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: