All the Wrong Places - adrift in the politics of Asia - by James Fenton

I began this book with some misgivings, expecting it to be outdated and overtaken by events, since it was written about Fenton's experiences as a foreign correspondent in South East Asia during the 1970s. My misgivings were well founded, in one sense, but in ways that are interesting in themselves.


Fenton's accounts seem almost quaint, actually, and they generate a feeling of nostalgia for a time when the rough diamond western journalist could, clad in sweat stained khaki and clutching a notebook, hang out with the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge and report from an exoticism that has no equivalent today. Video clips of missiles striking buildings in dusty, sun baked villages in Afghanistan or Iraq just don't seem so intriguing. Perhaps the politics are missing. Fenton was a proud socialist and saw the wars of the 1970s in SE Asia very much as US imperialism being beaten back by a morally superior, popular cause. That in itself seems very dated to us now. Can one imagine a journalist being politically 'committed' (a term of praise for the 1970s left) now, in Pakistan or in one of the African conflicts? The left/right dichotomy has all but disappeared, leaving only confusion and relativism.


So Fenton's book seems to take us back to a time in some ways simpler. He writes brilliantly about the fall of Saigon, portraying for us the empty hotels and the select band of foreigners remaining and living a sort of postmodern colonialism, denying while at the same time enjoying an intrinsic advantage stemming from race and wealth. None of them would ever be in the same position as the desperate Vietnamese, trying to escape from the advancing Vietcong.


And that is one of the ambiguities of Fenton's account, the occasional uncertainty about whether he is an observer or a participant. I suppose in this book he is the latter and in his reporting very much the former.


I found it interesting having travelled in SE Asia in the early 1980s, when people like Marcos were still in power. Without that background, however, I think I would have found it too much out of time.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Jane Austen - you gotta love her. Beautiful prose, a perfectly crafted world of manners and feelings and then a nicely paced story about esteem, love and social delusion. This is the first of hers I have read for many years and it is easy to forget just what a class act she is. Of course, in the UK, nearly all of her novels have been adapted for film or TV so her mass appeal has grown a lot in recent years. And rightly so.

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Dickens is, quite simply, the Guv'nor. Pace, style, characters - all faultless. Some of his books go on a bit but not this one, his first. It was written for monthly publication so it is episodic. But the good thing about that is the regular narrative crescendos you get as the story unfolds. It also includes many digressions, as characters relate stories and anecdotes, notably one that goes into fascinating detail about Edinburgh topography and customs - well, fascinating if you live in Edinburgh, as I do.

Dickens's well known disdain for law and politics is on full display and his account of a by-election is hilarious but acerbic at the same time. His descriptions of politicians' pomposities and misguided motivations could have been written about the Leveson Inquiry here in the UK, which is currently examining the corrupt relationship between politicians and media owners. And you just know, when legal process enters the story, that ridicule and comic exaggeration is on the way.

I really enjoyed this book. Lots of great characters and, most of all, a brilliant asseveration (to use a Dickensian word if ever there was one) of the sheer joy to be had in human existence.

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Affecting. A bit mysterious. About animals. Naïve in style. It these ways, this is similar to Life of Pi, the author's big selling and Booker Prize-winning novel of a few years' ago. But if that sounds like an acquired taste, don't let it put you off. This is a rather brilliant book, with a huge amount of meaning and emotion packed into fewer than 200 large-ish print pages. The narrator is a writer, who had a big hit and then struggles with his next book, which is about the Holocaust - echoes of Martel's own experience, surely? The best thing about the book is the artless way in which a grim foreboding is created - a bit like those horror films where you just know that the appearance of the cute little girl holding a teddy is the precursor to horrible violence. The violence in this book is allusive rather than narrated. But the use of animals as proxies for humanity is incredibly moving, drawing as it does from the well of sympathy we have for them, our innocent and trusting charges. Which works powerfully in this book to make us think - hard - about how we can treat people like, well, animals.

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Yes, we are talking about the David Byrne. Talking Heads, all that. But this book nicely illustrates his polymath nature. It is funny, self deprecating, ironic and polemical, all at the same time. He writes about cycling and his experience of it in different places. He takes a folding bike when he goes travelling, unpacks it in his hotel room and then takes off. His observations are wry and amusing and he uses words like 'funky' and 'groove' with no trace of irony. For those who are familiar with his pallid yet intense persona as lead singer with Talking Heads, it may come as no surprise to learn that music was what allowed him to interact with people in ways he knows he could never have done without it.

He is very passionate about urban design and how people live, and can live, in cities. We could all do with a lot more of his creative and lively views on superficially dull matters like road furniture and air conditioning.

His style is very easy going and, well, like a diary. It has a particular rhythm and tone - a groove, actually, that I really got into. Nice.

The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten (originally published under the name Leonard Q Ross)

I bought this book after hearing it described by someone being interviewed on the radio. I pick up a lot of recommendations from listening to people talk about books, usually on the radio. It is hilarious, humane and gentle. No wonder it is a classic to so many people.

It is really a short collection of stories from the New Yorker, where they were first published. The main character, Hyman Kaplan, is a Polish immigrant, learning English for citizenship purposes in the US. All the stories are set in his class at the American Night Preparatory School for Adults. The characters are sketched in with a few subtle strokes but the real comedy lies in the language and the misunderstandings of the students, recounted with a sympathetic irony that keeps it very well clear of any patronising, English-centric, cheap shots.

One of the worst programmes ever created for television in the UK was called Mind Your Language, based in an English class for foreigners. It was screened in the 1970s and was cliched, xenophobic and really, really unfunny. This book might well have been the programme's 'inspiration' but the difference in quality and humanity is striking.

A lovely book.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

I have been a bad, bad reader and given up with this book. I got half way through and then found I was not enjoying it, that I was becoming too conscious of its imperfections. Partly this was to do with it being translated into English from the original Russian. All translations lose something in translation, of course. But this one (Vantage edition) never achieved the necessary cruising altitude of style where you forget it is a translation at all and get carried away with the story and the meaning.

It is apparently based on 'War and Peace', at least in the episodic, multi-stranded story. So there are several parallel plots, all set against the background of the Great Patriotic War and, in particular, the Battle of Stalingrad. This mimicry of Tolstoy also begins to grate, after a while.

But, for all these pompous imaginings, I just got bored. It was hard to recall when I picked up the book which characters I had met before (a common problem in all big epics with casts of thousands) and the plot was too diffuse to keep my interest.

But is it always wrong to give up on a book? I feel guilty about it, naturally, I suppose, for someone who enjoys reading. And if you are reading an acknowledged classic, like this, there is something self improving, one hopes, about sticking with it to the end and sharing in the common cultural experience that has so entranced others. I stuck with Henry James, Moby Dick (a pretty tough and unusual read) and I have read Proust's In Search of Lost Time twice, with nothing but enjoyment both times. So I don't feel incompetent to finish this book. I just was not enjoying it.

I met a very impressive and thoughtful man a few weeks' ago, who told me that his life had changed since he had found he had cancer and was now in remission. He was a very senior EU civil servant, spoke several languages and was clearly an exceptionally erudite man. He said his whole approach to work and life had changed; he had become completely generous in his approach to other people and no longer sought to manage his staff's work, just to encourage them. Anyway, I asked him if it had changed his attitude to reading. He said it had, in that he now read only for pleasure. In his case, this seemed to mean reading philosophy but as we get older, perhaps the pursuit of pleasure is the best motivation for reading. I am afraid this book just wasn't giving me any.