Paperback Reader » Man Booker

One (Wo)man Booker failure

Paperback Reader — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:30:02 +0000

Hm, can one call it a failure if I never actually stated that I would read the entirety of the longlist before the prize was awarded? To be fair, that hasn’t be done yet and only the shortlist is being announced today…

Suffice to say, though, I have only read four of this year’s Man Booker dozen and in the process of reading another; I have only reviewed two, one of which I loved but doubt will make the longlist because it is too “popular” and “readable” (as if they are bad words!) My lack of motivation had nothing to do with the judges’ choices but more my own craving for older fiction, which has been previously documented on Paperback Reader.

I do intend on reading the shortlist but will not be rushing to do so before the winner is announced on October 12th; in fact, since I own all of this year’s longlist I do plan on reading all of the books at some point but not with any deadline or enforced timetable on my part. I look forward to reading more about what the judges and my blogging peers think of the choices before committing myself to reading them in any order.

However, I could not resist speculating which books will make the shortlist later today. Now, as I have only read 1.5 of the books enough this is not at all an informed opinion! I am simply basing my prospective shortlist on what I have heard/read about the titles and my own instinct.

I would also like to draw attention to two of the titles I think will make the shortlist -The Slap and In a Strange Room- featuring on the inaugural longlist for The Green Carnation Prize. Please check out this prize if you have not already; the focus on gay literature is one born of a passion for reading and a desire to highlight the work of gay writers, which can only be a good thing. I have read In a Strange Room and will definitely be reading The Slap as well as exploring some other titles on the longlist.

Please check out the Man Booker shortlist once it has been released and see how my guesses matched up!

In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut

Paperback Reader — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:00:24 +0000

Damon Galgut was a writer I had not encountered before In a Strange Room was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize. He has been previously shortlisted and the blurb on the front of this book alludes to him being “a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee”; as a recent yet ardent fan of Coetzee, I was most intrigued. I also read that In a Strange Room would be liked this year by those who enjoyed Summertime last year; I was impressed and wowed by the latter novel so was excited by the comparison. Regrettably, the similarities between Galgut and Coetzee did not really extend for me beyond their shared South African heritage and the similar front covers of In a Strange Room and Summertime; both attempt to do something different with autobiography but Galgut is not in the same league as Coeztee and his In a Strange Room is the poorer writer’s Summertime.

In a Strange Room has a tripartite structure; the book is divided into three separate stories – the Follower, the Lover, the Guardian- each following the protagonist/narrator in his travels. The protagonist is Damon, a South African and a writer looking back on three memorable travel experiences; like John in Summertime, Damon is Galgut and Galgut approaches writing autobiography in a different form. The narration shifts between first and third-person, with passages often changing between “he” and “I” pronouns mid-line; these shifts increase in frequency as the book progresses and as Galgut asserts himself as the protagonist. I found this an incredibly off-putting device and did not entirely see any point to it other than experimentation; I think it was supposed to act as a means to distinguish between older and fresher memories and their strength but it was not effective for me and distanced me from the story, such as it was.

There is not much of an over-arching plot to In a Strange Room and the three sections lacked any cohesion together other than their travel and traveller connection. In the Follower Damon‘s travels take him through Greece where he meets Reiner, a fellow traveller, who he connects and disconnects with; in the Lover Damon travels through Africa in a small group that includes Jerome, who is never in actuality his lover but who he does share an intense attraction with; in the Guardian Damon is in India with his friend Anna who is suffering from mental illness. The Guardian was the section that had the most emotional resonance for me, was fast-paced and had a plot; I wish Galgut had developed this memory -the one closer to him in time and depth of feeling- into a novel-length work; I would have loved to have discovered more about Anna and Caroline and think the Guardian section would have worked exceptionally well stand-alone.

