Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I've just started on Restless by William Boyd, and so far it's properly gripping, good story telling and interesting stuff. Only 40 pages in, so it could turn to useless mush, but right now I'm impressed.
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Having read the Musketeers - a much better book than I was anticipating, although it had lots of the aspects of romantic fiction and 19th century fiction that I dislike, and will keep me from reading much more pre-20th century stuff.
Now I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point which is fascinating stuff, and which doesn't do that thing that lots of these non-fiction making-a-case books do, of either having an idea which can be expressed in one chapter and then just reiterating the introduction with thousands of examples; or taking an idea and then illustrating it with very thin and flimsy evidence (I've only seen one of those social science things I really hate, where a single piece of research on one person or a group of 8 or whatever, is presented as the key to solving lots of problems).
Later today I'm off to Waterstones to go hunting for holiday reading.
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There were a number of drivers, I think.
As a very young boy I lived in a house full of books, thanks to my fairly academic parents. So I always read a bit. I think I started reading full books when I found my dad's old Biggles books, and was reading them, but almost nothing else. Really limited.
Then my sister, I think, was reading some Daphne du Maurier, and my competetive instincts said "I can't let my older sister be reading full novels and me not", so I asked my mum for some novels. And that got me on to Sherlock Holmes.
In my early teenage years I'd hide in my room away from everyone and just read. I was really unsociable, actually.
Mostly, to be honest, my mum was the main driver - but I think for Christmas when I was about 14 or so my Aunt bought a JG Ballard novel which I was completely hooked by, and that got me interested in much more diverse range of novels than I'd ever been into before.
Since then, though, the best source has been my mum - she's seen what kind of stuff I was interested in, and even to this day, she finds me books I never knew about and which are fantastic and which are just slightly shifted along from what I am comfortable reading. She's been fantastic at inspiring and, more to the point, guiding me on to more diverse and more interesting literature.
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What bothers me is when a really good piece of science fiction or fantasy etc come out, or becomes popular, and it suddenly becomes too good to be science fiction or fantasy so it ends up in the general fiction section (see Doris Lessing, JG Ballard, Margaret Atwood etc).
I feel the complete opposite. I think the idea of trying to keep something as part of "my own genre", or trying to adopt it, is not only weird, but it's kind of selfish. Lots of people want to read, say, Margaret Atwood, and couldn't face reading EE Doc Smith, or even Orson Scott Card. But if you hide the more literary parts of SF in amongst the space opera, many people just won't venture in to that section of the bookshop and the world will miss out on some great books.
You may respond that they should broaden their minds more, and not feel so prejudiced against SF. Maybe that's true, but it won't change things. Also, though, the idea of having an SF section in the first place is opposed to the idea of mind-broadening. And the narrower the cliquey sections, the worse it is.
The idea that "paranormal romance" actually has a section in a bookshop is just insane.
I remember a friend of mine once telling me that she liked novels about China. Which is just as weird a categorisation - because China can be anything from the court of Kubilai Khan, to Monkey, to the destruction of the cultural revolution, to some weird future-SF stuff. Her real taste was, actually, for slightly romantic visions of the far-east. But you'd be a bit freaked out if there was a "slightly romantic visions of the Far East" set of shelves in the bookshop, and rightly so.
Anyway, I've been wandering off on one.
Back to where I started - I'd much rather that E.E. Doc Smith and Philip K Dick were rolled in with Jane Austen and Stephen Donaldson and Kingsley Amis all on the same shelves, than turn up at a bookshop and not have a clue where to look for David Mitchell - a bit of ghosts, a bit of history, a bit of literary, a bit of SF - or where to look for Ballard - a bit of SF, future fiction, fantasy, literary. No matter that the SF fans think of these authors as "theirs".
And, also, you have to pity the poor shop-worker who wonders where to put 1984 (do you move it away from all the other Orwell) or Brave New World or (if you take Brian Aldiss's approach from Trillion Year Spree) even Franz Kafka, or Frankenstein.
Better, much better, to keep the fiction section properly heterogeneous.
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It depends in what way it is bad. If it's shockingly badly written but still has a rompy sort of plot, like Angels and Demons, say, I'll read to the end because it's still effortless even if there's not much pleasure in it.
If, though, it's heavy and turgid and deep and serious and also bad, then I'm much more likely to not finish it.
That said, some of those bad heavy books you start reading, and think they'll improve, and then you're 150 pages in, and you think "I've sunk so much time and effort into this that, even though I'm not enjoying it, I'd better finish it".
Any good businessman will tell you that you should write off sunk costs. But, as with business, it's also hard to do that when reading.
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I really hate the fragmentation of bookshops between "serious" literature and "genre" literature.
