Saville by David Storey

As you can see from the date of this entry, it has been quite some time since I last blogged about a Booker winner. Part of that is due to the length of the book: Saville is nearly as long as the three previous books combined. But even so, it shouldn't have taken more than a week to finish David Storey's novel.

The problem was, it was dull. Painfully so. The story of Colin Saville, son of a Yorkshire coal miner, it explores the early years of his life in detail. Excruciating detail. From before his birth, to childhood, to school, to young adulthood, we see every aspect of Colin's life.

That's not bad in and of itself--the problem is that Colin is a character both passive and opaque. There is no insight to what he actually thinks or feels until more than halfway through the book. Page 356 to be exact--it was such a surprise to actually get some insight to his character that I remembered the page number.

Even that brief glimpse of enlightenment turns out to be a bit of a mirage, as after that, he never describes his thoughts or his feelings himself--instead, he only denies whatever words of description anyone else ever applies toward him. "No" is his most-used word.

Though he remains as opaque as ever, he does break out of his passivity--sort of. He transforms from an obliging youth to a bitter, whiny, self-centered young man, always ready to lay the blame onto others. Though I believe the term was not widely used at the time the novel was written and published, Colin appears to be the epitome of the passive-aggressive type.

Essentially, Saville is the story of the tragedy that occurs when a person of limited ambition does what he is told to do, but then finds himself unhappy with his reward. Such a story is certainly worth telling, but Saville isn't it. It's one of those novels where everything interesting happens offstage, and the truly interesting characters are only bit players in the story.

The novel ends with the protagonist finally leaving home, striking out independently for the first time in his life, going beyond the village that he hadn't left before--but the novel stops before he's actually even left yet. That's the story I want to read. I don't want to wallow in the story of a failure--I want to see what he does about it. It's no fun being in the head of a person with no passion. I want to find out what plans he has, what goals he's going to set.

With a completely passive protagonist, the novel is a massive exercise in frustration.

I read a quote from Francis King, who was one of the jury members the year that Saville won the Booker prize. She claims that it won solely because the other two jury members were a committed socialistic poet, and the wife of a Labour Prime Minister, respectively, and because they saw Saville as a piece of Socialist literature. Well, that's as may be, but that hardly seems to be a valid reason for rewarding an author.

Next up: Staying On by Paul Scott.

Postscript: I just want to quote the blurb on the back of the paperback edition that I read:

Against the harsh beauty of a Yorkshire landscape swept up in the turbulent passions of overwhelming social change, SAVILLE unfolds the rich human saga of a gifted young man's fierce struggle to achieve a higher destiny--one that would tear him from everyone he loved.

Colin Saville, coal miner's son, a deeply driven and complex man, fulfills his father's dream and his own consuming ambition when he wins the scholarship that will take him beyond his parents' humble world--and the two women who loved him--to a life they can neither accept nor understand.

What a load of baloney. That sounds nothing like the book I read or the protagonist in the book. What kind of bodice-ripping romantic figure are they trying to turn him into? This is an example of why marketing people are evil.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Prior to reading this novel, my experience with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's writings was limited to the sole Merchant Ivory film I have ever seen, the tremendously boring A Room with a View, for which she was the screenwriter.

Maybe it did have good acting: it did feature Simon Callow, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denholm Elliott. But it was so very, very dull. As I recall, the film lasted most of the 1980's. Probably because of the sheer boredom, I never bothered watching another Merchant Ivory film: they all appeared to be very pretty movies where brilliant British thespians stood around, failing to do anything interesting.

So, I erased any expectations I might have when I began reading Heat and Dust, Jhabvala's slim 1975 novel. I found it to be an engrossing and beautifully written story of cultural seduction.

The novel tells two stories, nearly completely parallel to each other. In the novel's present day, the narrator, an independent young woman from England, travels to India to visit the site where her grandfather had lived. He had been a colonial, born and raised in India, but still completely western in attitude. The main draw for the narrator is the story, only whispered about among her relations, of her grandfather's first wife, who had deserted him to run off with a minor Indian prince. Scenes of the narrator adjusting to life in India--where the mundanities of daily life that had changed little over a half-century--alternate with scenes in 1923, with an India during the waning days of British rule.

I should point out that revealing that Olivia, the young wife in 1923, runs off with an Indian potentate at the book's climax hardly counts as a spoiler, as that information is revealed in the first two pages of the book. The plot is not so important as how the plot is spun.

The modern India that the narrator arrives at is a country that has been independent for a quarter-century, where the standard of living for the average person is much the same as it ever was: in hot weather, everyone sleeps outside, dysentery and other disease are universal, there are more folk remedies than modern medicine. Though the caste system is only referred to in passing, there is still an aversion to one's person being "polluted."

But there are also changes--the westerners still to be found are not colonial masters, but rather pupils--people flocking to the east in search of enlightenment, in whatever form it comes. Most of them are disillusioned by the realities of life in the subcontinent: enlightened India still has robbers and swindler--and most of all, disease, and the twin irritations that make up the books title.

At the same time, the modern Indians are confused, and not a little insulted by the westerners who have everything praising the life of people who have nothing. They may not have much in the way of material goods, but they certainly know when they are being patronized by people with a facile knowledge of eastern philosophy.

In 1923, there is no such fascination with Indian religion among the youth of Britain--though perhaps Olivia finds herself becoming fascinated with this country that is new to her--unlike her husband Douglas, she was not born in India, but England. Much, perhaps most of day-to-day life is frightful. The intemperate weather, the disease, and most of all, the isolation. The isolation is tempered when she comes to meet the Nawab of Khatm, the local prince. The Nawab is fascinated by Europe, or perhaps just the luxuries of European life. He is still inextricably Indian. It may not be his Indianness so much as his charismatic personality that draws Olivia to him.

Her husband refuses to socialize with the Nawab, for reasons he does not reveal. He compels Olivia to snub him, but soon she is seeing him regularly, without telling her husband. She goes so far as to refuse to go to the mountain retreat with the rest of the British wives during the excruciatingly hot months before monsoon season. She says it's because she cannot leave her husband--and she might not be lying. Her feelings for her husband may be as strong as those for the Nawab.

In modern times, the narrator follows the story by reading Olivia's letters, and by visiting the various places that Olivia, Douglas and the Nawab lived and walked fifty years previously. Like Olivia, she finds herself in an unexpectedly complicated situation--similar enough to Olivia's that one begins to wonder if she is trying to live on Olivia's behalf, or perhaps she's simply a very dedicated historian.

Ultimately, both Olivia and the narrator are seduced by the country itself. Olivia is overwhelmed by it, the narrator seems to take it more in stride, though perhaps there's a massive disillusionment yet to come.

Jhabvala finds beauty despite the squalor--sometimes within the squalor, although the squalor itself is never ignored: in a country with many people with dysentery, there's obviously going to be a lot of crap. I like her portrayal of Indians. They are not mythologized as noble savages--there are quite obviously going to be scoundrels among them. They are all very distinct in personality. She does an excellent job in portraying those personalities.

She does indulge in mockery of the hippies who come to India looking for enlightenment, but it's a gentle mockery, and she appears to have affection and even admiration for their drive.

It's a lovely novel with a gripping story, and one of the best novels I've read so far while on this journey through the Bookers.

Speaking of which, Heat and Dust was the ninth Booker Prize winning novel I've read so far out of 45 total, which means I'm one-fifth of the way through. To date, the best novel has been Troubles by J. G. Farrell. Heat and Dust would be the second-best, while Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur and Stanley Middleton's Holiday are also worth mentioning. The only two I really didn't like among the first nine are The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer and The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens.

Next up is Saville by David Storey.

Holiday by Stanley Middleton

On two occasions has the Booker Prize been awarded to two winning novels in the same year. In 1974, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton's Holiday were the lucky two.

Gordimer's The Conservationist is clearly the better regarded of the two. It is still in print and widely available. Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, and The Conservationist was shortlisted for the "Best of the Booker" for the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize. Holiday was out of print for many years and was so completely forgotten that the Times of London sent the novel's opening chapter to 20 different literary agents in the guise of a young author trying to get published, and the work was unrecognized by all of them.

So you won't be surprised to discover that I liked Holiday much more than The Conservationist.

It's a story told fairly simply: there are numerous flashbacks, but not needlessly obscure. Nor are there any effects to estrange the reader from the characters in the story.

Edwin Fisher, employed in academia, is on holiday in a town called Bealthorpe, an old-style seaside resort, rather twee and dusty. There's little more to do there than to take walks, sit on the beach, enjoy the kind of entertainments that were old hat thirty years ago, and go to the pub. And talk.

Edwin talks to many people. He does so almost against his will, because that's what his father used to do, and he is tremendously embarrassed by the memory of his father. But talk he does. "Nature is fine, human nature finer," he quotes more than once.

Edwin is married. He's at the resort alone. Why is he alone? Where is the wife? Everyone asks him this, and he never gives a straight answer. We learn that there has been some trouble. The marriage is over. And Edwin discovers, to his chagrin, that his in-laws are visiting that same resort town.

During his holiday, he splits his time between negotiating with his parents-in-law over what it would take to reconcile, and being both friendly to and standoffish from the people he meets--his fellow hotel guests, some bikinied girls on the beach.

We see more and more flashbacks of Edwin's marriage to his wife Meg. Her reactions seem outlandish and dramatic, though it's probable that they are simply thrown in sharper relief by Edwin's tweediness. It's very possible that he's an unreliable narrator.

Ultimately, the novel seems to be the story of a man who has lived such a male life in such a male world, that he simply does not find himself able to live with someone who does not seem to respect masculine primacy. Edwin Fisher may be the 60's/70's British version of the modern man-child. Unlike the TV show and toy obsessions of today's man-child, Edwin occupies himself with nostalgia and quotes, a pat on the head, and a half-crown to go to the pictures with.

