Reading

Review: Stoner

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Stoner, a novel by John Williams, was copyrighted by the author in 1965, and was first published in the UK in 1973.  As the copy I have was published by Vintage in the UK, I can’t tell when the novel was first published, but a safe bet would be in the mid-60’s in the US.

John Williams was born in Clarksville, Texas in 1922.  During the Second World War, he served in the US Air Force in China, Burma and India.  His first novel, Nothing but the Night, was published in 1948, and his second, Butcher’s Crossing, was published in 1960.  His last novel, Augustus, was published in 1972.  Williams received a Ph.D from the University of Missouri and he taught literature and the craft of writing for thirty years at the University of Denver.  He died in 1994 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

It would be fair to say that Williams is not a well-known author, but Stoner has recently attracted significant favourable reviews.  For example, Julian Barnes of the Guardian says, “It is one of those purely sad and sadly pure novels that deserves to be rediscovered.”

Tom Hanks writes in Time Magazine: “It is simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher.  But it is one of the most fascinating things that you’ve ever come across.”

The New York Times says: “Few stories this sad could be so secretly triumphant, or so exhilarating.  Williams brings to Stoner’s fate a quality of attention, a rare empathy that shows us why this unassuming life was worth living.”

I think I read that an employee of a major book seller (was it Waterstones?) rediscovered the novel, and praised it to the point where it became the chain’s book of the year.  I decided I had to get a copy.

Having now read it, I can tell you that I agree with the above reviews.  Moreover the writing is beautiful and captivating.  It is clear, clever and without unnecessary embellishment.  It is a novel that makes one reflect on life in general and one’s own life.

Those of you who have read my reviews will know that I tend to be critical of particular developments that occur without reason.  As someone who was educated in the sciences, I believe that for every effect there is a cause, and I’m not content unless a major effect has a cause that is identified (or at least hinted at); I become sceptical, and I begin to question the author’s attention.

There are three effects in Stoner which for me are presented without cause.  First, Stoner becomes an instructor in literature at a major university.  He is an only child, without self-awareness, or any particular ambition, without childhood friends, growing up on a farm, who goes to university to study agricultural science.  He’s likeable enough, but he does not interact much with others.  In fact, when his literature professor asks him a question in class, he is unable to summon the resources to answer.  We are, in effect, asked to believe that he became a teacher because the same professor told him that that was his destiny.  Based on what?  Most university instructors I have known are outspoken extroverts.  Once Stoner becomes an instructor, I can accept that, over time, he develops the skills to become quite a good instructor.

The second point has to do with Stoner’s wife Edith, whom he takes in marriage based on a fleeting attraction.  This turns out to be a disastrous mistake.  Edith has unpredictable swings in mood and behaviour which are not hinted at when Stoner first meets her.  She seems like a shy girl, but she becomes a nemesis, a witch.  He behaviour is so erratic and so irrational that I found myself doubting her as a character.  Could not Williams not have hinted at a psychological defect or at a strategy which Edith was following.  As a result, I lost interest in trying to understand the relationship between Stoner and his wife.  For me, she was just a “problem”.

The third point has to do with the relationship between Stoner and Katherine Driscoll, a young instructor with whom he has an affair.  I can understand how they could fall in love, but what I don’t understand is how their physical relationship could (apparently) begin so smoothly.  Stoner had no sexual experience before he met his wife, and with her it was disastrous.  Katherine has little experience, and it wasn’t very pleasing.  How could these two sexual misfits behave like practiced lovers immediately?  Give them time, author!

The above tend to be my personal reservations, and they don’t motivate me not to recommend Stoner.  It is a rare and captivating novel.

Sable Shadow and The Presence

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My fifth novel, Sable Shadow & The Presence, has just been published.

 Photo

The publisher’s press release says the following:

“Is the Voice You Hear Your Conscience, Or Is It Something Else? 
From an early age, Henry Lawson hears voices. He attributes one to the Sable Shadow, a confidant of the devil, and the other to The Presence, a representative of God.  He believes his life becomes a “board game” between these two powerful influences. 
Sable Shadow & The Presence is the fictional autobiography of a bright, but introverted and slightly insecure young man, one who studies the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.  He begins to see life in existential terms, although this does not infringe on his rudimentary Christian beliefs. Upon Henry’s entry into the business world, he receives vital guidance from Sable Shadow, and advances to a high corporate level. With his career nearly at its peak, Henry suffers a series of devastating tragedies and attempts suicide. With the help of his wife and a psychiatrist, with whom he engages in philosophical dialogue, he constructs a completely new identity to overcome his past.  But will this identity escape the influence of Sable Shadow? 
This thought-provoking, psychological novel is rich in triumph and tragedy, success and failure, good and evil. It is a modern day look at Paradise Lost.”

I would recommend it, if:

  • you like biography (this is a fictional autobiography)
  • you are interested in philosophy (layman’s level, not academic level)
  • you’ve wondered what existentialism is all about
  • you are interested in what it takes to get ahead (and fail) in the corporate world
  • you have a layman’s interest in theology
  • you think you might be interested in Henry Lawson’s theory of how to succeed in life

or

  • if you’re just interested in a good story

 

Review: Restless

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William Boyd’s Restless won the Costa Novel Award in 2006, and when I found a copy in our small library in Sicily (it had probably been left by a guest), I decided I had to read it.  The reviews on the cover were effusive in their praise.  For example, The Times was quoted on the front cover as saying: “Boyd is a first-rate storyteller and this is a first-rate story . . . An utterly absorbing page-turner.”

The setting of the novel is the early years of World War II, when Britain and Russia were fighting against Nazi Germany alone, and the US had not entered the war.  The central female characters are Eva Delectorskaya and her daughter, Ruth.  The chapters alternate between Ruth telling her side of the story, in the first person, from 1947 onwards, and Eva’s story being told in the third person from 1935 until 1941.  Ruth does not know her mother as Eva; she knows her as Sally Gilmartin, née Fairchild.  She also didn’t know that her mother was half Russian, half English, and was living in Paris, age 28, when the war broke out in 1939.  The principal male character is Lucas Romer, who recruits Eva into a special branch of the British Secret Service.  Eva is beautiful and fluent in Russian, English and French.  After being recruited and trained in Scotland, one expects that Eva will be parachuted into France to work alongside the French resistance.  But we learn – partly through the files that Eva/Sally passes to her daughter and partly from Eva herself – that she has been recruited into an organisation which attacks Germany through the media.  The stories that the organisation places are sometimes fabrications and sometimes exaggerations or little-noticed Nazi misdeeds. In 1940, the organisation, including Lucas and Eva, move to New York City, where their focus shifts to persuading a reluctant American people to join the war against Germany.  Eva and Lucas become lovers, and for Eva, Lucas is the perfect secret agent: brilliant, and devious, but devastatingly attractive.  Of course, they succeed in persuading the White House to go to war, but just before Pearl Harbor, Eva is sent on a mission during which she is nearly killed.  Suspecting everyone, including Lucas, she goes onto hiding: first in Canada and then in England.  Years later, as an old woman, she persuades Ruth to help her unmask the traitor.

What could be a better story?

What I particularly liked about it was the subversive activity involving the use of the media.  One wouldn’t expect media people to be literally assassins, but when one is a traitor and one has to prevent something from happening, one uses strong measures.  The daughter who doesn’t know the truth about her mother, who discovers it during the course of the novel, and who collaborates with her in realising the conclusion, is another appealing feature.  The story is very well-written – not in a literary style – but in straight-forward, clear language.

The only faults I could find were what seemed to be a little bit of ‘filler material’ about Ruth’s occupation: teaching English as a second language to business people.  I also wasn’t clear about what actually happened during Ruth’s nearly-fatal mission.  Somehow, it didn’t all fit together.

But having said that Restless is a first rate thriller, and if you decide to pick it up, be sure you haven’t any pressing engagements: it’s difficult to put it down.

Book review: Aleph

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I’ve been on holiday in Sicily for almost three weeks, so I had some time to do a little reading.  (The weather, the sea, the beaches and, most importantly, the company were all very nice.)  At the news stand/book store in the main square of Capo d’Orlando, I had a look through their collection of English language books, which are to be found in the darkest inner recesses of the store, mixed in with German language books. Aleph, by Paulo Coelho, a popular and well-regarded Brazilian author, caught my eye.  I had read his Eleven Minutes some time ago, and I was impressed.  It is the allegorical story of a young girl who, through her failures to achieve true love, goes to Switzerland where she becomes a successful prostitute.  But then she meets and falls in love with Ralf, an artist with whom she falls in love, and she discovers sacred sex: a mixture of sex and love in which one gives up one’s soul for the loved one.  Thought provoking and a very nice story.

Aleph is written in the first person, and it is, at one level, an interesting story about a trip across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  At the allegorical level it is Paulo Coelho’s complex exploration of self discovery.

The train trip seems to involve the author himself: he reports on his interactions with his publishers, editors, journalists and readers in a very modest yet engaging way.  One sympathises with his hardships: lack of sleep, the cold and bad-tempered colleagues.  I found it easy to wish that I, too, were on that hellish train just for a chance to meet Paulo Coelho.

But the ‘meat’ of the story involves a perceived sin that Paulo committed in an earlier life: as an official in the Spanish Inquisition, he failed to testify to the innocence of several young women who were then burned alive.  One of the young women has been reincarnated as Hilal, a young Turkish woman who believes that her life depends on making contact with him.  Diligently, she tries to establish a relationship with him without really understanding her own motivation.  Paulo learns in a sequence of dreams what he did.  She forgives him unconditionally and unknowingly, and he finally declares his sin to her, and is able to persuade her to get on with her own life as a concert violinist.

The ‘Aleph’ is a condition where all things in the universe and all time are able to converge at one point.  It represents perfect enlightenment.  Paulo and Hilal are almost in an Aleph at a certain point between the carriages of the train.

Interestingly, there is no sex between Paulo and Hilal: not that he isn’t tempted and that she isn’t willing.  At one point, she appears naked to him and he remembers her naked before the Inquisition.  The only difference being that then she had pubic hair, but now she is shaved.  He comments negatively (and quite rightly, I think) on the popularity of women shaving.

This is quite an interesting novel.  The trip, the characters, their relationships, and the actual events are all captivating.  And Coelho’s writing style is both engaging and clear.  The problem for me with this book is that I don’t believe there is such a thing as an aleph, nor do I believe that, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, we carry a debt from one life to another.  It’s another example of my literal mind getting in the way!

Review: Bring Up the Bodies

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I have just finished reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  I felt that I had to read this Booker Prize-winning novel by a writer who has won the Booker Prize for the last two years.  I’m glad I did, because now I can see what all the fuss was about.  In my opinion, the novel is very good, but it also has its faults: see below.

The setting is sixteenth century England during the reign of Henry VIII, and the time frame is from the onset of illness of Katherine, the ex-queen and Henry’s divorced wife, to the execution of Anne Boleyn, the king’s second wife.  The story is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to the king and the second most powerful influence in the kingdom.

What I liked about the novel was its (for me) faithful rendering of the culture and values of Tudor England.  The characters, though there are perhaps too many of them for one novel, are clearly drawn.  The prose is captivating, but sometimes a little difficult to follow.  And the story, itself, even if well-known, was difficult for me to set aside.

There are 762 reviews of Bring Up the Bodies on Amazon.com at the moment: 469 are five star and 26 are one star.  I thought it would be interesting to look at the one-star reviews and see to what extent I agree.

Here are excerpts from five of the one-star reviews:

  • “Non-specific pronoun use drove me batty… She begins lines with “He says….” He who? Why do I have to wonder who the speaker is?”
  • “If I had not been rather familiar with the Tudor history the author’s disjointed rambling would have lost me with the first ‘children falling out of the sky’ to the end.”
  • “Ms. Mantel’s offering is not completely factual and gives a very biased, gossipy, and amateurish impression of the people of the age.”
  • “She seems to be allergic to telling the reader who is speaking so you find yourself constantly going back through the pages to try and discover who is saying what.”
  • “Beautifully written, yes – try and follow the story! Yeesh! By the time the slew of adjectives are regurgitated (some call it prose) the story line (plot) is long forgotten. That’s okay at first but it occurs page after page after page and soon all one is reading is prose and about what?”

I have to admit that at first the use on the non-specific pronoun, ‘he’, confused me, as well.  But after about ten pages, I realized that ‘he’ almost invariably referred to Thomas Cromwell.

“Children falling out of the sky” occurs on the first page, and when I first read it, I wondered what the image was about.  But, by the bottom of the page, I realised that the ‘children’ were tamed hawks.  Still, I wondered why the author would begin a novel with a confusing statement.  An ambiguous statement – OK – but confusing?

Historical novels do not pretend to be ‘completely factual’, and it seems to me that it’s OK for an author to present a biased point of view, as long as the biased view ‘holds water’, which, in this case, in my opinion, it does.  It is gossipy: so what?  Amateurish?  I don’t think so.  I, too, have read a lot of Tudor history and I think Ms Mantel does an excellent job setting the reader down into the culture, values, and scenery of the sixteenth century.

What I found confusing was that Ms. Mantel would use different names for the same character: the ‘Duke of Norfolk’ could be ‘Thomas Howard’ on the next page.  I believe this is faithful to the customs of the 16th century: a man could be ‘Thomas’ to his friends, but ‘the Duke of Norfolk’ to strangers.  Still, with so many characters (68 are named in the Cast of Characters) it is difficult to recognize all of them in each instance.

The prose in Bring Up the Bodies borders, at times, on the poetic.  Take, for example this paragraph:

All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters.  And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry.  Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

In my opinion, Ms. Mantel sometimes gets carried away with her imaginative imagery, and risks losing some readers in doing so.  “Spy on what the saints are doing” is an example.  In a way this image is appropriate: the culture of the 16th century was fervent in its religious devotion and fear.  Moreover, the image reinforces the clarity of the sky.  But to the modern reader, the image is jolting: how can one look at the sky and spy on the saints, if, indeed, there are any saints?  If I had been clever enough to have this image spring to mind, I might have tempered it to say: “the sky is so clear one might think to see God’s halo.”

 In summary, I think that Bring Up the Bodies represents a landmark novel, and is worth the extra effort to read it with understanding.

The Character: Kate

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Kate Conway may seem like a minor character in The Iranian Scorpion, and she is in the sense that she does not appear often in the novel.  She is a single, free-lance journalist in her mid-forties: an attractive, bright, well-connected woman with her own accommodation in a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. 

What is she doing without a man?  She tells Robert Duval, the central character, when she meets him in the hotel bar, that she’s tried long-term relationships and they’re not for her.  However, she’s not necessarily opposed to short-term relationships, and she evidently has a weakness for younger men.  Robert is in his early thirties.  Not surprisingly, they become lovers, and very good friends.  He is the man she needs, and she becomes his mentor/guardian angel.

Early in the story, Kate connects Robert with her key contact in the Taliban: Vizier Ashraf, a high-ranking elder.  It is Vizier Ashraf who provides Robert with access to Azizullah, a large-scale opium farmer.  And it is the Vizier who gives Robert the phone number of the Taliban’s ‘agent’ in eastern Iran.  (The Taliban have conflicted views on drugs: on the one hand they are opposed to drugs for religious reasons; and on the other, drugs are a convenient source of necessary funding.)  The Taliban’s man puts Robert in touch with The Scorpion’s man.

Kate also provides the essential telephone link between Rustam, who knows where Robert is, and the Drug Enforcement Agency.  The DEA brings pressure through diplomatic channels on Iran; this ultimately turns out to be unsuccessful.

Finally, Kate writes the charge sheet against The Scorpion via a syndicated article on Robert and Rustam’s adventures in Iran, with photographs taken secretly by Robert.

So, Kate provides several essential links in The Iranian Scorpion.  She is a tough, savvy, libidinous woman!  I hope you like her.

Review: “The Deceit”

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I’ve been on holiday this week, so I have been a little negligent in keeping my blog current, but please rest assured that I will catch up.  While on holiday, I’ve been reading The Deceit.  I decided to buy Tom Knox’s thriller, The Deceit, because I wanted to see how another author writes a thriller, and because it is sited, at least in part, in Egypt, which is the main setting of my sixth novel.

The Deceit is a complex tale of the occult.  It begins with a prominent, old Egyptologist who is searching for the Sokar Hoard, a collection of ancient documents, which, rumour has it, will alter our concepts of religion.  Meanwhile, in Cornwall, England, there is someone practicing very sinister witchcraft, which involves the burning of dozens of live cats.  A detective inspector gets involved when a body is found – in mysterious circumstances – at the bottom of an abandoned tin mine.  The young protégée of the famous Egyptologist sets out to find the Sokar Hoard, on the basis of rumours that his mentor actually found the Hoard, but is now dead.  The young protégée is joined by a freelance movie maker and they discover part of the Hoard, but are – at first – unable to translate it.  Back in Cornwall, the detective inspector begins to home in on the practitioner of the deadly black magic.  The protégée, the movie maker and the detective inspector are threatened by various sinister forces, but they decipher the key message of the Hoard, and understand the nature of the black magic, respectively.  They also learn the connections between the message of the Hoard and the black magic.   If it were true, it would surely make your hair stand on end!

There are many twists and turns in this story.  Some of the twists seem more like diversionary devices, than essential elements  The characters seem two-dimensional; their purpose is mainly to facilitate the story.  The language is story-telling language; it does not aspire to literature.

What contributes substantially to its believability is the author’s compelling knowledge of ancient Egypt.  The places, the ancient culture and beliefs are all very real, and form the platform from which the occult tale can be launched.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a leap too far.  Too much of my religious understanding and my knowledge of science is called into question, but for those who do not suffer from credibility blockages, this novel may be just your cup of tea.

Pupils Who Turn to E-books are Weaker Readers

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This was the headline of an article in The Daily Telegraph – May 16.

The article reported the results of  a survey of 34,910 eight to sixteen-year-olds which was undertaken by the charity, the National Literary Trust.  It found that nearly all children had access to a computer at home and 40% owned a tablet or smart phone.  It reported that the number of children reading from a screen every day had, for the first time, exceeded those who read printed material.

The study reported that children had been slower to make use of digital devices than adults, but that the number of young digital readers has doubled in the last two years.  Publishers and retailers have understood this and are offering a larger range of children’s books and comics available in digital form.

The study found that pupils who read only electronic books every day were considerably less likely to be strong readers than those who read in print, and they enjoy reading much less.  Fewer electronic readers have a favourite book.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, boys are more likely than girls to read from digital devices.

One interesting (and not unfavourable statistic) from the study is regarding the reading of news by pupils.  While the proportion of students reading newspapers has fallen from 46.8% in 2005 to 32.2% in 2012, more than 40% of children and young people were reading the news on their computer, smart phone or tablet. This suggests to me that the number of students who are taking an interest in the news is growing.

One socio-economic statistic is that children who receive free meals at school are less likely to read traditional books than their counterparts who do not receive free meals.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literary Trust said: “While we welcome the positive impact which technology has on bringing further reading opportunities to young people, it’s crucial that reading in print is not cast aside.  We are concerned by our finding that children who only read on-screen are significantly less likely to enjoy reading and less likely to be strong readers.  Good reading skills and reading for pleasure are closely linked to children’s success at school and beyond.  We need to encourage children to become avid readers, whatever format they choose.”

Instilling a Need to Read

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In the Daily Telegraph, about 10 days ago, there was an article by Jonathan Douglas, Director of the National Literacy Trust (literacytrust.org.uk), a “charity that transforms lives through literacy”.  The first two sentences in the article caught my eye: “Reading for pleasure at the age of 15 is a strong factor in determining future social mobility.  Indeed it has been revealed as the most important indicator of the future success of the child.”  This finding is the result of research carried  out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.  The research examined education and reading as factors in promoting social mobility.

I suppose many parents who read the article would readily agree with this conclusion.  Douglas said that the research distinguished between different motivations for reading: whether the reading is the result of parental carrots and sticks, or whether it is entirely voluntary.  The research suggested that those who read for their own pleasure have a desire to “engage with stories, texts and learning.  Reading for pleasure therefore reveals a predisposition not just to literature, but to the sort of lifelong learning that explains increased social mobility.”

Douglas goes on to talk about different formats for reading.  By way of example he points out that emails typically use different language than a written letter.  He says, “Analysis so far on the  impact of digital literature is that it can play an important role in building core literary skills, but there is an ongoing debate about whether it conveys the same benefits as reading a physical book.  Initial research in the Unites States would appear to suggest that it doesn’t.”

Douglas points out that there are differences between boys and girls in terms of their reading for pleasure.  “In Britain, girls read more and have  more positive attitudes to reading than boys.  This is not a universal phenomenon. In India, by contrast, it is the other way around, though that may have more to do with questions of gender and access to society.  In Britain, it is about gender and attitude.  The reluctance of boys to read for pleasure seems more social than biological.”  A recent study by the National Literacy Trust found that reading for pleasure was not something that “boys wanted to be seen doing.”

Douglas argues that reading for pleasure will result only from teenagers having access to books that interest them. “If that means car manuals or books about football for boys, then so be it.”

On the subject of classical vs. modern young adult fiction, Douglas says, “There is a balance to be struck, and this goes to the heart of the current debate about whether a canon of classics needs to be imposed on teenage students in our schools.  Some say that this proposal is wrong and the way to get them reading for pleasure is to give them complete freedom to choose.  Others say that without a knowledge of the classics, they are being failed by the education system because the will miss out not only on great literature, but also on a vital part of their own cultural identity and heritage.”

What is your view?

The Hare with Amber Eyes

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I’ve just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal.  It was highly recommended by my cousin, Peggy, and it won the 2010 Costa Biography Prize and was a Sunday Times best seller.  I dutifully bought a copy and read in during a recent trip to Sicily.  In many ways it is a fascinating book.
The hare in the title is a small ivory netsuke from a collection acquired by the author’s great grandfather’s cousin in Paris in the second half of the 19th century.  Netsuke are small, precious, hand-carved and polished figures of animals and people, made in Japan by skilled craftsmen of ivory or unique hard wood, like boxwood.  The collector, Charles Ephrussi (born 1849), was from an extremely wealthy Jewish family originating in the Ukraine.  The family made their money buying and selling grain from the Ukraine and later in a banking empire.  The story traces the lives and life styles of the family from Odessa in the Ukraine to Paris to Vienna to Tokyo to London (where the author now lives) alongside the collection of 264 netsuke that were passed through the family.  The collection is quite extraordinary in that all 264 pieces of the original collection have survived several transfers between family members, including temporary custody under the mattress of a ladies maid during the Nazi occupation.  The pieces, while extremely valuable as a collection were also very precious to their various custodians.
But it is not the netsuke which take centre stage in this story, which is really about the lives (good times and bad) of the family members.  Particularly fascinating are the descriptions of the life styles in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.  They are life styles which we would not recognise today.  For the family, things started to go very wrong with the rise to power of the Nazis.  But post-war, with family members scattered through Europe, America and Japan, lives became stable and even improved.
The book strikes one as a very learned biography.  It is erudite, and colourfully descriptive, with an extensive vocabulary and frequent phrases in French or German.  But it is the descriptions of people’s daily habits, their attitudes, priorities, activities, dress, etc., in the various cities over a period of 15 decades which are most fascinating. 
The family characters are real, but they seem suitably distant and untouchable.  We know them from a distance.  The descriptions of settings and the author’s reflections on what he has learned are sometimes too copious, but I suppose the author wants to immerse us in the results of his very extensive research, from which he, himself, took great pains and satisfaction.  In fact, I find it rather startling that De Waal was able to take two years away from his family (married with three children) and his occupation (world-famous ceramic artist) to do all the necessary research.  But he deserves our thanks for creating a fascinating biography and a literary treat.