For all kinds of reasons, too. Even if the split is just fiction, sf and fantasy, romance, it still bugs the hell out of me.
First of all, it allows people to become really insular in their reading habits - it means people can ignore huge swathes of fiction, and only ever buy in their preferred genre.
That's the puritan side of me who thinks people should be encouraged out of their comfort zones.
In the second wave, there's all the crossover stuff - how much "serious" fiction is also romantic. Or if you're looking at JG Ballard or Margaret Atwood, are you putting the books in SF or in "Fiction"; or even do you put the magical realism into fantasy?
It means, too, that authors aren't encouraged to have varying and interesting outputs - publishers want them to fit safely in their genre so there's a comfortable way of marketing their output.
Also, of course, historically it is a nonsensical suggestion that "romance" or "detective" fiction are not part of the mainstream of serious fiction.
And, finally, there's the parallels with music - which I also despise the genre-isation of, where someone is only into grindcore or electroclash or whatever, and it's nonsensical, given that the best music is magpie like in its impurity and desire to steal from everything. I think the same is true of fiction, too.
Just because something can have a particular label put on it, doesn't mean it would appeal - or even should appeal.
Labelling and categorisation are bad things.
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It used to be alphabetical. Then, when I moved house, it became completely and utterly random, apart from particular authors being grouped together.
But, since I disposed of all of the fiction, it is now thematic. Science:History:Food:Travel Writing:Biog with Guide books and Cookery books kept in different places.
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I used to keep them all. Everything. But I moved in with the GF, and we had very little space, so the books were just kept in boxes in the shed.
In the end it became obvious that I just didn't need them. I never went back to (most of) them. I never cared that I couldn't see them.
So, now all the novels, with perhaps 5 exceptions, have either been given to friends or to charity.
If I ever really feel the need to read a book again, I don't mind buying it again. Because it will almost inevitably have been more than 5 years since I last read it.
The only books I now keep are non-fiction: travel writing, history, science, politics, food as well as, of course, guide books and cookery books.
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In the book The Master and Margarita, the phrase 'from devil knows where' always pops up. I can't remember if that's the exact wording but it's something along those lines.
Entirely appropriate, of course.
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It's not really repeated phrases, but as I was mentioning on the Murakami thread, there are some authors who repeatedly use the same images and settings - both to make atmosphere and to use as cyphers. Murakami always uses food, and uses cats, to create his setting of domestic normality. Although the books clearly aren't about food or cats, the protagonist is always cooking some spaghetti, or drinking a beer.
Meanwhile, the other author I mentioned there, JG Ballard repeatedly used drained and empty swimming pools and crushed, broken sunglasses, to create an imagery of wealthy suburbia gone into a state of decay. Reading his memoir, you discover that this is all, really, remembered from the chaos and destruction around the expat scene in Shanghai just before and after the Japanese invasion, which so influenced his writing.
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I certainly agree that the characters, in general, are relatively simplistic - they have their traits and they stick to those traits, and that's it. In that way I definitely feel like it's a book that's, in large part, a childrens' adventure.
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So, now I feel like I'm trundling along talking to myself - probably because I'm reading slower than everyone else.
Anyway, so far - with the exception of Countess De Winter - Dumas treats women incredibly badly. His regional stereotyping is bad; but his stereotyping of women is horrible. Lots of "Because women are simple, and turned easily by a handsome man, she did what he said" nonsense.
I am, though, liking the way the three main musketeers have more and more flaws revealed as we go along; how their vanity and lies come along, and how they seem slightly less competent and brilliant the more we see of them.
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That's really the thing I love most about Murukami.
I love the descriptions, and the mundane lives of mundane people who have weird and wonderful things that happen to them. I love the repeated use of the same cyphers and places. The spaghetti and beer and food and TV and cats that always repeat - in a much more low-key and urban equivalent of Ballards broken sunglasses and empty swimming pools. I love the vaguely cyber-punk/matrix-y stuff that happens, where people get sucked into parallel worlds, but those parallel worlds don't bother with the high-tech stuff, and the attempts at explanation, that make cyberpunk feel astonshingly dated very quickly.
I love all that stuff. But really what grabs me is the lack of explanation, the lack of conclusion. The way it's left to the reader to think, and wonder. The way that narratives don't have clearly defined endings, the way they don't in real life.
I think it's fantastic stuff.
I really must read Hard-Boiled Wonderland.
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To me, at least, the style was no problem at all. The letters are really just a way of explaining the narrative. But apart from the paragraph or two of intro at the start of each letter, it's all really the same story, from start to end. All written by a single narrator, on consecutive days.
So it's not, really, structurally messy or difficult or clever. It's a pretty easy book to read.
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As I read on through it - it's really quite long, but not in a turgid way - I've got some more thoughts. For all that it's presented as high-culture in a lot of ways, it really is a schlock-historical novel. It's a good one, but it's definitely got some of those blockbustery elements of romp and more romp and more romp. Brave D'Artagnan kills person, rides on somewhere else, swordfights and kills. And our hero always wins just by being physically superior.
And there's a quite stupendous use of coincidence to get away with creating plot. It's stuff that no modern author who wasn't sold in airport-stands would get away with. Our hero happens to be lodging at the house of a key player with the monarchy; our hero happens to be walking and spots the Duke of Buckingham being snuck in to the louvre; etc, etc. To an extent that I think that perhaps Dumas isn't the greatest at plot-building.
There are other elements of the book's age (and perhaps it's targeting at a young audience) that bug me - the obsession with where people are from, and what the special character is of people from a particular region. D'Artagnan is a Gascon, therefore he has great night-vision (another point of creating a skill suddenly where it's needed for our character to succeed). His servant is a Picard, and they are brave. Someone is from Burgundy and they have other character traits. And so on. I'm sure this is a form of that 19th century nationalism and a belief in a form of exceptionalism which was commonplace. But it really grates on me, trying to read this is a modern novel. If you were to read a book written now talking of someone being Scottish and therefore being brave but tight with cash; or an Irishman being a biut stupid - not because of any other reason, but just because of their Irishness - you would baulk. I suppose it's a bit like Shylock's jewishness, too.
Fortunately the plot bounces along and is fun enough, so I don't get too caught up with these kinds of irritations of the modern reader in an old novel.
Although I am reminded again of some of the reasons I tend to have a dislike of Victorian era fiction. There's the "straightness" of it - it really rarely tends to be layered and so on, the stuff I like with modernist/early post-modern fiction. There's the fairly substantial and long winded explicatory paragraphs. There's the general obsession with the lives of the rich and famous (Dickens being a great exception - no country houses and sons of nobility for him). And there's the character who sees a woman and suddenly is in love with her and must do everything for her; who changes his entire world-view on a whim. And who makes decisions of trust based on someone's facial expression, which means he absolutely must trust this person.
Actually, if it wasn't for the fact there's a fun adventure story going on here, I might have thrown the book out of the window by now, if I think about it. Thank god it's not some low-key romantic comedy (I think it'll be a while before I pick up your books, Ms Austen).
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Not much more to say on the book yet, but I've been reading a few small things about Richelieu, and it's interesting stuff. He's presented in clearly a very bad light in the book, yet apparently even in France when Dumas was writing he was held in fairly high regard.
He was never exactly popular, because he was thoroughly cynical and brutal and oppressive, and he was properly machiavellian when dealing in international affairs. But he was astonishingly effective. There are people who consider his centralising of power away from feudal lords, and his imposition of rule throughout the land, and his building of national secret services, and taking tax collection out of the hands of local authorities and into centrally appointed collectors to be the effective birth of the modern nation state.
Even more so, his focus on the state above all else, and the way it boosted France, could be seen to be very, very instrumental in shaping French attitudes to their nation for centuries to come - arguably, even the present day.
Very interesting stuff.
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I'm not exactly making quick progress - there are a lot of words, 600 odd densely packed pages with not too many paragraphs - but it's a really fun book. A rare day today, I was commuting on the tube thanks to the rain, and I almost missed my stop being a tad too engrossed.
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My guess is that it's deeper, but as I said, I'm only 20 pages in. I'm intrigued as to whether he follows his political instincts, or whether he follows his story-telling instincts alone. As I said, my guess is the former.
Although it's already interesting that, despite writing in the post-revolutionary period, he still seems fairly staunchly monarchist. I suppose we're still waiting for the second Republic to come on, so this would be the period of the French restoration when this was written. All the same, I'd have thought there'd be less love for how wonderful various monarchs were. Again, hard to know if this is just superfice considering how early in the book I am.
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So I've really only just opened the book - you know, 20 pages in, that sort of thing - but here's the first couple of observations.
First of which is that my edition is just awash with footnotes (well, they're at the end of the book), which is distracting to start with. Frankly, I'm not so stupid that I can't work out context from a book like this.
Second is that it's a really easy start to the book. Light and bouncy and fairly driving along.
Third, and related - I didn't realise that Dumas was basically just writing reams and reams of pulpy fiction for the magazines, and that's what this comes from. It's not dissimilar to Dickens' writing mould, or perhaps a better comparison, Conan Doyle. Have to keep it exciting so that people will buy the next edition of the magazine.
It'll be interesting to see how much politics/moralising Dumas puts in, once I get further in - the kind of stuff that would have easily slipped from any of the films, but given that Dumas was a political activist himself, in amongst the revolutionary period of mid-19th century Europe, and given the Dickens example that writers did tend to drive their own agenda through their fictions, there could well be stuff going in in the book.
Although, on the other hand, he was largely a romantic writer, and could literally be working on writing the romance, the fun novel, with not much thought to trying to smash anything into peoples' skulls.
More once I've read some more, but there's my first swathe of thoughts.
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I have noticed it appearing more, and think possibly that just the authors who wrote chardonnay-and-shopping-and-boyfriends-and-weddings chick-lit; and the people who read them, are all 5-10 years older and have started being mums and suddenly have a new observational humour to exploit about their common experience. Expect, in 10-15 years a "My kids are leaving for university and I've nothing to fill that void, middle-aged women finding excitement elsewhere" type of fiction.
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How did this win the booker prize, I wonder. Really, how did it win? It's not as bad as The Inheritance of Loss, but it's pretty much as shallow. It's better than, say, Atonement or Life of Pi, but I can see where the value is in those books.
That said, it's not actually a bad book. It's the fun, romping, easy to read, tale of Balram Halwai, a boy from a lower caste from the North of India who, by various machinations - most of which are telegraphed throughout the book - made his way up to being an entrepreneur in Bangalore, the exciting new capitalist face of India.
The writing style is really easy, and full of humorous wryness.
Really, I have no complaints about the book. But it just isn't very deep, and doesn't say very much we haven't heard before. All the blurb on the back, and in the reviews, tells us how it presents the seedy dark underbelly of India, rather than the mellifluous, spices and saris and mughal palaces that we have in our mind. And yet, I think of the Indian novels I've read, that have been literary successes, I think of Inheritance of Loss, or of God of Small Things, or of Q&A, or even of A Suitable Boy (although, perhaps not of Midnight's Children), and they all do the same thing. Look - India is large and full and filthy and corrupt and the respect for life is limited and the caste system isn't that great.
It tells me very little that's new about India.
Ironically, perhaps the best thing about the book is the snide dig at the leaders of China - something, oddly, I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. The book is written in the form of letters to the Primeminister of China, who is visiting Bangalore that week. And we get to see, in Balram's rise up, someone of the oppressed poor who finds the keys to revolution against his capitalist overlords, and yet he ends up, in many ways, as a capitalist himself, nearly as corrupt as those who came before him, helping out his people and his friends.
I'm not sure it's deliberate, although I suspect it must be, but it appears that Balram's life is a bit of a reflection of the communist rule of China.
Anyway, all in all a fun and readable novel. But, all in all, not really substantial enough to think of it as a Booker winning kind of thing.
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Well, I just read Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. It's a perfectly fun, entertaining, easy to read novel. But it really isn't Booker winning material. It feels, still, like all those other Novels About India that get wide literary praise in the UK, the kind that tries to describe the whole Indian experience. And it seems remarkably shallow for that. Oddly, perhaps the most interesting element is what seems to be a bit of playing with China, rather than India, and China's move to expel its capitalist overlords to become capitalist itself.
Not, ironically, that I've actually seen that mentioned anywhere.
Anyway, good enough to read, but not prize-winningly good.
Next up, I think, are the Musketeers.
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I never set a limit for a number of reasons - firstly, books are all different - and they're also different to what you expect when you start them - so it's impossible to know at the outset how long a book should take you. And a book taking a long time doesn't mean it's a bad book. Often the best books are the ones that take the most effort and thought - and therefore require a closer, more patient, slower reading.
But, also, it's impossible to determine outside factors, too, which allow you reading time. Clearly, for example, I read far, far more when I'm on holiday - particularly on long train and plane journeys - than when I'm cycling to and from work, working and not having much spare time at home on weekdays.
But then, I never quite understood the obsession with just reading your way through a huge number of books. I'd rather read, and appreciate, in depth 10 or 20 really good, but perhaps dense, books, than churn my way through a book a day of fluff without bothering to actually stop and think much at all.
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I don't feel under much obligation - I didn't vote for it - but it's one of the more engaging choices of recent months, to my mind, so I'd like to get involved.
Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)
in Past Book Logs
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Some cracking holiday reading - Restless was fantastic. Really good, fairly intelligent spy thriller. Quite complex and interesting.
Then Good to be God by Tibor Fischer - which was funnyish, but not up to the standard of his first three novels. Much better than Journey to the End of the Room or the risible short stories.
Then Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which is really, really sharp apocalyptic SF.
And now Moondust by Andrew Smith, which is a truly excellent book, as Smith tries to find the remaining living men who walked on the moon in the Apollo missions. Great stuff for those of us still romantically attached to the idea of space travel as glory, the Tom Wolfe "Right Stuff" attitude.