Orange Prize 2009

Yay, Marilynne Robinson has won this year's Orange prize with her superb novel, 'Home', (which I listed as one of my books of the year for the Independent on Sunday at the end of 2008). Anyone who hasn't read it should try 'Gilead', her novel from 2005, first, then enjoy this sequel.

This week's reading

If you want to have your wits scared out of you, I'd recommend John Lanchester's piece on the banks in The London Review of Books. I'll forgive him for what he says about the 'dreaded Scottish pound note' for being able to shock me with what we've got ahead of us.

Reviews from Independent on Sunday 24/05/09

Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury, £8.99) *****
The harrowing story of Owen Matthews’s mother, Lyudmila Bibokov’s childhood in Stalinist Russia almost overshadows the sequel to that childhood: the intrigue and danger that accompanied her later relationship with Matthews’s father, a Welsh-born student of Russian, on a trip to Moscow.
But any romance comes an inevitable second to the tale of Lyudmila and her sister, Lenina, ‘orphaned’ after her father, a rising star in Stalin’s government, was whisked off by the authorities and forced to confess to crimes against the Party, crimes he hadn’t committed. The world of Orwell’s 1984 is horrifyingly evoked by the trumped-up charges, the authorities’ lies to his wife, Martha, about when he would be released (he was shot, but his family wouldn’t find that out for years), the men arriving in black in cars in the middle of the night, the subsequent sudden removal of Martha (taken to serve a ten-year sentence in Siberia) and the depositing of the girls in an orphanage. No recourse to appeal; no voice raised to defend them: the acceptance of tyranny is almost as terrifying as the tyranny itself.
Matthews’s search through the appalling bureaucratic nightmare all these decades later for what really happened to his grandfather is heroic but he isn’t blinded by family loyalty to the increasing starvation and murder of peasants in the build-up to the infamous ‘purges’ that his grandfather at best either ignored or at worst, actually endorsed before his arrest. A great deal of family heart-ache is faced here, a microcosm of what was happening in the country at large. But Stalin’s death was his mother’s chance – she won a place at Moscow University and met Matthews’s father, a quiet, bookish man from the valleys with a love of all things Russian. Their struggle to be together is another relic of the Soviet age, less obviously terrifying to read but no less compulsive.

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (Faber, £7.99) ****
Greer’s writing has an ease and a delicacy about it that belies the tormented emotional lives of his protagonists in this story of race and homosexuality in 1950s San Francisco. Pearlie has married her childhood sweetheart, Holland, even waiting for him until he has returned from the war, and has given him a much-loved son. They live quietly in a newly created suburb of the city, working hard and rarely talking to one another: a quietness, Pearlie wants to believe, that comes from contentment, not estrangement. But one day a stranger arrives at their door, as strangers often do in suburbia, to disturb their calm: Buzz, a friend of Holland’s who was with him in the war. As Greer expertly unravels the history of both these men’s wartime experiences, we see Pearlie forced to deal with truths she’s unconsciously been avoiding for years. While the particular race and homosexual strands of this story could perhaps only have been set before the Sixties, Greer’s underlying point about the complacency in which human beings indulge towards one another, their necessary belief that they know all there is to know about the person they love, could be made at any time.

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke (Windmill, £7.99) ***
This is one of those novels that begins with the kind of energy and confidence that picks you up and wings you along, only to leave you struggling to get free when said energy and confidence become a bit too much. Sam Pulsifer has finished ten years in prison for setting fire to Emily Dickinson’s home – something he claims was an accident – during which two people, who’d crept up stairs to have sex on Emily Dickinson’s old bed, unfortunately met their demise. Yes, the humour is decidedly black, which increases as Sam’s nemesis, the dead couple’s son, tracks him down now that he’s free and happily married with a couple of kids, and threatens to expose him. Sam lies to his wife to cover for the truth, flees back to his parents and somehow ends up incarcerated for the same old crime – setting fire to a writer’s home – all over again. There’s an existential nightmare going on here, with Sam unable to escape his fate, no matter what he tries to do, but the way Clarke is forced to twist and contrive in order to give fate the upper hand is unconvincing and began to irritate me long before Sam landed back in prison.

Isabella de Medici by Caroline P. Murphy (Faber, £9.99) ***
Isabella de Medici was the daughter of Cosimo de Medici, a cousin of the infamous Catherine. Catherine de Medici was feared as a mistress of the black arts, a woman who rose to power by nefarious means, a plain woman in an age when only the very rich or the very beautiful made any impact on the world. Her relation, Isabella was both rich and beautiful, and much adored by her powerful father, too. But she also had a dark side, getting implicated in murder and in turn, herself being murdered, probably by her own brother. It’s the kind of tragic, convoluted, passionate story we expect of one of the de Medicis, and Murphy’s clear, detailed narrative doesn’t disappoint, although I think we’re still left with a more shadowy woman at the end than might have been the case. Isabella married a man who consorted with prostitutes and wasn’t above giving her a good slap, although this didn’t prevent her having two children by him and keeping herself busy with artistic projects. The deaths of two favourite brothers and her mother in one year must have had a huge impact on her, although, as Murphy argues, it was the death of her father, her protector, that really sealed her fate.

Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish (Faber, £7.99) **
It seems ungenerous in the extreme to put down a debut novel but I found the reliance of kooky, pithy observation after kooky, pithy observation as a novelistic structure, extremely unengaging here. Kotapish is trying too hard from the first line and it’s taken her focus away from what matters. Her unnamed narrator enjoys a tricky relationship with her mother, who suffered a miscarriage while with a man called Charles, when the narrator was very young. The mother seems never to quite have got over it; the daughter, possibly to escape it all, leaves for New York as soon as she can. While there, she witnesses a death on the underground – at least, I think she does. The moment is recalled in poetic terms, the assault on both the narrator and then on another bystander, rendered a ‘dance’, which makes it difficult to tell what actually happens. As a result of romanticising this event, Kotapish has a problem making us understand and empathise with her protagonist’s subsequent breakdown, because it simply doesn’t look as awful as it should have. This feels dishonest somehow, and while that might be because she wanted to show her character’s inability to face what has happened, it’s a misjudgement that seriously affects her story.

Book reviews

Scroll down for my most recent book reviews. I'll be posting up fifteen-twenty of my reviews per month, which appear in a variety of newspapers, including The Independent on Sunday, The Herald, The Scotsman and the Scottish Review of Books.

Recent reviews

From the Independent on Sunday:

A Journal of the Flood Year by David Ely (Portobello, £7.99) ****
First published in 1992, this novel about one man’s fight against the authorities when he spots a leak in the massive wall built along the east coast of America to keep the Atlantic at bay, has become a kind of dystopian classic. Given the increasing conviction of the environmental argument in the last fifteen years, it’s now even more timely, and if its essential premise is perhaps less original (lone voice speaking out against the official version), its plausibility is rarely in doubt.
William Fowke is on probation, banished to the inhospitable East Coast to write up standard engineering reports on the Baltimore Canyon region which is bordered by the great wall. When he notices an unusually high level of saline along part of the wall, he reports to his superior, Dr Matthews. Matthews tells him everything is fine, but the saline level keeps increasing.
Fowke’s futuristic existence is pretty much standard fare for lovers of dystopian fiction: the future is rarely imagined as a cuddlier place and Ely doesn’t divert from that depiction. Human beings never interact physically; they are born and raised in farms without ever knowing their parents. Some human beings, called ‘the excluded’, are kept outside of this society, and as Fowke causes more fuss about the leaking wall, he is eventually banished to live with them.
With a nod to the great dystopian master, George Orwell, Fowke’s only human interaction is with an agent called Julia. Ely is excellent describing the sudden shock of fingers touching, of the possibility of affection, trust and loyalty. Dystopian fiction uses the landscape to dehumanise. What it always feels is the real horror of the future is that we will forget what makes us human. Interestingly, what makes us human is never rationality, it is always imagination. Imagination and touch.

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg (Pocket Books, £7.99) **
Landsburg’s most interesting declaration in his book is that “economics in the narrowest sense is a science free from values”, but I’m not sure that’s exactly true. Free from certain kinds of values perhaps. His opposition to environmentalism, for instance, involves a different set of values: environmentalists want to ban pesticides, he says, but the economics of such a ban would mean that when pesticides are banned, “fruits and vegetables become more expensive, people eat fewer of them, and cancer rates consequently rise.” What Landsburg does seem to be arguing is that a world run solely on economic issues would produce some bad things, some good things, but the good or the bad outcome would only be incidental. Little would actually be done for the good or the bad (the use of pesticides isn’t, in the end, to prevent cancer, it’s for profitability). This book might have offered a much more provocative argument though, philosophically and ethically, at least to me, but for Landsburg’s fondness for the kind of propositions I used to loathe in school exams (if three men carry five bags in four hours, how long will it take five men to carry ten bags, that kind of thing).

A Pint of Plain by Bill Barich (Bloomsbury, £10.99) ***
You can almost taste the Guinness pit-stops on Barich’s leisurely stroll (‘investigation’ would be far too strenuous a word) through the world of the Irish pub. Or more accurately, the global phenomenon that is the Irish pub. Barich laments the fakery that purports to be authentic in as many out-of-the-way rural Irish pubs as in foreign inner-city ones, and ponders the liking we have for such kitschy homeliness that we feel the need to replicate it in cities and villages across the world. I’m not sure he comes to many conclusions but his study is fascinating, especially facts like the Irish Pub Company owning 500 pubs in 45 countries (Italy being its best client), and the revelation that if a general British pub switches to an Irish theme, simply redecorating with some “tin signs and etched Jameson mirrors”, its profits are almost certainly guaranteed to increase three-fold. The long-standing association of alcohol with the Irish has done their economy no harm, but the damage to the general health of a nation, while perhaps not entirely represented by the extremes of Brendan Behan, is alas, more authentic than the pubs themselves, and tends to be downplayed in Barich’s account.


The Witness by Juan Jose Saer (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99) *****
Those who are new to Jose Saer’s prose are in for a treat. This beautifully carved novella by the Argentinian-born writer who died four years ago is a mini masterpiece, tracing the journey of a sixteenth-century nameless cabin boy from Spain to the New World. At its heart is the darkness of cannibalism: when the boy’s ship arrives in an island, his fellow sailors and the captain are immediately surrounded by the inhabitants and all of them, save the boy, are killed. Their bodies are taken back to the islanders’ camp, skinned and eaten, the start of a ceremony that leads to drunkenness, sexual orgies and eventually, for some of the participants, illness and death. With Swiftian echoes, the boy is allowed to leave the island ten years later, but by then he has forgotten his own language and can only communicate in the grunts and gestures of the primitive islanders with whom he has spent so much time. Jose Saer draws perhaps inevitable parallels between the so-called ‘civilised’ world and an ancient, more primitive one, to cast doubt upon the values of Renaissance Europe, values that we have inherited. It is a spell-binding, provocative and disturbing read.

Understanding Novels: A Lively Exploration of Literary Form and Technique by Thomas C. Foster (A & C Black, £?) ***
This guide is marketed at “book lovers and literature buffs” but it’s really for those who want to learn how to write novels, not read them (a claim slightly supported by Foster’s urging at the end of one chapter to “remember me in your acceptance speech” as you win an award for your wonderful novel). As a guide to how to write novels then, it’s often very useful and highly practical: he shows, in reasonable detail and with humour, how much more or less information a character is hiding or showing depending on whether that character is written in a first-person voice or a third person voice, for instance, and also does a good job of reminding would-be writers of the importance of that beguiling first sentence (“a fairly complex seduction”). As an exploration of narrative technique aimed at students of the novel form though, I think it’s less successful, as it tends to favour breadth more than depth (and is perhaps why his chapter on writers borrowing from other writers is one of the best), and it’s depth that students need. But he also provides an entertaining history of the novel to appeal to general readers, too, so if one group of potential readers is disappointed, at least two others should go home happy.