1970 - (Lost Booker) Troubles, by J.G. Farrell

Troubles is the predecessor to The Siege of Krishnapur which won the Booker, and this one won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1970 (and posthumously, the Lost Booker Prize, one which has zero credibility with me because it was determined by popular vote).

Troubles is not as good as Krishnapur, but it's very good in parts. It's set in Ireland just after WW1 when the Troubles were just beginning. Major Bernard Archer goes to the ill-named and shabby Majestic Hotel (a symbol of the declining British Empire) to sort out an intemperate engagement but ends up falling in love with the place despite - or perhaps because of - its eccentricities. 

Angela conveniently dies of leukaemia, but it doesn't matter much because neither of them cared about each other anyway.   For the major, it's all a matter of behaving well, like an English gentleman should.  Just like Edward, the owner, whose eccentricity declines into madness as the IRA 'outrages' come closer to home, till he can't ignore them any more.

Why does the major 'take on' the Majestic?  It's falling to bits (and Farrell goes into overdrive with the farce, with hordes of cats and the vines taking over the bar).  Not unlike the Empire, it's a drain on the purse, but he has become fond of it.  He also falls in love with Sarah, who's really not very nice - but her characterisation isn't consistent, vacillating (due to a surprising lack of authorial control) between droll humorist to nasty cynic, an adventuress and a cripple playing for sympathy.  She deserves to end up with Bolton, though like the major, I don't like his violence towards her.  I guess she's a symbol of the violence the Empire doled out to the possessions it 'loved'.

Farrell does quite a god job of depicting both sides of a sordid story - though at times he overdoes the didacticism.  I can't quite visualise Edward's Oxford guests lecturing him on the need to look at the other fellow's point-of-view - it doesn't seem consistent with a gentlemanly background.   Having said that, one of the themes is the way young people don't subscribe to the old ways of behaving.  They're all a bit 'fast', quite rude, and not at all grateful.

Still, it's an entertaining book, except for the final atrocities, which are horrible.

I read and journalled this book 4/7/2003.  

1975: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

It took less than a day to read this - 180 pages long and easy to read - but it's a rich and fruitful book. It comprises two stories in parallel: the tale of Olivia who abandons her British husband when she goes to India; and of her un-named relative who goes to Satipur some fifty years later to solve the mystery of what became of Olivia. She ends up becoming 'seduced' by India too.

Olivia is naive but adventurous, and she doesn't like the other British wives and their disdain for Indian religion and culture. She is bored by their vapid lifestyle, and she outrages 'society' by visiting the local Naweb, an impoverished rogue in league with the Dacoits (bandits). The Naweb seems to exert a strange magnetic influence on those around him, including Harry, Olivia's only discerning friend and the one who helps her out when things go awry.

In the process of discovering these scandals about her great-aunt , the narrator finds herself following in some of her footsteps. However, whereas during the British Raj Olivia was isolated from the 'real India' by class, caste and custom whatever her wishes may have been, in post-independence India her successor lives amongst Indians, and can make different decisions about how to live her life. Once again India is depicted as a place that attracts those interested in its 'spirituality' but the dropout Chid's distaste for life as a mendicant shows just how silly it is for affluent outsiders to hanker for a life of poverty and hardship.

The title shows that Jhabvala had no illusions about the reality of life for most Indians.

I finished reading and journalled this book on 13.10.05.

2011 - The Sense of an Ending

A friend wrote recently on Facebook that when you lose someone you love there is no such thing as ’closure’, ‘only days when the loss doesn’t hit you like a truck’. I thought of this quite a bit as I read Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. The narrator Tony Webster, looking back over his long life, ponders whether he has made the most of it. He’s a peaceable man (or so he says) and he likes things settled, tidy. He wants this so-called closure but it evades him:

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? … There had been addition - and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest. (p88)

When his ‘chippy, jealous and malign’ younger self (p97) comes back to shock his older peaceable self that ‘finds comfort in his own doggedness‘ (p89) his unrest escalates. He had thought himself safe from follies melted away by the frailties of memory because as we age ‘the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration’. (p98)

This made me think about the selves we create on Facebook, GoodReads, Twitter and yes, on blogs like this one: these digital selves are a kind of testimony about who we are. The longer we engage in them with people that we actually know, the more we recognise that these digital selves are not always corroborated by face-to-face contact. Digital selves are edited, filtered according to some view of the self not necessarily shared by others, and these selves are plastic – not in the sense of fake (or not usually, not with my friends) but in the sense of malleable.

Tony’s view of himself is that he’s a more-or-less reasonable sort of fellow. He looks back wryly at his adolescent self when he thought (like most of us) that he and his friends were cool observers of the world and comfortable with their own superiority. Now he realises that by the laws of mathematics and philosophy most people are average and so is he. He might even be complacent about this except that the malleable self (and some of the toys of the digital age such as email and Google) startle him into realising that actually he was not only culpably vindictive as a young man but that he’s capable now of revenge, spite and harassment to an extent which imperils his fond relationship with his only confidante, his ex-wife Margaret. He uses those digital toys (and his own doggedness) to do some rather nasty things!

