The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)

One of my reasons for exploring the Guardian's 'best 100 novels written in English' list is to try and find some hidden gems - books that I have not come across before that are really worth reading. Poe's only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' meets only one of these criteria - I had not heard of it before - and now I know why.

The novel is an adventure story, following Pym as he stows away in a ship, running away to sea against his father's wishes. He is aided by a friend, one of the crew members, and plans to reveal his presence when the ship is past the point of no return. However, a mutiny spoils this plan, and he has to remain hidden, without help from his friend, for a long time. His privations are detailed in the first person narrative in considerable, not to say tedious, detail. Finally he emerges from his hiding place, and helps in a counter-mutiny. Having secured control of the ship Pym and friends are immediately struck by a storm, which rages for days, leaving them with very little food or drink, and their ship a wreck. Again Poe details the long days of surviving on the wreck - this is actually a very short novel, but it certainly didn't feel it while reading - until they finally resort to cannibalism, choosing one of their number to eat by lots.

Finally rescued, Pym joins another ship voyaging to the southern seas. Previous voyages of exploration are recounted in yet more detail. The purpose of all this detail is presumably to give the narrative a sense of realism, although I found the various adventures completely unconvincing. While stowed away on his first ship, for example, Pym is joined for several days by his pet dog, who his crew-member friend just happened to take along with him. Despite the ship having been taken over by the mutineers the dog at no point barks or otherwise makes his presence know. As soon as the storm arrives the dog stops being mentioned, presumably thrown overboard.

The voyage ends in the discovery of a mysterious island group deep in the Antarctic, when the rest of the group apart from Pym and a friend are massacred by duplicitous natives. Escaping from the island by canoe, Pym travels south towards the pole, when the novel ends abruptly with the appearance of a mysterious figure.

I've read incomplete novels where the author died mid-composition that end with more coherence and naturalism than this. It just stops, and it is obvious that the author, having reached a word count (or equivalent) thought "that will do" and moved on. The "editor's" postscript (which incidentally is not included in the kindle version of the novel I initially read, which is really irritating) is a fig leaf that does nothing to compound the absurdity of the ending.

I look for at least one of the following in any novel: characterisation, a decent story, some interesting use of language, or some ideas. Poe provides none of the above. Pym himself hardly emerges from his narrative at all - we really have no idea what he is like, other than extraordinarily lucky in surviving his various in extremis situations, which of course we know he does from the novel's ludicrous subtitle. (Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.) The story is extremely episodic and predictable, a loosely connected series of incidents. The language is inoffensive, at best, and the only idea worthy of the name is the suggestion that the south polar regions might lead to undiscovered continents, peoples, and species. I am a little more sympathetic to this final point - the world was still being explored in the 1830's, and new species being found, so this wasn't as ludicrous as it sounds.

Poe introduces some classic elements of gothic horror into the narrative - cannibalism, pirates, a ghost-ship, entombment, and so on, but ultimately the novel is as spooky as a Halloween costume in June.

I'm not alone in finding this all quite ridiculous. In an introduction to the novel, Jeremy Meyers wrote that Poe’s choice of the incomplete journal form “allows Poe to disguise and excuse his own inability to control the plot and complete the novel.” Poe himself called it a “very silly book.” Indeed. I don't know whether the unhappy experience of writing this novel led Poe to concentrate on poetry and short stories, but it is probably a good thing if it did.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut - 1969

I've written elsewhere on the mysterious process that is re-reading a novel. The experience ranges from a comforting stroll down memory lane, to the more common "I know I have read this, but for the life of me can't remember a single thing about it". Slaughterhouse 5 was for me definitely a re-read, and I had a dim recollection of the main elements of the plot, if you can call it that, but the primary experience was as close to a new read as makes no difference.

'Slaughterhouse 5' is a strange novel. It follows the life and times of time traveller, World War 2 survivor, and alien kidnapee, Billy Pilgrim. Billy experiences time as a continuum, and travels from point to point across it freely, making this an exceptionally fractured novel. “It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”Breaking that down into a "what happened" narrative requires the imposition of a more formal, chronological time scheme and would be misleading; there is a collection of events spread across time that is revealed to us, the reader, but only a limited attempt to present this in any sort of order. In a classic post modernist manner, Vonnegut explains “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”   On reflection, however, I think I may have overstated the impact of the fractured time scheme on the narrative flow of the novel - there is underneath all this jumping around in time nevertheless a reasonably steady progress of the central narrative, from Billy's capture as a prisoner of war, his transport across Europe to Dresden, to the final horror of the fire-bombing.

There's also an incongruous comic book silliness to much of the novel - at one point Billy is captured by aliens and displayed in a zoo, for example. However, the seriousness is never far away, giving the reader an unsettling experience of stepping from genre to genre in the space of a few lines. 

The title of the novel refers to the refuge Vonnegut used to survive the Dresden firebombing of 1945. He unequivocally portrays this as an horrifying act of violence, but doesn't take sides - the reader is left to draw their own conclusions about the morality of the raids. He quotes the figure of 135,000 deaths in the raid, which was accepted, to a point, at the time, but is now know to be a politically motivated exaggeration of what was nevertheless a massacre. Had the Allies lost the war the Dresden raids would undoubtedly have been treated as war crimes. Some of the horror of this event is shown, but it is mainly mitigated by insistence of the philosophy at the heart of the book, that bad things are best not dwelt upon, as they are always going to have happened; far better to focus on the good. This is best summarised in the fatalistic chant of the novel, "So it goes".

