Book Review: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro returns to what interests him most in his Booker Shortlisted When We Were Orphans: the duplicity of memory, social mores and the fusion of Asian and English culture.

It’s 1930s England and Christopher Banks is in the process of becoming a famed detective.  Suddenly he finds himself on all the best guest lists and talked about on the social scene – ironic really as Banks seems an awkward, terribly English type, horrified by public displays of affection and he’d certainly never make a scene.

But then a scene is made and it’s all due to the magnetic and ballsy high society (well sort of) Sarah.  She wants Banks to add her as his ‘plus one’ to a charity dinner, he doesn't want to (even though he clearly fancies her) as he’s already said he’s going alone (did I say he’s terribly English?).

I can sympathise with Banks.  I mean, these kind of social quandaries often plague me.  What to do when you see someone you sort of know when you’re walking through town?  Do you make eye contact?  Nod?  Pretend you didn't see them?  Duck into a shop?  Cross the road to avoid the whole sorry dilemma and hope they didn't notice you?

If Banks is reminding you of another Ishiguro character, then I'm not surprised.  Come on, he’s clearly Stevens.  Good ol’ Stevens, our awfully repressed butler from Remains of the Day, who just couldn't articulate what he really wanted.  It’s hard to read When We Were Orphans and not hear Steven’s voice channelled through the first person narrative.

Anyway back to this Sarah.  She seems kind of interesting.  I wonder what role she’ll play in Banks’ story?  The answer is not much.  She’s what we might call a red herring (and there’s a lot of those in this book).  Instead we’re drawn further and further into Banks’ crazy, hallucinatory inner life and his decidedly unique way of looking at the world.

Banks’ parents mysteriously disappeared when he was a boy living in Old Shanghai – possibly kidnapped.  His father worked for Morganrook and Byatt doing something ‘official but a bit dodgy to do with opium’ while his mother was a very vocal campaigner against the opium trade – often at odds with those around her (you can see where this might be going).  As you’d expect, this childhood event has cast a shadow over Banks, and it’s not long before he returns to Shanghai to try and solve the old case.

One of the issues I have with When We Were Orphans is I feel a bit duped.  What starts out as a Sherlock Holmes-esque detective story, interspersed with Banks’ memories of his parents and Japanese friend Akira in Shanghai, soon morphs into something else completely.

The latter sections of the novel are pretty much unbelievable.  Ridiculous plotting and contrived coincidences abound as Banks does his detective thing in Shanghai.  He returns to his childhood home and the family living there invite him for dinner and then say they’ll move out once he rescues his parents (they went missing 25 years ago) so they can all move back in together happily.  Er…yeah.  Do you want to break it to him or shall I?  

Banks also heads right into the front line of the Sino-Japanese War, darting among the troops and locals, getting soldiers and police to drop their weapons and escort him about, even bumping into his childhood friend Akira.  As you do.  I was fully expecting some kind of deus ex machina ending – you know, like the ones in Star Trek when we find out the alien who’s been tormenting the Enterprise and is about to kill its crew is just a kid and now daddy alien has ticked him off and sent him home without tea.  However I can’t believe that Ishiguro suddenly decided to go all airport fiction on us.  It seems that Banks is simply a lot more unreliable than I originally thought.

Looking back there were early signs of course.  Two old school acquaintances remember Banks as a loner weirdo, something he strenuously denies and attempts to dispute by providing some detailed ‘un-loserish’ memories.  Perhaps the biggest clue comes with the games he played as a kid with Akira, endlessly re-enacting the rescue of his parents and a welcoming home ceremony in their honour.  It’s hard not to see this motif appearing in his adult life on his return to Shanghai, and the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure what I can actually trust about the earlier sections.  I mean, why exactly don’t we see him solving any of his famous cases?  Instead, we always seem to meet him after he’s solved another one.

I know Ishiguro enjoys writing about memory – and how there’s a gap between what happened and what you remember happened.  But for me, When We Were Orphans is hard to pin down – I'm not really sure what its purpose is, apart from exposing the duplicity of memory, fantasy and unreliable narration.  There was nothing to hold me to this text, no real sense of character and the plot is far too smart for its own good.  When We Were Orphans is all about the clever and subtle manipulation of genre and reader, but it’ll leave you feeling cold.

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: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

I wasn't expecting to like Dark Places. I'm not a huge fan of the crime genre. However Gillian Flynn’s 2009 novel surprised me.

Dark Places follows the story of Libby Day, survivor of a 1985 massacre in Kinnakee which claimed the lives of her sisters and mother - and it’s her brother, Ben, who’s in prison for the murders. In fact Libby’s testimony helped put him there. Libby’s grown into a fairly unpleasant and selfish adult, wasting the past 24 years hiding away in a house in suburbia and living off monetary gifts from beneficiaries. That is until the money runs out. Unwilling to go out and work, Libby agrees to appear as “special guest” at The Kill Club for payment (it's a kind of ghoulish group into discussing, role-playing and attempting to solve famous murders).

Of course fundamentally Dark Places is a mystery story; we know that Libby’s family is murdered, we just don’t know exactly how. As soon as Libby joins in with The Kill Club she learns that most of them think Ben is innocent. Flynn’s structure works well here as we alternate between Libby’s first person sections ‘today’ and the actual day of the massacre. These latter sections are all in third person and follow different characters’ impressions of the day, from mother Patty to Ben himself. We get a real sense of dread as the 1985 sections move through that fateful day and events spiral out of control.

I was very much reminded of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Based on the real-life murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas, when we start reading Capote’s novel we already know the bloody end result. We just don’t know the precise sequence of events that night. The novel’s first section The Last to See Them Alive alternates between parts charting the Clutter family’s last day (all the while we’re looking for clues) and those showing Dick and Perry’s journey across the states to the isolated farm where they’ll ‘blast hair’ all over the walls. But who actually killed the family? Perry? Dick? Both of them? It’s not until the end that we finally get Perry’s confession, and even then I guess we’ll never know if it’s the truth.

Flynn plays around with these questions about truth and ambiguity throughout Dark Places. Due to alternating viewpoints we often get different takes on the same event. Patty believes her son enjoys the blokey repartee with his father, but we later learn he feels bullied and emasculated by it. One of Flynn’s real strengths is characterisation, and Ben is a wholly believable portrait of an awkward teenager in the mid-eighties. For example Flynn notes how his jeans are just slightly too short in the leg, which his “friend” Trey teases him for. Ben’s obsessed with death and thrash metal: the perfect scapegoat for a series of gruesome, apparently satanic murders? However we also discover some dodgy things about Ben; Flynn isn't going to make it easy for us, and she keeps us guessing right up to the end.

Some of the details near the end perhaps test the limits of credibility just that bit too much. But Dark Places is still an engrossing read, especially in its depiction of rural poverty in eighties America. In fact the sections I found the most appealing were those set in the past, on the day of the murder. Flynn’s novel is fast paced, evocative and moreish: definitely worth a read.

Book Review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

For her third novel, Lauren Beukes abandons not only the urban fantasy sci-fi of her first offerings, but also her usual South African setting to tell the story of a time-travelling murderer who stalks and kills his victims throughout Chicago’s twentieth century history.

At the start of the novel Harper Curtis, a violent immoral drifter in Depression era Chicago, stumbles upon the House (we know it’s important as it has a capital).  It’s a building with a strange secret – it allows you to travel from the late ‘20s to the early ‘90s.  Harper also discovers a room filled with girls’ names (his shining girls) and trophies (tennis ball, Janis Joplin tape, contraceptive pill packet) from each victim.  It’s like a map which he follows, hunting each girl through time, killing her in an unpleasant way (guts flying) and swapping one of her personal belongings for the trophy from another girl.  

So when he murders Jinsuk in 1993 he leaves a pair of stage wings from another victim and takes Jinsuk’s baseball card.  He then leaves the baseball card on the body of Zora in 1943 and takes her goodluck letter “z”.  And so on.  Of course this leaves loads of anachronistic items across time, a trail of clues that no one can solve… until Kirby that is.

Kirby is one of Harper’s victims assaulted in 1989.  However she survives.  Fastforward to the early ‘90s when she’s doing work experience at a Chicago paper and teams up with reporter Dan to try and track down her would be killer.  It’s these two story lines we follow in The Shining Girls, told either from the two main protagonists Harper and Kirby, or other characters in the scene (Dan, a homeless lad, Harper’s victims etc).  

It’s actually a fairly straightforward structure, but initially it’s daunting and complex due to the constant and seemingly illogical shifts in time.  This is actually something I found really appealing; I always enjoy narrative puzzles and went to work on this one, flicking back through what I’d read and finding clues, creating a chart of time-lines, events and victims (of course it all works).  It’s an angle that gives the typical ‘serial killer stalking women’ thriller a new twist.

But make no mistake – this is a page turner.  It’s a pacey thriller with quick shifts in focus and speedy chapters, which is crying out for a big screen adaptation (I can already see it: Se7en meets The Time Traveler’s Wife).  And it works.  Beukes has a tight hold on what she’s doing and most of the characterisation is detailed; oddly it’s only the serial killer who seems not as well drawn.  Perhaps this is a deliberate tactic?  We find ourselves empathising totally with his victims – even when their deaths are narrated from Harper’s perspective. 

After all, Harper is just vile.  He’s the kind of guy who hacks the legs off a baby chick just to see what happens and watches while his brother gets crushed by a truck.  He time travels to wank over future and past crime scenes and even goes through a phase of visiting his victims when they’re younger and chatting to them, just, you know, to creep them out and give him bigger kicks.  Poor Catherine for example.  He finds her as a kid, steals her hairclip, tells her he’s going to murder her later in life then scuttles back to the House.  When he decides to come for her (bringing back the hairclip he stole) she’s spent so many years freaking out about her sinister harbinger that she’s a drug addled mess begging him for death.  Harper is one sick bastard.

So when the demises are narrated from one of the shining girls’ POVs it’s almost unbearable.  There’s nowhere to hide, no escape.  In a peculiar kind of foreshadowing we know they never had a chance and never will – unless of course Kirby can make a difference.  

We spend a lot of time with Kirby and she’s characterised in a layered way.  Damaged by Harper both mentally and physically, yet out of place and awkward before he ever attacked her.  Her mother is a lax hippy parent who dates widely and smokes weed.  I’m sure I read somewhere that Beukes is a big fan of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Kirby’s segments did remind me of the Luisa Rey story (about a female journalist in ‘70s California investigating corruption, nuclear power plants and murder, written in a thriller style).  Like Luisa, Kirby is trying to find the truth at all costs.  She’s an outsider, marked not only by her horrific scars but by her punk hair and Fugazi t-shirts.

It’s an intriguing and disturbing novel and it’s certainly more mainstream than her previous work, but it’s not perfect.  The ending feels rushed and unsatisfying while there’s something slightly clichéd about the final chapter (I won’t give it away).  And we never really get to understand why or how the House works.  Not that it really matters I guess.  The Shining Girls is an inventive, gruelling and unsettling read, but one that leaves many questions unanswered. 

Theatre Review: Titus Andronicus at the Swan 2013

Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus has always had a bad rap. Featuring (in no particular order) murder, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, filicide and cannibalism, some critics refused to believe it was even

penned by the bard, while it’s rarely performed among the hundreds of Hamlets and Othellos (although it’s certainly increasing in popularity with modern audiences).

In fact, Titus probably has more in common with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well as later dark and twisted Jacobean revenge dramas like Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Shakespeare’s audiences, used to the influence of bloody Senecan drama, loved it.

The story follows Titus, an ageing general of Rome who’s spent years and years dedicating himself to the Empire and fighting the goths. In fact, he’s already lost twenty (yes, twenty) sons in the war. At the start of the play he returns to a Rome that’s in political uncertainty as two brothers campaign to become Emperor. But he doesn’t return alone; Tamora, the captured queen of the goths, and her sons are in tow. Titus promptly sacrifices one despite Tamora’s pleas for mercy.

And this is where the trouble starts. You see Titus is a stickler for rules. He’s the kind of guy who calls a spade a spade and he believes in the chain of command. So not only does he turn down the chance to rule Rome himself, he refuses to support the younger and more appropriate brother. Instead he puts Saturninus on the Emperor’s throne (big mistake). Before you know it, the Emperor’s freed Tamora and married her…and boy does she want revenge on Titus.

Many of the difficulties in the play come from the excessive, almost cartoon-like violence as well as the sometimes jarring combination of horrific action and beautiful language. When Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius, rape Titus’ daughter Lavinia they hack off her hands then cut out her tongue so she can’t speak or write their names. Her uncle’s lament turns her into some delicate woodland creature or plant, ‘hewed […] Of her two branches’ while her disfigured mouth releases ‘a crimson river of warm blood / Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind.’ Michael Fentiman’s 2013 production for the RSC at the Swan deals with the extreme nature of the play with an assured and deft use of black humour.

Not that Lavinia’s assault is handled lightly – I’m pretty sure such treatment would lose any audience immediately. The complete horror of her ordeal is heightened by the early bloodless stabbings in Act One, so when she finally opens her mouth the sight of all that red stuff spouting out onto her soiled white dress is all the more shocking. Chiron and Demetrius’ cruelty is intensified as they've hacked off her long blonde tresses and tied it round her stumps. Rose Reynolds plays the part with sensitivity and an increasing resilience; she delivers a judgemental 100 yard stare that penetrates the dark depths of any soul. There’s even a bit of awkward humour as she tries to eat a boiled egg with no hands in a kind of Hulk-Smash! moment.

But uncomfortable scenes aside, where this production really excels is in its biting, witty and deeply dark tone. In the ‘70s literary critic Nicholas Brooke pointed out how Jacobean and Caroline tragedy provoked “horrid laughter” in contemporary audiences – something that modern performances deliberately tend to minimise. Heaven forbid we laugh in Act Five of Macbeth or Lear.

Fentiman’s production however gives us the go-ahead to laugh all we want. There’s heads and hands flying about all over the place, severed limbs used as comic props, Titus dressed up as a kind of mad Nippy in a Lyons tea shop, and a finale that’s a triumph of orchestration. Tamora’s (Katy Stephens) expression when she realises she’s been feasting on her sons (murdered by Titus and baked in a pie) is priceless. The stage erupts into chaos – a jaw-dropping melee of mass murder and violence by unusual and comic means: Titus is stabbed with a table leg, one of the Emperor’s wenches rogers a dinner guest up the arse with a cake cutter, a corkscrew is rammed into a neck and I noticed one character gleefully brandishing someone else’s tongue on the end of a fork. 

Stage blood becomes more and more prominent as the play progresses, and I'm pleased to report that I got spattered when Titus cut Chiron’s throat (front row seats = very interactive). The audience go with it – there’s laughter and chuckles and guffaws. And a few gasps; Aaron’s murder of the nurse is particularly inventive. Not content with just stabbing the poor woman (who emits an almighty shriek) he rolls her over and sticks the knife…well let’s just say if you’ve seen Se7en you’ll know what I mean. On the night I went one woman in the audience lost all constraint at this point and bellowed out, “OH MY GOD!” in the loudest voice you could imagine. Of course we all laughed. I bet the actors high-fived each other backstage.

Both Stephen Boxer as Titus and John Hopkins as Saturninus are excellent, bringing a great deal of humour to their performances. Katy Stephens is mesmerising as Tamora: fierce, sexy, manipulative and with a great rock queen wardrobe. The sons Chiron and Demetrius (Jonny Weldon and Perry Millward) come as an identical pair of idiotic (but dangerous) buffoons riding BMXs. Aaron, the devious Moor, is physically a commanding presence, but he didn’t quite pull it off; I wanted him to be a bit more wickedly evil. After all, this is the guy who’s done a ‘thousand dreadful things’ (murder, rape, arson, cattle mutilation, corpse defilement…just the usual really).

The set-design and costumes show an eclectic mix of historical periods and cultures; there’s Nazi-esque iconography, modern riot police, Moorish temples, Muslim veils and the influence of classical Rome. Violent acts aren't just specific to one particular time, and a play that was hugely popular with contemporary early modern audiences still speaks to us today (this production opened in the same week as the shocking Woolwich slaying).

Titus Andronicus is an absolute triumph: disturbing, funny and relevant. It never descends too far into farce though, and the last moments are chilling. Aaron, buried up to his neck in the earth, is powerless to prevent the young boy Lucius (Titus’ grandchild) from picking up his baby…and then the cake cutter. The boy looks at both speculatively before the lights go out. It’s a bleak comment on how violence breeds violence, and it’s hard not to think of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. It’s a bloody (literally) brilliant production. Oh and by the way, the stage blood did come out in the wash.

Book Review: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

A lovely first edition hardback copy of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon was recently wedged through my letterbox for review.

I really enjoyed this one - shameless escapism but with added literary allusions. Perfect! You can read my thoughts on it here.