To read the rest of my review, please visit my ANZ LitLovers blog.
I read and blogged this Booker Prize winner on September 12th 2012.
Cross-posted at GoodReads.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

1992 - The English Patient

It’s a different experience, reading a novel after seeing the film first. As I lost myself in the pages of The English Patient I could see the thin, taut faces of the characters as they were in the film, and I could see how perfectly the adaptation and casting had captured the brittleness of the world they inhabited. My own mother is the only other one I know ever to so perfectly explain the sense of living for the fragile moment during the Second World War. Perhaps that was because she too had a sense of perspective about human life that came from a love of wild, desolate places, indifferent and unforgiving…

The English Patient won the Governor General’s Award in Canada and shared the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger in 1992. It’s an enchantment, one that made it very difficult for me to tear myself away from it. So you can imagine my astonishment when I saw some consumer reviews that claimed to have hated the book, dismissing it as pretentious or frustrating. I didn’t read much of this criticism (too depressing! too inane!) but I got the impression that these readers disliked having to ‘put together pieces of a jigsaw’.

Well, there are readers who like things to be straightforward (as if life is like that) and there are those who enjoy a carefully constructed artifice that gradually reveals the complexity of characters and events. In this tale of four people damaged by the loss of innocence that inevitably accompanies war, Ondaatje has woven fragments of their past lives into their uncertain present as they themselves reveal it (as, in life, we do). It is a beautiful story which creates a romantic setting out of a ruined Italian villa booby-trapped by the mines of the retreating German army, and juxtaposes it with the pre-war heroic age of discovery in the harsh deserts of Egypt and Libya.

To read the rest of my review, please visit my ANZ LitLovers blog.
I read and blogged this Booker Prize winner on July 17th 2011.
Cross-posted at GoodReads.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

1974 - The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer

I'm sure there were many things I missed in this complex movel, but then, I don't expect Nobel Prize winning authors to be easy-to-read...

I read The Conservationist in a kind of appalled fascination, repelled by the language South African Whites use to talk to and about the Blacks in the book. Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize winning author of this Booker Prize winning story, depicts her characters routinely using the language of master and servant in the most disparaging way, a kind of amused contempt exacerbated by its casual delivery. Reading it, one feels besmirched simply by being privy to the perspective of its White anti-hero, Mehring.

However as the tale unfolded, the main thing I noticed about The Conservationist was the sense of isolation of this principal character, Mehring. Unlike the dispossessed and powerless characters who work for and around him and enjoy companionable relationships with others, he – the rich, powerful white man in South Africa under Apartheid – is alone. As the story progresses he isolates himself even more, refusing all invitations and camping out in increasing discomfort rather than participate in society. Eventually his friends give up on him and the invitations dry up…

I read and blogged this book on February 10th 2011. To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/the-conservationist-by-nadine-gordimer/

2007 - The Gathering

I wish I hadn't left it so long to read The Gathering, it's a very fine book. Perhaps not everybody's cup of tea because some of it is quite confronting, but I plan to read more of Enright's work.

To see my review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/the-gathering-by-anne-enright/, and now I've got 12 to go...

2009 - Wolf Hall

Oops, I read this back in January 2010 but I forgot to post about it here...

The trouble with big, beautiful books is that they become a part of one’s daily life for so long that there is an aching emptiness when the last page is turned.

So it is with Wolf Hall, 650 pages long and winner of the 2009 Booker Prize. There is none of the usual anticipation about the next book on the TBR; there is only disappointment that there is no more of this one to read.

It is the story of Thomas Cromwell who rose from humble beginnings to be the most powerful man in England save King Henry VIII whom he serves. Mantel has painted a sympathetic portrait of this schemer, starting with his childhood at the mercy of a man most brutal in the days when most men were brutal to their sons. There are only tantalising glimpses of his time in Europe, when, aged 15, he fled one beating too many and so learned the arts of listening, reading, accounting, and the judicious use of a knife. He learned planning and plotting too, and so found himself the useful assistant to Cardinal Wolsey, at a time when the Cardinal needed a wily young adviser. For it was Wolsey’s fate to be senior churchman of Catholic England at the time when the king and the Pope were at loggerheads over Henry’s marriage plans.

Mantel’s sympathies are with the king. With succession wars in living memory, England needed an heir to the throne and Katherine of Aragon had failed to produce one. Anne Boleyn as her successor was no prize, but the king is besotted – and desperate for a son. A solution that would appease his conscience and the law had to be found, and urgently; the Pope – aided and abetted by Henry’s rivals in Europe – wouldn’t annul the marriage. It was Henry’s good fortune that his dilemma coincided with the need to reform a corrupt church, but Wolsey couldn’t get it all together in time. Biological clocks ticked faster then, and Henry needed a man who could give him what he wanted. Wolsey was lucky that old age and infirmity claimed him before anything nastier could.

Cromwell, a lawyer now, survived being Wolsey’s loyal friend and supporter, and became the king’s man instead. Mantel tells this astonishing rise patiently and with style. It is a story we all know, with people familiar to us if not from history lessons then from countless TV series and films. Henry’s six wives have kept the BBC busy since its inception…

Yet Wolf Hall is full of surprises: Cromwell as an uxorious husband and his sustained grief at Liz’s death; the loss of his children; his patronage of the poor at his gates; and the making of his portrait by Hans Holbein. This most powerful of men was besotted by small dogs, all of which he named Bella, in memory of his only childhood friend. We are privy to his conversations with the rich and powerful, the poor and oppressed. We see the formation of his opinions, the reckoning of possibilities, and his summations of the human beings he manipulates. As his speculations unfold, we witness the development of his plots and plans and his anxieties about how they proceed. We see his thoughts; we share his dreams.

It is a masterpiece.

Cross posted at
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/wolf-hall-by-hilary-mantel/

1972 - G. by John Berger

The curiously-named G. by John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Wikipedia has very little to say about the book so although there is a bit of chat about it on GoodReads I presume that it isn’t widely read and nobody feels confident about writing the definitive entry about it for Wikipedia.

I liked it, and I liked it a lot. It’s unashamedly postmodern, but it’s picaresque which makes it a reading experience somewhat different to other postmodern books I have read.

The central character is the English-Italian G, and if Berger explained why he doesn’t have a proper name, I missed it. At first I thought it might be an allusion to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian hero who led the movement to unify Italy, because G (via British Foreign Office machinations) gets mixed up in the irredentist position of Trieste, an Italian seaport that was under the control of Austria at the outbreak of World War I and not formally annexed to Italy until 1920. Following this line of thought I remembered that Giuseppe is an Italian variant of the Hebrew name Joseph (Son of Jacob, the one with the many-coloured coat) because the name means ‘one who enlarges’ – but it all seems a bit tenuous because G is more of a Don Juan than a proper spy. If he was a spy at all. So now I think he’s called G because Berger just wanted him to be enigmatic.

Scholars, I expect, might have a grand old time reading and re-reading this book to unpick its treasures, but general readers are best advised just to ‘go with the flow’ and just read it as it comes. The plot (such as it is) will gradually emerge, and with it will come the sense that the affairs of men which seem of such importance to the people involved are insignificant beside the grand events in history which form a backdrop. While G is philandering with an assortment of other men’s wives, provoking melodramatic revenge by one outraged husband or masterful resignation by another, the aviator Jorge Chavez was redefining the possibilities of flight and the geo-political map of Europe was being redrawn.

The scene where Italian peasants flock to see Chavez’s plane cross the alps and to attend his funeral is a reminder not only of the adulation that attended these pioneers of flight, but also of the momentous changes wrought by aviation. The domestic drama of G, dawdling in Trieste to seduce Marika, the wife of the Austrian Von Hartman, is juxtaposed against the horrors of trench warfare and Italy’s decision to become involved. It’s very powerful, not least because (since we all already know about the war) the reader tends to be as interested in the seduction as G is. The moment that I recognised that I was as oblivious to the main event as he was came as a bit of a shock.

Berger’s technique forces acknowledgement of a novel’s artificiality. Here’s an example, where the author’s assertion that what he is writing is an artificial construct intrudes/harmonises with (take your pick) into the narrative about the revolt in Milan on 6 May 1898 (when Garibaldi was leading the nationalists towards their goal of unifying Italy). G, still a boy, is fleeing the insurrection with a Roman girl who has found him lost in the street when he wandered away from his hotel, but the narrative segues away from the child’s plight:

Along the street several riflemen have been posted in the windows of upper rooms from where they can fire, over the barricade, at its defenders. Under their covering fire the soldiers in the street are advancing.
Already three defenders have been wounded.

Let me speak of one of the wounded. The bullet has entered just beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what
remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.

Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. (p73)

Berger also uses beautiful poetic imagery to alert his readers to what he is doing in his story. A wife, attending a ball, has ‘deer coloured hair.’ (p281) Immediately the confident Marika who believes she is in control of her romance becomes something else; like the soldiers on the battlefront she is destined to be a victim of forces beyond her control.

I like the way Berger amuses himself with disingenuous regret, when he admits that any attempt to describe a seduction would be ‘absurd’.

The experience was central to her life : everything that she had been, surrounded by her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything
she had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to
disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible. Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her unique experience. (p131)

It’s surprisingly easy to follow what happens in the story even though Berger keeps wandering off into sub plots and private reflections about the nature of writing. This technique will probably drive some readers crazy, but if you can tolerate ambiguity and a haphazard structure there is much to enjoy in G.

Author: John Berger
Title: G.
Publisher: Viking Press, 1972
ISBN: 670333417
Source: Personal library

I read and blogged about this book on 7.8.2010. Cross posted at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/g-by-john-berger/

1970, The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

The Elected Member was the second winner of the 1970 Booker Prize, after Something to Answer For by P.H.Newby in 1969. Bernice Rubens (1928-2004) was born in Wales and began writing in her middle thirties when the kids went to school. She was shortlisted again in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence, and her winning book was shortlisted with some august company...

To read the rest of my review visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/the-elected-member-by-bernice-rubens/

I've read 22 now, and 12 to go (not counting this year's yet to be announced winner, of course).

2006, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I've had this one on my TBR for a while, and having seen Slumdog Millionaire, I thought it was time to read it!

http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/the-inheritance-of-loss-by-kiran-desai-beware-spoilers/

I finished reading this book and journalled it on 12.3.09.

2008 - The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

My first Booker Prize winner for 2009, and what a good one it was! Here's my review.
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-white-tiger-by-aravind-adiga/

1989 - The Remains of the Day by Kasuo Ishiguro

I've just finished my first Booker for 2009 and what a gem it is! The Remains of the Day is a wonderful book and an equally impressive film.

Here's my review: http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-remains-of-the-day-by-kasuo-ishiguro/

Lisa Hill, January 24th, 2009

http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/

Lisa: Progress so far...

Ok, I've finished posts of 17 Booker Prize winners: all 15 Bookers I'd read and journalled prior to joining this Challenge, and 2 that I read in 2008, In a Free State and Rites of Passage. Posts from me are going to slow down from now on!

Of the 24 titles remaining, I have 10 on my TBR: The Elected Member; G; The Conservationist; Saville; Offshore; The Remains of the Day; The Famished Road; The English Patient; True History of the Kelly Gang; and The Inheritance of Loss. I think I might start with The Elected Member and fill in gaps chronologically from there onward.

There are 5 to acquire from somewhere: Midnight's Children; The Old Devils; How Late it Was, How Late; The Gathering; and The White Tiger. I'd like to buy these as First Editions, to add to my collection.

And then I shall decide what to do about the remaining 8 that I have read but not journalled, mostly because I read them before I started keeping a reading journal in 1997. (Sometimes I finish reading a book late at night, start another, and forget to journal the finished one. This, I think is what happened with Disgrace which I read in 1999, and with The Line of Beauty in 2004.) Will I re-read them? Maybe... there's a few others on my TBR to deal with!

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers, 9.1.2009

2005 - The Sea by John Banville.

The Sea is a brilliant book. I don't think it can be matched for the quality of its poetic prose or the cleverness of its imagery both sharp and subtle. It arouses intense feelings of nostalgia, loss, impatience and relief - it's really quite extraordinary.

Max Morden has lost his beloved wife Anna, and he isn't coping well at all. He's a middle-ranking art historian and he's supposed to be writing a book about Bonnard (a French artist), but he's not getting anywhere because he's wallowing in grief and old memories and alcohol.

His memories revert to childhood. When he was a child he went on holiday to the 'chalet', the cheap part of a holiday village, where he met the Graces, middle-class and socially a step above him and his deserted mother. He becomes a part of their household at The Cedars, playing almost daily with twins Chloe and Myles. He falls in love, as eleven year old boys do, first with the rather slatternly mother (fat, vague, drinks too much) and then with Chloe, fumbling with her at the beach and at the pictures. Disaster strikes when Rose, inept au pair/governess to the twins, catches Max fondling Chloe's budding breasts at the beach and they have a blazing row, culminating inexplicably in Chloe swimming out into an unusually high tide, followed by mute, web-toed and probably intellectually-disabled Myles. They both drown.

The memory of this event is so strong that when Anna dies, Max goes back to The Cedars to grieve. As in Marion Halligan's The Fog Garden, he seems to become lost in memories, overwhelmed by the loss of Anna and the twins. In what passes for life in Miss Vavasour's boarding house, there are some acutely funny descriptions of The Colonel, Miss V and her awful fat friend 'Bun', but the general tone of the book is of unbearable pain and loss, culminating in Max getting so drunk that he knocks himself out at the beach. He has to be rescued ignominiously by the Colonel, and is finally carted off to be rehabilitated by his daughter, Clair, and her droopy boyfriend, Jerome. Ghastly as this ending seems, in the context of what's gone before, there seems to be some hope because Max begins to plan escaping to paint in Paris.

It is a wonderful book, richly illuminating in its portrait of grief unresolved. It also shows Max's painful agonies about which class he belongs to (still an issue in England!) and how needlessly lives can be wasted. Clair has probably left it too late to have either children or the career as an art scholar that she could have had. It is a very moving book, but I loved reading it.

I was on holiday in Italy when I read The Sea, and hated having to leave the book behind. I bought a new first edition when I returned home and had it autographed by Banville when he visited Melbourne!