Middleton's prose is beautiful and clear, and he paints a vivid images of a long-gone England that was so very old even back when it was relatively new. He creates characters who can talk, who like to talk, and who like to talk with people who like to talk.

If there is any flaw, it is that the novel ends a bit too quickly, that the ending is just a bit too pat and convenient to fit what we know of the flawed and broken characters.

But then again, by that point, the holiday is over, and there isn't further time for sitting around.

Next up: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

This was a hard novel to read. Not hard in the James Joyce sense--Nadine Gordimer didn't make up words (though there were a handful of Afrikaner terms that sometimes took some puzzling or looking-up). Quite a lot of it was written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and what made it harder was the difficulty in deciphering whose consciousness is being streamed. Eventually, I had to give up trying to figure whose thoughts or words were whose at any given moment, and simply take in the novel as a whole, and try and sort it out later.

So: Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and liberal. During the old apartheid regime, some of her works were banned in her native land, and she was a member of the illegal ANC. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The Conservationist was published in 1974 and was a co-winner of the Booker Prize that year.

The protagonist, Mehring, is a rich and successful South African businessman in his 40's. He lives a life on the road, mostly for business, flying to Europe, Japan, Brazil. When he's back in South Africa, he spends his weekends at a farm he bought in what is apparently an attempt to bring back--what? His youth? Not really--his memories of youth seem primarily centered around his first seduction, that of a married woman more than twice his age during the war years. An idealized home for a family? Except he's extremely divorced and completely detached from his only son. Eventually, he uses his farm as bait: an idyllic getaway and trysting site for whatever woman he's currently pursuing.

It's hard to tell the women apart, actually. There is a female voice, very strident and liberal (and privileged) throughout the novel that is never explicitly identified. His ex-wife? Or perhaps a consolidation of all the women he's ever lusted after?

Except that "lusted" implies passion of some kind, and Mehring does not appear to have any. Virtually the only passion he shows is anger at black children collecting the eggs of guinea fowl on his farm: he hates to see the fowl disappearing.

While the majority of the book is told from Mehring's approximate point of view, others do come to the forefront occasionally: Jacobus, the farm overseer, who handles the day-to-day running of the farm, Jacobus's family members and underlings, the Indians who run the local general store. All of these people live in the margins of society, most of them surviving despite illegal working status due to bribery or anonymity.

Perhaps the key to the book is the dead body that is discovered at the beginning of the novel. A black man is dead, quite possibly murdered. The police claim to have limited resources and are unable to take care of matters immediately, so they take the extraordinary step of burying the body, with the intention of digging it up again later and investigating it at some unknown point in the future. Of course they never do, and Mehring would submit a strongly-worded complaint to the authorities--but he can't be bothered. Ultimately, the only matters he takes an active hand in is chasing after women far younger than himself--or perhaps he only seemingly is the active party in those cases, and is really drawn in, irrelevant of his own actions.

Gordimer is a wordsmith with a poetic use of language. Her descriptions of people and places are also vivid and beautiful. More's the pity that reading the novel is such a frustrating experience. Everyone is passive, waiting for the end, possibly a destructive one--perhaps this was a novel that had a greater impact prior to the end of apartheid, since we now know that the system ended relatively peacefully via reform rather than violent revolution.

In the end, a difficult read that was more of a chore to get through than any other novel so far on this journey. It was possible to take pleasure in some of the detail, but the larger forms did not seem worth the effort.

Next up: 1974's other Booker Prize winner, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is an author I have tried to read before. A few years ago, his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was recommended to me. I made a less-than-valiant attempt and quit after a single (brief) sitting.

This time, more properly motivated, and with a proper head of steam, I was well-equipped to plunge into Murakami's 2002 novel, Kafka on the Shore.

I'll neglect my usual cursory plot description for the simple fact that this novel's plot is so labyrinthine that I would hardly know where to begin. Additionally, disclosing any of the plot reveals would be doing any possible future readers a disservice as, at least in the case, coming across the major plot points as they are slowly revealed was one of the great pleasures of the book.

Is it allegory? I rather hope not. I've got no problem with symbolism, and there are symbolic characters, places, objects and events throughout the novel. Enough to fill a graduate student essay several times over. But allegory always struck me as the author taking numerous symbols and turning them into something boring and awful.

I'd prefer it to be magical realism, if it all possible. My brain much prefers dealing with magical realism: I don't feel the need to understand everything so much as I feel the need to experience it. And that's what a lot of the characters in Kafka on the Shore do. Not a huge amount of understanding going on, but quite a lot of experiencing. Looking to see what passes by.

I like the characters. Though three of the most important characters are laconic (Kafka), shallow and unpolished (Hoshino), and developmentally disabled (Nakata), their thoughts come across clearly, even if tracking the deeper meaning of what they have to say and think does take some effort and attention.

I particularly like the boldness of the characters in talking about ideas. Even if they don't have a great amount of experience, they aren't afraid to share what they think and what they feel about concepts that are new to them. And I like how more seasoned characters take seriously the thoughts and opinions of the neophytes. This is a universe where knowledge is prized and shared, and where no one person has a monopoly on such.

