A Perfectly Good Man

This month's book was "A Perfectly Good Man" by Patrick Gale. It is the story of Barnaby Johnson, a Cornish parish priest, and spans his life from aged 8 to late middle age. It is written in a series of chapters from the point of view of different characters: Barnaby, his wife, his children, his lover, and the son he has by his lover. Gale is such a clever writer - the chapters jump back and forth in time, in no apparent order, and the reader is kept wondering how all the twists and turns will be reconciled. However, all the loose ends are neatly tidied away most satisfactorily at the end.

  The story opens with the suicide of Lenny, who has been crippled in an accident on the rugby field. He decides at aged 20 that he wishes to commit suicide. He obtains the necessary drugs, and asks to Barnaby to go and see him at the time he plans to take the drugs, so that he has a witness. Spoiler alert coming up! Lennie does not know that Barnaby is his father, and nor does the reader till much later in the book. The book is the back story of Barnaby and Lennie.
  Another contributing character is the extremely unpleasant Modest Carlsson, a second-hand book seller and dealer in pornography. He meets Barnaby when the latter is a young curate, and becomes obsessed with him to the extent that he follows him to Cornwall. He is the complete antithesis to the 'perfectly good man' that Barnaby is.
  I think the characterisations are marvellous, all the characters seem to leap off the page, well rounded and quite believable. We all liked Barnaby, though one or two of our readers responded to him in the same way as does his adopted Vietnamese boat-boy son, Phuc or Jim, finding him too diffident, and wishing he would be less accepting of everything, even the awful Modest. He is even asked by an uncle at aged 8, 'Please don't feel you always have to be good. Sometimes you are so good it hurts to watch you.'
  Being set in Cornwall, the cake was Cornish heavy cake, which is actually mentioned in the book. Probably the fault of the cook, but it was possibly the most boring cake ever made, though the birds enjoyed it very much!

Three Cups of Tea

In Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time , Greg Mortenson, and journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the journey that led Mortenson from a failed 1993 attempt to climb Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain, to successfully establish schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Views of the group were mixed and there was some debate about whether it is such an inspiring story in the light of facts discovered about Mortenson after publication: facts that suggest his so called adventure wasn’t quite as altruistic as it seemed. In 1993 Mortenson was descending from a failed attempt to reach the peak of K2 when he wandered away from his group, got lost and subsequently into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher so, grateful the villagers had saved his life, when he left the village he promised that he would return to build them a school. And the book is the story of how he did it. The difficult process of getting funding, his armed kidnapping, fatwas issued by mullahs, repeated death threats and separation from his wife and family. He built the Braldu Bridge, the Korphe School and since then has established 78 schools. An apparently astounding story of success in the face of hardship and opposition. The bridge and the schools do exist but the story behind them could be quite different.
               There are alleged inaccuracies in the story as well as financial improprieties in the operation of the Central Asia Institute. Also in dispute is Mortenson's claim that he got lost near K2 and ended up in Korphe; that he was captured by the Taliban in 1996; whether the number of schools built and supported by CAI is accurate; and the propriety in the use of CAI funds for Mortenson's book tours. Despite the controversy there were those of us who found it an uplifting read and thought there should be some recognition of the fact that there are now schools where there weren’t before. However, balanced against this was argument about the purpose of the schools and the kind of education being offered in them. Simply constructing schools is not enough. What kind of identity is being constructed in the process of schooling, which role models are being presented, what outlooks of the world and sense of purpose in life are being imparted. A particularly strong message in the book is to build schools before madrassas get them and so turn students into "Good Muslims" (defined as modern, progressive, tolerant and pro-West) and remove their misunderstandings and apparent ignorance about America – which is characteristic of "Bad Muslims" (defined in the dominant cultural discourse as backward, fundamentalist, violent and anti-West).
            It was a reasonably easy read although generally agreed that parts could have been left out to move the narrative on a bit faster.

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

A lively discussion ensued after reading this book, and although we ended the evening agreeing to differ, we all agreed we enjoyed the discussion!

Some felt they could connect with the early part of this book, the glimpses into the school life of a group of young men growing up in the sixties with no experience of relationships with girls, and the in jokes and insecurities that prevail.
  As the book develops through the eye of the narrator, Tony, there was a feeling from some that there was not enough development of character and story, that the sparse anecdotal style was not enough to maintain interest. Others felt that this was an honest depiction of how memories are laid down and recollected, and how the recording of history “accurately” is necessarily flawed and subjective.
We all expressed some irritation (as a group of women at a certain age!) with the narrator’s lack of emotional intelligence, and agreed that he was not particularly likeable, but at the same time his honesty  was disarming.
  The book takes on a new energy with the advent of the legacy from Tony’s erstwhile girlfriend’s mother, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding this prompted an interesting divergence of opinion within the group. Theories as to why the legacy was left to Tony, what may have prompted the suicide of Adrian, the “too clever” and intense member of the friendship group, took us well into cake-and-coffee time. One of us expressed that she didn’t care enough about the characters, who were all so unpleasant, to hypothesise at all!
  Others of us could identify with the angst ridden feelings evoked particularly in the early part of the book, vividly expressed. Whereas the gaps and lack of background narrative irritated some but engaged others in our group, the outcome was an interesting debate about how we remembered our own history, many of us recalling different experiences of a similar era , how we might have recorded it then and with hindsight now.
  As the chooser of this book, I agree very much with the opinion that this is a book that changes on re-reading, and that having read it again my empathy with the characters changed. Julian Barnes economy of style and lack of description made me experience his “snapshot” characterisations from different perspectives, which I found both stimulating and salutory. It is one of those books that has, for me, a lasting impact on how I consider both personal recollections and received historical accounts.