Very, very remiss of me, gentle reader, but I've let the book reviews slide lately. I could claim there's been too much to do, but perhaps it's just laziness, of the sort only resolved by the enforced laziness of lying on the beach.
So to pick up the backlog in anticipation of renewed virtue over the summer holidays (it started here last year, remember?), the four books completed since the last Facebook note review. Two were consumed as audio books (unabridged): "Stalin", which was taken in bursts over time, and "Game Change" an epic 14-hour listen taken over a car journey of conveniently near identical length. The other two were read conventionally. (For the record, for those unused to audio books, I find that they stay in the memory just as well, perhaps even better than, regular books and, after a while, I can no longer recall the form of consumption. Only real drawbacks: (i) you really need a good long, lone car journey or two and (ii) you miss out on any pictures - something I guess applies to "Stalin" and might have helped fix all those Russian names better.)
So briefly, the reviews:
Stalin
Superbly read by John Nettles (Inspector Barnaby), this huge tome relates in amazing detail the endless paranoid manoeuvrings of one of the world's greatest ever tyrants. One can only suppose that a historian of Sebag Montefiore's calibre has solid sources for his descriptions of innumerable meetings and encounters with the Great Man (no endnotes in an audio book), meaning that the research behind this work is prodigious.
The book focuses quite tightly on Stalin and his entourage, only occasionally venturing beyond the Kremlin Walls, the dacha and the Sochi getaway, to the broader Soviet Union where the effects of the brutal paranoia impact on ordinary people. The perspective of the book encompasses this, of course, but is generally concentrated on the inner court, family and hangers-on immediately around Stalin and who indulge and suffer from the daily machinations of the Leader. The principal lesson is clear: get anywhere near to the heart of power and your days are almost certainly numbered, the only trick for survival being to have arrived in the circle shortly before Stalin's death (you had to get lucky too) or be a son or daughter (though this did not save you in every case). Otherwise, over a span of time from the twenties to the fifties, to get anywhere close to Stalin was effectively a suspended death sentence, with the lenghth of the suspension a matter of the dictator's whim. Truth be told, Stalin was also a death sentence, literally and figuratively, for millions of ordinary people who never made it anywhere near him, people who nonetheless hero-worshipped this monstrous figure.
Stalin himself, for all the detail of this book, remains a mysterious figure, human and inhuman, at the same time utterly cold and calculating, puritanical, paranoid, yet given to drunken festivity, real weakness, genuine insight and bouts of sentimentality.
Recommendation: with a tome of this length and detail, let's face it, you've got to be interested. But if you are, this is great narrative, magisterial history and impressive scholarship.
The Monster in amazing detail: Stalin
A Day and a Night and a Day
In this hugely ambitious novel, Glen Duncan takes on big themes through the perspective of a torture victim in an American cell, perhaps in Guantanamo, perhaps in Morocco. The prime thread is the narrative of the day, night and day of the title during which a cynical, intelligent, worldly Gap-clad US interrogator, Harper, tries to extract from the protagonist, Augustus Rose, information about the anti-establishment, anti-Al-Qaeda organisation to which Rose belongs. A second thread consists of the memories into which Rose escapes to try to cope with his torture - memories of an inter-racial New York background, a distracted but loving Italian-American mother, a surprising and successful career in restaurants and, above all, a love affair with an idealistic but terroristically-inclined white girl (Rose is black), Selena. The third narrative thread has Rose, post-torture, nihilistically holed away on a remote Scottish island, where a chance encounter with a girl on the run from an abusive policeman boyfriend forces him back into the world of human engagement and violence.
To tell the truth, it can be hard to work out exactly what is going on in this novel, at least in terms of the narrative of who got where and how. Entire decades can go by in a couple of elliptical sentences, which, if you miss them, can leave you wondering how exactly you got here. Some of it doesn't make immediate sense and/or stretches credibility a bit far. Nonetheless, the real interest of both author and reader here is on the inner worlds, particularly of Rose and Harper, and how this emerges in their deeply asymmetrical relationship. Along the way, a lot is said about the modern values, the human values that try to co-exist alongside them and the ambiguity of motives and morals. You feel you are in the presence of genuinely big ideas, interestingly distilled, but the lack of narrative cohesion can get in the way.
One way or another though, the "feel" of this book stays with you.
Recommendation: a tough book to recommend unambiguously, as many a reader will find it flawed, but for me, this is a book which is worth taking on in spite of its flaws.
Deep and meaningful, but a tad confusing
Solar
Who can have missed the publication of the superstar of British literary fiction's latest novel? In London recently, every bookshop was promoting Solar massively, and that's when, of course, I too bought my copy. How could I not, after Atonement and Chesil Beach?
Solar takes a very different tone from these two, leaning towards comedy, relating the chequered career of a rather venal but Nobel Prize winning British scientist who drifts into climate change science while juggling a highly complex private life, including an improbable number of affairs and, rather incidentally, a not-quite murder.
It's a light and entertaining read, but, frankly, feels a bit a of a let-down if you were expecting something on the level of McEwan's recent output. To be fair, McEwan wasn't trying to write that kind of book this time round, but to indulge his long-standing interest in science in a lighter tone. Some have said the book is heavy on science, though I personally did not find it so.
Recommendation: a bit of a summer-read perhaps. You don't owe it to McEwan to read this book - he's doing fine - so up to you. I could have lived without this one.
Ian McEwan lightens up in the latest literary superseller
Game Change
As with many political bestsellers, Game Change is known for the one or two revelations it makes about the 2008 US presidential race. These are indeed extraordinary: first, the stories from the Edwards camp, in particular the utter contrast between the public and private personas of Elisabeth Edwards, the growing megalomaniac detachment of John Edwards from reality, and the unhinged story of his relationship and consequent love-child with the frankly loopy Real Hunter. Second, and for me even more fascinating, come the revelations about the process whereby Sarah Palin found herself propelled into the limelight as a vice-presidential candidate and the amazing behind-the-scenes stories of how she handled her candidature. You could say it is reassuring the the story ends up with persons other than these remarkable dramatis personae elected to high office, but it is anything but reassuring to note how close they got. Europeans are perhaps protected from this by the debatable virtue of their insiderish party political systems, America, with is more open, individualistic system, are protected differently, by an insanely long and gruelling campaign and pitiless attention which probes and probes and exposes the slightest weakness. So far, just, it has kept the Edwards and the Palins out, thank goodness.
This book is far more than its sensational revelations, though, it is a detailed and painstaking account of the principal campaigns, those of Obama, Clinton and McCain. All three emerge with great credit, though ultimately you come to the conviction that the right man won. Much of the narrative, particularly of the Obama campaign, will be familiar to the fanboys of US politics who will presumably buy this book, but its wide perspective allows very revealing comparisons of how the different campaigns were run and why the end result reflected not only the personal strengths and weaknesses of the candidates but also of their operations.
Recommendation: if you're a fanboy, absolutely. For others this may be a bit much. That said, everyone should read the Palin section, just to appreciate how close we came...
So to pick up the backlog in anticipation of renewed virtue over the summer holidays (it started here last year, remember?), the four books completed since the last Facebook note review. Two were consumed as audio books (unabridged): "Stalin", which was taken in bursts over time, and "Game Change" an epic 14-hour listen taken over a car journey of conveniently near identical length. The other two were read conventionally. (For the record, for those unused to audio books, I find that they stay in the memory just as well, perhaps even better than, regular books and, after a while, I can no longer recall the form of consumption. Only real drawbacks: (i) you really need a good long, lone car journey or two and (ii) you miss out on any pictures - something I guess applies to "Stalin" and might have helped fix all those Russian names better.)
So briefly, the reviews:
Stalin
Superbly read by John Nettles (Inspector Barnaby), this huge tome relates in amazing detail the endless paranoid manoeuvrings of one of the world's greatest ever tyrants. One can only suppose that a historian of Sebag Montefiore's calibre has solid sources for his descriptions of innumerable meetings and encounters with the Great Man (no endnotes in an audio book), meaning that the research behind this work is prodigious.
The book focuses quite tightly on Stalin and his entourage, only occasionally venturing beyond the Kremlin Walls, the dacha and the Sochi getaway, to the broader Soviet Union where the effects of the brutal paranoia impact on ordinary people. The perspective of the book encompasses this, of course, but is generally concentrated on the inner court, family and hangers-on immediately around Stalin and who indulge and suffer from the daily machinations of the Leader. The principal lesson is clear: get anywhere near to the heart of power and your days are almost certainly numbered, the only trick for survival being to have arrived in the circle shortly before Stalin's death (you had to get lucky too) or be a son or daughter (though this did not save you in every case). Otherwise, over a span of time from the twenties to the fifties, to get anywhere close to Stalin was effectively a suspended death sentence, with the lenghth of the suspension a matter of the dictator's whim. Truth be told, Stalin was also a death sentence, literally and figuratively, for millions of ordinary people who never made it anywhere near him, people who nonetheless hero-worshipped this monstrous figure.
Stalin himself, for all the detail of this book, remains a mysterious figure, human and inhuman, at the same time utterly cold and calculating, puritanical, paranoid, yet given to drunken festivity, real weakness, genuine insight and bouts of sentimentality.
Recommendation: with a tome of this length and detail, let's face it, you've got to be interested. But if you are, this is great narrative, magisterial history and impressive scholarship.
A Day and a Night and a Day
In this hugely ambitious novel, Glen Duncan takes on big themes through the perspective of a torture victim in an American cell, perhaps in Guantanamo, perhaps in Morocco. The prime thread is the narrative of the day, night and day of the title during which a cynical, intelligent, worldly Gap-clad US interrogator, Harper, tries to extract from the protagonist, Augustus Rose, information about the anti-establishment, anti-Al-Qaeda organisation to which Rose belongs. A second thread consists of the memories into which Rose escapes to try to cope with his torture - memories of an inter-racial New York background, a distracted but loving Italian-American mother, a surprising and successful career in restaurants and, above all, a love affair with an idealistic but terroristically-inclined white girl (Rose is black), Selena. The third narrative thread has Rose, post-torture, nihilistically holed away on a remote Scottish island, where a chance encounter with a girl on the run from an abusive policeman boyfriend forces him back into the world of human engagement and violence.
To tell the truth, it can be hard to work out exactly what is going on in this novel, at least in terms of the narrative of who got where and how. Entire decades can go by in a couple of elliptical sentences, which, if you miss them, can leave you wondering how exactly you got here. Some of it doesn't make immediate sense and/or stretches credibility a bit far. Nonetheless, the real interest of both author and reader here is on the inner worlds, particularly of Rose and Harper, and how this emerges in their deeply asymmetrical relationship. Along the way, a lot is said about the modern values, the human values that try to co-exist alongside them and the ambiguity of motives and morals. You feel you are in the presence of genuinely big ideas, interestingly distilled, but the lack of narrative cohesion can get in the way.
One way or another though, the "feel" of this book stays with you.
Recommendation: a tough book to recommend unambiguously, as many a reader will find it flawed, but for me, this is a book which is worth taking on in spite of its flaws.
Deep and meaningful, but a tad confusing
Solar
Who can have missed the publication of the superstar of British literary fiction's latest novel? In London recently, every bookshop was promoting Solar massively, and that's when, of course, I too bought my copy. How could I not, after Atonement and Chesil Beach?
Solar takes a very different tone from these two, leaning towards comedy, relating the chequered career of a rather venal but Nobel Prize winning British scientist who drifts into climate change science while juggling a highly complex private life, including an improbable number of affairs and, rather incidentally, a not-quite murder.
It's a light and entertaining read, but, frankly, feels a bit a of a let-down if you were expecting something on the level of McEwan's recent output. To be fair, McEwan wasn't trying to write that kind of book this time round, but to indulge his long-standing interest in science in a lighter tone. Some have said the book is heavy on science, though I personally did not find it so.
Recommendation: a bit of a summer-read perhaps. You don't owe it to McEwan to read this book - he's doing fine - so up to you. I could have lived without this one.
Ian McEwan lightens up in the latest literary superseller
Game Change
As with many political bestsellers, Game Change is known for the one or two revelations it makes about the 2008 US presidential race. These are indeed extraordinary: first, the stories from the Edwards camp, in particular the utter contrast between the public and private personas of Elisabeth Edwards, the growing megalomaniac detachment of John Edwards from reality, and the unhinged story of his relationship and consequent love-child with the frankly loopy Real Hunter. Second, and for me even more fascinating, come the revelations about the process whereby Sarah Palin found herself propelled into the limelight as a vice-presidential candidate and the amazing behind-the-scenes stories of how she handled her candidature. You could say it is reassuring the the story ends up with persons other than these remarkable dramatis personae elected to high office, but it is anything but reassuring to note how close they got. Europeans are perhaps protected from this by the debatable virtue of their insiderish party political systems, America, with is more open, individualistic system, are protected differently, by an insanely long and gruelling campaign and pitiless attention which probes and probes and exposes the slightest weakness. So far, just, it has kept the Edwards and the Palins out, thank goodness.
This book is far more than its sensational revelations, though, it is a detailed and painstaking account of the principal campaigns, those of Obama, Clinton and McCain. All three emerge with great credit, though ultimately you come to the conviction that the right man won. Much of the narrative, particularly of the Obama campaign, will be familiar to the fanboys of US politics who will presumably buy this book, but its wide perspective allows very revealing comparisons of how the different campaigns were run and why the end result reflected not only the personal strengths and weaknesses of the candidates but also of their operations.
Recommendation: if you're a fanboy, absolutely. For others this may be a bit much. That said, everyone should read the Palin section, just to appreciate how close we came...
Gravitas and ineptitude: stunning revelations and fanboy analysis of the 2008 presidential race
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