I finished reading it and journalled it (on scraps of paper, brought home in the suitcase!) in Monterchi, Tuscany, on 20.10.2005.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

2003 - Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre

This is the Booker prize winner that sent the media into a frenzy because the author, D.B.C. Pierre (real name Peter Warren Finlay) is a former drug addict who conned a friend out of a whole apartment somewhere in America. (He said he used some of the prize to pay him back). It wasn't really a book I wanted to read because (a) it's full of foul language and has no apparent literary qualities (b) it's narrated by a real smartarse who speaks like those morons I sometimes see on TV. This type of 'gonzo' adolescent slanginess was what also put me off The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Pulitzer Prize or no.

It is however, a clever satire, and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. Vernon is accused of the mass murder of his school mates after a Columbia-style tragedy, and the justice system is so screwed up with pseudo-experts and media tricks that he's found guilty and sentenced to death. Vernon's mother and her friends are obsessed with getting into the media to report on it, and his girlfriend (of a sort) turns him in, to a reporter in Mexico. It's just good luck that he is finally found not guilty and all ends well in crazy 21st century Texas.

There is a bit of a problem with the loss of plot direction about 2/3 of the way through, and I felt mildly guilty that I lost interest in the details of Vernon's life at about the same time as it was to be terminated. I almost put the book aside then, but persisted, and it does recover its impetus, romping through to its unlikely 'happy' ending.

I have heard that Americans mostly don't like this book. It is unequivocal about the immorality and injustice of capital punishment, now obsolete in the rest of the West. It is vicious satire, exposing the narcissm and materialism for which America is often lambasted. It is savage about the trashy way of life exemplified by the greed of its characters (takeaway food, monster fridges, obesity and dieting); it's ruthless in its commentary about their institutions (the legal system and the media). I don't know whether it's fair comment or not. I've never been to America, and I don't imagine that a short time as a tourist in their splendid museums and art galleries would qualify me to make a judgement.

I finished reading this book and journalled it on 15.11.2003.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

1998 - Amsterdam

Shakespeare used to use Venice as a setting for wickedness and corruption because Italian cities were fair game and a beaut contrast to the respectabilities of England. McEwan has used Amsterdam as a place of freedom to do dreadful things with drugs and state-sanctioned deaths, and to deliver a shocking finale to this very entertaining book. A reviewer called Kirkham on Amazon dismissed this book as 'middle-brow fiction British style - strong on the surface, vapid at the centre', but I don't agree.

Molly Lane dies, and her lovers meet at her funeral. Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday are great friends, united in their dislike of Molly's husband, George, who's stuffy and pretentious. They also loathe Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary and likely claimant to the Prime Ministership.

Clive's a successful composer, struggling with writing a Millenium Symphony. (How long ago the Millenium fuss seems now!) He's not avant-garde, he's got pretensions to Beethoven. McEwan mocks him a bit, because he's popular and therefore probably lowbrow, but he paints an interesting picture of the artist at work. Clive is at pains to shrug off the 'creative genius must-not-be-disturbed while in seclusion' tag. He makes time for his friends and he schedules his responsibilities to fit in around his composing efforts. But clearly something is not quite right because the deadline looms (as the Millenium did) and the work's not finished. Clive finds he has to get some peace and quiet and takes himself off to climb in the Lake district and allow the muse to come...

The trouble is, that he is interrupted, even there. He's had a row with his mate Vernon, a not-very-successful editor of a newspaper which is struggling to compete with the cut-throat world of English tabloid 'journalism'. He is at war with the 'Old Grammarians', a pun to show their links to both the old public schools and the old ways of writing - he wants to do upmarket tabloids, with feature articles on 'Siamese twins in local government'. There's a very funny comment on this type of writing in which the editor discusses revamping their columns with the team, suggesting that they hire 'someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You've seen the sort of thing. Goes to a party and can't remember someone's name.... Twelve hundred words.' Navel gazing is deemed too intellectual, what they want is 'navel chat' and the topics they brainstorm are hilarious: 'Can't work her video recorder'. 'Is my bum too big?' 'Buying a guinea pig'. 'His hangover.' 'Her first grey pubic hair'. 'Always gets the supermarket trolley with the wobbly wheel'. 'Always losing biros'. (p129). (I think of this excerpt often when I scan today's papers, and every now and again I email it to the editor, with so far no impact whatsoever, but I live in hope...)

Anyway, Vernon has some compromising photos of the loathesome Garmony. Taken by Molly, they capture him in his pathetic cross-dressing. These photos are the subject of major debate even before publication - with injunctions in court, rival papers sneering at their use and so on. Clive tears Vernon apart because the freedom to be a cross-dresser is one of the freedoms they fought for in the 70s. Vernon wants to bring down Garmony because he's a racist, a hypocrite, and a 'scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers, travellers, marginal people' (p73) but Clive believes that 'if it's ok to be a transvestite, then it's ok for a racist to be one. What's not ok is to be a racist...if it's ok to be a transvestite, it's ok for a family man to be one too.'

Up in the mountains, Clive can't shake off this row and the angst it causes him, and for a while it threatens to block the muse there too. Inspiration eventually comes, but so too does a rapist intent on harming a solitary female hiker. Clive sees the start of the violence, but - in the service of his 'art' - does not intervene.

