False Azure

I recently faced a flight out of a small airport while ill and with no unread book to make the minutes speed up. The airport bookshop was disappointingly stocked, and I struggled to find anything that wouldn't instill in me such an urgent desire to throw it through a window as to make me constitute a security hazard. In the end, I picked up The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho, despite the clear warnings from celebrities on the cover and introduction, claiming the book had changed their lives.

I should have heeded the warnings.

The book seemed to me to be childish rather than direct, irritatingly shallow in its message and based on a deeply unpleasant view of the way the universe works. Only someone who believes human beings are the most important creatures in existence could possibly find this book attractive.

At least it was short. And made the free newspaper given out by the air hostess seem a more engaging proposition.

I'm now in the middle of reading Gormenghast for the first time and, unsually for me, I'm taking it very slowly so that I don't miss a thing. It's the perfect antidote to The Alchemist. Thank goodness for books with murky underbellies and disturbing half-glimpsed undercurrents and great blinding flashes of glory.

It has been a long time since I was grabbed by the beginning of a book as much as I was by the first chapters of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The creaky, dark-textured version of Oxford, so near and yet so far, the sparkish characters with their wonderfully blurred moral compasses, the mad science, the high politics -- and, best of all, the daemons, so mysterious and puzzling and perfect, setting us firmly down in a world where 'ae' is still defiant and well. I loved it all.

I flagged a little over the course of the first book. For the most part, the writing style is clean and strong and no-nonsense, but in places I felt Pullman easing back in the face of his younger audience. And on occasions, the character of Lyra takes an annoying Enid Blyton turn. But the story as a whole drove me on, taking ever more audacious leaps away from fantasy clichés and into questions of strikingly topical relevance.

I also loved the grey shades and downright murky shades of the characters. Not for this world, the cheery/scowly stereotypes who fall neatly into their prescribed courses. Mrs Coulter, in particular, was like a breath of pure air to me, after having suffered through the five Harry Potter films, with their cloying insistence on the power of motherly (/god-fatherly/friendly/professorly) love as the magic ingredient that separates good from bad. (Note that this is a comment on the HP films, not the books. I read the first, because a copy came into my hands, and have not read any of the others merely because there are so many wonderful books and so little time.)

So, onto the second book, The Amber Spyglass, and another cracking beginning. The way Pullman gradually deepens and shifts the jeopardy throughout the first couple of chapters of this book should make them required reading for any writer wishing to understand how to follow through after obeying the instruction to start in media res. I was also impressed with the drawing of Will's character, much more subtle and interesting than Lyra. He could so easily have become a prig, another Enid Blyton stolid little chap. But Pullman gives him such depths of heart under his brittle exterior, it is impossible not to love him.

I flagged a little more over the course of this book. The science and the mysteries that have been hinted at become a little more corporeal in this book, and not always very convincingly. I could not at all believe in the scientist-nun; that is to say, I could believe in her as a nun, but not to the least degree as a scientist. The sentient particles were disappointing ... I had hoped for something grander. And the continual changes of viewpoint weakened the narrative drive for me. I was continually being whisked away from the big events to learn about some character I didn't much care for. But I was still hooked, still desperate to learn quite how far Pullman would push his premise.

I had to wait about six weeks to read the next book, through a combination of trivial but maddening circumstances. During this period of torture, I had several times to walk past perfectly good copies of the book in the local supermarket, because the copy I had purchased was waiting for me in an inaccessible location!

It came, at last, and I dived in. And then I read the last half of the book, and felt ready to go and bury my copy in a compost heap. What a disappointment! All the boldness of the earlier chapters had vanished, and in its place we had clunky moralising of exactly the kind that the rest of the trilogy had set its face so resolutely against. Mrs Coulter turns to the light and sacrifices herself for Lyra in a sudden fit of motherly passion. Satan (or as close as we come) is defeated by being dragged down a very big hole. The scientist-nun's response to her best chance to study the sentient particles is to have an out-of-body experience. And then, the indigenous wheeled race of one world are given an almighty slap in the face when the love of two proto-adolescents manages to do what centuries of devotion and affection amongst them could not achieve. Only human love is of interest to the sentient particles, apparently.