I like the elements of Greek tragedy. Interestingly, just about the whole novel could be staged as a Greek tragedy: not until nearly the end (the scenes with the two soldiers) were there any scenes with dialogue in which three characters spoke. Up until that point, all dialogue scenes (to the best of my memory) involved only two characters.

I like that so much was left unanswered. Explanation is so mundane.

I like that, as was talked about within the text of the novel, it was essentially a Bildungsroman, though not for the main character solely. There was plenty of Bildung to go around. Even if they are fictional, I like to see characters improve themselves and expand their horizons.

I like that the novel itself was very literate and musical. Sometimes it feels like including a mention of a book inside other books is a cheating shorthand allowing the author to co-opt themes from other, greater literary sources without having to do of the heavy lifting himself, but that didn't feel like the case here.

To me, one of the signs of a good book is for it to encourage me to change my behavior in some manner. Kafka on the Shore makes me want to find a cabin in the woods where I can sit and read and listen to the forest for days on end.

Next up: back to the Booker Prize. 1974's The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer.

The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell

If there is one genre which certainly thrived in the 20th century unlike any previous era, it would be black comedy. Perhaps only a civilization that made it through two World Wars, several genocides, and a constant stream of existential threats could have learned to treasure what is essentially gallows humor on a vast, unhinged scale. And since all of that did happen, it remains a popular theme to this day.

Except that most black comedy is terrible. For the rare masterpiece of the genre, Dr. Strangelove for instance, there are hundreds of smirking, snarky, terrible stand-up comedians (mostly white and male, I should point out) who confuse sarcasm for wit. Yes, they can get quite dark, but for comedy, they'll do what all comedians have done since the dawn of time: make jokes about genitalia.

The Siege of Krishnapur, the 1973 novel by J. G. Farrell (one of six Booker Prize winners to be later shortlisted in 2008 for the 40th anniversary "Best of Booker" award), is a masterpiece of black comedy in that, through all of the darkness, it never actually stops being funny. Like Farrell's previous novel, Troubles (which I loved), The Siege of Krishnapur is a very funny book about something extremely unfunny. In the last book, it was the Irish War of Independence. Here, it's the Indian Uprising of 1857. That particular event involved native troops in a mutiny against their British East Indian Company overlords through a wide swath of northern India, resulting, eventually in appalling atrocities committed by both sides. Today, some historians view the mutiny as the first battle in a war of independence which would finally reach fruition ninety years later.

The novel tells the story of the fictional town of Krishnapur where the British have a long-established presence. Mr. Hopkins, known throughout the novel as "The Collector", is the leading East India Company authority in the region, and knows that something is afoot. He can hear the rumblings of mutiny, and so, quietly prepares a defense against a possible uprising. Meanwhile, he lives the life of a Victorian gentleman who believes firmly in technological progress, as especially embodied by the Great Exhibition.

Meanwhile, young George Fleury, a poet and idealist by nature, visits India with his widowed sister. After first arriving in Calcutta, he falls in love with Louise Dunstaple, who basically rejects him out of hand--justifiably, as he is a self-righteous drip. The characters travel to Krishnapur, and Fleury has a number of chances to humiliate himself in front of whole new audiences: especially the first native Indian he meets, the son of the local Maharajah. Fleury is completely oblivious to how completely insulting he himself is.

Not long after their arrival, however, come rumors of the (historical) mutiny at Meerut. When a general who had previously pooh-poohed the danger of a rebellion arrives bloody and half-dead on his horse, it is clear that war has begun. The Collector manages to bring together the local westerners in the main Krishnapur residence of the company, and defends it with a few able-bodied soldiers, various superannuated veterans, some still-loyal Indians, and various people with no other useful purpose (i.e., Fleury). Their armaments are small and numbers are few compared to the vast army of Indians poised against them, but thanks to an easy-to-defend position and a number of cannon, they manage to hold off the Indians for some time.

However, life in a siege is not something a well-bred Victorian gentleman or lady was ever prepared for--suddenly, English gentlefolk who had been living a life of luxury were forced to undergo deprivation of food, cleanliness, privacy, and worst of all, domestic help. The ladies find themselves shocked and appalled that they must share quarters with the black sheep of their number--Miss Hughes who, heaven help us, lost her virtue. A fallen woman!

There are many eccentric characters to be found--the Anglican minister who copes with the desperate situation by trying to convince Fleury of the literal truth of the Bible, completely oblivious to the dangerous situations he harangues the younger man in. The pair of doctors who completely disagree about everything, and whose treatments for cholera are totally diametrically opposed. The magistrate, an atheist, who is the last word in cynicism. And the Collector himself, who sees his world of bric-a-brac slowly crumbling, as does his faith in civilization and progress.

And horrible things happen. Many of the English defenders die gruesomely. Those who are even slightly wounded find those wounds becoming serious, thanks to pre-Pasteur medical treatment--and those with serious wounds invariably die. Many are wiped out by cholera. Meanwhile, the Indian besiegers never seem to grow fewer and number, and, to add insult to injury, Indian sightseers bring picnic lunches to watch the English get wiped out.

And yet, it's funny--whether it's the juxtaposition of all-too-proper Victorian etiquette with a siege situation where people receive a ration of a handful of flour a day, or the ridiculous behavior of eccentrics like Fleury or the "padre", or simply slapstick situations, as when Fleury and a soldier friend scrape black beetles off a naked woman, using the only tools they have at hand--covers torn off a copy of the Bible.

The situation gets more and more desperate--the defenders eventually retreat to a smaller and easier-to-defend redoubt, finally to one smaller yet. Eventually, they run low on ammunition and are reduced to shooting the head of Shakespeare, torn from a library bust, from a cannon. Yet the threat of certain death isn't enough to stop the compulsive eccentricities of some of the defenders.

What this novel has to say about humanity is not pleasant to contemplate: that we hold onto our prejudices and illusions to an absurdly unhealthy degree? That even in the most dire circumstances, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment matters more than the survival of our fellow man? That our imagined progress and cultural superiority can be wiped out in an instant?

Yes, it's a black comedy. Therefore, a more cynical version than what might actually happen in reality. Perhaps even far more cynical.

But still...

Next up: I take a brief break from the Booker Prize to read Haruki Murakami's 2005 novel, Kafka on the Shore.

G. by John Berger

Reading a series of books by different authors in purely chronological order can make for some interesting contrasts from book to book. V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State was written with a rigorous, almost fierce austerity: at times, Naipaul included only the barest minimum--or less--of description of tone, of thought, of motive. By Comparison, John Berger's G., winner of the Booker Prize in 1972, overflows with description of the internal lives of the characters. At times, not only does the author prove points of view of all of the characters, but that of the author himself, anecdotes from the author's life, and side comments by the author about writing in general, and the present book in particular.

G. is the story of its protagonist, called either "the protagonist" or "G." throughout the novel. The illegitimate child of a wealthy Italian merchant and a privileged Englishwoman, born in the late 19th century, he is raised by neither of his parents but his mother's relatives. Due perhaps to his parentage, his upbringing, or a number of unusual childhood experiences, he grows into a man with unusual abilities: he can see people as they really are, and be seen by others for what he really is. He is a man who chooses to live without illusions of any kind.

And so, he becomes a seducer. Not for seduction's sake--he does not set to rack up carnal conquests. Not because he is fickle by nature--he seeks out women, not because he is indecisive, but because of his decisiveness. He does not deliberately try to inflame the jealousy of other men, nor is he oblivious to it. He is indeed aware of the fiancees and husbands that he cuckolds, but they simply aren't of any importance to him, even when they are bearing firearms. He does not lie to get women into bed--he speaks only the truth.

Though G. is an active player in his own life, he maintains a curiously impassive attitude. Or perhaps that it's that he's impassive towards the rest of the world, and he is solely concerned with the woman he currently loves.

He certainly seems impassive towards the world he lives in: whether it's a labor uprising in Milan, the dawn of aviation, or Italy's entrance into the first World War, he is unconcerned with the works and days of man--only a small subset of women occupies his interest.

And the central irony of all the vast amounts of mental and emotional description to be found in the novel is, we never really understand why G. does what he does. It would be acting out of compulsion, but he never seems to be compelled--he lives out of his own free will. Perhaps it's better to say that he sees a particular destiny for himself, allows that destiny to happen, and only at the end grows a bit desperate, because he does not see how that destiny can continue.

Overall, the novel can be rather tedious, with its constant switch of point of view and copious description of characters' thoughts. Sex is not at all romanticized--rather than being erotic, the author seems to go out of his way to make the descriptions vulgar.

The descriptions of the early days of aviation are nicely evocative of a period long past. Many of the side characters are beautifully constructed. Only G. remains elusive, a living plot device.

Next up: J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur.

In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul

In a Free State is a novel which isn't. It's better described as a short story collection (evidently, there was quite a bit of debate at the time whether or not the book should have been considered a novel--it came very close to not being considered for the award at all). There are brief introductory and closing vignettes, two short stories, and one brief novella. None of the stories have any characters or settings in common. All that ties them together is unity of theme: being exiled to a foreign land.

V. S. Naipaul, who would in 2001 win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is familiar with this sort of exile: his family came from India to Trinidad where he was born. Subsequently, he moved to England, making him a sort of double-exile. In In a Free State, he applies that experience to consider several facets of the colonial experience.

The book begins with an excerpt from a travel journal, telling the story of a passage by boat across the Mediterranean from Greece to Egypt. The ship is an intensely multicultural experience: it's all business, after all, and business must be done. In the end, it's not cultural differences which cause trouble--it's passengers violating the unspoken order of things.

