The Casual Vacancy - J K Rowling (2)

Of course, no sooner had I finished my previous blog than I googled "Rowling" and "Dickens" and established, conclusively, that there is no such thing as a new idea. In fact, the association between JKR and CD was established long before this novel, in, for example, interviews and comments by JKR herself. And there is the answer to the Christmas ghosts reference. Simply put, the reference to Dickens is there because JKR wants us to approach her dark novel of life in 21st century England in the same way we think of Dickens' social commentary in his novels. Dickens did not have any simple solutions for the situations he found his characters in - neither does Rowling.

Drawing a link between yourself and one of the greatest English novelists is a bold step, and Rowling has a long way to go in terms of building her canon before any such parallels are justified - to be honest they are a bit ridiculous at this point in her literary career. You can't argue with the impact of Potter, but however much it crossed over into adult readership, and however much it addresses serious themes, it remained a work of children's literature. You have to admire her chutzpah though, and if you are going to adopt a role model you could do much worse than Dickens. Of course I am not suggesting Rowling is equating her work with CD, simply saying that she would like her novel to be thought of in the same way ie as serious social commentary.

Having said there is no such thing as a new idea, so far I have not found anyone online pointing out the echoes of Christmas Carol with this novel, so I am feeling a bit smug as of now.

One other thought about this novel - Rowling seems to experience a visceral disgust with fat people, men in particular. She attracted some flak in the Potter novels with this tendency, and built in positive overweight figures later on in the series to balance the impression given by the Dursleys and others. Here fat is strongly associated with nastiness, laziness, and corruption, and is described with a distaste bordering on disgust. A sympathetic character equates obesity with drug abuse, and while Character A says X therefore the author thinks X is obviously too simplistic for words, the insistence of her returning time after time to the observation that the fat middle class men in this book are unattractive and unpleasant really leaves an unavoidable impression that she equates obesity with moral weakness. Fat teenagers are one thing - fat middle aged people are just bad.

Last comment on this edition - what a bad, lazy cover!

The Casual Vacancy - J K Rowling

This is a bit of a trojan horse of a book - ostensibly about middle England's parochial concerns about a vacancy on the parish council of a small town in the West Country, this novel actually addresses a wide range of social issues, from self harm, racism, prostitution, domestic violence, etc, etc. Its like an episode of the Archers on crack.

The litmus test, as always, is was it a good read? The change of style from the Hogwarts novels is dramatic, and takes time to adjust. We then have a large cast of broadly similar characters doing largely similar things. Sorting out who is who takes a while. The election, when it finally comes, is a damp squib (ha ha, Hogwarts joke there for you) and some of the more melodramatic plot twists are telegraphed some way off. So far so bad, but despite that I found myself turning pages interested in what happens next.

Rowling's middle England is a bleak, dark place. There's not one happy family - all the children seem to despise their parents, with good reason. Huge psychological neuroses are carried around on shoulders young and old. A doctor refuses to treat a heart attack patient. There is no love or affection that is fulfilled. The only glimmer of hope for this community dies in the first chapter.

This novel has attracted over 500 Amazon reviews, so the chances of me having much original to say about it are slim. It has been portrayed as a political attack on the middle class, sneeringly done by someone whose political roots and allegiances are with the council estate rather than the detached mansions she now inhabits. This is of course simplistic; Rowling has not rewritten Hard Times here. But the mention of Dickens leads me cunningly on to what I think might be an original point. In this novel the Parish Council website is hacked four times, by four different characters, and messages are posted on the sites comment forum by "the ghost of Barry Fairweather". Note - "the ghost of BF", not "BF's ghost". Four ghosts - ring any bells? I think there is a deliberate, subtle reference here to the four ghosts in A Christmas carol, including the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Is Robbie Weedon a Tiny Tim figure perhaps?

Why - just a coincidence, or is Rowling making a more subtle point about regret. There is no Scrooge-like redemption at the end of this novel, and I clearly can't build much of a case for the reference - but I bet it is there somewhere.

The End: Germany, 1944-45 by Ian Kershaw

As readers we are as guilty as the rest of the media when it comes to our insatiable obsession with the second world war. We just keep returning to it, drawn irresistibly, by that haunting "what if?". Here the focus is on the last year of the war in Europe (incidentally, it would have been nice if Kershaw had even acknowledged that there was a war going on elsewhere) and tries to answer the question - why did Germany fight on into 1945 when the end was only a matter of time, and when the cost was so high in terms of human life and destruction of property, including Germany's cultural heritage.

Asked this question a non-historian would hazard that the Nazi party, its leadership, in particular Hitler, would have had something to do with it, and of course this is the case. So successful had the Nazi's been in making themselves part of every aspect of German existence that the thought of giving up when their leaders where still promising victory was inconceivable. factor in the mythology of the stab in the back surrender of 1918 and the scene was set to a fanatical fight to the death. The detail of this is portrayed by this book - and it is fascinating to see how the administration managed to keep mundane activities running almost up to the end of the war. More chilling is the retribution meted out to anyone who tried to hasten the end of the war, or surrender, even with the Allies at the point of victory.

Kershaw makes very effective use of letters home and diaries, as well as other sources such as secretly recorded prisoners of war, to get nearer to the heart of what ordinary Germans really thought about the end of the war. The illusion of Hitler's invulnerability was extremely strong.

