Books to come

  • Family Romance - John Lanchester
  • The Missing
  • The most important 25 books on science - a choice

Books we have read - quite a variety

  • 12 books that changed the world
  • 26a
  • A Fairly Honourable Defeat
  • A Little History of the World
  • A Perfectly Good Man
  • Air and Angels
  • Americanah
  • As you like it
  • Behind the Scenes at the Museum
  • Beloved
  • Brazzaville Beach
  • Brighton Rock - book and film
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - book and film
  • Chavs - the demonisation of the working class
  • Cider with Rosie
  • Contemplating the Future
  • Desert Island choices
  • Disobedience
  • Dry White Season
  • Esprit d'Corps
  • Excellent Women
  • Fairy stories - Xmas readings
  • Flight Behaviour
  • Going Solo
  • Grapes of Wrath - book and film
  • Great Speeches of the 20th Century
  • Jamaica Inn with film
  • Left Hand of Darkness
  • Moon Tiger
  • Mrs Woolf and her servants
  • Mukiwa - a White boy in Africa
  • Nathaniel's Nutmeg
  • Never let me go
  • One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich plus film
  • Our kind of traitor
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock - book and film
  • Raymond Chandler novels and The Big Sleep film
  • She landed by Moonlight
  • Shipwrecks
  • Slaughterhouse Five
  • Smut
  • Snowdrops
  • Stoner
  • The Bone People
  • The Diaries of Adam and Eve
  • The Finkler Question
  • The Good man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
  • The Guest Cat
  • The Handmaid's Tale
  • The Music Room
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  • The Reader
  • The Sea Room
  • The Sense of an Ending
  • The Sisters Brothers
  • The man who never was - film
  • The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry
  • Thousand Pieces of Gold plus film
  • Three cups of tea
  • Three men in a boat
  • Toast
  • Under Milkwood - Richard Burton recording
  • We need to talk about Kevin
  • When I lived in Modern Times
  • Wolf Hall
  • Women writers - see Xmas Menus

Thursday 31 December 2015

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler

The story opens with Denny's phone call to his parents, Red and Abbey, telling them that he is gay, and ends with a conversation some years later to his girlfriend promising her that he is going to change and 'do things differently'. Denny is travelling back to live with her after an extended stay at his parents' house to support his elderly parents. When his mother dies, the family are obliged to sell the family home and go their separate ways. Denny travels back to his girlfriend and while he is desperately trying to convince her of his commitment to their relationship,  his seat mate is in in floods of tears. Denny doesn't address the crying person, but it reminds him of the painful times when he himself felt totally alone and desperate as a child.
Denny is the third child of Abbey and Red's four children. He has two older sisters and a younger brother, Stem. Denny is problematic as a child and an adult, and his father never really acknowledges him as a son he can be proud of. In addition, it turns out that Stem, though he has a close relationship with his parents, is not actually their child. .  .
The story unravels with the lives of Abbey and Red, bringing up a family in the house built by Red's father, Junior. The family home was carefully crafted and provides an idyllic setting for bringing up a family. The first part ends some 40 years later with Abbey's death. She is ageing and getting forgetful, but she can never truly relax from her duties as a mother and grandmother. The second part relives the time when Abbey chose Red a her preferred partner. Was she attracted to him by his good looks or his upstanding moral principles - his calm and considerate behaviour? Or was it his unpretentious manner that made her feel appreciated and loved. After Abbey's death the kids rally round and the family home is vacated.
Then we travel back to the story of Junior, the builder of the family home. Surprisingly we find out how much he hated his wife Lennie Mae. Why did he resent her? They met when Lennie was thirteen, an illegal entanglement, and when she was old enough she escaped her village life and followed him to Baltimore where Junior was working as a house builder. Though she embarrassd him, he felt obliged to look after her. The truth was that she was more than capable of looking after herself. Both Lennie and Junior come from humble beginnings but they manage to get themselves into a respectable neighbourhood and take the family a step up in social standing. It's a hard process, and we discover that this family home is fraught with plenty of bitterness, resentment, disappointment, and psychological trauma.
The colour blue weaves its way into the story; the blue shirt that Red wears to Abbey's funeral, the blue paint that is used on the swing (and then washed off in rage). Denny's memory of the his mother's sewing basket when he looks for the blue thread to mend his father's shirt, clearly illustrates  the notion of family ties. The characters are all connected by the invisible thread that binds them through the dramas of family life that are played out in the family home.
A beautifully written account of family dynamics through the generations. Anne Tyler gives us some wonderful observations, amusing yet poignant, of the highs and lows of regular family life - observations that we can probably all recognise.
Chosen and reviewed by Merinda Wilson, 31 December 2015.

Wednesday 14 October 2015

The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The Reader by Bernard Schlink – himself a law professor and judge

The moral dilemma
This is a story with a great moral dilemma at its heart – do you own up to knowing someone  when you know that will raise many awkward questions.  Should Michael have intervened in the trial as he could easily have done? Easily but also risking his reputation etc. It is also a mataphor for the German past and present – if Hanna is the past then Michael is the present – confronting the past but while being ashamed of it. All the judges and their assesors are the past. Is Hanna the scapegoat?

The consequences of randomness
While this is only a novel – it could be a true story such is the infinite variety of life but I was struck by the randomness of events and how in Lorenz’s postulation of the effect of the flap of a butterfly’s wings events unfold which can be traced back to single seemingly unconnected incidents.

So in The Reader
Michael – a middle class boy vomits in the street
Which just happens to be where an illiterate former member of the SAS lives who just happens to pass by at that moment.
During the war – Hanna is a guard like hundreds of thousands of others – she is detailed to march women prisoners from a camp to somewhere else and in some small town the women are locked into a church for the night BUT
A random hit by an enemy bomb (perhaps a British bomb) sets the church on fire – the Allies did not ever deliberately bomb churches.
Two women happen to find somewhere to escape the fire.
One woman writes a book of this – many many books have been written.
Michael happens to study law in another town (Heidelberg) – what chance that he would go to the trial of the one person with whom he has ever fallen in love?

And it all stems from the fact that Hanna was illiterate – we never quite know why except that it signifies that she most probably had a most deprived childhood.

The love story
Michael Berg feels guilt, shame and horror at what he finds out about Hanna yet at the same time his teenage relationship with her is part of his growing up and though he kept it secret from his parents and friends he was proud to be with her. They fell in love and falling in love is not determined by class or age appropriateness. There is little in the book about Hanna’s responsibility towards him. She was in her 30s when she first seduced him – or did she – he was an extremely willing participant – yet shouldn’t she have known better –  she always refers to him as Kid. Can /should we forgive her in her lonliness?

Hanna’s illiteracy
Her illiteracy is her greatest handicap but she is not a stupid woman and is able to understand the often complex writings Michael reads to her. Of course it is her great undoing and we never really know how responsible she was for the burning of the church and the women inside for she admits probably a far greater role than perhaps she actually took  - anything rather than admit she cannot write even her name.

A further twist is that it was her job to choose who should go to the gas chambers and she chose the weakest but asked them to read to her before they left - why? It is this Michael uses as his excuse for not revealing her secret.

The witness
At the trial two of the witnesses (mother and daughter) are survivors of the fire – the daughter now (1995) lives in New York in quite palatial splendour –  (contrast with Hanna’s impoverished flat). In part three of the book Michael goes to visit the daughter and tries to give her the money Hanna has asked to be given to her.   He tells her his story.
When Michael suggests an organisation for illiteracy the woman remarks
‘Illiteracy ….is hardly a Jewish problem’ yet he finally gives it to The Jewish League Against Illiteracy’.