This last part of the plot was a particular disappointment. Throughout the trilogy, hints had been dropped that Lyra was destined to be the next Eve. Most intriguing. I spent quite a lot of the inter-book weeks speculating on what this might involve. I quickly ruled out the idea that Lyra's role was to have sex. That had never been part of Eve's particular transgression, viewed in this trilogy not as a sin but as an awakening of human consciousness. So, Lyra's task was to do something much more interesting ... to bring us to a new level of knowledge and awareness, perhaps? Something bold and fresh and satisfying, no doubt.

But no ... Lyra's great task is to be a teenager in love. It's not quite clear how far she is expected to go on her first date in order to tempt those voyeuristic sentient particles back to earth. Pullman's prose at this point because vague and evasive, breathless and embarrassed -- the textual equivalent of the camera pan up to the roses blooming on the bush -- though this may have been at the insistence of his publishers of course. Whatever the reason, it's not clear what actually happens and, more importantly, it is far from clear why it all happens.

As if this wasn't all tear-making enough, at the very end the entire message of the trilogy (that we should distrust authorities telling us what is good and bad, and what we can and cannot do) is negated when Will and Lyra calmly accept some rather ludicrous constraints on their behaviour because they have been told so. But, they have been told so by the good guys, and they are always so easy to spot, right? So that's alright, then. They tearfully obey. To make matters worse, this constraint seems only to be part of the story because Pullman wanted to ram home the message that people should try to be content in their own worlds, rather than yearning after paradises that may not exist. Well, it's a fair enough point but was it really worth sacrificing the whole intellectual drive of the book to include it?

Overall, I'm glad I read the trilogy. There is a lot to admire and I was pulled deep into the cosmos that Pullman envisages. The book also made me think -- even at the hair-pulling end -- which is always something to be thankful for. But oh I do weep for the book it could have been without that awful ending.

I acquired my first Carol Shields novel from a special offer on a cereal packet. It was a pretty good deal. I munched my way through several bowls of bran fibre flakes over the course of a week, as per usual, and in return I got a free book. Unless, it was called -- a wonderful title by itself, but one which also connected neatly with the structure of the book. Each chapter title was a single word: despite, instead, yet, unless -- all adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions, the workaday glue words that add subtlety and expressive power to otherwise blustery noun and verb phrases. Since the novel was also largely concerned with the changing state of mind of the main character, as she deals with the problems of her children and her own life, the different chapter title words also helped to set the mood for each chapter - the tone of the internal interrogation that was its subject. It was ingenious. It took me several chapters to spot that something was going on at the level of the chapter headings, and a few more to really work the pattern out. Often, this kind of intellectual device, while being interesting in itself, comes at the expense of my involvement in the story world. But in this case, the sequence of questions and moods raised by the chapter headings added a whole extra level of tension and structure that really helped to keep me keyed in to what was happening to the narrator.

So, when I spotted a copy of another Shield's novel, Larry's Party, in a charity booksale, I made a grab for it, hoping it would turn out to be as much of a bargain as Unless.

Larry's Party is a slightly earlier book than Unless, and it was interesting to chart the similarities and differences, and how Shield's ideas had evolved. The earlier book tracks the life of an ordinary guy, who by a series of accidents (including the accident of his genes) manages to become a world famous authority on and designer of garden mazes. Unlike Unless, this is a book that wears its internal structuring very much on its sleeve. Each chapter covers a significant aspect of Larry's life at a certain age: his work, his love-life, his hair... The first chapter gives us a word picture of a naive, enthusiastic Larry just starting his working life (as a floral designer) and the last with a middle-aged, uncertain Larry throwing a party for his two ex-wives and several friends, and bringing his life full circle.