There are a few things I would like to have seen covered in this book. Firstly, the war is portrayed as a European battlefield, and while the focus was on Germany I don't see how the context of the World War could be ignored. Secondly, the war the conflict to the north and south of Germany is largely ignored, along with pretty much any other non-Germanic part of the conflict. As I understand it Germany had large reserves of forces in for example Norway which were never called into the final struggle for the homeland - why not, when old men and young boys were being pushed into uniform? Finally, we hear time and again that many Germans clung to the hope of some secret weapon that the Nazis were working on. We are led to believe that these were simply false hopes, rumours dreamt up by a desperate populace and allowed to spread by a propaganda machine running out of lies. But is that the whole story - was there really no German research into new weapons that could, potentially, have turned the course of the war?

Dominion - C J Sansom

Alternative history novelists are a pretty unimaginative bunch - the Second World War is I suppose such a compelling period of history, when tiny moments can be seen to have had, in hindsight, such momentous impact, that they rarely stray far from its grasp. The turning point in this version of German victory in WW2 is Chamberlain's resignation in 1940, and Halifax's acceptance of the premiership. Surrender on terms to Germany swiftly follows.

So far so pedestrian, but Sansom sets his novel 12 years on, in a downtrodden England when the resistance is gaining momentum, Hitler is ailing, and the never ending war between Greater Germany and the USSR is draining the life out of the Reich. This world is realised in a lot of detail with alternative histories laid out for the rest of the world, the British political establishment (including Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, foreign secretary, and of course, irresistibly, Churchill, leader of the resistance) and various other British institutions.

What follows is a highly conventional spy narrative, with several strands closely interwoven, never more than a day or two apart. The principal character, David Fitzgerald, a fairly anonymous civil servant finds himself involved in a spy ring. By coincidence Frank Muncaster, a depressive university friend of his, becomes aware of some highly secret information which must not fall into German hands. This is all hugely unconvincing - it is never explained why the USA would want to try to smuggle Muncaster out of the UK when they already have the knowledge he carries. When the secret is finally revealed it is all one big "meh", and the novel fizzles out of a beach in Rottingdean, of all places. For much of the novel this implausibility doesn't really matter - Sansom drives the plot along convincingly and doesn't allow too much time for reflection. The period detail, clearly the result of a lot of research, gives the book the feel of a 1950s black and white movie.

This was an undemanding, very long, read, that was an interesting digression on the "what if" theme, with a reassuring "we win the war in the end anyway" conclusion which I would not be at all surprised to see televised sooner or later.

Moranthology - Caitlin Moran

You see what she did there? - the last two letters of her name are the first two letters of the word describing politely what this is, so she mashed them together to come up with the title. The good news is that this is by far the worst "joke" in the book, which is a collection of her recent articles, reviews, and gossip, the latter also being known as Celebrity Watch, which is usually the best thing about the Times on Fridays.

Moran can certainly turn a phrase. Her writing is always well constructed, easy to read, and worth reading. I have a few reservations, but these shouldn't detract from the overall appreciation of what is a good bedtime read. The review of the Great British Bake Off, and the squirrel scandal of 2011, is genuinely laugh out loud funny.

Those reservations: first, there are some sudden switches of tone, moving from D list celebrity gossip and euphemisms for body parts, to highly serious commentary about social issues. Moran is a genuinely passionate writer on issues such as poverty and mental illness, and to read these articles alongside what is undeniably amusing chatter about Katie Price sometimes struck a jarring note. Second, her defence of the Murdoch/Times paywall didn't ring true - I know she takes the Murdoch shilling, and has licence to speak her mind within certain no doubt unwritten constraints, and I am sure she would say she genuinely believes it is right to make people pay for some content on the Internet, but there is no serious discussion of consideration of the counter-arguments about setting the web free, user generated content, etc.

Aside from the social commentary, and in particular the attacks on the Government, Moran is at her best when writing about her enthusiasms - Lady Gaga, a quite historic interview, Sherlock, Dr Who. What struck me about many of these articles is that I had a clear recollection of reading them first time around - always a good sign, although it must mean I read the Times more often that I thought I did.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1993

I made a sincere effort to read as many of the Booker Prize winners as could reasonably be expected earlier this year (see a number of reviews) - but the award of this year's Booker to Hilary Mantel for Bring Out the Bodies, the sequel to the 2009 winner, Wolf Hall, may well have defeated me. Wolf Hall was a slog, and to have to go through it all over again is a read too far for me, now, when so many other books stand unread, waiting their turn. But one Booker winner that I have read recently is Roddy Doyle's 1993 winner, Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha. This novel is now on the GCSE syllabus. It is written entirely through the eyes of ten year old Paddy, the title character, a ten year old boy growing up in Ireland in the late 1960s.
The appeal of the novel, to teenage boys in particular, is obvious - Paddy is a bit of a sociopath, bullying his younger brother almost to the point of resignation, and running around the fields and building sites of his home town without little or no thought as to the consequences of his actions.

I think we are supposed to warm to Paddy because of his vulnerability, but that was hard - he is clearly a bright kid but other than that he has very few saving graces. As an accurate portrait of childhood, as it was then at least, this novel would appeal to teenagers feeling no-one understands their world, even if the world of a teenager in 2012 (or 1993) is much changed from the 1960s. The language used is authentic, even down to the amount of explicit swearing. I can understand that syllabus setters would have considered themselves quite radical, setting as a GCSE text a novel in which there is little traditional narrative, strong language, and lots of slang ("mickey", "spa", etc). Paddy is the classic flawed narrator - his account jumps in time and between themes with no warning, and the reader has to work hard to follow the text, being challenged to  keep up. Keeping up is relatively straightforward to an adult reader, but I can see how teenager would find decoding some of his puzzles either rewarding (as the GCSE people would have hoped) or irritating, as I suspect happens more often than not.
My only reservation about this novel was its authenticity. Paddy is a coarse, violent and totally self centred little thug, but he is acutely attuned to the ebbs and flows of his parents' relationship. While he bullies his brother relentlessly and seems to have no insight into the damage he is doing, when it comes to his parents he acquires an emotional intelligence way beyond his years. Doyle is emphasising the damaging impact of parental relationship breakdown on children, which is unarguably worthy, but my instinct is that while children pick up more than we expect, few are as finely tuned to the nuances of their relationship as Paddy Clarke.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoievsky

Raskolnikov, a former student, having discontinued his studies through lack of money, lives a bitterly impoverished life in St Petersburg. His pride is wounded by receiving small amounts of money from his mother and sister living in the country. He hears from his mother that his sister has recently left her post as a governess in scandalous circumstances. She is rescued by an offer of betrothal by a wealthy local man, and accepts in the interests of financial security rather than any trace of affection. This dilemma mirrors his own, caused by his poverty. To break out of this situation he decides to murder and rob a local pawnbroker, which he does, killing the woman's sister along the way.

His state of mind during this killing, and thereafter during the months of the investigation of the crime, is the focus of this novel. The author reveals this to us mainly through the narrator's commentary. While the murder - with an axe - is brutally described, Raskolnikov never reflects on the details of his crime or expresses any remorse. Nevertheless the psychological trauma of the event cannot be suppressed, and he falls ill, and behaves in such as way as to arouse the suspicions of the police and his family and friends. He is blessed with very steadfast friends and family who stand by him, believing in his inherent goodness, right through to the end of the novel. Raskolnikov lies to himself, suggesting that the murder was something he never really intended to do, while simultaneously showing us the detailed and devious preparation he has made for the murder. He could easily have avoided detection or capture if he had the will to do so. Instead he crumbles and confesses, and is sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labour camp, where he is followed by his adoring prostitute lover, Sonya.

This was not an easy read. The translation, for me, was wooden, and the original language must have been very intense and complex to have produced such turgid prose. It was a struggle to finish and there was little doubt all along about the outcome - the title tells us Raskolnikov is not going to avoid eventual capture and punishment. The tendency for each character to have multiple names only added to the confusion.

Reviewing "classics" is never easy, even less so when the novel is a translation, and much loved by many readers. The entry point is hard to find - one's own reading and judgments risk being facile, plot summaries are available elsewhere online with much more detail than my memory can supply, and all that needs to be said has been said elsewhere, many times over. I prefer reviewing works that are less monolithic than this. But having read the novel it is in keeping with the spirit of this blog that I record some impressions, however simplistic.

The idea that a novel can be driven by a character who is both a murderer and someone the reader is invited to identify with, even like, was a dramatic shift from a world where only black and white positions existed, with no scope for any shades of grey. I couldn't warm to Raskolnikov, and as a result I found less and less of the novel to engage with. I did finish, but it was a challenge.

The Hound of the D'Urbevilles - Kim Newman

Why restrict yourself to one clever idea - the Holmes stories written from the perspective of Moriarty's Watson? - when two - mixing in themes characters and plots from 19th Century fiction - will be twice the fun? Well, perhaps on reflection the whole is less than the sum of the parts, if I can use my second cliché this early in the review. There are some problems with this approach. Let's start with Colonel "Basher" Moran, the character Newman creates to act as Moriarty's second in charge and his chronicler. Moran is a nasty piece of work, and while the author tries to give him all the roguish charm at his disposal, it is still impossible to like Moran, let alone feel any sympathy for him. Perhaps at the end of the novel, when effectively abandoned by Moriarty he takes his revenge in a clever twist, one is twinged, but by then it's a bit too late. Only in top class writing can we like mass murderers like Moran - here he is drawn as a cartoonish figure to help avoid any natural repulsion from his killing, whoring, and generally dissolute behaviour.

Secondly, in the Conan Doyle stories Moriarty is, deliberately, very lightly drawn. The absence of any detail about him adds to his sinister omnipresence. Here he comes across as less sinister master criminal as peevish schoolmaster - I exaggerate, but not much. Being second in command to a bloodless criminal mastermind might be an interesting job, but here Moriarty is just an inverted caricature of Sherlock Holmes - all his traits, quirks, and characteristics are reflected in the portrait of Moriarty, including the experiments with bees/wasps.
Lastly there is the use of stories, characters and themes from 19th Century literature. At first this seems like it might work - these stories provide a structure and setting for the Moran and Moriarty characters to develop. But it doesn't quite work. The first story used is a very obscure Zane Grey novel - the epitome of the trashy disposable pot-boiler. Later stories are stronger but the gimmicky impression is hard to shake off. While most of the borrowed themes are recognisable, inevitably one feels irritated if one spots a reference, but is unable to remember its source - particularly as Newman seems to prefer the more obscure quarters of 19th Century fiction. Sometimes it works, as with the Green Eyed Goddess chapters - but I was left wondering why not just invent your own story lines?

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan (2)

I said at the end of August I was going to revisit Sweet Tooth after a period of reflection. Having read a couple of interesting reviews of this novel, as well as some commentary on Atonement, which although utterly different from this novel in terms of setting has some interesting parallels, I have what I hope are some clearer thoughts on this novel, and in particular what McEwan does here.

To recap, Sweet Tooth tells the story of a relatively naive young woman, Serena Frome, going to university, having affairs, starting work with MI5, and meeting an author. The big twist at the end of the novel is that instead of this being a first person narrative from Serena's perspective, it is written by her author boyfriend in a mixture of anger and disappointment when he discovers that their relationship was based upon a lie - she was initially sent to meet him by MI5 to involve him unwittingly in a half baked attempt to win the cultural cold war. His exposure as a dupe is done with his collaboration.

