My Year of Reading: 2012

My Year of Reading: 2012

Welcome to 2013! Another year of reading in the... um.... books.

This marks the beginning of the third year I have kept this blog. In that time I have written up on every single book I have read in that time. I've blogged through sickness, vacations, typhoons and pregnancy. I'm the blogosphere's version of the postal service! I've even managed to maintain the blog through the first six weeks of my daughter's life. Why stop now, hey? Here's to continued reading success in the new year.

I'm not one for memes, though I like to follow what others are reading. I think reading challenges are a clever idea, but I've never felt compelled to force myself to do more or less of anything literary. I see a lot of bloggers stating that they will read ten classics this year or that they will endeavor to finish at least five books over 700 pages or that they will read more non-fiction or Charles Dickens or less erotica or whatever. I respect the diligence and discipline, but I've always considered the act of reading (no matter what I am reading) as diligence and discipline in and of itself. Furthermore, reading challenges often narrow a person's reading rather than broaden it. So I vow to continue reading whatever I may get my hands on over the next twelve months.

So what's new in 2013? Well, for one thing, I will be sharing a portion of my reviews with the good people over at I Read A Book Once.... If you haven't been over there yet, I sincerely urge you to do so. Jonathan is doing some stand up work and the resources he is amassing put this little corner of the net to shame. And since this blog is strictly reviews I might even get around to posting a rant or two along the way. I'll be sure to let everyone know when I have posted something new over there.

Otherwise, let's get to the main event, shall we? We're all here to get a load of my year end lists. And without further ado, here they are in no particular order...

Best Fiction of the Year

1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

This novel absolutely blindsided me. When someone asks me my favorite novels, this one always seems to pop in my head.

2. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

I could have chosen any one of three of the George R.R. Martin novels I read this year, but I'll go with my favorite.

3. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

This is one of those solidly written novels that you carry with you for years. 

4. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro made my top five last year and manages to find his way on again with this nuanced masterpiece.

5. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides

Speaking of making my list two years in a row, Here's Eugenides again. I had wanted to read this novel for ages and it did not disappoint.

Best Non-Fiction of the Year

1. Bossypants by Tina Fey

The great thing about this book was that its awesomeness was completely unexpected.

2. Anvil: The Story of Anvil

Yeah, sure the writing is atrocious but I double dog dare you to read this book without a)bawling and b) becoming a huge Anvil fan.

3. Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

Perhaps it was the impending birth of my daughter, but this diatribe on the insidious marketing strategies aimed at young girls really struck a chord. Everyone with a daughter should read this.

4. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

This book got a lot of undeserved slack. It's a very open and honest book about parenting and worth reading.

5. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

Anyone even remotely interested in the larger workings of world politics should read this book. Whether you agree or disagree, Mearsheimer presents some compelling evidence.

Worst Books of the Year

Note: I'm not implying that these are bad books when I list them as the worst books. These are books that either disappointed me or failed to live up to certain expectations. I still stand in awe of the fact that these people are able to sit down and write novels. I have unwavering respect for that.

1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

After Cloud Atlas, how was Mitchell ever going to maintain expectations? This book is fine, but ultimately disappointing.

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

...and a million YA readers wept. Sorry.

3. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Meh.

4. The Story of O by Pauline Reage

Shocking erotica that failed to shock or eroticize. Fifty Shades of Snore.

5. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre 

Seriously, WTF was going on?

Anyway. Hope everyone had a great New Years and I look forward to continuing the blog into 2013.

Every House is Haunted

Every House is Haunted

By Ian Rogers

Note: This is my first review in partnership with the good people over at I Read A Book Once.... Although all the reviews I write for them will also appear here, I encourage everyone to pay the site regular visits as it has lots more news, reviews and author interviews. I'm excited to be part of the team.

A blues guitar player whose name I cannot recall once said that the blues isn't about the notes a musician plays, it's about the notes he doesn't play. Horror works in exactly the same way. A horror writer is responsible for providing a precise amount of detail that is necessary to frighten a reader. No more, no less. Not enough detail and the reader cannot picture the scenario, too much detail and you eliminate the fundamental criteria in all scary stories: the reader's imagination. It's a literary balancing act that is often destabilized by a writer's overwhelming desire to add more (in this case unnecessary) detail. The writer should provide only what is absolutely necessary for the reader to conjure up the most horrifying aspects of their own imagination.

As P.T. Barnum may or may not have said: "Always leave them wanting more." While this is true of virtually every situation in life, this truism is especially true for horror writing. Good horror should end in a hair-raising climax that wraps up enough (but never all) of the story's loose ends. The unresolved (or unrevealed) issues at the end of a horror story are the most crucial. In my humble opinion, horror should leave the reader alone with their own imagination as to what happens next. Does Carrie rise from the dead and terrorize the town of Chamberlain? There should be room for infinite imagined terrors to occur in the readers mind after the last word has been written.

The reader, on the other hand, has responsibilities of their own when entering into a horror story. He or she must enter into a horror story with an open mind, devoid of preconceptions and biases and prepared unequivocally to suspend their disbelief beyond its usual boundaries. Unlike other genres of fiction, I make it a policy to enter into a horror story with no expectations. If you project your expectations onto a writer they are bound to disappoint. I will hereafter refer to this phenomenon as the Late-Era Stephen King Anomaly.

So as you can see, horror fiction is a social contract of sorts between a writer and a reader. A symbiotic relationship that, when it works, results in extraordinarily fun reading but when it doesn't.... egads!

So it was nice to sit down with Ian Roger's new collection of short stories with a wide open mind and be pleasantly surprised to find an eclectic anthology of stories that are not only well-written but also offer the precise amount of detail while leaving all the climaxes as open ended as possible. No awkward reveals, no detailed descriptions of monsters that never, ever live up to expectations and no not once was I disappointed with an ending. That's a difficult feat to achieve.

Every House is Haunted is a loosely intertwined collection of stories that range from paranormal to science fiction to strict horror. I'm not going to summarize over two dozen stories for you, so you'll just have to go find this book yourself if you are interested. I will tell you that it is cleverly divided into five sections, fittingly entitled The Vestibule, The Library, The Attic , The Den and The Cellar. A literary house tour, if you will.

Although Rogers notes in his introduction that his greatest influence was Stephen King (and who am I to question that?) I thought his style throughout the collection was predominantly reminiscent of Robert McCammon's short fiction. However, "The Tattletail" is a nod to J.K. Rowling. H.P. Lovecraft is manifest in "Charlotte's Frequency" and, most tellingly, "Winter Hammock" evokes the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut. Certainly not literary lightweights. If Rogers is running on even half capacity compared to those writers, you can't miss. I'll go so far as to say he's pacing them rather well, indeed.

Of course, I don't want to imply that Rogers doesn't have a distinct literary voice. He most certainly does. But short fiction is a difficult genre. The writer has to get straight down to business, often at the expense of details that either the writer or the reader would have otherwise like to have been privy. Maintaining the trust of the reader is difficult when you are trying to craft as story only 20 pages long. It doesn't take much to disappoint a reader in a short span. So voice and pacing become an especially important aspect, one that Rogers handles adeptly. One does not want the same voice in each and every story. A certain amount of homage is an ingenious way to ensure each narrative employs a different tone and voice.

So what, exactly am I rambling about? Is this book any good or not? Should you go out and buy the damned thing or not bother? Well, like most titles in the horror genre, this is not the sort of collection that is going to win over new fans. There is little to no cross-over potential here. If you like romance, you'll find none of the cross pollination one finds in titles such as Twilight. However, if you are constantly on the lookout for new and interesting work in the paranormal genre, this is a can't miss title. Well crafted stories, well crafted characters, no condescension and boat loads of fun to read. In Every House is Haunted, Ian Rogers doesn't play all the right notes.

A Feast for Crows: Book Four of A Song of Ice and Fire

A Feast for Crows: Book Four of a Song of Ice and Fire

By George R.R. Martin

Note: I promise, there are no overt spoilers in this post.

Trying to avoid Game of Thrones spoilers on the Internet is like trying to shield yourself from the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan two decades on. Everyone knows that Spock was going to die in the end and everyone knows A Feast for Crows is the weakest of the Song of Ice and Fire series. Or so the Internet would like you to believe.

I admit it, I had put off reading the fourth installment of the series because it has been roundly discussed over the Intrawebs that this book is the bad apple in the proverbial bushel, the weakest link in the maester's chain, if you excuse my nerdiness. If Sesame Street did a 30 second bit on the series it would the one thing that doesn't belong. If A Feast for Crows were a movie it would be Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Godfather III. If it were television, it would be the first season of The Simpsons. If it were music it would be post-David Lee Roth Van Halen. Hell, even George R.R. Martin himself felt the need to write an epilogue to this installment explaining why it is the way it is. Apparently he had to divide the fourth installment into two books to accommodate the entire story. Fine by me. He shouldn't apologize or explain his work. All this awesomeness came out of his head and nobody else's. He reserves the right to tell his story the way he wants. To hell with us critics, right? So what if A Feast for Crows is different.

And make no mistake, A Feast for Crows is indeed the odd man out of the series in a lot of ways. Rather than continue the stories of Bran Stark, Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister, Martin opts to introduce narratives from a host of other characters, most notably Cersei Lannister and a bunch of Vikings, I mean Iron Islanders. As well, Martin introduces a few extremely dull characters from Dorne (yawn). But seriously, if you have been on Team Cersei through the first three books, this is the book for you. A solid 40% of the book is told from the perspective of the cruelest of the Lannister clan. By the end of this novel I'm not sure whether I want to punch Cersei in the throat or take her out for a nice seafood dinner. Either way, I don't think her behavior would have been at all believable without the first hand account of why she does what she does. If nothing else, one could regard A Feast for Crows as a primer for all things Lannister.

Furthermore, by adding characters into the narrative mix Martin fleshes out the situation in Westeros a lot more. Up until now, the happenings in Dorne, the Vale and the Iron Islands, have been sorely ignored. This was the first novel in which I got the feeling that things were afoot in all corners of the realm. Though I'm going to be honest here... I'm still entirely uninterested in what is happening in Dorne. Who cares about the Dornish? They are even less interesting than the Tullys.

And despite radio silence from my two favorite characters (Daenerys and Tyrion) and a complete lack of The Others, Martin hasn't abandoned all the familiars. Sansa and Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Jaime Lannister and Samwell Tarly are all represented and their stories have progressed sufficiently. And the absence, for a novel, of Varys was refreshing. Don't get me wrong, Varys is a great character, but he's creepy and there was enough Robert Arryn and The Brotherhood Without Banners in A Feast for Crows to keep the creep factor high.

So, to make a long blog post short, A Feast for Crows isn't as bad as people say it is. It's different, that's for sure, and it doesn't follow the formula of the previous three novels and there is absolutely zero Tyrion represented (that did sting) but it's all logical progression and I finished the novel excited to sink my teeth into A Dance with Dragons. Am I glad to be over the hump? Yes. Was it as painful as it could have been? Well, if I had read this when it came out and had to wait a year for the next novel, yes, it would have been. As it stands, I can start A Dance with Dragons any time I want and that makes a load of difference.

Previous reviews in this series:

A Game of Thrones
A Clash of Kings
A Storm of Swords

Pariah

Pariah

By Bob Fingerman

What is it about the zombie genre that makes it such a tenacious sub-genre in our popular culture? Certainly it is not the nuanced characterization of the walking undead. From the opening scene of George Romero's 1968 genre-setting film Night of the Living Dead  to present, zombies, with very few exceptions, have been rather two-dimensional in scope. They are reanimated corpses who have a singular existential urge: to devour human flesh. Not the most rounded characters. And yet they seem to have more staying than vampires, wizards and werewolves which lend themselves to complex characterization.

So what gives?

The difference is the secondary characters. While other similar styles of horror focus the narrative on the specific creature (be it vampires, werewolves or what have you), what many people fail to understand about (most of) the zombie genre is that the zombies are actually inconsequential to the story being told. Zombie lore, at it's finest, is social satire. The writer or director uses the notion of a zombie apocalypse as a way in which to render society down to a microcosm of our complex social networks. Zombies focus the multitude of humanity's ills and places them under a microscope for the writer or director to examine in detail.

The zombie element is simply a clever and visually exciting backdrop to the real story: the human drama unfolding in the farm house or the shaping mall or the tenement building. When zombie lore strays from this nowhere-to-run motif it often falls flat on its face (note: this does not include anything that is written or filmed from the perspective of the zombie... that's genre deconstruction and worthy of its own discussion. See Dust). George Romero himself is guilty of straying in some of his more recent work, especially Day of the Dead.

All this is not to say that those working within the zombie genre are entirely reined in with respect to how they tell their story. There is still more than enough creative leeway within the genre to sustain it for years to come.

Case in point, Bob Fingerman's novel Pariah. The novel begins months into the apocalypse. The streets of New York are wall to wall zombies. A group of people living in a building in (or near) the Bronx have barricaded themselves inside their own building and are slowly starving to death and/or going crazy. As with so much zombie lore, each character represents a specific social stereotype that the author wants to throw into his own personal meting pot. What would happen if we put a misogynistic jock, an elderly Jewish couple, an artist, a woman who has recently lost her husband and infant daughter, the son of a mid-western Jesus freak and a middle aged black dude all together in a tiny space? What if they couldn't leave? How would that pan out?

This story could just as easily take place on a lonely spacecraft in deep space or a collapsed mine or an Antarctic base during the winter. Really, it would work in any local that offered no immediate escape. It would just be difficult to explain how an elderly Jewish couple ended up in Antarctica. That's where the zombies come in handy. It doesn't hurt that they are creepy and gory and scary as well.

This is what Fingerman understands so well. Rather than try to re-invent the wheel, Fingerman stayed true to the spirit of that old farmhouse in Romero's original film. Pariah is very much about humans trying and failing to co-exist in times of extreme duress.

But if that was all there was to Pariah, why would it merit such a lofty discussion on the nature of zombie lore? Thankfully, Pariah brings more to the table than simply another retelling of the same rat-in-a-cage trope. Fingerman, in what can only be described as a moment of undead clarity, introduces the concept of zombie immunity. What if specific individuals, for whatever reason, repelled the walking undead? What if certain people were simply unappetizing to zombies and could walk among them entirely unmolested? How would that work?

Pariah isn't a perfect novel. I found that Fingerman threw far too many pop culture references into his dialogue and internal monologue. While I fully understand the pervasive nature of books, music, films and the like, I don't think that people living under these conditions would reference SCTV or Dumb and Dumber that often. A lot of the pop culture references felt shoehorned into the narrative as a way for Fingerman to sound off about his own views rather than develop his characters. Unless, of course, he was insinuating that the sum of our culture doesn't amount to anything more than what we know about The Addams Family. In that case, this book is even more depressing than I initially thought.

But that's a minor inconvenience to an otherwise thought-provoking addition to the zombie oeuvre. I'm not one for spoilers so I'm just going to urge those who enjoy all things zombie to read Pariah. I'll admit that if you aren't a fan of the genre I don't think this will be the novel to turn you on to zombies, but if you, like me, crave all things living dead, this is a can't miss novel. It maintains all of the standard features that drew you into the zombie sub-genre to begin with, stays true to the mythology established by George Romero and throws just enough monkey wrench into the cogs to leave you asking more questions that it answers. Pariah is certainly a next step sort of work and, in time, should be considered canon for the keepers of zombie lore.

Sex With Kings

Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry and Revenge

By Eleanor Herman

Sex With Kings is the sort of niche history that really gets me going. I love it when a historian bites off a little corner of history and chews on it for 200-300 pages, especially if it is a subject that has otherwise been left to rot on the side of the plate. Subjects such as the etymology and evolution of the word fuck or the history of the human fear of premature burial arouse in me a curiosity that must be satiated.

When I came across Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry and Revenge (via someone else's book blog, but I forget whose. If you read this and it was your blog let me know and I will edit in your credit) my insatiable curiosity was roused. How could a history of royal mistresses not fail to entertain as well as inform. So long as it didn't focus on the detritus one finds in the British tabloids, this should have been a fantastic read.

Well, it is.

And it isn't.

First, one must give Eleanor Herman her dues. This book is an exhaustive piece of research. One wonders whether she was able to get her hands on every single existing letter written by or about royal mistresses since the reign of Louis XIV and if it isn't the definitive work on the subject, it should be.

This book is stuffed with juicy details into the private lives of the kings and queens of Europe. From the sorcery that some mistresses performed to maintain their relations with the king to the knifing ways in which they batted off pretenders to their position to the manner in which each of them was cast aside upon the death of their royal benefactor. It is a veritable historical gossip rag full of exposes and scandals.

But it that was it, if the sole purpose of Herman's work was to satisfy the leering eyes of historical royal worshippers then this book would be pointless. Herman also examines the ways in which mistresses have shaped the history of Europe. How some wars were the direct result of the meddling and others were settled due to the soothing hand of a king's dangerous liaison. In the case of King Ludwig of Bavaria, his mistress Lola Montez directly caused the revolution of 1848 that eventually forced the King to abdicate his throne and move into exile.

But I did have some problems with this book. First and foremost is the title of the book. When I first heard about this title I was excited to read the way in which mistresses were kept and perceived in a wide variety of royal and imperial settings. Sex With Kings suffers from excessive Euro-centrism. This wouldn't have bothered me so much had it been mentioned in the title. something like Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry and Revenge in Europe, but it wasn't called that. I wanted to know about the Imperial courts in Japan and China, the harems of Middle Eastern kingdoms and the such. But it concentrated primarily on Europe (and if I'm being honest, it focused even more primarily on Western Europe, Russia and Serbia only factoring in on a couple of occasions).

I also didn't enjoy the organization of the book. I understand that this is always a problematic point for anyone writing history. Do you write your subject chronologically, thematically or do you write it as a character study. Here, Herman chooses a thematic organization with such chapter headings as Beyond the Bed - The Art of Pleasing a King and Loving Profitably - The Wages of Sin. I suppose this organization was as good as any other but I found it difficult to juggle the names of kings, queens and mistresses from chapter to chapter. When Herman refers to Madame du Pompadour for the umpteenth time in chapter 10 I was forever trying to remember whether she was the mistress of Louis XIV or Louis XV. I would have preferred a character study that was divided either by king or by mistress.

Nevertheless, Herman is forgiven any personal problems a reader might have with her work. As it stands, she has bitten off a chunk of history to call all her own. As of this moment, Eleanor Herman is the official authority on the history of royal mistresses in Europe.

Narcopolis

Narcopolis

By Jeet Thayil

Note: Apologies, this blog post is rushed and poorly written due to the fact that my wife and I have just recently had our first child and things are a little hectic around the house. I hope I can figure out how to maintain the quality of this blog over time without neglecting my duties as a father. Let's see.

It's tough to write a different book about India.

Lots of writers write about India. It's one of those mystical locales that was tailor made for story telling with its bouquet of culture, its irrepressible sights, sounds and smells and its rich history, India has been the setting for dozens of novels that have achieved serious critical acclaim. In fact, since 1997 three Man Booker Prize winning novels have been written by Indian novelists and if you go back through the history of the prize you find that, aside from the Indian winners, many of the winning novels were set in India. 

But something I have noticed over the years is that every modern book I read about India invariably returns to the same themes over and over, most notably the continuous reverberations of colonialism and a level of navel-gazing that rivals Canadian literature. While they are always well written and interesting, I have been waiting to get my hands on something a little different from the sub-continent for some time. Jeet Thayil's novel Narcopolis is just that book.

While Narcopolis didn't win this year's Man Booker Prize, it did make the short list, and thank god for that. Thayil dared to write a novel about India without resorting to the aforementioned safe themes of his contemporaries. Instead, Thayil's narrative is a gritty, no holds barred view into the world of drugs and prostitution in the slums of Bombay. It is a side of India that is rarely mentioned in the English literature from India. While I'm not sure if I'd want to read a glut of books about opium dens in Bombay, I sure would like to read about India from some new angles.

Fittingly, the novel begins with a seven page run-on sentence and doesn't let up from there. I say "fittingly" because what follows is a dream-like narrative that follows the lives of several noted junkies and prostitutes that frequent the opium dens that were popular in Bombay prior to the 1990s. The story begins in a sort of heyday and the slow demise of the den's popularity parallels the decay of the characters.

Written as a series of entwined anecdotes surrounding Dimple, an opium addict and prostitute in Bombay. Dimple was born a boy but was castrated during childhood and lives her life as a woman. Other characters bob in and out of the narrative and each have their own debauched story to tell. The entire book exudes a certain hazy tone and the novel progresses like the literary equivalent of opium smoke languidly wafting through the air. Often many of the stories drift off into nothingness while others that seem like tangents join with the larger narrative structure and continue on from there. Stories braid themselves around each other throughout and Thayil's style has a lazy, unhurried feel as if he is chewing on the sentences one word at a time, thoughtfully relishing each word and placement in relation to the entire work. The language is debased, vile and at time shockingly graphic, but in the hands of Thayil they are impossible to ignore.

Narcopolis is the first of the 2012 Man Booker Prize short-lister that I have read. For the language alone it is worth the read. Given that it did not win, I am excited to see what may have been deemed better than this carefully crafted work. Furthermore, it's really nice to see some more unorthodox Indian literature getting recognition. Perhaps this means we can expect a run of post-post-colonial literature out of India over the next few years.

One can hope.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By Michael Chabon

It took me an eternity to get around to this book. I read Michael Chabon's book The Yiddish Policemen's Union last year and enjoyed it, but not enough to go rushing out and read another of his books, especially one that is over 600 pages long. But I kept hearing these things about this book. People kept telling me how it was one of the best books of the past ten years and totally deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. It simply weighed my bookcase down for far too long and I had to pick it up.

Glad I did.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is exactly what books and literature is all about. It's good writing and a great story about well-formed characters that deserve and gain the respect and empathy of their readers. It is well researched, impossible to predict and, as everyone seemed to tell me prior to reading, entirely deserving of the accolades it has garnered. OK, so I just sort of started vomiting attributes. Let me slow it down and explain.

First and foremost, Michael Chabon is a fantastic writer. I don't mean "fantastic" in the way we over use the word but rather in its more traditional usage as fanciful. But I knew this to be true when I read The Yiddish Policemen's Union  Of all the things I didn't like about that book (and there were a few things), Chabon's abilities as a writer were never questioned. He has an undeniable ability with tone, pace and, most of all, setting. I could practically smell 1940s Manhattan throughout this novel in the same way I could the Sitka Settlement in The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

As an aspiring writer myself, I find Chabon an intimidating novelist to read and appreciate. Reading a single paragraph is liable to send me to my bedroom a blubbering puddle of delicate emotions wrapped in a flimsy eggshell of a man not to be heard from for the remainder of the weekend. I mean how does he write that eloquently? Damn him! (And when I say "damn him," I mean he's fantastic (And when I say he's fantastic," I me... oh never mind)).

You can be a fantastic writer but if the story doesn't jive with readers, all those pretty paragraphs and succinct sentences (and all that alluring alliteration, I might add) are for naught. This was my fundamental problem with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Great writing. Excellent characters. Wonderful tone. Good pacing. Boring-assed story. Not so with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I especially loved the fact that each character has their own story to go along with the common story of the novel. As in, each of the characters in the novel has their own problems and tribulations to deal with outside the bubble of the central story. And whereas some authors (coughcathylambcough) tend to spread the issues and drama on thick, Chabon knows exactly how much drama and stress to foist onto his characters shoulders without inducing reading induced epileptic seizures brought on by repeated eye rolling.

I genuinely cared for every single character in this novel (Yes, even Sheldon Anapol). They were rendered in such three dimensional detail that they seemed to have genuine texture and depth. I really felt like these guys existed in the annals of comic book lore. Surrounding him with real life comic book names such as Stan Lee and Bob Kane only augmented the illusion of reality. A very definite blur was put into effect.

And that's something else that deserves mention. Michael Chabon quite obviously researched the hell out of the comic book industry in the 1940s (and the Second World War as fought on the continent of Antarctica as well). As a fan of historical fiction I appreciate the attention to detail. But I also appreciate Chabon's determination to make shit up whenever it pleased him. I like Chabon's attitude toward history: Render it as close as possible to the truth whenever possible but throw it out the window when it doesn't fit the story he's trying to tell. Excellent lesson for any writer.

Speaking of the story, it is not only riveting (as I mentioned earlier) but it is also unpredictable. At no point during this narrative did I have a single clue where Chabon was taking me. There's nothing wrong with predictable story lines, good writers can take you down familiar roads and show you different sights along the way, but it's always nice to have someone show you an entirely different path. I, at no point in the reading of this novel, knew where Chabon was taking me. Furthermore, there were episodes in this novel that I could not have predicted in a thousand years of predictions.

So it won the Pulitzer Prize. Did it deserve it? Of course, I don't know. I haven't yet read everything published from 2000. But it couldn't have been the worst option. As I said off the top, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is everything that a reader should expect from literature. Good writing, strong characters and a romping good story.

I mean, seriously, in literature, what else matters?

Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye

By J.D. Salinger

Note #1: Never seen that cover, but I'd love to have a copy of it.

I've been a little reticent about writing a blogpost about Catcher in the Rye. It seems a little personal. Of all the books I've read, Catcher in the Rye and I have the closest relationship. It is not my favorite book ever written but it is close and it is the book I have read the most often (I think the last reading was my twelfth or something). I feel like I'm a bit too close to this story to write anything remotely coherent in blogpost so I'll refrain from that. But I can tell you exactly how my relationship with Holden Caulfield has changed over my years of reading.

I picked up my first copy of Catcher in the Rye at a used bookstore in Campbellville, Ontario when I was 16 years old. It was in an Anything for a Quarter box sitting outside the shop and didn't even have a cover. At the time I was only vaguely aware of the book as something iconic but I think the appeal lay solely in the fact that it was the only book in that box that wasn't a fifteen year old computer manual and I had a quarter in my pocket so... why the hell not, right?

Upon first reading, I didn't get it. It all seemed to be about some dumb, horny kid who doesn't care about school, goes to New York, does a bunch of weird stuff in a few bars, goes to a museum, then gets sick. I remember finishing and wondering what all the fuss was about. I also told myself that was the last time I would ever read that nonsense.

A couple of years later I found myself without a book to read or money in which to buy one (18 year old me does not use libraries). It was the summer before university and I wanted to intellectualalate and academicize myself before my sojourn into the world of higher education. For whatever, reason, the book clicked with me on that second reading. Perhaps it was because I had a couple of years under my belt and I had gone and done weird things myself (Sadly, none of them involved prostitutes in seedy hotel rooms). I found myself empathizing with Holden in a way I could not have a couple years prior. While I couldn't exactly understand his aversion to school or growing up, I could totally understand a lot of what made him tick. He was a kid who didn't get all this adult stuff. I totally understood what he was getting at. Holden was a telling it like it was. Adults were all fake and, while I didn't much care for his disregard for education, I could identify with his passionate dislike for those in positions of power.

I didn't pick the book up again for a decade. It wasn't until my first year in Taiwan that I returned to the football field of Pencey Prep. At the age of 28 I wanted to reach into the novel and slap the living daylights out of Holden. He seemed to me to be a sniveling, whiny, entitled little snot of a kid who, granted may have lost his brother and may have the most uncaring parents on the planet, but he just didn't seem to see all the advantages he was being given. He was allowing so much to slip through his fingers. He had no idea how hard it was all going to be once he was really out of school and none of these well-meaning people like Mr. Antolini and Mr. Spencer would be around to try and help him. I fell hard for Phoebe on this reading. I felt terrible for her and the influence he seemed to have on her. This reading really made me think about my own relationship with my own sister and how I might have warped her.

I've picked the book up over a half dozen times over the last three years as I have found it is a particularly excellent book to teach to Taiwanese high school students. The vocabulary isn't difficult (Holden has a very limited vocabulary) and the kids seem to relate to Holden's angst about school, parents, growing up and life in general. The students and I have a ball discussing and analyzing the bit when Holden describes his dream job of being the catcher in the rye who stops children from running off the cliff into the abyss. It is perhaps the best example of metaphor I have ever used as a teacher since it can be interpreted in so many interesting ways.

As for me, my recent readings of the novel have softened my opinion on Holden. I don't want to tear out his trachea anymore. In fact, I find that I have an unlimited ability to pity him. Talking and slapping would never do Holden any good, anyway. He's got the world figured out and there's very little anyone around him is going to say or do to tell him otherwise (Mr. Antolini comes closest but blows it by being A) drunk and B) creepy). I feel bad, but Holden is the sort that is going to have to learn life's lessons the hard way.

To me, Holden is and remains entirely disconnected from the world around him. He, at no point during the relation of the narrative, recognizes that he represents so many of the qualities he describes as phony. He is both a child and a man and totally disaffected. He's completely innocent and understands nothing about the world that is rapidly changing around him. He is caught up in a maelstrom of emotions and trauma, most likely stemming from Allie's death and cannot seem to move forward with his life. His academic, social and eventual physical failure are entirely due to his refusal to grow up despite the fact that everyone and everything around him is screaming at him to do just that. And after all the madman stuff that happened around that Christmas, he learns exactly what you should be expecting him to learn.... Absolutely nothing.

Like no other character in literature, Holden simply breaks my heart every time I read his story.

At this point, when I read Catcher in the Rye I find myself asking a very singular question: What became of Holden?

Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest

By David Foster Wallace

There is something (slightly) wrong with the title of David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest. It is not infinite, though there were parts of this book that felt as if they were. This, of course, is a tongue-in-cheek comment. The title itself has very definitive purpose on the narrative of this novel and I'm not implying that I dislike it. It just makes me laugh a little, is all. What I can say with a degree of assurance, however, is that if ever you wish to read a novel whereby you can confirm that you are witness to genius, Infinite Jest is your huckleberry.

Infinite Jest is, admittedly, a major undertaking for any reader, whether casual, academic or accidental. I suggest quitting your job, booking a room at a hotel for a couple of weeks and blasting through. This behemoth of a novel should not be taken lightly by anyone (how could you? if you read it in its original printed version, it's the size of a telephone book from a mid-sized American city... Say... Toledo. Mercifully, I read it on my Kindle which offered another set of problems. (I'm still only 23% done? I was on 23% three days ago!)) It's the sort of book that would scare off most readers by its sheer size and reputation. I can only imagine the physical and psychological toll this novel would have taken on DFW. 1

Now, I'm going to be honest here. I read this book over the span of two weeks. At this point in my life, I'm a casual reader. I may like to read hefty, weighty novels, but I'm reading them in the informal sense. I'm not in a position to give this novel the academic treatment. There are thousands of pages of PhD and seminar presentations on the nature of subjectivity vs. objectivity in Infinite Jest floating out there. There are perhaps dozens of thesis papers discussing the feminine archetype in the works of David Foster Wallace or psychological deconstruction of Don Gately and Joelle Van Dynne. If you want an critical analysis of the Incandenza family, O.N.A.N. and Quebec separatism please go somewhere else (especially for Quebec Separatism).

See, here's the thing... Infinite Jest, for all its reputation as a scholarly read, for all its comparisons to Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses and such, for all of it's 1000+ pages of carefully (and weirdly) constructed sentences, Infinite Jest is a surprisingly easy read. Enjoyable too. Downright entertaining if I may be so bold. Which is quite the left turn for those in the habit of writing scholarly fiction (are you listening, Zombie Thomas Pynchon?).2  At no point in my reading (which was certainly not an accredited academic combing) was I furrowing my brow in consternation, banging my head against the wall, drooling on the page or lamenting the deficiencies of my costly education. So don't let this book give you a case of the howling fantods or anything. It's accessible.

At its heart, Infinite Jest is a novel about a video (called an entertainment cartridge in the novel). This video is so entertaining that anyone who watches it will become infinitely, hopelessly and addictively entertained. They will remain comatose in from of said video so long as it continues to play (it loops) and if it is taken away, the remainder of the viewers life is spent begging, pleading and screaming for more. Even a single glimpse. It reminded me of the Monty Python bit from ...And Now For Something Completely Different where a joke writer writes the funniest joke ever and immediately dies laughing. His wife, thinking it's a suicide note, reads the joke and also dies, as does the first policeman on the scene... and the second. It turns out that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads it dies laughing. Naturally, the military takes notice, translates it and uses it as a weapon of war.

Anyway...

Infinite Jest is about locating the master copy of this lethal entertainment (also referred to as the samizdat) in order to maintain the precarious stability of O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations) and the precepts of Onanism. In the process it's about the Incandenza family with all its tremendous dysfunction. It's about James Incandenza, the maker of the film and his struggles with alcohol and his ultimate (grizzly) suicide (it's also about his ghost). It's about his wife Avril with all her proclivities toward hygiene. It's about Orin Incandenza, punter for the Arizona Cardinals. It's about Hal Incandenza, a highly ranked junior tennis player at an elite tennis academy and a closet marijuana addict (I never though that was even possible, but apparently it is). It's about a cast of dozens of other characters who are painted in shades and tones so vivid that even now I have a hard time understanding that these people are simply constructs of DFWs imagination.

The story is also one of addiction and all its dimensions. It's about America's addictions and America's addiction to addictions. It's about obsessions and compulsions and depression and psychological disorders. Crippling, debilitating depressions. Life-altering compulsions. I'll never watch another MASH episode in the same way. Infinite Jest made me realize that neither I nor anyone that I have ever known has ever, ever really had substance abuse problems. Not in any real, meaningful way. Not in the way in which Wallace portrays substance abuse. Not even close. Lucky me.

The story is essentially written in reverse with the ending at the beginning and doesn't come together until the very end. Be forewarned. The novel also has almost 400 endnotes (many of which have endnotes of their own). Casual readers may be inclined to skip the endnotes. Don't. They are infinitely (pun intended) important to the novel. A lot of character development occurs in the endnotes as well as the handy filmography of James O. Incandenza. If you read this, do not skip them.

Infinite Jest is indeed a very readable novel and so but it is still a major undertaking. David Foster Wallace is renowned for his use of arcane, obscure and invented vocabulary as well as jargon and massive, multi-clause sentences, so come into this book armed with a good dictionary and an open mind. I promise that if you enjoy reading and expect that, as Wallace is quoted as saying, that fiction is "about what it is to be a fucking human," well sir/madam/doctor you owe it to yourself to read Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace shows use exactly what it means to be a writer. An open, honest, humanized writer whose heart and soul are splattered and smeared and spread across the page (or the 1000s of pages) and if one or two things come out wrong who cares because it's all about how it feels coming out rather what it looks like going in so just go with the flow and accept that while reading Infinite Jest you will be in the presence of absolute literary genius.

