I finished this mighty tome over a week ago but a number of factors have delayed me posting about it - mostly time, but also the fact that I enjoyed it so much I've been mulling over my exact response ever since.
At the outset I had no idea what to expect from this 1915 novel, the first of Maugham's extensive output I've read, but it is now firmly installed as one of my favourite reads of all time. That sounds rather hyperbolic but few works of fiction have engrossed or affected me as much as this one.
There are several technical reasons why this shouldn't be such a great book. On the surface it's your average bildungsroman (snazzy jargon, eh?), detailing the life of Philip Carey from when he's orphaned at the age of 9 to when he seems to be, surprisingly to himself, happy for the first time at around the age of 30. He lives with his uncle and aunt in Kent; goes to school; studies in Germany; spends a dull year in a London accountancy office; decides he'd rather be an artist and lives a brief but unsatisfactory bohemian life in Paris; moves back to London and uses his inheritance to study to be a doctor; falls in unrequited love with a waitress; and that's halfway through the novel. I'll stop there for fear of spoiling it any further! There are no leaps in time: at 700 pages long, Maugham leisurely describes events in every year of Philip's life. It's apparently a largely autobiographical novel. Philip in no way has an extraordinary life: he's very ordinary. In fact, he's not even really all that likeable; he's a bit of a loner and a snob. The only thing that sets him apart is the fact that he has a club foot (Maugham himself was afflicted with a stammer when he was growing up and transferred the embarassment he felt about that across to Philip's feelings about his foot). The prose style is very flat. There are no great sweeping passages of dazzlingly poetic description, nor an increase in pace as the story unfolds. The story just keeps going, as people's lives do. 95% of the time the novel shows events exclusively from Philip's point of view. The people he meets (many, clearly, as the story takes place over 20 years) are physically described in a very plain, superficial way and you find out about them as Philip does. The novel is also very dated in places.
So why do I think it's so special? Probably because of the very fact that I've seldom come across a story where the ordinary is so emphasised. Of course there are hundreds of great realistic novels with acute psychological perception of characters and events (e.g. Wolf Hall, not to mention classics such as Middlemarch and Anna Karenina). There are also great books that detail a long period of a particular character's life (e.g. David Copperfield). But Of Human Bondage particularly stands out to me because I felt on every page exactly how Philip felt, so good was Maugham at telling his story. The themes of wondering what one should do with one's life; of art versus the real world; of belief and non-belief; these are all themes I'm extremely interested in and all are dealt with in depth by Maugham, organically as we see what happens to Philip year by year, as we see the great highs and lows of an ordinary human life.
And those other characters, so sparingly described by Maugham; we see them in more depth the longer we and Philip get to know them, and that's exactly how it is when we meet and get to know people in real life. Mildred, the subject of Philip's destructive infatuation, is the other character who naturally stands out the most. She's a character that is easy to hate but also magnetically appealing to read about. This is precisely how Philip feels about her.
This is a brilliant book, and though it is dated in places, this even adds to its sense of reality: people did talk and live in the way described within its pages in the 1880s to 1900s. There were times when I was elated by the events occurring to Philip and other times when I felt real despair for him (particularly towards the end as his relationship with Mildred completely unravels and he subsequently suffers a more material loss). Maugham manipulates but in the subtlest of ways. A stand-out chapter for me is when Philip is in Paris and realises that though he has some talent as a painter, he will only ever be mediocre. He then has to decide whether to continue or to try to figure out what to do instead for a living. It's an enormous decision for him and, I think, a great insight into that point in everybody's life when they have to leave old certainties behind and grapple with the realities that life thrusts upon us all.
The only troubling part of the book for me is the last 10 pages. The book ends on a happy note for Philip but to this reader, it seemed somewhat strange that he gave up the dreams he had been striving towards for so long. I won't spoil it by going into detail but I had mixed feelings about the ending. Perhaps Maugham meant the reader to close the book and think that perhaps life can bring us happiness in the most unexpected of ways; that sometimes dreams have to be abandoned to truly be content. I could happily have read another 700 pages about Philip and would really like to know what happened in the next 20 years of his life. Unfortunately for me, Maugham never chose to write that book. So I'll have to be content with this one and I'm sure that I'll re-read it when I'm older. I'm currently at about the same age Philip is at the end of the story so it'll be interesting to see how I react to it in the future.
I'm now reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (I'm quite near the end) and hope to write about it next week.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Friday, February 04, 2011
The Innocent by Ian McEwan
I finished this novel at the beginning of the week but have only just found the time to write a post about it.
