Enigmatic reading: "The Girl Who Wasn't There" by Ferdinand von Schirach

This is one of those purchases based on little more than the anticipated need for a shorter, quicker, lighter read (post-Franzen), a vague wish to read something by a new (to me) author, and some Waterstone's in-store marketing. Short and quick it certainly was, but "light" might be doing it something of a disservice.

Picking this book up in a bookshop, this book looks like a fairly standard-issue work of crime fiction, albeit with the apparently fashionable twist that it is foreign. (I suppose that, after Scandinavian noir, it was time for a dalliance with the German Krimi.) On reading however, this is rather distant from your standard whodunnit, with over half of the book elapsing before the (I am told) familiar figure of defence counsel, Konrad Biegler, comes on the scene to deal with a crime we only discover to have occurred at that point. Prior to that, the story is entirely the life story of the central protagonist, Sebastian von Eschburg.

Eschburg hails from a fading, dysfunctional aristocratic Bavarian family, living out a childhood between a slowly disintegrating Schloss and a cold-showerly traditional boarding school and a slowly disintegrating family. Slowly, at least until the day when the young Eschberg goes hunting with his father, witnesses the evisceration of a deer and something even more traumatising. The boy, later man, lives, somehow seemingly almost contentedly, on the borders of autism, observing the world rather than participating in it, perceiving reality not as most do, but in shades of colour. It is a predisposition he turns to his advantage, as he becomes a photographer, increasingly feted in the art world, though also increasingly drawn to dark, edgy and even criminally pornographic subject matter.

Ferdinand von Schirach

Superstar writer reading: "Purity" by Jonathan Franzen

On 18 October, along with some 1500 other people, I went to the Bozar concert hall in Brussels, to see the latest crowd-pulling international star packing them in the course of a European tour. No, not Barenboim; not Yo-Yo Ma either, but superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen. He who has been said to embody The Great American Novelist. 

For an American writer to pack out an event in a major concert hall, in a city where English is not even the national language, is fair evidence of his status, and indeed, after we had all endured  a rather embarrassing and unnecessary introduction from Flemish writer Saskia De Coster, Franzen delivered for the fans, answering questions from interviewer Annelies Beck (who, by contrast, did a great job) and from the audience with dry and witty aplomb. He also read two extracts from Purity, one relating the purloining of a nuclear missile for the purposes of enhanced sexual gratification in a trashy Texan relationship, the other a conversation between leading character, Tom Aberant, and his former wife, Anabel Laird, aka Penelope Tyler, in the course of which he is persuaded via a rambling, disconnected exchange to go to visit her (something they, and we, know to be a terrible idea). The latter extract in particular showed off Franzen's extraordinary talent for combining great emotional depth with painful but laugh-out-loud comedy. As it happens, I saw this same extract cited by Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, who did a recent Lunch with the FT interview with Franzen, as having left her "slack-jawed with admiration", but wondering "what his ex-wife would have made of it".

I have remarked on those Franzen sentences before, the ones that stop you in your tracks with admiration for the sheer skill with which he employs language. Purity offers many such moments, though - and I can bring no hard statistics to the table on this - perhaps not with the sheer number of them as we saw in The Corrections or in Freedom. This novel felt just slightly more concerned with the story, in slightly more of a hurry to get on with it, and in fact I was surprised at the speed I was turning the pages, especially in the earlier parts of the novel. Of course, this is still a long book, and a correspondingly long read, but somehow it felt just slightly less effortful than the two previous blockbusters.

Europolitical reading: "The Making of a European President" by Nereo Peñalver García and Julian Priestley

It is with trepidation that I begin to write about this book, it being the second by someone I actually know (the first one was this). Not only that, half the writing team is familiar to me not only as a former colleague, boss and friend, but also as co-writer of a previous book. So you can see there are potential pitfalls here. 

 So it is just as well that I can honestly say I enjoyed this book. A mark of that fact is that I read it extremely quickly, partly in the office (the subject matter made that somehow acceptable). The assertion of "enjoyment" may seem strange - as it did to a friend I mentioned this to - when discussing a non-fiction book on the potentially rather arcane subject of the evolving manner of electing a president of the European Commission, but I can offer two explanations. First, I am something of a geek myself on such matters, not least having played my own small part in making the Spitzenkandidaten process a reality, through my role in a communication campaign on the 2014 European elections which insisted that "this time it's different" and exhorting voters to "choose who's in charge". Second, spare the blushes, dear authors, the book is well-written, easy to read and, well, interesting.

Three things stand out for me as I look back on the book. The first is its historical perspective. The history of the EU is of course relatively short, and that of the European Parliament, at least as a serious factor in the story (i.e. since the first direct election in 1979), is even shorter. Short enough indeed that one of the authors, Julian Priestley, has first-hand experience of pretty much the whole thing. However, being a practitioner inside the system does not necessarily imply the ability to step back and look cooly at the historical trends and tendencies that were playing out. In this case, however, that perspective is very much there. It is fascinating to see how the jump to (what appears to be) an entrenched new way of electing a Commission President is not some out-of-the-blue coup pulled off by a newly assertive Parliament, but a coup pulled off by a newly assertive Parliament as part of a long term process, whereby the choice of president has steadily been politicised and democratised over the years. Seen this way, the step taken with the 2014 elections and the election of Jean-Claude Juncker, in the face of the opposition of most EU governments, is the continuation of a long-ongoing trend, rather than a one-off - and therefore more inherently fragile - event. 

