Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel

(Note: Before reading, I want to be clear that this post has very little to do with Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall. I know it's the title of the blog post, but I'm feeling tangential.)

When I first started Reading in Taiwan, it was my mission statement that I would anything and everything that fell into my grubby, book-devouring little hands. The thought process was that I was living in a small town on a small, non-English speaking island with the bare minimum of English books at my disposal. It was a great social experiment and for a time it was pretty damned awesome. I read books I would have otherwise never have read. I read romance, fantasy and non-fiction novels about soccer players. I read I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I was taking one for the proverbial team.

But over the course of three years, things have changed in my neck of the woods. I am not as isolated from the literary world as I once was. A couple of years back my wife was thoughtful enough to buy me a Kindle which made acquiring new books a cinch. Furthermore, acquiring actual bound books made of paper has become a lot easier in Taiwan due to the Internet and 7-11 (God bless 7-11). Nevertheless, I remained resolute in my stubbornness to read anything that came my way and finish everything I started, regardless of how good or bad it was. I mean I read The Story of O when I really didn't have to. I wanted to keep the spirit of the blog intact despite the encroachment of modern technology and increased access to books.

That is, until today.

I was driving home tonight thinking about how I was 40% through Hilary Mantel's 2009 Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall. I set the same goal I had set for myself every day this past week: to finish at least 10% before going to sleep. I have accomplished that goal exactly zero times this past week and it suddenly occurred to me that I would not achieve it tonight either, nor tomorrow night nor any night after that. I was staring down another two weeks (minimum) of slogging through Wolf Hall. It felt like the literary equivalent of sitting in a dentist office waiting room waiting for a voluntary, and completely unnecessary, root canal. Why was I subjecting myself to such an avalanche of torture when there are perfectly corpulent books awaiting me on my shelf and Kindle? And considering I was trying to read Wolf Hall quickly just so I could start something new, well, that's a terrible reason to read.

"But what about your mission statement?" I thought to myself.

"A cute but antiquainted dogma," I rebutted. "One rooted in another time. Another place."

"But what will people think when you say you couldn't finish Wolf Hall, a novel that was so celebrated? and why do I sound like Yoda?"

"Care not what people think. Nothing to prove, you have."

(Seriously, this is actually how I think).

The truth is, I was never going to like Wolf Hall. And I should have known.

Don't get me wrong, Wolf Hall is well written and painstakingly researched and probably deserves the Booker Prize for its meticulous (almost obssessive-compulsive) attention to detail alone. But Wolf Hall had three strikes against it right from the start and I should have seen the signs.

First, Wolf Hall is about the English Royal Family in general and unless the novel was written by Bernard Cornwell and is set on a blood-soaked 10th century battlefield in Essex, I'm not interested. As an unwilling citizen of the Commonwealth, I have a knee-jerk disinterest in the Royal Family. Just mention the names of Prince William and whatshername and my mind switches to auto-pilot whereby I continue looking at the speaker and nodding in a polite fashion but internally I have begun to ponder new and interesting ways in which to rip the speaker's tongue from his or her mouth.

Second, Wolf Hall is about Tudor England in specific. As a history major, there are nations and time periods I like better than others and I am hard-pressed to think of a time and place that interests me less than Tudor-era England. (maybe modern day England, but I'll have to run some tests to see which sets off the boredom alarm first and that's a diagnostic I'm in no hurry to run). Give me the Mongol Hordes riding across the Asian steppe or the Early Christian Church fathers or Qing Dynasty China any day of the week. But try to get me excited about Henry disengaging from Rome due to his inability to conceive a son and you've got a recipe for a nap.

Third, the length of the novel was the nail in the coffin. I have a pretty high threshold for shit. I can usually roll my eyes through a bad book just to say I've suffered like Jesus on the cross or something at parties. My mother always called me a masochist, but even I have limits. It's one thing to press on through a 250 page novel you hate. It's quite another to press on through a 700 page novel of the same ilk. I'll force down a bad meal, but I won't eat the leftovers for a week. That's just dumb.

Of course, I want to be clear that I'm not calling Wolf Hall a bad book. It most certainly isn't. It's just not my thing. Not at all. Not even a little.

But all this got me to thinking about novels that I have left unfinished. Surprisingly, in a lifetime of voracious reading the novels I have quit are few and far between. I've read lots of books that seem to pop up on other people's Did Not Finish lists. I've read (and enjoyed) long books like Infinite Jest. I've read difficult books like V. by Thomas Pynchon (I didn't understand it, though) and I've read the entire Old Testament. I've also read my share of terrible novels (Cathy Lamb comes to mind) But when it came to finding books I never actually finished, I could actually only think of six (though I'm sure there are more):

1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of all the books I have ever hated, I hate this one the most. I hated it from the beginning. I hated the language. I hated the fact that each character took three pages to ask for a cup of tea and I hated Tom Bombadil (seriously... WTF?). I think I dropped this book somewhere around page 400 and have vowed never, ever to pick it up again.

2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: At the age of 16 I had this notion that I was going to become a man of letters or some such nonsense. I determined to read all the great works of literature and I was going to start with The Brothers Karamazov. Great start. I got about 60 pages in, realized I didn't understand a single thing that was going on and I went back to reading Michael Creighton novels. I've been meaning to pick this one up in recent years, but there is always something more interesting on my shelf. I think my 16-year old self has 37-year old me spooked.

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I love Marquez and I've read several of his other novels, but this one eluded me. Perhaps it had something to do with every character having the SAME GODDAMNED NAME!

4. Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte: I recall literally throwing this novel out my bedroom window with only 40 pages to read. I recall hating it with every fiber of my being but for the life of me, I cannot recall why. As I said before, I'm a masochist, but not so much of one that would willingly revisit this novel to find out why I hated it.

5. The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: Because it's plain terrible.

6. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: I honestly believe that everyone who loves this novel didn't actually read it. It's worse than The Black Arrow.

I can now add Wolf Hall to this esteemed list of personal literary failures.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger

By Aravind Adiga

Happy Canada Day!

And like any red-blooded Canadian citizen, I like to enjoy our nation's birthday by sitting down and writing a blog post about modern Indian literature. This year I have the pleasure of cracking a Moosehead, turning up Blue Rodeo on the stereo and getting down to business with Aravind Adiga's "blazingly savage" debut (and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize) novel The White Tiger. I put those words, "blazingly savage," in quotations because they are not my words but rather those of Neel Mukherjee, reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. I'm not familiar with Mr. (Mrs.?) Mukherjee's work for the Telegraph but a simple racial profile (i.e. reading his (her?) name off the byline) indicates that he (she?) probably knows significant amount more than me about India, Indian culture and Indian literature.

That's not to say that I'm writing about this novel in a vacuum. Long-term readers of this blog know that I am an avid fan of Indian literature and read as much of it as I can get my hands on. And I don't know it you have noticed or not but I have been reading quite a few recent Man Booker Prize winners and nominees, recently. It hasn't been a conscious thing, but I have been made aware of my recent trend and it's true (I picked up a recent nominee this morning, so expect more in the near future). So, I'm not entirely devoid of opinion on this novel and I'd like to think that my opinion has some weight on this stiflingly hot Canada Day in Asia.

I bring up Mukherjee's words because I cannot think of a more succinct way in which to express my feelings toward this novel. Set in modern day India, Adiga's novel is told from the perspective of Balram who is introduced as an entrepreneur at the onset of the novel. Narrator via a series of letters from Balram to the premier of China, it is revealed that Balram a small-town indian who has work his way out of The Darkness as a driver for Ashok, a local landowner based in Delhi. As driver, Balram is singly endeared, repressed, ignored and abused by his employer, resulting in a complex relationship that culminates in Balram murdering his boss (note: this is not a spoiler as it is mentioned in the first 20 pages of the book). The result is a "blazingly savage" (see I can't help myself) treatise on the injustice of India's caste, the human quest for freedom and the nature of individualism in a collective culture.

On the surface, The White Tiger is a simple (yet effective) examination of the stifling caste system in India and the way in which it maintains and perpetuates itself. Through Balram we are introduced to the knee-jerk servitude of the lower castes and the way in which lower castes are disregarded entirely. In all the novels I have read about India I have never encountered such a naked appraisal of the injustice of the caste system than in The White Tiger. But nowhere in this novel is the injustice more manifest than Adiga's blistering rant on the nature of Indian democracy and the manner in which the ruling castes manipulate elections to their advantage. Scathing stuff.

But for all the ways in which the caste system hinders social mobility in India, there resides within each individual a burning desire for freedom in some form. In this case, it is Balram's desire for freedom from his master's inconsistent and increasingly erratic relationship. Throughout the novel, despite Balram's questionable behavior, the reader finds it difficult to fault Balram in his often wayward quest to find his way out of the intricate web of relationships and obligations that was woven for him since birth.

Which brings us to the theme of individualism. At a young age, Balram is given the moniker of "The White Tiger" by a local luminary touring the schools in the area. In Indian lore, a white tiger is someone who comes around only once in a generation and is different from everyone around them. Despite the fact that his life trajectory seems to follow the median for his particular caste, Balram maintains the notion that he is somehow different from everyone in his village. Is this a partial motive for his later crime? Perhaps, but more telling of his idea that he is different from everyone around him is that the entire novel is a series of letters from Balram to Wen Jiaobao, Premier of China and the leader of the world's most collective culture. What significance is there in Balram, the stalwart white tiger of individualism, in writing to the very antithesis of individualism? Vanity, perhaps. The same confession written to the office of the President of the United States of America would be received with an anticlimactic shrug. Perhaps Balram has an inherent sense of irony.

It should also be noted that aside from these fun themes, there is an underlying current of globalization gone horribly wrong. In a recent blog post I noted that naive protagonists are often better than those in the know simply because it is more entertaining from a reader's perspective to read  a story told from the perspective of someone who knows precious little about the world around them. Despite his recent success, Balram is the poster child for the half-educated child of globalization. In a sense, technology has permeated our culture (and one would presume Indian culture as well) enough to misinform a significant portion of the population about everything from poetry to physics. We see it in America among the adherents of intelligent design and we see it throughout The White Tiger.

This is the novel that Slumdog Millionaire desperately tried to be and failed. That's not a knock on Slumdog Millionaire so much as it's a heap of respect for Adiga's ability to actualize modern India in a way that is both endearing and horrifying at the same time. This novel is unrelentingly ferocious in its depiction of India and its caste system. The White Tiger deserves all of its accolades. If I had somehow read this novel a few Canada Days ago, before Neel Mukherjee, I would have said that The White Tiger is "blazingly savage."

Read it.

Life & Times of Michael K

Life & Times of Michael K

By J.M. Coetzee

This is me talking out of my ass...

Often the most powerful, most blisteringly conscious novels are written from the perspective of the naive. Whether it is the innocent naivety of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or the simplistic worldview of Ignatius J. Reilly in a Confederacy of Dunces, or the practical clarity of Yossarian in Catch-22, naivety illuminates the world in a way that erudite characters often cannot achieve. Characters of limited intellectual capacity have a way (albeit filtered through the erudite minds of great writers) of boiling life's complexities down to simple concepts and reflecting them back on the reader as absurdities or truisms or whatever the writer wishes to convey. It is often only through the window of simplicity that we can she the world for what it really is and this particular literary convention is one of the great gifts that novels give humanity.

Conversely, J.M. Coetzee has made a career of reflecting on larger social issues, chewing the fat under the guise of simple characters on flat, 2-dimentional settings. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee paints a bleak, featureless, Cormac McCarthy-esque landscape in which to wax intellectual on the subject of imperialism. Coetzee thrives in stripped down settings and simple characters. It's no wonder that he is the first person to win the Man Booker Prize twice. Literary critics seems to love simple narratives that involve simple characters. I'm not here to argue with the critics. It's a solid literary device. See Dent, Arthur.

In J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize (and Booker Prize) winning novel Life & Times of Michael K, the reader is presented with just such a character. In Michael K, Coetzee has created a character designed exclusively to suffer for the greater good of his reader. Set in apartheid era South Africa, Michael K is a simple man born with a cleft lip who simply wants to help his mother return to her childhood home in Prince Albert in the country before she dies. Unfortunately he attempts this journey in the midst of a war and the trip is rife with dangers. When his mother dies mid-voyage, Michael oscillates between living a life of absolute freedom on the veldt and confined to labor camps as well as living in a state that can neither be called living nor dead. In both circumstances Michael suffers immensely, but only in absolute freedom is truly happy and bears his suffering willingly.

By stripped clear so much of the clutter that the average person's life collects, Coetzee is free to examine man at it's very foundation. Gone are the articles of civilization and the social mores that bind us and dictate kurt behavior. In Michael K, Coetzee has created a character devoid of family and social pressure and completely without material wants and needs. From here, Coetzee is free to use Michael as a vehicle in which to explore the essence of human nature, specifically the notion of freedom.

Freedom is the central theme of Life & Times of Michael K. It is through the clear lens of Michael, a sexless, apolitical entity that we are able to examine the nuances of freedom vs. confinement. In this respect, Coetzee answers the question: is it better to live an indentured life of plenty or a meager life completely unfettered by the demands of society. In true Coetzee fashion, he avoids the temptation to guide the reader's opinion, leaving the narrative open-ended and entirely open for discussion.

There has been much discussion about Michael K's last name and whether or not it is indeed Kafka. Certainly the parallels are there. In fact, the novel bears striking resemblances to The Trial and the themes and tone of the novel seems almost lifted verbatim from its pages. This could have been a travesty, but assuming that Coetzee generated parallels between Life & Times of Michael K and The Trial on purpose, one can rest assured that Kafka's essence is in capable hands.

Bear in mind, if you are looking for a light summer read, steer clear. Life & Times of Michael K is a heavy, thought provoking novel rife with symbolism and heavy with metaphor. I read it as an allegory on the nature of freedom vs. incarceration but I imagine it could be read in a number of different ways (as a parable on race relations, for example). The narrative itself is slow and plodding and doesn't really move much at all, but if it is simply plot that you desire, then you've come to the wrong place if you've come banging on J.M. Coetzee's door. To be sure, this is without a doubt a work of literary genius and deserves to be savored like a fine wine rather than devoured like a Big Mac after a 12 hour shift in the mines.

There is a profound wisdom to be found within Coetzee's work and a good portion of that manifests itself within this novel. The novel is deserving of all the accolades it has been afforded.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

By Ben Fountain

Whether intentional or not, when Francis Ford Coppola debuted Apocalypse Now in 1979 he was thrusting The Vietnam War back into the American limelight, holding it up to America's face for all to consider. While the film would eventually garner the success it so richly deserves, it was a long time in coming. In 1979, America was only four years removed from the images of the last helicopter rising from the roof of the presidential palace in Saigon... the image that signified the ambiguous end to America's most ambiguous war. In many ways, America was not yet ready to deal with the Vietnam War. In many ways, Coppola forced the issue and demanded America step up and face Colonel Kurtz, a metaphor for America's wayward foreign policy in the post-war years.

Fast forward a couple of decades and a couple of even more morally ambiguous wars and you come to Ben Fountain's debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. In much the same way as Apocalypse Now, this novel is a stark and ofttimes blistering story that may well do with the Iraq War what Coppola's film did for Vietnam.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is mainly set over a single Thanksgiving weekend in Dallas. Bravo Company is winding up a tour of the home front after having achieved a level of heroic stardom because one of their recent battles with the insurgency was caught on camera by an embedded Fox News correspondent. The footage  The company has been wined and dined by the country's elite including a stop at the White House. Their final stop is a Dallas Cowboys game where they are to be paraded as heroes in front of an American television audience during a halftime show featuring Destiny's Child. Over the course of the day, the Bravos meet the tight-fisted, conservative owner of the Cowboys, Billy falls in love with one of the cheerleaders and virtually everything they know and understand will be called into question by a world they no longer understand. To the home front, the war is simply a primetime spectacle rather than the real life tragedy it actually is. At it's essence, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is, at its core, heart-breaking.

Told from the perspective of Billy Lynn, a surprisingly astute nineteen-year old soldier with a ferocious game-day hangover, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk instead parades the reader through a particular view of America circa 2004. It has been lauded as the Catch-22 of the Iraq War and with good reason. Fountain delivers a panoply of ironies and absurdities about American culture and society ranging from the tyranny of organized sports to the fallacies inherent in the notion of trickle-down economics. All observed with the full capacity wisdom that a nineteen-year old soldier from small-town Texas can muster. The fact that it is set during the ostentatious, over-the-top consumerism-fueled pomp of an NFL football game (A Dallas Cowboys game, even) provides high definition contrast necessary to see the ironies and absurdities in all their particular glory.

In one especially poignant scene the owner of the Cowboys is addressing a press conference called in order to introduce the Bravos to the Dallas media. He takes the opportunity to provide his own personal justification for the war in Iraq, rattling off a laundry list of reasons pertaining to the economic plight of the Iraqi citizens and the corruption of the Saddam Hussein government. What he and all the people at the press conference fail to realize is that he says nothing whatsoever that differs from the problems faced by most Americans.

And this is the real success of this novel. Fountain delivers his story in such a straight forward, un-ironic tone that the irony of the words are almost (but not quite) lost in their simplicity. I say not quite because Fountain's complete and total lack of subtlety allows the ironies and absurdities to be both peripheral and front-and-center at the same time. All without compromising the actual story arc. Make no mistake, the Bravos are heroes. That is the one constant in the entire narrative. The rest is so decidedly ambiguous it is difficult to maintain a moral compass setting.

