Family reading: "A Spool of Blue Thread" by Anne Tyler

This was the third of my 2015 Booker Prize shortlist reading list (dammit, meanwhile the 2016 shortlist is out...), and the first novel I have read by Anne Tyler. However, it is her twentieth novel - the first was written in the year of my birth, it transpires - and just a little research reveals she has carved out a niche for herself writing stories about families, generally based in her hometown, Baltimore. (Apparently, you can even do Anne Tyler tours there, probably slightly less edgy than the Wire tours also on offer.) 

 I knew none of this before embarking on the novel, so had no expectations in any particular direction, except that this would be a Bookerish book, if you see what I mean.

This is, indeed, a very family book, the tale of the Whitshank clan, centring on the couple Red and Abby, he an independent builder by trade, still at work in his eighties, she a retired social worker (still with a tendency to look after waifs and strays of all kinds) and general materfamilias to a growing extended family, two daughters and two sons, along with their partners and offspring. The main action of the novel arises out of the increasing age and frailty of Red and Abby, which persuades their children of the need to move in with them, something which will test in real life conditions the various stories this generally close-knit family tells about itself. As you might expect, all is not plain sailing, and the inner dynamics of the family emerge in various ways. 

Do not expect however outbursts of terrifying violence, bitter conflict or tragedy, for Tyler's business is to talk about families as they actually are, with underlying tensions and conflicts, yes, with rebellion and resentments along the way, but also with ties that bond, a basic solidarity, stories that bind through life's ordinary adventures, and in which people are generally decent. If that sounds like it might tip to the rather schmaltzy and sentimental, sort of The Waltons in Baltimore, then the risk is real. However, Tyler is better than that (presumably this being why she shows up on a Booker shortlist at the age of 73) and manages to describe the life of this not-so-unordinary family with incisive insight, a goodly dose of humour and with a capacity to touch deep feelings. Perhaps it is the clarity with which she observes the very ordinary challenges of life, in particular here the process of becoming old, which holds the books power. The passage of time itself, the change it brings to family members, young and old, is a central them of he novel, emphasised by long flashbacks into the lives and adventures of pre-Red-and-Abby generations, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, as is the capacity for small, even insignificant, details of life to be the vehicle whereby the fundamental differences between people are expressed. 

Anne Tyler

I liked this book, all the while being quite surprised as to the hold it managed to exert over me. Yes, I do have, as some level, a kind of "so what?" feeling about having read it, but at the same time cannot deny that it drew me in, absorbed my interest and, yes, made me feel deeply in sympathy with these people. I'm guessing that, like many readers, this is so well observed, so wryly conscious of what really happens in families, that I feel this is my family too. 

Mysterious reading: "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison

I had been meaning to read something by Toni Morrison for a while now. I was most recently prompted do so by the lavish praise heaped on her in his latest book by Mohsin Hamid, who studied on her creative writing course. So when looking for some audiobooks to accompany me home and alighting on an internet recommendation of her own reading of Song of Solomon, I downloaded the book immediately and looked forward to the second part of the journey (the first being pre-booked by Alan Johnson), when I would listen to it. For the sake of disclosure, I should reveal I had been looking for a shorter book, to fit into a Colmar-Brussels drive, and that Song of Solomon qualified, clocking in at only three hours, arguably rather too little, indeed. This means it was an abridged version, something I generally prefer to avoid, but I reckoned that if Toni Morrison herself were reading it, then it would at least do the book justice.

First things first, Morrison writes beautifully, evocatively, every word doing its work, having its value. This much is obvious from just listening to the sentences go by. Her writing is also allusive, somewhat oblique, coming in on what it means from an angle, as it were. Song of Solomon is a story of a family, and in particular one of its members, Macon "Milkman" Dead III (yes, there are reasons) to trace his roots and work out who he really is. It starts in a mid-sized Midwestern town, in the orbit of Chicago, and takes us, in an inversion of the classic African-American journey, from North to South (Virginia), where Milkman encounters the past of his family and the truth about who he is - not a simple thing.

