Category Archives: Booker Prize

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The Snowdrops – Review

snowdropsBelieve nothing. Believe no-one. Such is the nature of post-Glasnost Russia presented in Snowdrops. To understand it, you have to scrape away the veneer it presents to the world, and look beneath the surface.  To the expat lawyers, bankers and businessmen based in the country’s capital, Moscow is a city booming with new opportunities for generating wealth and having fun.  Beyond the public face however, is a city of predatory nubile women and exploitative entrepreneurs.  In Moscow, people vanish from their apartments and bogus financial deals are concocted but neither raise too much of a stir amongst the police (they’re too busy taking back-handers themselves).

Through the narrator Nick Platt we experience how easy it is to get caught in the city’s tentacles. The story is written in the form of a confessional letter from Platt to a woman he is about to marry. When the book opens, Platt is a late-thirty-year-old lawyer who escaped the tedium of England for Moscow. He spends his days arranging complex and dodgy  oil industry deals to make  new wealth-hungry class of businesspeople even more wealthy; a job he describes as  ”smearing lipstick on a pig”. Now he’s about to sign off on a huge deal somewhere up in Murmansk. It has catastrophe written all over it but Platt is too busy being in love to pay close attention.

The focus of his ardour is Masha. She’s young, uber-attractive and wears tight mini skirts and jeans. He sees her and her younger, more sluttish sister Katya at a Metro station. Soon they’re dancing and drinking together in tawdry themed restaurants and pole-dancing bars. It’s a relationship that the reader sees comes with big red warning lights (why would someone like her be interested in a middle of the road corporate lawyer) but Platt is oblivious to all the signs. Gradually they hook him, persuading him to put up $25,000  to help their ‘aunt’ exchange her sell her city centre apartment for one in the country.

Inevitably it goes wrong.  The unstable layers of the relationship reveal themselves to Pratt as the debris buried under heaps of snow reveal themselves when the thaw sets in.

….whitish on top, creamy underneath, then a sort of stained yellow like leaked battery fluid, then a layer studded with rubbish (broken bottles and crisp packets and lonely discarded shoes, suspended in a gritty white lava) and beneath that, at the bottom, a base of sinister black slime.

It’s the idea of revelation of the hidden that gives the book its name – snowdrops apparently is a Moscow slang term for a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in a thaw.  In this novel they represent

…the badness that is already there, always there and very close, but which you somehow manage not to see. The sins the winter hides.

Platt becomes a snowdrop in essence. But only recognises this when it’s too late.

I was in too deep, had slipped too far from what I was before to what I was becoming.

And that for me was one of the flaws in the novel. Platt’s predicament is all too inevitable and his character too lightly drawn to make this a compelling read. His attempts to explain how his naivety  leads him astray and to excuse his behaviour, seem rather lightly sketched to create any sense of sympathy for him.

A. D Miller’s writing has good pace and some finely crafted observations on the nature of the city. But the narrative progression had an air of predictability and the central characters almost came straight out of central casting.  While I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t see anything particularly remarkable about the book. So I’m puzzled why this got onto the Man Booker prize long list this year — it doesn’t experiment with any new form of narrative or seem to say anything we haven’t already heard about modern-day Russia so what was it that the judging panel found compelling enough to select it from the hundreds of other options?

In Miler’s favour, this was his debut novel so maybe with time, he’ll just get stronger.

 

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Sunday Salon: reasons to be cheerful

sundaysalonIt’s been a milestone week.

Milestone 1: On Wednesday I led my first book club discussion.   I’d never even been to a book club meeting until December and was completely thrown when asked to choose the February book. Of all the scores of books I want to read, it should have been a cinch to name something. But  all that came into my head was Possession by A.S. Byatt from my Booker prize list; which wasn’t even on my radar screen for this year. Afterwards I kept thinking I’d made a terrible mistake when one member said they’d tried it and hated it so wouldn’t read again and a few others wrinkled their noses when I described it. So I approached Wednesday with a considerable degree of nervousness, imagining that most people wouldn’t even turn up or if they did, would say they couldn’t finish the book and they hated it.

How wrong I was. Three people said instantly that they loved it (not just liked, but loved). When the scores were tallied at the end, the average put it at the second highest score for any book they’ve read in the last 3 years. Crumbs!

What was fascinating was how people enjoyed the book for different reasons – some were keen on the dual love story aspect, some enjoyed the mystery angle. Some enjoyed the poetry. All agreed that it was a highly technically accomplished book and wondered why we hadn’t read more by Byatt.

Milestone 2: Thursday saw the first anniversary of this blog. A time to reflect on how my original ideas have changed over the last 12 months and will likely change again. Here’s my post on the topic.

Milestone 3: Joined my first virtual group read. The people behind the Unputdownables blog have selected Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky for the Feb/April read. I’ve not done one of these because the reading schedule is usually faster than I can manage. But since this novel is on my Classics Club list and I’m a tad daunted by it and  their reading schedule seems very manageable I thought I’d give it a go.

So three reasons to celebrate. All of which have been great antidotes to the doom and gloom of the books I’m currently reading. Crime and Punishment is a surprisingly approachable book so far but it’s topic doesn’t exactly lend much cheer. Little Dorrit is a super yarn but the shades of the prison house that surround the central character of Amy Dorrit are so deep that I’m downhearted on her behalf every time I pick up the book. I know there will be a happy ending since Dickens does so like those but there is a lot to get through before that. And the last book I read The Armies by the Colombian author Evelio Rosero (a book I read as part of my world literature challenge) was rather bleak too. (my review is here)

I must make sure the next book I pick has more light than shade……

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Review – Possession by A.S. Byatt

When a writer dies, should their private lives die with them? Or should they become the  possessions of academics and enthusiasts, to be collected, catalogued and analysed like laboratory specimens. Possession in all its manifestations — physical, spiritual, emotional — is the focus of  A S Byatt’s 1990 Booker winning novel. The more you read it, the more forms of possession become apparent: legal ownership of correspondence and creative work; obsession with words; control of one’s history;  exertion of influence; emotional disturbance.

possession

The first example comes only a few pages into the story when a postgraduate researcher uncovers some letters which hint at a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. He steals them and also hides his discovery from his boss. Instead he teams up with another academic Maud Bailey, who has devoted years to dissecting LaMotte’s work. Together they embark on a quest to discover the truth, piecing the story together from a vast array of sources, including letters, journal entries and field trips to Yorkshire and France.

But they are not the only ones in pursuit. From across the Atlantic come Professor Leonora Stern, an avid feminist who is possessed by LaMotte’s supposed lesbian tendencies and Mortimer Cropper, a scholar-collector who is hell-bent on acquiring everything once owned by Ash and shipping it to the USA.  In the background there is Cropper’s arch rival Professor James Blackadder, editor of Ash’s Complete Works who is determined to preserve all of Ash’s work in England. Ranged against them all is the determination of Ash’s widow to preserve her husband’s secret. What ensues is a cross between the tradition of the romance adventure with its battle between good and bad and the tradition of a mystery story where the characters have to follow a trail of clues to find the solution.

Byatt skillfully weaves these (or to use Byatt’s own description of ‘a piece of knitting’)  into two parallel stories. The painful Victorian love story of Ash and LaMotte, retold through their poems and letters, has its counterpoint in the present-day story of Mitchell and Bailey, whose academic partnership slowly grows into love. Their stories are intertwined so objects from one era reappear in the other — a Victorian jet brooch that Maud wears for example —  and the two pairs of lovers share similar behaviours; so Roland’s admiration for Maud’s hair parallels Ash’s fascination with LaMotte’s tresses.