In a Strange Room ended powerfully but a book should be judged on its overall strengths and this one did not have a beginning, middle and an end but three disconnected stories, one of which I loved and two that bored me. In a Strange Room is a journey novel, one of those where a journey -or three- act as a metaphor for a journey of self-discovery; the motif itself is old-hat and I don’t think that Galgut said anything more profound on travel than Paul Coelho has in the past. Each section appeared in The Paris Review as a separate piece and I think they should have remained that way, with the Guardian piece reworked and developed.

This book has garnered much appreciation in less-pedestrian quarters and I think it may very well be shortlisted for the Booker but I did not care for it very much.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Paperback Reader — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:00:05 +0000

You may have noticed that Room by Emma Donoghue is a novel that is receiving a lot of attention across the blogosphere. Longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, there has been an ever-increasing organic buzz surrounding the novel, that is exciting, deserved and nothing like a droning vuvuzela. Picador in the UK have been fully-behind Room from the beginning, acquiring it for a six figure sum after a hotly-contested multi-publisher auction. I received a proof copy of the book months ago and am ashamed I did not pick it up sooner, instead seemingly jumping on the bandwagon once everyone else was reading and reviewing it too. As it was, I opted for Room over any of the remaining Booker dozen because I found its premise appealing and intriguing.

Room is highly original and incomparable; it really is like nothing I have read before. Much has been made of the novel’s readability and the fact that it can be easily read in one sitting but it is incredibly accessible and thrilling; I found it difficult to put down and in my second -and last- sitting I read it late into the night. I do wonder, however, how it will stand up to multiple rereads (by the Booker judges) as it relies heavily upon suspense, intensity and revelation. I also wonder if it is too accessible and popular to take the prize; although I found it immensely readable and outstanding in its originality, I did not think it was particularly literary.

Inspired by the Fritzl case, where Elisabeth Fritzl and her children were found to have been incarcerated in the basement of their captor’s (in this case, Joseph Fritzl, the woman’s father and children’s father/grandfather) house in Austria, Room is about Jack, a five-year-old boy and his Ma, who are being help captive in the room of the title. Eleven feet by eleven feet, Room is a converted garden shed with a security door and a skylight somewhere in America (a detailed plan of Room can be viewed here). Narrated by Jack we are given unique insight into their way-of-life beginning on his fifth birthday. To Jack, Room is the height of his existence with everything Outside make-believe; they watch a limited amount of television together each day but Jack knows -because Ma has told him- that everything in TV is pretend and only he, Ma and the things in Room are real. Now that he is five, Ma thinks he is old enough to know that there is a world outside and begins the process of “unlying” to him. Through Jack’s innocent point-of-view we learn that Ma, a nineteen-year-old student, was lured by her captor, “Old Nick”, seven years previously and is visited nightly by him, hiding Jack in the wardrobe where he listens to and counts “Old Nick creaks Bed”. Like Fritzl Old Nick withholds food and power as punishment and other day-to-day actualities and pertinent plot points directly mirror the real-life case.

Jack’s innocent voice lessens the tragedy of what is being described whilst still poignant; Donoghue has employed a very clever device in her narration because the depiction of events are far less harrowing through the eyes and words of a child. Ma educates and exercises Jack via games and imagination but some of the games serve an essential purpose, minus Jack’s understanding of it.

After nap we do Scream every day but not Saturdays or Sundays. We clear our throats and climb up on Table to be nearer Skylight, holding hands not to fall. We say “On your mark, get set, go,” then we open wide our teeth and shout holler howl yowl shriek screech scream the loudest possible. Today I’m the most loudest ever because my lungs are stretching from being five.

Then we shush with fingers on lips. I asked Ma once what we’re listening for and she said just in case, you never know.

The quote provides an insight into the style of Room in addition to illustrating the above point. To begin with the style irritated me as I became used to how Jack looked at Room and life but by the latter half of the book I found Jack exceedingly endearing. I cannot reveal to you what changed for me without spoiling the book but the narrative voice really grew on me; Jack inspires one to look at things differently.

Some readers will have issues with the subject matter and its topicality (there is a suggestion in the novel that Ma could have chosen to smother Jack upon birth as opposed to raise him in that confined and restricted environment and I was struck by recent news stories not of the kidnapping variety) but Donoghue goes further than striving for shock factor and the sentimental. The most touching part of Room is the strong bond between mother and child and how Ma teaches Jack and interacts with him using limited means; Room is a testimony of imagination, exhibited by how Ma and Jack use theirs. The quote below demonstrates how novel and important this interaction is but ***beware of spoilers (in reading the quotes -only the quotes- below you will instantly see where the novel goes)*** So often children are deprived of one-on-one parental attention and imaginative play that is essential to their development. Jack is articulate (within his perimeters) , intelligent and possesses an extensive vocabulary due to the extended time he spends with his parents; no, Jack and Ma’s situation is not the means of raising a savant child but a happy medium in child rearing is required. Of course, Jack’s unique situation, his advanced grasp of language and increased childhood innocence is what makes him so believable, useful and cherished as a narrator. Emma Donoghue interesting discusses her use of Jack’s voice, its intent and her means of creating it in this article; she modeled Jack on her own five-year-old son, Finn, at the time of writing, whilst making necessary adaptations in lieu of Jack’s unique upbringing.

The child-mother bond is the crux of the novel in its extraordinary setting. Ma breastfeeds Jack, amusingly referred to as “some” by him with references to left and right and the creamier; modern society can be so outraged by breastfeeding beyond a certain age and public feeding and Donoghue tackles the stigma that natural feeding attracts head-on. The second quote below (again, it is a spoiler) concerns breastfeeding, underlining people’s obsession with it, was one of the funniest in the novel for me.

With its Room setting and framing and its onus on TV being unreal, I believe that Donoghue is playing with the concept of the Fourth Wall and what makes reality. Ultimately it is a gimmicky book but one that is immensely readable and that I shall be passing on both physically and as a recommendation to everyone I know.

The below quotes contain spoilers.

Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma doesn’t even hear.

The woman nods. “You breastfed him. In fact, this may startle some of our viewers, I understand you still do?”

Ma laughs.

The woman stares at her.

“In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?”

The Return

Paperback Reader — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:00:43 +0000

Hello, all. I have officially returned from a holiday at home; I was back in London at the tail-end of last week but we enjoyed a few more days off de-compressing from our time away. Glasgow was … temperamental weather-wise; one day I was driving along a flooded street in torrential rain, water up to the chassis and such a badly steamed-up windscreen that it was like driving blind in a cloudy bubble (quite possibly the most horrific driving experience I’ve yet had) and the next I spent the day on the patio with a book, strawberry-flavoured beer whilst I left the BBQ in the trusty hands of my boyfriend. As always I didn’t read nearly as much as I would have liked but a great time was had with loved ones, even if the sun was not always splitting the skies.

I did check in online last week as the pre-Booker anticipation built; I was on tenterhooks awaiting the longlist announcement and quite excited by the result. I am not going on record by saying that I will read the entire longlist this year but I should have them all in my possession this week and we shall see where my reading then takes me … At present I am itching to read Room by Emma Donoghue (which I shall begin later today), The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner; I was delighted at fellow Scot Warner’s inclusion on the list as The Sopranos (to which The Stars in the Bright Sky is a sequel) is a favourite from when I read it about a decade ago.

I also came across this article in Bitch magazine (online) last week. Its focus on the importance of positive female role models in young adult literature is a subject I feel strongly about; in a society where Bella Swan passivity is culturally embraced, the need for strong heroines in literature is paramount. The examples of empowered young females in both the piece and its subsequent comments have me adding to my wishlist and nostalgically reliving my own childhood and young adult reading.

Whilst I was away a new literary prize was established, celebrating the writing of gay men. So forward-thinking and diverse is this prize that it has already caused controversy and undergone a name-change! More about The Green Carnation Prize can be found here.