This is all very clever - all of the inconsistencies in "Serena's" earlier narrative are immediately explained. There is an under-current of distaste for example in her descriptions of her earlier love affairs which only makes sense when we realise they are as imagined by her current lover. The portrait of her younger self as not as clever as she thinks she is, and frankly just a bit too generous with her affections, suddenly makes sense if they are a portrait by a jealous boyfriend, not a self portrait.

Is McEwan doing anything different here from what he did in Atonement - completely reframing a story and making the reader realise that this is all just a story, the people aren't real, these things did not really happen to them despite all the earlier attempts to give the narrative verisimilitude?

Where I am left feeling uncomfortable by this novel is in the author's portrayal of Serena's approach to literature. She is a mathematics graduate, but reads voraciously, indiscriminately, and has little or no interest in literary theory. To her books are just stories, to be consumed in a day and discarded. She - and remembering this is through the cynical and hurt lens of her author boyfriend of course - is not the kind of reader we think her boyfriend would want. And not really the kind of reader we would want to be. But have we been? Have we rushed through Sweet Tooth to its denounement without fully engaging with the text, without spotting the clues that Serena's narrative isn't as straightforward as we are led to believe? Are we guilty as charged?

In a recent interview McEwan has portrayed this novel as a traditional love story, suggesting that the central relationship will survive the trauma of deception and the subsequent damning judgement that is handed down. I certainly did not read the novel's ending in that way - there is little to suggest there will be a "happy" ending here other than our traditional desire to see one. But the romance is not really the driving force at the heart of the novel. Incidentally this is also definitely not a novel about espionage either, despite the setting - no spying is done, and anyone picking this up expecting a spy story will be deeply disappointed.

If not a romance, nor a spy story, then what is this? At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is a meta-fiction - a fiction about fiction. Of its kind it is one of the more sophisticated (yet deceptively simple), ambiguous species of novel, comparable to The Magus for example.

House of Silk - Anthony Horowitz

I would have thought that pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, of which this claims to be the first authorised by the Conan Doyle estate, would be one of the easiest to pull together. Each of the stories follows a fairly rigid pattern, and there are a series of boxes for any author to tick - Holmes with violin, tick, cocaine addiction referenced but not indulged, tick, London fog, rattling coach drives, cheeky Cockney urchins , Mrs Hudson making tea, Mycroft being inscrutable, and of course the dazzling deductions based on flimsy evidence (but never guesses, oh no). And with Dr Watson you have the most affable and gentle of narrators, always comfortably behind the pace, leaving the reader a sense of superiority - we can work out which is the Holmes in disguise character before he does, how the locked room is escaped from, etc. Horowitz sinks into the comfort of these clichés with an almost audible sigh, and the reader is granted 400 pages of predictable, unchallenging nonsense.

Another Conan Doyle tradition that Horowitz follows religiously is the tendency to not bother too much with plausibility. Raymond Chandler in the Simple Art of Murder famously described the Holmes stories as "mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue" and elsewhere, although I can't find it now after at least five minutes on Google, picks apart the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles, pointing out just how many absurdities and improbabilities the plot contains. Horowitz maintains this tradition with a plot that depends utterly on people being in the right place at the right time - for example Holmes's escape from prison depends on him bumping into a prison doctor who he knows from a previous case, not to mention the bizarre behaviour of the Irish gangster who marries a man to exact revenge upon him, which as a plan has a number of flaws in it (ie a dependence on him being gay and thus not want sex with you, but prepared to marry you nonetheless!)

There is some updated knowingness here - we meet Moriarty, but he doesn't play a part in the plot - and the concern for the underclass (for example the street children Holmes uses as his eyes and ears in back streets) missing in the Conan Doyle. Watson's narration is set many years in the future, after Holmes's death, which as a device adds nothing to the novel. As a deviation from the Conan Doyle tradition of having a near contemporaneous narration this seems a strange one to choose.

Nevertheless, Horowitz does a competent job throughout, without at any stage dazzling or impressing - the nearest he comes is during the unveiling of the villain at the close, which as described above doesn't stand up to much if any scrutiny. In the back of my mind throughout the read was the way the recent TV series had grasped all of these conventions but not proven shackled by them, managing to remain true to the spirit of the original but reinventing Holmes for a modern generation. The House of Silk suffers significantly by comparison

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The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

Continuing in my attempt to catch up with the best part of a life time of not reading Booker prize winners, I recently finished, not without a fair amount of persistence, Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty". Hollinghurst is a slow writer - he has only written half a dozen novels in total - and the only other work of his I have read is the "Swimming Pool Library" which feels like decades ago.

This novel is a leisurely portrait of the life of a rather pampered young man in mid 1980s London, when Thatcherism was at its most rampant and Aids was beginning to have a dramatic impact on the lives of gay men.

Nick Guest leaves Oxford and lodges with the family of one of his undergraduate friends, Toby. Toby's father Gerald is a Conservative MP. Nick is a Guest in more ways than one - welcomed as a lodger, his homosexuality is acknowledged by the family but largely on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis. Their's is a social liberalism that has some clearly defined limits.

Nick begins his sex life with a romance with a black Local Government worker, but his affection for Toby remains undimmed. In parallel the political life of the family father develops, culminating in a visit from Mrs Thatcher which is vividly realised - I wonder if this was all Hollinghurst's imagination, or whether he was present at something similar. Nick them moves on to a clandestine relationship with another Oxford friend, who keeps up a front of heterosexuality, and introduces Nick to a cocaine dependency.

The third phase of the novel sees things all fall apart. Aids takes Nick's first boyfriend, then his second, and again in parallel Gerald's political career falters over a financial and then sexual scandal, something the conservative party seemed to specialise in in the 1980s. Finally Nick is thrown out of the lodgings he has enjoyed for far too long, and takes an Aids test which he expects to be positive.

As a portrait of gay privileged life in the 1980s this is probably the definitive work, for what it is worth. But the novel had other attractions for me. Hollinghurst is particularly good at the detailed nuances of social interaction - words and gestures are accurately dissected for their meaning. This isn't just the fact with the wealthy - the visit to the black, evangelical family of his first lover, Leo, where his sexuality is quite literally the love that dare no speak its name, is captured perfectly in all its ambivalence.

i didn't fall in love with this book - the central character is far too unlikeable and unsympathetic, almost narcissistic - and it didn't make me want to turn to more of Hollinghurst's works. The Booker short list for 2004 was weak by comparison with some years, although this novel did beat David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which by comparison was far more innovative and readable. But I was left admiring Hollinghurst's craftsmanship, which is more than I can say for many of the other novels that have won the Booker subsequently.

Selected Poems - Robert Herrick

Read in a 1996 Everyman edition which you can still buy for the astonishing price of £1.

Herrick is best known for his "To the Virgins, to make Much of Time: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...", which is an excellent representation of his oeuvre - light verse that focuses on themes of love, women, and (albeit indirectly) sex. Herrick comes across in these poems as a lover of life, and especially of women. His output was prodigious - he was clearly not one of those authors who agonised over getting every word exactly right. There is a small amount of Chauceresque smut along the way as well (think of the Miller's Tale). But by far and away my favourite poem from this collection is the gorgeous "Upon Julia's Clothes":



Upon Julia's Clothes

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!

I can't imagine another poet being able to use the word "liquefaction" so stunningly. You could dismiss this as just another piece of dirty-old-man-ery, with a very simple AAABBB structure. And the archaisms - whenas, methinks, - could be off-putting. But push past that and take it for what it is - a glorious hymn to a woman's beauty and sexual attractiveness. And in that it is astonishing.

Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves - P G Wodehouse

The novels of P G Wodehouse are so easy to dislike one really has to struggle to overcome the stench of monied stupidity rising off them. Rich people running around getting into "scrapes" (how easily the slang infects one's language) in highly contrived "comic" situations, which are all resolved by the intervention of the gentleman's gentleman. Incidentally there is no subversion here - in portraying the working class servant as brighter than the upper classes he serves, Wodehouse is flattering to deceive - Jeeves is still a poodle even if he can do tricks.

There is a temptation to treat these novels - and having read one you have pretty much read them all - as self parodies, clever because they are so dumb, cool because they are clichéd. But they are production line stuff, knocked-off-in-a-weekend pieces of nonsense. Wodehouse makes little or no attempt to vary the diet (see summary plot below taken from Wikipedia to save you the trouble of reading the book, or any other of Wodehouse's for that matter.)

I know the story of Wodehouse's internment in the second World War has been gone over in detail elsewhere, and I don't intend to go over old ground here. One of my favourite authors from this period, George Orwell, was a strong Wodehouse supporter, and that would normally be good enough for me. But I am sorry, there is no doubt in my mind that it is just not good enough to say Wodehouse was uninterested in politics, or simply naïve and foolish - he had a responsibility as an author to not be such a fool, and there is plenty of evidence in his novels to suggest a man of considerable intelligence and political awareness, if not interest. It can hardly have been surprising to anyone that the author who described the English upper classes at decadent play was able to take the rise of the Nazis so casually. Wodehouse may not have been a Nazi himself, but in his portrait of Spode, the Moselyesque English fascist, he clearly makes the mistake of not taking them seriously enough - not everything can be laughed away.
"Bertie Wooster returns to Totleigh Towers, the site of an earlier ordeal that nearly landed him in prison and, worse still, in bonds of marriage to Madeline Bassett, the syrupy daughter of the house who believes the stars are God's daisy chain. Only Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie's childhood friend and Madeline's on-again off-again fiancé, stands between our hero and the dreaded state of matrimony. No surprise, then, that matrimonial disaster looms for our hero when Madeline, inspired by the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, orders Gussie to abandon his beloved steak and kidney pie and take up a vegetarian diet. Add the intrigues of Miss Stiffy Byng to win her fiancé the Reverend Stinker Pinker a vicarage, the rivalry of collectors Sir Watkyn Bassett and Bertie's Uncle Tom over an objet d'art, and the irresistible culinary attractions of American Emerald Stoker, and you have trouble of the sort only Jeeves can mend."

Ark - Stephen Baxter

"Ark" is the sequel to Baxter's "Flood", reviewed here a few days ago. This is a real doorstep of a book, as science fiction often is, which picks up the story several years before "Flood" ends. The central theme - a space rocket takes survivors to another world to avoid the apocalyptic flooding of earth - had already been heavily trailled in "Flood", and Baxter covers some familiar ground in opening, presumably for the benefit of readers who hadn't read the previous novel. (Incidentally, JK Rowling was a master of this - she always got the "what you missed" section out of the way early in the Potter novels, with considerable economy - although towards the end of the series she stopped bothering, on the grounds if you didn't know Harry was a wizard etc then you had been living in a hole in the ground for the last five years. Anyway, back to "Ark").

"Ark" has a very similar construction to "Flood" - short chapters following a large group of characters, with a few individuals at the core; occasional significant time jumps; a tendency to somewhat casually kill people off and usher in new generations quite regularly.  In fact this is probably best seen as a mirror novel of "Flood" with the only significant different being the terrain - space instead of earth and water.

Baxter indulges himself with a leisurely account of the early days of the flooded earth space programme, constantly threatened by the rising water and the human tide which accompanies it. The group of Candidates being trained to undertake the flight are examined closely, although I felt that the time jumps and the sudden deaths made it harder to care about any of them. Zane, the most vulnerable, was unconvincing - someone with his vulnerabilities and weaknesses would be unlikely to have passed the various vetting processes.

I think we all know without spending too much time considering the issue that long months and years in deep space would be terribly boring, and it is a challenge to the author to make them seem less so. He can fast forward decades in a page but we still return to the same setting with the same crew (give or take) and the same set of issues.

After ten years the crew reach Earth 2, which despite its flora and fauna and evidence of advanced intelligence is considered by most to be uninhabitable - leading to a three way split between them - some try to settle Earth 2, others decide to return to Earth, hoping that the waters had receded (they hadn't!) and a third group vote to push on another unimaginable 30 years to a possible Earth 3. I would have liked to hear more about what happened on Earth 2, but this group is not mentioned again. The group that returns to Earth find Ark 2, an unlikely underwater settlement, but the main focus is on the group that travels on to Earth 3, giving us a lot more of the same. Planet fall, when it comes, is almost as much a relief for the reader as it must have been for the passengers.

I have no evidence for this, as usual, but my hunch is that what really interests Baxter is the speculative science behind inter-stellar travel, colonisation of new planets, etc, and the plot and characters in this novel as simply window-dressing around this core. Which isn't really good enough is it?

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan

Read in the Jonathan Cape hardback first edition.

Any new novel by McEwan is something of an event, and this is no exception. Sweet Tooth is an ambitious novel. Set in the early 1970's, and rich with period material, the story follows a young woman, Serena Frome, in her first few months working for MI5. Sweet Tooth is the name of the operation to which she is assigned, designed to channel MI5 funding into sympathetic writers - in effect the cultural Cold War. Serena is tasked with providing funding for a supposed pro-establishment writer, without letting him know where the money is coming from. No doubt MI5 did something very similar, although the operation is plainly ridiculous, all the more vividly so when contrasted with some of her more incidental work supporting operatives under cover within the Provisional IRA.

Serena begins a relationship with the writer, Tom Haley, she is "running", without telling him she is a "spy". This provokes a strong reaction from one of her colleagues. Much of the novel is spent reaching this point, filling in Serena's early love affairs, including one with a professor at her university who in later turns out, to little surprise, was leaking information to the Russians earlier in the Cold War.

Serena reads Haley's short stories, and we are given detailed synopses of them, including extensive quotes. This gives us the stories within stories which gives the novel a complex structure. Eventually the details of the MI5 funding come out in the press, no doubt leaked by this jealous colleague, and the relationship reaches at crisis.  In the final chapter there is a revelation which reframes the rest of the narrative in a very similar way to the disclosure at the end of Atonement, and prompts the reader to look at the novel in a completely different light. This technique could be irritating - it's not really necessary - but the successes of the novel elsewhere outweigh this distraction.

The central character appears to be an open, slightly delusional, slightly dishonest, and not very likeable character, and prior to the final chapter revelation I (and I think most readers) thought this was simply a flawed narrator of the kind we are very familiar with in much contemporary fiction. The fact that McEwan has gone further than this doesn't I think take us anywhere particularly new - one kind of flawed perspective in a narrator is very similar to another; it is not as if we get any closer or indeed further away from "the truth".

A couple of other moans before I try to get to why I read this novel in little over 24 hours. First, the period detail which McEwan tries so hard at getting right. The problem with this is that his trying is just too apparent - for example telling us the price of a pint of beer in 1974 (13p). Period detail needs to be accurate and appropriate, but not flaunted. Second, the plot developments, other than the final twist, and too obvious - the Cambridge don who turns out to be a spy is just a bit of a cliche, and can be seen a mile off; like-wise the boyfriend who is not just that much into sex with his hot girlfriend, who shockingly turns out to be gay. And so on. Lastly, the Monty Hall problem, which McEwan doesn't spend too much time on, thankfully, has already been done in Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident" and comes across as tired here.

So why did I keep reading with such interest? McEwan's prose style is mature and well crafted - there is rarely a false note with the language (as opposed to the plot). The central character is a bit wet and dim, always a few pages behind the reader and her associates, but is generally likeable and pleasant. Some of the period and geographic detail also struck a personal chord, and many of the other writers referenced were familiar. In itself that's not enough to account for the interest, so I think what I am going to do is let the novel settle in my mind for a bit, maybe read some reviews and reread a few chapters, and come back to it in a few weeks.

Flood - Stephen Baxter

Working on the basis that anyone Terry Pratchett decides to work with must be pretty damn good, I decided to give Stephen Baxter another try after "The Long Earth" (see review last month). "Flood" appeared to stand out from the other recommendations for reasons I haven't decided upon. The name really tells you most of what you need to know about the premise of the book - the world floods in genuinely biblical proportions. The novel opens in the very near future with the release of a small group of hostages from their captives in Spain, a release facilitated by the Gates/Jobs/Branson like boss of one of the hostages. From this point the waters begin to rise, and never stop, and we follow the lives of the hostages as they try to adapt, along with the rest of the world.

You can probably pencil in most of the main events along the way - the gradual breakdown of society, the development of enclaves of the rich, the move to a floating society - didn't Kevin Costner cover this in Waterworld? There is little to keep you reading beyond the inevitable and unending succession of watery disasters. I didn't identify with any of the principal characters, and I got the impression Baxter didn't either, so lightly did he ink them in and so casually did he kill them off. The episodic nature of the description of the flood is reinforced by regular time jumps - several years pass between chapters, and if this is an attempt to avoid any boredom with the inevitability of the progression of the flood then it doesn't work.

As a highly regarded science fiction writer the very least I would have expected from Baxter is some coherent science, but that is probably the most disappointing part of the novel - the attempts to explain the causes of the flood are pretty risible. There are some successful things about this novel - the description of a generation growing up never having known land for example worked well for me - this is a small consolation to what is otherwise another hugely disappointing work. I am going to persist however and have ordered the sequel "Ark" as something stubborn within me wants to know where Baxter is going with this.

The Woman Who Died a Lot - Jasper Fforde

Read in the Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition.

This represents a return to fform ffor Fforde, after the disappointing "One of Our Thursdays is Missing". The seventh in the Thursday Next series, eighth if you count "The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco", sees Thursday recovering from injuries sustained in a kidnapping attack, and feeling her age. Offered a post in the Wessex Library Service we spend around 75 pages catching up on life in 1980's Swindon, during which I was a little worried that the inventiveness of earlier books remained missing. But the scene setting is worth the time, because the book kicks in with a puzzling attack on Thursday's family which is clearly the work of Aornis Hades, Thursday's nemisis. From there the action never flags.

The span of the novel plays out over a week in which a lot happens in Thursday's life. God has decided to cut out all the potential confusion about his existence, and make himself apparent to man. Mankind seems to have taken this in his stride, even when God gets a bit truculent and starts smiting some cities out of existence, downtown Swindon being next in line. So there's that to sort out, as well as Thursday's new job in the library service, investigating mysterious attacks on book collections by Goliath, her other nemises, if global corporations can be nemises, and indeed if the plural of nemesis is nemises. Her brother Joffy is now in effect mankind's chief negotiator with God over the difficult "meaning of life" question. Aornis has escaped, and needs tracking down. And the lives of her children get more complicated as the grow up - Friday is due to murder someone at the end of the week, Tuesday (keep up there) is investigating how to deflect God's wrath via an anti-smiting device, and Jenny doesn't exist.

How Fforde keeps all these balls in the air, adding in jokes about Dark Matter (setting up the next book in the series nicely) and a range of wacky ideas about time travel, avatars, parallel worlds (thrown in and lightly thrown away) and of course the Book World, is hard to describe, but he does, masterfully.

The acid test of a good read is if you don't want it to stop. I read this in a couple of days flat, and didn't even notice that it was over 350 pages (just checked) - whereas Wolf Hall (for example) was on a slow countdown. I know that probably makes me a sucker for light comic fantasy (and a good dodo joke) - guilty as charged.

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall won the Booker prize in 2009, and its sequel, Bringing up the Bodies, is the Bookies' favourite for the 2012 prize. If it weren't for this accolade I very much doubt if I would have read it, not being an historical fiction fan, and I certainly would not have persisted to the end of the 650 pages.

This is very much the "anti-Booker" - instead of the usual slim volume of sensitively crafted, flawed memories, this is a detailed recreation of the life of Thomas Cromwell. As always the best and first question to ask is "Why?" - which Mantel helpfully answers in a short Q&A published at the end of this Fourth Estate paperback edition. Mantel found Cromwell a mysterious figure, and decided to give him a voice. This she does very well - his portrait is well rounded and convincing. He comes over as a sympathetic figure, caught up in turbulent times, trying his best to follow his conscience whilst at the same time to survive and prosper.

Mantel draws heavily from the historical record, which is of course legitimate - Shakespeare did very much the same - and we get a detailed insight into the key characters from this crucial period in English history. There is, as you will have guessed, a faily big "but" coming. In fact, several. Where to begin?

First, everything takes such a long time to happen, and while we wait for Henry to divorce Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn the material used to fill the gaps is not interesting enough to carry the reader along - I confess I took a two week break half way through reading this, and only returned out of a sense of duty or stubborness.

Second, the author's much criticised use of the male singular personal pronoun is deeply irritating. Usually, but not always, "he" is used to refer to Cromwell. The idea no doubt is to pull the reader closer into identifying with him, but it generates huge confusion virtually on every page, which is compounded by large blocks of dialogue and the use of the present tense. You can usually work out in the end who is being referred to, and devices to make the reader pause and think are often no bad thing, but here the main impact is one of irritation.

This confusion is made worse by the huge cast of characters, many with the same name, who are often lightly sketched. I gave up bothering to try to work out who was who, who was related by birth or marriage to who, and so on - the investment of effort and time wasn't proportionate to the reward.

Finally, the title is simply a teaser for the second book in the series, (I am assuming it is a series - there are a lot of wives to go), Wolf Hall being the home of the Seymours. It is an evocative metaphor for the dog eat dog world Henry created amongst his court, but it is a bit of a cheat.

In the end, do we care enough about the central character to justify the 650 pages? I didn't I'm afraid, and unless you are a big historical fiction fan (think Philippa Gregory or Alison Weir) I would not recommend this.

The Complete Enderby - Anthony Burgess

Read in the Kindle edition

Julius Xavier Enderby, poet, is one of my all-time favourite literary characters.

Book 1 - Inside Mr Enderby, published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell in 1963. We first meet Enderby through the eyes of a group of time travelling school children, on an educational trip to visit some of the poets of yesteryear. There are echoes of Joyce Grenfell in the teachers admonitions to the students not to misbehave, which of course they do. Enderby lives alone, in squalor. His bathroom is his sanctum, where he composes his poetry, filing much of it in the bath which he shares with a family, indeed generations, of mice. He lives a narrow, routine existence, troubled by the outside world as little as possible. But people just won't leave him alone.

Nasty neighbours and a nosy landlady are a nuisance, but his problems really start when he wins a literary prize, which he accepts in person at an event in London - or rather doesn't accept, his speech getting away from him somewhat. After that he loses control of his life. Vesta Bainbridge, women's editor of "Fem", takes him in hand, and begins the arduous task of transforming him into husband material. She succeeds to the extent of getting him in a fit state for their marriage but the change is temporary, and he manages to escape from her (on their honeymoon in catholic Rome) as she rapidly transforms herself into his dead step-mother. At some point, apparently angered by his betrayal, his muse, always conceived as a literal companion, deserts him. Seeing no future without poetry, Enderby attempts suicide. He attempt fails, and we leave him in a rest home undergoing a cure to rid him of his infantile obsession with poetry and its trappings.

Book 2, Outside Enderby. The psychiatric transformation of our hero is no more effective nor long lasting than Vesta's attempt, and with the return of his muse, Enderby is about to leave his job as a barman when fate once more intervenes. The bar where he works is being used as a venue for a pop group - the lead singer of which has plagiarised some of his poetry, left behind in his flight from Vesta's home. The singer is shot by a bitter former band member, but Enderby is framed, and flees. Taking a holiday flight to Tangiers, narrowly escaping the clutches of a matronly astrologer on the way, he tracks down Rawcliffe, a failed former poet who had plagiarised his extended poem, the Pet Beast, turning it into a schlock horror film script. Rawcliffe, who is in all the anthologies, is dying, and Enderby cares for him in his last days, instead of killing him as intended. Enderby inherits Rawcliffe's bar, and settles down into a comfortable life of exile. But the happy ending is denied him, because at the end of the novel he is visited - literally - by a personification of his muse, who is a cruel mistress, and who appears to intend to desert him, once again.

It appears that Burgess planned books one and two as a single volume, and only published them separately when a serious illness threatened to be (indeed was diagnosed as) terminal. But having created this character it seems Burgess couldn't really leave him alone.

Book 3, A Clockwork Testament, or the End of Enderby, finds Enderby lecturing in creative writing and minor Elizabethan drama in New York. He is more of a fish out of water than ever, finding much in New York and his students to frustrate and anger him. This is a lighter revival of Enderby, putting him in comic situations in which his frustrations with the modern world are never far from the surface. Enderby makes no compromises for his new situations, and is blunt to the point of being offensive towards his black students, particularly in his liberal use of the N-word - what would have read as challenging and daring in the 1970s comes across as simply offensive in 2012, not that Burgess would have given a stuff. But this is true of many treatments of this issue, and we should be wary about imposing 21st century values on 1970s Britain, or any other period for that matter. Which I suppose is his point.

The discussion about the potentially corrupting influence of art, as exemplified by the popular response to the vulgarised film treatment of "The Wreck of the Deutschland" dominates much of the novel. This is Burgess's response to the media storm generated by the film of Clockwork Orange, hence the otherwise inexplicable title of the third novel in the series, in case the point were to be missed (which of course it is now much easier to do, with Kubrick's film available to watch on terrestrial television, and pretty tame stuff compared to, for example, the Saw movies.)

The fourth and last Enderby novel, Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby, in which Burgess imagines what might have happened to our hero if he had not taken the post in New York. Here he is offered a role scripting a musical representation of the life of Shakespeare, variously entitled Will! Or An Ass for an Actor (check!!) in a very different part of America, rural Indiana. Here is as much a fish out of water as anywhere else, and comes in for a lot of stick from the cast, crew, financial backers, and the community generally. He becomes besotted with the female lead, April Elgar, a gorgeous African American, who befriends him and who allows Burgess plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his scholarship and knowledge about Shakespeare's dark lady of the sonnets.

The musical is of course chaotic, and on the opening night Enderby has to take the part of Will, which he does triumphantly (after his own fashion) - ad-libbing, breaking the fourth wall, ignoring an intervention from a US Equity equivalent representative who tries to stop the show, ending in a dance of the beginning of the world on stage with April. Instead of the usual time travelling tourists, Burgess book-ends the story with more erudition about Will and Elizabethan theatre - a story about spying and the theatre in Shakespeare's time to open, including a theory on Shakespeare's involvement in the development of the St James' edition of the bible which I have never taken the time to follow up but if taken at face value appears very convincing, and ending with a science fiction tale about a time traveller going to an alternative 1590's London to meet Shakespeare. The trip doesn't end well, but this stand alone story is a far more interesting treatment of the parallel worlds theory than "The Long Earth".

Why is Enderby such an endearing, successful character? He meets many of the criteria you would look for in a sit-com character - good hearted but hopelessly adrift in the modern world, always falling unwittingly into comic situations, and at the same time puzzlingly attractive to various maternal and not so maternal women. For Enderby poetry is the all-consuming mistress that he cannot allow himself to be distracted from. The comedy switches from quite low brow, scatological stuff to highbrow meditations on Elizabethan theatre and Shakespearean scholarship.

Burgess's style, throughout the quartet, is one of the major enjoyments of the novels. He plays with language freely, at times showing off, but rarely distracting from the overall fun of the piece. Here's an example from Book 2. Enderby is serving drinks in a bar when he meets an old acquaintance, whose breath, he notices, smells of onions:

"Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions.  "Onions" said Hogg."

I can just imagine Burgess's pleasure at meeting the no doubt self imposed challenge of repeating "onions" four times consecutively without interruption nor syntactic trickery.

I've read these novels for pleasure several times since discovering Inside Enderby many years ago, and apart from the easily offended they should be a joy for all readers. I cannot recommend them highly enough.