A S Byatt

A S Byatt

Byatt’s versatility as a writer is evident in the multiple narrative styles found in Possession. She wrote all the poems herself, a task which required her to adopt different voices and styles for each of her Victorian poets – so successful was she that many readers apparently believed Ash and La Motte were real. Her publishers were not so convinced, fearing that  readers would find the the inclusion of so many poems too intrusive and a distraction from the mystery story.

I didn’t find them distracting so much as tedious. I’m not a fan of poetry which relies on my knowledge of myths and legends, nor do I enjoy poems which use over-blown language. Both Ash and LaMotte were guilty on both counts – many of their poems were just so dire I skipped them. Nor did I appreciate the long, and frankly often very tedious, passages in the letters between these two poets in which they discussed layers of meaning in Nordic myths. If this is how writers in their era talked to each other, I can’t imagine I’d enjoy spending much time in their company. Was Byatt making fun of them in the same way she  ridiculed the academic world for its dogged pursuit of apparently trivial knowledge? I still wasn’t sure by the time I finished reading.

I can’t say that reading Possession was a deeply enjoyable experience. I admired Byatt’s command of language and her ability to tell a story but never felt her contemporary characters came alive in the same way as the Victorians did or that the inclusion of so much poetry really enhanced the book.

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Review: Midnight’s Children

Bedazzled; bemused; baffled: reading Salman Rushdie’s 1991 Man Booker Prize wining novel Midnight’s midnights childrenChildren is a roller coaster experience. It’s a novel on a grand scale both physically (weighing in at more than 600 pages) and thematically; covering more than 60 years in the turbulent history of India and Pakistan.  It demands a great deal from the reader with its abrupt and extreme changes in narrative flow, its multiple digressions and contradictions,  its 100 or so characters and a style that blends comedy with history;  Christian with Islamic and Hindu references and almost an encylopaedia’s worth of facts.

In essence the novel is the life story of Saleem Sinai, a child born on the stroke of midnight, at the exact moment that the newly independent state of India comes into being. He and the 500 plus other children born at the same time, enter the world with unusual powers — in his case psychic and  olfactory powers — that create a mystical bond between them. Under Saleem’s instigation the children unite in a Midnight Conference during which they telepathically discuss options for their country’s future governance. Saleem believes his destiny is inextricably linked with that of India or, as he puts it:

I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

Every twist and turn in India’s history he therefore reads in terms of his the vagaries of his own life and the fortunes and misfortunes of his family.  A bomb raid by Pakistan on Bombay he sees as a deliberate attempt to wipe out his entire family while Indira Gandhi’s repression and round up of undesirables, he re-interpretes as a systematic campaign to  eradicate all the Midnight’s Children who are viewed as de-stablising forces in society.

But there is a huge gulf between the expectations he believes are placed on his shoulders as the first child of a new nation, and the reality of his life. He is acutely aware of this gulf even at a young age.

Already at the age of nearly nine, I knew this much: everybody was waiting for me … had created around me a glowing and inescapable mist of expectancy…… I became afraid that everyone was wrong – that my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be acutely useless, void and without the shred of a purpose.

As unreliable as Saleem proves to be as a historian,  we still warm to this man labouring with the burden of history on his shoulders as well as multiple nicknames that draw attention to his enormous nose (Snotnose and Sniffer are just two of his sobriquets). Impossible too not to be bemused at the bizarre nature of some sections (an arch enemy who kills people by squeezing them with his knees; a married couple who live secretly in a cellar of a house, entering and exiting through a trapdoor). And equally impossible not to admire Rushdie’s creative imagination or the vividness of his writing.

Despite all of those factors, I still did not enjoy reading Midnight’s Children. The moments of pleasure were sadly too few to outweigh the times when I felt I was ploughing my way through the reading equivalent of treacle. Too much detail (particularly towards the end when Saleem is fighting a war in Pakistan), too many different allusions to keep track of and too many twists and turns. So I admire the ingenuity and appreciate how Rushdie pushed the boundaries of literature but ultimately I was bored.

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Sunday Salon: A new bookish adventure

sundaysalonAs we’re only a few weeks away from the end of the year, the blogosphere seems to have been very active with ‘favourite books of 2012′ articles. On my blog this week I featured two of these lists - I found them both interesting more from a perspective of what they didn’t include than what was selected.

This has been an eventful bookish week personally.  After months of inquiries that just sent me down further dead ends. I finally tracked down a book club relatively close to where I live.  There are many clubs around but they don’t advertise themselves – members join via word of mouth it seems. Our library service wanted to help but since most of the clubs are held in people’s homes, they couldn’t disclose personal phone numbers. Very frustrating. Eventually I found one based at a small independent bookshop  called Nickleby’s (which has the added advantage of course that I can browse and buy at the same time).

My first experience was on Wednesday. It was an venture into the unknown for me – I had no clue what to expect; a highly erudite discussion or a ‘Janet and John’ level of chat. It was just at the right level thanks to good preparation by the peson The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje. You can see my review here. It’s fair to say this had mixed reviews – generally most people agreed it was a book of two halves but we didn’t come to an agreement on which half was the best. I got ‘persuaded’ to nominate the March read but it wasn’t easy coming up with something on the spur of the moment. In the end we settled for Posession by A. S. Byatt (selfishly, I chose it because its on my Man Booker prize reading list) ….

And in other news……

Have finally made a start on my backlog of reviews. I want to get these finished before year end and before the memory fades too much to write anything meaningful. First up was Bring Up the Bodies which won the Man Booker prize for Hilary Mantel this year which I’d read in August when it was on the long list. It’s as good, if not better than her earlier one about Cromwell (Wolf Hall).

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Review: Bring Up the Bodies

bodiesThe year is 1535. Thomas Cromwell has put aside his lowly origins as the son of  a blacksmith and is now chief minister and leading statesman within the court of Henry VIII.  He’s fast approaching the height of his career, having found a way for Henry to extricate himself from his childless marriage and uncovered a rich source of new income for the King through sequestration of monastic lands and buildings.

Most books featuring Cromwell concentrate on his work and achievements as lawyer and statesman. What makes Hilary Mantel’s novels about this period different is the way she reveals the man behind the titles and the legislative actions. The Cromwell she shows us, first in Wolf Hall and again in her sequel, Bring up the Bodies, is a complex character. He’s an astute business man with a thriving cloth trade with Flanders derived from relationships built during his years in that country. He’s a politician par excellence, nimbly navigating the myriad jealousies and jostlings for position amongst the gentry and aristocracy that surround the King. But in Mantel’s text he is also a loving and devoted father with a touch of humanity that extends to opening his home to the poor and needy who require food. The man who manipulates young, impressionable men into confessing they committed adultery with Henry’s new queen (Anne Boleyn) is the same man who is moved to tears when he finds the angel wings his dead daughter once wore at Christmas time.

cromwell

Thomas Cromwell as portrayed by Hans Holbein

It’s that duality of character that Mantel brings to center stage in Bring up the Bodies, conveying it in a third person narrative style that simultaneously has the intimacy of a first person narrator. Often those moments of character revelation come through short comments made almost en passant.

One such passage occurs when Cromwell is despatched by Henry to see the woman he divorced (Katherine of Arragon) in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Katherine is a problem that will not go away for this royal couple – she refuses to acknowledge the validity of the divorce, refuses to give allegiance to the new queen and is a focal point for Catholic plots against Henry. they need to know whether reports she is dying are true. What Cromwell sees is a shrunken figure of a woman  swaddled in an ermine fur cape.

She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room – the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl  with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects the evauated contents of the dowager’s stomach.

Noticing the ermine fur coat in which she is swathed, the pragmatic side of Cromwell’s character comes to the forefront. “The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies.’ But almost immediately the lens is changed to show his more thoughtful nature as he wonders whether Katherine’s dreams are of the gardens of the Alhambra she left as a young girl:

….the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock’s tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.

Four months after I closed the book, I could still remember that passage and the way Mantel shows Cromwell’s mind leap from the wizened creature he sees in front of him to a simple action he could have taken to remind her of a better life.

Moments like this abound within the novel. For that reason alone, Mantel for me deserved to win the Man Booker Prize 2012.

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Sunday Salon: Discovering a new author

Every year I hope to find an author whose work is completely new to me.  It doesn’t matter if they’ve been around for a few hundred years or still relatively new in their writing career; it’s the pleasure of the discovery I enjoy.

So far this year, through my challenge to read all the Booker prize winners, I’ve had multiple first-time experiences. Admittedly some have been more pleasurable than others. I do not for example have any desire to read another book by David Storey or Penelope Fitzgerald but I do want to explore further J G Farrell and V S Naipaul.

Beryl Bainbridge at her desk

This week saw another first for me – Beryl Bainbridge. I’ve been aware of her for many years largely I think because of her image as a hard talking bon viveur  from the heyday of London’s Fleet Street and her predisposition to fall off bar stools during parties. But I knew nothing of her literary work and ashamedly couldn’t name a single book she had produced. But then I discovered this was an author whose work had been shortlisted five times for the Man Booker prize (though she never won). Clearly she was worth investigating, which is why I’ve spent this week reading The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress.  It was her last novel before she died from cancer in 2010 and although she kept writing until the end, she never actually managed to complete the book. It does feel unfinished but I enjoyed her style sufficiently to want to read more next year . (Read the review here) There are plenty of titles to choose from – including the last one, she wrote 18 novels in total. But I’m going to start with one for which she was a Booker shortlist candidate:

  • The Dressmaker (1973)
  • The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
  • An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)
  • Every Man for Himself (1996)
  • Master Georgie (1998)

Anyone read one of these and can give me an opinion on which to choose first?

Interested in learning more about Beryl Bainbridge? Read the 2002 profile at The Guardian.

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Booker prize winners from page to screen

Still from the film Life of Pi

Many Man Booker Prize winners over  the decades have made the transition from page to our TV and film screens – Hotel du Lac, Disgrace, Last Orders to name just a few. For Downton Abbey fans, Dan Evans was in the starring role of one of these adaptations in 2006  when Line of Beauty (written by Alan Hollinghurst) was adapted by Andrew Davies for a UK tv series. Hollinghurst wrote an article for The  Guardian about his experience of seeing his novel adapted for screen.

This winter, two films based on previous winners of hit the silver screen within a short space of each other.

Just a few days ago an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which won the prize in 1981, was released. Although the book’s setting is India, the filming was actually done on location in Sri Lanka because the director was afraid of reprisals from religious fundamentalist groups if they had chosen India or Pakistan for the location. And the large ensemble cast had to sign secrecy agreements to prevent news of their location being disclosed, which couldn’t have been easy given that more than 800 extras were roped in for the crowd scenes. The website for the film is here .

Due for release on December is an adaptation of Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, which won the prize in 2001. Directed by Ang Lee (whose previous credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain fame), it stars an unknown 17 year old Indian actor called Suraj Sharma. The book  relates the story of a 16-year-old boy who is the only person from his family to survive when their boat sinks as they journey to a new life in Canada. the sinking of a freighter. He finds himself on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a wounded zebra and a Bengal tiger. It’s not the easiest subject to convert to film. Lee shot the early scenes in a small town  in Southern India and then made extensive use of  a giant water tank and 3D technology for the ocean scenes. Life of Pi  gained positive reviews when it was shown at the New York film festival in September.

See reviews in The Guardian and the New York Times

Some of the other prize winners from the last few years are also in various stages of production:

  • Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel) are being adapted for BBC 2 – due for broadcast in late 2013
  • A dispute  broke out earlier this year between script writers and financiers involved in an adaptation of The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga). There’s been no news since on whether this has been resolved so casting can begin.
  • Last month director Werner Herzog announced that his next project would be an adaptation of DBC Pierre’s award-winning 2003 novel Vernon God Little
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Sunday Salon: Around the world, from my chair

By accident, this week has found me reading novels set in far flung corners of the world.

Last weekend I started to read Midnight’s Children, the 1991 Man Booker prize novel by Salman Rushdie. It’s set in India on the cusp of that country’s independence from Britain. The book opens with the birth of the central character Saleem Sinai at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the exact moment the newly in dependent nation is born. it then goes back in time to look at the lives of Saleem’s ancestors including his grandfather doctor. One thing the two have in common is a large nose and an uncanny sense of smell that enables them to detect when something is not quite right.

This is not an easy read – I find I can only absorb it in small doses and keep forgetting who each of the characters are – so as light relief I began reading a book that has been on my shelves for more than a year.  Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress is a first novel by Dai Sijie, a writer who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China during the 1970s but now lives in France. It’s a poignant ‘coming of age’ novel set in a remote mountainside village near Tibet where the narrator and his friend Luo are sent as teenagers to be ‘re-educated’ by living among the peasants. The narrator is a ‘fine musician’ who entertains the villagers with renditions of Mozart sonatas though since all Western culture is banned he has to pretend the music is written in praise of Chairman Mao. His friend Luo is a gifted storyteller. They both fall in love with the beautiful daughter of a tailor and  with  books by Balzac and Dumas they discover another boy has kept hidden. It’s a mesmerising story about a painful period in China’s history – a story made even more touching when I discovered that it’s semi autobiographical since Sijie himself was also subjected to the same re-education program.

From two of the world’s current economic powerhouses, my reading took me this week back to the cultural and economic powerhouse of ancient Greece with an adventure into reading some Greek tragedy. I’ve put Medea and some of the other plays written by the Greek dramatist 400 years BC onto my reading list for the Classics Club challenge, thinking that you couldn’t get more classic than this. I was expecting something rather complex in terms of language or meaning but was very pleasantly to find how readable it was and how its themes still resonate today. The central of Medea reminded me a little of Lady Macbeth in the way they view murder as a means to an end but at least Lady M experiences remorse where Medea seems to feel none. You can read the review here.

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Classics 1 down, 49 to go

A momentous week – I just finished reading the first book on my Classics Club list. It was North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell which I picked because she is an author I have limited experience of – I read Cranford earlier in the year and was underwhelmed. But a few other bloggers said I should give her another go. And I am really glad I listened to their advice. You can read my review here. (astonishingly for me, I managed to get the review done within a month of finishing the book).

Anyway, so one done, but there are still 49 more to be completed to meet the challenge. I keep changing my mind about what should be on the list – I took out most of the children’s books this week to give space for Trollope, Gaskell and George Eliot. I also added in a very old text indeed – the play Medea by Euripedes that was written 400 years BC. It was on the syllabus for a humanities course I did several years ago but I never got around to reading it. Feels like I should have a go. Maybe I will learn that Greek tragedy isn’t my thing.

I have less than 5 years to read the remaining 49 texts so it will be a stretch, particularly as I’m also trying to read all the Booker prize winners. I did a quick count today and was surprised to find I’ve read 12 of them so far this year which feels like very good progress.

I’m just starting the 13th book – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I enjoy books set in India or by Indian authors and have read a few this year (Staying On, Sarawasti Park, for example) so the subject interests me .But – and it’s a big but - I also know this is not going to be an easy read.  I chose it really because the film version was released recently so it felt the time was right to give it a go. It’s a pretty long book so I might need to read something else in parallel to give the brain a rest. At the moment it’s a toss up between I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas which multiple colleagues in work tell me is great.

Any thoughts on The Slap anyone?

 

Postcript: had to make a quick edit to this post when an astute blogger pointed out I had written Margaret Gaskell, not Elizabeth!. Oops