When Vernon hears about this he is outraged, and when he is sacked over the photo fallout, he decides to avenge himself. Here the story becomes grand farce, as the two friends meet up in Amsterdam to poison each other. Clive is livid because the finale of his new symphony is no good. It's derivative and unfinished because Vernon intervened and called in the police about the hiker, just in the last couple of days that Clive needed to finish off the composition. Not everyone likes the shocking ending, but I think it works. A reviewer on Amazon calls it Jacobean, something I should have picked up myself, considering my degree in Eng Lit at Melbourne University, where we studied Jacobean plays in some detail. Amsterdam is (in my opinion) a morality play where reprehensible characters get their comeuppance in a 'tragedian bloodbath'.

There are much delicious satire in this book, such as the description of Clive's mansion in its various incarnations as a flower child's pad (p45) and a composer's hideaway, still holding the detritus of the passing years. It's quite clear (p64) that Clive is a very wealthy, comfortable snob and slob! He sneers at modern music (p22) and writes the kind of stuff the public likes (p23) - but there's also a lovely passage which resonates with anyone creative about how the muse comes on p84.

There's also an interesting thread about euthanasia. Molly dies a ghastly undignified death from some horrible disease that prevented her not only from caring for herself but also from tidying up her own affairs (which was how the photos got into Vernon's hands). Appalled by this, Colin and Vernon made a pact to 'help each other out' if ever either one should be unable to fend for themselves, and it looks here as if McEwan is making a strong case for trusting someone with power of attorney to end the suffering of the terminally ill. However, considering how things turn out between Colin and Vernon, McEwan's view seems to be that even the best of friends can't be trusted with the power of life and death over another.

I finished reading this book and journalled it on New Year's Day 2003.
Lisa Hill, ANZ Litlovers

2002 - Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Life of Pi is probably the most popular of all the recent Booker winners, still on prominent display in most of the independent bookshops I patronise, and often featuring in polls of favourite books. There's a recent illustrated version too, which is probably going to become a collector's item, but I don't like it even though it's beautiful. I prefer to imagine the story and settings for myself.

The tale purports to be the bizarre story of a 16 year old boy's survival of shipwreck, cast away at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Or maybe not. I think that Yann has constructed his story very cleverly to show us how we would rather believe almost anything than confront unappealing truths.

There is a very good plot summary on Wikipedia which is worth reading if you are at all confused, but beware, there are still spoilers below if you have not yet read the book.

It begins credibly enough with the boy's childhood in Pondicherry, starting with an explanation for his nickname. His real name is Piscenes (French for 'swimming pool') because his father, a zookeeper, liked swimming. The teasing he gets at school results in him taking the nickname 'Pi 3.14 infinitely recurring', the significance of this being that mathematical pi (∏) is an irrational number. I think Yann is warning us early on that the boy is not to be trusted...

Anyway, the family sets sail for Canada to escape Indira Gandhi's Emergency and the ship sinks. Pi is cast off in a lifeboat with a zebra, an wounded orang-utan, a hyena and a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. (See the Wikipedia link for an explanation of the signifiance of this name). There's a really grisly account of the zebra's death at the hands of the hyena, and the orang-utan dies too. The tiger kills the hyena, and then it's just the tiger and the boy - who survives by mastering the tiger, to the extent that when he later has an opportunity to abandon it on an island, he doesn't do so.

The twist in this tale is that when Pi is finally rescued in Mexico, his story is investigated. The shipowner's investigation team don't believe any of his story so Pi tells them another, one which reveals the metaphors of the fantasy version. In this version, Pi is in the lifeboat with a chef, a wounded sailor and his mother. When they are starving, the sailor (the zebra) is butchered by the chef (the hyena), who also kills the mother (the orang-utan). Pi then kills the chef, i.e. the tiger is the boy's other self, the savage whose instincts make him kill in order to survive. By killing the tiger/chef the boy checks these violent impulses so that he can re-enter civilisation. The investigators don't like this version either, and when they write their report, they use the fantasy.

As a fantastic tale, it's splendid. Some parts are a bit gory and unpleasant but the prose is beautiful, e.g. when he describes the stars, and it's often very funny indeed. There are rich veins to be mined by book-groups and symbols to be deciphered everywhere.

I read and journalled this story while on holiday at Carlyle House in Rutherglen, (one of Victoria's lovely wine regions) on 4.11.02.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

2000 - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Beware: lots of spoilers if you haven't read the book.

This story is superb. Atwood is one of the best writers of our time, and everything I've read of hers (The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride, Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad) has been terrific. The Blind Assassin is complex, and readers have to be content with ambiguity, but it's well worth it.

Iris is the narrator, but that's not clear at first. She's an old woman, remembering, setting the record straight (she says) for her grand-daughter, Sabrina. She ponders her sister's suicide and a parallel story, a strange fantasy novel , which seems to the reader at first to be completely irrelevant. It is supposed to have been posthumously published by an unidentified pair of authors, then the author of this story-within-a-story is revealed as Iris's dead sister Laura - but it's not, and eventually it becomes clear that Iris wrote it herself, not Laura.

Two sisters, relics of an older time when women were merely decorative pawns, bought and sold to enhance the social position of the men in their lives. In class-conscious Britain, the Chase family would have been dismissed with a haughty sniff as 'Trade', but in Canada, in the backblocks beyond Toronto, theirs was a respectable old family with a asuccessful manufacturing business and the girls had to 'marry well'.

Why, I wondered, did Richard Griffin, a wealthy industrialist in his own right, want to marry Iris when her father's button factory failed? Was the Chase family name really so valuable that a dynamic man like him would want an insipid, ineffectual wife? All the efforts of Winifred, Richard's awful sister, to mould Iris as a suitable wife failed; like Laura, Iris became dreamy and feeble (and didn't eat) to avoid unpleasantness, and she's a failure as a society wife.

Both Laura and Iris are besotted by Alex Thomas. He was some kind of subversive during the Depression, presumably in the pay of the Russians; then he's involved in the Spanish Civil War and finally killed off in WW2. Laura learns of his death through a telegram because he had named her next of kin, a message from beyond the grave that shows which sister he preferred.

Iris is the narrator, so we're told that Alex loved her, but he was also Laura's lover. The strange stories interwoven with the main story purport to be Laura's account of events, but as we eventually know, they were really written by Iris. They tell of meetings in sleazy rooms, of Alex composing SF fantasies, and how he finally sends one of these stories off for publication. Through these co-authored stories we see Alex for what he is: brutal, ruthless and manipulative; the female contributions bring softenings, happy endings and kindness. When Iris finds a copy in a trashy store, she's surprised to find that her 'blind assassin' and the 'mute virgin' have been omitted from the story. Stripped of her fantasies, the story is what her behaviour has been: merely sordid.

As the pages turn, Iris finally realises what the reader has already concluded: Richard has a penchant for young girls and his taste extended to Laura. He forced Laura to abort her child, but the child Iris bears is Alex's. Iris names the baby Aimee, but she's not much loved by her mother, who's not a loving person at all....She's a real old misery. She paints herself as exploited and bullied, but she's scornful of Reenie and her daughter Myra - both of whom are good to her in her old age. She's very conscious of money and status - her own social standing is ambiguous, but she's delighted to see Winifred snubbed.

So, who is the blind assassin? The one who doesn't see, sent to murder the sacrificial virgin as a way of challenging the status quo? Not Alex, although by seducing both girls he's just the same as Richard, only seedier. I think that Iris is - she pretends to be the mute innocent who finally reveals all, using Laura's name to publish the book that ruins Richard's career. She does this under the pretext of needing to tell the truth to Sabrina, in a vain attempt to win back her grand-daughter's affection.

It's Iris who tells Laura that she had a secret affair with Alex, so that Laura drives off a bridge in despair. It's Iris who publishes the book and drives Richard to suicide. Her choices are vindictive, cruel and spiteful; she seems not to have a real freind or confidante anywhere. When her daughter and grand-daughter reject her just as Myra's mother Reenie finally does, she has no one to blame but herself.

It's beautifully written, capturing the tone of the period with details of clothes, buildings and politics, and Atwood has complete mastery of her characters. Iris is a sardonic snob, much given to judging others and utterly wrong about people because she's so superficial. And yet, we feel just a little pity for her in her loneliness, at the end.

I finished reading this book and journalled it on 31.3.2002.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

1997 - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This book caused a bit of a storm when it won the Booker in 1997. Some people really disliked it. I loved it, especially the wordplay and the private language of the twins. They way they pick up and distort words and phrases from the adults around them can be very funny at times, as when they turn Baby Kochamma's stern warning to be 'Ambassador of India' at the airport into 'Ambassador E. Pelvis and Ambassador S. (stick) Insect'. At other times this wordplay shows a dawning awareness of the grim and heartless world of adults, as when an angry parent's 'later' delivered 'meaningfully' becomes LayTer, a horrible, menacing, 'goose-bumpy' word.

Of all the adult characters, only Ammu is sympathetically drawn, and even she is selfish in risking her family with forbidden love for an 'Untouchable'. Velutha is depicted as a kindly man, ambitious for an 'Untouchable' but we never really see inside his head. Chacko, a foolish Anglophile and bully, would be comic if he were not so cruel and self-deluded; he still loves the idea of Margaret as his wife (because she's English) even after she divorced him because of his laziness and selfishness. Baby Kochamma is a viperous old woman keen to stir up trouble for everyone and anyone, and so protective of her family's reputation that she invents murder and rape to convict Velutha. (Not that there's any need for a trial. In Roy's India police can deliver a fatal beating with impunity, it seems.)

(My favourite character was actually Baby Kochamma, wicked old crone that she was. Her malevolence permeates every event; she's only happy when others are down for she needs to feel morally superior to survive. Bossy, opinionated, disagreeable in every way - she's a wonderful invention!)

As the story is revealed, we become aware that Estha has become an elective mute because it was his word that denounced Velutha, his friend and adult playmate. Baby Kochamma blackmails him into agreeing that the children were abducted when in fact they were running away from angry adults - trying to teach them a lesson and intending to come back when the adults 'begged'.

With the theme of forbidden love, there are numerous taboos broken. Chacko marries an English girl to the dismay of both families. Baby Kochamma nurtures a fruitless love for a Catholic priest for a lifetime. Ammu falls for Velutha, though it's just for sex and they both know it; and as adults Estha and Rahel have an incestuous relationship. Then there's the dirty old man who abuses little Estha at the pictures, to the irony of the wholesome Sound of Music on screen.

So nobody has a happy love life - all yearn for the forbidden, and suffer for it. A tragic theme but not a tragic book. It's too playful for that and the language is rich and powerful, never sordid or gloomy. It's as if Roy says: bad things will happen; the god of small things will have his way, but life goes on - and people do as they will in surviving it.

It's clear that Roy doesn't like the caste system, but she interprets it as part of the inheritance of exclusion and snobbery that came with British rule. It's also part of the way women wield power when they are otherwise powerless. Roy seems to love India too much to be appalled by it and is content to bring it to world attention and leave it to others to express opinions about it.

Highly recommended and a terrific book for book groups.

I finished reading this book and journalled it on 3.2.2001.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

1996 - Last Orders by Graham Swift

Last Orders is a lovely book. It won the Booker Prize in 1996, and was made into a terrific film with Michael Caine as Jack.

It's a deceptively simple story. Four blokes take a day trip to Margate Pier to spread the ashes of their mate, Jack, to the sea. Multiple narrators carry the story through flashbacks to the past and commentary on present events, gradually revealing a complex network of relationships, misunderstandings and betrayals, a fragile web held together by grudging affection and respect.

There's Ray, an insurance clerk and punter: Lucky Ray Johnson who's had an affair with Jack's wife; there's Vic, an undertaker whose business is across the road from Jack's butcher shop and there's Lenny, a fruit-and-veg stallholder whose daughter was 'knocked up' by Vince. Vince is Jack and Amy's foster child, brought up as their own when his family was killed by a doodle-bug in the war. He's a substitute for the child-that-never-was, June, Amy and Jack's grossly retarded daughter. Amy wastes fifty years of her life visiting this child who is incapable of responding to her and she can't forgive Jack because he would rather June were dead.

In an interview, Swift says that his characters are undeducated, inarticulate Londoners who have feelings they can't express. I think it's true they're pretty hopeless at expressing things, and there's a gulf between thought and words, but also (as we thought when The Spouse and I saw the film) it was as much a problem of males being unable to express their feelings as much as a lack of education and language. Amy is best at saying what she thinks and feels...

The narrators are not meant to be trusted. Ray, for example, isn't always honest with himself, and neither is Amy. She uses visiting June in the home as an excuse for her affair with Ray to stop, when the real reason is partly that Vince is coming back from military service in Aden and partly that she's realised that she really does love Jack. Swift not only creates doubt about his characters in this way but also through showing that each of them sees the world through their own perspective and they don't always have all the facts. Vic, for example, sees Ray and Amy together - he never says anything about this to anyone and jumps to the conclusion that the affair has been going on for years.

The damage done by stubbornness is a strong theme in this novel. Amy steadfastly refuses to accept Jack's feelings about June; he stubbornly clings onto the hope that Vince will be the son he never had so that the business can become Dodds & Son. Lenny ruins his daughter's life by insisting that she has an abortion and then when things go awry he stubbornly washes his hands of her. For years and years Ray fails to communicate with his daughter in Australia because he doesn't know how to tell her about crucial events that affect her life. These 'invisible people' in the novel play an important role in the characterisation of the others, and the plot.

What binds the men together is that they are 'drinking partners'. Swift portrays tolerance in male friendship as a kind of moral blindness, as when they conspire 'not to notice' that Ray has been sleeping with his mate's wife. Some people see these characters as male stereotypes - Ray blathering on about mateship in the army and Vince being a petrol-head - but I don't think so. Initial impressions are subverted as different layers and perspectives emerge. Vince, for example, isn't a petrol-head - he's used the army to learn a trade to get into business and achieve social mobility. He's more interested in exploiting the role of the car as a status symbol than he is in performance machines; he might just as easily be selling cashmere or diamonds.

Is Amy a stereotype because we only see her through the men's eyes? It's only her bloody-minded devotion to poor June that casts her so stolidly in the role of 'mother'. She doesn't do much mothering of Vince, not even when he was little. She makes unexpected decisions as the novel reaches its conclusion, and the question of her relationship with Ray remains unresolved at the end. Stereotypes don't lend themselves to ambiguity in this way, and I think Swift's characterisation results in memorable personalities - quite an achievement considering how the reader has to piece things together. Just as the characters do.

I finished reading and journalled this book on 3.5.2003.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers