the Darkness in modern day India.  Our narrator and anti-hero is Balram Halwai; born in the Darkness and desperate to get out.  His journey is complicated by ancient caste systems and hierarchies, but a lucky break sees him working as a chauffeur in Delhi where he learns how to be an “entrepreneur” - although his interpretation of this role and what it entails is shown with an acerbic and satirical slant.

There’s an angry tone in Adiga’s writing.  For all of Balram’s witticisms Adiga uses him to explore and comment on social issues.  It’s part shocking, part funny.  We see Balram stuck outside an American-style mall, looking in, but allowed to enter once he changes his clothes.  We see ownership, slavery and squalor.  Balram tries to “dip his beak” into a Russian blonde but runs screaming when he sees her dark roots.

This novel doesn’t have characters; instead we’re given a grotesque array of caricatures, all cruel, twisted, perverted, corrupted or just plain weak.  The ending when it comes is abrupt, the outcome is predictable.  We see two extremes of India and nothing more. 

But maybe they aren’t as far apart as all that.  The Darkness isn’t just down to geography and social status - you can bring the darkness of moral hypocrisy with you wherever you go.  Adiga’s narrator brings this novel to life, but ultimately the centre seems hollow.