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. 

Grimly Soviet reading: "Moskva" by Jack Grimwood

Moskva announces what it wants to be (or at least what its publisher wants it to be) on its cover, where a promotional roundel announces "Fatherland meets Gorky Park". That, in the thriller business, is setting your sights pretty high, but it has to be said that Grimmond delivers: this is a high quality effort, more than a cut above your average summer beach read.

Gorky Park is the more apposite of the comparisons, as Moskva is a crime thriller set in the Soviet Union of 1985, at the moment of Gorbachev's ascendency to the Party leadership, and a slight opening of horizons that came with that. Not that you would really guess that from this story, which draws on the past, as far back as Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin in 1945, to build its plot. (Interestingly, Grimwood's acknowledgements include mentions both of Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and Keith Lowe's Savage Continent as source material for this novel.)

The central protagonist of Moskva is Major Tom Fox (in non genre-conforming fashion referred to as "Tom"), who has been posted to the UK embassy in Moscow, we swiftly understand, to keep him safely out of the way of a parliamentary select committee which might ask awkward questions (awkward for whom is not completely clear) about his prior service in Northern Ireland, which we understand through constant flashbacks to have been undercover, violent and traumatic. Tom Fox is damaged goods in other ways too, his daughter a recent suicide, his son neglected and estranged, and his marriage collapsing messily. Tom, an ex-seminarian to boot, is supposed to write a report on the role of religion in the Soviet Union (with a view to its potential to destabilise the regime), but nobody seems to take the task too seriously. In any case, everything is derailed when the British Ambassador's teenage stepdaughter, Alex, vanishes, and Tom, possibly in search of redemption for his guilt over his dead daughter, takes upon himself the task of finding her and bringing her to safety.

Roman reading: "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" by Mary Beard

This was one of those slightly intimidating tomes that has been lurking on my bookshelf for a while. It is a doorstop of a book at over 600 thick - so much so that I noticed myself frequently checking I hadn't accidentally turned two - pages (530-ish without the notes, bibliography and so on), and was bought after I read a very favourable review, I think in the FT or the Economist. Whatever, for a while it daunted me, at least until the holidays came along. 

In the event, my fears were misplaced. For all the dauntingness of the subject, roughly 1000 years of ancient Roman history, Beard writes for the most part in an easy, engaging style, belying the sheer learnedness that lies behind this book. I noticed praise for her somewhere, pointing out that she has pulled off the not-obvious trick of being a media-star intellectual (I was actually unaware of this...) while retaining the credibility of a serious active academic - she is professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. 

Part of the way Beard achieves the readability of SPQR is the sceptical lucidity she brings to her depiction of ancient Rome and Roman politics. She is happy to debunk some of the accumulated myth around the subject, pointing out, for example, in respect of Caligula, that his name means "bootikins" (a childhood nickname deriving from the cute spectacle of a small child in large military boots), that his

horse never became consul, and that: “The idea of some modern scholars that his dinner parties came close to orgies, with his sisters ‘underneath’ him and his wife ‘on top,’ rests simply on a mistranslation of the words of Suetonius, who is referring to the place settings — ‘above’ and ‘below’ — at a Roman dining table.” Similarly, she points out that Cleopatra's supposed means of suicide - by poisonous snake bite - is highly improbable: "Suicide by snakebite is a hard feat to pull off, and anyway, the most reliably deadly snakes would be too hefty to conceal in even a regal fruit basket." 

Beard also shows a mostly illuminating willingness to use contemporary points of reference to explain the politics and attitudes of ancient Rome. When describing a panic, and subsequent campaign, against pirates, she fixes the political psychology neatly: “Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern ‘terrorist’”. Similar references, occasionally accompanied with overt authorial asides, illustrate many features of Roman politics. On one occasion, discussing the dangers of undertaking conquest without a viable game plan for the governance of the conquered territory, she inserts a wry aside alluding to the much more recent invasion of Iraq. (Sorry, can't track down the quote...)

Globalised reading: "Discontent and its Civilisations" by Mohsin Hamid

This was an impulse buy in Nottingham Waterstones based on two factors: (1) the apparent subject and (2) the author, whose novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia delighted me hugely back in 2013. I say the apparent subject, because this book, which seemed to me from the cover to be a collection of musings of a globalised Asian about life in New York, London and Lahore, is at its core more a journalistic reflection on Pakistan, its multifaceted cultures, its contorted politics and its place in the world. The book is in fact a collection of articles written and published in the US, UK and Pakistan approximately since 2000, divided into three sections: Life, Art and Politics. 

In the Life section, probably the part I enjoyed reading the most, we learn a lot about Hamid himself, the experience of a articulate and learned Pakistani, with a talent for writing, who experiences life first in New York (until just before 9/11), then in London for the next eight years or so, then in Lahore. Hamid is humane and intelligent advocate for what is good about globalisation, refusing to be drawn into any notion that the world can be decoded in terms of "civilisations", still less antagonistic ones. If there is a constant thread through the book, it is this refusal to categorise people by monolithic labels, in particular, for obvious reasons, the label of Islam. His accounts of Pakistan in particular emphasise the staggering diversity of that country, something poorly understood by westerners, notably, and tragically, by US policymakers over the last 15 years. Hamid's "philosophy of life" (a grand term he would doubtless eschew), is ultimately deeply attractive in its inclusiveness and tolerance. If he is the ambassador of globalisation, and others, both East and West, perceived it as he does, then globalisation is to be embraced.

The Art section talks about writing. Hamid's three novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the aforementioned How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia have all been extremely well-received (mental note to make sure to read the first two sometime), but I did not, in all honesty, feel greatly enlightened by his "theory" on the subject of writing, though it was interesting, for example, to read his thoughts on the use of the second-person narrative in his third novel.

Heart-warming reading: "The Reader on the 6.27" by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

One or two of the reviews I have seen of this book, including quoted in its own blurb, describe it as "set to be a book club favourite" (Independent on Sunday - quoted inside the front cover). That got me wondering about what makes a book a favourite for book club purposes. Is this some kind of code? If so, it is one publishers seem happily to adopt. Some books I have read even propose "book club questions" at the end of the story. If I were a writer, I'd have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it indicates both a path to sales and at least a modicum of meaning in the contents. On the other, I can't help but feel that the book club designation carries a hint of a rather supercilious "middle brow" categorisation.  However many book clubs may have discussed, say, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, it is hard to imagine a reviewer positing it as a "book club favourite". None of which is to say that "book club" books cannot be great books, maybe just that they are a certain kind of book. 

If so, The Reader on the 6.27 is probably that kind of book. It is without question a feel-good story, full of quirky charm and arresting ideas, underpinned by a love of books. 

The awkwardly-named Guylain Vignolles (easily spoonerised in French to mean "ugly puppet" lives alone with his goldfish, keeps a low profile and hates his job, which is to feed unsold books into a moloch-like pulping machine called a Zerstor 500, but referred to by Guylain as "the Thing". The machine has a kind of sinister life about it:

No trace remained of the books that has lain on the floor only a few minutes earlier. There was nothing but the grey mush that the Thing expelled in the form of great, steaming turds that fell into the vats with a gruesome giant plopping sound. This coarse pulp would be used one day to make other books, some of which would inevitably end up back here, between the jaws of the Zerstor 500. The Thing was an absurdity that greedily ate its own shit.

There are hints even that the Thing has a life of its own, turning itself on at night to devour rats and, more seriously, once having consumed the legs of Giuseppe, Guylain's predecessor as machine operator, in a notorious industrial accident. Giuseppe, invalided out and now dedicated, with Guylian's help, to recovering as many as possible of the books produced with the pulp including his own flesh and bone, Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days, as a way of recovering his lost limbs, is one of Guylian's few friends, alongside Yvon, a security guard at the recycling plant given to declaiming alexandrines on the job. Otherwise, the co-workers are an unappealing lot: the barking supervisor, genrerally known as "fatso" and the junior machine operator, Brunner, who spouts Front National style prejudice all day.

Rock'n'roll reading: "1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year" by David Hepworth

The premise of this enjoyable book sounds like one of those slightly over-emphatic late-night assertions by the Hornby-esque music nerd to the assembled company which has decamped after the pub to the North London bedsit of one of their number, to rummage through the record collection, debate the relative merits of Joni Mitchell and Carole King and finish off whatever miscellaneous bottles can be dug out of forgotten kitchen cupboards. (If that sounds a little retro - the "record collection" bit? - then that is entirely appropriate, as we will see.) 

 Anyway, in this case, our music nerd is the author, David Hepworth, whose nerdism became his profession, and his assertion is that 1971 was the greatest, most fecund, most propitious year in the history of rock music, with an outpouring of unassailable long-playing classics, which shaped the popular culture for years to come. "Long playing" records (LPs) are a critical dimension in this.  Hepworth's thesis is that the transition from sixties pop to seventies rock is essentially the transition from singles to LPs, from 45s to 33s, from kids' music to something for an older, wealthier audience, from a societal fringe phenomenon to a mainstream industry, and that the transition is marked, temporally and symbolically, by Paul McCartney on New Year's Eve 1970 serving the writ that made the breakup of the Beatles irreversible. 

As you would expect from such a highly qualified über-nerd, Hepworth assembles a mass of evidence and anecdote to back up his thesis, beginning with the release of Carole King's Tapestry in January and working his way through the year to Bowie's Hunky Dory in December. 

Is he right? I am more than happy to accept that he is, though doubtless someone in the North London bedsit will argue vehemently for another year. The truth is it matters not a jot. The point is that Hepworth has provided himself with an excellent pretext to do what I suspect he likes doing most, telling the fascinating, eye-opening stories of a crazily creative, productive, self-destructive era which did so much to shape the popular culture for years to come. And it is true that, for my generation at least, and, mark you, I was 7 in 1971, both the characters and tunes of that year are extremely familiar, embedded in the consciousness as it were. 

Digitally existential reading: "The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World" by Laurence Scott

This is really a most startling book. Starting with the late-Victorian notion of a "fourth dimension" - encompassing such phenomena as spiritualism and, famously, HG Wells' time traveller - Scott looks at how digital technology, and in particular an always-on internet, are transforming the experience of being human. Scott himself is a thoroughly wired human being, albeit not quite a digital native, having come of age, as he puts it, just as the internet emerged in the mid-1990s, and is certainly no luddite. So his reflections on how technology is changing what it means to be human are from the perspective of someone completely on the inside (it actually being hard to be anywhere else), though still with a memory of a non-digitalised life.

Everyone is writing about this, right? Hundreds of thousands of bloggers and miscellaneous digerati opine constantly on the subject, generally in a rather tedious and/or self-satisfied fashion. Not so Scott, whose frame of reference and scope are almost mind-blowingly broad. His book ranges from Greek myth, across the canon of Western literature and culture, to 70s and 80s TV shows, and the vicissitudes of Katie Price (aka Jordan). Nor is this done for effect, but out of genuine erudition, an attempt to examine what digital technology means for the human condition. Indeed, arguably, the digital subject of the book seems occasionally almost a constraint, somehow holding Scott back from achieving escape velocity into pure philosophy and metaphysics. 

Essentially what Scott is looking at is how the advent of universal connectivity is transforming the relationship between the individual and the world. The world meaning not only human society, though that is of course a large part of it, but also with the physical, geographical and natural world. Deep rooted psychological change is afoot, he argues, affecting, amongst other things, our linguistic decoding of our environment (a fascinating section on the "nounification" of language), our understanding of each other and of ourselves, the meaning of silence, our interpretation of events and our capacity for creative thought. These subjects are examined in a wonderfully elliptical way - sometimes he ranges so far from the starting point that one begins to forget what it was - thereby building up a highly nuanced, complex vision of digitised humanity. Some observations are small, but exceedingly perceptive, for example on the etiquette of social media exchanges and the new scope it provides for social power-play and anxiety, others are genuinely existential. 

Getting a life reading : "Point Hill" by Paola Buonadonna

Though it is a rather fraught endeavour, it seems like I am starting to make a habit of writing about books by people I know. Julian Priestley, most recently with Putsch, but previously with The Making of a European President and indeed Europe's Parliament: People, Places, Politics, is one such. Another, likewise on a trajectory from non-fiction to the novel, is Paola Buonadonna, whose wonderful memoire, Leaving Azzurro Behind, featured here in June 2014. Attentive readers of this blog, insofar as they may exist, will though have noticed her name more often, as she often crops up as the (so far unfailingly reliable) source of book recommendations, the latest of which was in fact the subject of the last post, Life After Life. However, in matters literary as indeed in other matters, Paola walks the walk as well as talking the talk, which brings us neatly (?) to Point Hill, a novel I believe she originally wrote some years ago, but took the plunge and published earlier this year. 

Yes, trains come into it too somehow

Avowedly, Point Hill started out as "a warm, light, optimistic novel about a bunch of thirty-somethings looking for love, meaning and fulfilment and finding it." So says Paola on her blog (link at end). Well, in the end it is, still, "a novel about a bunch of thirty-somethings looking for love, meaning and fulfilment." Whatever it is that happened between the first draft, written in a pre-9/11 golden age when history had ended (with due allowances for ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Rwanda et al) and Point Hill's published version, it clearly involved several upbeat adjectives falling by the wayside, and probably led to a altogether more nuanced piece of fiction than the original might have been. (Not that there's anything wrong with light and optimistic novels, let it be said.)

One key to this character-driven book is making sure you have a clear grip on who the characters are. I was somewhat remiss in this department early in the book, tending to mix up Andrea and Shireen, something definitely more my fault than the author's, as I was getting into something of a tangle at the time reading-wise, with too much on the go at once. Anyway, here's the pocket guide to the Point Hill cast: 

Reset reading: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

If you download an audiobook from iBooks now, it seems, you also get the text version at the same time. (Unless the system glitched on me twice the same day.) Which is interesting, because you can mix your media. I "read" most of Life After Life as an audiobook in the long - but not quite long enough - car trip from Brussels to Rome, but was able to fill in bits by reading a chapter or two on my phone. In case you were wondering, the dual versions were not in sync, so I had to re-find my place when I switched, but I can't imagine that is a feature which will be long coming.

Life After Life is a hefty book, 630 pages in its paperback manifestation, or 15½ hours' listening. It has taken me a while to get round to acting on this at least year-old recommendation by unfailing literary guru, Paola Buonadonna, but it was well worth it. I may as well say it now, Kate Atkinson has bowled me over once again with this extraordinary book.

"What if we had the chance to do it again and again … until we finally get it right?" So observes Teddy, one of the novel's minor, though highly significant characters, expressing the premise on which Life After Life is based. This is a story of alternative outcomes, lived primarily, though by no means exclusively - the history of the world may also change, by Ursula, the third-born of a well-to-do middle class family residing in the still bucolic delights of the Home Counties, just beyond the fringes on London. From the outset, alternative paths are signalled. Her birth, on 11 February 1910, occurs earlier than expected, on a day of severe snow, which prevents both doctor and midwife from attending the mother, Sylvie. Tragically, the baby is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, and Ursula never even manages to draw breath. Except, in the next scene, the doctor has somehow beaten the snow and is on hand with the vital surgical scissors and Ursula lives. Such alternative scenarios recur over and over again: Ursula's young life is blotted out, always marked with a variant on the phrase "... and darkness fell" on several occasions, only for us to be taken back to 11 February 1910 for the start of another variant on the life, one in which Ursula, never consciously but often guided by a vague hunch, a sense of dread, or what her mother calls déjà vu, avoids her (intended?) fate. 

Rhetorical reading: ", TED Talks: the Official TED Guide to Public Speaking" by Chris Anderson

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but today I realised that my normally rather orderly and linear approach to reading had broken down. I had three books on the go simultaneously, plus clear intent to embark on another (in the form of an audiobook) tomorrow. Chaos! 

 Clearly, there is a need to restore some order, and I trust the upcoming summer holidays will help me achieve this. However, one thing I could do immediately was polish off one which I had come close to finishing, but had been rather distracted from, TED Talks: the Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. There is a reason for my failure to finish this book, which has been on the go since May (possibly even April), namely that I had the impression it was delivering diminishing returns.  However, being rather purist on such matters, I thought I should make the effort to finish a book which had, after all, given me quite a lot along the way. I'm glad I did, by the way, even though I still feel that 80% of this book's value came in the first 20% of its pages. You will note in passing the pleasingly TED-ish quality of this 80/20 rule (which, I discover as I write this, is officially a thing, viz the Pareto Principle).

I am an unashamed fan of TED talks, and will freely admit to harbouring a desire myself to get up on the TED stage one day (though to talk about what, I'm not quite sure). The basic idea behind TED is one that appeals to me immensely, that of, as TED has it, ideas worth sharing. The notion that individuals with special expertise or experience should be given a platform to share their knowledge and ideas with both a live audience and a worldwide public is perhaps not an utterly original one, but the genius of TED has been to combine a fundamentally traditional format - the short spoken presentation - with the power of the internet, and - here's the key - to do so by reviving the most ancient of accomplishments: rhetoric.

Close to home reading: "Putsch" by Julian Priestley

It feels like it has taken a very long time to get round to writing this review. It is bad enough that I read the book nearly a month ago; what is worse is that I had already read the book long before that. The hawk-eyed who download this book from Amazon (at a very reasonable £6.36) will perhaps notice my name in the acknowledgements as a pre-reader - ha! the identity of the mysterious Himoverthere is thus incidentally revealed! - which means the Raphael Sinclair and his accompanying cast of characters have been familiar to me for longer than most.

Perhaps my tardiness can indeed be accounted for by this. Not only is this novel by my friend, mentor and former boss, Julian Priestley, but I also feel some sort of personal stake in the project, at least by association. So whether I can be considered a completely objective reviewer is a moot point. But then, who said the scribblings on this blog were supposed to be "objective reviews" anyway? Nonetheless, what follows will be a shot at talking about Putsch as if new to, and distant from, it, not least because I plan to transplant it later as an Amazon review.

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Putsch proves the point that truth can be as strange as fiction. It must have been slightly galling for the author to see real political events mirroring, occasionally outdoing, the events described in his novel, both just before and just after publication. At the same time, it is a terrific vindication of his insight into the political mood of the times, skittish and combustible, but, as ever, and has we have seen, carried out by ambitious, calculating individuals. 

Without spoiling, Putsch is the story of a former Labour minister, Raphael Sinclair, who together with a clique of bright young ideologues recruited from Oxford, mounts an internal challenge to the leadership of his party, which is in power and which, we understand, bears a close resemblance to the doomed post-Blair regime of Gordon Brown. Sinclair was a rising star, but is now out in the cold, having resigned, a few years earlier, in opposition to the Iraq war.  His trick is to see an opportunity in the general state of political disaffection in the country, which paradoxically generates a pent up appetite for someone who can offer new ideas, new energy, and a genuine perspective for change, all to be delivered with a combination of populist fervour, rigorous organisation, smart communications and a considerable amount of raw cunning. 

Though Sinclair has clearly exhibited himself as a man of principle (the Iraq resignation), the ideology behind his bid for power is left extremely ambiguous. The array of smart youngsters he deploys as the stormtroopers of his insurgency espouse a far-left programme which makes the Labour party of the early 1980s look rather lily-livered, but Sinclair himself, though giving them license to tout their ideas up and down the country, never quite signs on to the whole package. At the end of the book, you are still wondering quite what his game is. Which is of course very much the point.

Authentic reading: "This is How You Lose Her" by Junot Díaz

I am in serious debt to my book blog. It is almost a month since I listened to this (audio)book, and another, highly significant, book has passed since. So it's about time. 

I admit that this book was bought initially on the strength of something as banal as its length. I needed an audio book to accompany me on a drive  from Brussels to Cardiff, so something clocking under about seven hours. After that, the title caught my eye, then a snagged memory of reading a review somewhere recommending it. Hardly a choice based on fastidious literary criteria, but a felicitous one nonetheless. 

It may help that on the recording I bought this book is read by its author. The reader had to be intimate with the language and cadences of the Dominican community transplanted to the US, mostly in rough parts of New Jersey, for that language and those cadences are so much of the power of this short collection of stories. On the page, it might be a struggle, but Díaz brings the sentences to life, giving an authenticity - almost an extra character - to this inside view (told from various interlinking perspectives) of the often harsh life of the immigrants at the bottom of America's food chain. 

At the centre of the stories is a single character, albeit at very different stages of his life, Yunior, transplanted along with his mother and brother from the Caribbean to the unbelievable cold of a New York winter by a father he barely knows. In fits and starts, with some digressions via other characters on the margins of whose stories Yunior still hovers, the life of an individual and a community emerges. 

Satirical state-of-the-nation reading: "Number 11" by Jonathan Coe

Note to self: I must stop reading books in the wrong order. Number 11, the second of the audiobooks consumed on my recent trip to Nottingham, was for me a follow-up to the  delightful Expo 58, a spy-ridden, Cold War Belgian romance. I noted at the time that the ostensible 1950s lost innocence of Expo 58 was reportedly untypical of Jonathan Coe (so far, so right), but also that I would be back for more to try out some of his more reputedly politically trenchant and acerbic fiction. Hence, when the opportunity presented itself, Number 11 went onto the iBooks account. Except that, it seems, it should have been What a Carve Up! to which this novel is a (sort of) sequel. Oh well.

Mind you, there's no problem about reading Number 11 as a standalone novel. I just have the feeling I would have registered what Coe was up to sooner if I had read the earlier book. As it was, Number 11 was a slightly odd experience, as it was not immediately apparent what kind of book this was. Indeed, even at the end, I am not quite sure. The story starts with an account of a childhood visit by two friends, Rachel and Alison, to Rachel's grandparents in Beverley, Yorkshire. There are hints of weirdness, even of the supernatural, in the girls' adventures during their brief holiday, during which, in a kind of Famous Five style, they unravel the mystery of a strange local woman, her spooky house and a possibly undead character seen in the woods at night. But - or at least so it seems - this is no ghost story, but perhaps more a tale of growing up and friendship. Except that we are then abruptly transported into what seems a completely different story - a completely different style of story - from which Rachel and Alison are suddenly absent.

Proustian reading: "Mothering Sunday" by Graham Swift

Long journeys have recently meant an opportunity to pursue my black-and-white film project, but long solo car journeys do not allow that, so it was back to the audiobooks for last weekend's trip to Nottingham. Two books were thus "read", and this is the first of them.

In its original hardback edition, Swift's latest novel - a novella, perhaps - has 136 pages. That makes less than 4 hours in unabridged audiobook form. Is there a pattern here? Are grand British writers looking to the short novel as a vehicle for their writing? Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (which has several similarities with Mothering Sunday), or Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending and The Noise of Time spring to mind. If this is a trend, it is a good one, at least if these superb, dense, poignant books are any indication. 

I may as well say it at the outset, Mothering Sunday is a truly beautiful book, extraordinarily evocative, wonderfully crafted, delicate and powerful at the same time. It was also, in its audiobook edition, excellently read, by Eve Webster.

Although numerous flash-forwards take us into the protagonist's later life, the primary action of Mothering Sunday takes place on a single day, a precociously summer-like March 30th, in 1924. We are located at the tail-end of a disappearing world in which upper middle-class families still employed domestic servants. Traditionally, on Mothering Sunday (now, more prosaically, "Mother's Day"), such families gave their servants a day off to visit their families, which is exactly what the Niven family do for their two domestic staff, their cook and Jane, the maid. Only that Jane is an orphan (her full name is Jane Fairchild, a typical foundling's name), has no mother to visit, and thus receives a day to do as she pleases, with a gifted half-crown in her pocket. Notwithstanding the offer of a borrowed bicycle for the day, her initial plan is simple, to spend the day in the garden reading a book borrowed from Mr Niven, an indulgent employer in this respect. A last-minute phone call changes that, though, and the bike is called into action.

Meanwhile, the family too has plans. The two remaining children (the other sons having fallen victim to the Great War) of two other local families  of similar status, the Sheringhams and the Hobdays, Paul and Emma, are to marry. The forthcoming wedding is to be celebrated by the two families, along with their friends, the Nivens, with a lunch at a Thames-side restaurant. Consequently the houses of all three families will be empty, both of family and staff. 

Except that, following that last-minute phone call, which Jane answers, the Sheringhams' house will at least briefly be occupied. Paul Sheringham, we discover, has for seven years been enjoying the attentions of the Nivens' maid. It has been a furtive, behind-the-bike-sheds, in-the-bushes kind of thing, and, yes, initially involved a financial consideration, but today, at what might be his last pre-nuptial opportunity, Paul wishes Jane to come to the front door of his home where he will be alone, having excused himself from the family lunch in order to meet, a little later and closer-by than the main event, his bride-to-be, Emma.  And so the contours of the day, a unseasonably sun-drenched day in the idyllic English countryside, are mapped out: the three families will meet for a jolly riverside lunch, the happy couple-to-be will have their own romantic lunch, the servants will visit their families, and Jane will go to her pre-lunch assignation with Paul Sheringham in an otherwise deserted house. 

The beauty of this book lies in its exquisite telling of, in particular, that assignation and of all the filaments of meaning and consequence that go with  it. For all its shades of class domination, indeed some already outdated droit de seigneur, this encounter is not what we might expect, some sort of presumed ritual humiliation of the working class girl by the entitled toff. In fact, it is a liberation, an empowerment - for both of them - from the confines of their socially assigned roles, albeit with very different outcomes for them. This is not some sort of polemic about class distinctions, they are the surface - it goes much deeper than that. This is, after all, as the subtitle has it, a "romance". Swift's extraordinary feat in this little book is to fill every detail of the prolonged scene - many are returned to, mulled over, re-examined several times - with nuance and meaning, pointing both backward to a world in passing and forward to personal and collective stories to come. Proustian just seems the right word.

Graham Swift

The couple's encounter in Paul's bedroom, quickly and most agreeably consummated, is in fact the key scene of the novel, from which everything somehow flows. There follow long, drawn out minutes, during which Paul accumulates an impossible lateness for his meeting with his fiancée, drawing out the process of preparing himself for the departure which will close a part of his life forever, and during which Jane lies motionless, naked, on the bed, maintaining a total stillness so as not to disturb this pregnant moment (metaphorically, literal pregnancy being precluded by certain technical measures, which, like much else in the scene, are described with some precision). During this time, the narrative clock slows to a crawl, as every detail, every thought, every movement, every shift in the light, is documented, retained, weighed for its significance. This continues after Paul's eventual departure, which sees Jane finally break her motionlessness and undertake, as bidden by Paul, a tour of the empty house, still naked, absorbing its signs, its history, its meaning. In her tour, of a normally forbidden intimate zone, both of a family and of an entire social construct, a whole history, personal and universal, is told. The scene is utterly engaging, suffused with both inner calm and outer tension. It points also to Jane's future vocation, which, as the flash forwards (flashes forward?) to erudite public broadcasting interviews tell us, is to write, to be famous as an observer of life and of others, though at the same time a dissembler, never to tell the story of this most formative moment. No need to tell everything, not even the root cause of everything else. 

There is a drama in this story, a crisis which follows the idyll of the encounter in the Sheringhams' house, but it is one which only adds to the depth of the narrative. In particular, for me, it served to deepen the (connected) understanding both of the historical moment and its protagonists, above all that of Mr Niven, Jane's employer, who reveals, in spite of himself and in a way he would deeply recoil from expressing, an indistinctly directed intuition, a sympathy and even (dare I say?) a love which redeems not only him, but possibly also an entire social class and even, potentially, a nation from an even greater dislocation than it was to suffer. 

If there can be any criticism of this sublime book, it is its flirtation with writerliness, the self-referentialism of the writer, an abstract cogitation on the power of words, which are perhaps implicit in Swift's typically introspective, intensely focused work. But, for crying out loud, you have to push it to be critical of a work, which, in my view, is as close as you get to literary nirvana: dense, honest, allusive, nuanced, gripping.  

Yes, I liked it. This is good as the contemporary English oeuvre gets, so lap it up, dear readers. Also, by the way, if you still need convincing as to the merits of the audiobook format as a way of reading, this is possibly the best example I can think of how well it can work. Going on a four hour solo (or suitably accompanied) drive somewhere soon? Treat yourself.

Republican reading: "Dictator" by Robert Harris

I am not alone in having waited inordinately long for the third part of Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy. The first two books, Imperium and Lustrum, were wonderful reads (though I read them in the wrong order) and left me eager to finish the story. In the event, I had to wait well over four years (see Imperium review), a period in which Harris published two other novels, both excellent, but seemed frustratingly disinclined to return to ancient Rome. (The intervening two were, The Fear Index and An Officer and a Spy, by the way.)

Dictator continues the story of the Roman Republic's last bulwark, Cicero, as related by his slave - and later freed friend - Tiro.  The book opens with Cicero in exile, having been ousted from his consulship by his bitter opponent, Clodius. However, as Cicero frequently remarks, nothing in politics lasts indefinitely, the wheel turns and Cicero is able to return to Rome and join in the daily political fight. One has a sense throughout - of course, we know how the story ends - that Cicero is engaged in an uphill struggle, his successes contingent and the forces against him ever stronger. While the daily machinations of Roman politics may offer alternations of triumph and disaster, the long-term trend is for the collapse of Cicero's beloved Republic. It is Julius Caesar, who Harris portrays beautifully as a high-functioning psychopath, who fatally wounds the Republic, and whose post-assassination aftermath turns decisively onto the road which will lead Rome to the dictatorship of emperors. 

The strength of Harris' work, which is extraordinarily well-researched, is to take us thoroughly inside the world of Roman politics, seen through the (acknowledgedly imperfect) eyes of one of its great practitioners. We live the vicissitudes of ancient Rome as Cicero lives them, albeit through the occasionally interpretative lens of Tiro, feeling the setbacks and flashes of hope as he feels them. Nor does Harris forget Cicero is a human being. Perhaps more in this novel than in its predecessors do we see the dimension of Cicero as a husband, father and brother, buffeted by storms personal as well as political. As a result, we care very much for both Cicero, and the man who is ultimately his best friend, Tiro.

Compromising reading: "The Noise of Time" by Julian Barnes

It’s a general principle: if Barnes writes it, I will read it. He is on that short list of buy-it-whatever writers for me. However, on this occasion, it was as much the subject of his latest novel as its author which persuaded me I needed to lay hands on the book as soon as possible. The Noise of Time is about Russia’s greatest twentieth century composer, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (though he, by this account, would himself have awarded that accolade to Igor Stravinsky), and his tortured relationship with Soviet power. 

Power, with a capital P, and its relationship with the man and his art, is the subject of Barnes’ slim latest novel. The book relates three episodes from Shostakovich’s life, each of them centring on a “conversation with Power”: one when he is a young man in the 1930s, though at that point already established as a leading composer in the Soviet Union, one from the early post-war period as he participates in a Soviet “peace delegation to New York, and one from later life, when he is cast in the role of Grand Old Man of Soviet music.

In all his encounters with Power, Shostakovich is forced to face the implications of being an artist in a totalitarian system. The first, in 1936 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, is sparked by the Dictator’s displeasure upon attending a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich’s only produced opera. Although the work had up to that point received favourable reactions, Stalin’s disapproval is manifest immediately in denunciations in Pravda for “formalism”, “cosmopolitanism” and all the usual litany of formulaic criticisms, normally sufficient to end a career, indeed even a life. When an article subsequently drops in the epithet “enemy of the people”, Shostakovich, understands how perilous his situation is and looks to help from influential friends. Whereafter his first “conversation with power”, a summons to the “Big House” in Leningrad, where a menacing NKVD apparatchik questions him about his circle of acquaintances and makes it abundantly clear that a second meeting, scheduled for two days later, is likely to be decisive. The composer’s escape is the result - or so it seems - of the arbitrariness typical of the Terror, and leaves him in a constant state of on-edge preparedness for the worst, and camped out in the hallway of his apartment block by the lift ready to be taken by his expected nocturnal nemesis, saving his family the trauma of watching him dragged from bed and home.

Aspirational reading: "Five point someone" by Chetan Bhagat

In the course of my recent trip to India, I became fascinated by the whole idea of "Rising India" (that's a compound noun, note) and what that means for society. I was also struck by the sheer number of billboards advertising schools, always "English medium" schools offering glittering future prospects for their alumni, possibly the most common commodity promoted by large format advertising in the cities we visited. (I will upload a little photo gallery at the end of this post.)

 One way to get an insight for what this ongoing transformation of India implies for ordinary people, I thought, might be to read a popular novel on the subject. I had flicked through a book in Delhi airport's WH Smith (yes!) entitled Half Girlfriend, which from the blurb seemed pretty on-subject, but didn't buy it thinking I could pick it up next time I passed though a couple of days later, after finishing the book I was on (last review). However, next time the book had disappeared, so I had to scout for another. The result was Five point someone. 

Only now, writing this, do I discover that both books are by the same author, Chetan Bhagat, who describes himself on the inside cover as a writer "focusing on youth and national development issues", as well as "motivational speaker", and ex-international investment banker who gave the job  "to devote his entire time to writing and make change happen in the country". Yes, that's a mite off-putting, I'll concede, but if this guy can't tell me about social change in India, who can?

OK, this is a slight novel. It was easily read in a day - the day of our return journey from India - but it did the job, it did provide an insight into how things work for the aspirational Indian middle class, even if Bhagat is using his book to argue against the extremes to which the students in elite institutions are pushed by the system. 

Erudite reading: "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple

I have read William Dalrymple before, The Last Mughal (2006). This astonishingly powerful account of the Indian Mutiny (or the "First War of Independence", as I now know it to be termed in India) made a huge impression on me, to the extent that when, in preparation for an upcoming trip to India, I spotted the name "Dalrymple" in the travel section of Nottingham Waterstones, I could hardly not pick up the book. 

City of Djinns is an autobiographical account of a year spent by a young William Dalrymple, together with his newlywed wife, Olivia, in Delhi. The book is a mix of the personal recollection of an (initially) rather wide-eyed Brit decamping in the chaos that is Delhi and the learning he acquires while there: tales of the British Raj (a brief interlude), the Mughal empire it supplanted and indeed the preceding centuries, fading into the semi-myth, semi-history of the Mahabharata. Correspondingly, the book provides a marvellous introduction to the reality of contemporary Delhi (though the 12 years since its publication have wrought many changes, I suspect) as well as to the history with permeates the city, both through the monuments and sites any tourist will visit (Humayan's Tomb, the Red Fort...) and through the oral tradition and backstreet religion the casual visitor will find it much harder to encounter directly.