2005 Man Booker Prize Nominee Reviews
My New Year's resolution in 2006 was to read the Man Booker Prize
2005 Long List (the 2006 list wasn't published on Jan 1). It took me
until September to track down all the books, as many were first published
in the UK and didn't make it to the USA for a while.
The Harmony Silk Factory, by Tash Aw
I read this book in about four hours, on a plane from Salt Lake City to
Boston, finishing it as my bags appeared in the claim area at Logan. It's
the first book I've finished from the '05 Booker Prize nominee list, and I
really enjoyed it.
It's the story of the man who worked his way up from being a Chinese
peasant in Malaysia in the early 1900's to the most powerful, and corrupt
man in the Valley in the 1940's and 50's. It's told from the points of
view of his son, his wife, and his best friend, but never him. We see
different facets of him depending on who's talking: the corrupt lying
traitor of a father, the distant cold husband the wife falls out of love
with as she falls in love with a Japanese officer, and the struggling
Communist whose motivations become more clear as his English friend
records their conversations in between notes on designing a garden at his
old age home. The ending was somewhat contrived, and I had to wait until
the last third of the book for certain things to become clear, but the
writing style was engaging and the book kept me engrossed to the point of
standing there in baggage claim, racing to finish the last five pages
before my bags arrived. I was dancing with impatience to find out the last
view of things, and it was fascinating seeing how one man could appear so
different to three people who were close to him. The author had me
disliking the man at the beginning and then finding more and more sympathy
with him as the novel went on.
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
I'm definitely liking this reading list a lot, two books in and I love
both of them.
This one is about a woman, Kathy, who's looking back on her life as she's
ending her stint as a carer and about to start making donations, and about
the friendships she's had with Ruth and Tommy.
It starts from her memories of childhood, and gradually makes its way back
to the present day, meandering around England, never localising things too
clearly, mapping out the internal landscape more than the external. She
grew up in a boarding school, always isolated from the world, until the
age of sixteen when she and some friends were sent to live in another
group home, only supervised by one aged caretaker and some veterans, older
students. From there, they get to choose when to begin training as carers,
and after a stint caring for people making donations, it's their turn. The
ghost of deferring donating threads through the book, a possibility if two
people can prove that they love each other enough to earn three or four
years to themselves. They can't dream of being an office worker or a
postman, because their future is set for them. But because they're so
sheltered, they accept it, and do the best they can, forming friendships,
having spats, making up, doing what they must, and only occasionally
wondering why.
About halfway through the book, the author spells out the fact that
they're clones, bred to donate organs until they die of it. Four is the
limit, though he never gives the order or what the last one is, though I
suspect it's the heart. Their guardians and other people are uncomfortable
around them, and this distresses the children to a certain degree, but the
author shows the self absorption of childhood quite clearly, even given
the flashback manner of telling the story.
It's a wonderfully self contained story, exploring what it might be like
to grow up knowing that you're going to have your organs harvested, but
not really bothered by it, because you've been conditioned to accept it.
There are no radical clone revolts, just step after inevitable step taken
on a premapped road.
Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie
Somewhat like "The Harmony Silk Factory", this is a story about a man told
from many points of view, but unlike that book, we get to hear from
Shalimar in places. He kills his wife's lover early in the novel, and it's
witnessed by his wife's daughter (christened Kashmira and renamed India by
her father's wife, and now living in Los Angeles). Then we learn the
history of the love affairs, and how Shalimar came to the point where he
could kill Max. Psychic connections between the husband and wife, and
husband and daughter, exert shadow forces on the characters, and
everything circles around a Kashmiri town high in the mountains. Max's
history is almost disjoint from the rest of the story, but his Alsatian
background and fighting in the French resistance provide a prequel of
Shalimar's life, as he moves from the village in Kashmir to the mountains
in order to train and fight in the Muslim Jihad, after his Hindu wife
betrays him. Religion, nationality, race, love, hate, death, revenge all
pull the story forward. It's not an easy book, good people (well,
sympathetic characters) are overrun with events beyond their control, and
dark desires culminate in a deadly encounter in the dark, bow and arrow
against knife, as high tech security systems wail in the background, and
night vision goggles give one of the combatants an advantage.