"One out of Many" tells the story of a domestic servant from India who travels to Washington D.C. to care for his patron, a diplomatic official of relative unimportance. It begins as a conventional fish out of water story, as an inexperienced resident of Bombay travels to America, constantly causing disasters and leading a ludicrously poverty-stricken life. To mention that he survives, finds a much more profitable job, and eventually becomes a US citizen makes it sound like a rags-to-riches story of success, though it leaves out the major point that he hates his new situation.

The story "Tell Me Who to Kill" differs in that the central character travelled to a foreign land willingly--to find and help his brother. The unnamed narrator comes from a poor family somewhere in the Caribbean. His younger brother Dayo, the one member of his family who, it was decided, would be destined to succeed, travels to England to study. The narrator follows Dayo when it is apparent the younger man is in trouble, and works to finance Dayo's success. It all ends disastrously, though it's hard to tell precisely what happened--either the narrator killed someone, or the narrator took the guilt for Dayo killing someone--the reality of the situation merges with the Hollywood movies that narrator constantly talks about.

"In a Free State" offers the fewest details on geography of any stories in the book: essentially it's a story of a long journey by car from one unnamed East African city to another (a vast lake appears in the course of the book--if it's intended to stand in for Lake Victoria, then it might be taking place in Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania). There is a civil war either already started, or imminent and inevitable, between the forces of the "King" and the "President." The car is driven by Bobby, a gay civil servant, and the passenger is Linda, the wife of a co-worker. While violence looms in the outside world, the two in the car show increased irritation and verbal violence towards each other. At the end, there is a brief epilogue, another travel journal excerpt about a visit to Egypt, where the narrator is no longer able to tolerate the sight of a local guard threatening Egyptian children from getting too close to a tourist compound.

As Naipaul is a man of Indian ancestry and of Trinidadian birth, you might expect him to automatically side up on the side of the colonized, but that isn't necessarily the case here. He notes that decolonization oftend has ugly results, that the natives are not necessarily the pure, enlightened, simple folk sometimes lionized in fiction (in fact, apparently he has been criticized for opinions believed to be neocolonial).

He seems to sympathize more with the exiles in general, whatever their station, as so often, away from their original home, they try to turn their new country into their homeland, with little chance of success. The most important point is something Linda says in the main story: "It's their country, but it's your life." Being an foreigner does not rob you of all rights, whether you're a government official, a laborer, a cook, a prisoner, or a spouse, whether you're an immigrant or a colonist.

As much of In a Free State had to do with crumbling empire, it sadly suffered in comparison with Troubles by J. G. Farrell, which I had read immediately before. After the humor and rich characterization of Farrell's novel, Naipaul's work seemed dour and sketchy in comparison. However, in retrospect, the brevity of the work, the lack of unnecessary description make it bracing reading.

Next up is G. by John Berger.

Troubles by J. G. Farrell

A colonial power, hated and feared by the natives. The colonizers are inclined to view the natives as dangerous, terrorists, sub-human. In their view, all of the natives are bad--well, maybe a few are all right, but you can never tell them apart from each other by looking at them.

A subclass of the natives see themselves as the buffer between the colonizers and the natives (and, quite incidentally, as the natural leaders of the natives).

There are also those who are more than happy to take advantage of confusion and fitful violence in order to enrich and empower themselves.

And most tragically, or perhaps, pathetically, the liberals: those who sympathize with the other side (usually colonizers sympathizing with the natives), and who defend them, even when it is not in their best interest to do so. Their actions are not appreciated or regarded in the least bit highly by the side they are defending, due to an unfortunate tendency to patronize instead of empathize--and ultimately the loyalties to the side they originally come from doom them.

The basic problem is that neither side wishes to view their counterparts as human, or at least, fully human. Liberals do acknowledge the humanity of their counterparts, but are unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The sad part about what I've written is how many times and places it is applicable to: India, South Africa, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Troubles, by J. G. Farell was published in 1970. As you might guess from the title and year of publication, it is indeed about Ireland--though not about the specific Troubles that were current that year. Rather, the novel is a period piece, set in the turbulent months just before the declaration of an independent Irish state.

Most of the novel takes place in a deteriorating hotel, the Majestic, in a remote part of Southern Ireland, on the coast of the Irish Sea.  (That I was staying in an old hotel named the Majestic when I read the novel is a coincidence verging on the spectacular).

Major Brendan Archer is an Englishman, a recently demobbed officer from the trenches of the Great War. Too wealthy to actually need an occupation, he travels to the Hotel Majestic to visit a girl he met briefly before going off to war, who then subsequently appointed herself his fiancee. Although he never asked her to marry him, he does and did not object to this engagement, as he is very easygoing, and there was always a very good chance he might have died after all. But he survived the war, and so he goes to Ireland to end the engagement, one way or another.

Life at the Majestic turns out to be rather extraordinary: it's been decades since "better days"--so many years of neglect have gone by, the hotel is literally falling apart--holes in the plaster, in the roof, in the floors. Huge hosts of vermin and of cats virtually taking over some parts of the hotel. When some rooms become uninhabitable, it is easier simply to move to a new room than to try and fix the old.

The guests of the hotel consist mostly of elderly women who remember the hotel in better days. Why they themselves do not go on to better lodgings is partially due to habit, partially to nostalgia, and partially due to inability to pay. In effect, the Majestic has become a home for indigent widows.

The Major (as he is generally known throughout the novel) tries to speak to Angela (his fiancee) one-on-one, but finds it difficult to do so. Either she is already engaged in conversation with someone else, or she is not to be found at all. Much more accessible is Angela's friend Sarah, a rather caustic Irish girl who take a dim view of the British, but who the Major finds fascinating.

After a brief sojourn to Dublin, the Major decamps back to London for awhile to visit his elderly aunt, his only living relative. He is visited there by Sarah, who he finds more and more attractive. Eventually he returns to the Majestic, free of his engagement, and attempts, clumsily, to woo Sarah.

The 'Troubles', however, become a topic of tremendous importance, as acts of violence large and small occur across the island--the newspapers, it is pointed out, only write stories about the most appalling murders, while smaller crimes are printed in digest form. Edward Spencer, owner of the Majestic and father of Angela is militant in his opposition to Sinn Fein and the IRA, sure in his belief that only overwhelming violent force against the populace at large can win the day. The fact that he is unwilling, or perhaps unable to temper his rather extreme opinions in front of Catholic Irish indicate that his future in Ireland may meet an unhappy conclusion.

As the winter draws near, the hotel deteriorates faster and faster, and Edward, to the Major's discomfort becomes isolated and weird. Worse, Sarah seems as difficult to talk to as Angela had been previously.

The climax of the novel is a Spring Ball held at the Majestic: Edward, suddenly taking an interest once more in his hotel, has the building partially spruced up, invites prominent local families (primarily of the Unionist, protestant persuasion, of course), and throws a do like they used to have decades ago. Against all expectations, the ball goes well--at first. As the evening continues, things go off the rails, as the Major's relationship with Sarah comes to a head. Eventually, just about everything that could possibly go wrong, does.

The novel ends shortly before the end of the Irish War of Independence, with virtually everything destroyed that once was seen as permanent and unmoving.

At the time of its original publication, Troubles was not eligible for the Booker Prize. For the first two years of its existence, the Booker Prize was awarded early in the year, with the eligibility period being, primarily, the year before. In 1971, the award was moved to late in the year, with books published the same year being eligible. As a result, there was a window of several months in 1970 during which books first published then were not eligible for either the 1970 or 1971 awards. In 2010, the Booker Prize Foundation decided to correct that oversight by holding a "Lost" Booker Prize for books that fell within that window.

Troubles is definitely a worthy winner of the Lost Booker Prize. It's startlingly well-written with an array of distinct, vivid characters. The tone of the novel varies between sadness for a way of life going extinct, anger at the violence and low value of human life during the Troubles, and humor at the ridiculousness of trying to maintain a refined existence in the absurdly run-down hotel.

I was reminded of two other great novels when reading Troubles. The setting of a hotel where, it seemed, hardly anyone ever leaves was like a dissonant echo of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the difference being, in Mann's novel, the protagonist eventually leaves the (in much better condition) sanatorium in order to fight in the first World War--the same conflict the Major is returning from to begin his indefinite hotel stay.

It's also hard to think about the ball sequence without remembering a similar set-piece in Lampedusa's The Leopard, another novel about the violent death of the old order, though in the Italian work, the prince's ball ends considerably more successfully.

Troubles was a true pleasure to read, a very fine novel. I'm now looking forward to getting to the 1973 winner, The Siege of Krishnapur, also by Farrell, and, so I'm told, a sort of a prequel to Troubles.

Next up: the first Nobel laureate on the list: In a Free State  by V. S. Naipaul.

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

Tolstoy pointed out that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Ultimately, there are going to be far more novels written about unhappy families than happy ones. Hey, nobody ever said that serious literature had to provide light entertainment.

The Zweck family in The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens is pretty miserable. The late matriarch of the family, Sarah, has been dead for years, but the mourning has never really stopped. Daughter Bella has grown old taking care for her family and has lost any chance of marriage she might have had. Youngest daughter Esther was disinherited for marrying a gentile. The father, Rabbi Zweck, finds himself unable to communicate with his children. And oldest son Norman is a drug-addled, mentally unstable failed former child prodigy, still living in his boyhood bedroom at age forty-one.

We first meet Norman in bed--a bed he inherited from his mother. At night he sees masses of silverfish crawling along the floors, turning his room into a filthy mess. That the silverfish are only a hallucination brought on by the massive doses of amphetamines he takes is a fact he refuses to admit.

His father and sister Bella are near the breaking point for taking care of this brittle man for so long, and make the decision, soon regretted, to have him committed.

While in the hospital, he is cleaned of the drugs--but finds a source on the inside, and soon is seeing silverfish around his bed there. During his stay in the hospital, there are many flashbacks to the lives of the family in earlier years, providing snapshots on how they became the way they are.