This may however be my first "failed" audiobook. The dense, sideways allusiveness of Morrison's prose, even when she is reading it herself, may not lend itself to the format. The natural mode of the audiobook, it seems to me now, is the relatively linear narrative - the story which progresses with some degree of limpidity. This is not to say it can't deal with complexity (think Life After Life or Mothering Sunday, two recent audiobook gems which are highly literary and I think actively benefit from the format), but that Morrison's style, dense and oblique, may fare better when one has the leisure of taking the time needed on the page. It is also possible that the abridgement caused some damage (strange interstices from a different male voice perhaps filled in some gaps?), though my feeling is that it runs deeper than that. In any case, to cut a long story short, I found it hard to follow precisely what was going on at any given point, not always sure who was in action or how exactly the situation in which the characters found themselves arose. I wonder whether listening to this as a spoken narrative, while simultaneously accommodating the necessities of driving a car, was simply to place too many demands on the format, ultimately not allowing me sufficiently to appreciate the wonders wrought by Morrison here. 

Toni Morrison, allusive

For wonders they are, and I need to be clear that, in spite of the vagueness I felt about narrative, I enjoyed listening to Toni Morrison. Her writing is, as I said, beautiful, even on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, and though I feel I maybe missed out on some of this book, I got much else.  For me Song of Solomon was a succession of impressions, a series of moments, a wealth of characters which had their own power and presence. 

I will be back for more Morrison for sure, but next time it will be a book.

Meanwhile, if you want a proper review, here's a contemporary one from the New York Times.

Gritty reading: "This Boy" by Alan Johnson

Though it is not long since he was a lauded cabinet minister and touted as a possible Labour Party leader (shame that didn't work out), Alan Johnson's account of his early life in This Boy does not betray much in the way of political careerism. If he had professional dreams as a youngster, they were of being a writer or a pop star, with the latter possibility actually coming far closer to reality than the former as he entered his twenties. Instead, famously, he became a postman, in order to be able to support the young family he was starting, and presumably it was in the workplace that his - practical and moderate - political interests began to take concrete form. 

As for being a writer, well, of course, he did that, albeit much later, by writing this superb memoire, a memoire moreover that only occasionally and tangentially makes any sort of explicit reference to politics, though, naturally, what he describes in itself carries an implicit and hefty political clout. So this is no typical political memoire, doing what such books do, taking us behind the scenes at the meetings of the great and good, dishing the dirt on colleagues, justifying one's own actions and all the rest. This is rather a personal story, perhaps above all a tribute to two deeply remarkable women and a tale of survival in the most abject of circumstances. Rather than resembling a political memoire, This Boy puts me more in mind of a book like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, though to be frank, this book feels more honest and distinctly less self-promotional.

Succinctly, This Boy is the story of a young Alan Johnson growing up in an area of West London (Notting Hill, North Kensington or Kensal Town - take your pick, the terms elide) in a family blighted by extreme poverty. Though his father, a jobbing musician, Steve, is around some of the time in the early days, his contribution to the family is practically non-existent, indeed negative, to the extent that, when he finally walks out on them his children rejoice and his wife, though bereft, is also more than anything relieved. The work of holding the family together, and (just) fed, is done first by young Alan's mother, Lily, and, subsequently, increasingly by the utter force of nature that is his older sister, Linda. 

It beggars belief that, at recently as the 1950s and 1960s conditions such as those described by Johnson could exist in London. The house in which the Johnsons lived had already been declared as unfit for human habitation in the 1930s, though the intervening war had stopped anyone doing anything about it. Initially, there is no electricity, just gas, no indoor sanitation and, of course, no heating. The walls are damp, the fabric of the house disintegrating. The Johnsons' "kitchen" is on the landing. The environment is horribly unhealthy, especially for Lily who suffers from a chronic heart condition. Nonetheless, she battles on, just about able to support her family through an accumulation of heavy cleaning jobs (which her doctors consider dangerous for her, living life on tick (hence steadily accumulating debts and arrears), and, as time passes the increasingly critical contribution of Linda, who grows up extraordinarily fast to deal with the the situation. It is a family story of cold and hunger, of debt and being cut off, of scrimping and saving. For example, one of Lily's systems for keeping the house warm is to follow the trail of customers of the local coal merchants and pick up all the odd bits of coal they drop in the street along the way. Through such devices, the family keeps its head above water.

Confounding reading: "Satin Island" by Tom McCarthy.

I may as well start by admitting it: I was pretty much flummoxed by this curious little book, which has little in the way of plot or even progression, and the meaning of which is frankly pretty obscure. Nonetheless, it was also readable and enjoyable, carrying me along quite nicely in its strange anthropological universe. 

To try to summarise at least minimally what it is about, it centres on a first-person narrator, known to us only as "U", an anthropologist who, having made a name for himself with an analysis of 1990's clubbing culture, has been hired by a swish, trendy London outfit, known only as the Company, as its "house" anthropologist. U helps the company devise its advice to its clients, which include corporates, governments and international organisations (including the European Commission and the European Parliament - a rare fictional mention for my employer), assisting them in gaining purchase in the lives of consumers, clients and citizens, according to need. It is a little vague (to say the least), but U's activities, largely from an idiosyncratic underground office far removed from the slick, glass-walled corporate paradise on the Company's upper floors, seem to be quite crucial, his insights into human systems delivering substantial returns for clients. 

Formally, U has received two principal tasks from his CEO, a deliciously sketched corporate wunderkind called Peyman: charismatic, aphoristic, media-beloved, VIP back-slapping, jet-setting and conference hopping. First, U is to contribute to the huge and prestigious contract the Company has just landed, the Koob-Sassen project. What exactly this project entails remains highly mysterious. It involves ministers, thus governments, but goes much further into the realm of the supra-national, supra-international, supra-everything, seems to be about connecting things and will affect the lives of absolutely everyone, though without them actually noticing. So yes, it is potentially rather sinister, this fact dawning on U (arousing sex-fuelled Patty Hearst and Baader-Meinhof related fantasies of destruction) even as he contributes, very successfully, to its progress. 

Mythical reading: "The Fishermen" by Chigozie Obioma

This is the first of my sister-gifted set of 2015 Booker Prize shortlisted works, which, I admit, have been sitting waiting on the shelf rather longer than they deserve. Then again, I had thought that the focused summer period would be a good time for them (the next one is another). 

The Fishermen is a debut novel by Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, one of whom many see as a rich crop of young contemporary African writers. He was also the youngest of the 2015 Booker nominees. (He didn't win, by the way, that was A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.)

In this impressive novel, Obioma pulls off a number of remarkable combinations: the perspectives of child and adult, the mythical and everyday, the guileless narration of childhood and sophisticated, even arcane vocabulary, the Bildungsroman and Aristotelian tragedy, the political  and the domestic, the rational and the religious, English and African native languages. For me, the most striking of these combinations was between the simple, almost naive, narration of the story by the central character, Ben, from perspectives shifting between later adulthood and contemporary childhood (he is nine during the main events of the book), and the often heartbreaking events he relates. 

Ben is the fourth of a set of brothers - Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin - living in a middle--class family in the town of Akure. There are also two infant siblings, David and Nkem, the sole daughter. The story begins when Mr. Agwu, the father, an employee of the National Bank of Nigeria, is posted to a distant city, in the dangerous north of the country. The family stays behind in Akure, with the father only able to return every couple of weeks. Mr Agwu is an aspirational patriarch, a strong believer in a "western education", a railer against corruption and superstition, a man who actively wanted many children (in a country where birth control is the new orthodoxy), and has mapped out splendid professional futures for his sons. He is, to our eyes, a severe disciplinarian, keeping his sons in line with the menace - and the use - of the belt, but he is also, fundamentally, a good man whose absence from the family, and consequent inability to keep his sons on the straight and narrow, turns out to be a disaster of mythical (that word again!) proportions.