You are Not So Smart: - David Mcraney

Subtitled: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself.

This is a very gentle, easily digestible introduction to psychology. 48 chapters, each only a few pages long, covering all the basics of how the way we perceive the world is more complicated than we think. So far so good - this book began as a blog, and it shows, and who am I to pass judgment on bloggers taking their work further? Sometimes the dumbing goes too far - not all straightforward psychology points could be used to support the books central thesis, and they really didn't need to - they should be interesting in their own right. I also felt the central thesis itself was part of the problem - explaining that the way we perceive the world is filtered through our senses, our memory and a host of other filters to create our perception of reality is a strong enough point on its own without it being reduced to the conclusion that we are not as smart as we think we are - it's not about intelligence at all, it's actually much more interesting than that. I accept of course that there is a marketing strategy at work here, and it seems to have been effective.

There were a couple of other quibbles I had with this book, which I generally enjoyed and consumed quite quickly. Firstly, it focuses relentlessly on everyday perception. Whenever it tiptoes closer to the darker side of psychology - not all brains are the same, and although we can be gulled into doing things we wouldn't normally do, the point is we wouldn't normally do them - it quickly moved on. Some people would do abnormal things, and these outliers on the scatter graph of human psychology are probably another but much more interesting book entirely. Secondly the book had a strangely mid-Atlantic feel which was a little disconcerting - apparently this was because it was originally American and had been edited for the UK market. Lastly the research the author draws upon was largely fresh - to me - but there were a few old favourites (the prison guards/prisoners experiment for example) which I was expecting to crop up throughout the book, and which eventually made an appearance. I was hoping he would manage to avoid the obvious, but he didn't quite make it.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to read introduction to psychology you could do a lot worse. This doesn't claim to be an academic textbook, and you largely get what you have paid for, with that caveat about intelligence/perception.
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The Bachelor - Stella Gibbons

Oh dear. If you have read anything I have written previously about Stella Gibbons it will be immediately obvious that I rate Cold Comfort farm as one of the best books ever written. Hyperbole? perhaps, because I would recognise the book is not without its flaws, but if I had to chose one book for a life time of desert island living this would be it. It is by far and away the book I have reread the most in my life. But sadly nothing Stella Gibbons ever wrote approached the genius of CCF. In bringing her catalogue back into print Vintage have done us a mixed blessing - while it is exciting to read anything she wrote, the disappointment is inescapable. I will keep reading her to try to capture the magic of CCF, but with steadily decreasing expectation and hope.

The Bachelor is a perfectly decent romantic novel of manners set in 1940s wartime London and the Home counties (a thinly disguised St Albans).  The romantic entanglements of the lead characters and supporting cast is handled well, but it isn't where the interest of the novel resides. To be honest it was the strangely detached description of the war and its impact on the lives of the characters was were I derived my most interest in this novel. The war is a fact of life, a backdrop to pretty much everything the characters do - rationing, the blackout, characters missing on service, the Home Guard, refugees, prisoners of war and evacuees are all there - but everyone just gets on with their lives as if it was a temporary piece of nastiness that sooner or later will pass, which of course it did. The novel was published in 1944 and I suspect written near then, because the threat of invasion or defeat is not even hinted at. The portrayal of the middle class characters who oppose the war and appear to treat it as a case of a misunderstanding between countries taken too far was interesting - these are not conscientious objectors or pro-German or pro-Nazi supporters, more ideological pacifists who think the conflict can be talked away. This pacifism is tolerated as an eccentricity rather than disloyalty or treason.

Towards the end of the novel the war comes more into the foreground. Kenneth the bachelor of the title is in London looking for Vartouhi, the feisty refugee who is less than half his age, (this is not seen as a problem by anyone) who has left his employment after a row with his sister Constance, and is working in a milk bar. He tracks her down in a depressed, bombed out part of London similar to the streets where "Starlight" is set, albeit twenty years later. The extent of the bomb damage is depressing if not to say upsetting, and through this landscape comes Vartouhi, followed by her "boyfriend", a Canadian soldier with the unlikely name of Raoul who is clearly well on the way to being a psychopath. Although Vartouhi is cheerfully unafraid of the menacing Raoul, Kenneth quickly realises he is dangerous, and sees him off with a show of bravery that seems to draw upon his years in the trenches in the Great War. This section of the novel stands out as a compelling piece of narrative compared to much of the sleepiness of the rest of the book.

So why he "oh dear". Well first this novel is the reason for my prolonged absence from this blog - it was incredibly heavy going. More than a few pages a night would send me off. The plot consistent solely of the predictable romantic affairs which resolve themselves as expected from the beginning, but take over 400 pages to do so. Very little else happens. The major plot incidents involve an argument about a bedspread - albeit a bedspread loaded with sexual symbolism - and a Christmas visit from an aged relative.
Gibbons handled romance with a delightfully light touch in CCF - the relationship between Flora and Charles is covered in a few lines of text - but when she says "This is forever isn't it darling?" and he says something romantic about how nice her hair smells, it is utterly convincing. The relationships in the Bachelor are believable enough, but the characters take a very long time reaching the same point as Flora and Charles.
I remain Gibbons's ardent admirer, and won't give up on her back catalogue, but now for something completely different....

The Red House - Mark Haddon

The premise of this novel is very simple. Brother and sister Richard and Angela have recently lost their mother after a long and distressing illness. Somewhat out of the blue Richard offers to host (can host be used as a verb like this?) Angela and family in a week long holiday in a cottage in Herefordshire, the eponymous Red House. Richard brings his second wife Louisa and her daughter, Melissa. Angela brings husband Dominic, teenage son Alex, slightly younger but still teenage daughter Daisy, and eight year old Benjamin. (I wrote the sentence above without reference to the text, a good sign that the characters came to life for me).

Over the course of the week their back stories are filled in, childhood traumas revisited, (Richard and Angela's mother was an alcoholic, Angela had a stillborn child eighteen years earlier, and so on) and although very little of note happens in the course of the week (more than you might have thought from reading some reviews) the character development is more than sufficient to maintain interest.  One teenager slowly comes to a realisation that they are gay, another is embroiled in a cyber bullying/teen suicide scenario. There is some light shopping, cooking for eight, board games and jigsaws, a traditional rainy holiday.

The narrative style Haddon uses here sometimes makes the reader work harder than they might be used to - there's very little "Richard said" or "Angela drowsed off and began to dream" - instead we are pitched straight into the stream of consciousness or dream itself, and left to catch up from the context and content. Occasionally one has to back track once working out what is thinking or dreaming or talking. That is clearly a deliberate attempt to keep the reader focussed and paying attention, and it works well - the text is not so obscure that the reader can't eventually work out who is thinking, even if they have jumped associatively from what was being said a moment ago.

In "The Curious Incident" Haddon came very close to successfully presenting the world through the eyes of a  child with Asperberger's Syndrome. I had some issues with this - I thought the way Christopher navigated his way around the London Underground a bit too contrived and unconvincing - but here the ventriloquism reaches a new level. Each character has a convincing internal monologue. Benjy's eight year old perspective on the world was especially touching and convincing, but each character is given their own realistic voice. Haddon can show the world equally well through the narcisstic eyes of a teenage bully, lovers feeling children again through one another's touch, or a mother still grieving for a lost child after 18 years.

There are no heroes here - everyone is flawed one way or another, some more than others, but equally no cardboard villains, just real, convincing, vulnerable people. The detail is stunning - one character puts soft brown sugar on her frosties in a way only someone with weight issues would; another character has unsuccessful 20 second sex which ends violently, but still exults at having had sex. There are also plenty of reference to popular culture and literature here to keep the reader entertained, but the novel wears its learning lightly. All in all highly recommended, and I will be tracking down his second novel when a gap emerges in my reading schedule.

Skios - Michael Frayn

It must be, I would have thought, quite rare for a writer to sit down and sadistically decide "I am going to write a farce", as Frayn appears to have done here. Farce has an inflexible set of rules and protocols that can work well on stage, when in the course of a performance improbabilities can be disguised and belief suspended, but within the pages of a novel, set aside every now and then for reflection and consideration, the natural objections that spring to mind - "he wouldn't behave that stupidly!" or "She would check before doing that" - come to the fore and won't be ignored. I've long admired the artistry of successful farceurs, on the basis that farce is one of the most difficult forms of literature to pull off successfully, but trying and missing is a bit like jumping the Grand Canyon - failure even by a small margin is pretty catastrophic. So to mix my metaphors Frayn is on a highwire from the outset with this novel, and while the effort is impressive I would struggle to describe the performance as enjoyable.

The central premise of this novel is that someone collecting a guest speaker at an airport, picks up the wrong person. It could happen. Here the person picked up in error goes with the flow because - and there's no real nice way of saying this - he has a mental disorder that means he embraces chaos, not in a "Wouldn't it be fun" way, but in a way that has no regard whatsoever for the consequences of his actions. He lives totally in the moment, like a goldfish with a memory of a few minutes. We are invited to think of him as a charming rogue, a combination of Boris Johnson and Hugh Grant, but in reality someone like this would spend their life in A & E, picking their teeth out of the gutter. Checking she had picked up the right person doesn't occur to Nikki - presumably she has a file on him, or access to the Internet, - and no-one at the conference has ever read a book or article by this character that included his illustration.

This all has a strong period feel to it, and in the character of the academic travelling from one far flung conference to another, peddling his tired theories about nothing much I was reminded of the portrait in Larkin's "Naturally the Foundation..." from Whitsun Wedding. The other strong echo was of Carry On films - Carry On Conferencing. So spot the foreigner with the silly accent, who can't speak proper English, and has an identical twin brother, with much hilarity ensuing. Things are thrown in pools. Lonely secretaries yearn to be taken away from all of this. Russians are gangsters; Americans are fat and stupid. Someone even gets into bed with the wrong person and only realises their mistake when things start to get intimate. We only needed a matron and a bit of drag to complete the picture. I am not complaining - all these characteristics one would expect in a farce - but you do have to wonder who finds this funny in 2013?

Despite all this I was willing to give Frayn the benefit of the doubt. This was a gentle undemanding read, with what felt strongly like half an eye on the TV adaptation market. The jokes just about work, and the plotting was sufficiently tight to keep me reading. But there are only so many times the same plot devices can be used to keep the action moving, and ultimately Frayn completely ducks out of even trying to make the novel's ending work. Having orchestrated a big finale, with all of the characters moving towards a final scene in which all the threads are drawn together, misunderstandings explained, lovers reconciled etc, it all falls flat.

If you want a beach read and some gentle discourse on identity, academia and relationships, you could do worse, but you could do a lot better - David Lodge's "Small Worlds" for example.