Bella and his father try many ineffectual ways to assuage their guilt for having institutionalized Norman, but essentially all of them end in failure, sometimes humiliatingly so: worst of all being the Rabbi's ill-considered attempt to confront who he thinks was the source who sold Norman the pills.

Finally, the family tries to use the crisis to bring them together--and for awhile, it appears as though it is working. In the end, however, nothing is resolved, and the family is broken utterly to a degree no reconciliation will ever fix.

Would it be shallow to dislike a work of literature merely because it has miserable characters, painful themes, an unhappy ending, and so on? Perhaps. Still, I don't think I'm being shallow in my dislike of The Elected Member. It's not that the characters are miserable as much as they revel in misery: they specialize in it.

Characters are deliberately non-communicative: they say something generic, think to themselves of the ugly truth they would prefer not to say, and congratulate themselves for not saying anything of importance. Meanwhile, the opposite party always knows what was meant anyway--speech in this novel becomes a pointless and annoying game of charades.

Gradually, the novel draws a portrait of the dead mother, and an unpleasant portrait it is: dishonest, self-centered, lacking in sympathy, lacking in humanity. It starts to become difficult to believe that this character could have been so important to so many people: she sounds monstrous.

But there is more than enough monstrousness to go around: an aunt who is a nurse is described as cheerfully enjoying the pain of others (unsubtly, she is named "Sadie"). It is implied she takes sexual advantage of patients in her care. There are doctors who can't be bothered to show up at the hospital where they work. And Norman himself, who manipulates his family, may have deliberately led a man to suicide, and, it is strongly implied, may have been engaging in incest.

But it's not unlikable characters and revolting behavior that makes this book a failure: it's that it all seems a formless mass. There's nothing compelling here. Misery does not ennoble characters nor literature. Art does, and there was not enough here.

If you want a portrait of a hellish mental hospital, forget this book, and read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest instead. And as authentic a portrait of London Jewish life this might be (the author was from a Russian Jewish family), the Yiddish is laid on a bit too thick. Ultimately, all the characters seem to be talking in comedy accents--though perhaps that's more my fault for being a fan of borscht belt comedians. However, how can one expect to write deathless prose for a character who speaks like a refugee from a Woody Allen film?

Next up, the "Lost" Booker Prize. Troubles, by J. G. Farrell.

Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby

There are a lot of unreliable narrators in fiction, but Townrow, the central character of Something to Answer For is a pretty remarkable example of the species. At first, one starts to think he's simply a serial liar, but soon it becomes apparent that he himself is not so sure what's true or not--and perhaps he is actually able to change reality based on his illusions.

The novel takes place almost entirely in Port Said, Egypt, immediately before and during the Suez Crisis of 1956: one of the traumatic events that signaled the end of Britain as an imperial power. Townrow, who had served in Egypt during World War II, is asked to return by the widow of a friend, who insists that her husband has been murdered. The novel is not mystery. Mystery novels are about resolving mystery, but this novel revels in it.

He arrives in Egypt, is shanghaied and brutally beaten, and spends most of the remainder of the novel in a haze, mostly of the alcoholic variety. There may have been a murder, an audacious plot to smuggle guns to Cyprus or Israel, death threats, a trip to a mysterious island paradise, and a disappearance, or they may all have simply been imagined or lied about. Or perhaps he's simply a spy with a highly elaborate cover story.

When Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal, suddenly Townrow, as an Englishman becomes persona non grata, except that he's conveniently become Irish. At least he thinks he is. He needs to check his passport to be certain of his own nationality.

Townrow is strangely honest, after a fashion. He doesn't lie for the sake of self-preservation or self-enrichment, but simply for lying's sake. Or perhaps it's all just a giant con, which it is, of course. What else is fiction but con artistry with a willing target?

Not a towering masterpiece, but an enjoyable read. The edition I read seemed to have a handful of spelling and punctuation errors, which was odd.

Reading Something to Answer For hasn't lit a fire under me to seek out further works by P. H. Newby--though instead, I am rather interested in reading more about the Suez Canal.

Next up: The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens.

Mission Statement

Anything worth reading is worth writing about. And that is what this blog is for.

As you may have heard, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month encourages people to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I've attempted it (unsuccessfully) twice. I was considering doing it a third time, when I realized how few novels I actually read. This year so far, I've read a grand total of one novel: Lampedusa's The Leopard (which, by the way, is a masterpiece). How can I write fiction if I don't read it?

Around this time, I saw that the 2010 Man Booker Prize had been awarded (to The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson). I looked at this full list of Booker Prize winners, and I realized I had never read any of them. So I decided to read all of them. In chronological order.

First things first: I checked the local library's catalog. They had 38 of the 45 winning titles.

Then I checked the local used book stores. They had two more.

That left five to be purchased online. Luckily, Amazon makes it easy to purchase used books inexpensively.

I'm certainly not going to be able to read all 45 novels in 30 days. But I will read what I can, when I can, and post my impressions here.

So, let NaNoReaMo begin! First up: Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby.