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.