India/Kashmira's voice is distinct, with the the staccato rhythm that
threw me off at first, while the older generation has more languid music
in their thoughts and words. World events are mentioned, to root the story
in recent times, and the story swept me up, making me wonder why I never
read about this event or that, having to remind myself that this is
fiction, albeit with strong lashings of reality.
In the Fold, by Rachel Cusk
This is the first one on the list that I had to work to get through,
because it wasn't engaging me.
It's the story of a man who helps out an old college friend, going to the
family sheep farm to help with the lambing. It's a very localised story,
taking place mostly in houses in two small English towns, with some
transitions between them, but it took place mostly indoors. It focused on
the relations inside the farm family and Michael's, not a lot of cross
talk happening, or at least not substantial. The relationships were fairly
bad, lots of arguments, secrets being revealed, affaires re-hashed, and
general remarks just made to hurt. Not very enjoyable to read, for that
reason, and I didn't come away with any feeling of having explored the
depths of the human character. People squabble, great. Granted I might be
missing something, but I have no wish to dig deeper to find out what it
is.
The funniest thing is that I next started "The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-Time", and as the autistic narrator is describing the kinds
of novels that he doesn't like to read, his sample say-nothing quote could
have come from "In the Fold". I'm liking this book a lot better, and
empathising with the narrator quite a bit (esp his panic attacks in
crowds).
Saturday, by Ian McEwan
This one I enjoyed. :) At one point I'd wondered if someone could write a
novel that took place in a single day, and it turns out, someone has.
This novel covers about 24 hours in the life of a London neurosurgeon,
from waking up to see a plane flaming out over London, making love to his
wife, a car accident, a squash game, a visit to his mother, a concert, a
dinner party, and being called in to operate. It's his inner life that's
the richest part - his thoughts on 9/11, the coming war in Iraq, diagnoses
of people he encounters, thoughts on his family and where his life is
going, they all enrich his movements through the day. There's a slow build
up to the main conflict and a satisfying resolution; it's a classic
construction, but solidly built and well detailed.
I seem to have picked up more than I thought from staring at images of
brains for the past four years, most of the neuro stuff made sense to me,
and I enjoyed getting lots of detail about a couple of surgeries, as well
as the squash game, and cooking dinner. :) This novel reminded me that
even a regular day can be made special by how you approach it - there's an
undercurrent of mindfulness in the story, of being present and seeing and
reacting to what's around you, rather than just what you expect to see.
It's enhanced by having read "The Curious Incident..." right before,
seeing the contrast between the thoughts of an autistic teen versus a
middle aged dad - both are observing the world around them, but at
differing levels of detail.
The Sea, by John Banville
"The Sea" is about a widower who goes back to an old vacation town on the
sea after his wife dies, and he tells the story of her illness and of his
summer by the water with the Grace family. He talks of his first loves
more than his wife, he's hard on himself, and meanders in memory, trying
to find himself again after a year of nursing his wife by reminiscing
about when he first became self conscious, separate from the world.
This is the book that actually won the Booker prize, though it wouldn't
have been my first pick. It's beautiful and lyrical and sad, but self
consciously so. It feels like, when I stumble across a glorious phrase,
that the author left it there deliberately to stay me, demanding that I
linger over it and cherish it. There were many words that had me reaching
for a dictionary or paging through my own memory for definitions, to the
point of disrupting the flow of the novel. Maybe it was that the narrative
tone wasn't quite consistent all the way through, that the author had
these phrases and built the rest of the story around them, I'm not sure.
Jeanette Winterson is better at this style of story telling, her books
feel more cohesive than this. Maybe it's partially a function of the
protagonist, an old man reliving life versus Winterson's youngish females.
There was one horribly jarring paragraph where Max obscenely berates his
wife for losing him, and then goes on being lyrically descriptive of the
past. It does convincingly portray a man dealing with grief, the thoughts
he expresses feel very immediate, due to digressions in the text and
statements of explicit clarification. I guess it's growing on me a bit
more as I think about why I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. It's not
bad, but maybe I just couldn't relate to the emotions he was experiencing.