If you were to ask me: If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could only have one book in which to read forever, what would it be? Infinite Jest with all its wonderful layers of text and subtext and sub-subtext would be as good a choice as any.

Footnotes:

1. It is easy to fall into the trap of reading Infinite Jest as an insight into the emotional and psychological problems of David Foster Wallace, especially in lieu of his suicide in 2008. The novel explores substance abuse, depression and competitive tennis, all of which were important aspects of Wallace's troubled existence. But to read this novel as a microcosm for DFW's life is to sell this book short. It is quite a bit more than that.

2. Apparently Thomas Pynchon isn't dead. Who knew?

Brave New World

Brave New World

By Aldous Huxley

I am in the middle of the biggest book I have ever read and it would have been at least another week before I updated my blog so I decided to dip into my pool of recently re-read novels that I have read with a class over the past year. I'm a little tired, so this post might seem a bit disjointed, but I'll do my best to edit it over the next few days.

Aldous Huxley's classic 1932 novel Brave New World, along with with George Orwell's 1984, set the bar for dystopian fiction. Brave New World is not a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination. The narrative is flimsy and often tedious and those who read this novel for the story are bound to be extremely disappointed. But if you read it with the Western world as an immediate comparison, Huxley seems to have has a startlingly clear vision of the future.

What strikes me as odd is that in 2012 the comparisons between Huxley's version of the future and that of Orwell not only remain valuable, they have, to a certain degree, been actualized in our world. Both of them. At the same time. I'll touch on the comparison, but I'll concentrate a good deal more on Brave New World as it is the novel I have most recently read (I haven't read 1984 in about 15 years).

Orwell's dismal notion of the future is still very much a concern especially when you look into the restrictive regimes of China and North Korea. With their social, cultural and economical restriction, China has realized Orwell's nightmare in a very real way and their culture and population suffer for it. The Great Firewall of China is the most visible symbol of China's big brother style control. Whereas, in the west, the Orwellian notion of Big Brother spoke to an entire generation raised under the ominous specter of Soviet-style governance and the possibility of Cold War nuclear holocaust, it is Huxley's version of the future that has manifested itself as our own sort of dystopian nightmare. While Big Brother certainly lives on in the West through our over-litigized court system, Google Earth, book banning and video surveillance (to name just a few), it has lost some of its steam over the years.

In Huxley's version of the world, humans are engineered in a laboratory (Bokinovsky process), spared from the aging process and divided and sub-divided into several classes and sub-classes of people who never intermingle except for hedonistically disposable encounters that have no emotional currency. Each class of human comes complete with favorite colors, a disposition for certain kinds of work, a similar IQ and a predilection for specific activities. The trade off for this eternally youthful life is a lower life expectancy and complete adherence to the rigid caste system.

The manufacture of humanity is akin to our own ever-increasing demand for eternal youth. While we have not gone so far as to implement eugenics programs or bio-engineering Olympic athletes, were certainly have made a massive industry out of cosmetic surgery in an attempt to maintain that which cannot be maintained. Botox injections have become as commonplace as the application of mascara. Body modification has become socially acceptable. Scientists tease us with talk of frayed telomeres and their effect on aging. We look everywhere and anywhere for reassurance that we will retain our youth. It has become imperative to maintain vitality into your 50s and 60s. How many times have we heard someone say "Fifty is the new forty," or "Life begins at sixty."

I'm certainly not implying that living a healthy lifestyle into into your autumn years is somehow inhuman, but our obsession with youth and beauty has reached manic proportions. If one extrapolates this desire to remain young for as long as possible, the extremes expressed in Brave New World don't seem so far fetched.

But what of control?

The people in Huxley's novel have no inherent value other than their work. Therefore it is of the utmost urgency that those in control maintain stability among the population (in the novel the world is controlled by a vague organization of which a man by the name of Mustapha Mond controls Western Europe). Rather than implement Orwellian control measures (which, of course, did not yet exist in 1932), Huxley supposes that in this world people are given every possible distraction and pleasure they desire. Those in control (whoever they are) provide everything and anything that a person might want as a method of pacification and mollification. There is simply no reason to question anything if you are constantly entertained. However, with so much entertainment comes abject ignorance and blind adherence to the system.

When we juxtapose Brave New World with the Western world there are shocking similarities. If you take a look at society as a whole's obsession with reality television, social media, conspiracy theories, K-Pop, FarmVille, Fifty Shades of Gray, The New York Yankees (etc... etc...) and couple that with are almost constant use of technology as entertainment (just look around at the hordes of smart phone zombies completely disengaged from the world around them) one can plausibly opine that we are very much heading in such a direction. We are engorged with information and entertainment (infotainment). We run the risk of being at once the most informed and technologically advanced society in the history of the world and the most ignorant.... at the same time. That's not to say that any of these things are bad by themselves (except reality television. Reality television is to the human brain what ten gallons of Coke a day is to human teeth). But they are distractions from much of what is happening around us and we have proven to be less than responsible in dealing with what is important and what is not. We willfully distract ourselves with utter nonsense, and in turn eat up valuable time and energy. Now, I'm certainly not making a case for limiting or banning anything but we do have addiction and attention deficit issues, don't we?

This notion of ubiquitous entertainment, by itself, makes Brave New World every bit as prescient today as it was in 1932. The West is a woefully (and willfully) ignorant society. The East is too, but via very different (Orwellian) means. It's interesting that Brave New World and 1984, two books so often compared, have become more than just symbols of the American dominated Western world and the Chinese dominated East. They have become virtual trail markers on an ever-more-clear cultural trajectory. High school students for decades have compared and contrasted these titles only to discover that such comparisons and contrasts exist on a macro-scale.

While China struggles with Orwell, we wrestle with Huxley. If Brave New World can teach us anything about our own world it is that we run the risk of losing common track for some vain notion of hyper-individuality (which, at its extreme is just a form of hyper-conformity). In the process we may have derailed into a banal wasteland of nonsensical nihilism.

Well, that was uplifting. Who's up for a Soma vacation?

The Story of O

The Story of O

By Pauline Réage

The Story of O! O, my virgin eyes!

Back in the late 1980s a Canadian rock band called The Pursuit of Happiness sang these apropos lyrics:

"Adult sex is either boring or dirty."

In the case of The Story of O, I think the line comes full circle. Adult sex is both boring and dirty.

Full disclosure: I read this because it appears on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and I've been using that list as a reference for a few years. The novel dropped into my hands and I took the opportunity to read it.

So anyway... I've got a glass of wine and I'm settled down. Let's see if I can say something about The Story of O without making a complete ass of myself.

The Story of O is an erotic novel written in 1954 by Pauline Réage The pen name for French author Anne Desclos). It is considered one of the most important novels of the 1950s for its stark depiction of female sexuality and its themes of bondage, sado-masochism, body modification and sexual degradation. The narrative follows a woman, referred to only as O, who gradually descends into the depths of sexual slavery via bondage, whipping, torture, piercing and branding. O is prostituted by her lovers and in one alternate ending she asks permission to commit suicide, which her lover grants.

That about sums up the entire book right there. 

Yup!

Oh, you want more, huh? Oh, OK. Let's see....

I'm no prude, but seriously... if sex is consuming this much of your physical, emotional and psychological activity (never mind the actual time and energy one would need to devote to it), I think someone might be in need of a course in time management. And I'm not talking about just the characters in the novel but also Pauline Réage (or Anne Desclos or whatever) herself. I mean I'm a red-blooded male so I certainly understand... um... aspects of this sort of behavior but hell. I just simply couldn't relate to the vast majority of this stuff from both the male or female perspective. I'm sure there is some sexually liberated sort out there that might scream down my throat about this, but I'm perfectly happy with my limited (and entirely standard) sexual mores. To me, sex just isn't worth so much hassle unless, of course, you work in the adult entertainment or prostitution industry, in which case it may be considered a career decision. But I refuse to go down that road. We are talking literature here, right?

I tried to read the novel metaphorically at one point. I tried to read the story as a parallel for the history of the Christian Church (that worked for a time), as a diatribe on feminism (I'm not the best person to be giving The Story of O a feminist reading) as a discourse on the 1912 U.S. presidential election (I have no idea why), but nothing seemed to stick. It all seemed so utterly pointless. Who would go to so much trouble for their sexual proclivities? Anyone? anywhere? If so, I can't imagine I would overly interested in meeting them. Not for any moral reason, but I figure I'd have very little to talk to that person about. Sex is an extremely boring topic of conversation. Six seasons of Sex in the City proved that.

Perhaps you just had to be there. After all, this novel was published in 1954 and I can imagine it would have caused quite the stir at the time. I remember reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac in 2005 and not getting it. I thought it was a pretty pedestrian account of bumming around the country, something a lot of people I know have done or are currently doing. I had the same experience with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I get the idea that these are the sorts of books that spoke to the zeitgeist and have subsequently echoed poorly as they have aged.

Given the pervasiveness of pornography on the Internet, The Story of O loses a good amount of its ability to shock. In fact it is downright pedestrian compared to what a six-year old can find in half a second via a Google search. I'm aware that much of pornography in the early 1970s (Deep Throat, for example) was modeled after The Story of O (and I'm not too sure how comfortable I am admitting to the fact that I know this) but in recent years pornography has far surpassed even the most extreme realms of Pauline Réage's imagination.

Anyway, I'm not terribly interested in delving much farther into this novel. I really have nothing of substance to say about it. I'm glad I read it due to its literary significance, but, like Kerouac and Deep Throat, I think The Story of O was a product of its time and place... nothing more. At this point the only thing I can really say about The Story of O is that it was boring and dirty. In that order. 

Oh well, at least now I don't have to read Fifty Shades of Grey. 

A Spot of Bother

A Spot of Bother

By Mark Haddon

One of the principle reasons that George Carlin remained a relevant comedian well into his later life is that he never once compromised his freedom of speech for the comfort of others. Carlin's brand of social commentary pulled no punches and he was more than willing to spell out the inconsistencies in our system and within ourselves. Although his primary purpose was to entertain an audience, he certainly left his audiences with a lot to think about. A good deal of his celebrity had to do with the ability to make his audience uneasy about the things he said. In the paraphrased words of Louis C.K. , good comedy takes people to dark places and makes them laugh about it. Or, to put it more succinctly, good comics joke about things that people just don't joke about.

Just ask Tig Notaro.

Good comics understand that everything can be funny in the right context, even issues as categorically unfunny as rape, abortion, cancer and death. I tend to agree with Carlin. Comedy is all about delivery and timing. In the right hands, anything can be rendered not comedy. But it's a tricky business, comedy. If the subject matter is handled in any way incorrectly, the crash and burn can be spectacular. Just Michael Richards.

To be sure, comedy in literature isn't at the same level as stand-up comedy. Carlin, Notaro and C.K. have to make an audience laugh with a degree of consistency over a one/two hour period without fail and much of that has to do with pace, timing and delivery of the comedy. Ask an untrained comedian to get up on stage and do a Jerry Seinfeld routine verbatim and I suspect they'd bomb. Writers, I think, garner a little more forgiveness from their audience. That's not to say that writing comedic novels is a breeze. The same pace, timing and delivery inherent in stand-up exist in writing, it's just that readers can choose to put a book down quietly and walk away mid build. They just don't work under the same stressful conditions.

When literary comedy is done right (Shakespeare's comedies, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) it is virtually impossible to put the book down mid-stream (lest you break the rhythm). In the true Carlin tradition, Mark Haddon hit the comedic nail on the head in 2003 with his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It was poignant yet hilarious novel told from the perspective of an 11-year old autistic child. Certainly, in most circumstances, autism isn't anything to joke about. Just ask the parents of autistic children or those that work with them. Yet Haddon handled the subject matter with both tender gravity and brutal levity, finding the perfect balance between what was acceptable and hilarious and what was unacceptable and categorically un-funny.

I have to imagine that when Haddon took the challenge of writing a comedy about a mentally disabled child he did so with the utmost care to walk the razor's edge. Building an empathetic cast of characters helped immensely. The novel was a commercial and critical success and deserving of the accolades it has received. Mark Haddon had written a comedic novel about a subject that people don't joke about. I'm not sure whether George Carlin ever read the book, but I'm going to imagine he would have enjoyed it.

In his latest (as of the writing of this blog-post) novel, A Spot of Bother, Haddon tries to do with dysfunctional families and mental illness what he did with autism. A Spot of Bother is a story of a family that doesnt seem to communicate all that well. George, the father, is very quickly loosing his mind, his wife, Jean has been carrying on an affair with a colleague of her husband for 15 years, Katie is the emotionally unstable daughter who is poised to get married for the second time and Jamie is the emotionally distant homosexual son. The family makes my family seem like a walk in the park by comparison. A bunch of things happen, there's quite a lot of blood, irrational behavior and a few good laughs along the way. But it doesn't work.

While there are moments of awesomeness in this novel (George rationalizing that cutting a growth off his leg with a pair of kitchen scissors, for example), A Spot of Bother doesn't really follow through in the same manner as A Curious Incident did. In fact, it falls way short. I tried to pinpoint the problem and the best I could come up with was that they elements he used in The Curious Incident that made it such a pleasure are absent in A Spot of Bother. And I don't mean to judge Haddon's book based on his previous success. That's not fair. It's just that the comparison sort of works with what I'm trying to convey, and this is a bit more about my point than it is about Haddon's novels. Bear with me.

First, in A Curious Incident, Haddon created a wonderful cast of characters in which the reader could relate. This is not so in A Spot of Bother. The entire Hall family are so entirely unlikeable. It's hard to relate to dysfunction if you can't relate to at least one of the characters involved in said dysfunction. The characters are universally selfish, self-absorbed and rude. One wonders how they were all able to find any success in the working world and life in general with those character traits. The parents, George and Jean, continuously allude to Katie's fiancee as being "inappropriate," but I struggled to understand why. Ray seemed like a legitimately wonderful man with very few character flaws. I couldn't understand why anyone, anywhere would dislike the guy and yet the entire family and a few friends seems to instinctually understand he is perhaps wrong for Katie. I thought she should consider herself lucky. I got the impression that the editors (or Haddon himself, edited out an entire section where we would all understand what was so wrong about Ray.

Which gets me to Ray. His one and only moment of irrationality seems so entirely out of character from  the rest of the book I figured it was tacked on to create a couple dozen extra pages of drama. Actually, a lot of stuff seems to be tacked onto this book then forgotten. The story was full of unresolved holes. Did Katie get fired for taking the day off work? What happened to Graham after his and Katie's talk? What about the guy that went blind? Perhaps these were examples of how self-absorbed the characters are, but I kept waiting for the repercussions of their actions to catch up with them and they never seemed to.

Don't get me wrong, Haddon is a great writer. He is articulate and his style reminds me a lot of Douglas Adams (which is a good thing, obviously). It's just that instead of taking the reader into dark places and make them laugh about them (i.e. mental illness, cancer, fear or death, etc...), Haddon simply takes us to dark places, drops us off, says a few quick words and drives off, leaving the reader to wallow in the pathos left in his wake. There seems to be a half-hearted attempt to make light of the subjects and a sort-of but not-quite attempt to create a comedy of errors as a frame, but it all seemed to fall flat on its face. This wouldn't be all that bad, really, if Haddon was treading on safer ground. But it left me with the distinct impression that he had little to no empathy for those suffering from real mental illness or those coping with a truly dysfunctional family.

Given the fact that he wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time I give him the benefit of the doubt. Some of the dialog is quite astute and there are some really funny scenes interspersed throughout but the novel was hardly chortle-worthy. By way of comparison, it's not Michael Richards embarrassing himself on stage, but it's certainly not Carlin-esque either.

It's just that this novel left me saying: "Meh."

The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day

By Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the third Kazuo Ishiguro novel I have read in the past twelve months. If there is one overriding theme throughout them (the others being An Artist of the Floating World and Never Let Me Go) it is that Ishiguro is not interested in the story that appears on his page so much as he is interested in the story going on in your head whilst you are reading the words he put on his page. More directly, Ishiguro's novels are about the story not being told as opposed to the story being told. Furthermore, like his other novels, The Remains of the Day may not even really be about what it's about but rather may be an elegantly crafted metaphor about something entirely different. If I've sufficiently confused you, good. Let's get on with it, then.

The Remains of the Day is Ishiguro's third novel. Published in 1989, it was the winner of that year's Man Booker Prize and has garnered the status of classic since then, and for good reason. The novel is a thematic work of genius that examines (but doesn't examine) the subjects of dignity, loyalty and social constraints in post-colonial Great Britain as well as being a metaphor for the very same Great Britain.

The story centers upon Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, an old country house occupied by a preeminent English gentleman prior to World War II but currently (1956) owned by an American who bought the house (complete with authentic English butler) after the death of its former occupant. The story is ostensibly about short motor car trip undertaken by Stevens from Darlington Hall to the West Country in order to visit a former colleague. The story progresses as a series of journal entries along the way in which Stevens elucidates on the finer points of the domestic services industry and what (not who) makes a good butler. He also recounts several key events that occurred during his tenure at Darlington Hall that speak volumes about himself, his staff, his employer and the world around him. Though Stevens seems like a trustworthy character and one would hardly call his judgment into question, one must continuously question his ability to recall instances with the clarity this story requires. This gives the entire narrative a subconscious haze that must be navigated at all times.

The entire narrative is written in the stiff colonial language of the gentleman class and Stevens, like the people he has worked for in the past is obsessed with how he is perceived. Language and decorum are , therefore, tools in his profession as a way in which to cultivate an air of dignity benefiting a house such as Darlington Hall. ItThey are also self-constructed walls of social and class constraint that willingly bind Stevens to the house and the gentleman therein, regardless of his own opinions.

In lieu of thinking for himself, Stevens adopts an unconditional trust in his employer. Loyalty, dignity and professionalism trump all personal issues. In one particular scene which plays out as both comedy and tragedy, Stevens carries out his duties on a especially busy evening while his father falls ill and dies. It is an apt description of the social constraints that bound the class conscious British between the wars.

Buried deep within the bedrock of Steven's recollections is a more personal account of Darlington Hall's housekeeper, Miss Kenton. It becomes plainly apparent to the reader that Miss Kenton and Stevens have significant feelings for one another, but their professionalism, coupled with Steven's inability to read subtlety and nuance (to the point that I began to think Stevens might simply be mildly autistic, but I'll leave the psychological analysis of this novel to more capable reviewers) conspire to keep them apart. Even when a simple word or gesture might have broken the proverbial ice, they remain colleagues throughout, much to the consternation of this reader.

There are a lot of levels from which a reader might read this novel, but the most interesting (at least for me) was that The Remains of the Day is a brilliant metaphor for the end of the British Empire. In fact, the metaphor is so apparent (once you notice it) that it rivals Animal Farm in its bluntness. The novel itself is set in 1956 and although it is never mentioned in the book, that year coincides with the nationalization of the Suez Canal by General Nasser in Egypt. In Great Britain, the loss of the canal marked the end of the Empire. The era of the gentleman, country houses and the butler was over and Stevens himself is has become a relic of the past, a quirky historical curiosity sold along with a house to an American with a great deal of knowledge about colonial Britain but no idea how to actually be a gentleman.

But at a deeper level it is a social commentary on the relationship between crown and Empire. Lord Darlington represents the crown and the butler Stevens represents the Empire in this exquisite analogy of pre- and post-war Britain. Much like the pre-war British colonies in Asia and Africa, Stevens places an undue and undeserved amount of trust in Lord Darlington only to find that, in the end, Lord Darlington was involved in affairs far beyond his scope of understanding. Indeed, Lord Darlington represents a bygone England and his views are not even remotely in tune with the times. Naturally, Stevens remains unconcerned with his lord's affairs and serves him any way he can.

When war breaks out and Darlington finds himself on the wrong side of the line, it is Stevens that suffers most. And when Lord Darlington passes away, Stevens remains, left alone to pick up the pieces under the watchful eyes of an American. The parallels between this story and the demise of the Empire are so plentiful it probably merits a second reading at a later date.

The fact that Kazuo Ishiguro can write novels with so much nuance and subtlety is extraordinary. It takes a very gifted writer to write novels that work on a multitude of levels. Off the top of my head I can only think of a handful that have that capacity. I would hazard a guess that this novel wouldn't appeal to everyone due to its verbosity and pace (it is rather slow in bits) but The Remains of the Day really pays off in the end. I know that Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children has been deemed the Booker of Bookers but I'd give the nod to The Remains of the Day as the best Booker winner I've ever read.