My Books

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes has written some of my favourite novels over the last couple of decades (Flaubert’s Parrot, Metroland, Talking it Over, Love etc, Before She Met Me …) and his latest, which won the Man Booker prize for 2011, was no exception.

What do we remember about the key relationships in our lives as we get older? This is the question that comes to preoccupy the main character in The Sense of an Ending. Tony Webster is in retirement, nearing the end of a life he considers unremarkable but pretty satisfactory.  In the early stages of the book, he chronicles this life with the rather tidy explanations of key events that most of us tend to rely on in summing up our lives.

Tony’s watershed moment comes when he receives an unexpected bequest that includes the personal diary of an old friend who died young many years before. From this point, it becomes apparent to both him and the reader that he is an unreliable narrator. Delving back into events, he is forced to re-interpret his past and question truths he held which now appear to have been built on illusory grounds. Successive ‘understandings’ giving way to newer ones as they are proved inaccurate too. In the process, Tony discovers that “as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or what you have been.”

The book’s unsettling message is that we only partially understand our own life stories; as Barnes’s character is confronted with the unreliability of personal memories, he reflects that “the history that happens under our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent”.

Esther Freud

Lucky Break

Esther Freud's stories seem to draw one in gently - not page-turners that hook you right in from the beginning, but gradually working their way right into your affections. Lucky Break, published this year, is just like this. 

It recounts the diverging paths and fortunes of a group of actors who first meet as students at a drama college in London. From nervous, hopeful young first years being inducted into Stanislavsky, method acting, and a brutal, often arbitrary weeding out of talent, we follow the unpredictable course of their careers over a decade and a half. The highs and lows ... first night elation, disastrous castings, unscrupulous agents, the mechanics of sex scenes, demoralising periods of waitressing in Pizza Express or playing a penguin for four-year-olds, and the rare lucky breaks that lead to A-list success ... are all narrated with an authentic, unsentimental touch and often pitch-perfect observation. In one of my favourite quotes, "There had been blood, foundation and some hysteria."

The authenticity must derive partly from personal experience: Freud herself attended drama school in London and acted early on in her adult life before turning to writing, and she is married to actor David Morrissey (State of Play, The Deal, Sense and Sensibility). In any case, this is an engaging read with some surprising outcomes in the lives of her characters, proving the fickle nature of fortunes in the acting world.

Justin Cartwright

Other Peoples' Money

With the recent banking crisis and financial meltdown at the heart of this story, it centres on the declining fortunes of the Trevelyan-Tubals, an upper class English private banking family, whose wealth is in jeopardy. Its elderly patriarch, Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, is dying in his Matisse-filled Cap d’Antibes mansion, unaware of the crisis and the increasingly desperate measures being taken by his son Julian, his reluctant successor, to save the family from disaster.

Into this scenario Cartwright weaves a colourful, rich cast of characters. He conveys the world of privilege, private yachts and trust funds as vividly as that of those with no money – the latter most memorably in the shape of  ageing playwright and thespian Artair MacCleod, working on his magnum opus and reduced to consuming leaky pasties while eking out a living staging productions of Thomas the Tank Engine for ‘little, obese, pig-faced kiddies of Cornwall’.

There are some great female characters too – including the dying patriarch’s much-younger, attractive wife Fleur, cavorting semi-guiltily with her personal trainer in in a broom cupboard at the local gym while reflecting on her vulnerable future position in the family, and the twenty-something cub reporter Melissa, who is on her first job at a parochial Cornish newspaper and shifting uncertainly from blogging about cupcakes to becoming caught up in a story of national importance. I thought Cartwright treated them all with empathy and intelligence, avoiding clichés, and found interesting observations about random aspects of contemporary life on almost every page.

He also conveys very well the tension of looming financial disaster, though (thankfully) without boring us with the technicalities of the process – (unlike Sebastian Faulks who also used this as a theme in A Week in December but with pages of detailed and mind-numbing explanations of sub primes, hedge funds and collateral debt). An engaging plot intertwines the affairs of all these characters in what is really a comic, satirical novel – intelligent and also highly readable. And as a wee bonus, the novel signs off with a final page that is wildly improbable, but at the same time sweet and funny, and made me laugh out loud.

Verdict: 

His earlier novels were hit and miss for me, but Justin Cartwright just seems to be getting better and better. Don’t miss The Promise of Happiness and To Heaven by Water.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go

It’s difficult to review this book without revealing any plot-spoilers, but I do my best here, despite the fact that many will have either read it already (it was published in 2005 and nominated for the Booker prize in that year) or seen the film, released last month, with Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan. I confess to never having read Ishiguro (despite having loved the film version of his Remains of the Day with Anthony Hopkins), so when my younger daughter passed the book on to me, I was curious to find out what I’d been missing.

Ishiguro’s story is set in an alternative, possible England of the 1990s – an England which is familiar and recognisable, but at the same time puzzlingly different. Ruth, Tommy and Kathy are a trio of friends at a rural boarding school, and their story is told retrospectively by Kathy, now in her early 30s. Her narration is understated - a series of small, ordinary incidents of school life, of psychological shifts in friendships and relationships between the pupils and staff – so that it takes a while for the reader, as for the narrator, as she describes their slowly developing awareness, to figure out that their lives are far from ordinary. Ishiguro’s trick is to offer small pieces of the puzzle at a time, in a way that makes the reader impatient to find out more: with each (partial) answer, more questions are raised.

By the end of the book we understand all, and we understand, too, how plausibly this scenario might develop. It is desperately sad; the characters, for all their flaws, become people we really care about. And this, really, is the point of the story: in Ishiguro’s hands this is not the lurid sci-fi mystery that the plot might have suggested to a less skilled writer; it is a book about humaneness and the exploitation of people, and what it really means to be human.

After finishing it, I was surprised, to say the least, to read, in an interview with Ishiguro, that he considers Never Let Me Go to be his “most cheerful book to date”! His explanation made sense, however, and helped me understand what he was trying to achieve: “There are bleak things in it. We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong. It’s not my view of life that it’s peopled by savages, that all people want is money and to kill each other.” (London Evening Standard, 3 Feb, 2011)

Now I need to get my hands on the film, and start reading some more of his books …

Howard Jacobson

The Finkler Question

The winner of last year’s (2010) Man Booker prize, this novel is essentially an exploration of what it means to be Jewish, from the differing perspectives of three ageing men friends. One, the elderly, melancholic Libor, is comfortable with his Jewishness; the second, Finkler, a popular ‘media philosopher’, aligns himself with an organization of “Ashamed Jews” who denounce the actions of the state of Israel, and the third, Treslove (a former BBC producer and the only non-Jew), is obsessed with becoming Jewish himself.

Most of the story unfolds in the form of conversations between the three friends, with Treslove’s fascinated attempts to understand all things Jewish (for him ‘Finkler’ is synonymous with ‘Jewish’, hence the title) serving as a convenient device for exploring different, often conflicting, versions of Jewish identity.  At the same time we are given random glimpses into each man’s relationships with the women in their lives, past and present, as well as insights into the nature of male friendships.

Despite appreciating Jacobson’s sharp and often funny observations on all these things, I confess to a persistent, mild ennui while reading this book. Perhaps this was partly because of the somewhat ridiculous manner in which Treslove’s obsession with ‘Finklerishness’ plays itself out and partly because the females in the story are presented one-sidedly through the lens of the male characters, hence never fleshed out. Whatever the reason, I read it with a sort of detached admiration for the writer’s craft, but without ever feeling properly engaged with either characters or plot.

Damon Galgut

In A Strange Room

Deservedly shortlisted for the 2010 Booker prize, this is South African writer Damon Galgut’s latest, and he seems to be getting ever more interesting as a writer. His previous two novels - The Good Doctor (also shortlisted for the Booker and winner of two other prestigious awards) and The Imposter – both had protagonists with same quality of inner loneliness and dislocation, reflected in the remote landscapes they inhabited, and this same sense of alienation comes through in this story, except that the protagonist here is Galgut himself, and the landscapes he inhabits are constantly changing as he travels restlessly and often aimlessly.

The book recounts three different episodes from his life, each involving a journey undertaken in different circumstances, in different parts of the world – Greece, central Africa and India. Each exposes a complex relationship with his travelling companions (some of his own choosing and some whom he meets by chance). These are explored in terms of his own central role in relation to these companions: he is, alternately, the Follower, the Lover, and the Guardian (the ties that bind being, respectively, ones of unequal power, of love/desire, and of responsibility for another). The unifying theme of these separate journeys is thus the nature of intimate relationships between “lives joined together for a little while and then unjoined again." Thrown together in ‘strange rooms’ and in often difficult circumstances, his characters face one another with the particular intensity of feeling that travel to foreign places can confer on our relationships with others.

 There is a great deal of sadness in these stories. Galgut’s sense of dislocation is palpable (he describes himself at one point as “unweighted and centreless, so that he feels he could blow away at any time”, while at another, “emptiness weighing him down like a black suitcase chained to his wrist”) and he is almost brutally honest in his judgement of himself. Yet rather remarkably, what emerges most strongly despite this is his sense of humanity and compassion.

This book is beautifully written – the style is spare, deceptively simple with never a word out of place. I found myself re-reading passages just for the pleasure of their words, then ear-marking the pages. It is also immensely readable (the final, most powerful story, The Guardian, is in fact compelling reading).

Verdict: a haunting and memorable read

John le Carré

Our Kind of Traitor

John le Carré’s novels, particularly his most recent ones, follow a now-familiar theme: essentially good, decent, perhaps somewhat naïve, individuals find themselves drawn into a web of intrigue and espionage involving major and powerful players; they do their utmost, despite great personal risk, to see that justice and fairness prevail; and finally, they are brutally betrayed by the power and self-interest of multi-national corporations or corrupt governments. He played this theme brilliantly, with two very different kinds of plots, in his previous two novels, Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man. Our Kind of Traitor follows the same pattern, which is why we are set up to understand from the beginning that it must end badly. But this is only part of the problem with this book …

Perry Makepiece, an Oxford English lecturer and his barrister girlfriend Gail, encounter a charismatic Russian money-launderer while on holiday in Antigua, and are drawn in as intermediaries in a trade-off deal between him and British intelligence. The action moves between Antigua, London and Switzerland as a web of corruption unfolds, involving senior British politicians and bankers and Russian gangster-capitalists. As always with Le Carré, his characters completely draw one in, so that we too feel empathy for his complex and charming master criminal and understand (well, sort of) how the decent, idealistic Perry feels compelled to help him in his quest for asylum in Britain. He is also brilliant as ever at conjuring the world of intelligence agents and their psychological make-up (A Perfect Spy being his all-time masterpiece portrayal of the spy’s psyche), and the best passages of this book are the scenes where he describes the complex minutiae of secret agents and their targets in action. Unfortunately there is too little of this  action to sustain narrative tension throughout the book; instead there are long stretches in which Perry and Gail recount retrospectively (and slightly boringly) their encounters to their handlers. In short, it takes (unusually) a long time before one is hooked into the story, and once in, there is a sense that le Carré is (unusually, again) either not fully in control of the plot or ran out of steam somewhat with this one.

Verdict: Second-tier le Carré , though still much to enjoy.

José Saramago

Seeing

What happens when the citizens of a country decide, en masse, to exercise their democratic right to turn in blank votes in a general election? This is what happens in the opening chapter of Seeing. The residents of Saramago’s nameless capital city do not abstain from voting or spoil their ballot papers; rather, they queue up in record numbers at polling stations in order to submit votes that they have left blank, thus rendering the existing government (symbolically, at least) powerless, without a mandate to either continue or be replaced by another party. An alarmed president, prime minister and cabinet suspect a conspiracy, an anarchic plot, and respond with increasingly desperate, repressive measures. But is the point being made by the blank voters simply that the choices on offer (a generic party-on-the-right, party-on-the-left and party-in-the-middle) are just not worth making?

Seeing is a sequel to Saramago’s Nobel prize-winning Blindness; it is an intriguing and subversive exploration of notions of blindness and clear-sightedness in relation to modern Western democracies. In accepting his Nobel prize for Blindness, Saramago suggested that “human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world … the universal lie has replaced plural truths”. Clearly, the hypothetical political leaders in Seeing are the universal liars who have rendered the electoral process meaningless.

The translation I read was by Margaret Jull Costa, recommended to me by one of my graduate students who has experience himself of Portuguese-English translating. Saramago’s writing style takes some getting used to, however: extremely long, run-on sentences using commas rather than full stops; no quotation marks or line spacing for dialogue; characters have no names, only roles (the doctor’s wife, the minister of the interior). One has to resist the urge to read quickly; his prose style forces the eye to read slowly and once you do that you appreciate the sense and irony, of which there is plenty.

Verdict: Not an easy read, but intriguing and rewarding.

Rose Tremain
Trespass

Rose Tremain is one of my favourite authors and, though her books rarely if ever disappoint, some have stood out as being amongst my best reads ever: Restoration, Music & Silence, The Colour, and her last but one novel, The Road Home. Trespass doesn’t quite make it, for me, into the outstanding category, but it is an engaging and absorbing story nonetheless, by one of the best living novelists around.

As in The Road Home (a brilliant portrayal of an Eastern European immigrant’s attempts to adjust to London), the theme of being an outsider in one’s adopted country is foregrounded. In this case the setting is southern France (the Cévennes) and the tension is between the English middle class dream of buying an escape to the French countryside versus the sense of ownership that comes from the inhabitants’ deep-rooted connection to the land. An ageing London antiques dealer, Anthony Verey, is driven by failing fortune, loneliness and fear of old age to follow his sister to the Cévennes, where she is living out the French dream and a late-life love affair with an ungifted and insecure woman painter. Apparently ignoring the uneasy relationship the two women have with the local inhabitants and their difficult path to acceptance in the community, Verey sets his heart on a decrepit but potentially splendid property. It is owned by another sibling pair: the violent alcoholic Aramon and his vulnerable sister Audron who harbours dark secrets from war-time occupied France and is not only fiercely attached to her land but biding her time for revenge.

As you may have gathered, this is no Peter Mayle-style rural idyll; as one reviewer put it, this book puts the terror into terroir! The story is dark and from the foreboding opening pages the reader is put in no doubt that the outcome will not be of the happy-ever-after variety. Tremain captures perfectly the deep loneliness of each character, making us feel for even the ones that are overtly unlikeable, and thoughtfully explores the territory of both physical and emotional trespass.

Verdict: An entirely engrossing, if unsettling, read.

Kate Atkinson

Started Early, Took My Dog

Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth in Kate Atkinson's series (following Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?) involving private investigator Jackson Brodie. How happy I was to see this come out - she'd come pretty close to killing Jackson off in the previous novel, and I was afraid she'd got tired of him. In even better news, I hear the Brodie series is being adapted for TV and will be appearing on BBC One next year.

Jackson Brodie is enigmatic and full of contradictions: a man's man (ex-army, Special Forces and police) who loves Emily Dickinson's poetry and is haunted (in this book, especially) by the voices of his ex-wives and lovers. ('Unlucky in love' would be an understatement for this man's romantic history). Behind these women, though, is the first, primal, loss - his beloved older sister, whose unresolved murder when Jackson was a boy remains both his personal 'grail' and the spectre in his relationships.

Lost lives, the vulnerability of both women and the elderly in a harshly-judging society, and the unforgiving cycle of disadvantage and poverty are all themes in Started Early, Took My Dog. And this is what makes it impossible to categorise the Jackson Brodie series as mere 'crime novels'. Remember that this is the author who beat Salman Rushdie to the Whitbread prize with her very first novel in 1995. Her writing is beautifully fluid, her dialogue is authentic, and she knows her territory: this is not just the Britain of historic abbeys and National Trust estates (though these do feature); it's also the Britain of soulless shopping malls, housing estates and failed expectations. Reading this book is rather like watching re-runs of Prime Suspect (littered with violent deaths, sexist and corrupt coppers, gritty realities), only with an additional large dose of compassion and a bit more humour.

The plot, centred on a long-ago murder and a lost identity, is complex (pay attention!) and weaves back and forth in time. On the way we're rewarded with a rich cast of characters; each role, however small, an absorbing vignette. It seems to me a measure of Atkinson's skill that even an almost-mute four-year-old girl and a dog are fully developed and engaging characters. In the end, the mystery is resolved, though, as in life, not all the ends are neatly tied up. And does lovable, prickly Jackson Brodie find the lasting love that we loyal readers all so desperately wish for him by now?  I won't say, but I can reveal that he is bonding very touchingly with a rescued dog.

Verdict: Loved this; read the previous three if you haven't already; more, please.

Sebastian Faulks
A Week in December

Set in London in the course of one week in December 2007, this novel is essentially Faulks’s (not very pretty) commentary on the state of contemporary Britain.

His large cast of characters is intended, ambitiously, to represent a wide cross section of this society. There is an unscrupulous hedge fund manager intent on amassing an even more sizeable personal fortune by bringing about the collapse of a large bank; meanwhile his neglected teenage son is on the brink of a psychotic episode brought on by experiments with skunk. There’s an affable Asian chutney and pickle magnate about to be awarded an OBE by the Queen, while his disaffected son is becoming enmeshed in a radical Islamist terror cell. There are wealthy Tories obsessed with class and political ambition, an Eastern European Premier League footballer with a centrefold girlfriend and a taste for the high life, a bitter and vicious literary critic filled with envy and contempt for writers more successful than himself, an impecunious and virtuous barrister who hankers for a return to decent education and values in Britain, and a young female tube driver who cruises the Circle line underground by day and by night enacts a life in virtual reality as a character in a computer game.

Two main plots are developed which interconnect the lives of these people: a build-up to the global financial crisis, and a planned terrorist bombing. We all know how the first of these panned out, so this one is interesting chiefly to those who appreciate technical details of financial shenanigans (and Faulks provides way too much of this for my taste). The second does at least allow for some build-up of narrative tension; I won’t reveal how this ends, but I will say that while Faulks gives a surprisingly superficial, disparaging assessment of the teachings of the Q’ran, he does at least avoid simplistic assumptions by making the young radical a rounded and sympathetic character; clearly he is not the bad guy in the piece – that role is assigned to the amoral financier. Faulks’ point seems to be, with so many of his characters inhabiting a disconnected, self-interested and increasingly virtual world (the teenage druggie obsessed with reality TV and fantasy soccer, the tube driver living out online role play, the fund manager manipulating vast sums of money in cyberspace) it’s no wonder that young Hassan looks elsewhere to find value or purpose in life.

For me this was a patchy book – thought provoking, even compelling in parts, slow-moving and tedious in others. I keep hoping Sebastian Faulks will produce something as brilliant and moving as Birdsong; unfortunately he hasn’t done this  (for me, at least) yet.

Verdict: Worth a read, but didn’t really sustain either plot interest or engagement with characters.