As a classic post modern meta-narrative, Slaughterhouse 5 is as much about the process of writing a novel as the events described. As is now quite common, but at the time was much more original, the book contains its own review:

 

"There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
Which is as good as a summary as I am going to find. One footnote - this novel contains a passing reference to "The Red Badge of Courage", another American novel about war, and also one of the top 100 Guardian novels. So it goes.

 

The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey – 2000

By coincidence, following on from my previous review of ‘In Cold Blood’, this is another novelisation of factual events. More specifically, this novel is (effectively) a biography of Ned Kelly, the famous Australian outlaw, written in the first person using Kelly’s own distinctive personal style.

Kelly was a first generation Australian, son of transported Irish Catholic parents. Part of a large family, Kelly’s life was troubled from the start, with his father being imprisoned and then dying when he was 12, and subsequently a long series of increasingly serious brushes with the law. If you establish a country peopled by former prisoners it is hardly surprising that there are one or two law and order challenges; add in nationalist resentments from the Irish community in Australia, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, and the grinding poverty which characterised the settlement at the time (the 1880’s, chiefly) then it is hardly surprising that some people decided to live outside the law.

Carey follows what is known of Kelly’s early life with care. His descent into criminality is shown as being unavoidable – despite Kelly’s efforts to remain honest, his personal code doesn’t allow certain slights to go unrevenged. This is all portrayed from Kelly’s perspective, and the elements of self-justification are not hard to spot.

The main interest in Kelly’s story is how he became transformed from a horse thief to a national hero. There are many components to this transformation, and Carey captures them all. Kelly had a naïve belief in the power of the written word, and some of his attempts to justify his crimes have survived, such as the Jerilderie letter. Google this to see the original text – Carey has captured the spirit of Kelly’s style perfectly. Here’s a transcript of the first page of the Jerilderie letter from the Australian National Archives:

‘I wish to acquaint you with  some of the occurrences of the present past and future, In or about the Spring of 1870 the ground was very soft, a Hawker named Mr Gould got his waggon bogged, between Greta and my mother's place house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places so Mr Gould had to abandon his waggon for fear of losing his horses in the spewy ground he was stopping at my mother's awaiting finer or dryer weather, Mr McCormack and his Wife, (Hawkers' also) were camped in Greta and the mosquitoes were very bad which they generally are in a wet spring and to help them Mr Johns had a horse called Ruita Cruta, although a gelding was as clever as old Wombat or any other Stallion’

There are in this one page several wonderfully expressive phrases – that first line for example, or “as clever as old Wombat” (note, not an old wombat). All Carey had to do to copy this style was pretty much abandon punctuation, throw in lots of vernacular phrases, and plenty of seemingly irrelevant detail, and the job is done.

The other components of the national hero legend are equally obvious. Kelly had a wonderful turn of phrase – the letter ends 'I am a Widow's Son, outlawed and my orders must be obeyed', and at his death it is claimed he said “Such is Life” – and very much in the Robin Hood tradition Kelly was the little guy fighting against an oppressive regime. The spectacular end to the story, when Kelly and his gang wearing their metal armour fight it out against a small army of armed police, gives the story the climax it deserves, although this ending is slightly thrown away in this novel, an inevitable consequence of the first person narrative. But Kelly emerges a charismatic leader, and it is entirely understandable that his legend is secured almost before his death. His crimes are not ignored, but the police murders/killings are shown in context as self defence.

There is a hunger in society for outlaw heroes. Bonnie and Clyde, immortalised in film but not, so far as I am aware, in a novel, are an example from American society. I wonder who will emerge as the outlaw hero of the early 21^st century – Julian Assange, perhaps (perhaps not) or the more elusive hackers of the Internet movements?

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - 1966

Read in Abacus edition.

This non-fiction novel (Capote's term for it) describes the murder of the Clutter family, a mid-Western American family, and the subsequent arrest, conviction, and execution of their killers, Hickock and Smith.

It's a banal and senseless murder, and despite the meticulous way it is reconstructed by Capote he never really gets close to explaining why the killing took place. The motive is one sense is quite simple - theft, and an attempt to cover their tracks - no witnesses - but it takes a certain deranged quality to murder four helpless people 'in cold blood', and it is that aspect of the killings that remains elusive. Towards the end of the book Capote hints at the possibility that Smith, the actual killer of all four family members, was triggered to commit the killings by some resemblance between the first of the family to die, the father, Herb, and an authority figure in his (Smith's) past, but the idea is only mentioned in passing and is not followed through.