I seem to need to make an emotional connection to characters in novels in
order to really enjoy them, and Max's state was just too foreign for me to
grasp.
A short history of tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka
This title is the one that first caught my eye when I scanned over the
list of books that I'd be reading this year. It's the story of a daughter
whose father remarries when he's in his eighties and the disruption that
it engenders in the family. Nadezhda and her sister Vera join forces,
after years of partial estrangement, to try and oust the middle aged
floozy from their father's life. The story's structure shares some
similarities with "In the Fold", but the details are much more charming.
Stories from the past come to light (moving from the Ukraine to England
via work camps), radically different from each perspective that's offered,
and there's a lot of conflict with the interloper and within the original
family. A lot of the quoted dialog is rendered in English as a second
language, with the conversations translated from Ukrainian flowing more
naturally, but this somehow works well to put me down in the middle of the
bilingual family.
The deceased mother's presence is felt throughout, in comparisons to the
new wife, in the tins of preserved food she'd left behind, in a locket
that's a bone of contention between the sisters, in her garden that's
going to seed behind the house. Nadezhda's husband and daughter are only
lightly sketched in, and we never meet Vera's daughters, this story
concentrates on the siblings and their parents. The father is a retired
engineer who's writing a book about tractors, and excerpts are presented
in the novel, and sometimes it seems to be the only thing that's keeping
him together as he weathers the failure of his new marriage, his wife
pressuring him for more and more money and immigration support, and
eventual death threats. The past story is just as engrossing as the
present one, as the sister digs for the reasons why her sister and father
are at odds, and the two parts are skillfully woven together. There are
moments of humour, as when Nadezhda's following the new wife trying to
find out if she's having an affair, and some sad/scary ones as we see how
her father is deteriorating, barricaded in his room. Overall, though, it's
a happy sort of novel, not as biting as "In the Fold". There are even
moments of sympathy for the new wife as well, as we get glimpses of why
she's acting as she is.
Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel
This book was creepy, in the skin crawling up your spine, here there be
ghosts and they be not friendly sort of way. The protagonist is a medium
with a spirit guide who happens to be someone from her childhood, who
scared her then and still scares her now. The group of men that hung
around her childhood shack, taking turns with her prostitute mother,
betting on fighting dogs, and "teaching her a lesson" slowly gather back
around her after they've died. Al's memories are a bit wonky due to always
having seen spirits and a childhood full of abuse, and she's not quite
sure what the men did to her, or what she did to them. That forms the
central mystery of the book, and franky, it's not strong enough to hold
the whole thing together. There's a strong sub plot of Al's manager and
how prickly she is, to the point of constantly abusing Al for her weight
and forcing her to diet, but the unpleasantness pales in the face of the
threats from the dead. Al is a working psychic, so we get to meet her
colleagues as they move around England working at various fairs and
performances, as well as seeing her interact directly with clients. Al
tries to do good deeds, sheltering a homeless man, and taking all sorts of
insults without complaint, in an effort to build up karma against the bad
things she attracts, and I had a lot of sympathy for her, but I wish that
the novel had ended more strongly.
Slow Man, by J. M. Coetzee
This book grabbed my attention on the first page, opening up with a bike
accident, and the victim flying through the air. The bicyclist in
question, an older man named Paul, ends up having his leg amputated and
having to totally rearrange his life. He goes through a succession of
nurses, and the last one cares for him so well that he becomes smitten
with her, and her children. Then a possibly psychic writer turns up on his
door step and urges him to take action, to woo the woman he encountered in
the hospital, or to declare himself to his nurse, something, so that he
moves forward, gets out of his gloomy flat and starts to live again. The
writer seems to know things she shouldn't, seeming a personification of
the author's omniscient point of view. The medical issues aren't dealt
with in as much detail as they were in "Saturday", and the psychic stuff
isn't as obvious as in "Beyond Black", and it doesn't seem like the
protagonist really gets to know his own self. I did empathise with him a
bit, mostly due to the bike accident and the loss of mobility, but his
pushing to enter the life of a self contained family to avoid living his
own, to take care of them when he can't take care of himself, was a bit
too escapist for me. There were some abrupt introductions of elements into
the narrative that felt jarring, the book could have been a bit longer and
more fleshed out. The ending left more questions than answers,
highlighting that every person has a point of view on events, and that
sometimes you just don't know what's the right thing to do.
Or something. :) I need to think about this one a bit more, I think.
A Long Long Way, by Sebastian Barry
This book follows a young Irish man who joins up in Dublin to fight in
World War I, and ends up in the trenches in France and Belgium. The
descriptions of the brief glimpses of beauty in and amongst the horror
were brief respites in a tale that was pretty much just matter-of-factly
bloody. Willie gets caught up in putting down a rebellion in the streets
of Dublin when he's about to leave for the continent and it really twists
him up that he's had to fight his own as well as the Germans. He holds
tight to the images of his father and sisters, despite some friction over
the events in Dublin, and tries to be true to his love, Gretta. His
friends in the trenches fall in a hail of bullets and bombs and gas - the
description of withstanding the second gas attack after the first was
weathered without masks, trying to suppress the memory of fleeing in front
of the deadly yellow cloud as a new one rolled over them, was quite
powerful.
I'm describing this really poorly. The writing is strong and beautiful and
the story is affecting. It gives a strong sense of what it was like to sit
in muddy trenches with death all around, yet at the same time we get to
share in Willie's coping mechanisms and don't quite get over whelmed. Not
an easy book to read, but a good one.
The People's Act of Love, by James Meek
Wow, this was a substantial book - the themes were grand and the scope
felt sweeping, for all that it's set mostly in a Siberian village.
It's about love, for people and causes, but it detours through
abandonment, castration, cannibalism, communism, lies, sacrifice, and
military atrocities. It seemed like every time I started to build a
picture of one character, it would be revealed that they were lying about
something big.
There are two main couples, and in each one, one partner does something
that they believe in but that forces them away from their other. The book
starts with a short description of these events, then dives into the
consequences. The characters are richly drawn, changeable, very human. The
horrors and surprises that the story exposed were like a series of gut
punches.
the accidental, by Ali Smith
This book managed to be very structured and yet free form within that
structure. The three parts are explicitly called the beginning, middle and
end, but within each part, the story is unfolded through stream of
consciousness writing from each of the five characters, one after another
in the same order, daughter, son, husband, wife, and then Amber. The
family rents a holiday house in Norfolk and spends the summer months
there, and one day Amber appears on the doorstep. Eve thinks she's one of
Michael's students, he thinks that she's one of Eve's interview subjects
or reviewers. Amber insinuates herself into the fabric of the family,
instantly accepted yet still an irritant, and changes everything for the
better though it seems the opposite at times. Amber's thoughts are the
most obfuscated and have the smallest amount of space dedicated to them,
she's the unknown that catalyses the family into change. The daughter
stops looking at everything through the lens of her video camera, the son
stops obsessing about the girl at his school who committed suicide, the
husband is forced to deal with his infidelity, and the wife stops
pretending to be someone else. The tone of the sections shows a
progression in the character's attitudes, they become more linearly
narrative as the book goes on and Amber's influence is felt.
Very well written, and it pulled me through the pages quickly after I
became accustomed to the structure.
Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes
This books starts from the births of two men, and goes until the death of
one of them. Each man's life is detailed in sections under the heading of
their name, with a couple of supporting characters getting random
sections.
The two men don't encounter each other until about half way through the
book, when Arthur takes up George's cause, trying to get him compensation
for being wrongfully imprisoned. Well, I assume it was wrongfully, they
never actually solve the mystery of who committed the crime. The book
seemed to meander through their lives, very linear and accepting of what
comes next. George sits through 3 years of imprisonment, a patient
unimaginative solicitor, while Arthur charges around being enthusiastic
about stuff. We get to learn about Arthur's interest in spiritism, his
long platonic affair while married to a consumptive wife, and his
annoyance at always being associated with Sherlock Holmes. The book takes
place in England in the late 1800's and early 1900's, glossing over the
first world war in the latter pages, and sprinkling the text with
references to personalities of the day.
George's trial is frustrating, as it's all built on circumstantial
evidence, and George himself is astonished that he's convicted. With this
being the central event that connects the two men, it's doubly frustrating
that we don't get to see closure on it. Arthur's personal life proceeds
apace, with him waiting dutifully for his wife to die before he can marry
his love.
The book is richly detailed, the characters are engaging, and it kept me
turning the pages, but it felt ... unsatisfying. The references at the end
show that Barnes did his homework, it's all based on fact, so maybe that's
the point, that life isn't neat and tidy, that sometimes you just don't
know. But I'd rather a novel tell me what bloody well happened to kick off
the whole thing. :)
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
This book focuses on a family of five, living in a college town just
outside of Boston.
The father is a dry, self absorbed prat of a non published professor who
tries to keep a firm grip on the lives of all in the household as they all
slip merrily between his fingers. His control is irrevocably lost when his
affair is brought to light. The mother/wife, Kiki, is very strong and she
forgives him until she learns more details, and the scandal breaks over
the town. The daughter is actually attending the father's classes, the son
is highly religious & at loggerheads with his agnostic family, and the
younger son is pretending that he's from Roxbury, hanging out with
Haitians, rapping and being an activist. The author mixes their points of
view throughout the story, and throws in a random chapter from another
young woman's perspective (which I felt was one of the strongest chapters
in the book) as she prepares for the professor's class. Then add an
academic/familial rivalry between the main family and another one that
conveniently moves in down the street from them, add in sexual high jinks
and a
controversial bequest, and it gets complex. Too complex, really. Plus
there's a whole sub plot about a random young guy they meet on the Common
who ends up taking a class with the daughter and trying to be friends with
the son, and who falls for the girl that the other son lost his virginity
to, while the daughter falls for him. Gah. And the whole thing ends on an
anticlimactic note, not seeming to really wrap up anything much inside the
family. The outer issues are dealt with more cleanly, but all in all, it
had me annoyed when I reached the end.
The writing style is clear and descriptive, the plot could use some more
editing. The point of view changes arbitrarily, sometimes she explains
things just in flashback, and sometimes we get long drawn out descriptions
of things as they happen. The tensions raised by it being a mixed race
family are handled okay, but it could have been more polished - it felt
like she was trying to say too much, about fitting into a college town,
about fitting into urban circles, about affirmative action pro/con, about
religious differences between related people.
There were a few characters who were consistently described as beautiful,
but only the daughter of the rival professor was sketched out enough so
that we could see her from a few different angles, using and reacting to
her looks. The professor's infidelity didn't seem to be about his wife
gaining weight, it was just him not saying no. Hrmph.
Overall it was okay, had some good bits, but would have been a lot better
if the point of view didn't jump around so much, and she didn't try to
cover so much ground.
This is the Country, by William Wall
From when I was about a third of the way through the book:
It's set in modern day Ireland and told from the point of view of a junkie
who's semi-sort-of trying to clean himself up. It took a while for me to
get into the method of story telling, it's very much like listening to
someone tell you about stuff that happened to them, with tangents and
digressions and not being able to interrupt to ask "what were you in the
hospital for?" but if you wait a bit he'll tell you. :) So far it feels
like a view of a life while wearing blinders, you only see what you're
allowed to see.
Impressions now that I'm done: Still very much a story told as if over a
pint, with going back and filling in things, and skirting around the
painful parts, and not really listening to the first bit and then finding
out that it's important.
It's about family, those you love and those that want to kill you for
getting with their sister, about taking responsibility, finding a job that
you end up loving, and falling back into habits from a youth on the
council estates (breaking into homes and living there for a bit while
watching a foster family take care of your daughter).
It's dreamy in places, disjointed in more, mostly non-linear in time, and
I really liked it. At the start is a poem called "This is the country",
and each line of the poem forms a chapter title, and is used in the
chapter (but never really in a forced way). It's as if the poem inspired a
dream, influencing some of the action, but not appearing right in the
centre of it. It's still threading through the story though, but reading
it first didn't spoil the novel (unlike reading the list of thanks at the
start of a recent novel, I can't recall which one now, but it basically
gave away most of the plot to see for what the author was thanking
people).
And when certain characters were speaking, I could hear the lilt in their
voices.
This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson
This novelisation of real events covers the historical voyages of the HMS
Beagle, telling the stories of Captian Fitzroy and Charles Darwin.
The ship voyages to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego on a scientific survey,
before taking on Darwin, and the crew brings back natives to England to
educate them. Darwin signs on for the return trip, where the natives are
restored to their homeland (not without repercussions), and the ship
continues on to survey the coast of South America, the Falklands, and the
Galapagos. The birth of Argentina is witnessed, and then ship and crew
take off across the Pacific to make precise measurements in a string of
locations around the world. They stop in at New Zealand and Australia, and
South Africa, before returning home to a changed England 5 years later.
The story continues to follow the captain and the naturalist as they write
and publish the accounts of their journey and deal with the debate that
rages around Darwin's theories. Fitzroy is a staunch Christian and opposes
Darwin on religious grounds. He goes on to pioneer weather forecasting
techniques, but due to his nature, continues to fall afoul of politics.
Their wives are sketched in but barely, the focus of the book is on the
debate about geology, transmutation of species, and the "civilisation" of
native races.
The book was tough to read from a 21st century viewpoint, as the mores of
the day were represented without much apology. Fitzroy believed in the
intelligence of the South Americans and Maori that he came into contact
with, while Darwin (and everyone but a few of the Beagle's crew) tended to
view them as barely above apes. The South Americans that went to England
were mostly unprepared to deal with their reintroduction into their home
society, and Fitzroy agonised about their fates.
Despite the title of the book and the cover blurb's mention of Fitzroy's
manic-depression, his episodes are few and far between in the novel, and
the manic episodes occur more frequently. The descriptions are evocative
though, and the effect that the mysterious fits have on the regulation
bound and proud Fitzroy are distressing. Darwin is represented less
sympathetically, though the men remain friends through the majority of the
book, debating theories on what could have caused the phenomena that they
encounter while trying to skirt around the fundamental divide in their
philosophies.
There's a fair amount of nautical detail but it's not overwhelming,
especially considering that the bulk of the story depends on a brig to
move them from place to place. The long ocean crossings are shortened in
the text to touch on the high and low points, the story moves along
briskly.
Overall, a fascinating historical novelisation, and an enjoyable read.
All For Love, by Dan Jacobson
This novel covers the love affair between Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg
and Geza Mattachich, with some details about the woman who loved and
helped both of them, Maria Stoger. The Princess and her cavalry officer
cuckold Prince Phillip, run away to Paris, spend all their money,
Mattachich fights a duel with Phillip, and they get caught up by a forgery
on a promissory note that ends up putting the officer in jail and Louise
in an insane asylum. Maria manages to get them both free, indulging her
obsession from afar with Mattachich, but since the other two were the ones
who left behind autobiographies, she's given short shrift here. She's the
most sensible of the three, able to live within her means and care for her
original son and the one that she had with Mattachich. Louise is buffeted
by events, spending freely, sure that someone will cover her debts, then
waiting to be rescued. Mattachich seems to be genuinely in love with
Louise, and fond of Maria at least, but that doesn't come across very
clearly in the novelisation. The author is candid about starting from the
original sources and taking liberties with them, and Jacobson's voice is
clear throughout, putting a modern spin on the events taking place at the
turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. WWI and WWII are lightly touched upon,
as well as some tangential scandals. I'm not very familiar with the events
covered in the book, and it doesn't really stand on it's own as a love
story, the author's doubts as to the claims made by each party in their
memoirs leech all the romance out of the inter-class love stories. It was
interesting, and short enough that I got through it pretty quickly, though
I don't quite feel inspired to read up on Leopold II any time soon.