Barbara Trapido

Sex and Stravinsky

This is another author whose books I have never missed, since her first, Brother of the More Famous Jack, which I read in my twenties and which remains one of my favourite novels of all time.  Trapido’s stories often have Shakespearian comedic plots and are laced through with references to operatic and ballet scores. Sex and Stravinsky is no exception; the theme is Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and the story, despite its very modern characters, is like a series of commedia dell’arte scenarios with masked characters; the plot romps along with mismatched partners, mysterious paternity, separated twins and unreal coincidences. The result is that a certain suspension of realism is required, but the beauty of Trapido is that she sweeps you along happily despite this, because of the lightness of her touch, her whimsical, humorous descriptions and wonderfully drawn characters. Most memorable for me was the monstrously selfish mother (her long-suffering daughter’s ultimate revenge on her being one of the funniest scenes of many in the book) and the nightmare school French Exchange whose one redeeming feature is the shy ballet-dancing French teenage boy who describes himself in dictionary-translated English as a „tall, merry fellow“. The action shifts between the suburbs of Oxford, South Africa (with a memorable cast of domestic servants, imperialist English types, virile carnivorous Afrikaner men and Jewish intellectual activists) and the music and art culture of Senegal, with never a dull moment.

Verdict: All plot contrivances are forgiven in this entertaining, funny and satisfying read.

Tom Rachman
The Imperfectionists

This is a first novel and already something of a success: published in ten countries and (so I hear) the film rights snapped up by Brad Pitt.

The story centres on an English-language daily newspaper published in Rome - once modestly successful with a reputation for serious journalism, but now in jeopardy, unable to keep pace with the internet and 24-hour news channels. It is constructed as a series of character vignettes, each chapter about a particular employee, from hapless lowly copy editor to the hard-bitten female editor in chief.

The real success of this book lies in the way Rachman fleshes out these characters, whose personal lives are bound up with the declining fortunes of the paper. Some of the most memorable include chubby, pedantic and insecure Herman Cohen, the corrections editor who spends his days terrorising his staff over linguistic errors and firing off biting directives on word usage that make hilarious reading, while quietly coming to the surprising realisation that he has in fact been blessed with a happy life. There is the cringe-worthy foreign correspondent, Rich Snyder, expert free-loader and ace bullshitter who claims to have met Osama Bin Laden “Back in Tora Bora. Good times”, wears combat pants and says things like “Dude, lets commit some journalism”. And maybe the most poignant character, the strange and lonely Ornella de Monterecchi who since 1976 has been obsessively reading each issue of the paper, in sequence, from cover to cover, since 1976. Refusing to engage with  the present, she remains in a time warp, the date in her world currently April 23, 1994. Rachman really succeeds in revealing the inner desires, fears and pain of his characters, while also managing some moments of pure comedy.

Each person’s story stands alone, each involving a moment of discovery and occasionally a Roald Dahl-type chilling twist at the end. Each is a delight to read, but it is the weakness of the book that the connections between their stories are flimsy, so that one ends with something like a cast of great characters without a real plot; a short story collection trying to be a novel and not quite succeeding.

Verdict: not sure how it works as a novel, but a highly entertaining read.

Maggie O’Farrell
The Hand That First Held Mine

This is Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth book. I’ve read them all and loved every one – a rare thing to be able to say.

Her talent is for exploring the psychological territory of relationships - family secrets (After You’d Gone), sexual jealousy and ambivalence (My Lover’s Lover), sibling bonds (The Distance Between Us), identity and madness (The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox).

What I love about her stories is that she is never, ever sentimental or heavy handed – she writes sparingly and intelligently with a light but devastatingly perceptive touch.

In The Hand that First Held Mine, two stories are interwoven: one, set in post-war London, features possibly her most memorable character yet, Lexie Sinclair, who has escaped a stifling rural background to make a life for herself among artists and writers in bohemian 1950s Soho; the other, set in present-day London, features a young woman struggling to recover from the traumatic birth of a child while her partner undergoes a confusing and difficult process of reconstructing memories of his own earliest childhood. The parallel stories are gradually woven together, the plots connected, the gaps filled with a nice handling of tension.

This book is also one of the most intense, acutely perceptive portrayals of motherhood and the bonds between mother and child that I have ever read. Her ability to get inside the smallest sensory details of ordinary, everyday experiences reminds me of Ian McEwans’s talent for doing just that (except that O’Farrell manages with many fewer words!).

Verdict: This is one of my best reads of the year.