A non-fiction novel is arguably a contradiction in terms - novels are by their nature works of imagination. Of course many novels take as their starting point something factual, either in the public domain or the author's personal lives, so in one sense Capote simply takes this idea and develops it. But the reader is left uncertain as to what extent the description of events - including detailed conversations, and accounts of the characters' thought processes - are 'as imagined' by Capote, and which are based upon interviews with the participants and other research. The novel is sub-titled 'A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences', and in a short acknowledgements section Capote claims "All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons directly concerned, more often than not numerous interviews conducted over a considerable period of time". But apart from this acknowledgement, Capote erases any trace of himself from this novel - there is never any mention of "when I spoke to him" or "later he told me that...". In reality this invisibility is misleading - his presence would have had some impact, particularly long after the crime when the appeals process was coming to a conclusion. The 'support' of a celebrity writer would have had an impact, and of course people more cynical than me have pointed out that Capote had an interest in the final execution of Smith and Hickock, giving him the ending his novel needed.

My instinct is that wherever possible Capote stuck to the facts, as they could be verified. The killing is banal and there is no attempt to sensationalise it - in some ways quite the opposite, because Hickock's sexual perversions are glossed over, the executions when they finally come, is over in three or four pages, and while the murders are described in detail, this is done with as much sensitivity as possible in the circumstances. Capote tells the story of the killings murders themselves through Smith's confession - had the murders been described by anyone else the terror of the victim's would have been unavoidable, but because he was simply unable to share any real empathy with them it is (slightly) easier to bear.

Without wishing to labour the point, I find the form of this novel uncomfortable. Documentary recreations of crimes, where the known events are supported by evidence of one form or another ('according to a witness statement', 'in evidence, Smith said', the coroner's report said, etc.) allow the reader to judge for themselves the extent to which this the report is accurate. Similarly, imaginative recreations where the author attempts to step into the shoes of the characters and capture what it must have felt like to be present and involved in the crime, are another legitimate form. But this is a halfway house between these two forms, where some of the scenes are fictional (Dewey, the lead investigator, is shown at the end of the novel meeting one of Nancy Clutter's friends at her grave - he subsequently denied that ever happened) and others likely to be based upon conversations and interviews with the participants where their accuracy can never be tested. If the end result gave us an insight into crimes of this kind then the effort could perhaps be justified - but eventually all we learn is the banality of evil.

Disgrace - J M Coetzee - 1999

Disgrace follows the downfall and disgrace of David Lurie, a lecturer in Communications at Cape Town University. He is 52 and twice divorced. His job at the university has recently been redefined, prefiguring some of the significant changes in South African society that form the backdrop to and context of this novel. Lurie has a brief affair with one of his students. The descriptions of the sex between them are carefully constructed to make it clear that this is an abusive relationship. They are shown from Lurie's perspective, but even he, delusional about his attractiveness though he is, can still understand that what he does with Melanie, his student, is wrong. He sees her as “A child! No more than a child” (20). All the descriptions of Melanie emphasise her youth and immaturity, and her passivity towards a man old enough to be her grandfather. The descriptions of their sex, even though filtered through Lurie’s distorted perspective,  makes it utterly unambiguous that her consent is either not given, or given under pressure and protest:

“She is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her… “No, not now!, she says, struggling” (20/21).

Lurie may fool himself that he is being a sexual adventure – “I’m going to invite you to do something reckless” (16) but the reader is left in no doubt that this is a sexual assault:

“She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her… little shivers of cold run through her. Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself”. (Interesting use of the phrase “lay her out” as opposed to “lay her” for example, with the suggestion of her being like a corpse, laid out by an undertaker.

As soon as the ‘relationship’ is exposed, an unrepentant Lurie is sacked. He goes to live in the South African countryside with his daughter, Lucy, who runs a small holding a dog kennel with the assistance of Petrus, a worker on her property. Petrus’s status changes during the course of the novel. South African was still in transition at this point, moving slowly away from being the country of apartheid where white people held all the positions of responsibility and own much of the land. This transition is embodied by the changes in the relationship between Lucy and Petrus. He starts the novel as her employee (“I am the gardener and the dog-man” (65) but by the end he is a landowner and has proposed a form of arranged marriage with Lucy, which she seems minded to accept, as a form of protection.

The dark centre of the novel is a disturbing and distressing attack on the Lurie family, where Lucy is raped by 3 black men during a home invasion. Her father is shamed by his inability to protect his daughter, and puzzled by her passive acceptance of what has happened to her. She refuses to report the rape, and appears to accept as inevitable that it will happen again, and that there is nothing she can do about it. Her father urges her to leave the smallholding, but she refuses. Coetzee doesn't offer any simple explanations for this puzzling refusal. Lurie speculates that her response is an example of 'white guilt', where the sins of the apartheid era are expiated by the subsequent suffering of the white community: ‘

"But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

‘It was history speaking through them...A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t”.

The reader is invited to draw parallels between Lurie's behaviour towards his students and the mixed race prostitutes he frequents at the start of the novel, and the subsequent rape of his daughter.

I get that. The parallels are pretty unavoidable and frankly heavy-handed. White people in apartheid South Africa (and of course elsewhere) abused black people, and the response of the black men who rape Ellen, while not excused, have to be seen in that historical context. That, anyway, has been the typical reading of the novel in most reviews and analysis. (For example, the London Review of Books review summarises this question thus:’ Lucy decides not to press charges, believing that this rape, in the South African context, is not ‘a public matter’. In the face of irresistible historical change – the collapse of a corrupt order – the claims of the individual are necessarily of secondary importance, even irrelevant. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n20/elizabeth-lowry/like-a-dog)

But I am not buying that, not for one minute. Rape is rape, irrespective of race, and in creating a female character who appears to accept that being raped is the price she has to pay for retaining her home, Coetzee comes perilously close to suggesting that some forms of sexual assault can be understood if not condoned. There is no place for white people in South Africa unless they can come to terms with the retribution that is coming their way, Coetzee seems to imply when he puts these words into Lucy’s mouth:  

“What if rape is ‘the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.

This is not a didactic novel, far from it, but I have not found in any reviews any other explanation of Lucy’s response. But she is not a cardboard cut-out, allegorically representing white rule in South Africa; she is a strongly realised character, whose response to her attack is upsettingly realistic in all other respects.

There are two other important themes running through the novel which I ought to mention. Firstly, there is the question of human attitudes towards animals. Lurie volunteers in an animal shelter, in which his main role is in helping euthanize the unwanted dogs and cats brought into the refuge, and then disposing of their bodies. Coetzee suggests that a value of a society can be judged by the way it treats its pets; Lurie redeems himself by treating the dogs kindly, including respecting their bodies when they come to be incinerated. This echoes an earlier comment by Lucy when she foresees herself stripped of any status and value in South African society, “like a dog”. By this point in the novel we have come to treat sceptically anything Lurie says, so when he argues that “as for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution” (74).

This is not just an argument about how people treat animals, of course – the phrase “different order of creation” was used by those who sought to justify slavery and apartheid.  In a final, deeply pessimistic scene, Lurie sacrifices a dog who he had formed an attachment to through an apparent shared enjoyment of music. It is not by accident that the cover illustration of most editions of this novel feature a picture of a dog.

The other less successful theme is Lurie’s plan to write about Byron, more specifically a light opera about Byron’s sexual adventures in Italy. He plans to orchestrate this using the banjo, which is obviously intended as a way of illustrating the absurd gap between his view of the world and reality. It sets up some uncomfortable contrasts between Lurie’s meditations of 19^th century romantic womanising, and his own delusional view of himself.

I can admire the skill involved in constructing ‘Disgrace’. The carefully ambiguous title probably merits a separate blog entry all of its own, given the multiple things that are considered or treated as disgraces in this novel. But the central characters are unlikeable – Lurie in particular is something of a narcissistic monster (his reaction when told his daughter is pregnant is to consider the impact this will have on his sex life: “What pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather”) (217) or under-developed. Lucy is real enough, but trapped inside Lurie’s perspective we never get close to understanding what makes her tick.  There’s one ultimate test I always apply when evaluating a novel – would I read something else by this author? And my response here would be as of now, no, although I reserve the right to change my mind!

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

I was originally going to describe this Booker Prize winning novel as "a bit of a curate's egg", that is to say good in parts, but thinking about it further that would be wrong, unfair and confusing. Why so? The phrase derives, as I am sure you know, from a Punch cartoon of the late 19th century. It pictures a timid-looking curate eating breakfast. His host remarks: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones." The curate replies, desperate not to offend his eminent host and ultimate employer: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

So the phrase should mean something that is obviously and essentially bad, but described as only partly bad—its supposed good features credited with undue redeeming power. That was the original meaning at least - there is no such thing as a partly bad egg. But to be honest I have used the phrase slightly differently, to describe something that is indeed partly good, partly bad, but where the bad part is so overwhelmingly bad as to spoil the whole. A balloon with only a tiny hole in it still bursts. However, usage of the phrase quickly drifted from these meanings, and is now defined in Wikipedia as "something that is at least partly bad, but has some arguably redeeming features." Which has got to be wrong - a bad egg has no redeeming features, however much the curate may wish it has to avoid the embarrassment of his situation.



Phrases like this change their meaning all the time, and it is not something I am going to get worked up about, but I intended to honour the memory of Punch by avoiding it to mean partly good. Which is what "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" was. It has some powerful descriptive passages, most strikingly the scenes in the Burma Death Railway POW camps, and also the escape from the forest fire at the end of the novel, but there are other much less successful parts of the novel. These less successful parts do not spoil the overall effect, even if they do bring it down a notch or two.

The novel opens with a first person narative by Dorrigo Evans, surgeon and World War 2 veteran. The time scheme is very fluid, and jumps around confusingly. Clearly this is for effect, but the overall impression is incoherence. We know Dorrigo survives the war, because we see him in old age, so some of the traditional suspense of a linear narrative is forfeit. Dorrigo has a romance with his uncle's much younger wife, shortly before going off to war where he is quickly (in terms of the narrative) taken prisoner. The novel really only takes off when it reaches this point - the survivor's account of the brutality of the Death Railway. This is unblinkingly horrific, vividly portrayed, and pretty disturbing. Flanagan shows some events from the perspective of the prison guards, and this insight into their thought processes and values humanises them to some extent. Nevertheless this is not a "we are all guilty in war" portrayal - there are good people and bad people here, just that the bad people remain human despite their barbarity. (An example - the Japanese forces supervising the building of the railroad were given insufficient tools and machinery to lay the track. So they had to force the prisoners to build the railway with just hand tools and back breaking labour, all the time on sub-starvation rations. No wonder so many died, but did the Japanese forces have the choice of just abandoning work on the lines? Did they have spare food and medicines they withheld from their prisoners?)

The war ends suddenly and almost in passing, and the horror comes to a close. The trauma lives on of course, although Dorrigo seems to cope remarkably well considering. His tragic romance with Ella is easily the least successful part of the novel. She believes he dies in the war, he thinks she has also died, so there is no post-war happy ever after. This is not particularly tragic nor moving, and even when they do finally meet they move on without speaking. Flanagan's prose in these sections is at times horrible, sub-Mills and Boonian. For example (page 81) "Ella was kind, he told himself. And somewhere within him he pitied Ella, and buried even deeper was an understanding that they would both suffer because of her kindness and his pity. He hated her kindness and he feared his pity, and he wanted only to escape it all forever." Yuck.

A few years back I made a valiant effort to read as many Booker Prize winning novels as possible. I was doing well until beaten by Hilary Mantell - I managed to finish "Wolf Hall", but just couldn't face "Bring up the Bodies". The Narrow Road puts me back on track, and while I have some reservations I am glad I read it, expanding my knowledge of Australian contemporary literature along the way. But I have no inclination to delve into Flanagan's back catalogue, which I think is the test of whether this really was prize-winning literature.

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.

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.

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.

Amsterdam - Ian McEwan

Read in 1999 Vintage edition

The important thing to remember about this novel, winner of the 1998 Booker prize, is that it is pre-Atonement, pre-On Chesil Beach, even pre-Saturday.  In other words it is not the work of a mature writer at the height of his powers – which I know is not much of an excuse, but it was the best I could come up with. In fact after a few hours of puzzlement – what the heck was he thinking of? - I think I came to understand what McEwan was trying to do here, and I was willing to forgive him.

The plot is flimsy. Molly Lane has died in her forties of an unspecified dementia, (false note struck straight away – everyone would have wanted to know what her illness was, and would have talked about it) and her past lovers assemble to mourn her. The cast includes:

·         George, her present husband, who maliciously prevented people from visiting her, and used her illness as a means of imposing the control on her he was never able to exercise when she was well.

·         Vernon, editor of a mildly left wing broadsheet, who is struggling to take it down market, running stories about conjoined twins instead of chess tournaments

·         Clive, a composer who has been commissioned to write a millennial symphony (we are in the late 1990s). Clive is revealed as a casual plagiarist;

·         Garmody, the Foreign Secretary, who has a range of unpleasant right-wing views. He is a Portillo-like figure (that is the nasty Portillo of the mid 1990’s not the avuncular figure he has become).

Clive and Vernon, long standing friends, casually make a pact to kill one another should either of them become ill in the way Molly did. George finds pictures of Garmody amongst Molly’s possessions that show him cross-dressing.  He sells them to Vernon, who uses them to boost circulation, but falls out with Clive as a result. Meanwhile Clive, on a walking break in the Lake District, sees a woman being attacked, but does not intervene because he wants to work on his composition.

Vernon is sacked, Clive can’t finish his composition, and in a rage they decide to kill one another, which they do while in Amsterdam, using the country’s relaxed laws on euthanasia. The front cover of this edition shows two gentlemen in frock coats and top hats duelling in a wood or forest, with one or two others watching on as seconds, a not so subtle reference to this mutual destruction.

Each character tells their section of the story in the first person, so we don’t see them in their full awfulness immediately – they have little or no insight into their own behaviour. For example when Clive sees the woman attacked he views the incident as little more than a domestic argument, when to the reader it is chillingly, obviously, more than that: “She made a sudden pleading whimpering sound, and Clive knew exactly what he had to do.” (88) He walks away.

McEwan assembles a cast of grotesques, and hurries to dole out suitable outcomes to them all. The implausibility of the ending really needs no elaboration from me, and he came in for a huge amount of criticism – the worst of which was to compare it to the kind of contrivance used by Jeffrey Archer. To a point this is justified – the ending is ridiculous and unbelievable. But I have a theory as to what McEwan was aiming for. It is a mistake to read this as social realism, a psychological study, or a thriller. This was intended as social satire, however clumsily it is executed. In fact the novel I am most strongly reminded of is Evelyn Waugh's The Loved Ones, which is deliciously dark, and ends, like this, with sudden death. But while Waugh carries it off, McEwan undoubtedly doesn’t. Principally this is due to simple care with the various elements of the plot. Satire is such a difficult art that a near miss – as I believe Amsterdam is – is nevertheless a profound miss. If evidence of this were needed, I think it is significant that while the characters and events of Waugh's 1930s novel have stayed clearly with me for more than 20 years, I could remember nothing of this novel from a 1999 reading until I read the book this week. McEwan's themes - the intrusions of the press, injunctions, euthanasia, etc - are still very relevant, so I was surprised at how dated the novel felt.

The Sea - John Banville

Read in a Picador 2006 edition. Winner of the 2005 Booker prize.

A generic Booker prize winner is emerging from my reading of recent weeks. The short novel is narrated by an older character looking back on a formative incident from their youth – an incident that is not revealed until well into the novel. This incident has profoundly affected the later life of the main characters, but like the sun cannot be looked at directly, and has to be revealed slowly and through hints and subtle references. Other than this climactic event there is little plot development, and all the characters are seen through the prism of this incident. The typical 21^st century Booker favourite is heavy on atmosphere and imagery, but light on some of the more traditional components of the novel such as story.

The Sea could almost have been written as a "How to win the Booker prize" exercise, ticking so many of these boxes. This does it a disservice however, because within the generic Booker candidate is a much stronger novel struggling to get out.

The plot is easily summarised: Max Morden, (a pun on "maximum modern"?) recently widowed, having lost his wife after a long illness, goes to drink himself quietly into oblivion in a seaside boarding house from his youth, where, many years earlier, "something happened" – the traditional formative experience. Max narrates the novel in a stream of consciousness which flits from one time period to another. Slowly the childhood summer where he met the Grace family is unfolded. While clearly distressed at the loss of his wife, the narrator is still able to craft elaborate metaphorical descriptions of the Grace family and their seaside summer.

In what way does this childhood experience make the man, as we are led to conclude? Why does being witness to a traumatic childhood experience, combining sex and death (and while this is a spoiler, apologies, the real surprise would have been if his childhood had not been marked by an experience combining sex and death, wouldn’t it?) make Max the man he becomes? Does it affect his ability to form adult relationships, make a career, or otherwise live his life? Apparently not - there is no real hint that his average career and average life has been affected by the incidents of this extraordinarily long summer.

The fallibility of memory is often a strong theme of these novels, but is played straight here. Max misremembers, adjusts his focus, admits to fallibility, but on other occasions when the authorial voice is stronger has a stroner grasp of time and place. While he recognises these memories may be fallible or flawed, this doesn’t detain him long – nothing comes of the gap between memory and reality.

The reviews quoted on the cover and back of this novel focus heavily on Banville's use of language. He has a particular flair for imagery which while not directly associated with the thing being described, does have the effect of making the reader pause and reflect. At times this tips over into plain over-writing, such as when a farmyard is described thus - "Big shallow muslin-draped pans of milk lost in their own silence" (53). This doesn't really mean anything, but has the effect, if you are like me, take another pass at the sentence. Most of the time though the imagery works well; seabirds dive like "torn scraps of rag" (64), a waiter approaches "tentative as a fox cub" (65); a car engine cools "still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint" (79). I particularly liked the narrator's description of lying in bed next to his wife like "toppled statues of ourselves" (99)

Banville (or is it Morden?) tiptoes on the border with nonsense so frequently that is not surprising that occasionally he oversteps - such as when "being alone with Myles was like being in a room which someone had just violently left" (83); or when Chloe's teeth are described as having "a faint tinge to the enamel of her incisors that was green indeed, but a delicate damp grey-green, like the damp light under trees after rain, or the dull-apple shade of the underside of leaves reflected in still water" (138).

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually a great novel - or more specifically that Banville has the potential to write a great novel. The writing here is allusive, (I got lots of echoes of Eliot which I haven't traced yet) complex, very clever, and improves with time - rereading for this blog very shortly after the first reading was a surprisingly pleasant experience, not having to worry about the distracting nonsense of the big reveal, and being able to just enjoy the writing instead. Absolutely this is a flawed novel, but would it be too patronising of me to say it shows great promise?

The Sense of an Ending (2) - Julian Barnes

I wanted to add a few comments to my notes on Julian Barnes's "A Sense of an Ending". I have spotted what I think is a significant flaw at the heart of the novel, although to be fair it is one that is not apparent on a casual read. 

The novel's primary theme is the imperfection of memory, which the narrator describes more eloquently as "some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty" (page 4), and "that certainty produced at the point where the imprefections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation" (page 17). To illustrate this the letter Tony writes to Adrian and Veronica is exhibit A. In Tony's memory this letter is unremarkable:

"as far as I remember,I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent" (page 42) 

- all fairly restrained, dignified stuff. The actual letter is far more robust, and is positioned by the narrator as being the cause of all the subsequent problems in their various relationships.

But this doesn't work, because when Tony describes his recollection of the letter he is already aware of what he wrote, he has seen the original - unless we are being invited to understand that the narration of part one is divided from part two by the reading of Mrs Page's will.

While possible that is unconvincing - why would Tony record the events of part one unless to provide background to part two? So he already knows his language was harsher than he describes it in his softened page 42 version. This is important to the understanding of Barnes's central theme, that memory is fallible, but that documentary evidence can often teach us how flawed our memory is. Here the documentary evidence is to hand, but Tony still presents us with the pre-documentary version.

I appreciate that I need to set this out more clearly, but for now I think my central point is that the points Barnes are discussing are not fully thought through.

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Read in a Vintage books edition 2012.

Plot outline - Part 1

The narrator of the novel, Tony Webster, looking back over 40 years to his youth, tells us about his group of friends at school in the 1960s. The tight knit group is joined by a slightly detached fourth member, Adrian. Adrian sees the world from a different perspective from the others, but is clearly very bright, and goes on to Cambridge. Tony goes to Bristol, another friend to Sussex, and the fourth goes into his father's business (Barnes having fun there with the subtle gradations of university attainment and status.) Just before they leave school another boy commits suicide, ostensibly because he has got his girlfriend pregnant. This is a portent of things to come, a rather clunking clue in fact. There are along the way some irritating "if this were a novel" comments from the narrator, drawing our attention to the artificiality of the construct, just in case we weren't aware that we are reading a book rather than watching real life unfold.

At university Tony has a relationship with a girl, Veronica, including an awkward weekend stay at her parents’ house. He later introduces her to his former school-friends; shortly afterwards they separate, and shortly after that she and Adrian get involved. Hearing from them about the relationship, Tony writes a spiteful letter cursing them. In the end it appears to have been a literal curse, because Adrian commits suicide. At the time we are told this was an existential act of someone unable to see the point of life, but it doesn't take much to detect that it might be more complicated than that.

Part 2

Forty years flash past, and we are brought to the present. As this is a routine and predictable discursion on the fallibility of memory, we know that the way Tony remembers things is unlikely to be an accurate recollection of the past (even Tony knows and acknowledges this). It comes as no surprise therefore when these events are given a new focus. This is precipitated by the death of Veronica's mother, who bequeaths Tony £500 "blood money" (Veronica's description) and Adrian's diary. We are left to guess how she came into possession of this document, but Veronica has requisitioned it and refuses to honour her mother's will.

Tony pesters Veronica for the diary, which leads to several abrupt, uncomfortable meetings. She persistently tells T he "doesn't get it" - there is clearly some dark secret from their youth that has yet to emerge. She takes him to meet a disabled person who we are led to believe is her child. Finally, in the last scenes from the novel it is suggested that the disabled person is Veronica's brother, the product of a late pregnancy of her mother's (am I the only one offended by the simple leap that equates late pregnancy with an undefined disability?) It is also suggested, but never made explicit, that the child's father was Adrian, and that Tony's spiteful letter had been the catalyst of this affair, which in turn had led to Adrian's suicide and Veronica's embitterment.

Although Barnes is trying hard to be modern here - having a flawed narrator retelling tales of their past through the perspective of the present, and then having to re-evaluate that initial view because of an unexpected catalyst - is in many ways very traditional.

Does it work as a novel? Well the Booker judges obviously though so, for what that is worth. But the book is not without its problems. First of these is Veronica. Her behaviour is irrational. Even if we fill in some of the gaps of the story in line with Barnes’ s hints and assume that Tony’s letter to Adrian was the catalyst for an affair with veronica’s mother, and subsequently Adrian’s suicide, this still asks us to accept that:

a)       Veronica believes that Tony’s letter was the sole reason for the affair and suicide, and that none of the principal actors bore virtually any responsibility for their behaviour. She maintains a relationship with Sarah, her mother, until her death in old age, despite the suggestion that she (Sarah) had stolen her boyfriend from her, borne him a child, and provoked his suicide.

b)       She would bottle up her anger and resentment for forty years without saying anything to Tony

c)       When finally her mother dies and the diary comes to light she is willing to show Tony the consequences of his actions, but not simply tell him. If he doesn’t “get it” telling him he doesn’t get it seems a pretty stupid waste of time.

None of this is in any way psychologically convincing. It just doesn’t ring true. Barnes tries to disguise this by showing us events solely from Tony’s point of view, which works for a while, but not after some reflection on the puzzles he sets us at the end of the novel.

Some other observations:

·          The novel opens with a series of vivid images, almost all of which relate to water in one way or another, including steam, the Severn Bore, and bodily fluids being washed down a basin. What is the significance of this symbolism – is water being used to represent memory, or time? 

·          There are some strong connections between this novel and Amis’s On Chesil Beach – a relatively banal incident in the early but unliberated 1960’s looked back on in older age and seen in a different light.

·          The novel is to my mind about a third too long – the meetings between Veronica and Tony where she seethes with anger about his betrayal could easily be collapsed into a single, much more powerful meeting. This would have made it a long short story rather than a novella, and disqualified it for the Booker – is Barnes really that cynical?

The Gathering - Anne Enright

Read in the Vintage 2008 edition shown

The decision of the 2007 Booker prize judges to give this book the nod over On Chesil Beach must rank as one of the all-time puzzling decisions of a prize panel. Because this was lame. The novel's central premise is very traditional - a family member has committed suicide, and the clan gathers to mourn their loss and review his life. This is shown us by Veronica Hegarty, the book's narrator, sister of the suicide, Liam. We are told early on that Liam's death can be traced back to an event in his childhood. The traditional dark secret revolves around her grandmother, Ada - I was irresistibly reminded of another Ada, great-aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed, and has never been the same since.

The reveal - that Liam was sexually assaulted by a friend of the grandmother. (he was staying with his grandmother as his mother went through yet another pregnancy) is underwhelming. The line between this assualt and his eventual suicide decades later is never drawn - in fact Liam is a very lightly sketched character, and we understand little about his life and why he took it. The disclosure of this incident from the past is not the turning point we are led to expect - it is not revealed to the wider family, and nothing comes from it.

Stylistically the prose is wooden and at times comically so. When the narrator has sex with her husband she describes lying there "quartered like a chicken". The narrator says of the young undertaker "You could unpeel him and he would still be true" (75) which is not just a whacky metaphor but gibberish isn't it? Whether this disjointed narrative is supposed to reflect the distressed psyche of the narrator is besides the point - it is still clumsyily written.

The central character is unsympathetic and the fact that her mother often is unable remember is unsurprising.

Novels where nothing happens, and the events just consist of unstructured memory - and the point that Veronica's memory is flawed, and is constantly being reconstructed is laboured to death here - flowing back and forth across the events of the past - are getting tired. I am really crying out for a novel where something happens and the characters are believable and interesting. Not much to ask for is it?

P.S. As with The Accidental, negative reviews on Amazon outweigh the positive - and I genuinely don't believe this is just Booker bashing.

The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai

Read in a 2007 Penguin edition.

Kiran Desai's novel is in many ways a very traditional exploration of modern India, but a dramatic contrast to White Tiger. The book is set in the 1980s in the shadows of the Himalayas, and follows the affairs of a small prosperous household - a retired judge, his cook, and his teenage granddaughter.

This is not a plot-driven book. From the time of the opening chapters to the novel's conclusion only a small amount of time has passed, and there has been little incident. Most of the narrative is devoted to following the characters' back stories - how the judge went to university in England, how his granddaughter's parents died in Russia, and so on. Most of this is extraordinarily predictable - everything plays out just as we expect, with little happening and minor dramas being created out of minor events such as the loss of a dog. The more dramatic events of the time are shown but appear largely incidental. In any event the time structure of the narrative has already shown us that no-one central to the story will be affected.

Although the setting allows for some exploration of the politics of northern India, and in particular the struggle for independence of the Gurkhas, this largely feels like window dressing for the centre of the novel, the lives of the main characters and the cast of eccentrics that circles them. The book really only comes to life when it jumps across to follow the cook's son struggling to make a life for himself in New York.  I wasn't surprised to subsequently read that this is the author's current home.

This has all been done before, and better, most obviously by Rushdie. The contrast with White Tiger though is interesting. Here the portrayal of India remains convincingly honest; the police are corrupt, there is crushing poverty, which robs people of their dignity, tourists are crass and insensitive - but at the same time the country has its beauty and the people have their charm, even when you have to struggle to find it. The book is well written, and the descriptive prose is very well done. For me this was not enough, and while this novel was head and shoulders above White Tiger, it nevertheless disappointed. Incidentally I found the title pompous and patronising - yes everyone has experienced loss of some kind of another, and it has had an affect on their situation and personality, and yes there is an obvious read across to India itself, but the same could be said of just about anyone and any country.

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger won the 2008 Booker Prize.

This first novel is written in the form of a letter to the Premier of China as an introduction to modern India. The author is not a fan - of modern India, that is, not China. India is a rich source of material for contemporary novelists, (for example, the Inheritance of Loss) and seems to be favoured by Booker judges. The novel charts the life of the narrator as a chauffeur to a prosperous family, and portrays the country as sordid, brutal, and above all bitterly corrupt.

If written by a Western author this account could be easily have been seen as racist. The author's closeness to the country he describes probably deflects that criticism. Nevertheless there are virtually no redeeming features of the country - the bravery of people who fought for India's independence is mocked, the beauty of the countryside goes unmentioned, and no-one acts through anything other than cowardice or self interest. The Indian Tourist Board will not be recommending this book in a hurry! It is an indictment of the country India has become in the years since independence, and is horribly unbalanced compared to say Slumdog Millionaire, which shines a light on the underbelly of India but equally shows the beauty of the country and its people.

The plot is very simple. The narrator murders his boss, and runs away with his money, showing a small amount of compassion by taking his nephew with him, despite knowing that the rest of his family is almost certain to be slaughtered in retaliation. Using the stolen money he bribes his way into a position of influence, and gloats over those he has left behind. We are told this fairly on in the book, so I am not including any spoilers. Years later he records his crimes in letters to the Chinese Premier, a plot device that makes little sense incidentally. The central character is deeply unpleasant; as well as being an unrepentant murderer, he is also bigoted towards gays, black people, and women. of course I am not suggesting the author shares these views, but they are presented without adequate challenge. Just because bad views are expressed by a bad person doesn't make them any more palatable.

By coincidence I am also reading "Crime and Punishment" at the moment, and although the comparison is probably unfair, Dostoievsky does something Adiga does not (or cannot), which is given us an insight into the mind of a killer. While the portrait of Raskolnikov shows us the internal struggles a killer goes through, in White Tiger the killing is shown as a simple commercial transaction, with little or no horror, nor psychological consequences - extraordinarily I have even seen one reviewer describe the murder as "brave". Killing someone in cold blood and leaving your family and friends to live or die with the consequences isn't brave. It's not even as if the main character was living an impoverished life on the streets - he was doing fairly well as a chauffeur. I appreciate the author isn't saying "Life in India is so bad murder becomes acceptable" - what he is surely is presenting us with is a world where morality has disappeared, so much so that a murderer sees little wrong with their crime, because they see similar acts of immorality being rewarded all around them. This is "Crime" with no "Punishment".

All in all a strange Booker choice, subverting many of our expectations about what novels about modern India should be, but with very few redeeming features.