Bernice Rubens - The Elected Member

Well, folks, this one has everything you could ever want out of a Booker winner: dysfunctional families, cultural identity (Jewish), drug addiction, hints of both brother-sister incest and homosexuality, and death. That's damn impressive. And it was only the second book to win the prize -- clearly it Set The Tone for the decades to come.

(Disclosure time: so much time has passed since I created this blog post and wrote the above paragraph that my opinions & memories of this book, never too strong in the first place, have dwindled away somewhat.)

The Elected Member is about Norman Zweck, his sister Bella, and his father Rabbi Zweck. Nominally the narration is Norman's, centering on his drug addiction and the psychotic delusions resulting from his withdrawal, but it gradually expands to envelop the entire family and their own histories, secret struggles, and resentments. It's not a fun book at all, but it's very well done.

Given my own interests and background, what I found the most impressive was the way Rubens portrayed mental illness from the inside out, showing the dreadful, chilling pathos of delusion: the way irrational beliefs can be held by otherwise intelligent people, the ways in which they cling unshakably to the results of their own brain chemistry, they ways in which they rationalise and rebuild reality so that it fits in with what they know to be irrevocably true. She shows the inevitable anger that develops against anyone trying to deny that reality, and the helplessness of anyone on the outside, seeing the psychosis for what it is but unable to break through. This portrait of drug addiction and delusion alone makes the book worth reading.

The title of the book relates to the family context of this individual tragedy; the metaphor is that Norman's condition makes him the single member of the family who has been 'elected' to be both scapegoat and victim as a result of the family's collective history, the events that led to Rabbi Zweck's unhappiness and Bella's bitter loneliness and their estrangement from Norman's eldest sister. Their guilt dictates how they react to Norman's condition and use it to streamline and reflect their own suffering:

They could not bear to make him miserable, though if she were honest, it was her own pain and her father's that was unsupportable. And so they had both entered Norman's derangement, making it workable, tidying it even, making it all 'nice'. They were both equally guilty. She knew in her heart, it was better for strangers to look after him. Her answer over the years to Norman's sickness had been that he was doing it on purpose to drive them all crazy. She had to be angry with him. It was the surest hold on her own sanity. If a mind wavered, it was best to keep the kin at bay.

As often happens with these depressing, clever, well-crafted books that end up on the Booker list, I was slow to get into it, engrossed while reading it, thoughtful for a day afterwards, and then more or less shook off my memory of the emotions it inspired within me. I can't say I loved it, I can't say I'd press it into the hands of anyone looking for recommendations, but I'm glad it was on my list.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust

There will be a sudden proliferation of reviews of Booker Prize winners on this blog, because I don't have many weeks left in my current town and I'm trying to get through all of those on my list that I know the local library has.

I'm fairly sure there's a whole subgenre of books that follow two narratives: one of them set in the past, and recorded in someone's diaries or letters, and one of them set in the present and featuring someone reading this record and also having parallel experiences in their own life. A.S. Byatt's Possession, another Booker Prize winner, is a book of that sort. Heat and Dust follows Olivia, the wife of an English civil servant in 1920s India, and her great-niece, who is inspired by the scandalous story of Olivia's life to visit India herself in the 1970s.

Nothing about the overall structure of the book was particularly compelling for me; everything was fairly predictable, the pacing was fine, and it was a good (short) length. I didn't love it, in short. But I'm interested in the British Raj period, and especially the tail-end of colonialism in the twentieth century, and I think as a frank portrait of India through the eyes of an European person, in both that time period and the more modern one, the book definitely succeeded and held my interest. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a German-born English writer who -- like both of her protagonists -- fell in love with an Indian man and lived there for a while, and the book doesn't read like it's trying to show India as it is to Indian people, but instead sticks with the more authentic (although hardly original) portrait of an outsider's personal reaction to the country.

It probably says a lot that as I write this, only a week and spare change after reading the book, I'm struggling to think of specific details to put forth as examples. I didn't care overmuch for any of the characters, and there wasn't quite enough emotional engagement with either of the protagonists for me to connect with them. But I do know that the book contained a lot of little things that I enjoyed, little observations of inner life, little scenes that were described vividly, little incidences and incidental characters that made me smile.

Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils

Kingsley Amis is one of those authors whose names I'm aware of, but about whose books I know nothing at all. Plus I have a tendency to mix him up with his son Martin, who falls into the same category. My preconceptions here were minimal.

Well, that's not entirely true. Having read the dust jacket blurb, I was fairly sure that The Old Devils would fall into what I think of -- rather depressingly -- as the Booker Prize Pattern: middle aged white people contemplate their mortality. (The secondary Pattern: coming-of-age in a poor country.) And to a large extent it does. The book follows a group of elderly friends from a Welsh town, and how their relationships and everyday routines are changed when two of them move back to the town after living in England. It doesn't sound like my sort of book, and I did initially find it very difficult to get into, but once I'd been introduced to all the characters and become accustomed to the style of story-telling, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.

In large part this was because of how carefully and unflinchingly each person was written -- each one the sum of their flaws, and the more painful parts of their history. I didn't like most of them much, and often that spoils a book for me, but here it just filled me with admiration at the understanding of human nature and the well-tuned ear for prose that created these characters. The self-important, self-deprecating, utterly self-centred poet Alan was particularly delightful to read about, because Amis's structuring of the book to switch between everyone's points of view allowed you to see him as others did, and so to laugh at him when he was being most unlikable in his own voice. I always admire it when writers can use multiple-character perspectives to provide this kind of depth of character portrayal, and Amis does it very well.

The most interesting aspect of reading the book, for me, was not a property of the book itself, but rather a fact arising from the particular context of me reading it. The characters are older than the protagonists of most books I read, and convincingly old, and it's incredible how alien I found their fixations and internal narratives, from the perspective of my own 24 years. Before starting the book I'd found a mention of it in a sort of enjoyable lazy non-fiction memoir-of-a-life-in-books by Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing. Hill said of The Old Devils that it was a way for Amis to talk about and confront his greatest fears, and holding that idea in my mind was a way in which I got more out of the book than I otherwise would have. Because, let's face it, I don't have it in me to viscerally recognise the fears of advancing age; the doublethink required to fixate on and repress frightening bodily symptoms; the greyness of perusing history and knowing it to be too late to change anything important; the mess and pointlessness of a routine entrenched in bitterness, or alcoholism, or resignation. I can read them and let them create a picture -- a good one -- in my mind. I can feel the fear, a tinge of it, on the pages. But it's not my fear and so it's not my story.

The book also has a lot to say about Wales and Welshness, and I was left again with the impression that for a lot of people the book would have sparked smiles at injokes, and feelings of recognition. As an outsider I wasn't left with a particular sense of what makes Welsh people Welsh (except for, it seems, truly epic amounts of alcohol consumption); if that was something Amis was trying to accomplish, then it failed for me, but I didn't get the impression that he was trying. I just don't think this book was written, at all, for people like me. Reading it was like reading a work in another language when one has a very serviceable grasp of the grammar and the vocabulary, but lacks the deep understanding of syntax and idiom and context that a native speaker might possess. Maybe I wouldn't need to be Welsh for this book to speak to me on more than a rational level. Maybe I'd just need to be closer to the fear.

Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

This blog was created with the intent of writing about my experiences as a medical student/maybe a junior doctor, but I've come to the realisation that I don't really want to blog about my education and my professional life; if a blog is to have any chance at longevity, it will need to be something I can work on as an escape from the medical world. And the only other thing I do enough of, it seems, is reading books. So let's see how that works out.

The champagne bottle to be smashed against the blog's creaking hull is Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), chosen for the highly creative reason that it's the first book I've finished since deciding to give this book-blogging thing a go. (No, I tell a lie: the first book I finished was Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but me trying to review that would be laughable at best and also lend a very misleading tone to the blog as a whole. Besides, I'd been slogging away at that one for months, and anything related to Plato or Socrates or really anything pre-Renaissance is at this point a far-off and distant dream.) I picked up True History because I'm in the middle of a personal project to read every book that's ever won either the Man Booker Prize or the Man Asian Literary Prize. Honest to God, I am least one-third as pretentious as this makes me sound. I merely have a weakness for lists on which items can be crossed off, and a few of my very favourite books of all time have won the Booker, so I thought I'd expand my horizons a little. And cross some things off lists while I was at it.

Like the terrible, terrible Aussie that I am, I had been putting off reading this particular book. Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the Booker twice (the other being J.M. Coetzee), and of his other winning book Oscar and Lucinda I can remember very little beyond the fact that there was a church made of glass in it, what more could you possibly want? But I knew that True History was written using vernacular, and I wasn't sure that I would find such unconventional language easy going.

I'm pleased to tell you that I was completely wrong.

The book is a fictional memoir of one of the most recognisable figures in Australian history, the bushranger Ned Kelly. I honestly have no idea if anyone outside of Australia is like to have heard of him (there was a movie? Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger were in it?) but here down under he's certainly a Thing. One of our better-known artists, Sidney Nolan, did a series of paintings of him, like this:

The letterbox-head is an instantly recognisable motif, drawing on the fact that Kelly and his gang wore plate metal armour in that shape.

However: the book itself. Edward 'Ned' Kelly, farmer turned bushranger, eldest son of a poor Irish family, is writing out his life story for his daughter to read. It's very difficult not to feel for this sober, hard-working, furious boy, to whom family is everything and poverty is truth and justice is nowhere.

As far as the writing style is concerned, Carey's done something that I think is quite spectacular: by roughing up the syntax entirely, removing most punctuation and leaving the grammar to fend for itself, he's managed to write a highly lyrical book that nonetheless manages to convince us that it could have been written by a poorly educated man with a natural gift for metaphor.

When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships the ROLLA and the TELICHERRY and the RODNEY and the PHOEBE DUNBAR and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 3 crosses nailed one atop the other.

For all that Ned Kelly's voice sounds Irish, the book feels deeply Australian; the descriptions of the bush ring true, and there's a lot of commentary about Australia itself as a fledgling colonial place starting to find its own identity as a settlement built by, but so remote from, England.

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. In the hut at Faithfull's Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed it is the clearest sight I ever seen and soon Joe seen it too.

UNFAIRNESS. It deserves the caps. A major theme of the book is that of injustice, betrayal, how anger can be forged into action, how life takes more from -- and piles more onto the heads of -- those who can least afford it, and how theft and murder and rebellion can become the only paths that seem sensible when the world is slowly destroying you and the ones you love. It's certainly not a cheerful book, and I don't think I could even describe it as 'uplifting', but I didn't come out of it feeling like my soul was crushed beyond repair or anything like that. Mostly I wanted to roll around in the sentences some more.

True History has won prizes out the wazoo, and I think it deserves every one of them. It's beautifully and unconventionally written, the plot is never slow or boring, and it grabs your emotions firmly by the collar and drags you along with them.

Finally, I was delighted to find in the book a quote directly addressing the fact that Australia as a country has a tendency to celebrate things that maybe aren't the most deserving of celebration (eg. ANZAC Day, the great patriotic public holiday on which we celebrate a crushing defeat!). For all his criminality, Ned Kelly holds the same sort of romantic, adventurous, folk-hero appeal as Robin Hood. This novel has also brought home to me the extent to which he, as a poor Irish-Australian criminal, stood at the time for resistance against the English, who were the authorities in the colony of Victoria.

What is it about us Australians eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might we not find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

This Australian's opinion is that Peter Carey can go on making spectacles like this one for as long as he wants.