THE INFINITIES - John Banville

John Banville is probably best known for his Booker Prize winning 'The Sea', and for being one of a generation of wonderful Irish writers who can be a bit too clever for us ordinary mortals. Some of my customers complain that they need a dictionary to accompany his books. I can't say I blame them. More recently he has also written detective thrillers set in 1950s Ireland under the pseudonym Benjamin Black which, being less intellectual, I thoroughly enjoy.

I approached 'The Infinities', which recently came out in paperback, with some trepidation. It tells the story of the final days of Adam Godley, surrounded by family in Ireland, told from the viewpoint of the Greek God Hermes, who happens to be overseeing matters and wickedly throwing various spanners into the works.

Would I be wowed or overwhelmed? I certainly started off wowed! How about this for an opening of any book, describing dawn?

"When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally."

or the running of a tap-

"The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels."

Bliss - and you know you are starting on a pleasurable experience.

It is, in more ways than one, Divine. Banville takes each of the characters, over the course of the single day that the book encompasses, and mentally disects them, almost to the point of torture. He uses Hermes to twist them and discover their darkest truths and desires. It is dreamy, almost other worldly and at times painfully lucid, with a surprise around every corner.

Exultant and absolutely brilliant.

SOLAR - Ian McEwan

It is what the trade would call a ‘banker’; a new novel by Ian McEwan and with global warming as the backdrop. Sure fire winner, this. Unfortunately for me, I am not Mr McEwan’s greatest fan, and came to ‘Solar’ (£18.99, Jonathan Cape), fresh from one of my favourite writers, John Irving, which made the task a bit more challenging. At least it is a proper book, rather than his last offering ‘Chesil Beach’ which was more of a novella, almost a pamphlet!

'Solar' is the satirical story of Michael Beard, a frustrated Nobel Prize winning scientist who has traded, dined and slept on his early career success for far too long. He has been appointed to head a government think-tank on climate change, largely on the basis that a Nobel Prize winner on the letterhead adds a certain something to any project.

McEwan does not bless Beard with any real virtues: he is fat, lazy, bored and cynical. His fifth marriage is collapsing - to his shock, due to his wife’s infidelities rather than his. However, this lack of appeal is balanced by McEwan’s eye for detail and ability to translate that into a strong narrative and an ability to construct realistic characters out of a few phrases. We are told relatively little of the various other characters, especially the women in Beard’s life, yet we seem to know them.

Early on in the book, Beard is invited on a celebrity and artist filled trip to observe the effect of global warming on the Arctic ice cap. It is with a delicious sense of irony that he observes the chaos of equipping twenty souls with the necessary clothing for their polar expedition and stopping them from losing any, even in the confines of their ship base. How can they hope to save the world if they cannot even find their snow boots?

However it is an incident, on his return home that provides the turning point and entwines Beard in an ever more complicated personal and professional web. The book takes place over several periods of time in the last ten years and in locations as diverse as the Arctic Circle to the New Mexico desert. McEwan deftly ties the strings tighter until Beard, totally enmeshed in a personal and professional mess of his own making, gets an unlikely glimpse of some little redemption, just too late.

McEwan still may not be my favourite, but he is on good form here.

UPDATE

This book has been shortlisted for the 'Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction', which comes as something of a surprise, being comic being something of a requirement I would have thought. It is certainly far lighter in style than earlier McEwan and darkly satirical, but more wry smile than comic. Still, what do I know?

CURMUDGEON'S PASQUINADE

‘Lifestyle’ magazines - the bane of our times - the curse of the middle classes. Glossy lumps of previously innocent tree that drop though our letterboxes and obstruct the way out of village shops. Each month a species of lemur becomes extinct to give way to our insatiable desire to consume and aspire. We know that the laminated kitchen worktop will do the job; but we have seen an article about hand hewn granite worktops, lovingly prepared and installed by a local artisan for only the price of a new 4x4. There are glossy ads for antique Victorian cast radiators reconditioned in a Sussex farmhouse style. We can find garden offices (posh sheds) and Alpaca farmers (posh shepherds).

Fortunately there are exceptions to this nonsense. There are a few useful pages and the occasional useful magazine, even the odd (or very odd) book review. But above all else, there is one page that stands out from all the others – Magnet magazine’s ‘Curmudgeon’. A wondrous page of razor sharp observations, recanted in the most gloriously un-PC style. [Editor – this a book review, where is the book?] When, a few months ago, the proprietor of Magnet told me that she was thinking of putting together his articles in a book. I immediately said “What a good idea and can we have some?”. Now it is with us, hot off the press; a book of his (or maybe her) collected articles, and what a collection it is.

It runs from 1993 to 2008, the bulk of his writings in one volume. Being Curmudgeon, he has entitled it: “A Curmudgeon’s Pasquinade” [CMH. £9.99]. Apparently a ‘Pasquinade’ is a satire or lampoon; I suspect that Curmudgeon uses words like this in daily conversation.

The pen, when used as a sword is a marvellous tool, and he wields it to great effect. He cuts down to size the pomposity of politicians and officialdom and slices through the idiocy of modern television and celebrity culture. In a written version of the great observational comedians, he finds humour in the frustrations of modern life. His writing is of great quality, he knows exactly how to develop an often absurd storyline in order to maximize the ridicule heaped upon his subject. He has a healthy contempt for his targets even more so for any notion of political correctness, tempered with a firm libertarian streak.

It is amazing, looking back over the years that the book covers, how consistent he has been and how consistently idiotic his subjects have been, just change the names of the celebrities, companies and politicians and the 1990’s stories are today’s. Many of the one hundred articles are illustrated by some superb cartoons by Manny Galitzine.

I have just had a hugely amusing weekend, dipping in and out of this book. It’s not often I laugh out loud while reading. I loved it.

Now, I wonder when he is going to take on lifestyle magazines……

BROOKLYN - Colm Toibin

First published in the Mayfield and Five Ashes Village newsletter, March 2010

Having been in the running for nearly every prize going this year, Colm Toibin’s novel ‘Brooklyn’ is now out in paperback (Penguin - £7.99). Beginning in Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland in the early 1950s, Brooklyn centres on the young adulthood of Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and elder sister Rose, after their father’s death and three brothers’ departure to England in search of work. There are no prospects for Eilis in the town. She studies bookkeeping and longs for a good clerical post and smarter clothes like Rose’s, but the best on offer is a Sunday job in Miss Kelly’s grocery shop.

Eilis’s escape comes in the form of another job offer. Father Flood, back visiting his hometown after emigrating to the United States, is shocked to discover a young woman of Eilis’s potential crabbed inside Miss Kelly’s corner shop, so promises to find her work and lodgings in Brooklyn. “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than in Ireland. And there’s work for anyone who’s willing to work.”

Eilis’s journey to America is one of cumulative grief. First she goes to Liverpool where her brother closest in age meets her and takes her for a good meal, in case the food on the boat is “not to her liking”. She does not know whether or not to embrace her brother, they have never embraced before. Eilis boards the ship to New York, to find herself utterly alone among passengers selfish enough to lock a seasick person out of the lavatory. On the voyage out, Eilis is struck suddenly by the inappropriateness of her going to America instead of Rose; then, in a moment of awed horror, she realizes the extent of her sister’s sacrifice: someone has to stay at home, and Rose wanted Eilis to be free.

After a harrowing journey, she arrives in Mrs Kehoe’s Brooklyn boarding house, with exclusively Irish women as fellow lodgers. Here, Eilis is young and vital enough to move beyond despair to find friendship, even love, in her new life. She works at a department store on Fulton Street. Clothes are the centre of her working life, a subject of intense discussion among her fellow lodgers, and, most importantly, a reminder of her sister Rose, whose poise and elegance used always to seem beyond Eilis.

Tóibín patiently dramatizes Eilis's homesickness and her brushes with enforced American good cheer, her relations with her fellow inmates at an all-Irish boarding house, her work at a moderately enlightened department store, her night classes, and her pleased discovery of all-night heating and affordable women's fashions. In time she meets a handsome Italian-American man who speaks seriously and tactfully of marriage. Then a death summons her back to Ireland, where she finds that America has made her glamorous and desirable, and faces a choice between the old life and the new.

Sometimes it's what an author doesn't say - what's written between the lines that's so forceful. Tóibín's spare but elegant prose seemed to reflect the rhythms of Eilis Lacey's life and personality well. Brooklyn is a story of an ordinary young woman dealing with the daily business of living. Only even for the most average of us, sometimes life is anything but easy or ordinary. Although Brooklyn has the makings of a historical novel, set in 1950s Ireland and New York, It's very literary but with all the trappings of a place and time lost to us now, which I thought Tóibín evoked perfectly with the all the right sights, sounds and particularly the mores of the period. He deals delicately with difficult issues (for 1950s New York) of Eilis’s supervisor’s wistfully uncertain sexuality and the decision of her employer to admit coloured customers.

Brooklyn is possibly Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date. Reading him is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to brilliant effect.

ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS - William Boyd

First published in the Mayfield and Five Ashes Village Newsletter, Febraury 2010.

First, a bit of book trade news. The last twelve months have been the toughest in living memory Borders, and several regional and specialist chains have gone bust and Waterstones and British Bookshops have both posted multi-million pound losses. Yet in this corner of Sussex there are four independent bookshops in a ten mile radius. Rather more than our brilliant business modelling (don’t get so big you can’t afford the losses!) it is due to the fantastic support we get from our loyal customer base, for which we thank you, very much.

There is one of those small, yet fundamental changes coming upon us. The paper Booktoken will be no more - bookshops are joining the rest of the retail world and going electronic and as from Feb 1st, will only sell the new cards. Paper tokens will still be accepted indefinitely; an advantage they will keep over the cards, which will only remain valid for two years from issue.

I must confess to being a big fan of William Boyd. He writes superbly, can deliver a convoluted yet understandable plot and constantly varies his writing format - satirical farce, epic fictional autobiography, stories told in the third person and in the first. He is not one to sit back on his laurels and ‘churn them out’ as many of his contemporaries are happy to do. His last novel ‘Restless’ won a hatful of awards, including the Costa.

‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ [Bloomsbury £18.99HB and £11.99 large PB] is probably his most complex so far. It is a thriller and tells the story of the unfortunate Adam Kindred, a research climatologist in London for a job interview, whose chance encounter with a man in an Italian restaurant leads to a series of terrifying coincidences that leave him stripped of everything he once took for granted. Framed for a murder he did not commit and finding himself at the centre of a pharmaceutical corruption scandal, Kindred is forced to disappear between the cracks of the sprawling modern metropolis.

The police are on his tail and so, for reasons that later become clear, is Jonjo Case, a psychopathic ex-SAS contract killer. Ditching his mobile and credit cards, it proves surprisingly easy for Kindred to erase the electronic trail of his identity. When he joins a church that offers free meals to the homeless, his new anonymity is underlined by a badge that gives him only a number, 1603, to denote his place in the faceless congregation.

Soon, Kindred slips inexorably into the ranks of the unnoticed. His new acquaintances are found among the dropouts who teem underneath the city's surface. Boyd takes the framework of a thriller and manipulates it to ask questions about identity, about what makes us human when all the outward manifestations of our individuality have to be abandoned in the name of survival. In Boyd's city, there is safety in sameness and the incuriosity of strangers. My only real criticism is of the central character - I had no real sympathy for him. He seemed to vary between being too stupid to survive in these circumstances to utter amorality and cynicism. We soon find that as well as losing everything he has in this chaotic coincidence; he has already thrown a comfortable life and marriage away for a sexual encounter with an infatuated student.

A wonderfully crafted, if at times flawed novel; many hallowed reviewers have described it as something of an allegory for our times, in that case - ouch!

MUFFIN & SCRUFF

First published in the Mayfield and Five Ashes Village newsletter, April 2010.

I have written before about the dubious benefits of visits from would-be authors, visiting with their sometimes less than riveting reads, and also the joys of discovering a local book that really hits the mark. So it is this month.

A few months ago, Mayfield resident Deb Findlater approached me with an idea for a children’s book that she was writing, mainly for bedtime stories for her grandson, Jake. It looked nice and appealing as an idea so I did not put her off. Just as well, as she came back in during February and her book had blossomed from a charming and quirky piece to the fantastic finished product “Muffin and Scruff”.
Most books of this type, even if the story is well written, have lots of rough edges, often literally; as the page setting, typeface, binding etc are some way off the professional standard. Not with this one though – Deb must have spent months polishing it into shape, it is just right, spot-on. A quality product, spiral bound with thick glossy card pages and perfectly laid out with beautiful illustrations by Janet Duchesne. Child friendly and child proof.
There are ten stories each one revolving around our two farmyard friends, “Two little chickens always up to mischief.” and their lives on the farm. Not only are the stories charming for young children, but they also have a moral element in that the tales revolve around thinking about others and the results of their actions. They are cleverly thought out and suitable both as bedtime stories for little ones and reading stories for when they get older.

At £8.75 for ten stories it is great value for money. A mass market publisher would have split it up and sold it for £4.99 for each story. If you are after an egg-related present for Easter – this is it! Even better, Deb will be in the shop on the morning of Easter Saturday to sign copies.