McEwan is a frustrating writer. He's got a hefty reputation as one of Britain's foremost contemporary authors but if you Google him or read some of the comments by general readers on his work on culture websites, a huge number of people seem to loathe him. My first contact with his work was when I read Atonement several years ago and thought it was astonishingly good. Since then I've read most of his novels (one or two a year) and have had mixed reactions: Amsterdam, which bizarrely won McEwan the 1998 Booker prize, is an extremely slight, mediocre work; the recent novella On Chesil Beach is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece of prose. So I always approach his work with trepidation, but have read so much of it now that I feel I might as well keep going for the sake of completion.
The Innocent is McEwan's fourth novel, first published in 1990. I knew that the setting was Cold War Berlin and that it was some sort of spy story, but assumed that it was set around the time it was written (i.e. around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall). I was quite surprised upon starting it to find it's set in the mid-Fifties, when the city of Berlin was still divided into different spheres of control (British, American, French and not forgetting Russian), before the Wall went up but at the height of anti-Communist paranoia on the part of the Western powers. Into this maelstrom of distrust, in a city still partially scarred by bulletholes from 1945 and with many buildings missing a wall or two, steps twenty-five year-old Leonard Marnham, the innocent of the title. Leonard is an expert on amps, fuses and recording equipment and has been sent from London for reasons he doesn't know in the beginning to work on a new project in what purports to be an American radar station. It soon turns out that the Americans and British have been working together in secret (of course) digging a tunnel beneath the border that separate the Western and Russian sectors so that they can tap the phone lines and listen in to the messages going to and from Soviet High Command.
It being the 50s, Leonard is innocent in both his professional life and his private life. He was living with his parents back home in England and finds the freedom (for him) of Berlin intoxicating. In the beginning McEwan does well to describe Leonard's personality and contrasts him superbly with the more confident Americans, mostly in the superb characterisation of the brash Bob Glass. There is also a lot of technical information about the operation in the tunnel - sometimes McEwan really overdoes it but I think he was trying to make the scene as realistic as possible. He did the same in the rather silly Saturday when describing a scene of brain surgery. This dedication to the scene underground reminded me of the French writer Zola, who was dedicated to explaining everything in the name of naturalism. The Zola comparison is an apt one, as I will soon explain.
Leonard soon sheds his sexual innocence when he meets the vivacious Berliner Maria, and again McEwan is not shy about describing what goes on between them in Maria's apartment. After a short while, Leonard gets a bit too carried away and almost assaults Maria. It was at this point that I began to lose all sympathy for the character, as he really did act like an idiot. I think it's an important point that a reader does not have to sympathise with characters to appreciate a book, but when Leonard is the designated 'hero' and it is through his eyes that we see every event in the book, for me McEwan failed to keep me on his side. Leonard and Maria soon patch things up, but unfortunately Maria has an ex-husband...
A bare description of the plot doesn't really do the book thus far much justice. It is very well-written, with some great turns of phrase and a good narrative rhythm. The second half of the book is really not for the squeamish - McEwan's obsession with graphic description comes into its own when something terrible and unforeseen occurs in Maria's apartment and things turn very gory. It was difficult to read the next couple of chapters but equally difficult to put the book down! Black humour takes over when Leonard is forced to carry two very heavy suitcases around Berlin, desperately trying to dispose of their contents, but everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. This part of the book again reminded me of Zola: whereas earlier it was Germinal, set in a mining community, that came to mind, in the latter half it was the very nasty Therese Raquin, in which a bored wife and her lover murder her husband. Zola was determined to describe everything so that the reader is confronted with the fact that humans, alive and dead, are basically animals. The overall tone is one of disgust with people, their bodies and their actions. McEwan does more or less the same thing in his own book, but provides a hair-raising twist towards the end that had me on the edge of my seat.
The postscript was not entirely successful for me: I thought it would turn everything on its head and make me see the whole story in a new light. It didn't do that but it still worked as an ending thematically, and at least left this reader with a small feeling of hope for the characters.
Overall then, this was one of the best of McEwan's books that I've read. It's definitely not for those of a nervous disposition! It provided a fascinating insight into 1950s Berlin, had interesting characters and a genuinely involving plot.
After finishing The Innocent, I was hankering to read a classic. I have to read one every few books or I get withdrawal symptoms! I realised that I'd intended to read W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage last year and hadn't found the time, so as it was sitting on the shelf and looked fat and interesting, I decided to go for it. It's 700 pages long in the Vintage edition I own but its style is very easy to read and I'm already over halfway through. I've never read Maugham before and am really enjoying it. Will post about it soon.
McEwan is a frustrating writer. He's got a hefty reputation as one of Britain's foremost contemporary authors but if you Google him or read some of the comments by general readers on his work on culture websites, a huge number of people seem to loathe him. My first contact with his work was when I read Atonement several years ago and thought it was astonishingly good. Since then I've read most of his novels (one or two a year) and have had mixed reactions: Amsterdam, which bizarrely won McEwan the 1998 Booker prize, is an extremely slight, mediocre work; the recent novella On Chesil Beach is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece of prose. So I always approach his work with trepidation, but have read so much of it now that I feel I might as well keep going for the sake of completion.
The Innocent is McEwan's fourth novel, first published in 1990. I knew that the setting was Cold War Berlin and that it was some sort of spy story, but assumed that it was set around the time it was written (i.e. around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall). I was quite surprised upon starting it to find it's set in the mid-Fifties, when the city of Berlin was still divided into different spheres of control (British, American, French and not forgetting Russian), before the Wall went up but at the height of anti-Communist paranoia on the part of the Western powers. Into this maelstrom of distrust, in a city still partially scarred by bulletholes from 1945 and with many buildings missing a wall or two, steps twenty-five year-old Leonard Marnham, the innocent of the title. Leonard is an expert on amps, fuses and recording equipment and has been sent from London for reasons he doesn't know in the beginning to work on a new project in what purports to be an American radar station. It soon turns out that the Americans and British have been working together in secret (of course) digging a tunnel beneath the border that separate the Western and Russian sectors so that they can tap the phone lines and listen in to the messages going to and from Soviet High Command.
It being the 50s, Leonard is innocent in both his professional life and his private life. He was living with his parents back home in England and finds the freedom (for him) of Berlin intoxicating. In the beginning McEwan does well to describe Leonard's personality and contrasts him superbly with the more confident Americans, mostly in the superb characterisation of the brash Bob Glass. There is also a lot of technical information about the operation in the tunnel - sometimes McEwan really overdoes it but I think he was trying to make the scene as realistic as possible. He did the same in the rather silly Saturday when describing a scene of brain surgery. This dedication to the scene underground reminded me of the French writer Zola, who was dedicated to explaining everything in the name of naturalism. The Zola comparison is an apt one, as I will soon explain.
Leonard soon sheds his sexual innocence when he meets the vivacious Berliner Maria, and again McEwan is not shy about describing what goes on between them in Maria's apartment. After a short while, Leonard gets a bit too carried away and almost assaults Maria. It was at this point that I began to lose all sympathy for the character, as he really did act like an idiot. I think it's an important point that a reader does not have to sympathise with characters to appreciate a book, but when Leonard is the designated 'hero' and it is through his eyes that we see every event in the book, for me McEwan failed to keep me on his side. Leonard and Maria soon patch things up, but unfortunately Maria has an ex-husband...
A bare description of the plot doesn't really do the book thus far much justice. It is very well-written, with some great turns of phrase and a good narrative rhythm. The second half of the book is really not for the squeamish - McEwan's obsession with graphic description comes into its own when something terrible and unforeseen occurs in Maria's apartment and things turn very gory. It was difficult to read the next couple of chapters but equally difficult to put the book down! Black humour takes over when Leonard is forced to carry two very heavy suitcases around Berlin, desperately trying to dispose of their contents, but everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. This part of the book again reminded me of Zola: whereas earlier it was Germinal, set in a mining community, that came to mind, in the latter half it was the very nasty Therese Raquin, in which a bored wife and her lover murder her husband. Zola was determined to describe everything so that the reader is confronted with the fact that humans, alive and dead, are basically animals. The overall tone is one of disgust with people, their bodies and their actions. McEwan does more or less the same thing in his own book, but provides a hair-raising twist towards the end that had me on the edge of my seat.
The postscript was not entirely successful for me: I thought it would turn everything on its head and make me see the whole story in a new light. It didn't do that but it still worked as an ending thematically, and at least left this reader with a small feeling of hope for the characters.
Overall then, this was one of the best of McEwan's books that I've read. It's definitely not for those of a nervous disposition! It provided a fascinating insight into 1950s Berlin, had interesting characters and a genuinely involving plot.
After finishing The Innocent, I was hankering to read a classic. I have to read one every few books or I get withdrawal symptoms! I realised that I'd intended to read W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage last year and hadn't found the time, so as it was sitting on the shelf and looked fat and interesting, I decided to go for it. It's 700 pages long in the Vintage edition I own but its style is very easy to read and I'm already over halfway through. I've never read Maugham before and am really enjoying it. Will post about it soon.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Man is Wolf to Man
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
I finished this weighty tome yesterday and am off work with the flu today, so it's an ideal opportunity to offer a few final thoughts!
