So a very brief entry this time.

The story of refugees evacuated to the US from Saigon in the final days of the Vietnam War, The Sympathizer is relentlessly grim stuff. Many reviews tried to make the case that it was a hilarious satire, but obviously I disagree. Pervasive cynicism wrapped up in a pretty thin plot wasn't at all what I was looking for.

The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction

The Story Prize is an annual award given to a single authors' collection of short stories, selected from 3 finalists. A couple of years ago they put together this anthology, which has a story from each of the first fourteen winners.

So this (along with the next entry) was an obvious pick for me, as an easy way to discover the work of a range of new authors. Not surprisingly I didn't like all the stories, but there were a couple of gems and several others that were good enough to investigate further.

I found that I liked the longer ones better; the problem with a single very short story (10-15 pages) is that, in isolation, this can't be enough to make an informed decision regarding reading the collection from which it was taken.

But some of the stories here are excellent, and I ended up with half a dozen new collections on my ever-growing to-read list. Recommended.

The O'Henry Prize Stories, 2019

The tales collected in the O'Henry Prize Stories, unsurprisingly, work much more consistently well as standalone stories. The prize has been running now for 100 years; each year 20 individual stories judged the best out of hundreds published in a variety of literary and general interest magazines are recognized, and included in a collection.

As they are all written as isolated works rather than as part of a collection, I never felt like I might not be seeing the whole picture; a much bigger hit ratio makes these annual collections easy recommendations. Great value.

#reading #books

I've been thinking about all the hours of work that go into producing a good book, not to mention the time spent reading and rereading and thinking about it later. All for not very much money at all. As pastimes go, the value proposition is hard to beat.

My other great interest at the moment is cycling, which can often be rather more expensive. Although again, and as I'll write about sometime soon, it's undeniably an investment that offers a fantastic payoff, certainly compared with (say) spending an equivalent amount of time drinking beer, streaming TV shows or playing video games.

On to the Roundup: reading-wise, June was a month of two halves. Let's get the bad bit out of the way first.

First up was Underworld, a great slab of a novel. Perhaps befitting its aim of encapsulating an entire period of American history, my edition came with newspaper-quality print, complete with occasional squashed or reverse-italicised lines of text.

The cinematic prologue was strong, and that's what drew me in; as I always do with any novel, I sampled the first couple of dozen pages to see if it grabbed me. This one did, so I bought the book. But, sadly, soon afterwards it let go and wandered off, frowning and mumbling interminably to itself.

The story didn't build on the famous opening. There were a few sections that briefly raised my hopes, but any momentum built invariably dissipated. The writing isn't difficult in any way; the only challenge was to my powers of concentration. On several occasions I sat down, made myself comfortable, started reading, then within a few minutes my thoughts would start wandering, or perhaps I'd find myself looking at cloud formations through the window. Stories can be fantastic vehicles for getting across ideas, but if they can't even keep my attention how could they ever get that far?

It's just so very very verbose: strewn with overly-ambitious (and frequently bizarre) similies and meandering, more-or-less plotless prose. A bunch of mostly uninteresting characters going about their mostly mundane lives. I don't think there are any actual themes here; it's more like a literary Rorschach test. This became clear to me as I read through some of the reviews on Goodreads: everyone's got their own widely divergent interpretations of the book's meaning.

Another thing that struck me was that many of the conversations between pairs of quite disparate characters are almost uncannily similar, in both style and language. Often this takes the form of a stereotyped rapid-fire back-and-forth, in which the participants repeatedly talk past one another, returning to earlier parts of the conversation as if they're out of sync and/or in some kind of weird double act.

I broke my own golden rule: if a novel loses me, it gets an hour — tops — to get me back, otherwise we part company. This one got an extra 300 pages, as I fruitlessly waited for some kind of point to be made.

Fiction should arouse empathy: it can deal with ideas on a much deeper emotional level than is possible with most forms of non-fiction (see my discussion of The Overstory last month). A story has to make you care about at least something or someone described within it; if it doesn't do this it's fundamentally failed. That's what happened here.

So this was the first proper negative of my newly-resumed reading career, and it also left me slightly apprehensive about a couple of the other hefty novels I've got waiting on my shelf.

It was time to move on, and I needed a change of pace.

So it was with great relief, and not a coincidence, that I next chose a short story collection: Tenth of December, by George Saunders. And what a contrast! Here we have sharp, pointed prose that sets off at full speed and doesn't let up.

Saunders is obsessed with the connected themes of mortality, fate (in the sense of the limits imposed on individuals' lives) and luck, good and bad. Of the stories included in this collection, those that develop these ideas most strongly are 'Puppy' and 'Home', along with the title story. But all make you think.