Larry is quite an engaging character, and I enjoyed the beginning of the book. But after a while, I found myself losing interest. Each chapter would begin with a narrative section describing Larry's attitude to something or other (other men called Larry, in one case, for example) and then we would get some information about how life had changed for Larry since the last vignette -- where he was, who he was with, what new maze projects he had lined up. The problem for me was that I didn't really get any driving sense of where it was all going, and Larry himself was not quite interesting enough to keep me engaged all by himself. I also found the final chapter somewhat anticlimactic. I couldn't connect it in to the rest of the book somehow. The journey through Larry's life prior to this last chapter had been "warts and all", life as a series of barely predictable ups and downs -- a little greyer than most of us would like to admit, with highs that only really become visible as such in hindsight. But the last chapter breaks off with Larry still apparently having a good couple of decades before him at least, and the clear intimation that the good times for Larry are finally rolling in. It's a resolutely sentimental happy ending of the most traditional form, and I still can't figure out where it came from. (Having seen Adaptation, a few more outlandish explanations for the change in style and approach do leap to mind, but I'll do all the search engines who read this blog a favour and keep them to myself.)

Larry's Party did share one other feature with Unless that I enjoyed. It seems that Carol Shields is one of a small number of authors whose writing has the effect of sending me repeatedly back into the world of my own characters -- not afterwards, when I've put the book down, but actually while reading. It's almost as if my brain likes some of the ideas in the writing, and can't wait to try them out on some of my own current problems. It's great when I find an idea that I can usefully steal, but it's a bit frustrating, too, if the book is good and I want to know what happens next.

Ali Smith's the accidental is one of those books that makes me feel like two separate people inhabiting the same brain. The writer-me found it intriguing and unusual, a wonderful lesson in tight third person viewpoint as well as in using multiple viewpoints on the same set of events to deepen and broaden a story, rather than as a mere authorial convenience. As a reader, though, it left me largely unmoved. Strangely, I'm not sure these two sets of views on the book are entirely contradictory.

The book centres around five main characters: Eve, a writer and mother; Michael, her ambitious academic husband; Astrid and Magnus, Eve's children by her first husband; and Amber, the catalytic stranger who drops into the middle of this troubled family while they are spending the summer in a rural holiday home. Each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a separate chapter, rotating through them in the same order as the book progresses. The family members are written in third-limited and roughly the same length; Amber's chapters are first person, and typically much shorter and far more ambiguous, functioning more like commentaries on the theme of the story than anything else.

With the third person chapters, Smith uses the narrative voice to bring us right into the heads of the characters... it's not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it's perhaps as near as can be got it without being irritating as hell. And each chapter has a very distinct voice. The characters all emerge as quite different but believable people within just a few swift sentences of the start of each chapter. I particularly liked Astrid's continual use of the phrase "typical and ironic", and even found myself saying it when something typical and ironic happened not long after I'd finished the book.

This is also a book where the structure, the underlying skeleton of the story, was made very visible and explicit, and it was interesting to watch the reaction of the reader-me to this. I found I was willing to go along with it, but really expected to get some big pay-off from it at the end. Since I didn't really get one (or missed it, if it was there), the explicit structure started to feel like authorial intrusion - it was rather strange to get that sense from chapter headings and choice of viewpoint, and so on, rather than from the story itself...

As a reader, my main problem with the book was that Amber is supposed to be very attractive and charismatic, but I just found her incredibly smug and irritating. She makes bold pronouncements, apparently based on a supernatural knowledge of the family members' history and thoughts, she interferes into the lives of the family members in quite grandiose ways, with a confidence that can only be explained by the fact that the author is continually bending down and whispering in her ear, "go on, it's alright, this is the right thing to do". The ending of the book tries to suggest that this confidence is born out of the emotional distance of being swept into the lives of strangers without the baggage of your history and past mistakes. But I don't buy that myself. Nor did I get much out of Amber's interlude chapters. They were fun to read, but they took me out of the story world, rather than adding a new dimension to it. I suppose they did serve the useful function of stopping me from trying to make Amber work as a real person in the story - but they didn't help me to think of her as anything more significant than a literary device.

It's entirely possible that I've completely missed the point that the book was trying to convey. (It is a book that works hard at having a point.) I certainly admired the writing, and it's a wonderful tutorial on deep third-person limited viewpoint. But, for me, the accidental remains very firmly in the territory of good book, but never makes it into the land of good story.

Some time ago, I gamboled my way through The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. This was the first book by the elder Amis that I've read and I really enjoyed it. The prose style was confident and a perfect complement to the story, it was laugh-out-loud funny in places, while being a real roller-coaster ride of tale, even though nothing much really happens. It's an "issue" book, in that a problem is presented at the start, and then the rest of the book takes the reader through a sequence of varying and highly contrasting viewpoints on the problem. But the setting and characters are so perfectly and entertainingly chosen that it doesn't feel anything like as dry as this sounds. It's the kind of book where you are continually turning the page, just to find out what the author is going to dare to do next.

That said, I was slightly disappointed by the ending, although I can't put my finger on why exactly. Maybe subliminally I was hoping for a happy ending, but I think I was also put off by the fact that the event that brings the ending about is a massive coincidence, albeit a very clever one that ties together a number of the themes set out by the book.

So what's it about? The book centres around a 10 year old chorister, Hubert, who has the singing voice of an angel and a prodigious musical talent to go with it. The story describes how Hubert and those around him wrestle (or, in some cases, fail to wrestle) with the question of whether his talent should be preserved by means of an "alteration" - surgical alteration, that is. The whole story is set in England in the 1970's but... well, perhaps the easiest way to explain is to give a quote from the very beginning of the book that gives the reader the first clues as to the setting for the story. (This is rather long but hang on in there... you won't pick up on all of the clues (I certainly didn't) but it will be worth the wait when you get there.)

Hubert Anvil's voice rose above the sound of the choir and full orchestra, reaching the vertex of the loftiest dome in the Old World and the western doors of the longest nave in Christendom. For this was the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas. That bright May afternoon it was as full as it had ever been in the three centuries since its consecration, and it would scarcely have held a more distinguished assembly at any time: the young King William V himself; the kings of Portugal, of Naples, of Sweden, of Lithuania and a dozen other realms; the Crown Prince of Muscovy and the Dauphin; the brother of the Emperor of Almaigne; the viceroys of India, New Spain and Brazil; the High Christian Delegate of the Sultan-Calif of Turkey; the Vicar-General of the Emperor Patriarch of Candia; the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of United England; no fewer than twelve cardinals, together with less pre-eminent clergy from all over the Catholic world--these and thousands besides had congregated for the laying to rest of His Most Devout Majesty, King Stephen III of England and her empire.

[...] A large number of those attending his Requiem Mass would have been moved as much by a sense of personal loss as by simple duty or the desire to assist at a great occasion. Just as many, perhaps, were put in awe by the size and richness of the setting. Apart from Wren's magnificent dome, the most reknowned of the sights to be seen was the vast Turner ceiling in commemoration of the Holy Victory, the fruit of four and a half years' virtually uninterrupted work; there was nothing like it anywhere. The western window by Gainsborough, beginning to blaze now as the sun first caught it, showed the birth of St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, at Colchester. [...]Holman Hunt's oil-painting of the martyrdom of St George was less celebrated for its merits than for the tale of the artist's journey to Palestine in the hope of securing authenticity for his setting; and one of the latest additions, the Ecce Homo mosaic by David Hockney, had attracted downright adverse criticism for its excessively traditionalist, almost archaizing style. But only admiration had ever attended--to take a diverse selection--the William Morris spandrels on the transept arches, the unique chryselephantine pyx, the gift of an archbishop of Zululand, above the high altar, and Epstone's massive marble Pieta.

To few but the tone-deaf, the music must have been far more immediate than any or all of these objects: Mozart's Second Requiem (K.878), the crown of his middle age and perhaps of all his choral work. Singers and musicians had just entered upon the Agnus Dei. There was a story about this too, that it had been written out of the composer's grief at the untimely death of an esteemed and much beloved contemporary [...].

These first paragraphs set the tone for the rest of the book. The setting is England in the latter half of the 20th century, but not our 20th century. England (never referred to as Britain, though the exact history is not made clear) is a devoutly Catholic country, at the heart of a devoutly Catholic Europe. In this world, electricity and science are adjured as being evil, and an entire alternative technology based on gas power has arisen, allowing trains to travel from London to Rome in just 7 hours (over the magnificent new Channel Bridge). Martin Luther was persuaded back into the fold and became a high ranking catholic. The great enemy is the Turkish Empire and wars are still being fought over possession of Constantinople. To top it all, the Pope is a tone-deaf Yorkshire man.

The alternative reality is close enough to our own, with so many names that are recognisable, that a big part of the fun of the book is to see what strange changes the different path of history has made to these familiar figures. But it's also beautifully written and thought-provoking. I enjoyed it very much.

Looking over the books I've read in the past year, there have been several that did little for me, but only two that made me gnash my teeth in frustration at the wasted time I'd bestowed on them. (I may be in the middle of reading a third that comes into this category, but I'll save that for a future post.)

One of these was High Society, by Ben Elton. I got this free by collecting coupons from cereal packets, so probably shouldn't have expected too much. But I was caught out by the hammy dialogue and clumsy plotting and deeply unfunny writing, coming from half of the writing team behind Blackadder. It is supposed to be an expose of the drugs situation in the UK, but it read like a ham-fisted attack on nasty middle-class middle-Britain. All of the characters were lying, manipulative and dislikeable, except for two chirpy and hard-done-by working-class characters, who strove hard in difficult situations but came through in the end due to the depth of their working-class sincerety and all-round chirpiness. One of them is even a "prostitute with a heart of gold". Blegh! I'm as happy as the next person to have a laugh at the middle classes, but this level of stereotyping is just sick-making.

The other dud was Naked in Death, by J.D. Robb, a book so memorable that I had to go and look the title up on the internet so that I could type its name in here. Actually, that's not fair ... I do remember a bit more about it than that. I remember the bit where I got down on my knees and begged the heroine not to sleep with the hero, partly because he was clearly a jerk of Kilroyian proportions and partly because I was afraid her personality might get all soggy and munged up in the process. I also remember having to flick backwards through twenty or so pages, to check that I hadn't misread the hero's name, on account of the massive behaviour change he went through once the pivotal shagging event was over. What a brainless book this was. Still, at least now I feel I understand the meaning of the term "cookie-cutter characters" on a really really deep level.

On to something much better, with Rates of Exchange, by Malcolm Bradbury. This book has to have one of the slowest starts of anything I've read this decade, and I was beginning to get quite irritated with it. But I persevered and was glad I did. The story follows the journey of Angus Petworth, a lecturer in linguistics at an unremarkable college in an unremarkable English town, to The Republic of Slaka - a fictional Eastern European country, under the umbrella of the old USSR. Petworth is a frequent traveller for the British Council, and has given his anodyne lectures on "The English Language as Medium of International Communication" all round the world. But this is his first visit to a communist country - and one where the British Council has no formal representation to look after him. Instead, he is left in the hands of the Slakan bureaucracy, and in his innocent, ineffectual way, manages to get himself embroiled in politics, sex and diplomacy.

Bradbury evokes a wonderfully complete picture of the bizarre Republic of Slaka, giving it culture, geography and history, even inventing a very convincing language for it (and producing a phrase book). And though there is a lot of stereotyping going on, the characters seem very real and individual despite it. Bradbury does an excellent job of making the book funny (I laughed out loud in many places) while also still managing to convey the continual sense of low level tension that is a feature of travel in countries very different from your own. Petworth is always on the brink of disaster - whether he is trying to order a meal in a restaurant, find his way to his hotel or smuggle illicit documents out through customs.

