Writers

What Makes a Good Novel?

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In her blog, Words in the Kitchen Sink, Jane Heiress asks: What makes a good novel?

She got quite a few responses, some of which I have selectively included in quotation marks under the below categories.

Is it character development?  “This one is crucial. I tend to love characters that have similar personalities, ideals, or experiences as I do myself or someone I love. I don’t care nearly as much about plot or setting as I do about being able to love at least one character. Really, almost every other one of my preferences can be ignored, if an author can create a strong connection between me and a character. Maybe I’m narrow-minded, but I think most best-sellers find a trait or feeling that almost everyone can personally connect with.  Along the same lines, how does an author make me love a flawed character? One way is by giving him or her flaws that I have myself. I have many quirks that other people may see as “flaws,” but I consider ‘personality traits.’ Even when a character is truly flawed, I’ll give them more mercy if I can empathize with them.”

Memorable archetypes?  “I’m not too strong on archetypes, so I won’t comment on that one. I think the best fantasy novels use the archetypes in new ways, like what Tolkien did by making a hobbit a hero, or what Robin McKinley does with her awkward, misfit female warriors.”  Personally, I try to avoid archetypes.
Neat and logical plot?  I’m not sure a plot, to be successful, has just got to be neat and logical.  Slightly messy and somewhat illogical could make it captivating.  The plot is very important: it is the device which conveys the story and its meaning.  To my mind a plot should be believable, it should be original and it should be interesting.
Unpackaged realism?  “I think that realism has a place in a good novel, but to write a novel with the sole aim to expose reality is actually a very bad idea. If you want reality, you read the newspaper–though I guess it’s all about difference in taste, because journalists in general just can’t write, so if you want realism written in a coherent, logical, and truly unbiased way, you’re kind of up a creek. Anyway, the whole reason we read is so that we can feel like we’re not alone without actually surrendering our own sense of individuality (I stole that from C.S. Lewis). So there has to be enough of reality in a novel to help us feel that the characters might have the same sort of feeling we do when faced with tragic or happy life events.”
Societal issues?   “Societal issues are important if not too heavy-handed.  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an expose on slavery in the South, and it was very effective, but have you read that book?  I would hardly call it good, except as an expose on slavery, and if you want that, you could read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, or other first-hand accounts of former slaves.  Much more powerful.”
Moral lessons?  “Moral lessons don’t belong in a good novel.  They can be part of a novel, but if that’s the focus, I put the novel down and read the scriptures.”  I agree except that I think that ethical dilemmas have a place in a novel.  Ethical issues are more uncertain than moral issues, and are more subject to interpretation of the situation.  They therefore tend to involve the heart and mind of the reader.
Richness of setting?  “Richness of setting is very important.  Novels with a strong sense of place and circumstance are usually good.  Even though sometimes reading through the descriptions can be tedious.”  I’m not convinced that a setting has to be ‘rich’ to add importance.  In my opinion, it is more important for a setting to be both credible and interesting.
Quality of prose?  “Quality of prose is essential.  I mean, really, the only reason anyone reads The Great Gatsby is because the words are sparkly and fluid and they practically float off the page.  Jane Austen has beautiful sentences; Charles Dickens plays games with grammar as part of his subplots; Chaim Potok paints murals with words, so reading one of his novels is almost like going to an art gallery; Geoge Eliot uses such quality of phrasing that you can’t help loving the words she chooses to describe something.
Suspense?  Dramatic intensity? “Suspense is important, but I get bored if there’s too much of it.  I don’t guess ahead, and if you pack in the action and tension too heavily, I disengage and go on to something that unfolds more gradually.  I’m going to combine this one with dramatic intensity and use a movie as an example.  I don’t like action flicks because sometimes they go too fast and too much happens at once.  It’s not that I’m too dumb to follow it, but the high-speed car chases and stuff are not the substance of a story for me, so if there’s too much of that, I’m finished. There’s also a book out now, by James Patterson, a new series for teens, that is non-stop action.  Kids like it, but I thought it was second-rate, just because there wasn’t any good character development and his sentence structure was severely lacking in quality.  Robin McKinley sometimes goes the other way and tries to turn her high-speed moments of tension into epic poems.  It doesn’t work either.  J.K. Rowling’s action scenes work very well, mostly because they’re short.”
Comedy?  No one commented on this. I think that if one is writing a serious novel, rather than a comedy, comedy can have a place: either as a device to relieve tension for the reader, or to shed light on a character.  If suspense goes on too long, as the comment above suggests, the reader can lose interest.  Or, if a character says or does something funny, one sees a new dimension of him or her.
Emotional response?  “As for emotional response, if you can’t get emotionally involved with a book, it isn’t worth reading.”  Agreed!
Expanding intellectual horizons?  “When you’re trying to expand someone’s intellectual horizons, that’s tricky.  Any book worth reading will not do that on purpose, because no-one likes to feel dumb, or to feel like they’re being taught something.  A book that expands your intellectual horizons will do it in a painless way–too many new ideas too fast will not make a lasting impression.  The important thing is that a book will set itself up on familiar turf, then take your ideas to the next level.”

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Imagination

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There is an article in the books section of Last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph which caught my attention.  It is written by Hanif Kureishi, who is a novelist and a teacher of writing.  He makes the basic point that to be a ‘good writer’ one should not concentrate on a study of such things as plot, perspective and dialogue; rather, one should give the imagination free rein.  He goes on to make the following specific points:

“The imagination rarely behaves well. It can be ignored and censored, but never entirely willed away.  Such a willing away would be a mistake because, unlike fantasy, which is inert and unchanging – in fantasy we tend to see the same things repeatedly – the imagination represents hope, rebirth and a new way of being.  If fantasy is a return of the familiar, you might say that an inspiration is a suddenly uncovered part of the self, something newly seen or understood.  Emerson, who tells us in ‘Compensation’ that ‘growth comes by shocks’, writes in another essay, ‘The best moments of life are those delicious awakenings of the higher powers.’

“One of my students said he read books in order to have ‘more ideas about life’. You’d have to say that the imagination is an essential faculty, and that it can be developed and followed.  It is as necessary as love, because without it we are trapped in the bleak polarities of either/or, in a North Korea of the mind, dead and empty, with not much to look at.  Without imagination we cannot reconceive what we know, or see far enough. The imagination, while struggling with inhibition, represents more thought and possibility; it is myriad, complex, liquid, wild and erotic.

“The imagination is not only an instrument of art.  We cannot delegate speculation to artists.  Or rather: whether we like it or not, we are all condemned to be artists. We are the creators and artists of our own lives, of the future and of the past – of whether, for instance, we view the past as a corpse, a resource or something else.  We are artists in the way we see, interpret and construct the world.  We are daily artists of play, conversation, walks, food, friendship, sex and love.  Every kiss, every piece of work or meal, every exchanged word and every heard thing – there are better ways of listening – has some art in it, or none.

“To survive successfully in the world requires great capability.  To be bold and original is difficult labour; it can seem impossible, because we have histories and characters that become fixed identities.  We are made before we know it; we are held back by who we are made into.  Not only that, we are inhabited by destructive, chattering devils who want less than the best for us. . . .  There is nothing as dangerous as safety, keeping us from reinvention and re-creation.  Imaginative work can seem destructive, and might annihilate that which we are most attached to.

“Naturally, if we can do this, we pay for our pleasures in guilt.  However, in the end, misery and despair are more expensive, and make us ill.  Let madness be our guide, not our destination.

“Aspiring writer who wish to be taught plot, structure and narrative are not mistaken, but following the rules produces only obedience and mediocrity.  Great writing and great ideas are strange: their sorcery and magic are more like dreaming with intent than they are like descriptions of the world.  Daily art makes and remakes the world, giving it meaning and substance. . . . The imagination creates reality rather than imitates it.  There is no interesting consensus about the way the world is.  In the end, there is nothing more out there but what we make of it, and whether we make more or less of it is a daily question about how we want to live and who we want to be.”

I think this is a brilliant essay about the role of imagination in writing and in life.  For more about identity, how it is formed and shapes our lives, I refer the reader to Sable Shadow and The Presence.

Review: The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

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The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is the first novel by Fatima Bhutto, who is the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former President and Prime Minister of Pakistan, whose sister was Benazir Bhutto.  Fatima Bhutto graduated from Columbia University in 2004.  She lives in Karachi, and is a freelance writer.  Interestingly, her website does not mention this book.  Instead, it mentions three other books.  Judging by one article on her website, she seems to be a political radical.

The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is an interesting novel, relatively brief and quite intense.  It is set in the tribal region of northwest Pakistan and involves three brothers who are preparing to celebrate Eid, the Muslim feast at the end of Ramadan.  The oldest son has decided to leave his childhood sweetheart and go into business away from his home town of Mir Ali.  The middle son has become a doctor in Mir Ali and the youngest has joined his brother’s sweetheart as an insurgent.  In the novel, Mir Ali is the focal point for the armed struggle between Pakistan’s army and local people who crave their own freedom.

Fatima Bhutto does a very good job describing the culture, the issues, the people and the setting.  One gets the sense of a long-running, life-and-death struggle in the northwest of Pakistan.  It is clear that the author’s sentiments are with the insurgents.

I found the novel frustrating in the sense that it lacks focus.  There is an insurgent plot to kill a minister, and the story seems to be headed to a climax there, but the novel ends in uncertainty.  Was he killed?  Who killed him?  Or if not, why not?  There is some uncertainty as to who the insurgents are.  Some are Taliban; some are ordinary people.  What is the relationship between them?  The Pakistani government is clearly an evil influence, but in a book like this which is somewhat polemical, it would be a redeeming feature to hint more broadly at what the government should do differently (other than bringing in local conscripts).  There are also some religious issues: notably Sunnis vs. Shiites, but there are problems for Christians and Hindus, as well.  How do these issues fit into the over-arching themes of justice and freedom?

Ms. Bhutto’s writing in quite engaging.  Occasionally, there is a too long sentence which requires a second reading to gain understanding.  And, like all ‘young, modern authors’ she likes to use unconventional words rather than the conventional.  Mostly, this works well, but there is the occasional grating which disturbs the flow.  The characterisation of the two older brothers, the female sweetheart and the Pakistani colonel are all clear and intriguing.  The character of the youngest brother – the insurgent – is somewhat opaque.  We can understand why the two older brothers do what they do, but what – apart from his father’s lectures – motivates this brother to be an insurgent?

An interesting book and a particularly interesting author. I’m sure we’ll hear more from her!

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.

Is Surveillance Undemocratic?

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There is an article in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph as follows:

“More than 500 of the world’s leading authors have condemned the scale of state surveillance, warning that spy agencies are undermining democracy.  In a statement the writers from 81 different countries, including British authors Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, and Martin Amis, call for an international charter enshrining digital rights.  The authors warn that the extent of surveillance has undermined people’s right to “remain unobserved and unmolested” in their communications.

“This fundamental right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes,” it says.

“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.  To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as well as in real space. . . . Surveillance is theft.  . . . . This data is not public property.  It belongs to us.  When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.”

The statement comes after eight of the biggest technical companies formed an alliance to call on Barack Obama, the American president to reform surveillance laws.  Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Yahoo have united to form a group called Reform Government Surveillance, marking the first time competing companies have presented a united front.

From what I have read about Reform Government Surveillance, it seems to make a lot of sense.  But I have major reservations about the language used by the authors in their statement.

Reform Government Surveillance seeks five areas of reform:

1. The government should codify sensible limits on surveillance, limiting surveillance to known users and eliminating bulk surveillance.

2. Executive powers should be subject to strong checks and balances.

3. Government should be transparent: it should allow companies to report demands for data and it should promptly disclose the data publicly.

4. Governments should not restrict the international flow of data.

5. Legal conflicts between different government jurisdictions should be eliminated.

I have no problem with these five reforms, but, for example, where do people get the right to “remain unobserved and unmolested in their communications”?  If we speak publicly, we give up the right to be private and unobserved.  Just ask any celebrity who’s made a mistake on Twitter (or any other public place for that matter): are they unobserved?  No!  Are they unmolested?  They may not feel like it.  Hasn’t the person who wrote this statement for the authors heard of libel or slander laws?

“A person under surveillance is not longer free.”  Strictly speaking, this is true, but does it pass the ‘so what?’ test?  Where in the US Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence is there mention of ‘freedom from surveillance’ (or observation).  No civilized society can function without its citizens being able to observe the behaviour of others.  For a starter, we would have no witnesses in court.

“Surveillance is theft” . . . and when it happens, “we are robbed . . . of the principle of free will”.  There is a leap of logic in here somewhere.  It sounds a little like the existentialist concept of ‘Other’, but even the existentialists believed in free will.

You may have read about the trial currently underway in London of two Islamic terrorists who are on trial for murdering and trying to butcher a UK soldier in the street.  One was a Christian who converted to Islam.  In his defence (he denies murder, but admits killing the soldier) he said that he is a ‘soldier’ (he never served in the military), and that Allah told him to kill a soldier in revenge for all the Muslims who have been killed.  Can we afford, as a society, to overlook the behaviour of people like that?  I don’t think so.  I agree with the eight technical companies, but not with my fellow authors.

By the way, if I had been the prosecutor in the above trial, I would have asked the defendant two questions:

One: did he ever consider the possibility, as a religious person who believes in God and knows about the devious, lying devil, that it was the devil, not God, who gave him the instruction?

Two: has he studied the Qur’an sufficiently to understand, as most Muslims do, that to kill someone is a major sin?

 

 

 

“Let Children Pick Their Own Books”

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“There is no such thing as a bad book for children,” says author Neil Gaiman, best-selling writer and Carnegie Medal-winner.  He was delivering the second annual Reading Agency lecture at London’s Barbican on October 14.  He said that compelling children to read books deemed appropriate by adults will leave them convinced that reading is ‘uncool and unpleasant’. . . There are no bad authors for children that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. . . . They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories.  A hackneyed worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed or worn out to them.  This is the first time the child has encountered it. . . . Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing.  Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer. . . . Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love  of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian ‘improving’ literature.”  My own recent experience with children’s reading involves my grandchildren.  In Sicily this past summer, I brought along two illustrated books: one of Aesop’s fables and the other of fairy tales.  After dinner, I offered to read to them.  One grandson, in particular, was very keen to listen.  He would select one book or the other, pick out a particular story, and comment on it after I had read it (or even during the reading).  His younger brother and sister were interested, initially, but they preferred other occupations. More recently, I read bedtime stories to two other grandsons, aged 5 and 3.  They each picked out a book they wanted me to read.  (They had to take turns.)  The older one picked out a child’s book that would have been difficult for a thirteen-year-old to follow.  (It was a compilation of ancient fairy tales in ancient language.)  I pointed out that it maybe he wouldn’t like it so much, but he insisted that I carry on with the reading, perhaps because he wanted to get an idea of what older children liked to read.  After about the third tale, he selected another book.  His younger brother wanted to be read to, also, but his idea of being read to was to explore illustrated pop-up books, and comment on them. I can remember when I was about thirteen, there was a paperback novel called The Amboy Dukes in which my classmates were highly interested.  I was told, when I finally got a copy, was that the cover illustration was two teenagers having sex.  This seemed rather doubtful, as both the boy and the girl were dressed.  I remember showing the book to my mother, and pointing out the cover illustration.  She, too, was sceptical, but she made no other comment.  But, I decided to read it, in case there were salacious sections.  There weren’t.  It was boring.  King Arthur was much more interesting.

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!

Writers without a Genre

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Iain Banks, a Scottish “novelist of hallucinatory brilliance who attracted notoriety with his grotesque and bizarre tales” died last week at the age of 59.  His obituary in The Daily Telegraph says that until his first book, The Wasp Factory, appeared, he “plastered the walls of his room with rejection slips”.  I know the feeling!  The Wasp Factory was a controversial first novel which brought Banks notoriety (1984).  “Even before its appearance, one publisher claimed that the book had made him vomit into his waste paper basket.  It had a similarly emetic effect on many reviewers: ‘a repulsive piece of work’; ‘silly, gloatingly sadistic’; ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’ were among the judgements of the newspapers.  Many, though, also conceded the hallucinatory brilliance of the author’s imagination, and there was widespread acknowledgement that Banks’ control of tone and language were more assured than that of many established novelists.”

“The defining qualities of Banks’ novels, whether mainstream or genre, remained a macabre black humour and a taste for the bizarre and the Gothic. . . . In 1987 he published Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels; thereafter there was, for a time at least, a clearer distinction between his science fiction output and his more conventional novels, which tended to appear in alternative years.  His space operas, which combined political musings, scientific speculation, mordantly funny asides (the names of the artificially intelligent spaceships were a long-running joke), and violent, frequently gruesome action sequences, brought him a new, large and enthusiastic fan base.”

My reaction is that Banks was one of those rare novelists who had two distinct audiences: a mainstream audience and a science fiction audience, although it has to be said that some of his works had their feet planted in both camps.  One recent commentator expressed the view that “not since Robert Louis Stevenson, has a writer so successfully bridged multiple genres”.  As a child, I was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson; I liked Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and I thought of him as a clever novelist.  I decided to look him up, and I found that he, too, was a Scot.  His Wikipedia listing has him as a “novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.”  In fact, Stevenson wrote twelve published novels, five collections of short stories, six uncollected short stories, five volumes of poetry, seven volumes of travel writing, and a long list of essays and other works.  In addition to all that, Stevenson ” wrote over 123 original musical compositions or arrangements, including solos, duets, trios and quartets for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano.”

Unfortunately, he died at the age of 44, probably of a stroke, having suffered from poor health for much of his life.  With the rise of ‘modern literature’ after World War I, Stevenson was seen as a second class writer, specialising in children’s literature and the horror genre.  The 1973 edition of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (2000 pages) does not even mention Stevenson.  But later in the 20th century, his reputation began to re-ascend with recognition of his literary skill and imaginative powers.  Setting the critics aside, he is the 26th most translated author in the world.

So, sometimes specialisation is not necessary.

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.