He also has a keen eye for the absurd, as manifested both in individual humans and in human society (or potential, semi-plausible, alternative societies). This comes across most strongly in the middle four stories, culminating with the weirdest, 'The Semplica Girl Diaries'. At 60 pages, this is the longest story in the book, and it's not one you'll soon forget. The cruel, banal logic casually used to justify an utterly abhorrent practice almost made my skin crawl.

These stories, and the crisp language used to tell them, were very refreshing, especially following Delillo's turgid prose.

A strong collection.

Two strong short story collections, in fact; I enjoyed the first so much I immediately moved on to another one, equally excellent.

Ship Fever is a much more traditionally-written series of tales. The two collections are pretty evenly matched overall, although if pressed I'd say Barrett is the more consistent. But it's hard to compare them as they're very different authors: where Saunders is experimental, Barrett's language is tried and tested, right down to the technical aspects of the writing. Not one to eschew quotation marks, she's obviously also a big fan of the increasingly (and unjustly) marginalized semicolon; there are scores of them here, whereas I'd be willing to wager that Saunders has had his surgically removed from his keyboard.

The best of Barrett's short stories ('Rare Bird', 'Birds with No Feet', and 'The Marburg Sisters') each deal with individuals finding their place in life. They're all intelligent, well-paced and thought-provoking, as well as a lot of fun.

The other standout is the eponymous novella, which brilliantly evokes the story of Irish emigrants escaping the famine of the mid-19th century only to find themselves trapped in a typhus epidemic brought on by the filthy conditions of their voyage to Canada. A great way to finish the collection.

I'll definitely be reading more of both these authors: Saunders has a recent award-winning novel plus three earlier collections of short stories, amongst which Pastoralia most caught my interest. Barrett followed up this collection with a novel and another book of short stories, The Voyage of the Narwhal and Servants of the Map, respectively. These are all on my list.

The other book this month was Full Gas!. There's not much to say about this one: if you happen to be a fan of professional cycling but want to know more about many of the subtleties involved in it, this is a good choice. So, quite esoteric, but there you go.

Want more Reading Roundups? Here's the inaugural instalment from April, and also May's entry.

You can also subscribe below if you like.

#reading #books

When it comes to fiction, I consider myself to be in the exploratory phase; I've been scouring annual summaries, reviews and book awards shortlists for likely candidates, reading online previews of the promising ones, and ordering hard copies of those I like. If the subject matter doesn't interest me or the preview doesn't capture my attention, I forget it and move on to the next one. There's a virtually unlimited supply, so ruthless culling is essential.

So most of the novels on my list are critically acclaimed and from pretty big-name authors, almost all of whose work I'm experiencing for the first time. I'm going for breadth to start with, but will undoubtedly come back and read more of my favourite authors in future. I've started with contemporary-ish novels, but there are also quite a few classics that I'll get to later on.

I've also found a good place to buy my books: bookshop.org, from which the proceeds are distributed between independent booksellers around the country. Right now the storefront is pretty basic, so I'm hoping they'll add more features so as to become more competitive with Amazon. At the moment most books are generally a little more expensive (which is understandable and acceptable), but what's really jarring is paying the shipping costs on top of this. Hopefully they'll create some kind of membership program with discounts and/or offer free shipping for orders above a certain value. They also need to add book previews and links to reviews to keep people on the site. But anyway, it's a good start and I hope they're successful.

As ever, I won't be providing reviews here; I've included links to the publisher's website for a synopsis of each book, and you all know how to use a search engine.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Samurai, the story of a rather eccentric and very single-minded mother raising her son in the most uncompromising way. He more or less admirably rises to the challenge. Maybe the rest of us are all aiming way too low?

Indeed, I was left feeling almost ashamed at how wasteful I've been: killing time when I could've been doing something much more worthwhile. Not that I'm claiming to be a genius (like the subject of the story), but still. I took this novel as a badly needed wake-up call, and for that alone it was worth it. It's also a very entertaining read.

Following this debut, DeWitt doesn't seem to have done much more, but this stands as a very strong, and original, magnum opus.

Next up was The Road, which I read in a single long Sunday afternoon; this one certainly kept my attention. The planet described is almost unrecognizable as our own; everything bitterly cold, dark and grey with only a few small pockets of isolated humans still surviving in the otherwise-lifeless landscapes.

The reader is left in no doubt that whatever calamity has caused it (I'm guessing an asteroid impact), the end of the world really is nigh. There's no happy ending here; any reprieve for the characters is just delaying the inevitable. Horror in the true sense of the word. Relentless, with plenty of insight into human nature.