Today I feature in Triple Choice Tuesday, a weekly event hosted by Kim of Reading Matters that highlights three books that mean a lot to the participant. It was a pleasure to take part in a feature that I greatly enjoy but I found the task of narrowing down beloved books to three far more difficult than I anticipated. Please have a look at Kim’s site for my final choices.

This week I hope to catch up with some outstanding reviews as well as share with you some of my summer reading and more of the same can be expected over the coming weeks, interspersed -I imagine- with some Booker reading. In the meantime, did you miss me and what have you been reading and writing about? Please do alert me to any posts you think I should read as I’m putting off opening my Google Reader and suspect I will mark all posts as read once I do.

Recent Acquisitions

Paperback Reader — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:00:15 +0000

A few books have dropped through the letter-box of Paperback Reader abode over the last week and, at the time of going to press, I have read one of them with a review forthcoming.

I spotted Plan for Chaos by John Wyndham in a bookshop recently and was instantly intrigued as it was a title of his that I had not yet heard about; I was even more intrigued when I saw the description, “The newly discovered companion novel to The Day of the Triffids” across the bottom of the front cover. I read The Day of the Triffids recently and this book was written at the same time, overshadowed by the former’s success, and remained unpublished until last year, forty years after Wyndham’s death. Described in its blurb as “Part detective noir, part dystopic thriller”, the synopsis for A Plan for Chaos mentions missing identical women; clones; Nazi master race… and I’m hooked by the back cover alone.

Precious by Sapphire has been receiving some press lately as its big-screen adaptation has been nominated for a number of Oscars. Simon of Savidge Reads raved about this one and my interest was piqued; the big issues of social deprivation, race and child abuse need recognition in Hollywood and sometimes a distressing read is required. Vintage Books kindly sent me a copy of this upon request.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood is also an Oscar contender (best actor nod for Mr Darcy Colin Firth) and was also sent to me by Vintage. The novella was set in 1962 California with an English, gay, University professor, Charles, as its protagonist; Charles is grieving the death of his partner and coming to terms with this loss and subsequent loneliness.

Woman: an Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier is a scientific book about women and all that the sex entails. Eva of A Striped Armchair wrote about this book and I instantly requested it from my library; I read the first chapter earlier this month and knew from that I had to own my own copy, savour it, reread it and pass it on to every woman I know.

July’s People by Nadine Gordimer is the latest book group choice of the Riverside Readers. I have been wanting to read Gordimer for a while, either her Man Booker winning novel or her inclusions on the Virago Modern Classics list, but this title -her prediction of the ending of apartheid published before it ended with a subsequent ban in South Africa- sounds like something that I will love.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is the latest novel by a marmite author, an author who courts controversy, an author who has written one of my favourite books; his latest novel is about the feminist revolution and I wanted to read it for that alone. Jonathan Cape sent me a copy of this to review.

Have you read any of these or are any of them on your radar?

Wolf Hall

Paperback Reader — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:29:00 +0000

I will hold up my hands and admit that I had preconceptions about Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The Tudor period of history was not one that I had much prior knowledge of, excluding the names involved, nor one that interested me; truth be told, I expected it to be as turgid a reading experience as The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt (my thoughts on that book can be read here). Although big books don’t normally faze me, I found Wolf Hall daunting; I tried to put aside my negative feelings towards the book but from the outset -and the seven pages of the cast of characters and family trees- that appeared to be a challenge. However, a few pages in and I had set my prejudices aside and was engaged in the story of Thomas Cromwell, protagonist of Wolf Hall. Cromwell is not often portrayed sympathetically but Mantel creates a compelling hero in him and conveys a loyal man and subject. The novel, although preliminarily beginning with his early life, follows his rise from Cardinal Wolsey’s man to confidante of King Henry VIII; chiefly Mantel charts the years 1527-35 and Cromwell’s influential hand in the annulment of the King’s marriage with Katherine of Aragon and his subsequent union to Anne Boleyn as well as the early stages of the Reformation.

Wolf Hall is overly-long; I state the obvious about a heavy 650 pages tome but it does drag and lag in parts. Some of the dialogue could definitely have been cut without detracting from the plot but the minute attention to detail weaves an intricate tapestry of the time. I was fully immersed in the period and have gone from having no discernible history in the era to now seeking out The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl to fuel my need for more.

Set in a period where flesh burns and heads roll, Wolf Hall has an engaging plot to propel it forward although I found it lost steam during the last 150-pages or so; once Anne had been installed as (current) consort and the attention was on the imprisonment of Sir Thomas More, my attention waned. The historical events are meticulously researched and often the prose became bogged down in the sheer wealth of information presented; I preferred the less rigid factual detail and instead the insight given into life at court. The bawdy (sixty years at least before Shakespeare) was entertaining with a lot of sex and sexual gossip or innuendo; everyone was apparently sleeping with everyone else, extra-maritally or occasionally incestuously (not incest as it is considered nowadays but the morally ambiguous sleeping with the sibling of a dead -and sometimes living- spouse or the wife of your son). Many parts were humorous with jokes about everyone being named Thomas and if they are not then they are seemingly named Henry I thought that this brought out Mantel’s love for the period yet also a sense of humour about the historical facts she was presenting.

I have seen across a number of reviews people’s issue with Mantel using “he” continually as a pronoun and confusion over whom she was referring to; I had no problem with this and found it obvious that it was Cromwell, unless otherwise stated. I find it curious that this was not apparent to more people but perhaps I had a better understanding of her style being forewarned. As for the writing itself, the prose is not glowing but it does transport and convey. However, if unlike me, you are aware of the story being told, then the book may fail to captivate you. I seem to enjoy historical fiction when I have no -or little- knowledge of the facts unveiled; I may have enjoyed The Children’s Book more if any of what Byatt had told us had been new to me. Mantel was instructive in my case and she intrigued me. My only other criticism is that the title Wolf Hall shifts focus from Anne Boleyn to Jane Seymour, but that I am sure will be taken up in the intended sequel.

The Quickening Maze

Paperback Reader — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:26:00 +0000

Of the 2009 Man Booker contenders, The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds was the book that I anticipated the most and I left reading it until last. The blending of fact with fiction and the literary appropriation of history excited me; although historical novels were a recurring feature on this year’s Booker lists, The Quickening Maze was the one that initially appealed.

Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum – an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. [from dust-jacket]

I knew little of Tennyson and even less of Clare before reading. This is a creative and deft exploration of madness. In nineteenth century Epping Forest, the lives of the great poets are imaginatively vividly rendered and Clare’s insanity most of all. Rewriting the poems of Byron whilst in the asylum, Clare -in the novel- believed he was Byron and in his mind’s decline confused his child love, Mary, whom he hallucinated, with the many Marys that Byron loved.

Foulds is a poet himself but I never found the prose overly-poetic; beautiful words, yes, but accessible, simple, and a demonstrable love-affair with language. Structured through seven seasons with short vignettes and shifting narratives, the novel is very accomplished but I was never fully engaged; I enjoyed the novel but I wasn’t captivated. The characters, although interesting, didn’t gel for me. The Quickening Maze is a very subtle novel that intelligently blurs the lines between fact and fiction; it is beautifully written and crafted but some of its genius and strong themes could easily be missed in its gentle style. Its power though lies in the raw and intense evocation of the peasant poet’s descent into madness and the other characters movement into futility and hopelessness. For fans of Clare and Tennyson and of course those of beautiful prose then this will be a flawless and enjoyable read but for those of us who enjoy compelling narrative and characters, this is somewhat lacking.

[Tennyson upon being asked his opinion of Byron's poetry] ‘I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t yet written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think.’

The wind separated into thumps, into wing beats. An angel. An angel there in front of her. Tears fell like petals from her face. It stopped in front of her. Settling, its wings made a chittering sound. It paced back and forth, a strange, soft, curving walk that was almost like dancing. It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, touching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched.

She lay in her open grave, miles down, with the sharp voices of the places like dim clouds far above. She lay as still as she could. Her heart kept up its hateful slow tread in her chest. Warm tears that gave no relief now and then rolled into her ears, stopped, started again.

The Children's Book

Paperback Reader — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:20:00 +0000

I had preconceptions when I went into the challenge of reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. When I say challenge I am not solely referring to the challenge of reading the Man Booker 2009 longlist/shortlist but that The Children’s Book was a challenge in itself. I was daunted, not by its length as 615 page books don’t normally faze me but by the tome-like density of The Children’s Book. It was a slog to read; at times I felt as if I was wading through waist-high snow and not progressing anywhere very quickly. My boyfriend said that he has never -in six and a half years of us being together- seen me take so long to read a book; it took me nine days to eventually finish it. The sheer epic scope of this novel and its minute attention to period detail made it, for me, a very slow read and feat of endurance. The overwhelming amount of detail provided was impressive but I found most of it superfluous and thought that Byatt required a lot more editing.

The Children’s Book is certainly accomplished but I often felt that I was reading a historical account of the Victorian and Edwardian periods and not a piece of literary fiction; I was not engaged at all in the characters or the plot that was hidden amongst the detail. I did enjoy the last forty pages -the final section, “The Age of Lead”, that was set during World War I- but it was not long enough nor good enough to make up for the other 575 pages of boredom. If I had not had to read this book for my Booker challenge, I honestly don’t think I would have finished it as it was a chore. For the most part I did not find it enjoyable and was actually counting down the pages until it was over; at the last 150 pages stage I kept nodding off at every second paragraph, which I think is telling of something far greater than tiredness.

The premise appealed to me and literary fiction that was both about fairy tales in part and also about one of my favourite periods in history should have engrossed me but it didn’t. I find Byatt dry and like Rachel of Book Snob I suspect that she was attempting to write a thesis about Victoriana and not a novel. I haven’t provided a synopsis of the novel because it can easily be found on an online bookselling website or in other reviews; what I have provided is my gut reaction to the book and apologies to the Byatt fans or to those who thoroughly enjoyed the book.

As I said at the beginning, I went in with preconceptions. Reading the first glowing review of The Children’s Book only served in putting me off when large, detailed quotes were used to highlight the novel’s style; I know that books that contain such historical detail at the expense of storyline are not for me. Byatt has a large cast of characters that mainly belong to four families: the Wellwoods, with matriarch children’s writer Olive Wellwood at their helm; their cousins; the Cains, the father Prosper Cain the alchemist of the South Kensington Museum – later to become the Victoria and Albert; and the Fludds, headed by the famous potter, Benedict, who is a volatile genius; the remainder of the cast are integrated into one or all of these families or are merely supplementary but at times I felt the need of a family tree to keep them all straight in my head especially when one of the characters begins to be referred to by another name…

Proportionately I have given you over 600 words of what I didn’t like but now for what I did. I appreciated the ambition of the novel, even if it did not engage me. I was interested in the period but it was altogether too much. I enjoyed the intertextuality of the novel and the use of popular literature of the time to parallel sections of the plot; where I didn’t enjoy the sections of Olive Wellwood’s tales, I did enjoy Byatt’s references to them and comparisons with Peter Pan. Tom Wellwood didn’t want to be a grown-up and his shadow was “snipped off his feet in his cradle, by a monstrous rat.” I also liked the war poetry that was written in the final section. The Bluebeard allusions were interesting as was the puppet theatre and I welcomed the cameos by Oscar Wilde and Marie Stopes and the walk-on appearances by J. M. Barrie and H. G. Wells.

Lastly, some of the writing that I liked:

Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn. In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship – an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners’ children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.

Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.
In 1889 Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive’s early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming – or return – of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring.

The story books were kept in a glass-faced cabinet in Olive’s study. Each child had a book, and each child had his or her own story. It had began, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns.

Olive considered him. Reasons for his madness flickered across her mind and were rejected. The writer in her could could have imagined a scene in which the secret had ‘slipped out’. The woman in her felt both threatened and enraged. The woman needed to keep calm, or the writer would be unable to work tomorrow. The woman was afraid of age and loss.

Backwards and forwards both. The Edwardians knew they came after something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed little mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust.

The Glass Room

Paperback Reader — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:41:00 +0000

When the Man Booker longlist of 2009 was announced I didn’t know anything at all about The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and it didn’t appeal. In fact, I was deterred because the book’s cover reminded me of one of my University textbooks. The Booker enabled me to read a book that I would not have read otherwise and I have been rewarded. The Glass Room is an exceptional novel and I am now championing it to win this year’s prize; it is definitely in contention for my book of the year although that doesn’t come with a cheque for £50,000 and international acclaim.

All of the six Booker shortlisted novels are set in the past. The Glass Room is set in the Modernist period and encompasses the lead up to WWII and its aftermath and its affect on one house, one family, and the people they love.

The Glass Room, the subject and character, is a room of glass (clever things are done with the Czech and German translations where it also means the room of tranquility), the feature room in a modernist home. Architect Rainer von Abt creates a dream-home for a newly married couple, Viktor and Liesel Landauer; the Landauer House becomes an architectural sensation, a piece of art in its own right. The novel follows the Landauer House and its exquisite glass room, an open space of light and balance, through the history of an unsettled Eastern Europe and its time as a family home; a Nazi laboratory; a shelter from war; a physiotherapy gymnasium; and a museum from private ownership into Nazi hands to Soviet ones to those of the Czechoslovak state. The passing of ownership illegally is one of the novel’s central themes – who owns art? Is it the property of the artist, the commissioner, or the public, and can a building legally be considered a work of art? A curious question in light of the author’s note, where Mawer states that although The Glass Room is a work of fiction, its house and setting are not (apparently the Landauer House is modelled on the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, in today’s Czech Republic. It would seem from the brief entry I have linked to that Viktor and Liesel Landauer are also loosely modelled on the couple who had the house designed and built).

The writing in The Glass House is exceptional and the story deeply compelling; where you are shown the dramatic and breathtaking quality of the glass room so too do you experience a narrative that parallels it. The house is imbued with a past full of love and lust and witnesses the best and worst of Eastern European history and stands as testimony to endurance. The personal stories are engrossing but it is the story of the house that is awe-inspiring. If I can draw a crude comparison: Sarah Waters’ personified Hundreds Hall, home to the Ayres family, in the Booker shortlisted The Little Stranger pales in comparison to the wonder that is the Landauer House.

Beautifully written and rendered, The Glass House sustains a leitmotif throughout of light, balance and space. I found it engrossing from the opening pages and was immersed in the lives of Viktor and Liesel, a Jew and a Gentile, and most of all of Liesel’s close friend, Hana, who is a remarkabe character. I was wowed by this novel, its content and style, and thoroughly rewarded.

Some favourite passages (I didn’t take note of many as I almost loved them all):

The house grew, the baby grew. The latter was a strange and rapid metamorphosis, punctuated by events of moment: the grasp of her hands, the focus of her eyes, her first smile, her recognition of Liesel and Viktor, the first time she raised herself on her hands, the first laugh. The growth of the house was more measured: the laying of steel beams, the pouring of concrete, the encapsulating of space. And ten delay, problems with materials and the workforce, argument and frustration stretching over the summer and the autumn before things were resolved.

How do you dismember a body? There are two fundamentally different approaches – that of the surgeon and that of the mad axeman. The one is cool and calculating and progressive, with the application of bone-saw, scalpel and shears. The other is a frenzy of hacking and tearing, with blood everywhere and the taste of iron in the mouth. But whichever way you do it the result is the same – dismemberment.

How to Paint a Dead Man

Paperback Reader — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:01:00 +0000

This is my seventh review of the thirteen longlisted titles for this year’s Man Booker Prize. The shortlist is announced tomorrow and as I am only just over halfway through reviewing them (by design, intending to read them all by Awards night on October 6th) I am unable to make an informed decision as to which six titles will feature. I do, however, have favourites that I hope make the cut: The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, Heliopolis by James Scudamore, and the latest I’ve read, How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall.

Divided into four distinct and apparently disparate narratives, How to Paint a Dead Man is deftly structured. It is not plot-driven, by any means, but is an exceptionally well-written and compelling meditation on art and its relation to life and death. The first narrative strain, “The Mirror Crisis”, is set in present-day London and written in the second-person with the narrator, Susan, referring to herself as “you”, which at once includes the reader and distances the character from dark events. Susan is an artist and a curator of art exhibitions and her twin brother, Danny, has recently died; in her grief she loses herself in a torrid affair with her married work colleague. Hall says of this narrative, “I wanted a clear perspective/sound/identifier for each of the four voices. The second person is the most unusual device to employ in novel-writing, but I really liked using it: that imperative inclusiveness asks the reader to think and respond slightly differently, and in this instance it seemed perfect for Susan’s story of dislocation and intimate confession.” This was the section I liked best, both in narrative structure and dark content. The raw emotion and striking literary style had me gripped from the open paragraph.

The second narrative, “Translated from the Bottle Journals”, takes place in Italy in the early 1960s and is told in the first-person. Giorgio, an isolated artist, is dying and contemplates the events in his life that have distanced him from people -strangers and acquaintances- over the years.

“The Fool on the Hill” in the third-person relates the story of Peter Caldicutt, an artist in Cumbria, thirty years after Giorgio’s death, who becomes trapped in the Northern terrain, ironically the subject of his art and his fame. Peter wrote to Giorgio, the Italian artist and recluse, as a younger man and is also the father of Susan.

The fourth and final alternating narrative is “The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni”, which is also told in the third-person narrative; the latter two narratives are the ones I was engrossed in least, perhaps due to that authorial distance. Annette is a blind girl and was a student of Giorgio; she is an artist in her own right, a flower arranger, and her story is the most spiritual, religious, and surreal.

There is a very thin connection between the four narratives: Giorgio is connected to Peter and Annette; Peter to Giorgio and Susan; all four characters are artists and each narrative concerns a defining moment in their existence.

Whilst reading this, my seventh of the Booker longlist, I was struck by a similarly loose connection and cohesion to the nominees. Peter Caldicutt calls to mind Jake, the architect and protagonist with Alzheimer’s in The Wilderness; Hall strongly writes two male characters, and Harvey creates Jake; Scudamore also has a memorable male narrator in Heliopolis and Sarah Waters creates her first in Dr Faraday. There are also, of course, the memorable alpha Cheeta and the character John Ceotzee, J. M. Coetzee’s fictioneer. Perhaps coincidental but there is apparently a common theme of maleness amongst this year’s choices. Whatever their similarities, I foresee How to Paint a Dead Man making it to the shortlist tomorrow.

The funny thing is, you’ve been thinking so long and hard about death that you’ve lost sight of its fraternal twin, its obverse pole. This is the prerogative of grief you suppose. There have been times you’ve not realised you were crying, until you put your hand to your face and it came away wet, until you noticed that someone was looking at you curiously, the concerned stranger on the train, or the woman in the supermarket who offered you a tissue. You have been so consumed that you’ve almost forgotten about the other side, the affirmation, the positive stroke. Life.

In these preparatory passages there is also a section on how to paint a dead man. I have often wondered if the condition of death is perhaps less grave to the human anatomy than physical injuries. For in death there is release from suffering. Sadly, the master craftsman is unable to instruct us in the healing of wounds.