This is definitely a book for anyone who likes social comedy or satire, and who isn't put off by a lot of puns. Here is a small taste, describing Petworth's first meal in Slaka. His guide has advised him to order the duck (crak'akii) as the speciality of the house, and has then abandoned him to his hotel.

It is over an hour later, and Petworth still sits in the vast, chandeliered dining room of the hotel, awaiting, as he has long awaited, the meal he has once ordered. It is a grand room, with some sixty tables, each spread with white table cloths, which cast up a damp smell of recent laundering in the water of some brackish river. The tables are laid, creating an atmosphere of vast vacancy, for all but six of them are empty. Nonetheless, the maitre, in the way of maitres, has chosen to seat Petworth in a dark corner, under a noisy air vent, and next to the smells of the kitchen. The doors from the kitchen open frequently, to let out black-suited waiters who carry peppermills ceremoniously about the great room, carefully avoiding contact with all the diners. "Crak'akii," Petworth has said, some time ago, to one of these, as he passed incautiously close to the table. "Negativo," the waiter has said, "Kurbii churba, sarkii banatu. Da?" "Da," Petworth has said. "Tinkii?" the waiter has said. "Tinkii?" Petworth has asked. "Da, tinkii," the waiter has said, pointing to Petworth's glass, "Pfin op olii?" "Well," Petworth has said, "Pfin." "Da, pfin," the waiter has said, raising his peppermill and entering the kitchen. He has not, since then, appeared again, though others have, carefully curving their paths away fromhis table. The cloth on the table in front of him steams faintly; on it is a small stand holding the flags of twenty nations, none of them his own. The door to the kitchen now opens, and the waiter appears, comes over to his table, takes away the flags, and disappears again.

Just at the moment, I am reading a fascinating book called The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. It was given to me for my birthday by a bibliophile friend. It's probably not the kind of book I would ever have found for myself, but I'm very glad to have had it thrust in front of me!

Sei Shonagon was a court lady in Japan during the middle of the tenth century. She served as lady-in-waiting to Empress Sadako and became known as one of the finest wits and poets of her day. During her time at the palace, she began to keep what was known as a "pillow book" - a notebook kept near to one's bed, in which one could note down any stray thoughts or musings before one went to sleep. Apparently, some of these books were even kept inside the drawer of the wooden pillows used by Japanese people at that time.

By great good fortune, Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book has somehow survived through the centuries (although the original manuscripts are lost), giving us a fascinating glimpse into all the rituals and gossip and rivalries of court life at the time. The book is composed of a number of small numbered sections, some of which describe funny anecdotes, others which contain descriptive passages or recollections of earlier times, and some which are merely lists of things that interested the author. What makes the book so much fun is the character of Sei Shonagon, which comes across very clearly. She's a dreadful snob and can't help but pat herself on the back when she says something clever, but she is also very affectionate and lively, and she seems to have the happy knack of taking great pleasure in the ordinary things in life.

One of the most striking things about her book is the way that, despite the difference in centuries and geography and culture, the aspects of human nature she describes seem incredibly familiar. She reminds me a little of a character from Jane Austen, in fact, especially when she comes out with one of her clever put downs.

As a little taste, here is one of my favourite anecdotes from the Pillow Book. Shonagon is laughing at one of the court officials, Nobutsune, who thinks a great deal of himself but who is in fact rather dim.

`He has an appalling hand,' someone explained after [Nobutsune] had left the room. `Whether in Chinese characters or Japanese script, the results are always equally poor. People are always laughing at him about it. [...]'

One day when Nobutsune was serving as Intendent in the Office of Palace Works he sent a sketch to one of the craftsmen indicating how a certain piece of work should be done. `Kindly execute it in this fashion,' he added in Chinese characters. I happened to notice the piece of paper and it was the most preposterous writing I had ever seen. Next to his message I wrote, `If you do the work in this style, it will certainly turn out strangely." The document found its way into the Imperial apartments, and everyone who saw it was greatly amused - except, of course, Nobutsune, who was furious and after this held a grudge against me.

(Penguin Classics Edition, p.128)