I enjoyed reading this book more than I enjoyed finishing it. It is a psychological novel, narrated by a man in late middle age reviewing episodes in his life and finally understanding them. It is nice and short and I was reading a fresh, clean hard back which was given to me as a present. So a good reading experience.
It reminded me of some other novels - 'Engleby' by Sebastian Faulkes and 'The Secret History' buy Donna Tartt. The former because we realise as the novel unfolds that the narrator is not quite as unblemished a character as his own account might suggest and the latter because it ascribes highly intellectual insights to people in their late teens.
The tone is beautifully maintained and reinforced by the language. The presentation of the main character rings very true to this middle-aged, British reader, perhaps because the main character is, well, middle-aged and British.
I found the denouement a little unsatisfying - it did not quite live up to the suspense and foreboding that had so brilliantly been created.
But this is a really enjoyable, clever book.
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (also Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Memories of the Ford Administration, all by John Updike)
Rabbit at Rest is the last of 4 novels about the life and times of Harry Angstrom, an American everyman. They span his adult life. I don't know if Updike decided at the outset to make this a tetralogy but from reading them all, I think not. The last novel, which I have just finished, is as good as the others but is definitely following a well-worn groove. The protagonist, whose stream of consciousness we frequently follow in all of the novels, is a very real character in that he is fundamentally very flawed, with occasional flashes of moral rectitude. Like most people, probably. He is racist, sexist, selfish, unreasonable - but if our private thoughts were made public, as his are through Updike, all of us might look that way.
There are occasional slightly too visible efforts to connect the story to real events, to give a timeline. References to Watergate, Reagan or whatever. But Harry - nicknamed 'Rabbit' as a gifted young basketball player - displays all the prejudices of his origins in rustbelt America. He muses poetically at times and thinks often about God. He is not a shallow character.
Other characters are memorable and, on the whole, pretty convincing. But the best thing about this novel is the way it displays the textures of a life lived. TV, ageing, fast food - these are all nicely and subtly analysed in a way that gives the appearance of reality without descending into preachiness.
There is also a subtext about sin and redemption - the sins of the fathers are seen visited on the children in a cycle that looks likely, pretty much, to go on and on.
All in all, these 4 novels are a pretty amazing piece of writing. Maintaining the same tone and personality over such a long period is truly remarkable. One nagging concern is that they might well be of greater appeal to men than women. The whole perspective is male. There is quite a lot of sex, which Rabbit does not analyse all that much, treating it in a slightly animalistic way - as some men do?
'Memories of the Ford Administration' is tagged on here as it is one of the very few books - 'Ulysses' is the only other one I can think of - that I have tried twice to read and given up on both occasions. It is not a good book, in my view. It has some excellent scenes about the priapic academic who sits at the centre of the story and how he copes with his mid-life crises. But it goes off into long, long digressions by quoting the piece of historical research he is engaged in. I am sure it is a better book than I describe here; but it is long-winded and, frankly, I was not prepared to wait and see what the point of it all was. So not up to Rabbit standards.
But the Rabbit books are excellent.
There are occasional slightly too visible efforts to connect the story to real events, to give a timeline. References to Watergate, Reagan or whatever. But Harry - nicknamed 'Rabbit' as a gifted young basketball player - displays all the prejudices of his origins in rustbelt America. He muses poetically at times and thinks often about God. He is not a shallow character.
Other characters are memorable and, on the whole, pretty convincing. But the best thing about this novel is the way it displays the textures of a life lived. TV, ageing, fast food - these are all nicely and subtly analysed in a way that gives the appearance of reality without descending into preachiness.
There is also a subtext about sin and redemption - the sins of the fathers are seen visited on the children in a cycle that looks likely, pretty much, to go on and on.
All in all, these 4 novels are a pretty amazing piece of writing. Maintaining the same tone and personality over such a long period is truly remarkable. One nagging concern is that they might well be of greater appeal to men than women. The whole perspective is male. There is quite a lot of sex, which Rabbit does not analyse all that much, treating it in a slightly animalistic way - as some men do?
'Memories of the Ford Administration' is tagged on here as it is one of the very few books - 'Ulysses' is the only other one I can think of - that I have tried twice to read and given up on both occasions. It is not a good book, in my view. It has some excellent scenes about the priapic academic who sits at the centre of the story and how he copes with his mid-life crises. But it goes off into long, long digressions by quoting the piece of historical research he is engaged in. I am sure it is a better book than I describe here; but it is long-winded and, frankly, I was not prepared to wait and see what the point of it all was. So not up to Rabbit standards.
But the Rabbit books are excellent.
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
If, like me, you wonder daily why and how it has come to pass that political debate today in most western democracies is devoid of principles, this is the book for you. It is beautifully written and a brilliant, pointed reminder of why ideas matter and why we miss them so much in today's stunted and etiolated political discourse.
Tony Judt died recently and this book feels like a last shower of intellectual fireworks, crafted to be short and digestible but still full of wisdom. Among the several great pleasures of the book are the many pithy and apposite quotations he uses. The book's title comes from Oliver Goldsmith:
Tony Judt died recently and this book feels like a last shower of intellectual fireworks, crafted to be short and digestible but still full of wisdom. Among the several great pleasures of the book are the many pithy and apposite quotations he uses. The book's title comes from Oliver Goldsmith:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Pretty relevant to where we find ourselves today, huh? But many other wise words from great thinkers, not least among them John Maynard Keynes:
".......it is not sufficient that the state of affairs we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs that preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of transition."
are peppered throughout this brief but sparkling book.
Judt's basic point is that many of the achievements of 20th century social democracy have been squandered in pursuit of a short sighted and narrow minded conception of the human condition, based around the belief that markets are always right and that their very rightness is a kind of natural order. He is surely right that, in the UK at any rate, political debate is based on a shared assumption that economic, usually monetary, measures are the only means by which we can assess the value of what our people and institutions do. How often do we hear anyone ask questions like: is this just? Is this good? Is this the sort of society we want? Not very, is the answer.
He makes the point that no society can be healthy when fear takes control. At the moment, we are clearly at risk of losing all faith in our ability to influence our social and political environment. Globalisation and the inexorable power of financial markets make elected politicians seem irrelevant, reduced to idle commentary on affairs they cannot contain or direct. Judt thinks this situation is recoverable and his prescription is to change the language of politics. I hope he is right.
But this is a really tasty little book about ideas, written by a top class thinker. Nice one, Tony.
Sunday, 19 February 2012
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
I came to this book with no preconceptions, apart from glancing at the comments from critics chosen by the publishers for the cover, as it was a present. Overall, I found it slow and a bit superficial.
It is set in World War II London - the Blitz, sweet tea, civilians doing heroic jobs, all that. Nearly all of the characters are gay, in various states of denial about their sexuality. That is probably the main theme of the book, in fact. It is written back to front, in chronological terms. So we start in 1947 and move episodically back to 1941.
The narrative was too slow, in my view. Scenes took a long time to play out and there was much description that felt self indulgent and added little to the atmosphere or our understanding.
The characterisation felt superficial. I wondered, as someone who is not gay, whether I lacked sensitivity in failing to appreciate something but thought of brilliant, brilliant writers like Alan Hollinghurst who also write about gay characters and whose books I have loved. I concluded that the writing is just not that good.
If you had nothing else to read and were on a long train journey, this is a decent enough novel. Truth to tell, I felt with sufficient time and effort I could write it. The artifice is too visible. But we want, don't we, something more from our books? To be captivated by something that carries us away, to feel guided by something better, cleverer or more insightful than ourselves? I am afraid this book never quite achieved that, for me. But it was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange prizes so perhaps I missed something.
It is set in World War II London - the Blitz, sweet tea, civilians doing heroic jobs, all that. Nearly all of the characters are gay, in various states of denial about their sexuality. That is probably the main theme of the book, in fact. It is written back to front, in chronological terms. So we start in 1947 and move episodically back to 1941.
The narrative was too slow, in my view. Scenes took a long time to play out and there was much description that felt self indulgent and added little to the atmosphere or our understanding.
The characterisation felt superficial. I wondered, as someone who is not gay, whether I lacked sensitivity in failing to appreciate something but thought of brilliant, brilliant writers like Alan Hollinghurst who also write about gay characters and whose books I have loved. I concluded that the writing is just not that good.
If you had nothing else to read and were on a long train journey, this is a decent enough novel. Truth to tell, I felt with sufficient time and effort I could write it. The artifice is too visible. But we want, don't we, something more from our books? To be captivated by something that carries us away, to feel guided by something better, cleverer or more insightful than ourselves? I am afraid this book never quite achieved that, for me. But it was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange prizes so perhaps I missed something.
Friday, 10 February 2012
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
The writer is a 'development economist', in the jargon of the economics profession (on which, incidentally, he is very interesting in this book) and he does write from the perspective of the developing economy.Which is no bad thing, when he is so brilliantly and analytically critical of the way in which developed economies have been managed in recent decades.
The format of the book is pretty much as set out in the title - a series of chapters, each addressing an aspect of how capitalism works. His style is light and easy to read, full of the self deprecating humour that seems common to so many great expositors of complex subjects.
His basic argument is that the world economy is far too much influenced by the lazily accepted tenets of free market economics. He adduces plenty of evidence in support of this, showing that the application of this orthodoxy has actually diminished economic growth in those countries that have either embraced it willingly or had it forced upon them by agents of the 'Washington Consensus' such as the IMF.
He convincingly challenges some of the assumptions that underpin our faith in free market economics: that putting the interests of shareholders first leads to sustainable business; that the internet changes everything; that more education leads to economic growth; that governments cannot pick winners.
He also makes the excellent point that free market theories never, in wealthy countries, extend to immigration policy. If you allowed free immigration, lots of brilliant people from poorer countries would come to rich ones and undercut the native labour force, even in highly paid jobs. This would drive down costs and make businesses more competitive on grounds of cost, with no loss of quality. The free market would be working. But immigration control is a form of protectionism that is rarely questioned, even by the most ardent free market advocate. For good policy reasons, sure; but it knocks on the head any idea that policy interference with free markets is inherently bad.
Finally, he points out that the most successful economies in the world are not run by economists. Comfort for all of us who are puzzled by the intellectual deference accorded to the 'dismal science'.
This is a punchy, topical book, written in bite-sized chunks by a top class intellectual. Brilliant.
The format of the book is pretty much as set out in the title - a series of chapters, each addressing an aspect of how capitalism works. His style is light and easy to read, full of the self deprecating humour that seems common to so many great expositors of complex subjects.
His basic argument is that the world economy is far too much influenced by the lazily accepted tenets of free market economics. He adduces plenty of evidence in support of this, showing that the application of this orthodoxy has actually diminished economic growth in those countries that have either embraced it willingly or had it forced upon them by agents of the 'Washington Consensus' such as the IMF.
He convincingly challenges some of the assumptions that underpin our faith in free market economics: that putting the interests of shareholders first leads to sustainable business; that the internet changes everything; that more education leads to economic growth; that governments cannot pick winners.
He also makes the excellent point that free market theories never, in wealthy countries, extend to immigration policy. If you allowed free immigration, lots of brilliant people from poorer countries would come to rich ones and undercut the native labour force, even in highly paid jobs. This would drive down costs and make businesses more competitive on grounds of cost, with no loss of quality. The free market would be working. But immigration control is a form of protectionism that is rarely questioned, even by the most ardent free market advocate. For good policy reasons, sure; but it knocks on the head any idea that policy interference with free markets is inherently bad.
Finally, he points out that the most successful economies in the world are not run by economists. Comfort for all of us who are puzzled by the intellectual deference accorded to the 'dismal science'.
This is a punchy, topical book, written in bite-sized chunks by a top class intellectual. Brilliant.
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
This short novel is something of a period piece. Written during the 1930s, it describes the life and loves of an anti hero, Gordon Comstock. The themes are well known from Orwell's other works - poverty, class and alienation. These ideas, deriving from Marxism and the widespread belief that a better system than capitalism was within mankind's grasp, still seem a little dated despite the evident vacuity of today's political offerings. Orwell labours his point about money or, more particularly, the lack of it, and its corrosive effects in a way that echoes Tressell's 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'. He is however more in tune with today's sensibilities than Tressell in his clear recognition of the gulf between human decency and the implacability of all ideological systems. The anti hero and his only friend in the novel are socialists but only in an abstract sense. They are not able to live their socialism, in the misguided way that Orwell was always so scathing about, to the point that they abjure decent food and a warm fire. As in much of his writing, he points out nicely and neatly the remoteness of ideology from human experience and, in consequence, its dangerous irrelevance to it.
In modern parlance, the anti hero needs to get out more. Actually, when reading it, I felt Orwell was often describing a person with depression. But that is to medicalise, daftly, a situation that he uses to tell us a social fable.
The anti hero's redemption or return to the social currents whence he came is a simple narrative trick that feels a little rushed. But the pleasure of this book lies in Orwell's keen eye for the workings of class and social hierarchy in Britain. I suppose it is a rather British book - the aspidistra, the blameless plant that Orwell uses to symbolise the conformity and suffocating propriety yet deathlessness of lower middle class England, is a common houseplant in Britain - but Orwell writes such beautiful, beautiful prose I recommend it to all lovers of the English language.
In modern parlance, the anti hero needs to get out more. Actually, when reading it, I felt Orwell was often describing a person with depression. But that is to medicalise, daftly, a situation that he uses to tell us a social fable.
The anti hero's redemption or return to the social currents whence he came is a simple narrative trick that feels a little rushed. But the pleasure of this book lies in Orwell's keen eye for the workings of class and social hierarchy in Britain. I suppose it is a rather British book - the aspidistra, the blameless plant that Orwell uses to symbolise the conformity and suffocating propriety yet deathlessness of lower middle class England, is a common houseplant in Britain - but Orwell writes such beautiful, beautiful prose I recommend it to all lovers of the English language.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
A Bend in the River by V S Naipaul
I came to this book by way of recent reading about the Congo. This book is mainly set there, though the country is never named, either as Congo or Zaire. But 'The Big Man', who exerts a distant and baleful influence on events from 'the Capital', is clearly Mobutu. Even his infamous leopard skin hat and fetish stick are described in some detail. But he is never named.
There are many fine qualities to this book. For this white, western European reader, the perceptions and attitudes of the protagonist, an Arab African, are fascinating and refreshing or slightly disconcerting, depending on the context. The author is West Indian by birth but he came to England to study and that has been a lasting influence on his writing. The sensibility of the colonized is a key theme of this book. It is hard to imagine it being so powerfully delineated by someone who has no lived experience of it.
The language is spare and undemonstrative. This becomes hypnotic for the reader and creates an affinity for the languor and aimlessness of some of the characters. It also lends understatement and enigma to the dramatic events that unfold later in the book.
The book also has much to say about the nature of Africa and Africans but seen from the perspective of the outsider - 'the man apart'. It is quizzical, implying of some inner space impenetrable to those not born there.
There are some recurrent, metaphorical, motifs - the invasive water lilies that arrived with the Europeans but which now damage local food production and the way they float down the river, on and on, endlessly; the optimism of the protagonist's mentor, which survives many vicissitudes, finally coming to rest in London's Gloucester Road; and the lure and repulsiveness of Europe for those over whom its influence is unchosen but irresistible.
I confess I did not enjoy the only other book by this author I have read, 'A House for Mr Biswas'. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it. 'A Bend in the River' is a good book, dealing with serious issues. It is a bit of a slow burn and the denouement is slightly hurried. But for anyone with an interest in how cultures understand and misunderstand each other, it is required reading.
There are many fine qualities to this book. For this white, western European reader, the perceptions and attitudes of the protagonist, an Arab African, are fascinating and refreshing or slightly disconcerting, depending on the context. The author is West Indian by birth but he came to England to study and that has been a lasting influence on his writing. The sensibility of the colonized is a key theme of this book. It is hard to imagine it being so powerfully delineated by someone who has no lived experience of it.
The language is spare and undemonstrative. This becomes hypnotic for the reader and creates an affinity for the languor and aimlessness of some of the characters. It also lends understatement and enigma to the dramatic events that unfold later in the book.
The book also has much to say about the nature of Africa and Africans but seen from the perspective of the outsider - 'the man apart'. It is quizzical, implying of some inner space impenetrable to those not born there.
There are some recurrent, metaphorical, motifs - the invasive water lilies that arrived with the Europeans but which now damage local food production and the way they float down the river, on and on, endlessly; the optimism of the protagonist's mentor, which survives many vicissitudes, finally coming to rest in London's Gloucester Road; and the lure and repulsiveness of Europe for those over whom its influence is unchosen but irresistible.
I confess I did not enjoy the only other book by this author I have read, 'A House for Mr Biswas'. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it. 'A Bend in the River' is a good book, dealing with serious issues. It is a bit of a slow burn and the denouement is slightly hurried. But for anyone with an interest in how cultures understand and misunderstand each other, it is required reading.
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