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

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

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

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

Mischievously upending reading: "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye-catching cover

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

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

Great American reading: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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