Dickensian reading: "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt

To attempt to write anything about Donna Tartt's lengthy (800+ pages, in my edition) novel is, it seems, to venture into a debate about What is Art?, What is Literature? and other Big Questions. The critics are divided, with the bulk of reviewers - as well as the general public, if stellar sales are anything to go by - firmly placing the novel in the category of literary greatness, but with a dissenting minority of highbrow commentators crying foul, depicting the book as faux-literary pulp for an infantilised readership that cannot tell the difference any more. In an age when such elitism is scorned on principle, it would be easy to dismiss the latter school as snobbish and out of touch, but, on a different principle, I see virtue in someone at least trying to stand up for some notion of absolute merit, however subjective and slippery such judgements will be. 

I don't honestly know - to take one measure used in this particular debate - whether Tartt's Goldfinch will display the cultural durability of the Fabritius painting from which it takes its title. Will the novel still be admired in 300 years in the way that the painting is today? (Not - confession time - that I had previously heard of this Dutch masterpiece before the book made me aware of it.) Perhaps the problem is that, as many have noted, The Goldfinch occupies a literary space very similar to that staked out a century and a half ago, by Charles Dickens.

Indeed, you can take the characters and plot of The Goldfinch and match them, as many have, to equivalents in Oliver Twist. The hero, Theo Decker, is the orphan protagonist, his best friend, the extraordinary Boris, is the Artful Dodger, Theo's gambler father, Larry, is a sort of Fagin and so on. More than this though, the equivalence lies in the kind of book this is and the way it tells its story. Many, mixing the literary reference points, describe this as a Bildungsroman, the story of Theo's life and formative vicissitudes following the catastrophic event which defines the rest of his life. His strengths and his weaknesses play out in interaction with a magnificent gallery of characters, in a world full of twists, turns and coincidences, in sharply contrasting environments: the different Manhattans which together make up his true home, the bleakly foreclosed McMansion territory of peripheral Las Vegas to which he is brutally transplanted for most of his adolescent years, as well as a cold, dark and claustrophobic Amsterdam where climatic events take place. 

The Goldfinch, a painting by
Carel Fabritius (1654)

Like Dickens, Tartt writes a plot-driven, page turning narrative, something which in itself perhaps troubles the highbrow critics of the book. Dickens of course wrote to entertain, his novels famously emerging in instalments, paid for practically by the word by newspaper proprietors. This didn't void them of literary merit. The Goldfinch, though not written in the same way - indeed, Tartt is a notoriously slow writer, with this novel some ten years in the making - shares many Dickensian attributes. This is for example, despite its length, not a difficult or challenging read in itself, the story rattling along satisfyingly throughout. Perhaps neither characters nor plot are fully plausible at all times, but they are memorable and superbly evoked. Best of all is Theo's great lifelong friend, Boris, whom he meets in the desolate Vegas years, a worldly-unwise, drugged-up, precociously dodgy, effectively parentless Russian (or is it Ukrainian?) boy who washes up in the desert and teaches Theo the merits of perilous amounts of alcohol and drugs, the Great Russian Novel, shoplifting and the value of true friendship. Boris illuminates the pages on which he features. Alongside him, in a gallery of great characters, we have a wealthy Upper East Side family who take young Theo in for a while, whose high society lifestyle disguises both genuine concern for him and a strain of manic mental instability; the gentle giant Hobie, a surrogate parent for Theo, who provides a degree of security and refuge for his lost soul in a hopelessly uneconomic antiques restoration shop in Greenwich Village; the damaged and unworldly Pippa, who alone in the world shares Theo's defining experience, but though deeply loved and loving, remains always just out of reach; Theo's deadbeat dad, Larry, living off gambling and mixing dangerously with the Vegas underworld, swinging incomprehensibly between self-pity, some sort of real love for his son, the sense of life as a performance and cynical exploitation of his nearest and dearest, including his drug-and-alcohol addicted girlfriend, the wonderfully renamed Xandra, who turns out to be a bit better than her druggy, burned-out sexpot exterior might suggest. 

Primate reading: "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a most unusual novel. Really. It was one of the (newly admitted) US novels to be shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, and it is easy to see how something this left field would appeal to the jury. 

This was one of those occasional books picked up rather at random and/or on the strength of its cover and blurb. Yes, this occurred in time-honoured fashion in St. Pancras railway station in the new Hatchards. I had never heard of it, yet something about it appealed. Good, because I am deeply glad I read this book, even if, even now, I'm not quite sure I know what I make of it. I have a sneaking suspicion I didn't get the half of it, somehow skating superficially over the surface of a massively deep book. 

It is fundamentally a story of sibling love and loss, of what it means to be human, of what a family is and should be, of what it means to belong to a society, of the value of life itself - not just human life. There is a deep thread of guilt too running through this book - how to live with the sense of something which went drastically wrong, though quite how and why remains elusive. (Shades in more than one way of Behind the Scenes in the Museum here.)

So far, you might also think, so not-very-unusual for modern literary fiction. Until, in one of the biggest twists I have come across, you discover, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way though the book that...

NOTE: it is impossible to talk meaningfully about this book without "spoiling" the huge twist referred to above. It doesn't really change much, I suspect, but if you want, as I was, to be gobsmacked by the revelation, stop here, do not read on.

Fanboy reading: "Juliet Naked" by Nick Hornby

The second audiobook of the return journey from our Italian holidays, was an unabridged version of the 2009 novel by Nick Hornby. That makes nine hours of listening. Whence one of our problems with this book: the car journey during which we would listen to it could not plausibly last more than six, even taking it easy and with one moderate traffic jam en route. Solution? A prolonged lie-in the next day to complete the story. Yes, and if that is not an upfront recommendation, I don't know what is.

A novelty of this audiobook (for me, anyway) is that it is the first I have heard featuring different readers. This makes sense, as the story is told alternately from the point of view of its three main characters. Had I realised, I might have had my doubts, but in fact the trick works well, notwithstanding some slightly odd English accents from the American narrator. But let's get down to the book.

This is a novel with many Hornby tropes. The superbly depicted forty-something English-obsessive music fan, the understanding of the emotional power of popular music, the subtlety of understanding of how people together tick, expressed with understatement and humour, the fond depiction of ordinariness, the refusal to slip into easy-romantic outcomes. Like Hornby? You'll like this.

Annie and Duncun are locked into a going-nowhere 15 year relationship, living in a dreary (but affectionately-depicted) Northern seaside town - the real-world model for which, by the way, I have the strong impression I know well. One reason for the stasis is that there are three people in the relationship, Duncan, Annie and a 1980s American singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe, of whom Duncan is the biggest fan. Annie accepts this - "like a disability" - and, albeit with greater lucidity and objectivity, shares an admiration for Crowe's work, notably his seminal album, Juliet, in which the musician relates his affair and breakup with a famous Hollywood beauty and after which he abruptly ceased producing new music. Duncan is a leading "Crowologist", first among equals in an online community of (99% male) fans who obsessively analyse Crowe's work on a website Duncan has set up, and whose admiration for their hero is only magnified by the mysterious disappearance from view of their hero. The novel opens with a hilariously depicted US vacation, during which Annie and Duncan visit sites of significance in Crowe's career, not least (i) the Minnesota mens' toilet where Crowe seemingly underwent the epiphany which ended his career and (ii) a visit to Juliet's Beverley Hills residence. 

Forgetful reading: "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

I hesitate slightly over this one. This was consumed as another audiobook, on the car on the way back from holidays (there were two - see next review) and was an abridged version, three CDs clocking up a mere three hours. For a 330-page book, that does not seem a lot, and, having subsequently read some reviews (a thoughtful one here), it is clear that quite a lot ended up on the cutting room floor. In my defence, this was my (successful) bid to persuade my audiobook-rookie travelling (and life) companion of the merits of the medium, so I thought it wise to start with something short. 

The abridgement did not mean that I did not enjoy this novel, simply that I may have missed some important elements and my comments may suffer consequently. It also means that I will keep this brief.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson's first full-length novel. I bought it, (i) following the advice of my literary guru-of-the-moment that "anything by Kate Atkinson" would do the business, (ii) because they actually had it in the rapidly vanishing "spoken word" section of Nottingham Waterstones and (iii) because I had, albeit rather vaguely, heard of it.

This is such an English book. It is English in its understatement, English in its evocation of rainy holidays-from-hell in unexotic locations, English in its wryly humorous response to disaster, English in its 1950s and 1960s provincial smallness and greyness, English in its attitudes and accents, English in its oblique allusiveness, where talk constantly skirts around the important things. It is also a supremely accomplished book, one which takes us with a counterintuitively light and jokey touch through a family saga of repeated, almost inevitable-seeming death and disaster, both historical and contemporary, as well as small-town infidelities and dysfunctional family dynamics, all the while sucking us down, on a trajectory rich with hints and half-hidden clues, in an accelerating spiral like water emptying out of some great pit, towards the central, hidden truth with reveals so much about why the characters we have come to know are as they are. This big reveal, the nature, though not the details, of which we have gradually discerned, is anything but funny, and breaks dramatically with the so-English well-never-mind tone that gives the novel so much of its humour and character.

Dodgy London reading: "Three Brothers" by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd's recent work has tended to be in the realm of non-fiction: biography (including, famously, of London), history, and, generally, London-themes generally, for example, the excellent London Under. However, Ackroyd originally made his name as a novelist, bursting on the scene with his extraordinary Hawksmoor, which, as I have related before, had me spending my lunch breaks back in 1987 scouring East London for Hawksmoor churches, just to see if I could detect the sheer weirdness communicated so powerfully in Ackroyd's novel. In any case, since then, Ackroyd has been more or less a fixture on my must-buy list (with, obscurely, the exception of the biographies of people, an omission I should probably rectify). 

Over the years, through both his fiction and non-fiction, Ackroyd has become the undisputed, though unofficial writer-laureate of London. His vision of the city is of an almost living thing (hence a "biography"), with innumerable layers of history and experience piled on top of each other, with the London-past frequently breaking through into London-present. In his novels, this has proved a powerful source of mystery and strangeness, with the city seemingly living according to a separate notion of time, while in his non-fiction, there is a constant emphasis on how London's past impinges on and conditions its present in a multitude of unexpected ways. 

I hadn't heard of Three Brothers before I spotted in in the bookshop, but was of course intrigued. It marked a return to the novel for Ackroyd, and a uncharacteristically recent timeframe, opening in the postwar years and unfolding in the rather grimy, dodgy London of the sixties and seventies (not so swinging in this book). The story is one of three brothers, born in the gritty, partially blitzed streets of Camden Town just after the War, coincidentally on the very same day, 8 May, in successive years. Their life is not an easy one; their mother abandons the family early on, while the father, a would-be writer, can do little better than pick up low-skilled jobs, first as a nightwatchman, subsequently as a long-distance lorry driver. The boys are left pretty much to their own devices, and to find their own ways in the city. The three have opposing characters: the oldest, Harry, is a go-getter, ambitious and hustling, willing to compromise to make his way in Fleet Street where he rises to edit a national newspaper; the second, Daniel, is the academic, who makes it to grammar school, whence Cambridge, and becomes a member of the newly-empowered chattering classes; the youngest, Sam, is the sensitive soul, unable to hold down a proper job, but somehow more in touch with other people and the city in which he lives.

Other-worldly reading: “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is becoming a global brand. There are outward signs of this even as you pick up the book in a store. First, he no longer has any need of a first name, at least not for the purposes of the cover. Second, the edges of the pages of my paperback edition were coloured black, as if a child had taken a marker pen and run it over the sides of the pages, held tightly together. The effect is both rather gimmicky and surprisingly strange (also slightly off-beam, as black is very much a colour in this book). Add to these physical characteristics of my edition the Murakami-mania which attended the publication of this book in Japan - midnight queues outside bookshops, a million sold in the first week - and you start to get the vibe: we are in literary superstar territory here.

The question for the Murakami reader is whether the contents of these books is also somehow becoming branded. Certainly here we are in very familiar Murakami territory, the quest of a lonely, somewhat alienated protagonist struggling to (re)capture meaning and connections in life, while haunted by some traumatic personal event which desperately needs, yet seems to defy, explanation. There is undoubtedly a sense of having been here before, and though I devoured this book as eagerly as I have previous Murakami novels (helpfully, he is as keen on plot as on metaphysics), the sense of déjà vu was distinctly there, to the extent that I started to anticipate certain outcomes - though it was refreshing to find that I was generally wrong.

Revolutionary reading: " A Place of Greater Safety" by Hilary Mantel

This is a long-outstanding recommendation pending on my reading list, dating back at least a couple of years, initially on the part of that connoisseur of (a) historical novels and (b) the French Revolution, Julian Priestley, and recently renewed in conversation with another personal literary lighthouse, Paola Buonadonna. But experience warned me that a novel by Hilary Mantel is not a matter undertaken lightly, and The Place of Greater Safety had to wait for propitious summer circumstances before I felt ready to take it on. 

It's not only a matter of sheer length, though the 872 pages of my paperback-brick edition, covered with print that has me reaching for my brand-new reading spectacles in anything less than perfect light, are daunting enough. The real challenge, familiar to readers of the Wolf Hall (to be) trilogy, is Mantel's quirky prose style. Pronouns are slippery: who is the "I", the "she", the "we" in action? Perspectives shift without warning: suddenly the omniscient narrator becomes a first-person inner voice. Place and time jump unpredictably between, or even during, scenes. Standard paragraphs give way to stage-style dialogue, or note-form non-sentences. As ever with Mantel, it pays to be on your toes - this is not stuff to read in bed of an evening as you drop off to sleep. Frankly, it is all a bit of an effort; I will confess to numerous occasions when I would become aware halfway down a page that I didn't actually know which characters were participating in a scene and need to backtrack to find names and establish identities. 

What does all this achieve? Well, arguably, this is more how people think and experience the world - glimpses, snatches of conversation, fragments of thought. Cumulatively, it works extremely well in an evocative, allusive manner, building up an intimate portrait of Mantel's characters. It is also the way she has always written, it seems. I was aware that this novel was a relatively early work - it was first published fully 23 years ago, in 1992, and recently republished on the back of her recent successes - and had wondered if her style might be more straightforward than it was in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But no, not at all. This multi perspective, shifting technique is at the core of Mantel's method.

Tense, amnesiac reading: "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train is the first of the summer reading recommendations from the estimable Paola Buonadonna, the one she described as a "fun read". I had already noticed the book in the shops - how not to? - but neither had I quite realised its hit-of-the-summer status, nor do I think I would have actually bought it without Paola's testimony. So thanks, Paola. 

Of course, The Girl on the Train is the thriller of the moment, doubtless being read on a thousand commuter journeys every day. Deservedly so. Hawkins has served up a clever, perfectly paced mystery-thriller which pleases above all for the strength of its central character, the deeply unreliable Rachel Watson. 

Rachel is the "girl on the train" (the rather inaccurate use of "girl", one suspects, being chosen precisely to invite comparison with another wildly successful unreliable narrator story, Gone Girl, a not entirely inappropriate comparison), who rumbles into London from the suburbs every day. Her trip, thanks to a reliably unreliable section of London commuter rail network gives her the opportunity to gaze wistfully at the trackside houses en route, notably one, inhabited by a young couple she dubs Jess and Jason, for whom she imagines an idyllic existence of domestic bliss. Soon we discover that this vision contrasts markedly with her own life. She is a recent divorcee, from the wonderful, but not ever-patient, Tom, with whom she once lived in a house also visible from the train just a few doors down from Jess and Jason. Tom is still in this house, now with a new wife, Anna (who "stole" Tom) and their brand new baby, Evie. We are soon given grounds to understand Tom, Rachel is erratic and alcoholic, given to extreme outrageous behaviour, often in the direction of pathetically harassing Tom and Anna. Moreover, even her daily commute is a sham, she having lost her job months before, the pretence maintained for the sake of appearances towards her (almost) ever-patient landlady/flatmate Cathy, to somehow appease the world in general and, almost certainly, simply to have the opportunity fleetingly to observe the lives of Jess and Jason, Tom and Anna.

The story picks up, as the cover blurb will tell you, when Rachel sees something from the train which wrecks her view of Jess and Jason's domestic idyll, and which could have an important bearing on a police investigation into the subsequent disappearance of Jess (in reality called Megan, her husband being Scott).

Post-traumatic reading: "The Optimists" by Andrew Miller

So back to real books after the audiobook interlude, and indeed back to a book started a week or two before the two audiobooks did their thing. Back also to a writer who has featured a couple of times recently on this blog, the author of Pure (currently one of my most frequent recommendations) and Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller. These two books, set at opposite ends of the eighteenth century impressed me hugely and have stuck with me, leaving a strong sense of the weird, the unexplained and the unaccountable, perhaps in nature, perhaps in human nature. The sheer admiration they provoked led me to the 'M' shelf in Nottingham Waterstones in search of more by Miller.

Unlike the two historical novels, The Optimists is a contemporary tale, set somewhere in the mid-1990's. It tells the story of Clem Glass, a photo-journalist recently returned from a place we rapidly understand to be Congo, where he recorded the aftermath of an atrocity, a massacre of unarmed civilians, in a remote church. Details of the event, and Clem's experience of it, emerge in dribs and drabs over the course of the novel, but it is clear from the outset that the vision of hell and human depravity has completely derailed Clem, leaving him listless, without compass, disengaged. Ironically, what restores at least some purpose to his life is the acute mental breakdown suffered by his sister, Clare, a danger to her which outstrips even Clem's danger to himself and which prompts him to act. 

The bulk of the novel recounts the halting progress made by Clare, as Clem, together with family and friends, edge her back from her personal abyss over a summer spent in an old family property in the West Country of their childhood. Her recovery (of sorts) is matched, it seems, by Clem's re-engagement with the world, and his implicit acknowledgement that the pure evil he witnessed in the Congo does not define all of humankind, all of the time. 

The story takes a sudden turn (actually sudden turns are not unusual in this novel) when new reaches Clem that the man he believes to be the perpetrator of the church massacre, has been arrested in Brussels under an international warrant, and though subsequently released, is at large in that city. Whence a section of the book set in Brussels' Matongé district and environs in which Clem seeks to confront the man who sits at the heart of his nightmares. How this pans out, and what Clem experiences in Brussels prove that nothing is quite as simple as it might be. 

Technophobic (?) reading: "The Fear Index" by Robert Harris

This was the second of the audiobooks consumed on my solo road trip to Italy, this being made possible by the fact that a 14 hour drive became an 18 hour one thanks to a large diversion in Switzerland to avoid a two hour queue at the St. Gothard tunnel, more queues at the Italian border and the inevitable stop-and-start in the tratto appenninico  of the A1 motorway. None of which bothered me too much, as this was a gripping tale which wiled away the hours quite nicely.

This book is an unashamed thriller, in thriller mode, with leading characters referred to tersely by their surnames. I can't claim the intellectual respectability for an audiobook I invoked for Station Eleven, because this was an abridged version of the original novel (though still a meaty six hours of listening), but it is a high-grade thriller nonetheless, as you would expect from the excellent Harris. Nor is it ideas-free. Indeed, it is one of those speculative books which looks at the world and wonders what would happen if things were taken to their (or at least a) logical conclusion. (Dave Eggers' The Circle) was another in this mode.

The story centres on Dr Alexander Hoffman, a brilliant scientist, who has taken his knowledge, honed at CERN, from which he was somewhat mysteriously fired, and used it to build a fortune as a hedge fund manager. His hedge fund, Hoffman Associates, uses a sophisticated algorithm, developed by Hoffman himself and managed by a team of  PHD level "quants" (analysts) he has recruited himself and all of whom, we are told, are somewhere on the autistic scale. The fund has been extremely successful and has handsomely rewarded a motley crew of super-rich investors over years of bear markets. As the book opens, Hoffman is going live with an updated version of his algorithm, dubbed VIXAL-4, and is pitching to his investors for additional funds. 

Post-collapse reading: "Station Eleven" by Emily St John Mandel

This is the first of three catch-up reviews, the result of finishing three books in the space of three days. How come? 

It's down to a long, solo car trip, of the kind not undertaken for several years, and the rediscovered joys of audiobooks. You may consider that to be cheating, but I make no apology for Station Eleven, which was a full ten and a half hour unabridged listen. I even think a case can be made for getting more out of a book this way: you do actually experience every word - no skipping or skimming - and are generally in the hands of a professional who places emphases correctly, paces and pauses appropriately and helps brings different voices to life. It is, in short, a great and rewarding way to "read" a book, just so long as you have the time and focus to do it, such as, for example, on a long solo car trip.

But enough of the medium, what of the book itself? I sought out the book when I remembered that I wanted to read it, but had forgotten to include it in my selection of "real" books for the holidays. I had heard it spoken of highly here and there, most notably by David Plotz, he of the Slate Political Gabfest (and whom I once met), who raved about the book on a recent podcast. 

Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic story, set in a world twenty years after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity - though in fact probably about half of its volume is spent in pre-collapse flashbacks. If your heart sinks when I reveal the basic premise of the book, I sympathise. I am not one for disaster movies and post-apocalyptic fiction - all that scarifying revelling in doom and disaster is not generally for me. That said, there has been an exception, The Road, which I wrote about in 2011, a book so superbly written that its utter bleakness became a virtue. 

Rural reading: "Foxglove Summer" by Ben Aaronovitch

Sometimes you read a book which has to be followed by something a bit lighter. Ardennes 1944 was superb, but it was also such a book, gruelling in content and demanding in detail. So when it came to picking the next thing from my "to read" shelf, my eye alighted on something I had really bought for the holidays, Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch.

People who have followed this blog for a while will be aware of one of my weaknesses, namely an attachment to a series of books featuring streetwise London copper, Peter Grant, who is distinguished from his colleagues not so much by his good nature and fine line in banter, but by the fact that he possesses magical powers and is apprenticed to the head of the Met's "weird stuff" squad, the urbane and wizardly DCI Nightingale. This is the fifth in the series, with the previous four all reviewed on this blog: Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, Whispers Underground and Broken Homes.

There's an extra little story behind this book, which was purchased at the new Hatchards in St. Pancras station, which replaced my much lamented Foyles bookshop there. I spotted a pile of hardback editions of Foxglove Summer, "signed by the author". Well, the signature tipped me over the edge, as this isn't really the kind of book you normally buy in hardback, and a few moments later I was at the till. "They're good, aren't they?" said the lady at the till, adding: " He's a nice guy, I used to work with him." Whence an account of Ben Aaronovitch's less affluent years working as bookshop hand in a small London store, and generally of what an agreeable chap he is. Judging by his writing, this is, in fact, rather easy to believe.

Ardennuous reading: "Ardennes 1944" by Anthony Beevor

Over twenty years of living in Belgium have made the Ardennes familiar to me. Both the tedium of regular shuttling to and fro between Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg, and many a rainy randonnée through fields and woods have made places like Marche-en-Famenne, Houffalize, Ciney, Rochefort, La Roche en Ardenne and Bastogne literally and metaphorically part of the scenery. 

I confess that the Ardennes, when not playing the role of the over-familiar 150 km or so of southward-bound motorway, have often been for me a rather poor substitute for the British hills I always loved to tramp over. All a bit tame, too domesticated, too easy, with villages which seemed rather dour and same-ish (albeit populated by friendly folk partial to fine - but different - walker's beer). Nice, with some excellent detail, but let's say it, a bit boring. 

Of course, I was aware that these hills and villages were the scene of what most people call the Battle of the Bulge. On those walks around the wooded hills and valleys, I had encountered many small memorials, roadside plaques and even, in Bastogne for example, the odd bit of memorialised World War Two military hardware. Still, it never really sunk in; the mismatch is just too great: the Ardennes for me are a place of unpretentious charm, unreliable (but unextreme and generally varieties of wet) weather, portly day-trippers, grey stone villages, the odd rock valley, damp forests and rolling agriculture. 

Swinging sixties reading: "Funny Girl" by Nick Hornby

I knew a while ago that Nick Hornby had a new book out, but the potted plot summaries I happened across didn't quite persuade me I should go out and get it. Although I have hugely enjoyed and highly rate some of Hornby's books (About a Boy, Hi Fidelity, Fever Pitch), he never quite qualified for me in that "automatic buy" category of author, being a bit too obviously located in that laddish-but-sensitive-contemporary-male-writer genre. In other words, I thought I could harmlessly give it a miss, as it would be more of the same. 

What persuaded me otherwise was a March 2015 episode of one of my favourite podcasts, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, in which the book was discussed. This show, which, as its title implies, focuses on the popular end of the cultural market, is both articulate and fun, and has proven itself, to me at least, as a reliable guide. Anyway, on this occasion, there was a clear consensus that Hornby's latest was a hit: engaging, touching, page-turning and funny. (You can listen to the podcast, if you like, embedded at the bottom of this post.)

In a sense, this NPR consensus was perhaps a little surprising, because Funny Girl is very, very English, and to understand it, you surely need all kinds of cultural reference points I would not expect to be common currency in New York City. That said, from what I hear, British is currently extremely cool stateside, so perhaps the pop culture cognoscenti are now completely clued up about Steptoe and Son, Hancock's Half Hour and Till Death Us Do Part. 

In any case, the story of Barbara (later Sophie) begins in the quintessential working class English North of Blackpool, where we first meet our heroine as the local girl winning a wind-chilled, goose-bumpy and mottled limb beauty contest to become Miss Blackpool. The scene oozes the aura of a rather bleak provincial England just beginning, though only at the margins, to discern the contours of a new post-austerity world. Barbara is one who seems to detect change in the air, and this, combined with the advantages of ambition, looks (she is in late-fifties, hourglass, "Sabrina" mode, we are told), and a comedic talent only she understands at this stage, is what drives her to renounce her beauty queen title and head for London, with the time-honoured objective of getting into show business, though, less usually perhaps, into radio or TV comedy in particular. The novel is the tale of how Sophie's (she changes her name at the suggestion of her agent) fortunes progress in London and of how she builds a career in a wildly successful BBC TV comedy series called Barbara (and Jim). 

Sabrina, in case you
were wondering

Hornby's story observes a changing society with a sympathetic and gentle eye. His cast of characters allows him to illustrate different aspects of the social revolution underway. Besides Sophie, we have the BBC comedy writing duo Tony and Bill, who live out their homosexuality (still illegal in England as the novel begins) in contrasting ways; the handsome co-star Clive, whose vanity and paradoxically naive eagerness not to miss out on any aspect of the sexual revolution are his undoing; and Dennis, the producer and loyal BBC man to his core, stuck in a loveless marriage with a humourless wife of Third Programme pretensions, who yearns silently for the lovely Sophie, but is far too much of a gentleman to compete with the more obvious Clive. Hornby does such characters well - according to the NPR podcast, better than Sophie herself - with delicate observation and wry humour. 

Unheroic reading: "Red Love: The Story of an East German Family" by Maxim Leo

This was one of those unplanned, serendipitous purchases. It took place in the new Hatchards in St. Pancras station, thereby providing some hope that the role of that station in providing me with unexpected good reads is not over following the tragic disappearance of the old Foyles bookshop. Maybe it was prompted in part by an upcoming visit to Berlin (just concluded), but, as regulars will know, I am in any case a sucker for Cold War era history and anything to do with Berlin in general, so it stood a fair chance of jumping off the shelf into my hand anyway. 

It was a good choice, it seems. Only after reading it did I notice all the highbrow accolades and commendations this book had received, including a citation from Julian Barnes on behalf of the European Book Prize jury, which awarded Maxim Leo the Prize in 2011. Said Barnes: 

He describes these 'ordinary lies' and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour and truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state.

"Red Love" is the maybe slightly questionable English title of the translation of the original Eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte (An East German Family Story). The original title (and the English subtitle) however sums it up: this is a family memoire covering three generations of Maxim Leo's family. And a remarkable story it is too.

Green reading: "Honourable Friends: Parliament and the Fight for Change" by Caroline Lucas

If in the decade between 1999 and 2009 you had taken a poll of British officials in the European Parliament (such as are left) as to who their favourite MEP might be, there is a pretty strong chance Caroline Lucas would have come out top. One of the two UK Greens in the Parliament, she left the European Parliament in 2010 to stand in a by-election for the Westminster seat of Brighton Pavilion, which she has represented ever since. She was the first Green MP in the House of Commons and, after the 2015 election (the overall outcome of which she must deplore) the first Green MP to be re-elected. She remains however the sole representative of her party there, but, in part as a consequence, something of a national celebrity.

In all of this, my guess is that most parliamentary officialdom, regardless of personal politics, will have been cheering on throughout. She is a breath of fresh air in the political world: smart (in fact, ferociously intelligent), principled though not doctrinaire, hard-working and actually quite an agreeable person. Indeed, in her book, she mentions one or two lucky breaks she got as a new MP (a nice office, some helpful advice...) which she attributes to helpful House of Commons staff. It figures.

Anyway, all of this made me well disposed when, on a recent visit to the Charing Cross Road Foyles, I noticed her book. Not hard to notice, actually; her book was very much in evidence, heavily promoted in the politics/current affairs section. It looked quite approachable, not too long, and centring on a novice insider's view of Parliament.

Perhaps it's me, but it was that insiderish stuff which appealed to me most. I enjoyed her tales of absurd parliamentary ritual, the minutiae of the battle to get an office, the arcana of Westminster procedure and so on. I liked her accounts of the struggle to get anything done and her proposals to change the way Parliament works, even if she does sometimes over-egg the one-woman-up-against-the-system stuff. But this is not an exercise in self-aggrandisement, nor is it humourless. There is a lot of wry amusement over ridiculous hidebound tradition, such as all MPs being allocated a place to hang their swords before entering the chamber or Members who have mistakenly entered the wrong voting lobby hiding in the toilets until the vote is over, because it is not allowed to back out of a lobby once it is entered.

Pre-enlightenment reading: "Ingenious Pain" by Andrew Miller

After two quickly-read, but not totally satisfying, books, this was a still quickly-read, but unambiguously excellent novel from Andrew Miller. This is in fact Miller's debut novel, published in 1997. Like his latest novel, Pure, which greatly impressed me a few months ago, Ingenious Pain is set in the eighteenth century in a world undergoing a fundamental shift, towards the Age of Reason. In Pure, the story is told in Paris, with hints of the impending Revolution infusing the story of a rationalist project in still largely pre-rationalist times. Ingenious Pain, notwithstanding episodes in France, Prussia and imperial Russia, is rooted in Georgian England, a mostly still-traditional pre-modern society, but one in which even relatively humble village parsons can grapple with loss of faith, and where gentlemen amateurs exhibit feverish scientific interest in anatomical dissections and freaks of nature.

Into this world, as the outcome of a sort-of rape of a young village woman in the icy darkness of the severe winter of 1739, is born James Dyer. He is a remarkable child: tall, handsome, confident, blue-eyed (when he should not be), but indubitably strange. Though he understands perfectly, he does not speak until he is ten years old. He seems impervious to pain. His first words come after he has fallen from a tree, shattering his leg. The leg is set and he recovers remarkably quickly, never complaining even of discomfort. At the same time he is oddly detached, uninterested in stories and plays, strangely unaffected when most of his family are carried off by smallpox. His interests are more what we would call "scientific"; his favorite object is an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, which accompanies him throughout his life, and his closest interest that of human anatomy. You might even say he rather resembles something which today we might call "autistic".

It transpires that James is indeed impervious to pain. This is spotted first by a travelling showman, actually the one who set his leg and - it is hinted - may be his father, and is exploited by him up and down the land in a stage show to sell quack remedies. The second to see the truth is a scientific gentleman, member of the Royal Academy no less, with an interest in freaks of nature, who sees through the showman's act and abducts the boy to safety in his vast country house (a weird disorientating prototype of the Versailles Palace in Pure) to become an object of study, along with a pair of conjoined twins and (perhaps) a mermaid. James lives through these experiences, which involve lots of needles being pushed through his hands, a tooth extraction, and the ripping out of fingernails (all for the sake of a sale or scientific investigation - the two come to seem oddly equivalent) with a curious detachment. He is only spurred to act when he witnesses a gruesomely botched public operation to separate the twins, an event which persuades him it is time to move on.

Mischievously upending reading: "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

Since my discovery of the wondrous Gaiman, I have periodically turned to this extraordinary writer for intensive reading relief. His astonishing imagination (American Gods), his powers of evocation (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) and his adept intermingling of the real and unreal (Neverwhere) are all extremely satisfying and come in page-turning packages.

So it was that on my last book-shopping spree in Nottingham, I decided to add "something by Gaiman" to the pile. I was slightly surprised to find that I have already read all the Gaiman  novels on the shelf (if we include Stardust, where I have seen the film), except one, this one, Anansi Boys. And so it was that this book was added to the pile.

In some ways, Anansi Boys revisits the world of American Gods. It depicts the real world, inhabited mostly by real people, but dispersed among them a set of their rather ragged, half-forgotten gods, still capable of malevolence, mayhem and mischief but nonetheless still largely ignored, forgotten or unknown. In Anansi Boys however, it is the real world story which predominates; the gods meddle and interfere, but the human outcome is ultimately the one that counts.

The story centres on Fat Charlie, who is not really fat, but whose nickname, like others bestowed by his father, tends to stick irrespective of reality. This is because, as we discover following Fat Charlie's father's unexpected death in the middle of a karaoke party, his father was no ordinary father, but Anansi, a notorious trickster among gods. This revelation, courtesy of a foursome of redoubtable Florida-based ladies Fat Charlie knows from his childhood, is swiftly followed by another. Fat Charlie, who has since settled in London living out an undistinguished life as a bookkeeper for a (it transpires) thoroughly crooked theatrical agent, discovers he has a brother, a brother who, seemingly, has inherited all the magical tricksterishness of the father so evidently absent in him.

Taboo-breaking reading?: "Look Who's Back" by Timur Vermes

About one and a half million copies of Timur Vermes' book Er ist wieder da have been sold in Germany, placing it firmly at the top of the best seller lists. The English publication, Look Who's Back, is one of dozens of translated versions sold around the world. For me, my eye was caught by the, um yes, eye-catching cover design (the same as the original German design), and the admonition of Nottingham Waterstones' staff that I should discover for myself what this publishing sensation was all about. 

The eye-catching cover

The premise is indeed a tempting one: Adolf Hitler mysteriously wakes on a patch of waste ground in 2011 Berlin, his last memory being a slightly unfocused one of the Führerbunker in 1945, showing his old pistol to Eva Braun. He now has to get used to his old capital 66 years on, and somehow make his way in it. So I overcame a certain hesitation I always feel about buying yet another Hitler/Third Reich-themed book, and picked the book up as a lighter antidote to the heavy read I was just completing (last post).

The story is told from Hitler's perspective, and much of its comic effect - it does have quite some comic effect - comes from the mismatch between his perceptions of modern Berlin and our modern understanding of the reality. He is for example gobsmacked by the prevalence of crazy women in Berlin's parks obsessively picking up their dogs' excrement, speculating that these are childless old spinsters paying the psychological price of failing to breed strong sons and daughters for the greater good of the Volk. The plot is driven by another misconception, that of those he meets that he is a particularly inspired, uncompromisingly method-acting Hitler impersonator. It is on this basis that he starts out with a short slot on a comedy show, warming up the show's Turkish-German host, soon becomes a YouTube sensation with his hitlerian rants about the state of Germany, and ultimately achieves stardom in his own right as a genius satirist of modern life and politics. Of course, there is an uneasy tension between the appreciation he receives from the media in-crowd and chattering classes for his "satire", and the, well just, appreciation his words receive from many others, this being the source of the book's more serious edge. 

Great American reading: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s stellar reputation - in 2010 Time Magazine featured him on its cover alongside the headline “Great American Novelist” - is based on two hefty novels, The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). Chronologically speaking, I read them in the wrong order, tackling Freedom at the time of its publication, but only coming to The Corrections now, 14 years after it first appeared.

Actually, not the cover of my edition,
which featured an armchair, for reasons
you will discover if you read it.

Freedom mightily impressed me. Yes, I too used that phrase, the Great American Novel, for that, at least without the capital letters, is what Freedom indisputably is. It was maybe because of Freedom however that I kept The Corrections on the shelf for so long. Some trepidation came from its sheer length. Freedom was big, and took me a long time. So is The Corrections, and as you may have noticed, it is an inordinately long time since the last post on this blog. But there was a bit more to it than that perhaps. I maybe feared a let-down: could The Corrections be as good as Freedom? Would it place similar demands on me? Did I need another such book in my life, even if it was as good as Freedom? Hmm. Maybe somewhere inside me there was a feeling that you only need so much Franzen…

So how did it work out, the plunge into the second (albeit first) of Franzen’s mega-novels. 

First things first, yes, it’s a Great American Novel. But this time round that expression is more ambiguous than when I used it in the Freedom post. What is great about it (again) is its depth, range and ambition. Franzen takes on America: its society, its mores, its neuroses and its dysfunction. As with Freedom, it is however done through the unbelievably close observation of a family, both as a family and as five disparate individuals. There is a sense of unease in the novel, a tinge of a society on the brink of something bad - a “correction” perhaps worse the comparatively gentle economic one remarked at the end of the book. Many reviewers have noted that the book predates (just), but somehow also anticipates the more anxious post-9/11 America. 

Yet more Tudor reading: "Dissolution" by C.J. Sansom

I have no recollection of buying this book, though I can imagine I might have done. Did someone give it to me? A thousand apologies if that was the case and the person who did so is reading this... (However, as you will see, it was appreciated!)

This is indeed yet more Tudor reading, in the footsteps of the Hilary Mantel's stunning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the contrasting non-fiction of Ian Mortimer and Peter Ackroyd, but in a different mode, for this is one from the "Crime Fiction (Historical)" department. This is certainly not to say that the author does not know what he's talking about, historically speaking, but that you would classify this as a high-class whodunnit à la Colin Dexter or P.D. James, rather as literary fiction in the Mantel mode. The publisher's blurb tells us as much, citing admiring comments from precisely those two crime luminaries. 

Something else I did not know about this book, but realised upon encountering one of those annoying sample-first-chapters-of-the-next-in-the-series at its end, is that, in true crime-fiction form, it is the first to feature a central detective character whose adventures span other novels. Our hero is Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer and (in this episode) special commissioner appointed by Thomas Cromwell (far less sympathetically portrayed than by Hilary Mantel) to investigate a murder in a south coast monastery. What ensues is a classic closed-system investigation, with Shardlake and his side-kick, operating in the hostile environment of a snow-bound monastery where not only murder, but also dissolution is in the air.