This was a really great read and I highly recommend it to all lovers of meaty historical fiction. As I said in my previous post, the book is so much more than a 'period drama': it's staggeringly well-written, clearly impeccably researched and does a fantastic job of letting the reader see the world through Cromwell's eyes. It probably works so well because it's written in the present tense so it reads as if events are unfolding in real time. However, my caveat about the confusion caused by the sheer number of characters (so many Thomases - Cromwell, More, Wolsey, Cranmer, Boleyn, Wyatt etc!) and the odd decision to over-use the pronoun 'he' instead of naming Cromwell, remain. The former is more my failing as a reader than Mantel's, I think, and the latter was possibly a stylistic decision made to further the feeling that the reader is inside Cromwell's head.
The novel builds to a sort of climax with the trial of More (and I loved the scenes in the Tower between Cromwell and More) but on the very last page the story just ends abruptly. So I'm glad to have discovered that Mantel intends to write a sequel, provisionally titled The Mirror And The Light. There's still a lot of story to tell - the fall of Anne Boleyn, the dissolution of the monasteries, the birth (at last) of King Henry's male heir and of course the fall of Cromwell himself. I look forward to reading it!
Next book - The Innocent by Ian McEwan.
I finished this weighty tome yesterday and am off work with the flu today, so it's an ideal opportunity to offer a few final thoughts!
This was a really great read and I highly recommend it to all lovers of meaty historical fiction. As I said in my previous post, the book is so much more than a 'period drama': it's staggeringly well-written, clearly impeccably researched and does a fantastic job of letting the reader see the world through Cromwell's eyes. It probably works so well because it's written in the present tense so it reads as if events are unfolding in real time. However, my caveat about the confusion caused by the sheer number of characters (so many Thomases - Cromwell, More, Wolsey, Cranmer, Boleyn, Wyatt etc!) and the odd decision to over-use the pronoun 'he' instead of naming Cromwell, remain. The former is more my failing as a reader than Mantel's, I think, and the latter was possibly a stylistic decision made to further the feeling that the reader is inside Cromwell's head.
The novel builds to a sort of climax with the trial of More (and I loved the scenes in the Tower between Cromwell and More) but on the very last page the story just ends abruptly. So I'm glad to have discovered that Mantel intends to write a sequel, provisionally titled The Mirror And The Light. There's still a lot of story to tell - the fall of Anne Boleyn, the dissolution of the monasteries, the birth (at last) of King Henry's male heir and of course the fall of Cromwell himself. I look forward to reading it!
Next book - The Innocent by Ian McEwan.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
This is the Man For All Seasons
I'm now about two thirds of the way through Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and I think it's tremendous. A historical novel detailing the 'rise and rise' (as it says on the book's backpage blurb) of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's go-to man, it is so much more than a fictional recreation of events that anybody could have knocked off after ingesting a history book on the Tudors. Few books I've read can rival this one when it comes to detailing the inner thoughts, personality, memories, wants and desires of a human being. It really does read as if Mantel was somehow able to both go back in time and burrow into the brain of this fascinating man.
And that's what is particularly great about it. Because Thomas Cromwell has a bit of a bad rep and to explain why I'd better give a few historical details. Cromwell was a lawyer of humble origins who worked his way up from nothing to become the chief employee of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England, who almost rivalled the King in terms of power and prestige. Wolsey fell from the King's graces when he was unable to secure the Pope's OK for Henry to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn, which Henry believed was vital if he was ever to produce a male heir and secure the Tudor dynasty. Despite Wolsey's fall from power and subsequent death, Cromwell was able to finagle his way into the King's household and within 12 months became his chief councillor. In the early 16th century, for a man of no family name to leap to the top of the political pile, vaulting over the squabbling dukes and courtiers who had tumbled the Cardinal, was an incredible feat. Cromwell proved himself to the King by working out how to legally establish Henry as the only authority figure in England, thereby rendering the Pope's hold over his first marriage void and enabling him to make Anne his queen. In the process, the church in England broke away from Rome. So Cromwell was a major force in reforming both the church and state.
Cromwell is vilified by the Catholic Church, expecially since he was behind the execution of Sir Thomas More, a vehemently conservative public figure who opposed Henry's divorce and who was subsequently made a saint by the Pope. Robert Bolt's famous play A Man For All Seasons features More as the main character, as a man to be admired for his personal integrity, but in so doing Cromwell is cast as the primary antagonist.
