Days of audiobooks : day eleven

Listening to audiobooks in my 'office' and doing puzzles has been my relaxation for some weeks. 'Bird Life' by Anna Smaill was a delight; curious and turned into something unexpected, it tells about the friendship between a New Zealand young woman teaching english in Japan, and mourning her brother, and a Japanese woman, also a teacher and also mourning a loss. Here just a lovely moment (that I had to take down like dictation so I may have the punctuation wrong):

 "Dinah placed the carrier bag on the table, she cleared the pile of advertising circulars, the place from this morning's breakfast, the new letter that had been misdirected, sent to a different prefecture, finally redirected to the correct address, finally out the carrier bag on the cleared table and reached inside. It held a box made of thick quality cardboard, white as snow, white as bedlinen, folded along pre-scored lines. Inside the box she felt something shift, heavy and unevenly weighted, it slid. she put the box down in order to delay the moment of opening. She went to the bathroom, studied her face in the mirror, her heart was beating. she washed her hands and face, removed her makeup. She drew the curtains so she could see the light outside, then she walked back to the table and opened the lid. Inside was a pie. It was the pie from Shinjuku, the one that she had not bought. She sat down. Had anything before ever been so beautiful? It was unlikely. The pastry was crisp and fragile, like a bank of fine, sunny, buttery sand. The apples and sweet potato were so thinly sliced they were transparent, glimpses of the apple's perfect pink skin shone through the caramel glaze like flowers caught under rice. It was a fairy tale of a pie, a platonic vision of a pie, it was a pie you might find cooling on a windowsill with a red gingham cloth beneath. she folded the lid to prop up the interior so that the box sat on the table like an expensive display case. Then she took a knife from the drawer and cut herself a thin slice. She took a clean plate from the cupboard and returned top the table, placed the thin slice of pie on the middle of the plate. She sat down. Outside it had started to rain slightly and the sky was a vessel slowly filling with dark resonance. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something leaking. She thought about that bit of lore, was it true? that if you were in a car accident and the car was submerged, that you had to wait until the vehicle filled up with water, until the pressure of inside and outside equalised, then, and only then, you push the door open, and swum out.What strange beauty there must be in that darkness, she thought, the car's headlights illuminating the silt world of the water. You would not need to surface then, you would be able to swim forever. She looked at the piece of pie on the plate, then she took a fork and ate the first mouthful." 

Also 'When We Were Bad' by Charlotte Mendelson, that I may have started previously and then abandoned as it felt familiar. A lovely family saga, guaranteed to make you feel like your own family is nice and normal and well adjusted, and a wonderful window into reform Judaism. The fallout of the decision by Leo to walk away from his wedding echoes through the family and the community and seems to allow his siblings to face up to how much they are living their lives for others. I love a good story examining close family relationships.

Currently listening to 'The Way Home' by Mark Boyle, about his experiment living without money ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Listening to audiobooks is reading.

1419, Billy Summers and all that

It has taken me a couple of months but I have been listening to Lord of the Rings on audiobook over on Youtube. I started off with a multi voiced dramatisation which vanished after a few chapters (as things are wont to do there) then I found Rikash Doekhi and Paul Skinner who provided the remainder (though I was irritated the way Paul pronounced Gandalf, not enough to spoil it and his reading voice is excellent). I reviewed the book back in 2015 after Monkey and I shared the reading of it, and enjoyed it just as much this time around. I was reminded of the ending, which is missing from the films, where the Hobbits return and must fight again to reclaim their Shire from the forces that have invaded it. In some ways it feels a vitally important part of the tale, of how much they are transformed by their experiences, and how nobody rescues them, they do it together, without help from their fellowship. 

We had a very successful charity shop trawl last week, including copies of 'Girl, Woman, Other' and 'Piranesi'. Certainly enough to keep me going for quite a while. I tend to pick out authors that I have read before so I can be quite sure I have some good reading in my near future.

I picked out 'Me and the Fat Man' by Julie Myerson as a quick read (I have reviewed her before, here and here). In it Amy is drifting through life, not knowing who she is, having lost her mother very young and been raised by disinterested foster parents. She meets Harris, who claims to have known her mother, and through him, the fat man, Gary. But things are not at all as they seem, and events rush on, overtaking her, until a tragedy forces her to face up to things. It is a weird little story, about how a person flounders without roots. 
"It had seemed like chance that Gary and I should meet in the pub that night and had felt like choice when I fell for his big body and his gentle, unlikely ways.
But Harris had special skills. He had the skill of making you feel you were choosing, making you believe that anything could happen - that fate was just messing around. They were good times, the ones that followed - though then I was too blinded by the newness to see it. Just when I thought I understood a fact, another, stranger one appeared. Like the dolls you get that you open and there's another inside - each one eating up the next, so as the whole thing can continue. " (p.85)

Previous to this however I had finally managed to get hold of 'Billy Summers' by Stephen King. (Shocked to discover it is a decade since I read 11/22/63, it feels like only a couple of years ago.) I really enjoyed this book, he knows how to keep the story moving, with plenty of twists and turns, and how to make you like people, even when they are bad people; which I guess means he writes them as people not clichés, with strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us. 

Billy is a contract killer. But he only kills 'bad people', at least that's how he justifies to himself how he makes his living. He is sucked in to doing a final job by the promise of a big payout. But as he waits around preparing to make the hit he becomes more suspicious of the set-up, and makes his own plans to extricate himself from the situation. As is so often the case (they are criminals after all) people have not been straight with him and he digs a little deeper to find there are some even badder bad people behind the arrangement. Acting on instinct (and proving he is not such a bad bad person) he rescues a young woman and their relationship leads to other bad shit. All the while he is writing his own life story, which we read, and he reflects on how things have come to be this way. While I have no desire to dip into the horror genre I have enjoyed Stephen King, he tells a great story.

"Half way back to his office, he had a nasty thought. There were a few moments on his way here when he lost focus, his mind on Shan's drawing instead of staying where it belonged, on this morning's preparations. Has he dropped the Dalton Smith phone into the sewer instead of one of the others? The idea is so terrible that in that moment he's positive that's just what he did, when when he reaches in his pocket he'll find the Billy-phone, or the Dave-phone, or that useless burner. If so, he can replace it, his Dalton Smith credit cards are all good, but what if Don or Beverley Jensen should call on the day or two before FedEx can deliver a new one to 658  Pearson? They'll wonder why he's out of touch. It might not matter, but it might. Good neighbours, grateful neighbours, might even call the police and ask them to check his basement apartment to make sure he's okay.

