Fair enough, Shade. Ta for the info.
An update on my Booker status, since I'm not bored yet. I've got ten of the books to have made the longlist. These are:
- In The Country Of Men, Hisham Matar
- Get A Life, Nadine Gordimer
- Be Near Me, Andrew O'Hagan
- So Many Ways To Begin, Jon McGregor
- Carry Me Down, M.J. Hyland
- The Inheritance Of Loss, Kiran Desai
- Theft: A Love Story, Peter Carey
- The Secret River, Kate Grenville
- Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
- The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
Of these, I've read the first five. Well, in the case of Jon McGregor's
So Many Ways To Begin I've read only forty pages but that was enough to make me decide that that was enough of him.
In The Country Of Men is the story of a Libyan boy during the late 1970s. It showcases the oppression of the Libyan people with regards to secret police, people admitting their guilt to crimes on television, public execution in the masculine state. But, in contrast, it paints Libya as a land of sweet swelling spices, of happy families, a place where friendships flourish. With these opposites you may well think that Matar is doing for Libya what Hosseini did for Afghanistan by writing a nostalgic novel about their country of origin. And you'd be right.
In The Country Of Men, while a better piece of writing than
The Kite Runner, features little action and the majority of the story centres around the house of the narrator. The book is billed as being the story of a nine year old boy and, based on the simplicity of the narrative it could well be so but there are times throughout when the narrator states that he is telling his story from long ago. Indeed, he's twenty four. An adult telling a story in a childish style may be okay if he's slow or mentally disabled but there's nothing wrong with the guy. And his recollections are so lacking in sentiment that, like
The Kite Runner, this is an ethnic exercise in empty nostalgia.
Get A Life by Nadine Gordimer begins with the story of an ecologist recovering in his parents' home after radiation treatment for thyroid cancer has left him as a walking, talking Chernobyl. At his parents' in order to protect his wife and child. But, as he recovers, the parents take centre stage in the story, go their own ways, and then, once that story is over, in pops another one about an ecological problem in Africa. It's quite a messy volume and, because of Gordimer's distant prose, thankfully short. But there's something about the book that I liked; perhaps the way in which Gordimer's narrator was able to move in an out of characters' thought patterns and external description with ease. Not that I would recommend it to anyone.
Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan is the closest to me in geographical setting. It tells the story of an English priest who has come to a small Scottish village where industry has long since departed and religious bigotry is rife. The priest befriends a couple of local delinquents and falls into their world as he realises what he has missed out on by giving his life and career to God. But, after a few drinks here and there, the priest forgets that he's pushing sixty and his cute little friend is only fifteen. Thus he does what most priests do and the case ends up in court. Predictable storyline but that's not what
Be Near Me is about. It's about hopelessness, religion, taking control of one's life. The writing is strange in this one in that it opens with some of the most implausible prose I've read, both description and dialogue. Yet, once passed this I was able to enjoy the novel (perhaps because of the setting) and only noticed the occasional passage where the author strained for effort.
So Many Ways To Begin by Jon McGregor was just boring lists of adjectives strung in a line like the priest above's beads in order to make the most boring of objects interesting. It doesn't work. After forty pages I had no sense of character, place, or story. Saying that, it is set in Coventry so perhaps he has captured it better than I think.
Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland is the story of an eleven year old boy who has a gift for detecting lies. Whatever you say, he can tell if you are lying. His main obsession is the
Guinness Book of Records, notably the new 1972 edition. He hopes that one day he'll get into the book, perhaps for his lie detection abilities. He seeks to improve this gift and reads book after book on the subject. Yet all around him, the boy's family life is exploding. His father hasn't had a job in years, his grandmother (with whom they stay) is tiring of their residency, and his mother has her own problems to deal with. Slowly, and with complete innocence, the boy widens the gaps between the family and they begin to fall apart by his own hand. The novel, like
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha or
The God Boy has him obvserving the breaking up of a happy family without truly understanding what's happening. There's a darkness to the prose here, and this has been my favourite Booker read thus far, but I felt it could have done with something more authentic in the character's voice, some Irish colloquialism perhaps. You don't expect an eleven year old to be so well spoken. Especially not one with issues. And especially not an Irish one.
On now, to Kiran Desai's second novel,
The Inheritance Of Loss. I haven't even read what it's about, like most of these Booker longlistees. I decided just to read as many as possible because they were all brand new authors to me. And reading the blurb may prejudice me against picking up any of them.
And, while the debate about whether
Black Swan Green should win the Booker or not goes on, I find myself in the envious position of never having read Mitchell before. The criticism, mostly, says it's not as good as his last,
Cloud Atlas. Well, if that's true, I'll read
Black Swan Green and then the rest of the Mitchells in order.