Mantel resets the balance in her novel by telling the same story entirely from Cromwell's point of view, by exploring his origins, detailing his family life, delving deeply into the machinations of the Henrician court (which seems to have been like a nest of vipers) to show just how tricky it was to exist there, and most of all by casting More as the antagonist: as a religious fanatic with little ability to make friends or see the world from anybody else's point of view. Cromwell is fully humanised and he comes across as a deeply intelligent, funny, self-aware and likeable man, forever watchful. He has a network of friends and acquaintances across Europe; constantly adopts proteges and relations into his family home; has a spiky personality but is able to either soothe or provoke at will.
As well as being brilliant on the historical detail and in its psychological depth, the novel is also both surprisingly funny and tender. There have been dozens of witty lines that have made me chortle, mostly spoken by the characters rather than the narrator, and they always occur naturally in the situation - the dialogue would work well as a screenplay or stageplay. I also quietly shed a tear when tragedy strikes on the domestic front quite early on in the story and Mantel made me feel Cromwell's pain. Another aspect that I really liked in the first half of the novel was the loving master-servant relationship between the cardinal and Cromwell, which was brilliantly created. In fact there's a whole host of wonderfully drawn characters, from the insecure King Henry and the Machiavellian Anne Boleyn to the ferocious Duke of Norfolk and the vindictive Master Secretary, Stephen Gardiner.
Despite all these strengths, I would say that Wolf Hall is not the easiest of reads. Mantel's narrative style is quite staccato and she also keeps jumping between timeframes. This, combined with the sheer weight of characters (fortunately there's a handy cast list at the front of the book) and her quirk of rarely referring to her main character by name (instead writing 'he', which can get confusing when there's a lot of men in the scene), has often made me stop and go back over a few lines to make sure I fully understand what's going on! I haven't read any of Mantel's other books so I assume this is her way of writing. It takes some getting used to but the pros far outweigh the cons.
So I'm looking forward to finishing this and will post again when I've done so.
And that's what is particularly great about it. Because Thomas Cromwell has a bit of a bad rep and to explain why I'd better give a few historical details. Cromwell was a lawyer of humble origins who worked his way up from nothing to become the chief employee of Cardinal Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor of England, who almost rivalled the King in terms of power and prestige. Wolsey fell from the King's graces when he was unable to secure the Pope's OK for Henry to divorce his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn, which Henry believed was vital if he was ever to produce a male heir and secure the Tudor dynasty. Despite Wolsey's fall from power and subsequent death, Cromwell was able to finagle his way into the King's household and within 12 months became his chief councillor. In the early 16th century, for a man of no family name to leap to the top of the political pile, vaulting over the squabbling dukes and courtiers who had tumbled the Cardinal, was an incredible feat. Cromwell proved himself to the King by working out how to legally establish Henry as the only authority figure in England, thereby rendering the Pope's hold over his first marriage void and enabling him to make Anne his queen. In the process, the church in England broke away from Rome. So Cromwell was a major force in reforming both the church and state.
Cromwell is vilified by the Catholic Church, expecially since he was behind the execution of Sir Thomas More, a vehemently conservative public figure who opposed Henry's divorce and who was subsequently made a saint by the Pope. Robert Bolt's famous play A Man For All Seasons features More as the main character, as a man to be admired for his personal integrity, but in so doing Cromwell is cast as the primary antagonist.
Mantel resets the balance in her novel by telling the same story entirely from Cromwell's point of view, by exploring his origins, detailing his family life, delving deeply into the machinations of the Henrician court (which seems to have been like a nest of vipers) to show just how tricky it was to exist there, and most of all by casting More as the antagonist: as a religious fanatic with little ability to make friends or see the world from anybody else's point of view. Cromwell is fully humanised and he comes across as a deeply intelligent, funny, self-aware and likeable man, forever watchful. He has a network of friends and acquaintances across Europe; constantly adopts proteges and relations into his family home; has a spiky personality but is able to either soothe or provoke at will.
As well as being brilliant on the historical detail and in its psychological depth, the novel is also both surprisingly funny and tender. There have been dozens of witty lines that have made me chortle, mostly spoken by the characters rather than the narrator, and they always occur naturally in the situation - the dialogue would work well as a screenplay or stageplay. I also quietly shed a tear when tragedy strikes on the domestic front quite early on in the story and Mantel made me feel Cromwell's pain. Another aspect that I really liked in the first half of the novel was the loving master-servant relationship between the cardinal and Cromwell, which was brilliantly created. In fact there's a whole host of wonderfully drawn characters, from the insecure King Henry and the Machiavellian Anne Boleyn to the ferocious Duke of Norfolk and the vindictive Master Secretary, Stephen Gardiner.
Despite all these strengths, I would say that Wolf Hall is not the easiest of reads. Mantel's narrative style is quite staccato and she also keeps jumping between timeframes. This, combined with the sheer weight of characters (fortunately there's a handy cast list at the front of the book) and her quirk of rarely referring to her main character by name (instead writing 'he', which can get confusing when there's a lot of men in the scene), has often made me stop and go back over a few lines to make sure I fully understand what's going on! I haven't read any of Mantel's other books so I assume this is her way of writing. It takes some getting used to but the pros far outweigh the cons.
So I'm looking forward to finishing this and will post again when I've done so.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
So many books...
Having recently committed myself to using this blog properly, I've been surfing around and reading many fascinating book-blogs. It's so wonderful to discover there are other people out there as interested in reading great books as I am and a blog is the perfect way to record one's thoughts and impressions.
The downside about reading all these blogs is that every one makes me want to add yet more books to my already hugely long TBR list!
On Facebook recently I completed a ticklist that was sent round of 100 books that it was suggested everybody should read. I have already read around 70 of them! My brother, who is certainly not as fervent a reader as I am, commented that I would have nothing left to read by the time I reach the age of 40. Fortunately this is not true: though I do want to read the very best books as soon as I possibly can, there are hundreds of them and there are already so many I'd like to re-read some time.
Re-reading is something I keep putting off as I've felt there are so many books I haven't got to yet that it might be a waste of time to read a book I've read before, even if it's a great one. But from looking at other blogs, I'm beginning to see the virtue of it. You already know the plot and the characters when you return to a favourite, so a re-read can uncover other pleasures that you may have missed the first time around. And of course, there are some books I may not have fully understood on a deeper level the first time I read them (when I was in a hurry to get on to the next one!), so a re-read could be a revelation.
Having said all that, there are dozens of unread books I already have in mind to enjoy this year, so re-reading will have to be put off for a little while longer!
My TBR list for this year includes, in no particular order:
Graham Greene - The Comedians
Evelyn Waugh - Sword of Honour
Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
James Joyce - Dubliners
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Homer - The Iliad
Peter Carey - Parrot And Olivier In America
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Martin Amis - Money
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Julian Barnes - A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters
Ian McEwan - The Innocent, Solar
J.G. Ballard - Empire Of The Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View Of Hills
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-5
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Patrick Susskind - Perfume
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Anthony Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Emile Zola - Nana
Stendhal - The Red And The Black
Thomas Hardy - The Return Of The Native
John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River
John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
An exhausting, but not necessarily exhaustive, list!
Will post some thoughts on Wolf Hall, which I'm still very much enjoying, tomorrow.
The downside about reading all these blogs is that every one makes me want to add yet more books to my already hugely long TBR list!
On Facebook recently I completed a ticklist that was sent round of 100 books that it was suggested everybody should read. I have already read around 70 of them! My brother, who is certainly not as fervent a reader as I am, commented that I would have nothing left to read by the time I reach the age of 40. Fortunately this is not true: though I do want to read the very best books as soon as I possibly can, there are hundreds of them and there are already so many I'd like to re-read some time.
Re-reading is something I keep putting off as I've felt there are so many books I haven't got to yet that it might be a waste of time to read a book I've read before, even if it's a great one. But from looking at other blogs, I'm beginning to see the virtue of it. You already know the plot and the characters when you return to a favourite, so a re-read can uncover other pleasures that you may have missed the first time around. And of course, there are some books I may not have fully understood on a deeper level the first time I read them (when I was in a hurry to get on to the next one!), so a re-read could be a revelation.
Having said all that, there are dozens of unread books I already have in mind to enjoy this year, so re-reading will have to be put off for a little while longer!
My TBR list for this year includes, in no particular order:
Graham Greene - The Comedians
Evelyn Waugh - Sword of Honour
Honore de Balzac - Eugenie Grandet
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time Of Cholera
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
James Joyce - Dubliners
George Eliot - Daniel Deronda
Homer - The Iliad
Peter Carey - Parrot And Olivier In America
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Martin Amis - Money
William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War
Julian Barnes - A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters
Ian McEwan - The Innocent, Solar
J.G. Ballard - Empire Of The Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View Of Hills
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-5
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Patrick Susskind - Perfume
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Anthony Trollope - Framley Parsonage
Emile Zola - Nana
Stendhal - The Red And The Black
Thomas Hardy - The Return Of The Native
John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River
John Updike - Rabbit At Rest
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Richard Yates - Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
An exhausting, but not necessarily exhaustive, list!
Will post some thoughts on Wolf Hall, which I'm still very much enjoying, tomorrow.
Friday, January 14, 2011
A new start!
One of my many New Year resolutions is to restart this blog and from now on update it more than once annually! So...
My first read of the year was C.J. Sansom's 'Sovereign', the third in his series of crime novels set during the dramatic late years of Henry VIII's reign and narrated by the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who once again is pulled against his will into all sorts of political shenanigans.
I haven't read many crime genre novels but was attracted to the Shardlake series because of the historical setting. All English schoolchildren learn about Henry VIII, of course: the six wives are what first leap to mind, but his reign really was a significant one with the break from Rome and the beginnings of the modern state. I studied this fascinating period for two years when I took A-Level History and have since remained very interested in fat old Henry.
So I delved into Sansom's first in the series, 'Dissolution', a couple of Christmases ago and was amply rewarded with a great tale of murder and intrigue as Shardlake is tasked by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the killing of a royal commissioner sent to a Sussex monastery to total up just how much money the king would make out of the place upon its imminent destruction. The book reminded me of Umberto Eco's 'The Name Of The Rose', minus the heavy philosophizing but with heaps of historical detail, solid characterisations and a nice twisty plot. I now treat myself to a new instalment around every Christmas/New Year period. There are two more in the series and by the time I get to part five, 'Heartstone', in a couple of years I expect the sixth will have been published!
'Sovereign' was a pleasurable read. In brief, it is 1541 and Shardlake has been sent by Archbishop Cranmer to York to help arbitrate petitions to the king, who is travelling to the North with an enormous retinue to overawe the Yorkshire populace as they had recently risen up against him in protest at the vast religious changes sweeping the kingdom. Much is made of the contrasts between south and north Tudor England, which back then were almost like two separate countries. The people of York feel neglected by Henry and the atmosphere is explosive. Shardlake's other duty is to ensure the good health of a political prisoner, due to be transported to the Tower of London to be tortured into revealing details of the recent conspiracy. Things become even more complicated when a glazier removing stained glass windows from the dissolved city abbey dies a horrible death and Shardlake finds out more than he wanted to know about the king's true ancestry.
The novel is very cleverly plotted, full of juicy thrills, the usual excellent historical background and some great characters. However, it didn't always warrant its 650 pages. At times it plodded along with too much extraneous detail and repetitive, expository dialogue. Sansom must have wanted to make sure the reader understood the complicated family tree of the Tudors but at times his obviously wide historical knowledge didn't quite integrate with the flow of the storytelling and so in parts the book became heavy-handed. The last parts dragged somewhat, though a scene in the dungeons of the Tower was really gripping. The novel could have done with some closer proof-reading. For example, there was one point when Shardlake said he had no time to put on his cloak, having risen early from bed to attend to some emergency, but on the next page he lifted his cloak to ensure it didn't trail in the mud! Still, though Sansom won't ever be feted for the quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he certainly knows a lot about the mechanics of whodunit plot. All in all, a fun way to start my reading in 2011.
I've decided to continue my immersion in the Tudor world by finally getting around to reading Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall', which won the 2009 Man Booker prize and is about the life of Thomas Cromwell, portraying him not as the brutal enforcer he is usually seen as but as a fully-rounded, sympathetically rendered human being. I'm 150 pages in so far and as well as being magnificent it's an interesting contrast to Sansom's series. The setting's the same and both authors are good at conjuring up the period, but it's clear that Mantel is a great writer of literature as opposed to 'just' a genre author. It's an absolute delight so far and difficult to put down. More details soon.
My first read of the year was C.J. Sansom's 'Sovereign', the third in his series of crime novels set during the dramatic late years of Henry VIII's reign and narrated by the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who once again is pulled against his will into all sorts of political shenanigans.
I haven't read many crime genre novels but was attracted to the Shardlake series because of the historical setting. All English schoolchildren learn about Henry VIII, of course: the six wives are what first leap to mind, but his reign really was a significant one with the break from Rome and the beginnings of the modern state. I studied this fascinating period for two years when I took A-Level History and have since remained very interested in fat old Henry.
So I delved into Sansom's first in the series, 'Dissolution', a couple of Christmases ago and was amply rewarded with a great tale of murder and intrigue as Shardlake is tasked by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the killing of a royal commissioner sent to a Sussex monastery to total up just how much money the king would make out of the place upon its imminent destruction. The book reminded me of Umberto Eco's 'The Name Of The Rose', minus the heavy philosophizing but with heaps of historical detail, solid characterisations and a nice twisty plot. I now treat myself to a new instalment around every Christmas/New Year period. There are two more in the series and by the time I get to part five, 'Heartstone', in a couple of years I expect the sixth will have been published!
'Sovereign' was a pleasurable read. In brief, it is 1541 and Shardlake has been sent by Archbishop Cranmer to York to help arbitrate petitions to the king, who is travelling to the North with an enormous retinue to overawe the Yorkshire populace as they had recently risen up against him in protest at the vast religious changes sweeping the kingdom. Much is made of the contrasts between south and north Tudor England, which back then were almost like two separate countries. The people of York feel neglected by Henry and the atmosphere is explosive. Shardlake's other duty is to ensure the good health of a political prisoner, due to be transported to the Tower of London to be tortured into revealing details of the recent conspiracy. Things become even more complicated when a glazier removing stained glass windows from the dissolved city abbey dies a horrible death and Shardlake finds out more than he wanted to know about the king's true ancestry.
The novel is very cleverly plotted, full of juicy thrills, the usual excellent historical background and some great characters. However, it didn't always warrant its 650 pages. At times it plodded along with too much extraneous detail and repetitive, expository dialogue. Sansom must have wanted to make sure the reader understood the complicated family tree of the Tudors but at times his obviously wide historical knowledge didn't quite integrate with the flow of the storytelling and so in parts the book became heavy-handed. The last parts dragged somewhat, though a scene in the dungeons of the Tower was really gripping. The novel could have done with some closer proof-reading. For example, there was one point when Shardlake said he had no time to put on his cloak, having risen early from bed to attend to some emergency, but on the next page he lifted his cloak to ensure it didn't trail in the mud! Still, though Sansom won't ever be feted for the quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he certainly knows a lot about the mechanics of whodunit plot. All in all, a fun way to start my reading in 2011.
I've decided to continue my immersion in the Tudor world by finally getting around to reading Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall', which won the 2009 Man Booker prize and is about the life of Thomas Cromwell, portraying him not as the brutal enforcer he is usually seen as but as a fully-rounded, sympathetically rendered human being. I'm 150 pages in so far and as well as being magnificent it's an interesting contrast to Sansom's series. The setting's the same and both authors are good at conjuring up the period, but it's clear that Mantel is a great writer of literature as opposed to 'just' a genre author. It's an absolute delight so far and difficult to put down. More details soon.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
I'm back...
Haven't posted anything here since I set up the blog back in August. Early New year resolution to use this thing regularly!
Now, what's this reader's life been like these past few months? Highlights include discovering, with awe and wonder, the sheer delight of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe novels; being blown away by my first taste of William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying - I'd never appreciated til then just how flexible the novel form could be; and enjoying with satisfaction the deeply impressive debut of the hugely talented David Mitchell, Ghostwritten.
Least favourite of the recent bunch would definitely be The Outsider (L'Etranger) by Albert Camus, which I actively loathed while reading it. Good prose but hideous philosophy - didn't appeal to my sensibilities at all.
Finished my first Michael Chabon novel a few days ago, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. This was very entertaining, if a little esoteric. Chabon is quite the wordsmith: some delicious sentences, the best metaphors since, well, Chandler; and a great sense of humour. His Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is on the bookshelf at home - I look forward to cracking its formidably wide spine some time next year.
Right now am enveloped in the warm-duvet-on-a-cold-winter's-morning-like delights of Wodehouse's Leave It To Psmith. Effortlessly funny and a great way to distract myself on the way to work on the bus which habitually has broken heaters.
Christmas approaches but I'll be back in January.
Now, what's this reader's life been like these past few months? Highlights include discovering, with awe and wonder, the sheer delight of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe novels; being blown away by my first taste of William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying - I'd never appreciated til then just how flexible the novel form could be; and enjoying with satisfaction the deeply impressive debut of the hugely talented David Mitchell, Ghostwritten.
Least favourite of the recent bunch would definitely be The Outsider (L'Etranger) by Albert Camus, which I actively loathed while reading it. Good prose but hideous philosophy - didn't appeal to my sensibilities at all.
Finished my first Michael Chabon novel a few days ago, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. This was very entertaining, if a little esoteric. Chabon is quite the wordsmith: some delicious sentences, the best metaphors since, well, Chandler; and a great sense of humour. His Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is on the bookshelf at home - I look forward to cracking its formidably wide spine some time next year.
Right now am enveloped in the warm-duvet-on-a-cold-winter's-morning-like delights of Wodehouse's Leave It To Psmith. Effortlessly funny and a great way to distract myself on the way to work on the bus which habitually has broken heaters.
Christmas approaches but I'll be back in January.
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