He grabs the phone, and for a moment just holds it, feeling like a roulette player afraid to look at the wheel and see which color the little ball has landed on. the worst thing - worse than the inconvenience, even worse than the potential danger - is knowing he was careless. He let his thoughts slip to the life that's now behind him.

He brings the phone out of his pocket and breathes a sigh of relief. It's the one that belongs to Dalton. He's gotten away with one potential mistake. He can't make another. The fates are unforgiving." (p.144-5)

Stay safe. Be kind. Turquoise or Tangerine for the new sofa covers?

Autumn books

"he found himself here in a world that had no meaning for him, meaning being a thing human beings constructed out of familiarity, out of what scraps they possessed of the known, like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing. Meaning was the frame human beings placed around the chaos of being to give it shape" (p.193)

I felt ambivalent about 'Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights' by Salman Rushdie (though the front page of his website is an interesting collage of images). In it the world is invaded by strange forces and even stranger beings, and Geronimo Manezes, a perfectly ordinary bloke, finds he has the fate of the world in his hands. The human beings are just powerless victims of the jinni that have arrived, but the jinni are just all powerful destroyers with no particular aim in mind and little to distinguish between them. It makes numerous references to 1001 Nights and I kept expecting tales to emerge during the story, but it just turned into a battle for the world, with a somewhat predictable ending. Faintly unsatisfying. Sometimes I dislike a book when you get the feeling that the writer is trying too hard to be clever, but this is Salman Rushdie; I just was unconvinced by the fairyland thing and the motivations of pretty much everyone. Sorry.

I ordered 'Pandemonium' by Andrew McMillan after reading a Guardian review. They manage to be both clever with words and images, creating allusions to more abstract thought and emotion, and also about something real. That's a hard thing to pull off in my opinion. Really liked this one, from the section entitled Knotweed:

how many evenings have I thought the garden done
walked out and seen fresh clumps of weed mithering
the dirt    some people cannot tell the difference
between what should be there and not    I'm one of them
ignorant   till one thing overgrows another
or gets choked    there is always something needing
to be tended  a small salvage down in the muck
I've grown to think if I go out at night
I might catch them at it   but the soil lays still
beneath the harvest moon that is the size
of your sadness   and growing   waxing   until
its whole face peers over at our house   pockmarked skin
like a ploughed field picked clean of all its crops
still   you will not come outside

It seems like the library has mostly done away with actual audiobooks, what with the downloading thing that everyone likes to do, but I found this one, when I went searching for this book (probably another Guardian review). 'Doppler' by Erlend Loe is about a bloke (lot of them about) who begins to question everything about his life, and so walks away into the forest and abandons everything and everyone. He kills an elk (to eat, not for the fun of it) and is then adopted by it's orphaned calf. They have a nice contented, quiet life together, pilfering from unguarded houses and suchlike, until people begin to intrude back into his life. It is quite surreal and made me laugh out loud, which is not something that reading has done for me in a while. He talks to and about the elk as if it were a friend, it's a nice relationship. I totally get where he was coming from when he tries to steal a giant toblerone. You can't help but admire his single minded pursuit of avoiding the world, but somehow keeps drawing it to him. The unabashed thievery is refreshing. An unlikely hero for our time. Highly recommended.

'An Island' by Karen Jennings was serious reading, longlisted for the Booker this year. I see she is South African but the book feels like it has been translated from something east european. The country is unspecified but has a troubled and chequered political history. Samuel lives as a lighthouse keeper, but mostly it emerges because an extended prison stay has left him unable to function around people. He looks after his chickens and grows some vegetables and once a fortnight the boat brings him some supplies. A man washes up on the shore, alive rather than dead like most of the flotsam, and over the course of the following days an uneasy relationship develops between the two, who cannot understand each other. We learn the story of the rest of Samuel's life; as a young man he joined a political organisation opposed to the government. He was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, then ostracised by the other prisoners when they suspected him of collaborating. He is eventually released after 25 years but understands little of what has passed in the world outside. You begin to understand the suspicion he feels towards the man. 
"There had been thirty-two of these washed-up corpses during the twenty-three years that he had been lighthouse keeper. All thirty-two nameless, unclaimed. In the beginning, when the government was new, crisp with promises, when all was still chaos, and the dead and missing of a quarter of a century under dictatorial rule were being sought, Samuel had reported the bodies. The first time officials had come out, with clipboards and a dozen body bags, combing the island for shallow graves, for remains lodged between boulders, for bones and teeth that has become part of the gravelly sand.
'You understand,' the woman in charge had said, as she looked down at a scuff mark on her patent-leather heels, 'we have made promises. We must find all those who suffered under the Dictator so that we can move forward, nationally. In a field outside the capital, my colleague found a grave of at least fifty bodied. Another colleague discovered the remains of seven people who had been hanged from trees in the forest. They were still hanging, you understand, all this time later. Who knows how many we will find here? I am certain it will be many. This is an idea dumping ground.' " (p.5)

The story gradually builds up the tension between the two men. At first Samuel is sympathetic, the man is afraid when the supply boat comes and Samuel hides him, but later he feels threatened as the man tells him something he cannot understand but with a finger across the throat gesture that seems unambiguous. His feelings of weakness and impotence are made worse by memories of his youth when he participated in an unsuccessful protest and was unable to kill a soldier in a fight. He feels the security of his life on the island is threatened, he thinks the man wants to take it all from him, he is old and fears he can do nothing to prevent it. Things are bought to a head when another body washes up. I liked this quote, it is as if the island has become a microcosm for his country, that he is trying to protect, the man becomes like the Dictator in his mind. The trauma he has experienced is both personal and national, but all he has left in his life now is the island:

"It seemed a hundred years since he had last been here. A century within which he had trebled, quadrupled in age. He was older now, very old; older than any man had ever been. His body was in pain, as were his bones. His mind hurt to think of anything other than home and bed. He could capture nothing, everything had become intangible, a dream. There was no man on the island. There was no one but himself. He was alone.
He caught hold of the man again in his mind, forced himself to remember him. The threat of him. Would he be able to avoid death for a fortnight, keep alive until the supply boat returned, then flee to the jetty, beg to be let on board, hurrying them to start the motor, to go, to make haste? The island, the tower, the cottage, the wall, and his vegetables. All of it would be left behind, to be taken over and ruled by this other man. The smotherweed would be allowed to grow wild. It would cover the buildings, the garden, the land. The stone perimeter would collapse as the sea moved in, carving away the island, making away with it, until nothing remained.
He could not allow that to happen. He would not give up his land; he would not leave; he would never leave. The land was his always." (p.146)

An excellent read, thoroughly absorbing, and frightening, and troubling, so yes, I had a lot of reactions to it. 

Stay safe. Be kind. It's Banned Books Week, enjoy a banned book.

The Sunset Limited

'The Sunset Limited' by Cormac McCarthy is a play, subtitled 'A novel in dramatic form'. It is a single scene, between two players, originally designated White and Black, but in the narration of this audiobook the characters is referred to as The Professor and The Black. The Black character is an evangelical Christian and ex-convict, and he has just saved the Professor from jumping in front of the Sunset Limited express train. It is a philosophical discussion on the nature of life, death, existence, religious belief. The Black feels he was sent to the spot to save the other man and as such has taken on some measure of responsibility for changing his mind. The Professor repeatedly says he has to leave, but does not, and allows himself to be distracted, to be nurtured, by the care and attention of the other man. The story has no axe to grind, it is not portraying one belief as more reasonable or natural than the other, it is just presenting the views of the two sides, and as such what it achieves is to show quite how wide the gulf is between them. The Professor explains quite accurately the nature of existential angst and how it makes life meaningless, and in a way I felt frustrated because it made it seem as if that is what atheism is; the idea that atheism is 'believing' in nothing. But the Black's belief is also presented as a simplistic acceptance of something else being 'in charge' of life, of knowing or understanding things as not being relevant to whether life was worth living. The Professors listens curiously to the Black's tales of his time in prison and how he came to find God. He seems quite unmoved by the gratuitous violence of his life, and it is he who manages to shock the other man with his description of the worst thing in his life. They part with neither having changed their view, but not without having had an impact on the other. It was interesting because it was not polemical but just a quiet exchange between two men, a real conversation where they learned about each other's lives. 

(Other reviews of Cormac McCarthy: The Road and All the Pretty Horses)

Different countries

I read 'A Month in the Country' by J.L. Carr many years ago when I joined a book group in Stow on the Wold. Mum sent it to me for Christmas so I read it again. It is the most exquisitely lovely book, about how quiet can sooth the troubled soul. Set in the aftermath of the First World War Tom Birkin travels to a fictional Yorkshire village to uncover a medieval church mural, and there finds both individuals and a community that reaffirm the meaning of life after his dehumanising experiences in the trenches. It is an intensely nostalgic book, but then maybe books set in summer often are. At around a hundred pages it would always be a couple of hours well spent. Here, a random quote, because any passage would do:

"It must have been nine or ten days before Mrs Keach (the Vicar's wife) visited. I didn't work to set meal-times and came down the ladder when I was hungry. And, in the middle of those hot August days, I usually cut two rough rounds of loaf and a wedge of Wensleydale and took it outside to eat. On Saturdays and Sundays, I had a bottle of pale ale; weekdays, water.
It was so hot the day she came that the grey cat let me approach almost to within touch before it slipped off Elijah Fletcher's box tomb into the rank grass and then into its bramble patch. It was here, above Elijah, that I normally sat and ate, looking across to Moon's camp, letting summer soak into me - the smell of summer and summer sounds. Already I felt part of it all, not a looker-on like some casual visitor. I should like to have believed that men working out in the fields looked up and, seeing me there, acknowledged that I'd become part of the landscape, 'that painter chap, doing a job, earning his keep.'
So I nudged back my bum and lay flat on the stone table, covered my eyes with a khaki handkerchief and, doubtlessly groaning gently, dropped off into a deep sleep. When I awoke, she was leaning against the grey limestone wall looking towards me. She was wearing a dusky pink dress." (p.30)

Visiting my sister a couple of weeks ago I usually get an audiobook for the train and our new local library in Hulme did not have much of a selection. I came away with 'The Sister's Brothers' by Patrick Dewitt that was shortlisted for the Booker a few years ago, and not a title I would have gone out of my way to read. It turned out to be a most engaging tale, in spite of the random casual violence. Narrated by Eli Sisters, one of a pair of hired killers, it tells the story of their travels across America to California during the Gold Rush, and also, via his diary, the story of the man they are going there to kill. While I did enjoy the picture it painted of the place and the era, it was my attachment to Eli that kept my listening, taking the book to work after I got back because I wanted to know what became of them. He has trailed all his life after his admired older brother Charlie, but somehow he yearns for a different, more settled life, promising himself each time that this will be the last job. The people they meet along the way, the crying man, the lady accountant, his rather pathetic horse Tub, and then Hermann (their intended victim) himself, and the consequences of choices they make, all compound to make a different future not only possible but inevitable. No quote because I had to return it, but I would certainly recommend it. Having had mixed feelings about 'All the Pretty Horses' I had been somewhat put off this genre of narrative so I am glad I gave it another chance. 

Jeeves and all that

On Only Connect the other week Victoria scolded one of the contestants who said they had never read any Jeeves and Wooster books. I promptly ordered 'The Inimitable Jeeves' on audiobook from the library which Dunk and I listened to together. I confess I did not find them particularly funny, and after the first two the story lines became very predictable. I was sorry that they were so short and we did not get to know Jeeves at all, since he is the character I remember from the TV series, which I did watch with much enjoyment. So I feel like I have given Wodehouse a chance but I don't think I am going to become a fan any time soon. 

Something Wicked This Way Comes

wiki commons

To accompany ferocious knitting I went to the audiobook library, opened up 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' by Ray Bradbury and have listened to it for the last two days. It is a very dark and fantastical mystery featuring an old fashioned carnival, with all its attendant curiosities, including (as pictured) a calliope, which plays to attract customers to the show. But two young boys, Will and Jim, find something much more sinister going on as they witness a magical carousel that can add to or remove years from a person's life. It is a wonderful example of atmospheric writing as we follow their desperate attempts to thwart the plans of the mysterious Mr Dark, the Illustrated Man, who recruits unsuspecting, wretched people to his troupe by offering them a chance to extend their lives and then trapping them forever in the carnival. 

Here Will's father, (while the boys are in hiding), drawing on his in depth knowledge of the town library, tries to find out about the carnival and its origins:

"to the library and to most important books which he arranged in a great literary clock on a table like someone learning to tell a new time. So he paced round and round the huge clock, squinting at the yellow pages as if they were moth wings pinned dead to the wood. Here lay a portrait of the Prince of Darkness Next a series of fantastic sketches of the temptation of St. Anthony. Next some etchings from the Bizaria by Giovan Battista Barchelli depicting a set of curious toys human-like robots engaged in various alchemical rights. At five minutes to twelve stood a copy of Dr Faustus. At two lay an occult iconography. At six, under Mr Halloway's trailed fingers, a history of circuses, carnivals, shadow shows, puppet menageries inhabited by mountebanks, minstrels, stilt-walking sorcerers and their fantacinni. More, a Manual of the Air Kingdoms, Things that Fly Down History. At nine sharp By Demons Possessed, lying atop Egyptian Filters, lying atop The Torments of the Damned, which in turn crushed flat The Spell of Mirrors. Very late, up in the literary clock one named Locomotives and Trains, The Mystery of Sleep, Between Midnight and Dawn, Witches Sabbath and Pacts with Demons. It was all laid out, he could see the face, but there were no hands on this clock, he could not tell what hour of the night of life it was, for himself, the boys or the unknowing town. For in sum, what had he to go by: a three-o'clock-in-the-morning arrival, a grotesque-looking glass maze, a Sunday parade, a tall man with a swarm of electric blue pictures itching on his sweaty hide, a few drops of blood falling down through a pavement grill, two frightened boys staring up out of the earth, and himself, alone in a mausoleum quiet nudging the puzzle together. 
...
There was only one thing sure, two lines of Shakespeare said it, he should write them in the middle of the clock of books to fix the heart of his apprehension: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." (Chapter 37)

The moms get to stay home and bake apple pies and go to church, and would only make a fuss if they knew what their sons were up to, so it's dad who believes their tall tale and comes to the rescue and works out how to defeat these soul-sucking freaks. Toward the end we have Will, Jim and Mr Halloway going back to the carnival to confront and challenge Mr Dark:

"The calliope played sweet to pull Jim, to draw him in, and when the parade arrive with Electrico back the music would spin, back the carousel run, to shard away his skin, to freshen forth his years. Will stumbled, fell, dad picked him up, and then there arose a human barking, yapping, baying, whining, as if all had fallen, in a long drawn moan, a gasp, a shuddering sigh, an entire crowd of people with crippled throats made chorus together. 
'Jim! They've got Jim.'
'No,' murmured Charles Halloway strangely, 'maybe Jim, or us, got them.'
They stepped around the last tent, wind blew dust in their faces. Will clapped his hand up, squinched his nose. The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadow the dust filtered over the tents. Charles Halloway sneezed. Figures jumped and scurried away from an upended, half-titled object, abandoned half way between one tent and the carousel. The object was the electric chair, capsized, with straps dangling from wooden arms and legs, and a metal head-cap hanging from its top.
'But,' said Will, 'where's Mr Electrico, I mean Mr Cougar?' " (Chapter 51)

What a fabulous tale, frightening in an old fashioned kind of way, with a real deep, dark atmosphere and slow ticking plot that grips you and won't let you go.

The Shadow of the Wind

I have continued to be a bad blogger and allowed books to pile up, unreviewed. I took on a new knitting project and so after we finished 'Night Waking', Monkey and I have sat and listened to 'the Shadow of the Wind' by Carlos Ruiz Zafón on audiobook. This was a totally wonderful book. It is the story of a book, or, I suppose, the story of the author. Our hero Daniel, son of a second-hand bookseller, finds a copy of 'The Shadow of the Wind' in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and then gets drawn in to the mystery of its author Julian Carax and why someone wishes to destroy his books. As a young boy he falls under the spell of the enigmatic Clara, daughter of a book dealer, and this in turn brings him into contact with a homeless man called Fermin, with who's help he investigates the mystery. A tragic love story unfolds, of Julian and Penelope, but all the time, in the background there is the insidious presence of Fumero, a former schoolmate who, through the passage of time and the civil war, has become a corrupt policeman. So we follow the trail, picking up snippets of information from characters along the way, as Daniel grows into a young man. In his turn falls in love with Beatrice, his best friend's sister, in a wonderful reflection of the situation in Carax's life, where Penelope was the sister of his school friend Jorge. In fact there are several times through the story where events in Daniels life mirror what happened to Julian, dropped in very cleverly to draw the two of them together, as if fate has some kind of hand in the events of their lives. The background of the Spanish Civil War is present in the political and social upheaval, and the element of fear and uncertainty, but it does not dominate the story. It is another story of feuds and friendship, and of the relationships between fathers and sons, but it is the loyal housekeepers, neighbouring shopkeepers and sidekick policemen that do much of the holding the story together. We enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, who was who and how things fit together, and then were disappointed when the last three CDs were basically a letter from Nuria to Daniel explaining the whole story to him; it was very frustrating to have it all tied up so neatly and completely, with no loose ends, and then the final chapter just gave them all a 'happy ever after'.  Having said that it was a fascinating premise for a story and the whole book was very cleverly written, I can certainly see why it has developed such an enthusiastic following.  

Night Waking

'Night Waking' by Sarah Moss has been listened to in two long bursts, one day before Christmas and then the second half finished in the new year. I find descriptions of parenting sometimes a little hard to read in stories; I find myself being overly critical of the way a character treats their child, and I get annoyed by the often clichéd way writers depict children's behaviour in books. Having said that I think that this book shows very clearly the dichotomy that some mothers experience, between the life that they led before children and the one they have as a parent, and that their sense of loss does not mean that they don't love or want their children but it is hard to let go of your old way of thinking about yourself. 

Anna and Giles have come to live on a remote Scottish island with their children, the precocious Raf and the 'night waking' toddler Moth. They find the buried body of a baby in their garden, and Anna find herself obsessed with its origin and so alongside her struggles to complete her book and cope with sleep-deprived and isolated parenting, she begins looking into the history of the island. I found myself focussing very hard on the family relationships in my first half listening and it wasn't until I came back to the story a fortnight later that I found myself caught up in the parallel tale of the Victorian young woman who has been sent to the island to oversee the medical needs of the islanders. The image of a harsh life that the islanders experience and her attempts to break into their very insular community are contrasted very sharply with the affluent family who come to rent the renovated blackhouse that Giles hopes will help to fund the puffin research that he is doing on the island. The story revolves mostly around Anna however, her struggles with parenthood and academia, trying to cope with the inhospitable and remote island that her husband has bought her to, and then the family troubles of the blackhouse guests that she finds herself embroiled with. The mystery of the skeleton however opens up new areas of interest and research and finally encourages her to see beyond her narrow 'Oxford' comfort zone to a life that can also encompass this new place. A very satisfying story, with some very interesting background issues about the history of island communities, particularly about forced migration. 

Superpowers

There seems to have been a lot of hubbub around Karen Joy Fowler's 'We are All Completely Beside Ourselves', even the audiobook is in a queue and the librarian said I could only have it for a week. I used my day off to knit and listen.

SPOILER ALERT
I loved this story. I had not read any spoilers so had no idea what to expect. It is about the complexities of family bonds, but made oh so much more complicated by the presence of another species. It elicits some very profound and mixed emotional responses, because of the nature of anthropomorphism, and how people feel and react to animals that we perceive as being 'almost' human. So in a family that is raising a chimpanzee alongside their infant daughter you can imagine it is not going to be a normal childhood. The story tells a back and forth tale of the various periods of her life and her coming to terms with the disappearance of her 'twin' Fern. To add to the trauma her brother Lowell also disappears as soon as he is able, leaving Rosemary to deal with her parent's silence as best she can. As readers we are left, like Rosemary, trusting at first in the 'gone to a farm' story, and then assuming the worst of her father when she finally learns what became of Fern. 
Science has long been fascinated by the ways in which we are the same as the other apes, and the ways in which we are different. Rosemary's childhood is an experiment in observing the development of the two species side by side, where Fern grows from infancy, learns some sign language and becomes a member of the family, and comes inevitably to think of herself as a human being. When the experiment if brought abruptly to an end the consequences are both traumatic and long term for everyone involved. Having been the centre of much focussed attention for the first five years of her life Rosemary then has to adjust to being just an ordinary kid. She discovers that "kindergarten is all about learning which bits of you are welcome at school and which bits aren't": the other children sense her 'otherness' and name her 'monkey girl', a term that sticks, in her own head as much as anywhere, to define her ongoing relationship with the rest of the human race.
The book raises far more questions than it ever answers; about the use of such species in human 'experiments', about how different we are, about when humans bond with animals do animals really feel the same thing towards us. I was left slightly disconcerted. A good reaction I felt. If you have to wait in a queue for this book I promise it will be worth it.

"For years I imagined Fern's life as a Tarzan reversal, raised among humans and returned now to her own kind. I liked to think of her bringing sign language to the other apes. I liked to think that maybe she was solving crimes or something. I liked to think we had given her superpowers."

The man who disappeared

I have been listening to 'The man who disappeared' by Clare Morrall while knitting, cooking, painting and sitting around with Dunk. There was a rather lovely interview with her here in the Guardian just recently. It was engaging enough that when I got back from work today Dunk demanded that we have the last CD because it had been too late to finish listening last night. 
It is the story of Felix's unexpected disappearance, and his family's reaction to and recovery from their abrupt change of fortunes. Learning that he is wanted by the police for money laundering his wife Kate and the children are forced to rebuild their life from scratch over the months with no explanation for what has happened and assuming he may even be dead. Meanwhile Felix creates a fake life and hides there and muses on what he has been forced to give up. I didn't really feel sorry for him. I didn't really feel sorry for the family either, a bunch of upper middle class twits who have wanted for nothing and suddenly had to live like the rest of us. The characters behave in slightly peculiar ways and I often was left bemused by their decisions. Why would a person of strict integrity behave as Felix did, the grounds are just too flimsy. His weird aunts were a bit of a bad cliché. I was not sure about the daughter and her stalking of an older girl, and she was a spoilt brat. The young son was not very convincing and Kate herself was just a bit ineffectual. The reaction of her parents was strangely awful and unsympathetic. But the story grew on me because it is about family bonds and resilience and once you have spent a few hours you can't help but start wondering if they are going to manage to pull themselves back together, though the ending as it approached was very predictable.
It was an amusing distraction while decorating in the bedroom but I can't say it was a great book; if I had been reading I would probably have abandoned it. Her book 'Astonishing Splashes of Colour' was shortlisted for the Booker, so she must be capable of decent writing, perhaps this was just not a very good example. 

Big Brother

It's hard when you have a strong reaction to a book to move on to something else by the same writer. I have not tried anything Lionel Shriver wrote before Kevin (which won the Orange Prize in 2005) though I did read 'The Post-Birthday World' and did not like it so much. 'Big Brother' is her most recent book published last year and I have been listening to it on audiobook this week.

On the surface it is a story about Pandora, who is horrified (and that's not putting it too strongly) when she discovers her brother Edison has become morbidly obese. Taking a break from his hip jazz piano-player lifestyle he comes for an extended visit and his weight gain becomes, as she says, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. For the first half of the book she becomes his enabler, allowing him to indulge his every want, to the frustration and disgust of her slightly control-freak husband. As the end of his stay approaches she learns that there is nothing for him to go back to. Work had dried up and he had sold his beloved piano and eaten away the proceeds. In fact there is no home nor anything else to go back to since the storage company sold off his entire possessions to cover unpaid bills. In the second part of the book she decides to save him from himself and together they move into an apartment and embark on a crash diet that has interesting consequences for them both.

The book is about lots of things. It is about weight, and society's prejudice against and judgement of overweight people. It is about food and people's often very complex, often very twisted relationships to eating. It is also about fame. Their father is a famous sitcom star, having for years appeared in a show about a divorced family, and they both spent their childhoods obliged to live up to the fictional children in his onscreen family. Edison has his own measure of fame within the jazz world, and has not handled it well. And Pandora has found herself recently famous because her successful doll company has attracted the attention of the media. They have all handled their own and each other's fame in different ways. But mostly the book is about siblings. I have always felt that sibling relationships are unlike any other. They are part of your growing up and the childhood that has made you the way you are. You are separate but you have so much in common. Siblings are not like friends, you don't choose them, they are just there. There is a sense of obligation and responsibility that can be both a burden and a reassurance. It is also about how siblings lives grow apart and you cannot hang on to the intensity that is there in childhood. 

Zoe Williams at the Guardian didn't like it much, and I have to kind of agree with her. None of the characters are very likeable and the whole scenario is so incredible. I had to work hard at suspending my disbelief, rather as if reading fantasy. I kept wanting to say 'but what about...' or 'that just would not happen'. Their weight-loss programme is unhealthy and positively dangerous and no one in their right mind would inflict it on a grossly overweight person. But the transformation is brings is equally unbelievable; Edison just would not magically turn back physically into the young man he once was, and the weird personality changes were even more strange. Pandora's relationship with her husband is just bizarre, the only nice one being with her two step-children. Shriver tries to fix the whole thing with an afterword at the end of the book, retelling the story as it really happened, as if the tale was Pandora's fantasy of how she might have helped her big brother, to salve her conscience, to stop herself feeling she had let him down, but I am not sure it works. While I enjoyed the book and it had lots of ideas, it was very flawed, and maybe it is a warning about writing something that is too close to home. 

Emily Dickinson makes us human

I have been listening to 'The Humans' by Matt Haig (who also writes a thoughtful blog) and although bits of it drifted past me (or got drowned out by frying onions) it has really grown on me over the course of the last week. It tells the story of a mathematician called Andrew Martin, or rather a nameless alien who has been sent to earth to replace Andrew Martin, because said alien race learned that he had solved the Reimann Hypothesis (a real thing I discovered, the hypothesis that is, not anyone solving it) and that this would have led to undesirable technological advances in an undesirable species. 

The story starts off with 'Andrew' coming down here all superior, thinking he will just do his job of ridding the world of any evidence of the solution and then going back to his own world, but along the way he starts to learn all sorts of stuff about what it means to be a human being, he starts to form attachments, to make some sense of it all, and he changes his mind. While to begin with there were some fairly standard 'alien' responses, 'aren't the humans ugly', 'the food is disgusting', 'they are only really about as intelligent as dogs' and learning some early life lessons from a copy of Cosmopolitan, but then we watch our hero gradually come to see humans in a whole different light. The human Andrew had made a bit of a mess of his personal life, been a remote and neglectful husband and father, but the alien Andrew has a different set of motivations and begins to build a new relationship with his wife and son. In trying to pretend to be a human he is forced to take on some human traits. He arrived thinking that humans were a nasty violent race who needed to be kept in their place but then he discovers music, a bond with Newton the family dog, Emily Dickinson's poetry ("Emily Dickinson was making me human"), and most importantly an understanding of love. There are some wonderful laugh-out-loud scenes; I liked the one where he discovers peanut butter sandwiches and proceeds to share them with the dog and then the conversation they have when the pot is empty. And his analysis of human's interest in 'the news', we are only really interested in what is close to us, in our country, in our town, the closer the better, so that in effect Facebook is actually the ultimate news programme that is purely about what is happening to us.  As the story progresses he is left with a terrible quandary since his instructions are to come down and kill anyone with any potential knowledge of Andrew's discovery, but these are people he has now come to care about. 

While the message is a little warm and fuzzy it is cleverly written and he is tackling some timeless questions about humanity and morality. I was won over when he described sharing a cup of tea with his wife: "I was enjoying the tea, it tasted like comfort." That's pretty much what makes me feel human.

Damn hippy home educators

We sat at Julie's the other day and watched the pilot episode of 'Raised by Wolves' on 4oD (available for another 17 days, and a somewhat pretentious Guardian review here); it is written by Caitlin Moran (no relation to Dunk) and her sister Caz and is based (loosely) on their own childhood being home educated in a large family living on a council estate in Wolverhampton. It is being cheered in home ed circles purely because it contradicts the notion that all home educators are middle class hippy types (for visitors from America please read that as 'all home-schoolers are fundamentalist Christian types'). It doesn't make a big issue about them being home educated, though the scene where they watch from the garden when the school kids come past was excellent, it is more about family relationships. Certainly hoping they make it to a full series, the two young women playing Germaine and Aretha are wonderful.

And it ties in quite nicely with my Christmas listening which was 'Wild Abandon' by Joe Dunthorne (who also wrote the book that became the film 'Submarine'), which is about a bunch of home educating hippies. It is the story of an intentional community, started by Don and Freya and Patrick but enlarged over the years by a motley collection of drifters and WWOOFers. The story follows the disintegration of relationships as people begin to change their ideas of what they want in life and Don desperately tries to hold the whole thing together; daughter Kate goes off to college and meets a young man who's home offers all the comforts of modern life that their farm lacks, Don and Freya's marriage crumbles and their son Albert is left feeling abandoned and turns for companionship to Maria, who has all sorts of wacky ideas about where the world is headed. The relationship between Kate and Albert was lovely, siblings who grow up quite dependent on each other for company. Albert remains embedded in his experience of and love for commune life while Kate, out in the 'real world', makes a conscious decision to avoid discussing her childhood experiences. The story build towards the 'Results Party' that Don throws to try and tempt his daughter home. I liked the way that the character's little dramas were going on while the rest of life carried on regardless. Don is not a sympathetic character but he spouts some well reasoned arguments against formal schooling which are randomly scattered through the story so I felt that was his redeeming quality. I think the story succeeded because although it is witty and Joe allowed himself to gently mock some of their efforts it manages to avoid tired clichés, it created real people and a community who were trying to live their lives outside the accepted assumptions and values of society, and I can't help sympathising with people who try, it was hard and they made compromises but they didn't stop trying. 

The Emperor's Children

Claire Messud's book 'The Emperor's Children' was long listed for the Booker back whenever and it certainly tackles many issues surrounding social whatnots in modern affluent America. The twists and turns of the plot kept me listening through the 16 tapes (the library still has some books on tape though I believe they are being phased out) almost because rather than in spite of the fact none of the characters are very likeable. Marina, Danielle and Julius, despite their expensive education and their privileged backgrounds are struggling to make their mark on the world. Danielle is briefly smitten by Ludovick Seeley, a magazine editor, but he is naturally more taken with her beautiful friend Marina. Julius falls for his handsome (and rich) boss and they seem to quickly form an intense though somewhat superficial relationship, that just as rapidly unravels when Julius' proclivity for casual sex gets the better of him. Danielle is then seduced by Murray, Marina's father, a much respected writer and intellectual; apparently a regular occurrence for him, giving in to self indulgence and self-gratification that his wife turns a blind eye to, while she thinks she has found her soul mate. Crashing into their lives comes firstly cousin Booty, escaping shallow formal education for the inspiration of his idol Uncle Murray, an idealism that is soon to be shattered, and secondly the events of September 11th 2001. While not specifically, I felt, a novel about the effects of the attacks it is obviously something that has impacted greatly on the way American's view themselves and their society, but I don't really feel qualified to comment on what that impact is. I felt that for the characters in the story it was all still very personal, rather than political, how it affected their individual lives, it didn't seem to cause any of them to look or think outside their own narrow concerns. That's all really, she seems to be much admired for her astute social observations and analysis but I found the people shallow and on occasion their behaviour was a trifle clichéd. While I found the story engaging and the characters believable I don't think I cared enough about any of them. Shrug and move on to better things.

Lies, damn lies and Lolita

I ordered Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov from the library for Banned Books Week and it has taken me this long to listen to it. I am having a hard time getting my head around this because I felt subverted by it. I felt like I was listening to a love story, and had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't, the voice is so persuasive. It reminded me somewhat of Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, that I also listened to on audiobook, two years ago. Engleby is another character who tells a tale full of self-justification and you are similarly lulled by his story and constantly having to remember that you are only getting one side. Books with only one character are unusual, and it feels like Lolita has only one character, because we learn nothing that can be relied upon about anyone else. Humbert Humbert paints the portrait of himself as the devoted admirer, he puts Lolita up on a pedestal and worships her, and yet at the same time he is lying to himself as much as he is lying to us, which is why the lies are so convincing. He presents the story a little like Bonnie and Clyde, as if they are outlaws on the run from a society that disapproves of their love affair, so you feel from the beginning that things are unlikely to end well for him. He tries to give the impression of a power relationship between the two of them; he holds her captive with the threat of being taken in to care if she reveals the truth of their relationship to anyone, but at the same time implies that she can give or withhold favours to extract from him whatever she wants, he often finds himself prostrate before her contempt. He both loves indulging her and then at times resents what he perceives as her manipulation of him. He lives in fear that she will somehow escape him, and as time passes his neuroses and paranoia become almost as consuming than his passion for her. He loves her, wants only her, he compares other 'nymphettes' to her and finds them lacking, and yet the things that he wants about her are transient. It is the ultimate objectification, he desires the thing that is Lolita, not the person. He avoids pretty much talking about sex, because he wants the reader to believe it is a story of love and not mere lust. He focusses instead on her dewey eyelashes and her golden midriff, the soles of her feet and her delicate fingers. He chops her up into little pieces and loves each of them, as if he cannot see her as a complete person. He admits towards the end that he does not know her, has never bothered to know her, in all the time they spend together they do not talk about anything meaningful. And as the listener I found I was so wrapped up in his emotions and reactions to events that there was no space to think about what Dolores might have been feeling. I came to the conclusion that this is the power of the story, that you cannot escape his head, and as such you understand and almost sympathise with his final act, why he has to take his revenge on the person who destroyed his idyll. But the mere fact of almost sympathising makes me feel disturbed, you feel pity for him, but I am not sure he deserves it.

The Great Gatsby

I have not read much 'classic' American literature and to be honest had a bit of a negative view of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I thought that The Great Gatsby was some kind of celebration of the 1920s extravagant, self-indulgent lifestyle of the super-wealthy, and it really didn't interest me. When the film came out it certainly was presented that way by the previews. Then I read a review and was surprised to find that the book was described as a critique of this affluent society, so I downloaded it from the audiobook library and found it an interesting and enjoyable listen, quite a change from my usual reading choices. 

Being written third person seemed to exaggerate for me the sense that you were an outsider looking in on the events in question. The narrator, a young man who finds himself living next door to Gatsby is never quite one of the 'ingroup' but seems somewhat set apart and becomes a confidant of the enigmatic Gatsby. I found it interesting that although America often likes to think of itself as 'classless', a meritocracy, unlike Britain who is so bound up with class consciousness and boundaries, you find that when it comes to the crunch the Tom Buchanan's of this story don't like the upstart nobody who tried for a while to pretend to be one of them. The story is all about the superficiality, both of their lives and of their relationships. I find on the wiki page that the characters are all based on real people but I am not sure how that affects the way you react to the story. I did not like Daisy (curiously coincidental that I read two books in a week where the main character had the same name) at all, she is shallow and selfish and unable to take responsibility, but maybe I am being harsh and she is just a product of her era and her upbringing. The person who you do like is Gatsby himself, he has something of the true shakespearian tragic hero about him, he makes the ultimate sacrifice for love, and you get the feeling that he paid the price gladly. I was not sure that he saw through the glitzy surface of the world that he was trying so hard to be part of, he had been hypnotised by it as much as anyone, and I am certain that Daisy would have ruined him anyway because he had romanticised her as much as he had the lifestyle. I can see this is the kind of book that a reader could come back to over and over because I am sure in listening that there were things I missed. I like the fact that a book written of its own era has an atmosphere and language that cannot be copied by someone trying to write backwards, the fact of the author being there and living it makes the telling more authentic. Certainly it was an eyeopener and I will perhaps add something else by Fitzgerald to the pile.

Throttled by the apron strings

'When we were bad' by Charlotte Mendelson has been a most entertaining, if infuriating, listen. It tells the story of the Rubin family: Claudia the matriarch, a much admired rabbi, Norman her devoted husband, who has been secretly writing a book that will potentially be more successful than his wife's upcoming publication,  and their four adult offspring, Leo, Frances, Simeon and Emily, who can't seem to disentangle themselves from their mothers' apron strings. 

The book opens with Leo's wedding, from which he absconds with his lover, leaving not just the bride in the lurch but his mother in a profound state of flustered embarrassment. It is quite a momentous moment for Leo as everything in his life up to this point appears to have been orchestrated and controlled by his mother. Things nearly fall apart for him and his lady love as she challenges his loyalty to his family by pushing him for a show of commitment. Frances' life meanwhile is a sham of motherhood, not coping with her own new offspring and failing utterly to establish a rapport with her husband's two daughters, and nobody seems to notice until it is all too late. Simeon sits smoking dope in the background, clinging desperately to his teenage rebellion because he can't be bothered to go out into the real world. Emily just flaps around insisting everyone has to rally round and support their mother. While working all the hours god sends, to provide for the needs of her family, Claudia is so wrapped up with her own concerns and achievements that she does not realise what is happening to her family. Though they all live this slightly claustrophobic life, with all four of the children still in their parental home, and there is lots of heartfelt concern for each other, none of them seem able to talk about anything important. They are all keeping secrets from each other and pretending like nothing is going on. None of them are very likeable, being so wrapped up in themselves, but that is part of the appeal of the book. You get to laugh and think smugly to yourself that at least your family is not as dysfunctional as this one. As the plot rushes us madly towards all important the family passover seder and the publication of both Norman and Claudia's books you can see that the shit is about to hit the fan.

It is altogether a beautifully played out family saga, taking us from one person's drama to another, tying them all neatly together with the interrelationships between the four siblings and their parents. Sometimes it takes a crisis to stir things up and force the family to confront their stifled existence and face up to what they really want from life. A good lesson for all of us maybe.

After the fire, a still small voice

(Am playing catch-up here on all the posts that have been waiting to be written.)
'After the fire, a still small voice' by Evie Wyld was recommended on Savidge Reads, or rather he mentioned it in passing while singing the praises of 'All the birds, singing', which I put on the wishlist for later. There are some problems with audiobooks; firstly I will sometimes wander away momentarily and not pause it, or I will be listening but not really listening (if you see what I mean) and not realise I have missed some vital point in the story, but more importantly this one had the second CD missing from the box, but I just carried on regardless and hoped I could just catch up with the story. 

The story follows two men, Frank and Leon, separated by a generation but sharing a history that is not made precisely clear but can be guessed at early on in the tale. The chapters alternate between the two of them. It is all very quiet and slow, not very much happens; in fact even when Leon goes off to fight in the Vietnam war, it's as if he is watching the whole thing happen to someone else in slow motion. There is such a strong sense of detachment and isolation, it is in both the events of the story and in the characters of the two men. But everything about the writing is lovely. She creates the atmosphere of rural Australia so deftly, and then introduces us to a scrawny little runt of a girl called Sal who's blunt, no-nonsense view of life forces Frank out of his isolation. Maybe it was a sign that life had actually changed very little over the time gap, since I sometimes had trouble remembering which part of the story we were in, but that did not detract from it, in fact it drew on the sense of similarity between the men, and yet at the same time you were intensely aware of the gulf between them. Then Frank tries to go and visit, but fails at the last hurdle and drives away. I was left a little confused, as if I missed something, but then maybe life is just not that simple.
If you go to Evie Wyld's wiki page you will find links to some of her short stories online, also lovely.

Island Beneath the Sea

I have been listening to 'Island Beneath the Sea' by Isabel Allende for the last several weeks now; it is very long, over 17 hours of audio that I am sure I would not have stuck with in print. I have not read anything by Allende before and having trawled through a few reviews I find that this book was less than well received, not having the magical realist type themes of some of her earlier novels. It is a sprawling saga of slavery, revolt and one woman's pursuit of freedom. It jumps from narrator to narrator, and this I felt was its strength as I found all of them to be variously compelling and convincing. Set in the late 18th century the story follows the relationship between Valmorain, a frenchman who arrives on Saint-Dominigue (now Haiti) to take over his father's sugar plantation, and a young slave Zarité who is acquired to take care of his new wife, all set against the history of the island at a very turbulent time. There is nothing romantic in it; he owns her, rapes her, abuses her and gives away her first child. She, while accepting her lot in life, develops a strange intense loyalty to her mistress who sinks into mental illness and the drugged stupor imposed by the doctor to ensure the preservation of a final ditch pregnancy. This same loyalty is then transferred to the son who grows up alongside her own daughter Rosette. The tale follows the drama of the slave uprisings that freed the colony from French rule and abolished slavery. To ensure the safety of the children Zarité alerts her master to the coming attack and enables their escape from certain death, and earns as reward a paper that promises her emancipation. Their life takes them to New Orleans; Valmorain struggles with an equally strange sense of loyalty to her, when a new wife brings trouble and conflict into their slightly unorthodox domestic arrangements. Everything about the book was fascinating and well researched. The historical detail was well integrated into the story, they live through events and we see the effects of the social upheaval from both sides. The convoluted social strata was dwelt on at length; the way all the possible combinations of races related to each other, who looked down on who, who had this right or freedom, the subtleties of skin tone denoting everything about how life could be lived. Although he never acknowledges her as an equal, nor acknowledges what he owes her I did feel that over the course of the story Valmorain does have a subtle shift in the way he views Zarité, and the reader, like Zarité herself, cannot help but feel pity for how he ends up. The novel sweeps up all sorts of things in it's wake, from the influence of Catholicism and Voodoo, to Napoleon and the war in Europe, to the growing political divide in America. It is unflinching in its portrayal of slavery but the multiple narratives allows the reader to see the pains and pleasures of different life experiences, showing us the social and political situation from all perspectives and gives us a glimpse into the world of each one. History, drama and a enthralling human story, what more do you need; I will certainly come back to her writing again.