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.

Ray Bradbury - The October Country

My newfound love for Bradbury close at hand, I skimmed the library shelf and decided on this collection of short stories, largely because, well, it was a small paperback. (I have no car, and it's a twenty minute walk to and from the library; my book choices are highly influenced by my ability to lug them back home again.) I'd also heard that out of all the mediums in which he's written, Bradbury is best at the short story.

I've read some of Bradbury's essays and musings on his own writing history and writing methods, so I know that he had a habit of making lists of words that sounded good, sounded like they could have stories in them, and then plucking one out and working at it until he'd found the story. The list of titles in this collection reflect that: 'The Crowd', 'The Scythe', 'The Lake', 'The Jar', and so on.

Horror isn't a genre that I've read much of at all, and I'm not sure to what extent Bradbury's stories count as horror; I read somewhere that one can lump him in with Stephen King in a genre of 'American weird', which I think is a pretty apt description. Not all of the stories are frightening, or more than mildly horrific. But they're definitely unsettling; definitely weird.

He does seem fond of the age-old device of one person being convinced of the danger inherent in a seemingly innocuous thing, and the disaster that results when nobody around them will take their conviction seriously. It's a trope that can be tiresome when handled badly, but I was impressed with how effectively Bradbury recycled it in new, creepy, engaging ways. The trope is most blatant in what I think are two of the most seriously disturbing stories in the collection, 'The Small Assassin' (which could almost be read as an allegory for postnatal depression) and 'The Wind', a really quite beautiful story with a creative concept at the heart of it, making it enjoyable and gripping even though it develops in a very predictable manner.

As well as the outright weirdness, the collection also contains some stories with an almost whimsical feel to them (Jack-in-the-Box, Uncle Einar) and those that are quite specifically about familiar emotion translated into a fantastical setting; the quiet despair of the protagonist in 'Homecoming', being surrounded by his supernatural family and hating his normality and inbility to be what is expected of him, shows that Bradbury's creativity is not limited to the simple act of dark invention.

Something that struck me in particular, reading as I did all nineteen stories in a fairly short space of time, is Bradbury's focus on the horror of the body. This is most obvious in 'The Next in Line', what I thought was the standout story in terms of how utterly creeped out it made me feel; after a woman pays a reluctant tourist visit to some mummies arranged in a catacomb in Mexico, she is overwhelmed with fear that she will die and join them. The careful, meticulous, horrible descriptions of the way she deteriorates -- almost entirely done in terms of bodily sensation and paranoid thought rather than emotion -- is masterful, and very upsetting. 'Skeleton', 'The Man Upstairs' and 'The Dwarf' are also body stories, in which one's own body can be traitor or alien or hated. It's a visceral and ancient kind of horror. It works.

'There Was An Old Woman' is another body-focused one, but instead of the body being the primary source trouble, it's something to be treasured and clung to. I loved this tale of a cranky old woman whose stubbornness in the face of death is both hilarious and, in an odd way, inspiring; it was a wonderful little celebration of humanity's ability to rage, rage against the dying of the light -- and a breath of fresh air in such a dark collection.

I think I need a break before my next Bradbury book; much as I enjoy his writing style and his imagination, the occasional brief and delicious immersion is enough.

Karen Healey - Guardian of the Dead

This is only the second book I've read dealing with the mythology of New Zealand, the first being Keri Hulme's The Bone People, a Booker-Prize-winning fucking marvel of a novel that's somewhat like being kicked slowly in the chest. Guardian of the Dead is much more of an outright dark-fantasy novel, and the mythology -- and the idea of mythology -- plays a much larger part in the story.

(Tangentally, I'll say right off the bat that this is one of my favourite book covers ever. You don't realise how clever it is until you've actually read the book, but even at first glance it's gorgeous and creepy and sucks you in.)

Guardian of the Dead follows Ellie, who like most protagonists of urban fantasy is coping reasonably well with her life (at her boarding school on New Zealand's south island) until, well, weird shit starts happening. The story deals with magical beings, magical powers, and -- of course -- a quest to save the world, or at least a particular corner of it. Not knowing much at all about Maori mythology I can't say how much licence has been taken, but it comes across as self-contained and fascinating and has certainly made me curious to learn more. I was surprised and impressed at how far into horror the imagery strayed, too, wrapping the reader up in creepiness until you don't feel at all safe, and that makes the story itself more unpredictable, because hell, anything could happen now. This is contributed to by the fact that it has exactly the right tone to it, the feel of myth, where every action holds meaning and things like sacrifice and lies and family and courage become all-important.

The characters are sketched well, though I must admit that the love interest held no particular appeal for me. I was completely sold on the fact that Ellie liked him, and that he liked her, no problems there, but something in his personality was too flat for me to get on board entirely with his presence in the story. But I loved most of the very teenaged teenagers and the way they interacted, and the various magic-makers and figures of power, and how Healey shows that even when strange new fantastical things are happening, the motivations and niggling details of everyday life are still worth thinking about.

This book is a prime example of what I think of as the Social Justice YA Movement: it spins a great tale with a likable protagonist, but it also addresses asexuality, fatphobia, sexism and rape culture. Which is fantastic! The more books that show fat girls kicking ass, and asexual boys refusing to compromise their identity, and people judging and making mistakes and rethinking -- the better. Ellie's self-consciousness and automatic comparison of herself to others is almost painfully recognisable, and I think it would be so for anyone who's ever been a teenager. I like that everyone has secrets, and nobody's perfect, and people cross the boundaries between good-guy and bad-guy with perfect aplomb; a healthy dose of moral ambiguity is always welcome, especially in myth.

Also there is Shakespeare in it. Did I mention? SHAKESPEARE. Ding ding ding, automatic bonus points.

I'm going to push this on my sister as soon as I can, and I'd recommend it if you're at all into dark urban fantasy; and I'm now sitting around impatiently waiting for Healey's next book to fall into my hands, because I love the way she tells a story.

Ray Bradbury - The Halloween Tree

Alas! I am now 99% sure I will never have access to a time travel machine, because if I ever do, I fully intend to scoop up a large handful of Ray Bradbury's books and drop them in the path of my ten-year-old self with a note attached: READ THESE. And as my first encounter with Bradbury took place less than six month ago, at the ripe old age of 24, I can only assume that no such time-traveling opportunity will be presented to me in the future.

This didn't look like much when I pulled it off the library shelf (which I did largely because it looked short) -- a novel about a group of boys in a small American town on Halloween. Being Australian, the whole idea of Halloween has mainly entered my consciousness via the consumption of American media. A couple of optimistic kids might show up at the door every year, and we will have to cast around perplexedly for something to give them. During high school it was a good excuse for costume parties.

The first thing that struck me is that these are very boyish kinds of boys, so distinct that I think I could probably pick a Bradbury child from, for example, a Wynne Jones child, should they ever appear in the same story. The way the story is told, hyperbolistic and rapid and rough and overwhelmingly wondrous, is the perfect style for a children's story that refuses to talk down to you.

Over the course of Halloween Night, the group of boys is swept through the midnight histories of the human race: the realities and the myths behind each of their costumes -- skeleton and witch and caveman and mummy, all those classical figures that run through Bradbury's works -- and through it all they are chasing the missing member of their band, who appears to need saving from some unknown fate. It's just enough of a driving plot on which to hang ragged handfuls of fantasy and mythology and horror, and it works. Each of the scenes is evocative, and scary, and manages to sneakily educate you as well. Plus, it's overwhelmingly about how people conceptualise and cope with death, which is right up my alley.

My absolute favourite aspect of it, though, is the sound of the words. I was only a few pages in when I started doing something with this book that I've never done with any other: I read most of it aloud, or at least imagined myself speaking each word inside my head. I couldn't help it. I want to read it to children, with pauses in the spooky bits, and proper sound effects. I want to show them how words can roll together and echo, how rhythm sings when it's done right.

Here's a bit that's death-mythos and language all at once:

"...When you and your friends die every day, there's no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last -"

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

"- now you have time to think of where you came from, where you're going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beast-man, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?"

I'm on to a book of Bradbury's short stories, now, but I haven't yet met anything that impressed me as much as this small book.

Mary Renault - The Friendly Young Ladies

For a long time I thought Mary Renault only wrote historical epics about Alexander the Great and the like, but last year I read her book The Charioteer which is set during WWII (I don't think my obsession with war literature has had a chance to air itself on this blog yet, has it?), and it was a pleasant surprise. When looking up her other more modern works, I was struck immediately by the catalogue tags assigned to this one on the local libary system: Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Bohemianism, Young women, Physicians, Houseboats, Lesbians, Sisters, Bloomsbury (London, England), Psychological fiction, Love stories.

How was I supposed to pass that up? I would have read it on the basis of any one of those, let alone the stunning mishmash of appealing images conjured up by the full list.

The book begins by following Elsie, a sheltered eighteen-year-old whose mind is the product of too many of the wrong sorts of books, and who runs away from her emotionally unbearable home situation in search of her older sister, Leo, who ran away in a similar fashion many years earlier.

Although the story purports to set Elsie up as the protagonist, at first, one of the best things about it is that in face Renault is telling the story of five people: Elsie, Leo, Leo's lover Helen, thier neighbour Joe, and Peter, the young doctor who becomes fascinated by all three women. She jumps around between their points of view to reveal the differences between people as they see themselves and as they are seen by others. When thinking about the relationships and the narration and how they interact, I couldn't go past the concept of the Johari window; if you've never heard of it and can't be arsed with Wikipedia, it's sort of a division of an individual's personality traits into those recognised in themselves and those recognised by others. Renault has a deft way of combining close third person and a more impersonal narrative voice to highlight human nature. One of my favourite quotes concerns the misunderstandings that underpin all human interaction by necessity, because we are not telepaths:

Thought's secrecy must be one of the most wonderful of the works of God. Everything else is explorable, or violable, or reacts to chemistry, or can be laid open with a knife. But thought can only be given. That's the ultimate dignity of man.

(I have perhaps been thinking too much about X-Men and Charles Xavier lately; any kind of commentary about the privacy of thought grabs me.)

Two of the characters are writers; different types of writers, working on different types of books, which means there's a lot of scope for insight (and snark) about the writing process, and creativity, and the publishing industry. Those were some of my favourite parts; I also (predictably) loved the parts set in 1930s London, especially a London seen through sets of eyes that are by turns entranced and bored and interested.

If you're looking for plot, well -- there's really not much of a plot at all beyond the progression and deterioration of interpersonal relationships, and a few progressions of individual character, but I can't say I cared while reading it. It's one of the most character-driven things I've ever read, and isn't pretending to be anything else, and the way it sketches and analyses character makes it all-in-all very enjoyable.

Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him
- Leonard Cohen

I'm going to do something irritating and review the second book in a trilogy without having reviewed the first, but don't worry: I'm not going to talk too much about the plot. What I'm going to do instead is tell you why you should be reading Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trilogy (despite the uberdramatic name) even if long fantasy trilogies aren't really your thing. My sister made me read this one; our relationship has progressed to the point where I am no longer the sole bestower of wisdom and Good Reads advice, which is sort of depressing but also means I read things I otherwise might pass over. I read myself to death on high fantasy in high school and have left the genre largely alone ever since.

I was therefore pleased to discover that this is not your everyday derivative dragons-and-swords high fantasy, even though it features both dragons and swords. This is a (young) man narrating his memoirs, over the course of three nights, to a scribe. The protagonist, Kvothe, does dance perilously close to the realms of Perfect Awesomesauce Fantasy Hero, but is saved from it because his narrative voice is so very human: he's funny, dry, emotional, perceptive and angry by turns, and although the trilogy is indeed all about this one person, it's tribute to Rothfuss's powers of invention and lively writing that you never get sick of Kvothe's company. And the retrospective narrative technique means that there's an inbuilt curiosity about trajectory that keeps the pages turning: how did he get from there to here? We want to know. We really want to know. We wish the book would stop it with the enticing fucking hints. (Not really.)

Although this isn't an ensemble piece by any means, there's a large cast of characters that dance in and out of the story, and I think they might be my favourite thing about the entire trilogy, because they have lives. They're all recognisably complicated people who sometimes interact with Kvothe and sometimes are off doing their own thing. Even if they serve a very particular purpose for Kvothe and for the plot, the reader never feels like they're looking at some stock characters who have been dragged onstage in order to serve this sole purpose. I am particularly fond of the way Rothfuss portrays women (he's a blatantly feminist writer in a way that comes across on occasion as a mite too self-aware, but is still vastly better than the alternative, and very refreshing to see in the genre of male-authored fantasy fiction), and also Kvothe's university friends and their quirks and relationships.

In fact, the majority of the first two books revolve around Kvothe's life at the University, with the result that it kind of feels like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin fell into the hands of Raymond E. Feist and was subjected to a makeover: sure, there's adventure and myth and magic, but there are also long swathes of delightful academic time wherein people study for exams and geek out over weird subjects and get annoyed with their teachers and then go and get drunk. I love it. The greatest and best worldbuilding that Rothfuss has done is in this academic arena: all of the areas of study have been thought out and described beautifully, and their applications are fascinating, and they never come across as easy. Sometimes you have to study until your head aches. Sometimes things come easily, but sometimes you just don't have the knack for it.

The Wise Man's Fear also sees Kvothe leave the University on a sort of enforced gap year, during which this Penny Arcade comic happens (see also: the quote at the top of this review). Oh, and he also learns some crazy ninja skills and comes a bit closer to solving the mystery of his parents' death, which is related to a lot of dark mythology and a possible secret society (there's that plot I wasn't going to tell you about). Another very intense piece of worldbuilding is done here, and that's the people of the Adem, who communicate emotion and nuance via their hands rather than their faces, and have a warrior code and a matriarchal society structure that are impeccably thought out and effectively delivered. I could have read about that society forever; there's so much imagination put into their crreation that you can almost feel it coming off on your fingers as you turn the pages.

There's one more thing that I was so, so impressed to see in these books, and that's the treatment of money. There are a lot of stories where people rise from poor beginnings, and a lot of stories where it's just assumed or handwaved that the characters have enough money to live and to go and do whatever the plot needs them to do. What Rothfuss illustrates wonderfully is just how fucking difficult it is for poor students living hand-to-mouth. Kvothe never has enough money; not through fault (usually), but because he has neither family nor savings, and his tuition is expensive, and it's hard to hold down decently paid work and study like a maniac at the same time. It's a story that rings true with me and I think would with a lot of people -- not wanting to insult friends by not going out with them, but wondering how the hell you can get away with not buying a meal. Praying that no sudden misfortunate requiring money to fix it will come along, because you have no safety net. Borrowing. Pawning. Making compromises. Making do. For all that Kvothe is a talented, brilliant person, he has to work bloody hard just to stay afloat in his own life, and I always appreciate it when an author is brave enough to do that to their darlings.

This wasn't so much a review as a very long recommendation, but there it is: read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, and then prepare to sit around waiting for the third book along with the rest of us.