Next, the magnificent, immense The Overstory, the kind of book I've been waiting for.

In many of Powers' recent interviews (worth checking out) he talks about three different levels of storytelling. The first two are those we're all familiar with: psychological and social-political, whereas the third is very unusual in modern times: the connection between humanity and the natural world. He suggests that many of our current problems have arisen from losing sight of this connection — from erroneously imagining ourselves as somehow separate — and that we therefore badly need a realignment of our world view, along with the exchange of hubris for humility and knowledge for wisdom, if we want our civilisation to continue (a sentiment I'm in agreement with).

Powers makes this explicit in the novel itself through one of his characters, who, incapacitated following a devastating stroke, has had his wife read stories to him:

The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive— character—is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Ultimately, this is not a book about individual trees; it's about the whole tree of life and humanity's place within it. Or not: we're currently in a precarious position that we might not get through, at least not without a serious regression. But even if we don't, unless we completely destroy everything, life will go on just fine without us. A few thousand years and there will be little to show we were ever here. It's for our own enlightened self-interest that we need to make the necessary adjustments to our attitude to nature, while there's still time — to save ourselves.

Many of these underlying ideas will already be familiar to the informed reader, but, again to quote the book:

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

This is most certainly a good story.

Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America rounded out my May reading. Roth is yet another famous author I'm discovering for the first time. The novel was very good (in common with all the others this month), with precisely-written evocations of everyday life and how this can rapidly be disrupted by large forces outside of any individual's control.

Although an alternate history set around 1940, it is very relevant to our current situation; the dismantling of a nation via deliberate, gradual, quasi-justifiable steps is all too plausible.

So on to June, and first up is the Cold War epic Underworld, a door-stopper that looks like it might take up a good chunk of the month all on it's own, especially if I also get moving on A History of Western Philosophy.

I'll keep you posted.

#reading #books

In recent years this had become the single largest time sink in my life. I was never addicted to smartphone use, and video games, social networks and compulsive news reading (on a desktop computer) were eradicated long ago, but aimless browsing of the web has tended to creep back in, invariably gravitating to sports streaming.

Thirty years ago, before I'd even heard of the internet, I used to read a lot. Generally, what I was attracted to were books that I'd learn something from (non fiction, which comprised the great bulk of my reading), although fiction-wise it was mostly throwaway action-adventure bestsellers.

So the last few weeks, with everything shut down, I was at a loss. With my usual fallback out of commission, I'd found myself looking through my bookshelves most days, without ever actually getting around to picking out something and sitting down to read. But then I happened to read a review of Hilary Mantel's recently-released trilogy-completing Cromwell novel, and put in a pre-order.

When it arrived a couple of weeks later, I'd spent the free time of most of the intervening period still doing nothing much. It took another few days of this before I actually started to read. One week and 900 pages later and I'd already ordered half a dozen more novels, and gone back through my existing book collection with renewed interest. I was a reader again.

We truly are creatures of habit! Certainly, I am. I get into comfortable routines which gradually form an entire ossified way of life. My long retreat from reading has parallels with how I spent the first two decades of adulthood in the physical wilderness, before an almost Augustinian epiphany when I found the Way of the Bicycle (I've got a lot of thoughts on this, but as yet haven't got around to expressing them. Maybe now, that will change).¹

The Mirror and the Light, the aforementioned and long-anticipated completion of Mantel's life of Thomas Cromwell, thudded onto my doorstep and was itself placed into quarantine for a few days, before providing me with a week's worth of fantastic entertainment. There probably couldn't have been a better choice of book to act as a mental rust remover; in the early stages I was trying to get a grip on the fairly extensive network of characters (and their several ways of addressing one another) whilst also rebuilding my powers of concentration; within a couple of hundred pages I was progressing smoothly with my mind only sporadically wandering; and by the last third I was flying through. Mission accomplished!

On a technical level this last instalment is near-perfect, and the book is an excellent culmination of the story of an extremely interesting historical character. The depth of scholarship of the series is stunning. I'm not particularly interested in my native country's monarchy, but to the themes and ideas of the books this is anyway incidental. Issues of power, ambition and fate are timeless and universal, although obviously the details vary a great deal across time and place.² If you haven't done so already, get hold of all three books and settle in.

I've now developed a healthy — and active — reading list, of both fiction and non-fiction, reactivated my Goodreads account, and even started to develop increased writing inclinations. As well as the scores of books I've had on my shelves for years but never actually got around to reading, I also ended up ordering another dozen novels (to read prior to the classics I already own).

Next up was A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. While well-written and fun, this one's more of an optional read. It's a collection of short stories about disparate characters whose lives interact at various times. There are a few powerful chapters, but thinking back about the book a few weeks later there's not much that stands out.

Zadie Smith's debut novel from twenty years ago, White Teeth, is more substantial. A critical review from the time described it as an example of hysterical realism, a term meant to be disparaging. The book is certainly not short of overwrought plotting and grandiloquent soliloquies, but within this serious themes are developed. Set in multicultural London in the late twentieth century, several families' lives intertwine entertainingly, if rather implausibly, and the story does finally arrive at a fairly satisfying conclusion (something I had serious doubts about as the remaining pages started to run low). Although frequently frivolous, it's also intelligent and thought-provoking, and certainly there's a place on my shelf for that.

I'm now in the early stages of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, and though I'm well over 100 pages in, I'm as yet not sure what to make of it. It's different. It could be amazing. A single mother whose own lofty ambitions were thwarted educates her child herself, in the most accelerated way she can, whilst trying to keep the lights on. Will he end up a genius or a wreck, or both? Or neither: is that question betraying a sad failure of imagination?

I was already aware of the life of John Stuart Mill; based on how he turned out you could make a case both for and against that kind of upbringing. But it's a great theme for a novel, and I'm eagerly anticipating the rest of the story.

1 There's much sneering about midlife crises. I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case what happened after I turned 40 was I became more reflective about what I was doing, and not doing, with my life. I realized that changes needed to be made, and made them. As far as I'm concerned that's an intelligent response to a crisis that was already in progress: emphatically not a crisis itself. Anyway, as I'm in danger of digressing into an entirely different article, let's pause there and get back to the books.

2 As alluded to in the novel, The Prince was hot at the time. It would no doubt make suitable and enlightening concurrent reading.

#reading #books

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

Although its subject matter makes it heavy going, there's no doubt that every fan of literature should read this. Flanagan's novel won the 2014 Booker Prize, and most of it is truly excellent.

The core of the book is set in the Siamese jungle in 1943, and describes in remorseless, horrendous detail the forced labour of Australian prisoners of war during the construction of the Death Railway. Flanagan does about as good a job as anyone could of conveying the relentless misery and suffering inflicted on a few of the hundreds of thousands of victims (mostly Australian, British and Dutch prisoners, along with many more local civilians).

Much of the story is told through the eyes of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical officer who, through attrition, inherits seniority over his group of several hundred prisoners. Day after interminable day he is focused on a single task: trying to keep his men alive. This isn't easy. The men are literally on starvation rations, live in filthy conditions and have minimal access to medical supplies. They are worked continuously, and receive regular beatings for the slightest infraction (real or imagined).

Their captors regard the prisoners with total contempt (since they either surrendered or allowed themselves to be taken alive), and, given the appalling treatment of their slaves, it's often unclear whether they even care about completing the rail project at all. Their sole focus is carrying out, without question, the orders that arrive from the Emperor; at one point Dorrigo is inexplicably forced to pick one hundred of the healthiest prisoners, who must then embark on a 100-mile march deeper into the jungle – almost certainly a death sentence for most of them.

There are many unforgettable scenes: the horrific amputation of a prisoner's gangrenous leg; a senseless multi-hour beating of a prisoner for shirking (he'd actually been ordered back to camp as unfit to work, as he was no longer able to stand); the smell of the rudimentary hospital tents, containing rows of men whose bodies are in various stages of decay.

What doesn't quite work are the scenes describing Dorrigo and Amy, his uncle's young wife, with whom Dorrigo had an affair shortly before the war. While the extended jungle scenes are intensely gripping, effortlessly carrying the reader along, the events back home in Australia are disjointed and unconvincing, almost clumsy in places. Several of these sections seem out of place, as though they've been dropped in from elsewhere. I suppose that this love story is there to contrast with the horrors of the jungle, but I don't think it really adds very much.

But, setting aside these sections of the novel, we're still left with a gripping account of one of humanity's darkest periods. Resilience, bravery, selflessness, cruelty, hope and despair are all here in abundance. Although it's obviously not a fun read, Flanagan does us an important service with his unflinching portrayal of a major manifestation of the profoundly sick society that was imperial Japan. These events should never be forgotten, although soon enough they will be remembered only vicariously, through accounts such as this.

Note: this review was first published 9th March 2015

#review #bookreview #fiction

Book Review: Harvest, by Jim Crace

Beginning 400 years ago and continuing until the advent of the First World War, a series of Enclosure Acts moved under private control British land that was previously available for common use. The laws were so named because they involved enclosing open fields with fences, giving legal ownership to a single deed holder.

An inevitable consequence, and catalyst, of industrialization, enclosure allowed for more efficient land usage at the price of massive upheaval. Land formerly cultivated by peasants in an ad-hoc manner could now be farmed systematically, increasing returns. For instance, arable land that was collectively farmed by subsistence peasants using traditional methods and crop rotation was often transformed into pasture land for sheep farming, which was much less labour-intensive and also eliminated the need to leave fields fallow.

Once gaining exclusive control, the new owners were not shy about increasing the rent they charged to those working the land. In many cases, this led to a mass exodus of peasants from the countryside to the industrializing towns and cities; a process that created the working class. Entire villages often disappeared in this way. Riots, rebellions and revolts protesting these changes were commonplace, as were grain shortages and pervasive unemployment.

This is the background to Jim Crace's finely-written, absorbing and memorable novel. Set in a remote village that has minimal contact with the outside world, where very little has changed over many decades. The village is not identified, and no specific time period for the story is indicated, although presumably it is sometime in the seventeenth century. The village has effectively been left to run itself, and for a long time this works well enough, until finally it doesn't.

Most of the families have lived on and worked the land for generations, and are satisfied with their hard but predictable lives, regulated as they are by the seasons and nature's bounty. They don't like newcomers, or any kind of change. The narrator, however, is a settler: he originally arrived in the village a decade earlier, with his master, the current lord of the manor. He is Walter Thirsk, and he only gradually gained acceptance from the other villagers after his marriage to a local girl. His wife, however, died several years ago, which has left his position within the village less certain. At the start of the novel he considers himself to be an insider, but feels progressively less secure as lives begin to unravel and the villagers close ranks. This makes him an ideal observer of the upheaval that transpires, since, it turns out, he's not bound by family or group loyalties to the same extent as the others.

The events of the story occur over several days in autumn, during harvest. Walter describes a series of apparently unconnected developments. First, three unruly villagers torch the master's dove barn (after a night of revelry during the harvest celebration) in a botched attempt to smoke out the doves and thus prevent them from eating the grain prior to gleaning. Immediately following this, three strangers (a man with his daughter and her husband) arrive within the village boundary, and attempt to claim the traditional right to work the common land. These strangers, we later learn, are fleeing their own village's enclosure. The outsiders' ambitions are quickly quashed, however: following a brief stand-off with the villagers, the two men are placed in the pillory for seven days, and their female companion is sent packing. They are accused of burning down the barn, most vehemently by the guilty parties themselves.

Things rapidly unravel from there. A mapmaker has already arrived in the village; his work has raised suspicions. Why does the master want a detailed map of his land? Why now? The master was tied to the land by marriage, but his wife died the previous year. The dead wife's brother (the actual landowner) arrives the day after the harvest, with several brutal henchmen and some big plans, involving fences and sheep. He corrals and provokes the villagers, who give him the justification he needs to kick them off the land.

Throughout, Walter constantly vacillates: he initially wants to help the scapegoated strangers but somehow never gets around to it. He later wants to help the villagers but does not (in fact cannot: when the time comes they no longer trust him). He always seems to be absent whenever a major event occurs, and can only infer the true nature of what is unfolding around him. At any given point in the story, he seems to know what he should be doing, but is so hesitant that events pass him by. Can this paralysis be attributed to a failure to recognize the magnitude of the changes, or the inability to respond in an effective way?

Eventually, now alone in the village (even the mapmaker has disappeared one night under dubious circumstances), he releases the surviving prisoner from the pillory, hoping to gain a friend or ally. Instead, the strangers loot the village's vacated cottages, burning them as they go, before leaving with a cart loaded with loot – pulled by the village's two remaining oxen.

Walter, in his uncertainty, has repeatedly managed to avoid committing himself to any definite course of action. A direct consequence of this is that, while he has been lamenting the major catastrophe which was in any case inevitable, he has neglected to act to influence the more personal events in which he could have made a difference. So what possibilities are now left open to him, and what will he do?

This is a simple story told in a simple but effective way. The themes explored and the language describing them earned the novel a place on the Booker prize shortlist. Belonging, identity, displacement, change, reparation, the collective versus the individual, insiders versus outsiders and how these categories can shift: these are all explored in precise and beautiful prose. Although the writing has a simplicity commensurate with the era Crace describes, it is not difficult to see that the novel has plenty of bearing on our own times. This is a deeply allegorical, moral book; a parable that will stay with the reader for a long time.

Note: this review was first published 13th January 2015

#review