Michael and the prison
When Hannah is in prison Michael can again read to her without embarrassing himself – it is a form of atonement for not intervening – but was it enough and is her ending inevitable? He also visits her only once on the eve of her release but after an initial smile cannot reconnect.


The law
The law lecturer is more important in the film than in the book and the discussions in the lecture hall clearly explain that the law is the law and that Michael cannot interfere in the process. Another student draws our attention to the randomness of this trial – how it is the presence of the book which has brought it about. That there were hundreds of camps and thousands of guards and that indeed all the older generation are as guilty. This is emphasised - though not in words – by the panel of middle aged men in the court. We all know that lawyers defend the often indefensible and that justice is not always done.

I have skipped over the beginning of the book – the descriptions of the townscape and the importance of the buildings and the cityscape, his school, family and friends – they all go to make up Michael’s life while Hanna’s is unknown.

Finally 
Is this a book really about Michael and the consequences of one teenage mistake?

You could write another book about this book and the film. I shan’t.

The acting in the film is outstanding – it was a wonderful piece of directing by the late Antonio Minghella.


Sunday 27 September 2015

Dry White Season

This is the story of an Afrikaner called Ben du Toit, a schoolteacher living
an outwardly happy life with a wife and two children.

Ben comes from a very poor rural background, and is through his life
someone who is quiet and reserved, described as never being a ringleader,
apart from a minor ruction at University when his sense of justice is
offended. He marries Susan, the daughter of an unimportant Afrikaans MP,
who has “great determination but not enough talent to really reach the
top”. Ben has talent but little ambition, and Susan comes to the conclusion
quite early on that she is married to a loser.

Ben lives a comfortable suburban life and is never put in the position of
questioning the core values of South African society. His apolitical
existence starts to change when a cleaner at his school, Gordon, asks for
help in investigating the death of his son Jonathan at the hands of the
security services. It is not long before Gordon himself is killed and Ben is
thrown into an investigation that will progressively alienate him from his
social milieu and even from his own family. Helped by Stanley, a black taxi
driver and activist, and Melanie, a journalist working for English-language
and British newspapers, Ben unveils the crimes and brutality of the Secret
Police. He becomes a frequent visitor to Soweto, where he comes into
contact with a life far removed from his own, privileged existence.

He starts by believing that he needs only to have a word with the
authorities, “a brief conversation to correct a misunderstanding. For what
else could it be but a regrettable, reparable mistake?” But in the end he
loses his wife and his job, and perhaps the worst betrayal, one of his
daughters has informed on him to the security police. Melanie is forced to
leave the country. Ben knows his records are in danger of being lost to the
security services, so he leaves them with an unnamed narrator, who then
pieces the story together when Ben is killed in a hit-and-run. The narrator
knows that he will become a target of the forces that killed Ben. But he
says at the very end of the book “Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I
am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I
know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew
nothing about it.”

One of the main threads for me in the book is the systemized violence of
the security services. I found a paragraph in a book called The Lion Sleeps
Tonight by Rian Malan, an Afrikaans journalist, as follows:
“In apartheid South Africa, the violence of ‘the system’ was almost always
systematic – every bullet had to be accounted for, and every corpse
subjected to a postmortem, followed by an inquest at which the police
would put forth fatuous explanations which were duly ridiculed in
editorials, lampooned in cartoons, raised in parliament by Helen Suzman,
picked up by the foreign press for worldwide amplification, and ultimately
synthesized into novels and plays and Hollywood epics of A Dry White
Season variety”.

It was this same systematic adherence to the legal requirements as they
were implemented under those systems, that led to the revelations of the
Stasi records as wonderfully portrayed in The Lives of Others. Shades of
1984 as well.

Whether any of us has been in a position when we felt powerless to act
because the forces arrayed against us are just too strong I can’t say. But
Melanie’s father, Professor Bruwer says: “there are only two kinds of
madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do
everything. The other is the belief we can do nothing.” Ben has a revealing
conversation with the unknown narrator early on in his married life, when
he says that he “has the feeling that deep inside every man there is
something he is ‘meant’ to do.” (Page 29) (John’s brick-in-the-wall theory).

In summary, a black, rather depressing novel, with the terrible inevitability

of the end, but wonderfully written, with well-developed characters.

Friday 24 July 2015

Chavs - The demonisation of the working class

Definitions of working class:
1.     a social group that consists of people who earn little money often being paid only for the hours or days that they work, and who usually do physical work: The working class usually react/reacts in a predictable way to government policies.
2.     The working class are people employed for wages, especially in manual-labour occupations and in skilled-labour, industrial work. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, some white collar jobs, and most service-work jobs. The working class rely upon their earnings from wage labour, thereby, the category includes most of the working population of  industrialised economies of the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies, and of the rural workforce.


Owen Jones begins his book by telling the story against some of his acquaintances/friends. He begins with a joke: "It's sad that Woolworth's is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?" This was uttered by the host of a dinner party attended by the author in a part of east London that has in recent time been colonised by the middle class. Liberal views are taken as a given and, though everyone present has a professional job, not everyone is white, male or straight.
Jones, has a working class background, attended The University of Oxford, is in his late 20s and has worked both as a trade-union lobbyist and as a parliamentary researcher for a Labour MP. He doesn't say how he reacted to this mindless put-down at the time but whatever he did on the night, seem to have led him, indirectly, to write this book, which argues that class hatred is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
Chavs is full of reporting and useful information. Jones singles out the middle-class for their contempt towards working-class people, those regarded by right-wing commentators such as Simon Heffer as the "feral underclass". In this caricature, supported by the predominantly middle class media, "chav" means "underclass", or people who don't behave 'like us'. Its origins are associated with chavi, a Romany word for "child" or "youth", which developed into "charva" – meaning scallywag – used for a long time in the north-east. Others treat it as an acronym for "Council Housed and Violent". Its use took off about 10 years ago.
Jones writes, Chavs were portrayed as "Thick. Violent. Criminal." Travel brochures still apparently promise "Chav-Free Activity Holidays", while the London fitness chain Gymbox has felt free to advertise classes in "Chav Fighting".
Jones looks at the facts of increasing inequality, which has led British society to become ever more segregated by class, income and neighbourhood. In such circumstances, miscommunication has deepened between the classes; the Conservatives' demeaning of trade unions has helped to strip the working classes of what public voice they had, so that the middle class has effectively become the new decision-making class.
Whilst it is important to keep arguing, that the balance of power in our social and economic structure has a significant impact on our ability to understand people from different backgrounds,  it has led to stereotyping that will not go away and is convenient for governments of all leanings to describe the unemployed, state supported,  large estate residents as “lazy, feckless and responsible for their own situation”.  Jones reminds us that many of the working class have lost their pride, there no longer the jobs in the mines and factories and manufacturing that were available to previous generations of working class people. They do not have the ability to “get on their bikes” to find jobs in other places, nor the skills that are valued or easily transferable. There does not appear either that any generation of politicians can admit that their decision-making has effected this group of people.
Jones focuses on the case of Shannon Matthews, the child who disappeared in February 2008, to expose the way the rich and the powerful define the nature of contemporary working-class existence. Scores of Dewsbury Moor residents raised money, volunteered and searched for the young girl before she was discovered on 14 March, drugged and hidden in a divan bed at the home of a relative. From this moment, the community itself was seen through the prism of Shannon's mother Karen. Their efforts were ignored as a picture was painted of a lawless, morally corrupt,  unemployed nation. The press and politicians used the case to shine a light on a vision of "Broken Britain", dominated by a feral underclass.
The case of Shannon Matthews gives him his route into a wider discussion of day-to-day chav bashing and class hatred: Little Britain and Jeremy Kyle show, Harry Enfield and Shameless; the Little Book of Chavs, Wife Swap and the website Chav Scum. All ways in which the middle class can laugh at be entertained by and distance themselves from the working class, by highlighting just how different we are.
We mostly enjoyed the book. Some frustration was felt at the factually incorrect portrayal of the voting by the miners for the strike, the lack of a solution to the problem of this caricature, and his repetition of the facts to make his point felt. But mostly we struggled with the definition of Chavs, his being very different to our own. We no longer felt able to define working class in a changed  and ever changing world and believe the romanisation of life in the UK of the working classes in the past was to misunderstand the hardship of many of the working class and their families.






Wednesday 15 April 2015

The Guest Cat

A young couple (they are in their mid-thirties) rent a small house adjoining the large home of their elderly landlord & landlady in a quiet and scenic alley. The husband gives up his job in a publishing house to write. The wife is a proof-reader.

The book appears to be largely autobiographical (there is a great deal of attention paid to location details and descriptions of the geography of the area). The story is written 10 years after the events described in the novel. The tone of the piece is very nostalgic almost more retrospective in feel than you would expect from someone writing this story in their mid-forties. There is a sense of poignancy in the feeling of the passage of time, the unstoppable “flow of the Arno”. The sense in which events unfold that the narrator can only analyse in retrospect but whose import was lost on him at the time they occurred.

The description of their home and that of the garden of the large house and the seasonal changes are finely drawn. The narrator’s encounters with the natural world are highlighted in the juxtaposition of the two tales – one of the dragonfly and the other of the preying mantis. Nature is both gentle and deadly. The upside down reflections of passersby in the window of their house seems to suggest the mutability of the world outside the confines of their own home.

The couple’s nearest neighbor acquires a stray cat (Chiba) the cat divides it’s time between the two homes. The couple attempt to preserve that part of Chiba’s nature that is wild and untamed, they have limited physical contact with her. They delight in her aloofness. The husband who purports to care less for animals than his wife is in fact the one who encourages the cat to spend time with them. At this time in their lives the couple are unenthusiastically contemplating whether they will have children or not. These are not people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. The emotional restraint of the characters is reflected in the restraint of the prose.

In the course of the story there are three deaths of humans in the novel: the elderly landlord, a poet friend and a well-known poet whose funeral clashes with the memorial of the poet friend. We are told that:

“The word “to grieve” or “lament” in Japanese is actually made up of two different kanji characters — “sadness” and “resentment.” 

The cat Chiba also dies. The narrator attempts to engage with the neighbours in their grief at the loss of Chiba, the neighbours apparently feel that the couple have invaded the privacy of the family and unreasonably overstepped the bounds of social interaction. The couple feel they have been deprived of an opportunity to grieve the death of the cat.

The conclusion of the story suggests that Chiba’s owners were not completely truthful with the couple regarding Chiba’s death and the narrator suggests that the neighbour was being dishonest.

The story is unremarkable, the day-to-day of anyone’s life, however I feel it is a masterpiece of understatement. I do wonder how much of the nuance of the story is lost in transla

Tuesday 17 March 2015

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan


Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North takes its title from a famous piece of Japanese literature Okuno Hosomichi written by Matsuo Basho in 1689, when the poet embarked upon a journey from Edo (modern Tokyo) to the north of the country. Basho recorded his 1500-mile journey in 'haibun', a style of prose and haiku. Basho commented 'every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.'

I wonder if that was the sentiment of Dorrigo Evans, the protagonist of Flanagan's account of Japanese prisoners of war building the Burma Railway? Dorrigo is an officer and a doctor in charge of the camp hospital. His men are suffering not only the cruel realities of life in the jungle, but also the incredibly brutal conditions of their captors. Every day is a fight to survive the camp's harsh conditions, and every day Dorrigo has to confront his Japanese counterpart and negotiate how many men will join the railway working party for the day. Most of the men are dying or riddled with tropical diseases, and all of them are starving. But it is during this critical mental arithmetic exercise (critical for his men) that Dorrigo's mind becomes clouded with the image of Amy, his uncle's wife that he has been having an affair with. But now when he thinks of Amy he can no longer remember her face – he can only remember the dust motes that clouded his vision when he first met her in a second hand bookshop. When dust motes sparkle in the light it is like millions of tiny diamonds floating up to heaven.

Flanagan's love story juxtaposes the inhumane conditions of war with an unpredictable and passionate love affair. Flanagan graphically describes the brutality of one human being to another, and he exposes the destructiveness of human nature for the sake of obedience and deference. The portrayal of the Japanese officers' attitude to their mission - fulfilling the Japanese Emperor's command to construct a railway linking Thailand to Burma at any human cost - starkly contrasts with Basho's deeply aesthetic poetry. There is the description of Colonel Kota with his sword poised to decapitate Darky Gardiner, desperately trying to recite a haiku. His inability to finish the poem saves Darky from losing his head. But not for long. Later, Fukuhara is ordered to give Darky a severe and fatal beating, and in the middle of it he is forced to recite a poem; 'A world of pain – if the cherry blossoms, it blossoms.'

Through the individual stories of each prisoner we are touched by their live stories and their survival mechanisms. It is Darky Gardiner whose demise is the need to relieve himself in the latrines, in which he ultimately drowns. Nakamura tries to maintain his dignity in front of his men by commanding Darky's severe beating for the sake of his own vanity. And even in the opening scene we see Dorrigo refusing a piece of steak in order to feed those with greater need, a sacrifice that he must make to assert his authority over them . . .

After the war has ended, those who survive pick up their lives and try to live as normally as possible. Both Amy and Dorrigo believe that the other has died. Dorrigo spots Amy one day in a crowded street, but he continues walking. They are never re-united, but Dorrigo's dying memory is the crimson flower that Amy was wearing in her hair the day that they met that day in the bookshop . . .
 
By the 1980's, when I went to live and work in Japan, little was said about of the atrocities of the Burma Railway, and I  didn't have much idea about Japan's role in the Second World War. But having read this story I have come to realise why my family, in particular my grandfather, couldn't really understand why I would want to visit this country and meet its people. My experience of Japan, its culture and its people was of course very different. By referring back to Basho's poetry, Richard Flanagan, whose father was a POW on the railway, is attempting to reconcile the high and low points of Japanese culture.








Tuesday 10 March 2015

Thousand Pieces of Gold

I'm not sure what the rules are regarding the titles of books but it was surely unfortunate that there are two books with the same title - the other on Chinese proverbs which three of us bought by mistake and one even read a good deal of.

Sadly the film did not live up to expectations. The book tells a far more interesting story. Do we blame the script writer? To make matters worse the audio sync was appalling and got worse as the film progressed so much that we could lip read their speech seconds after they had actually said it - many seconds!
There is certainly a feeling with the film that politics was involved in its making and I'm not sure why. A new film could well be written covering many of the social and moral issues illuminated by Polly's life ending with the honour bestowed upon her by the State of making her home a National Heritage site - not many people share this,

Though some of the writing is a little amateurish the book is an easy read and we enjoyed it. None of us knew either Polly's story or indeed much about the slavery that still existed into the early 20th Century in America. How many Chinese men went to work on the mines and railways? were they indentured labour? how do they compare with the  Mexican (Latino) workers of today viz a  viz voting rights, becoming citizens, living conditions or with African Americans or Native Americans?
And what became of them - were they finally absorbed into the melting pot that is the US or did many have to return?

Details of Lalu's early life are sketchy and based on an interview she gave in the 1920's - even her ethnicity is unclear though in the film it is cited as Mongolian but this is not corroborated in the book.
She was passed from her father (the heart-breaking scene of her father returning home with his hands over his ears in the film is perhaps its most moving moment) -to a number of men and women for most of her life - until she came to rest with Charlie Bemis. Yet she remained a strong, kind, immensely proud and generous woman. It is easy to see how she earned the respect of the mining community with its rough drinking men.