With so many themes running side by side throughout the novel it is a little difficult to pin down what, exactly, it is about this novel that sets it apart from virtually everything else written on the subject of the Iraq War. Perhaps, unlike so many other war novels, the actual soldiers are incidental to the story. It is the American public with its obsession with celebrity and shopping and instant replay and meaningless buzz words like nina leven and currj and terrR that plays the central role in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Everybody supports the war and honors the heroes in theory. Everyone can spout off the necessary platitudes about sacrifice with expert media savvy. But do they mean it? America is still a land of haves and have-nots and there are systems in place to ensure that it stays that way... or so it seems to Billy. The culmination of the novel is such a succinct metaphor for the state of America today that I'm surprised it's not cliched (Maybe it is and I'm simply blind).

About halfway through this Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk it occurred to me that I was probably reading what would be regarded as a classic novel in the years to come. It has the style and grace and poignancy in writing to last generations and yet it is so deeply rooted in our own time that it would be a stellar illustration of our world circa 2004. I have no way of knowing whether what I predict will come true, but in my own mind, this is precisely the novel we should be reading ten, fifteen or fifty years from now when we attempt to understand the social, political and cultural motivations America had  during it's most ambiguous war. But more importantly it is a novel in the here and now and perhaps Fountain can force the issue as it pertains to the Iraq War. Perhaps this novel will force America to examine its motivations and try to understand the war's legacy

In that respect, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is not only this generation's Catch-22, it may also be this generation's Apocalypse Now. Absolutely crucial reading.

The Secret River

The Secret River

By Kate Grenville

About a third of the way through this book I developed a measure of regret for all the Australian literature I have not read. I admit it, I've read very little Australian literature. Furthermore, my understanding of Australian history is cursory. I know its history as a penal colony for the British Empire and I understand that, like their counterparts in North America, much of Australia's history is colored (pardon the mildly racist pun... I couldn't resist) by their relations with the indigenous populations. So it turns out that Kate Grenville's Booker Prize nominated novel The Secret River was a bit of an introduction to the particulars of Australia's earliest colonial days.

One part The Good Earth, another The Poisonwood Bible, The Secret River chronicles the life of transported felon Will Thornhill. Thornhill's story begins in late 18th-century London, where he has been born into extreme poverty. But when he marries Sal, the daughter of a local boatman, he is given the chance to make an honest go of it. However, a series of untimely events erases all of the marginal success bestowed on Will and his family and the vice-like grip of London poverty  returns. He takes one too many risks, gets caught and is condemned to hang. Sal, who is able to read and write, greases the right wheels and manages to have Will sentence lessened to life in New South Wales.

The introductory chapters about life in London serves as an exquisite preamble for the cultural collisions that follow in Sydney and, later, the Hawksbury River. It is vitally important to understand where the typical early 19th century Australian settler came from and what sort of person he was. They may have been industrious and diligent but they were also Great Britain's felonious castoffs. This is a point that cannot be ignored.

In Sydney, Will is able to earn back his freedom and works diligently to make a new life for himself and his ever expanding family. He becomes obsess with the notion of purchasing land, obviously taking to heart the old axiom "A man is nothing without land." When his eventually purchases a parcel of land in the wilds along the Hawksbury River, Will initially thinks that his life is complete. A place where he can earn an honest living off the land.

But the land of Will's hope and dreams, land that that he purchased with his own money and of which he holds title and deed  isn't his land and can never be his land. Within days of setting up a hut and planting a filed of corn, Will is confronted by a group of aboriginal people who make it clear that this land is, was and will always be their land. What follows is a escalation of tense that turns angry, the brutal, then murderous.

A lesser writer would have used this opportunity to roll out the tired "noble savage" trope whereby Will and the settlers learn a valuable lesson about living in harmony with and learning from their friendly aboriginal neighbors. In that lesser novel, the narrative would culminate in the evil settlers getting their comeuppance while the astute, forward-thinking settlers who sided with the gentle natives continue to live in peace and harmony. If said lesser novelist was truly Hollywood, there would be a big dinner at the end where all the good settlers and all the natives get together and laugh and sing and we'd all feel good about the future. Now I don't know a lot about Australian history but I do know that is exactly what never happened. And Kate Grenville is no lesser writer.

Instead Grenville paints a far more complicated image that is devoid of traditional good natives and bad settlers. We are confronted by white settlers brought to the land by force rather than choice, many of these settlers were shockingly uneducated and violent. Although driven by greed and hunger, these settlers were given the chance to reinvent themselves and make a life and they took it as would anyone else, often by forced removal of aboriginal populations. We are also introduced to the more lenient white settlers who befriend attempt to work with the aboriginals. Their plight is so ultimately marginal that despite their good intentions they seem to have blinded themselves to the very real problems surrounding them. Conversely, the aboriginal people aren't the pacific simpletons who trade their birthrights for a handful of seeds as they are often portrayed to be.  They know full well what is occurring along the river and act in retaliatory fashion all too often. 

In this context, the cultural clash that invariable follows is far more complex than simply the greedy white settler wantonly raping and pillaging the traditional lands of the indigenous populations. Grenville does an admirable job of painting life in early 19th century Australia with its escalating tensions and intensifying bloodshed. The Secret River is an extremely nuanced novel that masterfully balances the apprehensions of colonialism without resorting to traditional cliches.

It is also a reminder to me that I need to read more Australian literature.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops

By A.D. Miller

When I first moved to Taiwan in 2003, I read Alex Garland's novel, The Beach, almost fresh off the plane. Although The Beach focused primarily on the backpacker's mythological search for that one last undiscovered corner of the whorl in which to call their own, it did touch upon the notion of expats living overseas for extended periods. At the time, I expected my experiences in Taiwan to, if not parallel Garland's novel, provide for a working model. How completely wrong I was. Expat life is far more mundane than Garland's vision (obviously).

It is with this in mind that we meet Nick Platt, a Briton who has recently returned from nearly a decade living and working in Russia. Snowdrops proceeds as a tell-all from Platt to his unnamed fiancé as a way of airing out all his dirty laundry before settling down. A clearing of his conscience. And there is plenty here that needs clearing. It is a stark and honesty confession of a man who spent a decade living in a post-Soviet Russia replete with corruption, crime and hedonism and the way in which Russia altered the Platt's moral fiber.His story begins in his eighth year and concerns snowdrops.

It is telling that Muscovites have a slang term for the dead bodies that appear throughout the city following the spring thaw. These bodies, which have been buried under the deep freeze throughout the winter reveal themselves in the spring run-off like early blooming spring flowers of the same name. The metaphor is apt not only for the severity of Moscow winters but also for the moral ambiguity and crippling social problems that define post-communist, post-globalized Russia.

Platt is a lawyer and lives alone, his work is less than diligent and his social life is sleazier than he would like to believe. Like so many expatriates, time away from home has guided his moral compass in the direction of his adopted home. He is more likely to believe the shifty business practices of rich Cossack investors and cannot resist the allure of two beautiful Russian women (Masha and Katya) he meets on the Metro.

The women slowly creep into his life, first as a distraction from the monotony of life then as an obsession bordering on psychosis. While the depressing truth of the women's intentions becomes clear to the reader and their web of lies unfurls like, Platt continues to delude himself that everything is on the level and his relationship with Masha when, deep down, we know he knows exactly how it will all play out. I mean, it's right there in the title of the book isn't it? The tragedy of this novel is its complete lack of suspense as Platt continues to fall for the women's scam. One might assume that the allure of a leggy Russian woman in a short skirt and tall boots has a lot to do with it (and of course, it does) but A.D. Miller is insistent that the real culprit in this dupe was not the women so much as Moscow itself.

Like the work of Jeffery Eugenides, A.D. Miller has the ability to write his setting as a character of its own. In Snowdrops the Moscow of 2005 breathes with vodka-soaked life. Miller's Moscow is populated with Dagestani taxi drivers, Turkmeni road workers, Scandinavian shysters and sweaty Hungarian businessmen cursing in a dozen languages. The Moscow of Snowdrops reeks of cigar smoke and cheap perfume. What's not to love? Miller depicts the multi-cultural cash-grab, the winner-takes-all-and-damn-the-loser mentality that has come to personify modern Russia. The Moscow in Snowdrops pulses with perfect balance of kitsch, sleaze and bling. It is no wonder that Platt is ever bit as seduced by the city as he is by Masha and Katya.

It is often said that the longer you stay away from the country of your birth, the more difficult it becomes to go back. Platt's morally suspect friend Steve calls it long-term expat syndrome and I can vouch for the existence of such a disorder. As a long term resident of Taiwan (and one is in the planning stages of a return to Canada), I can relate to Platt's ordeal and his plight. It is easy to lose sight of oneself whilst living within another culture and I have met dozens of foreigners who have lived and worked in Taiwan for twenty, sometimes thirty years and it is difficult to imagine them living anywhere else. The ideas and morals you came with flake off like skin cells as you begin the slow transformation into something other. In Platt's case, he is not Russian, but he is no longer British either. He effectively belongs nowhere. So where do one's morals come from when one comes from nowhere?

Snowdrops was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and it is not terribly difficult to see why. I've often thought that a well-written novel that cuts to the heart of expat life would receive the right kind of attention. I figured the eventual novel would be about living and working in China, but Russia seems to work all the same. By focusing on a long-term expat, it cuts the culture shock factor in half and presents the cultural and moral differences in a more apologetic, less judgmental fashion. In this repeat, Snowdrops is everything that Alex Garland's The Beach was not. Gritty, sordid and pathetic but ultimately believable. Nick Platt could be anyone living and working overseas.

Hell, Nick Platt could be me.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending

By Julian Barnes

"History isn't the lies of the victors ... It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated." -- Julian Barnes, A Sense of an Ending.

From a reviewers standpoint, it's probably not a good idea to read an author for the first time if the book you choose to read has won the Booker Prize. Most importantly, it sets the reviewer up for possible disappointment should they reach into said author's back catalog to find other titles (I say possible disappointment because, as we all know, just because a novel wins a Booker Prize does not mean it is the best novel ever written by that author... but it's probably a good bet). But only slightly less important is the manner in which the reviewer is able to accurately review the novel in relation to their work prior.  Of course, even the most voracious reviewers can't possibly read everything by everyone, so these things have to be taken with a grain of salt.

A Sense of an Ending is Julian Barne's 11th novel. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2011. It is the first novel that I have ever read by Julian Barnes. I have read exactly zero titles from the 2011 Booker shortlist (though I've had Half Blood Blues on my shelf for a dogs age). How exactly do I express myself about this novel? It's good. Really good. Of course it is. It won the Booker Prize. Did I mention that? You don't get nominated for the Booker Prize unless your novel has some artistic merit (and I'm going to ignore the hairsplitting nonsense coming from the literati in their dusty offices. Put them in a room full of Cathy Lamb novels for a year and see what they think of Julian Barnes after that). So I'm going to try and make sense of his novel as a stand alone novel as opposed to a piece in a larger body of work or as a nominee for the award that it won. I am trying, but I haven't read everything.... yet.

The Sense of an Ending is a deeply introspective look into the past of Tony Webster, a retired man living alone somewhere in London. He has lead a relatively mediocre life (what is it with me and novels about mediocrity lately? I'm going to steer away from that theme this time around. Promise). Job, marriage, child, divorce.  He has a past, and spends a good deal of the novel recalling the trivial moments of youth in the days leading up to his life's one great tragedy.

The novel is divided into two parts. The first part chronicles Webster's past as he remembers it, among a clique of three other boys, one of which is a precocious boy named Adrian who fancies himself a bit of a philosopher (actually they all do, but Adrian seems more devoted to the craft). Webster recalls his first years at the University of Bristol where he begins dating a woman by the name of Veronica whom he neither marries nor harbors particular fondness for in his old age, an excruciatingly awkward visit to Veronica's family house and the eventual tragedy that becomes the vortex of the entire narrative. None of these things are particularly related.

But of course they are.

Part Two turns the entire first half of the book on its head when Tony, now in his early sixties, receives a bequeathment of five hundred pounds from Veronica's mother upon her death, despite the fact that he has only met her the one time (at the aforementioned awkward visit) and has neither communicated with her nor Veronica in almost half a century. What follows is a stunning meditation on the nature of history and memory, how one man's recollections can be entirely different (almost polarized in some circumstances) from what others recall. Those that have hitherto been viewed as manipulators or instigators. The events of his past that seemed so trivia in retrospect become the groundwork for the great tragedy in Tony's life.

The novel is essentially a discourse on perspective and perception, neither of which are qualities found in Tony. In fact, as we read, it becomes apparent that Tony is not even remotely capable of seeing the forest for the trees. So much so that the enigmatic (and often frustrating) Veronica is reduced to trite Hollywood-isms ("You just don't get it, do you?) by the end of the novel as she bangs her head against the wall trying to get Tony to see what he will not see. In this respect, Tony is outed for the manifestly ordinary man he has spend his life trying to disguise.

Barnes is trying to tell us something. What, exactly, is never precisely laid out for the reader, but it's all in there, more or less. from the cryptic equations in Adrian's diary to the long, slow (almost painfully so) reveal over the last 20 pages, Barnes warps with perception and recollection in a way that would confound most writers. However, by keeping the story on an arrow-straight trajectory he gives the reader ample opportunity to flip back and compare notes with earlier passages much in the same way a repeat viewer of the Sixth Sense might pick through the plot with a fine toothed comb. I haven't had the chance to do that myself, but I can imagine it would be a great deal of fun to do so.

But for all its philosophical acrobatics, The Sense of an Ending is an engaging and extremely readable novel. At exactly 150 pages, I read the entire book in a single sitting, something my attention span and two month old daughter let me do too often these days. I can't resist books that strike deep into philosophical territory without sacrificing character and story. It is a mark of truly excellent book if the writer can walk that line between meaningful human discourse and solid entertainment value. Julian Barnes does it with skill and style. I can't wait to read his novels that haven't won the Booker Prize.

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 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.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

It's odd which books leave a permanent impression. I read great books that usually fade off into obscurity again soon after reading (Water for Elephants). Others I remember in bits and pieces. I can tell you the basic plot, maybe even remember a character's name or two and perhaps a few specific points in the narrative that I felt were particularly memorable (Shalimar the Clown). Still others are so terribly bad that I recall them simply because it offended my sensibilities so much (Twilight). Then there are the rarest books of all. The ones that leave an indelible mark. The ones that refuse to go away, even long after reading. These books simmer just under the surface and are always the first books I recall when people ask me about my favorite books.

This is not to say that these ARE my favorite books, but for whatever reason they have imprinted themselves onto my brain. Plot, tone, mood, characters, setting, pacing.... everything is right there for immediate recall as if I read them yesterday. But it's not fair to say they are necessarily among my favorites. Midnight's Children is one of my all-time favorite books but I struggle to remember the details (I should probably re-read that one one of these days) as is Creation by Gore Vidal but I don't remember them as well as say, Late Night on Air by Elizabeth Hay. Some books just won't go away. Here are the ten books that I recall vividly long after finishing them (note that many of these have very specific gimmicks. That probably says a lot about the sort of books I enjoy):

1. Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

3. Replay by Ken Grimwood

4. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

5. Fall On Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald

6. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

7. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

8. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (Chapter 10 especially)

9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

10. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize nominated novel Never Let Me Go has all the criteria to squeeze onto this personal list. It is a haunting novel lush with details that makes the reader want to flip back to page one and start all over again immediately after finishing the last page. It's one of those books that I will forcibly foist upon friends when it is within my means. The fact that it does have a particular gimmick only adds to it's appeal for me.

Never Let Me Go is a sterling example of what can be done with science fiction in the hands of a talented novelist. I am not suggesting that Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury or the likes are bad novelists... far from it... but they were often limited by their genre. Ishiguro, like Margaret Atwood, is not strictly a science fiction writer and therefore brings fresh elements to the table. He applies a softness, compassion and, indeed, quirkiness to the genre that allows it to broaden it's scope without being weighed down by the conventions of science fiction.

Furthermore, Ishiguro is a writer entirely in command of his work. He leads the reader through his finely sculpted world one step at a time, opening the door a little at a time. Da Vinci Code Brown should take some notes. This is the way to write cliffhanger chapters. The revel is slow and methodical but at the same time relentless and tragic. Dan Brown has been wrongly commended on his talent to keep readers turning the pages. When you read Ishiguro you realize how clumsy Brown is as a writer.

I've often read books nominated for the Booker and thought to myself: "Who voted for this?" In the case of Never Let Me Go the question switches to "Who didn't vote for this?" No disrespect intended to the 2005 winner John Banville or his novel The Sea... until I read it, of course.

The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries

By Carol Shields

We were supposed to read this book in grade 11 English, but I recall that my English teacher that year, Ms. White, had disliked the book so much that we opted for Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, a book I thoroughly did not enjoy. I have no idea why I would recall such a trivial bit of educational history (and still produce grades in the low 30s in math) but there you have it.

Since then I have, for one reason or another, managed to avoid this book. Apparently Ms. White's opinion of the book carried a lot of weight with me because at certain points in my reading career I have actually gone out of my way to NOT read this book. The fact that it won the Governor General's Award, the Pulitzer Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize meant (and still means) nothing to me. But obviously someone, somewhere thought this book was pretty swell. Just not Ms. White and, by extention, me.

This got me to thinking about Ms. White. Why would one woman's opinion about a book keep me from reading it for 20 years? I recall that she was (at the time) in her mid to late twenties and a lot of other male students in my high school thought she was the bee's knees. She was partial to calf length floral print skirts and librarian sweaters, which was pretty risque attire for a teachr in those days. But my teacher crush was Ms. Thompson (blue jeans and sweaters!). There was no mistaking that.

My only vivid memory of Ms White was her running down a corridor because she was late for her class. At the same time, a student exiting a classroom in said corridor opened the door outwards and she ran face-first into the door. Then she fell down.The only thing I remember about her class was sitting in front of the school narc. But for some reason her opinion about the Stone....

Wait.... This entire anecdote was about The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence. That was the book Ms. White hated so much.....

Anyway, The Stone Diaries reminded me of my grandmother.