Welcome to Readers' Corner

Blackwell Readers' Corner was formed in July 1999 when a number of Blackwell employees decided that they wanted an opportunity to talk about books as well as to sell them. Meeting once a month in an Oxford pub, it has proved a popular and successful focal point for our members, giving rise to many memorable discussions. Read more about the group here.

For more details about how you can join in with the group, please email Tom Childs at tom_childs@yahoo.com, marking your correspondence 'Readers' Corner'.

Latest Reviews

April 2011 Amongst Women by John McGahern
March 2011 Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.
February 2011 - If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.
January 2011 - Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima
December 2010 - One Day by David Nicholls
November 2010 - Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
October 2010 - A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
September 2010 - Rabbit, Run by John Updike
August 2010 - Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
July 2010 - Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
June 2010 - The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
May 2010 - Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
April 2010 - Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee
March 2010 - The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
February 2010 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
January 2010 - Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

Scroll down for older Readers' Corner reviews or view the complete Readers' Corner review archive.

Latest Review

April 2011

Amongst Women by John McGahern

Michael Moran is depressed and dying. His family – or more specifically, the women in his family - rally around him. The three daughters suggest to their step-mother that they can revive his spirits by reconvening Monaghan’s Day. It was on this day that he met his friend and fellow IRA veteran James McQuaid to drink and reminisce. But McQuaid is long gone and a flashback to their last meeting shows that they parted on bad terms. Thus begins Amongst Women, John McGahern’s best known novel. This section is a flash-forward in a complex, multi-level story, rendered in measured, unadorned prose that is both evocative and precise in its descriptions of rural life in Ireland in the post-second world war years. Moran is at the centre of the story. He is a hero of the Irish War of Independence who has settled into farm life in County Leitrim with his family. A widower, his eldest son has rebelled against his authoritarian control and left for London. When Rose Brady, a 30-something maidservant, returns from Scotland in search of a husband, the possibility of remarriage presents itself. Rose’s family do not approve of Moran and his aloof ways, however Rose is set on him, accepts his proposal, and soon makes friends with Moran’s children. Will this sunny spirited woman be able to lift the gloom from the family home? Or will Moran’s rigidity grind her down, too?

Amongst Women was well liked by the reading group. It’s a poignant portrait of an overbearing and violent man, whose fixed ideas of church and family serve to suppress individuality and expression. Yet at the same time, we are very aware that the strong sense of family is shared by all, even the family members who are unable to live with Moran. He is feared and loved in equal measure. Is he a monster who drives away or represses his family, or is he a loving man who is the victim of his misguided views? And what is wrong with his beliefs? Has Moran not adopted the twin pillars of Irish identity promoted by Eamon de Valera, the first President of the Irish Republic? Is it not right to want to live a quiet, rural life of hard work, piety and tradition? Or is this the root of Ireland’s problems as it struggles to find a post-colonial identity that transcends the years it has lived under English rule?

In many ways, McGahern’s is an uncompromising depiction of modern day Ireland. Moran is not likeable, and one by one, we see his family attempt to escape his debilitating influence on their lives. Some, like Luke and youngest son Michael, are strong enough to run away and find their own lives; others, like Maggie, Sheila, and Mona, compromise and live unfulfilled lives. Is this gender divide a deliberate ploy of McGahern’s? At least one group member did not like the submissiveness of the novel’s female characters. Others argued that they, too, found ways of standing up to him – such as Sheila’s refusal to bring her children to the farm after Moran had verbally abused them. Another argued that each character represents a strand of Irish society – where choices are limited and often require emigration to the United Kingdom. What is telling is that in spite of being dominated by their father, each becomes independent, drawing on the self-worth instilled into them by him during childhood.

Amongst Women is a novel of survival and inheritance. It starkly asks if what the independence generation has given to their children is not worse than what they sought to replace? McGahern presents an Ireland that the Irish themselves may not particularly want to see and acknowledge. The rural idyll is shown to be a sham – this is brilliantly rendered in an episode in the novel when the Protestant neighbour shows Moran how to farm his land more efficiently, though Moran knows he’ll never be able to repeat this technique on his own; Irish politics is dismissed by Moran as “a crowd of small-minded gangsters out for their own good." Small town hypocrisy is epitomised by the gossipy women at the post office who mock the old guerrilla war hero, and whilst he declines in the countryside the only way for the next generation to succeed seems to be to move to England. Is it any wonder that a bitter man like Moran should direct his sense of betrayal on the only people he can lash out at - his own family?

For all this gloom, the group found Amongst Women to be moving, and greatly admired the novel. McGahern does not invite his readers to sympathise with Moran, yet it would be impossible not to empathise with his family and there is some light among the darkness. In spite of its hardness, the novel is a sensitive family story that has universal resonance. It attempts to understand what is at the heart of abusive relationships and, as such is as much about forgiveness as about condemnation. In this sense, the book shares much in common with Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Amongst Women is a profound and skilfully written novel that rewards the reader. It is therefore recommended by the group.

March 2011

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Yukio Mishima

Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary landscape in 1985 with her debut novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It won the Whitbread First Book Prize and was soon adapted by Winterson into a groundbreaking television series. A quarter of a century on, the group felt it was time to revisit this modern classic to find out if it has stood the test of time. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is the story of Jeanette, a young girl who is brought up by evangelical Christians in the north of England. Set in the 1960s and 70s, the novel offers an insight into a religious way of life that many people will find extreme and even repellent. Jeanette's mother and her Church have a literal view of the Bible, rooted in Old Testament authoritanism and an absolute belief in the apocalyptic predictions of the Book of Revelations. Young Jeanette, who is adopted, immerses herself in her religion and when her mother is forced to send her to school, she is rather surprised that her school mates do not share her vision of the world. Inevitably made an outcast at school, both by her fellow pupils and her teachers, there is however no sense that Jeanette is lonely or isolated. Instead, she zealously commits herself to her lifelong ambition to become a missionary, content to have friendships only with older women from the Church.

It is not until her teenage years that things start to change. Jeanette finds herself attracted to Melanie, a girl she sees behind the fish counter at the local market. Jeanette has become a persuasive sermoniser and soon encourages Melanie to join the Church. At the same time she begins an intimate relationship with her that goes against the teachings of St Paul. When the relationship is uncovered, there is a major uproar which results in savage retribution, including exorcisms and banishment - all of which forces Jeanette to reassess her values.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is an experimental novel that combines gritty realism with fairytales and Arthurian legend, along with a meditation on truth and fiction and the difference between history and storytelling. Each chapter is named after a book from the Old Testament of the Bible and there are discernable links. It's very readable and follows Jeanette's life from her birth through to her late teens, but intriguingly in her introduction, written in 1991, Winterson claimed that the novel has a spiral rather than linear structure. By this she means the reader must move back and forth in the novel to explore its themes. The novel is short, but it's ambitious, as it deals with class, culture and religion, as well as self-awareness and self-expression. Winterson wants to encourage her readers to explore the themes of the books, the most notable of which is love. In the book there are three kinds of love - between the mother and daughter, between two women, and love of God. Winterson is at pains to state that the novel is not "a gay novel" and although we felt that sex is pivotal to the book, we agreed that "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" should not be pigeon-holed when its scope is so much broader than an exploration of its protagonist's sexuality.

There was some discussion around the fact that Winterson's decision to call her protagonist Jeanette - in the television adaptation she changed this to Jess. In her introduction Winterson says Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is and isn't autobiography. Like her central character, she was brought up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire and left home aged sixteen after declaring she was a lesbian. Any other similarities may or may not be coincidental and Winterson's novel does not detail significant aspects of her life, for example, her relationship with her father and what happens to her after she leaves home. In this way, the book is like James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and DH Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers", as they all focus on the psychological and moral growth of a character very similar to their author from youth to adulthood when they become a writer.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit proved to be very popular with the group. Everyone appreciated Jeanette Winterson's fine writing and her wit as she vividly depicted life for a young girl brought up in unusual circumstances. It's grim and funny at the same time, as Winterson explores a frightening form of child abuse, as well as lesbianism. We all enjoyed the use of fairytales and speculated about the influence of Angela Carter and Italo Calvino. A taboo-breaking novel in 1985, it tackles difficult questions about our society that still resonate today and while attitudes towards homosexuality have changed considerably the book continues to be of interest, not least because of its insights into the nature of love. "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" is thoroughly recommended.

February 2011

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Yukio Mishima

Italo Calvino was a journalist and writer whose playful stories and novels made him a literary giant in Europe during the post-war period. His experiences during the Second World War, especially in the Italian Resistance, led him to join the communist party and his early writing career is dominated by social realism. He also collated and translated many of the finest "Italian Folktales" (1956), and it was this interest in folklore and fables that was to have a strong influence on his later works. Disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party and began writing very different kinds of books. The best known of these include Cosmicomics(1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979), the last of which was our chosen book in February.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller begins in a startling way. The writer addresses the reader directly - "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought", he writes before going on to meditate on what "you" do when preparing to read a book. The second part of the chapter is the opening chapter of a novel called "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller". At the end of this chapter the reader discovers that the book is misprinted and contains only more copies of that same chapter. The narrator continues to address "you", saying that you return to the bookshop where you are given a replacement book. This turns out to be another novel altogether, however you begin to read it before discovering that one chapter in, it too is broken off: the pages, which were uncut, turn out to have been largely blank.

So a pattern emerges, as Calvino's novel settles into a cycle of twelve two-part chapters, one half telling the story of "your" attempts to read the books you have started, and the second half containing a new chapter from a new book. Each time a new book is introduced "you" become eager to read it until there is an accumulation of ten books. At the same time, "you" begin to take on a whole life of your own, meeting the Other Reader, her sister, all the while becoming more and more involved in the hunt for both the missing books and even the authors themselves.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is a strikingly inventive and original novel. Inspired in part by the rich storytelling structure of "One Thousand And One Nights", it is a classic example of metafiction, that is, writing about writing, which became hugely popular in the 1980s when postmodern fiction was at its peak. Calvino's themes include the relationship between fiction and life, authorial objectivity and the subjectivity of meaning, the role of the writer and of the reader in creating a novel, and what makes an ideal reader and author. Calvino's book raises many questions which he doesn't answer himself; rather he asks his readers to try to work them out for themselves.

Interestingly, most members of the group admitted that they went into our meeting wondering what on earth to make of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. On discovering that they weren't alone, we began exploring some of the abovementioned themes, as well as simply expressing our feelings about reading such an intricate and artful novel. While some were perplexed by the book's complex structure, others found this a refreshing change from the standard British/American realist novel format that focuses on social and personal preoccupations. Character, too, is portrayed in a very different way from realist fiction. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is unashamedly intellectual, focusing on ideas and abstractions, yet it is humorous and engaging, and above all masterful story telling. The book contains a multitude of memorable stories - does it even matter if the majority of them are unfinished? And what an amazing range of stories -thrillers, romance, detective fiction, in fact, any number of genres and styles, all exquisitely pastiched by a superb craftsman.

By the time we went our separate ways we had all come to the conclusion that we had read something very special. Calvino's favourite author was Franz Kafka (his favourite novel being "Amerika") and he greatly admired both Lawrence Sterne ("Tristram Shandy") and Jorge Luis Borges ("Labyrinths"). It would be harsh not to include Calvino among such a pantheon of true originals. Like them, he has inspired more than one generation of writers, including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy. And who wouldn't be inspired? Ultimately, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is a celebration of books and reading. We agreed that it was an excellent choice and the book is definitely recommended.

January 2011

Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was a prolific Japanese author who achieved worldwide fame in the 1950s and 1960s before becoming notorious in 1970 when he committed ritual suicide after a failed coup d'état in Tokyo. His ground-breaking novels addressed sexuality, death, and politics during a time of great national change. Mixing Eastern and Western aesthetics in his writing style, Mishima's novels were critically acclaimed at the time, although he is much less widely read today. Perhaps best known for "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, the group chose to read an earlier novel, "Forbidden Colours", following its recent reissue as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Forbidden Colours is the story of Yuichi Minami, a young student whose extraordinary beauty makes him irresistible to both women and men. He first appears in the narrative emerging out of the sea onto a beach where he is spied by an old man, Shunsuké Hinoki. Shunsuké is a distinguished yet disillusioned writer who has come to the resort in pursuit of Yasuko Segawa, a young woman with whom he has become infatuated. When Shunsuké learns that Yuichi is betrothed to Yasuko, he encourages the young man to marry her even though Yuichi is unhappy with the prospect of this arranged marriage. At the same time, Shunsuké enters into a financial agreement with Yuichi to ruin the reputation of several women who have spurned Shunsuké's advances in the past.

Yuichi agrees, but unbeknownst to Shunsuké, he has his own dark secrets. Shortly after marrying, he begins to frequent parks and bars that are meeting places for Tokyo's gay population. Before long, he is the centre of attention as his beauty causes many gay men to fall in love with him. Meanwhile, Shunsuké's revenge plan is put into action. Yuichi is introduced first to Mrs Kaburagi, a former lover of Shunsuké and blackmailer, then to Kyoko Hodaka, a young married woman who rejected Shunsuké. But how long can Yuichi keep up his triple life before being found out?

Forbidden Colours is a complex and unexpected novel. Mishima tackles many themes, in particular homosexuality and misogyny, but also the politics of Japan in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The story takes its protagonists to the heart of the Japanese establishment as businessmen and politicians are exposed by the actions of Shunsuké and his protégé, Yuichi. "Forbidden Colours" also contains strong aesthetic and philosophical elements, as the plot and characters are delineated between beauty and ugliness, truth and lies, youth and old age, life and death. One also sees puppeteers and puppets at work, double and alter egos, although nothing is so straightforward as to be as it first appears.

The group's reaction to the book was one of an initial revulsion towards the main characters which is replaced by respect and admiration for Mishima's masterful craftsmanship. The reader is drawn into a dark and disturbing world that he or she may at first not like, while at the same time wondering how to understand the context of the novel. Mishima makes demands on his reader, but diligence pays off. Most of us confessed to knowing nothing about Japanese society in the 1950s. It came as a surprise to discover, for example, that homosexuality was not illegal in Japan at that time, though it was frowned upon and largely conducted in the underground world Mishima depicts. It is fortunate that in this age of the Internet and, in particular, Wikipedia, it is possible to discover that honour, obligation and keeping public face were considered more important in Japanese culture than the shame of being found to be breaking the taboos of homosexuality and infidelity. We decided that Mishima set out to explore this and to uncover the hypocrisy at the heart of his country's cultural, social and political identity. He does this brilliantly in an illuminating and unforgettable way.

Throughout the novel, Mishima draws on European cultural references. Endymion, Hippolytus and Phaedrus are just three of the classical analogies explicitly used by Mishima in the book. The group identified many more recent examples. In his central character, Yuichi, it is hard not to think of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; in Shunsuké's attempts to manipulate Yuichi, one cannot help but think of Miss Havisham and Estella in "Great Expectations"; the high society shenanigans call to mind the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton. There is also a touch of Maupassant's "Bel Ami" about Yuichi. We agreed that this helped us as Westerners to relate to the tale we were reading. At the same time, we acknowledged that the references to classical Japanese were harder to understand, although again it is possible to utilise the Internet to find out something about Buddhism and Samurai culture, both of which are referred to throughout the novel.

Forbidden Colours is a challenging read that rewards persistence. Mishima's plot and characters - who are more likely to be loathed than loved - will be remembered for a long time. His views on modern Japan, and to a degree, the modern world, are controversial. Mishima shows a world where convention can constrict and even destroy people, while at the same time suggesting that conformity may be the only possible freedom in this world. It's a bleak view and perhaps hard to stomach in the 21st Century, when so much value has been placed "freedom" in Western countries. The group found "Forbidden Colours" to be a fascinating read. One small gripe was to question Penguin's decision to use the translation, which is 40 years old, rather than commission a new one - at time the prose is almost impenetrable. However, for those who like demanding yet satisfying literature that offers a window into another world, this is a book to savour.

December 2010

One Day by David Nicholls

In 2010 David Nicholls' One Day was surpassed in book sales only by Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and Jamie Oliver. It also featured in many book of the year lists in national newspapers. Intrigued by the huge popularity of the book, the reading group chose it as its December book.

One Day begins on Friday 15th July 1988. The date is significant as it's the day that Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley first meet. It's the night of their graduation from Edinburgh University and although they are aware of each other, they've never spent any time together. By the end of the chapter, the reader is left wondering if they'll see each other again. Turning the page, one soon discovers that it's Saturday 15th July 1989 and that Dex and Em are still in touch, if not a couple. So, the pattern of the book emerges. Each of the 23 chapters is set on the 15th July over a twenty year period as the book traces the will-they-or-won't-they relationship between the two protagonists.

The book is very much set up as a romantic comedy that zips along on the banter between Dex and Em. Whether you find their antics funny may depend on your sense of humour. Nicholls, who is a successful screenwriter, writes most of the novel in the form of dialogue with very little time - or effort - having gone into the sparse descriptive passages. He doesn't give the characters much depth either. We are told early on that Dex is handsome, charming and self-assured, while Em is beautiful, clever and shy. Dex's diagnosis of Em is that she lacks confidence. Once she becomes more sure of herself she becomes more successful. From a literary perspective, this disappointed many of our readers. However, others enjoyed the fact that they were reading a fast-paced 'page-turner' with a high feelgood factor.

Many of the reviewers who championed the book have talked up the politics of One Day, as the posh Dex and working class Em move to London and navigate their way into the job market during the last lean days of Thatcher and the subsequent Major years, and then on into the New Labour boom years of Blair and Brown. Dex initially sidles into the world of late-night television shows, while Em struggles to make ends meet by serving at a restaurant. Later she becomes a teacher and then a successful children's author while he runs an upmarket coffee shop. However, while Nicholls adequately captures the social and cultural times in which his characters live, for most of the reading group there was little sense of Nicholls actively engaging in political commentary. It's a book that is structured around social engagements - holidays, weddings and deaths, all of which implausibly take place on a 15th July - rather than elections, strikes or demonstrations. The novel is more "Four Weddings and a Funeral" than "The Full Monty".

One Day, perhaps unsurprisingly, divided the group, although there was no disagreement that it's not to be taken seriously as a literary novel. We argued that Nicholls must know this, although several readers were annoyed that he peppered his book with quotes from Dickens, Hardy and Emily Brontë, as if trying to elevate his own love story by association with these great writers. Once one dispenses with any notion that the book is in any way serious, one can then settle into assessing the novel for its comedy and romance. This is where the main differences of opinion came in. Some people found Dex and Em's romance endearing and laughed out loud at their story. Others were exasperated. For them, Dex is irritating and unlikeable, while Em is dull and drippy, their story a little unconventional but always predictable. What is the explanation for their initial - and enduring - attraction? We are never shown or told, so why believe in it at all? For these readers, it was hard to care for two such people over twenty years and more than 400 pages when it is hardly credible that they would have wanted to spend any time together in the first place.

In the end,One Day is a straightforward love story built around a quirky framing device that doesn't stand up to much analysis. Its popularity is no doubt in part due to the fact that its central characters live through a period of history that is well known to its readership. This nostalgia, combined with the unchallenging subject matter, make it an easy and, for some, an enjoyable read. For those wishing to read something more substantial on the same theme, we recommend "Love In The Time Of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez or "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bernières.

November 2010

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer's third novel, is in fact two novellas united by one character. Jeff Atman (the Hindu word for 'self') appears in one and appears to narrate the other (we don't know this for certain, as he is never named, but there is enough similarity between the characters to make this assumption). He is a jaded journalist who is given an assignment: in the first to write about the Biennale art exhibition that takes place in Venice; in the second to write a travel piece on Varanasi. The result is an offbeat exploration of the state of the Western soul at the beginning of the 21st Century.

In Jeff in Venice, we learn that the protagonist is a 45 year-old writer who has spent much of his time avoiding responsibility - he's recently divorced and getting little out of life. After being given the Biennale commission, he dyes his hair (becoming Jeff Dyer, perhaps an alter ego for his creator?) and sets out in search of the ultimate freeloading experience. Jeff's short stay in Venice is characterised by a headlong rush into all forms of materialistic excess, as he and his colleagues drink Venice dry, snort vast amounts of cocaine, and in Jeff's case, has copious amounts of sex with a beautiful American stranger. At the same time, the contemporary art scene is viciously satirised. The result is a debauched comedy, set against the backdrop of Europe's most decadent city.

In Death in Varanasi the journalist becomes the narrator. It is never made clear if this assignment follows the other, or may in fact be an alternative to the one in Venice. This time, the focus is on spiritual overload as we are taken to a city where death and the dissolution of the self are the norm. The assignment is soon written, but the writer decides to extend his stay. Like von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's "Death In Venice", he becomes obsessed with another visitor to the city, although his fascination is with a scruffy dreadlocked woman rather than a beautiful boy. The writer's physical and mental health both deteriorate as he lurches around the labyrinthine city in search of enlightenment.

It is impossible to read Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi without comparing it to "Death In Venice". Thomas Mann's masterpiece is itself heavily influenced by Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy", which postulates that there is an opposition in us all between the Apollonian (reason) and Dionysian (unreason). Gustav von Aschenbach's undoing is his move from an intellectual asceticism to one of passionate abandonment. Jeff's two journeys seem less anchored in rationality to begin with, but rather as two trips by an unstable man into psychosis. One critiques the secular; the other questions the religious. In both cases, Jeff Atman's sense of self is lost as he fails to transcend the situations in which he finds himself. Unlike Mann's book, the result is more farce than tragedy.

This book strongly divided opinion. With one exception, the novel was not at all popular with the group. In the main it was perceived to be tasteless, unfunny, vacuous and above all rather irritating. The latter was particularly true of Jeff Atman in the first part of the book. To say that he was self-obsessed would be an understatement and most group members took no pleasure from spending time in his company. One reader called him 'a loathsome bloke' and expressed her distaste at reading an account of an empty life filled with the clutter of celebrity parties, 'art' events, drink, drugs, social shoulder rubbing, materialistic and literary one-upmanship - all that the affluent brainwashed think important. It could be said that this is precisely Dyer's point. And Jeff, too, knows it's inane, yet he is a part of it because he writes about it and therefore perpetuates it. The novel's one defender was left wondering if the irony of the first story was lost on the rest of the group.

The trouble with the book, perhaps, is that in the second part of the book, the narrator is no better and his journey no more enlightening. He remains a self-absorbed man whose life is going nowhere. Rather than being surrounded by dissolute art 'luvvies', he is this time living among a transient population of hippies and back-packers. The superficiality of the situation is not lost on him, but rather than seeking out meaningful relationships, for example, with the local populace, he falls in at first with other two other cynics who are biding their time in the same hotel, and then when they leave he starts to face inwards. Finding little of depth and value there, it is a short journey to an emotional collapse. The trouble with this is that for the majority of readers, there was no desire to read of such a disintegration of self. This section of the book largely left the reading group bored and frustrated, as well as complaining that Dyer's overall message lacked the profundity his subject matter surely required. One reader went so far as to say that if Dyer is saying 'Nothing will come of nothing' ("King Lear"), Shakespeare said it more succinctly and more effectively in one line.

Geoff Dyer's standing as a writer has steadily risen since his first book, "Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger", was published in 1986. Known as a witty commentator on contemporary issues from art to jazz, war and wantonness, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi won of the 2009 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. The bulk of book group members failed to find the humour in the novel and, as a result, were unimpressed with this book. It should therefore be concluded that it must be approached with caution - it will either make you laugh out loud or want to throw it against the wall.

October 10

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is a renowned short story writer, whose Collected Stories were published in 2008 to great acclaim. She's also written three novels, the most recent of which,A Gate at the Stairs , was last year short-listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in the United States and the Orange Prize in the UK. Set in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the novel is a poignant coming of age tale set in a sleepy mid-West university town.

Tassie Keltjin is a smart and slightly geeky 20 year old. Newly enrolled at Troy University ("the Athens of the mid-West"), she's a country kid who's never eaten Chinese takeaway or seen a man wear a tie with jeans. Her classes include courses on geology, wine-tasting and war movie soundtracks, suggesting she's not sure what she wants to do with her life. Tassie also needs money, so takes a job as a child-minder for middle-class Sarah and Edward. She soon discovers that they're adopting and indeed have not yet found a baby to adopt. Before long she is accompanying them to meetings with prospective babies and finds herself entering a world with which she is completely unfamiliar. Although slightly uncomfortable with the process, Tassie is happy to accept Sarah's generous pay, which she uses to buy a motorbike. Life seems to be looking up for Tassie, especially after she starts dating a Brazilian student, Reynaldo, with whom she is studying Sufism. But before long, Tassie discovers that no one is quite who they say they are.

"A Gate at the Stairs" is Tassie's story, which she narrates with wit and verve. Told several years after the events took place, it is also the story of the people she met during that strange period of her life. Sarah is an ostentatious restaurateur who has moved out west to escape a dark secret; husband Edward is a scientist who specialises in breasts (and indeed has a non-professional interest in them, too); Mary-Emma is the little mixed-race girl they adopt. Tassie also tells the story of her parents - city-born Lutheran Bo, who has rebelled to become a dilettante farmer specialising in spuds; his neurotic Jewish wife Gail; and Robert, Tassie's younger brother, who is failing at high school and thinking of joining the army. We also meet other unusual characters such as Tassie's room-mate Murph, "a nose-pierced, hinky-toothed blonde from Dubuque", and Noel, a gay cleaner. Together, these people seem an unlikely cross-section of people who are hardly likely to represent America's mid-West. Are they happy to be misfits or are they trying to fit in?

The group had mixed feelings about this book. Many said they enjoyed reading it, but when they started to think about it they found numerous holes, both in plot and characterisation. We were unable to say what we thought the book was about. Moore appears to want to write a domestic drama about the hypocrisy of babies becoming economic commodities whose identities are changed to suit the adopters' desires, while at the same time exploring national identity during a major political crisis. The result, we felt, was a failure on both accounts. Sub-plots appear from nowhere to bolster these themes, then on other occasions major story strands fizzle out as the book moves on to another section. This proved unsatisfactory and raised many questions about both Moore's intentions and her ability to marshal her material.

We all agreed that Moore is strongest when writing about Tassie, who is very well observed. She's funny and serious and seems to encapsulate the kind of challenges a 20 year old faces. Her naivety and awkwardness in the face of some of the situations she meets was well rendered. However, most of us felt her narrative voice was a little too advanced for her age and while her lyricism was often beautiful to read, we weren't always convinced that a 20 something mid-Westerner would articulate herself in such a way. At the same time, there was a great deal of dull and repetitive writing, and we wondered if this was supposed to be Tassie's doing or simply poor editing on Moore and her publishers' part. Either way, it did not make us view the book as a consistently well-written one.

The feeling among the group was that A Gate at the Stairs was an interesting and engaging read that could have been much better had the author shown a tighter control of her material. The sections involving Tassie, Sarah and Mary-Emma were our favourites, but we felt they were sacrificed for poorly sketched and implausible attempts to link the action to terrorists and the war in Afghanistan. These sections were the least successful and we wondered if Moore might have done better to have left them out all together. There was, in fact, a feeling that Moore may have tried to do too many things and to pack in too many disparate stories. Perhaps, like with Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Moore might have done better to have separated out these elements into a collection of short stories - which, after all, is her main craft.

We concluded that unlike other chroniclers of the mid-West like Garrison Keillor (Lake Wobegon Days) and Jonathan Franzen (Freedom, The Corrections), or of the suburbs like John Updike (Rabbit, Run) and Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist or Digging To America), which also deals with adoption. Lorrie Moore has not yet found her niche. The result is a disappointing novel from a promising author. It will be interesting to see if her next book is another novel or a return to short fiction.

September 2010

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

By the time John Updike died in 2009, he had become one of the undisputed giants of American literature. A prolific writer, he was a novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic and literary critic. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Updike described his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", often setting his novels and stories in and around the towns where he grew up and lived himself. His second novel,

Rabbit, Run, introduced the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and the fictional town of Brewer, "fifth largest city in Pennsylvania". Written in 1959, it was an immediate success and spawned three sequels, "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit At Rest", each written ten years apart. Together known as the Rabbit tetralogy, the series chronicled Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his premature death. The group chose to explore Updike's world through the first of the Rabbit books.

Rabbit, Run is the story of a 26-year-old salesman who believes his marriage is a failure. With one child and another on the way, we see him survey his life and find it wanting. A former basketball star in high school, Harry finds middle-class family life unsatisfying and is disgusted to see his wife Janice drinking and smoking heavily when pregnant instead of keeping their house clean and cooking him meals. On an impulse, when Janice asks him to buy a packet of cigarettes, he instead climbs into his car and drives south in the hope of escaping from his stifling life. However, Harry is soon lost and returns to Brewer in the small hours of the morning. Instead of returning to his family, he goes to see his former coach, Marty Tothero. He is soon having dinner with Tothero and two girls, one of whom, Ruth Leonard, is a part-time prostitute. That night Ruth takes Harry home and they start an affair.

John Updike described writing Rabbit, Run as an antidote to the reckless romanticism of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road", which was published in 1957 and which helped define the Beat Generation. In an afterword to the book, he says he wanted to show "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behind get hurt." He also - like the Beats - wanted to critique the period in which it is set. Harry Angstrom is a character who, for all his thoughts of rebellion, is a conservative who is powerfully attracted to conformity, yet it is paradoxically that drive to conventionality that dominated 1950s America that has made him so unhappy in the first place. The Beats' answer is to celebrate non-conformity, but Updike is saying that it's not that straightforward. The book, therefore, isn't simply a morality tale about the wrongness of "running away"; Updike speculates that the title of the book might be a piece of advice for its protagonist.

The book's reception by the reading group was decidedly mixed. Both the subject matter and the characterisation provoked a strong reaction. Many found it difficult to enjoy and complained that it was too dark - one reader calling it sepia in tone throughout. They didn't like the characters and especially not the bigoted Rabbit. Harry's name is well chosen, as his stream of consciousness is an angst-ridden storm of illiberality. Reading the book, which is written - unusually for the time - in the present tense, is an intense and often uncomfortable experience. Do we really want to be in the head of such an irresponsible and immoral person? Yet others felt that this was entirely appropriate as the book is about how an ordinary man faces his dilemmas. Is it such a surprise to discover that a small-town, poorly educated man might also be small-minded? And if an author is interested in writing about the American condition, why shouldn't his protagonist hold such views? They argued that Updike presents rather than judges Harry Angstrom. Furthermore, he finds a way to transcend personality; they professed to being deeply moved towards the end of the novel, where any dislike of the principle characters is superseded by sympathy as they go through a heartbreaking incident that changes all their lives.

There was much discussion about the deliberateness of the style - and whether it is effective or not. Some felt that Updike too often imitated modernists like James Joyce (Ulysses) and Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) and indeed Updike himself acknowledged in his afterword that such influences are perhaps too audible. Certainly, his style changed in the subsequent Rabbit books and the tone also lightened. One thing all agreed upon was that Rabbit, Run is rarely funny, though it was noted that its sequels are often hilarious.

A strong argument in favour of the book is that Updike presents the limited choices of the 1950s. This was especially true of the female characters living at a time when there was no contraceptive pill and where sex led to either marriage or prostitution. Marriage meant domestic drudgery and career opportunities were non-existent even for single women. Ruth was especially seen as a sympathetic character in this respect. Her story contrasts with Janice's, although neither are happy. In this respect, Updike offers a damning indictment of American society, much as Richard Yates did in Revolutionary Road(1961).

To conclude, Rabbit, Run was not especially popular with the group, unlike "Revolutionary Road", which was last year's Book of the Year, although some group members liked it and will read more of the Rabbit tetralogy. The issue seems to be tone (too dark) and style (too generic). Updike acknowledged these flaws himself and changed both in subsequent Rabbit books. The last two in the series, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit At Rest, both won the Pulitzer Prize and collectively, these books are regarded as a candidate for the illusive 'Great American Novel' that continues to haunt American literary circles. Collectively, the Rabbit tetralogy is recommended by the group, although not without a warning that, ironically, the first in the series may not be the best place to start.

August 2010

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Beyond Black is the story of two women, obese Al and skinny Col. Alison Hart earns a living by working as a medium. At psychic shows in satellite towns on or around the London Orbital Alison talks to dead people on behalf of the bereaved. Her business and home life is chaotically run until Colette offers to act as her business manager. Colette has recently broken up with her husband Gavin shortly after having spoken mysteriously to his dead mother. She initially wants to find out if she is psychic, too, but is sceptical about the whole phenomenon and so concentrates on making as much money as possible from Alison's unusual skill. Alison herself regards her ability to communicate with spirits as a torment rather than a gift. Indeed, behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona there is a desperate woman hiding some very dark secrets.

Hilary Mantel has described her novel a state of the nation book that aims to explore the dreams and nightmares of England at the turn of the Millennium. Her book is closely tied to contemporary events such as the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. She mocks the public's overreaction to these public tragedies, while at the same time exposing the emptiness of private lives. Mantel has fun satirising the way people in the south of England choose to live their lives. People living in modern housing estates are particularly open to derision, and mainstream employment (for example, working in offices and shops) is shown to be shallow and dull. Her characters are either boring, stupid or mad. To an extent, Colette and Gavin epitomise this. He is a computer nerd who is obsessed with cars; she is a book-keeper with no hobbies or interests. Neither have any emotional depth and fail miserably to form any meaningful relationships, including with each other. By contrast, Alison is a 'sensitive' with far too great an emotional side. She conjures up demons from her past who literally manifest themselves and subject her to endless pain and distress. Ironically, these demons are her "spirit guides" and she feels she cannot live without them. As the novel progresses, we learn more about Alison's terrible childhood, who these people are, and why they have such a debilitating grip on her.

Despite its intriguing premise, the group were not especially keen on Beyond Black. While acknowledging Mantel's descriptive abilities and her wry humour, we also found the novel to be long, repetitive and often tedious to read. The two strands of the novel compete for space and as a result, the book lacked focus. There is very little plot, in spite of the references to time and place - thereby proving that chronology alone does not make a story. Many of us were surprised that seven years pass, as there isn't any evidence of character development across this time period.

The book opens with a 50 page virtuoso depiction of a psychic show in a Windsor pub, yet the novel doesn't really seem to be about psychics at all. Mantel has stated that when she wrote this book she wasn't interested in whether there is any truth in claims that psychics are really able to speak to the dead. Her interest is in Alison's dark past and she creates 'ghosts' for her in order to explore the impact her childhood has had on her ability (or rather inability) to function as a woman. So what are the psychic elements of the novel for? Is it just another way to mock people who choose to seek meaning in their lives by consulting mediums?

Several members of the group complained about the negativity of the novel. There are no sympathetic characters and men in particular are presented either as pathetic or perverted and never pitiable. The female characters aren't much better, as they bitch about each other and obsess about food. If this is a state of the nation book, what are we to make of this? Is Mantel really saying that the English are a wretched and revolting people? If so, this would make for uncomfortable reading, however the group argued that Mantel's range is so limited that the book really isn't adequate as a state of the nation novel at all. Perhaps the most intriguing, yet in some ways least successful aspect of the novel were the increasing references to white worms, uranium, poisonous chemicals and "terrorists in the ditches", which seem to imply that Mantel believes that the world is full of menace just beneath the surface of everyday life that most people choose to ignore. Is Mantel saying that we are sleepwalking towards environmental catastrophe? If so, she's chosen an odd way to show this.

Overall, Beyond Black was a disappointment to the group. We felt that at 450 pages it far outlasted its welcome and many said they were glad to put it down when they'd finally reached the end of the book. We acknowledged that the book was well reviewed when it came out and continues to attract fans. This rather goes to show that novel reading is subjective. We agreed that Hilary Mantel is a talented and renowned writer. Indeed, her latest novel, Wolf Hall, won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Perhaps, as happened with last month's choice, one should not form a definite opinion of a writer simply on the basis of reading one book alone.

July 2010

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

William Boyd is a writer of great scope and ambition. He has written ten novels, three collections of short stories, several volumes of non-fiction, and a dozen screenplays. Boyd's range is broad and he has set his books both in the past and present, across several continents, apparently equally at home writing from both female and male perspectives. He's an accomplished stylist, too, moving easily between genres, sometimes writing in the first person, sometimes in the third person. As a result, he's developed a loyal following, eager to read his latest offering. His last novel, Restless, was a World War 2 spy story that scooped the Costa Prize and sold over 400,000 copies. His latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, is a thriller that is set in contemporary London.

The new novel opens with a meditation on the River Thames, but soon bursts into life as its protagonist Adam Kindred finds himself caught up in a grisly murder. With his fingerprints on the murder weapon, he decides that he must disappear until the police find the real culprit. So begins a fast paced account of a distinguished climatologist on the run from the police, forced to use subterfuge to drop out and enter the London underclass, initially sleeping rough, then living among drug addicts and prostitutes on sink estates, mixing with illegal immigrants and relying on the charity of phoney religious organisations. At the same time, a parallel plot reveals the true identities of both the murderer and his victim, as well as the conspiracy that the crime is supposed to cover up. With a large cast of characters and a multiplicity of perspectives, Ordinary Thunderstorms is an ambitious state of the nation novel, which at the same time deals with a favourite theme of Boyd's: identity.

Reception of the novel was very mixed. Although everyone enjoyed the opening chapter, those new to Boyd's writing were in the main rather disappointed. They complained that as a thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms lacked sophistication, while as a character study, it depended too heavily on stereotypes. Boyd's prose style was perceived to be flat and uninspiring, many of his set-pieces were undeveloped, his structure over-relied on coincidences, and his pacing was all wrong, as the reader got bogged down in unnecessary background detail before lurching on to the next scene. As if this wasn't damning enough, Boyd's symbolism was questioned - why a climatologist, why 'Adam Kindred' (which suggests a family man, not a man on the run), why indeed thunderstorms? Finally, the ending, which left several aspects of the plots unresolved, was seen as unsatisfactory. One group member asked if the cliffhanger ending is supposed to make us feel absolutely convinced that life is utterly unpredictable, or is it paving the way for an unnecessary sequel?

Others in the group were far more forgiving, although they too thought that Ordinary Thunderstorms was not amongst Boyd's best. There was much discussion about the moral dimension of the novel. Those of us who liked the book felt that Boyd's point is that all individuals are vulnerable in modern society, whether they are rich or poor. In keeping with many picaresque novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Boyd's protagonist moves around within the class system as his fortunes change. Adam is obliged to adapt and it is through this process that his principles are increasingly abandoned, the irony being that the more he does this the higher he climbs back up the ladder of society. Some questioned whether the book has a moral compass at all, but the book's defenders argued that Boyd is showing that in order to survive one has to break the law - and the moral codes that we take for granted. They did not think that Boyd is condoning this. Adam's descent into immorality is contrasted with that of Ingram Fryzer, the head of the drug company Calenture-Deutz, who stands to make a fortune once Zembla-4, the asthma wonder drug that his top scientist has discovered, goes into production.

None doubted that Boyd has attempted to write a 'big' book about the way we live now. Boyd has written that he was prompted to write the book after reading a newspaper article a few years ago that stated that every year the London river police remove between 50 and 60 bodies per year from the Thames. He wondered who are these dead people and what have they done to end up in the water? Boyd's love of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which begins with a dead body being hauled out of the Thames, and which examines greed and corruption in Victorian London, inspired him to attempt his own London novel. Like Our Mutual Friend, the river plays an important part in Ordinary Thunderstorms, a book that examines life, death and rebirth in 21st century London, with all its social variations and profound inequalities. Everyone agreed that this was all very interesting, however we wondered why Boyd felt the need to incorporate elements of classic chase thrillers, in particular John Buchan's The 39 Steps, with Big Pharma serving as the story's 'MacGuffin'.

After much discussion, the group concluded that with Ordinary Thunderstorms William Boyd has bitten off more than he could chew. Boyd is generally renowned for his expert story-telling and his ability to create memorable characters. He often experiments with form, and on this occasion, we felt that his choice of using the thriller genre as a vehicle for a state of the nation novel was a mistake. Characterisation was sacrificed to a plot that many felt didn't add up to the sum of its many parts. This was a shame as there is so much potential in the book. So, although some of us did enjoy it, we collectively concluded that Ordinary Thunderstorms was not a great success. We ended our discussion by recommending not giving up on Boyd and to try his other novels, which include An Ice Cream War, Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon, Restless or Any Human Heart.

June 2010

The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

JG Farrell won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, his novel about the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent and is based on the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow. Part ripping yarn and part social satire, The Siege of Krishnapur is a devastating account of one of the cataclysms of the Victorian Era. In it, Farrell lays bare the hypocrisies of Victorian values, and especially the British Empire.

The Siege of Krishnapur begins in a leisurely and comical way, with the discovery of piles of chapattis all over the Residency - the first sign that all is not well with the "natives". Through a series of amusing set pieces we come to learn about life in the fictional town of Krishnapur. Farrell introduces his principal characters: Mr Hopkins, who is referred to throughout as The Collector (this term was applied by the British East India Company to the person in charge of the governance of a district in a State); Mr Willoughby, who is the Magistrate; Drs Dunstaple and McNab; and the Padre. Each represents a particular attitude in Victorian thinking - the Collector is a progressive, the Magistrate is a pessimist, the doctors have contrasting views on medical science, the Padre is a religious conservative. Into this mix Farrell brings three young people - beautiful Louise and dashing soldier Harry, who are Dr Dunstaple's children, and Fleury a callow young poet who is one of Louise's suitors. Finally, there is Lucy, a "fallen" woman who the two young men are asked to bring to The Residency when the mutiny first breaks out.

Once the siege begins, Farrell's story picks up pace as he describes the unfolding battle and the deteriorating conditions in the Residency. At the same time, Farrell's characters begin to undergo a series of physical and mental changes, as their well-being and their views are challenged by the circumstances of their imprisonment. To say more would be to give away too much of the story, which is full of twists and turns and surprises.

The group were universally impressed with The Siege of Krishnapur. We agreed that it is a novel with depth, an excellent story with complex and fascinating characters who start by representing facets of Victorian society, but who transcend these through their experiences. Farrell writes brilliantly throughout, mixing realism with symbolism, satire with pathos, and always bringing his characters' humanity to the fore as they live and die in thoroughly appalling circumstances. By the end of the book, although we are still not expected to particularly like them, it is impossible to remain unmoved by his characters' plight as they are turned from a pampered elite into a bunch of threadbare and stinking scavengers. Farrell's exploration of his many themes (materialism, religion, culture, art, science, relationships, sexuality and civilisation itself) is remarkably accomplished. Indeed, if this is the measure of a great book, then we were in agreement that The Siege of Krishnapur is entirely successful.

The Siege of Krishnapur was the second in a trilogy about the follies of empire. Troubles, the first in the series, won the Lost Booker in 2010 and is set in Ireland during The Irish War of Independence (1919-21); the final book, The Singapore Grip, takes place in Singapore just before the Japanese invasion in World War II. The Siege of Krishnapur tells the story of the Indian Rebellion, or "Great Mutiny", when Indian soldiers rose up against their British leaders. It left tens of thousands dead in fighting and retribution and led to the formal annexation of India into the British Empire. At the same time, it may well have sown the seed for the end of empire, as the Indians became aware that their oppressors were not invincible. Although Farrell deliberately chooses to tell his story exclusively from the perspective of the British side of the conflict, through his exposé of the absurdities of class snobbery and of notions of racial superiority, the reader is left in no doubt where his sympathies lie.

The group chose to read The Siege of Krishnapur partly as a consequence of reading JM Coetzee's siege story, Waiting For the Barbarians earlier this year. The idea was to compare these two books, which both depict the impact of imperialism from a post-colonial perspective. We agreed that it was impossible to rank them, as these two great novelists have found their own means to explore their subject brilliantly. Both are highly recommended.

May 2010

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín is a multi-award-winning Irish novelist and critic whose novels include The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004). In January 2010, Tóibín won the Costa Novel Award for his sixth novel Brooklyn. Like several of its predecessors, it deals with the challenges of living abroad, especially of maintaining a personal identity.

Brooklyn begins in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Tóibín's hometown and the setting of several of his books. Eilis Lacey is a young woman who is unable to find work in 1950s Ireland. Her older sister Rose arranges for her to meet Father Flood, a priest who is visiting from New York. He persuades Eilis to emigrate to New York, where he promises to take her under his wing. He finds her a room in a boarding house, arranges for her to take a job in a department store whose owner he knows, and organises night classes for her in book-keeping. Although this all seems very constructive, Eilis in fact soon becomes unhappy. The job is boring, her landlady is repressive, and fellow housemates are malicious gossips. Furthermore, letters from her family make her homesick. It appears that Eilis has made a terrible mistake until she meets Tony, an eligible and attentive young man, at one of the Friday night dances that Father Flood puts on, and life begins to take on a different aspect all together.

Our initial discussion of the book revolved around the fact that Tóibín has chosen to tell a very familiar story. The history of Irish literature is awash with tales of migration, often to the United States. We expected, therefore, that Tóibín would look for a fresh angle. However, to our initial surprise, and then dismay, Brooklyn doggedly follows all the conventions of the genre, plodding through all the customary situations, as Eilis' unease is followed by a 'honeymoon' period when she falls in love and finds happiness. Tóibín's twist comes when she is forced to return to Ireland following an unexpected family tragedy. The final section of the book, we agreed, is the most compelling, though it, too was fairly predictable.

A major problem we all had with the novel is the fact that Tóibín decided to make his a "simple" tale. The plot is linear, description is kept to a minimum, characters rarely reveal any inner-life, and dialogue is very flat. We assumed these decisions were in order to universalise the story, however, we felt that the book suffered as a result. All the interesting sub-plots are suppressed, the secondary characters are indistinguishable, and any sense of time and place is smothered by the book's lack of colour. One member of the group thought the book could have been set in the late nineteenth century, as there were very few references that linked it to the 1950s (apart from one trip to the cinema to see "Singing In The Rain", which came out in 1952). We also thought that it could have been set in any number of locations. Tóibín makes no effort to evoke Eilis' hometown of Enniscorthy, and Brooklyn itself hardly features in a book specifically named after this distinctive district of New York.

On a more positive note, some members of the group liked Eilis, although this was far from unanimous. Those in favour found her reactions to her situation readily identifiable and very human. Her appeal is that she is the epitome of ordinariness - nice, helpful and easily influenced. These group members found it refreshing to read a book told from this perspective. Yet her naïve passivity grated badly for others. Was it possible that such a person could be so disengaged from her surroundings, apparently unaware of what was going on around her? What did she think or feel about her life? Tóibín never tells us. One group member expressed her frustration that Eilis doesn't mature and take a grip of herself and her life. Yet others felt that this makes her a product of her time, when women were expected to marry and stop work to bring up children. In this respect, Tóibín seems to be saying that in the 1950s life for Irish women was little different on either side of the Atlantic.

In conclusion, although some of us said they enjoyed reading Brooklyn, we were by and large under-whelmed by the book. The subject matter is promising - though hardly original - yet Tóibín's flat delivery, two-dimensional characters, and lack of insights left most of us feeling rather short-changed. We were undecided as to how deliberate Tóibín had been in writing his book like this. Many critics have highlighted the subtlety of the book, especially citing Tóibín's sparse and yet evocative style that "transforms ordinary lives into something extraordinary" (Daily Telegraph). We were unconvinced. There is a difference between 'understated' and 'not there', and we felt that the narrative veered too much towards the latter. So, in the end, Brooklyn was something of a disappointment, although it should not be said that there is nothing to enjoy about the book. Brooklyn is a pleasant, light read, but it certainly does not feel like a significant contribution to immigrant literature.

April 2010

Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee

Waiting For The Barbarians is an allegorical tale about oppression, perpetrated by an Empire that could stand in for any number of historical and modern day regimes. Set in an un-named country, on the edge of a desert, it tells the story of one man's descent from a position of power to one of utter depravation. At the same time, so-called 'civilisation', which is pitted against the 'barbarian' hordes who live beyond the perimeter of the Empire, is exposed as a charade, a series of artifices that can be reduced to dust - just as eventually becomes of all empires.

The Magistrate is the authority figure at the heart of JM Coetzee's dark tale. He lives alone in a tiny frontier settlement, complacently content to run the town's affairs, as he has done for decades, sating his lascivious appetites without much thought to the people around him. Then one day a Colonel from the Third Bureau, "the most important division of the Civil Guard nowadays", comes to the outpost to tell the Magistrate that the nomadic people who live in the hinterlands pose a threat to the Empire. The Magistrate is sceptical, but does nothing to stop the Colonel from interrogating the 'barbarians' he has captured. The Magistrate is awakened from his apathetic state when he sees what happens to these prisoners and he begins to identify with their plight. Before long, it is the Magistrate who is under suspicion of helping these mysterious people to undermine the Empire.

We were hugely impressed by Coetzee's novel. He brilliantly portrays one man's crisis of conscience, drawing us in to care deeply for this initially unsympathetic man. The Magistrate's actions are closely scrutinised, first by himself, and therefore by the reader, and then by the Colonel and his minions. With war being declared, a state of emergency is quickly declared, giving all powers to the Third Bureau. The barbarians, and by association, the Magistrate, are demonised and become both real and imagined enemies of the State. Soon, torture replaces interrogation, and trials are replaced by summary executions. At the same time, the Magistrate comes to represent all mankind in its opposition to totalitarian power, and through his struggles we see both the necessity and futility of individuals opposing such regimes.

We all agreed that the Magistrate is a fascinating character. His weaknesses are obvious at the beginning - he is complacent, self-indulgent, generally inclined to take the easy route and turn a blind eye. Yet he is also humane and tries to improve the lot of the people who are worse off than him. It is perhaps this emerging empathy that is his strongest trait, and it comes increasingly to the fore as he is tested more and more, humiliated and dehumanised by his tormentors, and made to suffer both physically and mentally. We thought that Coetzee's foremost achievement is in demonstrating how self-knowledge can come at a great price, while at the same time bringing dignity in even the worse situations.

The Magistrate was compared by one member of the group to King Lear, Shakespeare's flawed and self-centred monarch, who through his mistakes and subsequent suffering comes to recognise the importance of justice and humanity. At the same time, Coetzee vividly demonstrates the destructive - and ultimately self-destructive - influence of governments who choose to exercise absolute power and to rule by coercion. Whether one thinks of South Africa during the Apartheid era, African, Asian and American countries under European colonial rule, Stalinist Russia, the Cold War, or the current War on Terror, Coetzee's fable captures the very essence and impact of corruption.

Waiting For The Barbarians was a resounding success. We agreed that it magnificently updates Conrad's own masterpiece Heart of Darkness, depicting the duality of human nature, but without the unfortunate racial stereotyping that can make Conrad's 1902 novella seem very dated. We were also reminded of another allegorical writer, Franz Kafka, especially his exemplary studies of authoritarianism The Trial and In The Penal Colony. We concluded that Coetzee's novel tells an important story, which works on a realistic, symbolic, psychological and above all political level. More than this, we believe that it is a great work of art that reveals universal truths about the human condition. It is highly recommended.

March 2010

The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

The L-Shaped Room was Lynne Reid Banks' first novel. Set in London in the 1950s, it's the story of Jane Graham, a twenty-something single woman who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand. Upon publication in 1960, the novel, and subsequent film, caused a sensation because of its frank treatment of sex, illegitimacy and the challenges faced by women trying to bring a child into the world out of wedlock. The group chose to read this book to mark its fiftieth anniversary.

Jane is a former actress who now works as a public relations officer for a West London hotel. Thrown out by her father when she tells him about the pregnancy, Jane moves into a bug-infested attic bedsit in Fulham. She tells the story of her pregnancy as it unfolds, filling in the back-story from time to time, so that we become aware of the circumstances of her pregnancy and all the consequences.

The L-Shaped Room falls within the group of novels, films and plays written in the late 50s and early 60s that are known as kitchen sink dramas. Often rooted in working class experience, and starting with the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956), this genre is a form of social realism centring around anti-heroes who are dissatisfied with their lives and the world. Novels such as John Braine's Room at the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving (1960), told the story of young working class men who challenge the post-war status quo. Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room (1960), Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey (1958) and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965) widened the scope of the genre by exploring similar subject matter from a female perspective. All were hugely popular at the time, and played a part in changing British society in the sixties and beyond.

In Reid Banks' case, as with Margaret Drabble's, the lead character is middle class, but becomes an outsider as a result of her pregnancy. An impulsive act therefore is the catalyst for huge personal changes that raise the possibility that society itself needs to change. In The L-Shaped Room Reid Banks describes various experiences of working women, and in particular focuses on their mistreatment once their pregnancy is known to their employer. She also introduces themes such as sex, race, homosexuality and class through her choice of secondary characters: Jane's flatmates are Jewish, black, gay, and prostitutes. Like her, they are cast as society's outsiders. Reid Banks' novel has Jane finding unanticipated companionship, happiness and love among such people before she returns to her liberalised middle-class family.

Despite its kitchen sink credentials, some of us felt that the book isn't gritty enough to be convincing. One member commented that even the bed bugs don't bring Jane out in itchy bites! All her oddball neighbours turn out to have hearts of gold; her 'deus ex machina' aunt is a fairy godmother who suddenly turns up and bales her out in the middle of the novel, leaving her property and money; her father learns the error of his ways and welcomes her back; her boss worries about her; her doctor takes a personal interest in her welfare; two manuscripts are accepted by the first publisher who sees them... the list is endless. Reid Banks also relies entirely on stereotypes. Jane's flatmates are a jolly black guy, a neurotic Jewish writer, a wise old cockney woman and two cheerful tarts. Even the 'baddies' are stereotypes - the weedy lover; the wicked and rich abortionist. Though the ending isn't quite that of a typical romantic novel in that she doesn't get together with her man, it's certainly on the cards.

For all this, The L-Shaped Room proved popular with the group, largely because it acts as a window onto a period in British history that is thankfully long past - one where women were second class citizens, and where sexism, racism and classism were all commonplace. Jane is vividly drawn, lively and sympathetic. Her day-to-day experiences and observations reveal much about what was wrong with Britain in the 1950s. We acknowledged that it has become a period piece but at that, a useful illumination of how things were half a century ago. Though not especially complimentary of it as a piece of literature, we concluded that there is much to enjoy about the book, and that it is still well worth reading.

February 2010

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel by Junot Diaz. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic, but moved to New Jersey in the United States while a teenager in the 1970s. After graduating from Rutgers University he became a creative writing teacher. His first book, Drown (1996), is a collection of short stories about its teenage narrator's impoverished youth in the Dominican Republic and his subsequent struggle to adapt to his new life in New Jersey. Diaz's first novel took him 11 years to write and also seems to draw on his own experiences. This time it is about the de Leons, a Dominican family who move to New Jersey in the 1970s. In addition, it is narrated by a creative writing teacher, who graduated from Rutgers University. Now in his 30s, he looks back on his relationship with Oscar and his sister Lola, while at the same time reflecting on the impact of the infamous dictator Rafael Trujillo on the family's lives.

Yunior de Las Casas prefaces his story of Oscar de Leon's life by telling us about a curse, which he calls Fuku, that he says afflicts the Dominican Republic. More specifically, it has blighted Oscar's family. Yunior's style of writing is immediately apparent - sensational, confrontational, slangy, and full of insightful and often irreverent footnotes. He then launches into an account of Oscar's love life, beginning when his friend is seven. This very much sets the tone of the novel. Oscar is a fat "ghetto nerd", who is destined to be a figure of fun throughout his short and mostly unhappy life. Yunior also introduces Spanish into his lexicon. This features throughout the novel, and is never translated, so that non-Spanish readers are unable to understand the entire narrative. This uncompromising choice proved challenging to members of the reading group, as we will see later.

Yunior's tale is episodic and told in three parts. Three sections of the novel focus on Oscar's story - as a child, as a student, and finally as a young adult. These are interspersed with stories about his family. Sister Lola, who is Yunior's boyfriend for a while, narrates a section; another section is about their mother, Belicia Cabral's life in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s; a third section tells the story of grandfather Abelard Cabral's fate in 1940s Dominican Republic. In the final part of the novel, Yunior neatly wraps up his separate stories.

Diaz's two main themes are sex and death. There's nothing unusual in writing about these; however, we found the writer's treatment of both to be exasperating. For most of the novel, the reading group thought Yunior must be a teenager, as he writes relentlessly about both these topics in a very adolescent way. The idiolect Yunior uses - urban hip hop street slang, full of "niggers", "bitches", "homeboys" and an unending amount of sexual swearwords - proved too much for some members. It came as a genuine shock to discover at the end of the book that Yunior is married and in his mid-thirties. Even more of a surprise was the discovery that he taught creative writing. This may explain the numerous and contrived writing drills that are deployed in the book, such as a section without a full stop, knowingly addressing the reader, the footnotes, the Spanglish, but we still couldn't really believe that a mature and educated man would write in such a juvenile and illiterate way.

There were many other reasons why the group disliked this novel. For a book that appears to be about the Dominican Republic, and about the experience of immigrants from there to the United States, we felt largely that Diaz fails at describing both authentically. He is perhaps at his strongest when writing about the Trujillo era - the 31 year period when the Dominican Republic was ruled by a vicious megalomaniac. Those familiar with Mario Vargas Llosa's masterpiece The Feast of the Goat already knew the history, however they agreed that Abelard's story - perhaps the least self-consciously written section - is also the most powerful. Regrettably, Diaz appears to have very little to say about modern day Dominican Republic, and the section where Oscar visits the country is like a gauche cartoon of sex and violence, populated by whores and gangsters. Is Diaz saying that nothing has changed since Trujillo? It is impossible to tell given the lack of contextual detail.

Even less successful are the sections set in the United States. We are told that Oscar and Lola live in a ghetto, but we don't really get a sense of what their lives are like. We are never told who their father is, nor about their mother's life. Yunior endlessly describes Oscar as obese, fixated on sex and fanatical about sci-fi, fantasy fiction, roll-playing and fantasy games - a nerd's nerd, in other words. Yet Oscar's own voice never comes through and he is nothing more than a stereotyped grotesque. Upon reading the jacket of the book, one might imagine a modern day Ignatius P. Reilly, but Oscar is far removed from John Kennedy Toole's brilliant creation in A Confederacy of Dunces because he is not in the least a fully-rounded character.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a huge disappointment. It has such a promising premise, but we felt it never delivered. Though Diaz's writing is occasionally dazzling - and one group member applauded his vigorous style - it was in the main, extremely irritating. His characters were almost always caricatures. Moreover, there was very little sense of place and the different sections of the book never gel into a coherent whole. Novels such as Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban were cited as much more successful at describing what it is like to choose, or be forced, to emigrate to America. Furthermore, The Feast of the Goat is recommended as a far superior book about the troubled history of the Dominican Republic itself.

January 2010

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie's fifth novel, opens on the day the Americans dropped Fat Man, their name for the second atomic bomb, which was detonated over Nagasaki. Shamsie introduces twenty-one year old Hiroko Tanaka, and her fiancé, Konrad Weiss, who is a German writer living in Japan. In a split second, the world turns white. Hiroko survives the explosion, but Konrad, her father, and indeed all that she has known before is obliterated. All that remains are three bird-shaped marks on her back, burnt on from the kimono she was wearing at the time.

Burnt Shadows follows Hiroko's subsequent life across five decades and several continents. In part two of the novel, we follow her to Delhi, two years later, when she visits Konrad's sister Ilse and her English husband, James Burton. She also meets Sajjad Ashraf, a young Muslim who is employed by Burton as a legal clerk. Sajjad in reality does little more than play chess with Burton, who has lapsed into a malaise, while ostensibly preparing for the British withdrawal from India. Hiroko and Sajjad discover that they share a passion for languages, and soon Sajjad has volunteered to teach her Urdu.

The first half of Shamsie's novel covers ground that will be familiar to anyone who has read Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (The Jewel In The Crown et al) or EM Forster's A Passage To India. She faithfully replicates the style of these books to render realistic life in India under the British. She also sets up her book's main themes: dislocation, the importance of roots, identity, the end of empire, the rise of a new one, nation building, war and terror. All feature prominently in subsequent sections of the book, too, as the action moves first to Pakistan in the 1980s, then to present-day America and Afghanistan.

The group's initial response to this novel was to say that they all enjoyed reading it. Shamsie melds historical and thriller writing to produce a sweeping exploration of 50 years of world history that is a real page-turner. Linked together by the long life of Hiroko, the survivor of so much trauma, Shamsie is able to write about and connect nuclear destruction, the Indian Partition, the rise of Islamisation, the 9/11 terror attack on New York, and the war in Afghanistan.

We agreed that Shamsie is a talented writer who has written some wonderfully vivid scenes, and created several intriguing characters - a German in wartime Japan; a Japanese woman in Delhi; a Pakistani man working for the American government in Afghanistan. Our chief criticism was that we felt that these scenarios were perhaps not as fully explored as they could have been. Several of us argued that Konrad's story alone would have made a fascinating novel, yet in Shamsie's book, it is a mere fragment of the whole. Too often, a section ended and the action moved on, sometimes twenty of more years at a time, while the reader was left wondering what happened to the characters in the intervening years. Our discussion into why this might be centred on the suspicion that in trying to move her plot seamlessly from Nagasaki to Guantanamo Bay, Shamsie sacrificed many of the characters that made the book so interesting to us. This was a pity, as we all clearly wanted to read more about her characters - and indeed speculated that a longer book that filled in these gaps might have been more satisfying. We wondered if there are simply too many characters, places and cultures and the events span too many years in an effort to link cataclysmic world events and turbulent societies over the decades.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of five novels, mostly set in her native Pakistan. Those of us who had read her books before agreed that she is a gifted author, whose work warrants attention. Kartography was in particular singled out for praise. In Burnt Shadows she has expanded her horizons significantly, both in literary terms and thematically. We felt that Shamsie is a serious writer who has a superb eye for domestic detail and an arresting way with words. At the same time, she has shown herself to be able to write on a global scale, which is impressive. We felt that Burnt Shadows is not without its faults, but certainly recommend it.

December 2009

Me Cheeta by James Lever

A few years ago, first time writer James Laver was commissioned by Nick Pearson at Fourth Estate to ghost-write an autobiography of Tarzan's chimp, to coincide with the 75th birthday of the famous ape. Me Cheeta: The Autobiography came out in October 2008 with no reference to a human author, and was hailed as "the last great inside account of Hollywood's golden age". Meanwhile, another writer, R. D. Rosen, had been commissioned to write the authorised biography. In December 2008, Rosen debunked the whole story in an article for the Washington Post, proving that the chimpanzee known as "Cheeta" could not possibly be the same one that had starred in the 1930s and 1940s films, and that indeed, several apes had played the character. By the time Me Cheeta came out in paperback, Laver's name was on the cover. With this in mind, we approached a book whose writer had unwittingly 'printed the legend' with great interest.

Me Cheeta seems at first to be primarily a send-up of so many (often very boring) celebrity autobiographies. It begins in a gossipy way, as the chimp narrator tells an outrageous story about his experience of working with Rex Harrison on his 'comeback' movie, Dr Doolittle. It is funny, but slight satire. The tone of the book soon changes, however, as the narrator describes his early life in the jungle of West Africa (which is reminiscent of William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach) before he is captured and shipped to the United States in 1933. This section sets the tone for one of Laver's targets, which is the treatment of animals by humans, and in particular animal cruelty.

After an initially difficult time in captivity in the States, Cheeta is taken on by Tony Gentry, an animal trainer who in real life provided the apes for the Tarzan movies. In the book, the narrator is cast as "Cheeta" for 'Tarzan and his Mate'. Laver then documents the unusual relationship that develops between Cheeta and Johnny Weismuller, the star of twelve Tarzan movies, as well as Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane. At the same time, Laver lampoons the many score-settling memoirs of the period as he recounts the antics of the film-stars and their friends on-set and off-screen. The result, depending on your sense of humour, is either hilarious, or deadly dull.

In fact, the group was much divided by the book. Some loved it, others loathed it. Those in favour enjoyed Laver's linguistic dexterity, his wit and wisdom, and his keen eye for the ridiculous. They saw his satirical targets as being much broader than simply 'show business'. At the heart of the novel is a moving account of an unrequited love affair between an ape and a man - on the one level absurd, while on the other deeply poignant. The story of the decline of a strong but gentle man who is never a great actor, but always a consummate entertainer is all the more moving when it is juxtaposed with what happens to Cheeta once he has been cast aside by Hollywood, too (perhaps the greatest and saddest irony of all, unbeknown to Laver when he wrote the book, is that Cheeta's story was actually invented, whereas Weismuller's is real). Through its depiction, Laver lays bare mankind's attitude to fame, but especially its rotten relationship with the animal kingdom, with so-called civilisation being shown as greedy, materialistic and exploitative. Laver's chimps survive in a cruel and brutal 'natural' world, which contrasts sharply with the common perception that apes live harmoniously in the wild, and indeed live happy lives in captivity. At the same time, we are left in no doubt that the sentimental anthropomorphism beloved of Hollywood is a dishonest fiction.

The detractors were not amused and one went so far as to say that she objected to a whole book written in the first person from an animal's point of view, stating that humanising animals' thoughts and feelings is "infantile and crude". Others complained about the foul language used by Cheeta throughout the book, as well as the salacious and sexual nature of many of the movie-star anecdotes. They also said they found it hard to take an interest in a book about long-forgotten actors. The counter argument that it is not the name of the actors that is important, but rather the subject of fame itself, simply did not wash. For some, there is little or no merit in writing about celebrities at all.

All told, the book certainly proved an excellent choice in terms of generating a lively discussion! The book's fans were all hugely in favour of it. Some members of the group simply hated it, but other detractors were prepared to concede that the book is clever, if not to their taste. Me Cheeta is therefore, on balance, recommended with a strong 'health' warning.

November 2009

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

First published in Egypt in 2002, and subsequently translated into English in 2004, The Yacoubian Building has become an international bestseller. Written by a former dentist, Alaa Al Aswany, it attempts to open a window on present-day Egyptian life by telling the interlinked stories of the inhabitants of one building in the country's capital city, Cairo.

A principle character of the novel is the Yacoubian Building itself. Once grand, but now dilapidated, it stands on one of Cairo's main boulevards. Aswany writes about this building with affection for it is within its walls - and on the roof- that his stories unfold. The wealthy ones, such as Zaki Bey el Dessouki and Hatim Rasheed, live in palatial apartments; the less fortunate, such as Taha el Shazli and Busayna el Sayed, inhabit cramped converted storage rooms on the roof. As in any society, the rich and poor may be segregated, but their lives constantly overlap. Sometime this is to comic effect; at other times it leads to tragedy. Aswany's technique is to adopt the style of a soap opera, moving between each character in alternating sections. The effect is to present all of the contradictions in Egyptian society in microcosm. In doing so, Aswany addresses many issues, from religious fervour to political corruption, promiscuity to piety. At the heart of the novel modernity clashes with the vision of a more ancient society.

Setting his book in 1990 at the time of the first Gulf War, Aswany has a keen eye on history and politics. The start of the decline of the Yacoubian Building coincides with the military coup of 1952 which saw the old King of Egypt, Farouk, replaced first by an army general, Muhammad Naguib, then by the real power behind the coup, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, who ruled Egypt from 1956 until his death in 1970, presented himself as a moderniser. Seen by some as a reformer and "great man" who re-established Arab pride in the Middle East, Nasser was to others anti-democratic, repressive and ultimately paved the way for today's corrupt and undemocratic political system which is dominated by a single party (called the "Patriotic Party" in the novel, but clearly a thinly-veiled version of Egypt's National Democratic Party). The political aspects of the novel are epitomised by the story of Hagg Muhammad Azzam, a self-made millionaire who is prepared to pay huge bribes to become a member of parliament.

On the whole, the novel was well liked by the group. We all commented very positively about Aswany's storytelling style, which is at once ambitious but also very comprehensible. Like a modern day Dickens, he creates a host of characters which are underpinned by a clearly defined purpose. This gives the novel a manifest drive as Aswany lays bare Egypt's current circumstances in order to highlight his many concerns. These range from political corruption (as mentioned above), to the drain of talented people from Egypt to overseas, through to the rise of extreme Islam, and the treatment of homosexuals and women. We felt that Aswany is successful in this.

Our primary concern was that at times the novel is almost too formulaic. In trying to write a book that will have wide appeal, Aswany occasionally oversimplifies and one reader in particular felt that he often "tells" rather than "shows". She also complained that all the women are either buxom beauties or have lost their beauty. The rest of us felt that this was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book. We wondered if Aswany's novel might have been better had it been more nuanced, but this was a minor criticism.

The Yacoubian Building proved to be an excellent book choice this month. We all agreed that Alaa Al Aswany has found an effective way to write about contemporary Egyptian society in an accessible way. Using the oral tradition of storytelling, he weaves together the tales of a dozen inhabitants of one building, which acts as a metaphor for contemporary Egypt. Though not without its faults, the book is certainly recommended.

October 2009

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald was a German writer and academic who taught at the University of East Anglia for many years. In 1996, the first of his four novels was published in English for the first time. The Emigrants immediately established Sebald's unique style, as well as his themes. An unnamed narrator, who may be Sebald himself, describes the lives of four German émigrés, while interspersing his text with grainy black and white unlabelled photographs that may or may not relate to the text. The novel is concerned with memory and foreignness. The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo soon followed, to critical acclaim. Then in 2001 Sebald was killed in a car crash, aged 57. Austerlitz was his last novel, and it was this one that we chose to read.

Like Sebald's other works of fiction Austerlitz is an experimental novel. It is over 400 pages long and contains neither paragraph breaks nor chapters. As in the previous novels, Sebald's unnamed narrator adopts a digressive style, which blends fact and fiction, and throughout the book there are a series of often enigmatic photographs that underline the melancholy of the novel. The narrator begins by recounting his first chance meeting, in 1967, with an architectural historian called Jacques Austerlitz.

Over the next thirty years, Austerlitz and the narrator adopt what could best be described as a sporadic acquaintance. Slowly, Austerlitz's story unfolds. We learn that upon coming to the UK as a child in 1939, he was raised as Dafydd Elias by a strict Welsh Calvinist ministry family. When his adoptive parents fall ill and die, Austerlitz is taken under the wing of a supportive school teacher who reveals his proper name, but little more. It is only years later, by a series of arbitrary encounters, that he allows himself to discover the truth of his origins.

Like its predecessors, Sebald's novel deals with time, memory, loss and displacement, as well as storytelling itself. At its heart it is an investigation into the Holocaust and what its impact has been. Sebald deliberately foregrounds his narrative techniques in order to challenge his readers to think about how we tell stories about this unparalled twentieth century horror. Elsewhere, Sebald wrote about his revulsion at the so-called Holocaust "industry", which he felt often sentimentalized the genocide. Our own discussion contrasted classic texts written by Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man and Imre Kertesz's Fateless (a book group choice in 2006), with such books as Bernard Schlink's The Reader (a book choice in 1999), Schindler's Ark (both the book and film) and the Oscar-winning Italian film Life Is Beautiful. Sebald's approach is much more oblique, as if he is trying to avoid appropriating someone else's suffering. Yet Sebald's great power in Austerlitz is to make it impossible for the reader to ignore what happened. This is central to Sebald's literary project, which is to say, he did not want the reader to fall into silence and forgetting, just as he believed the German people have done since the end of the Second World War.

The group's response to Austerlitz was very interesting. To start with, we all agreed that although it is challenging and indeed disconcerting to read a book that does not have any conventional breaks and no straightforward dramatic plot, Austerlitz was in fact very compelling. Some found it very readable, while others said that the monotone and mannered style, combined with the huge (and some said excessive) detail, made it a far from easy reading experience. One group member referred to "the relentless onslaught of narrative". And yet, these long descriptions are essential to the book. Austerlitz's experiences are remarkable, his meditations often fascinating, even if he seems throughout to be a nearly man - someone who has never quite managed to participate fully in life. Is this Sebald's purpose, we wondered, to personify the feeling that life can at times be overwhelming - and yet we must carry on? If so, his techniques successfully imbue the reader with similar feelings and Austerlitz, for all his strangeness, is a sympathetic character.

The group agreed that Austerlitz is a fascinating, if uncomfortable book that rewards persistence and repeat readings. We had a sense that it is an important and necessary book. Although published less than a decade ago, it felt to us that Austerlitz could become a key novel about European identity in the post-war period.

September 2009

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

American writer Flannery O'Connor (b. 1925) lived a short and unhappy life. Her father was ill with lupus for most of her childhood and died when she was 15. She described herself as a "pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex". She was a prodigiously gifted writer and by the time she was 25 a glittering literary career seemed likely. In 1951, she was diagnosed with lupus and for the rest of her life she suffered a great deal before dying in 1964 aged just 39. O'Connor published two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and one collection of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find) in her lifetime. A second book of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965.

O'Connor's work is closely associated with what is known as Southern Gothic. Like William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams, for example, she locates her stories in recognisably southern, often decaying settings, and peoples them with grotesque characters. Southern Gothic writers often write about social issues such as racial bigotry, self-righteousness, and political or religious hypocrisy. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

The group chose to read Wise Blood. It's the story of Hazel Motes, a young war veteran who has returned home to Eastrod, Tennessee. The trouble is that his family are dead and the old house where he lived is now just an empty shell. He has been brought up in a god-fearing environment (his grandfather was a revival preacher), but his experiences of war and soldiering have left him deeply disturbed. He has rejected the story of Jesus as "a trick on niggers" and is convinced that the only way to escape sin is to deny that it exists. Upon arriving in the city of Taulkinham, he sets about starting the Church Without Christ. Hazel emulates another street preacher, Asa Hawks, and delivers his sermons outside cinemas. No one listens, but soon Enoch Emery, a manic 18-year-old, starts to follow Hazel around. Hazel, meanwhile, has his eye on Asa Hawks' 15 year-old daughter, Sabbath, and Sabbath has her eye on him.

In an Author's Note, written 10 years after the book came out, O'Connor described Wise Blood as a comedy about a man who denies that Jesus was the son of God, but whose integrity is demonstrated by his failure "to get rid of the ragged figure [of Jesus] who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind." The reading group wondered how seriously to take these comments. The novel is certainly intended at one level to be satirical. All the characters are weird and unlovable, and to a large extent we are invited to laugh at them. Looking deeper, we are shown that secular culture in the States (as represented by cars, movie stars and fast food) is morally bankrupt, and that southern style evangelical Christianity is morally bankrupt, too. We agreed that O'Connor successfully captures the claustrophobic, obsessive, brainwashing effect of a society dominated by Christian sects, consumerism and racism. Is Hazel's "religion" any better? He is often repellent, too, yet there is something about his anger that rings true. We felt that the tale turns to tragedy towards the end of the novel when he appears to have been defeated by his circumstances. The irony is that he is so imbued with the idea of Christian sin and guilt that the end of his life is filled with self inflicted punishment. We did not, however, see evidence that Jesus had returned to his life, so in this respect we were not in agreement with the books' author.

A major point of discussion was around the literary merit of the novel. O'Connor's style is arresting from the first page - her use of language and metaphors are highly original. In terms of structure, the book is episodic and contains many characters who appear and then disappear, almost unconnected to the central narrative of Hazel Motes' journey. Though we agreed that each character is linked by the novel's themes, this was not to everyone's liking and some people felt that the novel never quite coheres. One member of the group discovered that originally several of these characters had appeared in separate short stories: The Train, The Peeler, The Heart of the Park, Enoch and the Gorilla and that they had been edited and combined to make one novel. She wondered if they worked better as short stories.

Wise Blood made an excellent Readers' Corner choice, as there was much to discuss. Some of us loved O'Connor's vivid imagination, startling imagery and cast of monstrous characters; others were not so keen. We were not convinced by O'Connor's own interpretation of Wise Blood, but disagreed about whether this matters or not. Ultimately, we felt that there is much to admire and perhaps even enjoy, if you have the stomach for O'Connor's dark visions. The book is therefore recommended.

August 2009

The Believers by Zoe Heller

Zoë Heller's second novel, Notes on a Scandal, was a huge success, both as a book and then subsequently as a film. A taut and claustrophobic thriller, it reminded some of the group of the work of Patricia Highsmith, the subject of last month's book group discussion. Intrigued to read Heller's follow-up, we chose The Believers as August's choice.

The Believers is a very different kind of novel. It's a family drama, set in post 9-11 New York, but prefigured by a short prologue set in 1960's London. Audrey Howard is a young clerk who is unhappy with her provincial life. She meets an American lawyer, Joel Litvinoff, at a party. He offers her a profoundly different life from the one that she might otherwise have led. The book then moves forward to the present (2002), where we find Joel, now a celebrated radical lawyer, about to defend an alleged terrorist. Instead, he suffers a huge stroke and falls into a coma. The novel then tells the story of the Litvinoff family through alternating chapters that focus on Audrey and her three grown-up children. Karla is an overweight social worker, Rosa is a disaffected communist, and Lenny is a dissolute drug addict. Through their stories Heller explores what it means to have belief in the modern age.

The group's initial comments in discussing The Believers were divided between those who found the book very readable, but not particularly enjoyable, and those who found it hard going and positively disliked it. Interestingly, it was not the prose that was the problem for the latter group, but rather the characterisation. We agreed that Heller writes with great clarity and has a fine eye for detail. The trouble, we felt, was that in choosing to write about a thoroughly unpleasant family, she has risked turning off her readers. In fact, some of the group found certain members of the family to be utterly repugnant. To spend even a few hours in the company of such people - albeit in the form of fiction - therefore became something of a chore.

This led on to our first major topic of discussion, which was whether Heller's characterisation was convincing. Most of us liked the prologue and first chapter of the book, but were disappointed that Joel did not appear again, as we found him the most interesting character. Audrey, in contrast, soon becomes a loathsome battle-axe. Most of us did not know why she had made this transformation and felt that Heller made little attempt to explain it in the book. Unfortunately, the children were just as unappealing. Rather than creating rounded characters, each merely fulfilled a role: the idealist who has lost her faith so tries another, the homemaker who cannot have a baby so starts an affair, and the waster who tries to reform by drying out and getting a job. We wondered if this lack of depth was deliberate, but whether it is or not we found it unsatisfactory. Furthermore, we thought that the secondary characters - Mike, Chris, Khaled, Tanya, and especially Berenice - were too thinly sketched to be credible. Ultimately, we felt that the novel is far too schematic, as if Heller had drawn up lists of characters and then ticked them off in an effort to write a state of the nation book.

The second point of debate was on Heller's exploration of belief. Each character examines their own belief system - whether it is socialism, Judaism, fidelity, or the bonds of family itself. Each finds it wanting, though they either live with it or move on to another belief system. One member of the group asked if Heller is suggesting that if people begin to question their entrenched beliefs they just jump track to a new set of beliefs which answer the same needs in them. Furthermore, Heller seems to be criticising belief itself. She starts her novel by quoting Gramsci: "The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." Is Heller suggesting that all forms of belief - be it political, religious, social or sexual - are bogus? We argued that it takes a strong stoicism to live like this, but are we to mock those who have beliefs, just as Heller ridicules the Litvinoffs for theirs?

The Believers shows that Zoë Heller shares much in common with Patricia Highsmith. Both are enemies of cant. At its core, The Believers exposes the hypocrisy of a group of people professing to have deep convictions about their social obligations to humanity in general, yet behaving in a selfish and destructive way in their private lives. It is a cold and clinical exercise, rather than an impassioned plea from the heart. Perhaps this is the reason we were unable to warm to Heller's uncompromising tale.

July 2009

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, was published in 1950. A year later, Alfred Hitchcock radically altered it, turning it into a Hollywood thriller. In both cases, the beginning was the same: two men meet by chance on a train, and discuss their respective troubles with a wife and a father. One suggests a double murder as a solution, with this twist - they should exchange murders, thereby giving each other perfect alibis. Will they carry it out? And what will be the consequences of their action or inaction? Strangers on a Train is a dark tale of murder, madness, guile and guilt.

Highsmith is best known as a crime writer. Yet from the outset her novels didn't comply with the conventional portrayal of good triumphing over evil. Indeed, her most celebrated character, Tom Ripley, not only gets away with murder time and again, but positively revels in it. This is perhaps the best place to start a discussion of Strangers on a Train. The group argued that this book is less a crime novel than a psychological horror novel. The two main characters, Guy and Bruno, at first seem to be set up as opposites, yet Highsmith shows that both are capable of murder and the book is less about crime and detection than an exploration of the way in which immoral decisions occur. Taking the likes of Conrad, Kafka and especially Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as her literary role models, Highsmith transplants these European heavyweights into post-war, newly-affluent America, and asks, "what would you do if your material wellbeing were threatened?"

In the main, the novel was well liked. We thought it was a gripping story that never slowed its pace, as the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into the minds of the two protagonists. We noticed that Highsmith employs an interesting technique in presenting them. Throughout the novel, we are encouraged to identify with Guy Haines, the brilliant architect, who is always referred to by his first name. On the other hand, his counterpart, Charley Bruno, is a dissolute waster with a drink problem who is always referred to by his surname.

Much of the story is told from Guy's perspective, with the occasional switch to Bruno's. The detective in the story, Gerrard, hardly features, and for this reason some members of the group found him the least convincing character. That said, it was acknowledged that Gerrard is not especially important - the nub of the tale is in understanding the motivations and behaviours of the two would-be murderers. Hence, our feelings for Guy are crucial. Guy's world is portrayed so that we are meant to think it is seductive, but is it any less hollow than Bruno's when it is so materialistic? Should we sympathise with his plight? One member of the group observed that Guy clearly isn't as innocent as he would like to think since he has so many opportunities to say 'stop', yet each moral compromise brings him physical gains and he keeps on down the same path to ruin. The fascination the reader has is with Guy's descent into moral corruption and psychosis. In depicting Guy's fall like this, Highsmith lays bare the moral bankruptcy at the heart of American culture and challenges the reader to think about their own relationship to it.

The book was not to everyone's taste, but for most of us, it was a hit. The primary criticism was that neither character is likeable, but the common view was that it isn't necessary to like them to enjoy this book. The vast majority of the group felt that Strangers on a Train is a riveting read and therefore it is thoroughly recommended.

June 2009

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Last year's winner of the Man Booker Prize was Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger. It's an unflinching look at the dark side of the India economic miracle. Narrator Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw puller and self-styled White Tiger, has risen from a background of grinding rural poverty in northern India to become a successful entrepreneur in the southern city of Bangalore. Bangalore has become synonymous with the phenomenon of Western companies outsourcing their services to Indian sub-contractors, and therefore epitomises the 'new' India that Balram claims to represent. The novel takes the form of a series of letters written late at night by Balram to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the People's Republic of China.

Balram begins his story by telling what his life was like as a member of a low caste in an impoverished village in what he calls The Darkness. Village life is dominated by four exploitative landlords who are nicknamed The Stork, The Buffalo, The Wild Boar and The Raven. Balram's family know that he is intelligent, but are unable to educate him for long before he is forced to work in a teashop for nothing as "payment" for a loan for his brother's wedding. Balram soon comes to the attention of The Stork's family and is taken to the town of Dhanbad, where he becomes their second driver. He is soon relocated to New Dehli, where he becomes the driver for Ashok and his American born Indian wife Pinky. Balram soon discovers that the life of the rich and famous revolves around giving and receiving bribes, and in endless nights of debauchery. One evening, a drunken Pinky insists upon driving the car home, but kills a child in a hit and run accident. The matter is hushed up, with Balram being asked to take the rap. Balram realises that the only way a poor man can emancipate himself in modern India is by acquiring money by any means.

The White Tiger was well received by the group. It is a gripping novel that quickly draws the reader into Balram's world. From early on in the novel, we know that he is a murderer, as well as who he has murdered, but we don't yet know why he did it, nor if he has been caught. The narrator's voice is smooth and appealing on one level, not least because he portrays himself as a victim of so many social injustices. But it is also repulsive - this is, after all, the story of a man who has killed to get ahead. One reader commented "on the one hand I found him extremely disagreeable, for both sucking-up to his masters (though did he have any choice?), and for his crime; on the other hand I felt much sympathy for his plight. He's trapped, or rather would be trapped in his caste-based life unless he fights his way out, at whatever cost."

Adiga has stated in a recent interview with The Guardian that "at a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of [Indian] society. That's what I'm trying to do - it is not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination." Certainly, the book is a more realistic portrayal of Indian than, for example, the film Slumdog Millionaire, whose British director Danny Boyle opted to turn Vikas Swarup's hard-hitting novel Q&A into a Bollywood style fairytale.

We compared The White Tiger to Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a firm favourite of the group last year. We felt that as a work of literature, The White Tiger is not as good, but it is funny, satirical and a blistering exposé of globalisation. Adiga seems to update Mistry's 1970s set story of injustice and shows that while it is now possible to move up in Indian society, this can only be achieved through nefarious means. This makes The White Tiger a very uncomfortable read.

There was one area of the book that we found problematic. The realism is set against the 'conceit' of a series of letters to the Chinese Head of State. Some of us felt that this was too unbelievable and therefore that it detracted from the realism which Adiga is so concerned with. At times, too, Balram's writing has the feel of an educated westerner, rather than of a low caste Indian. We also wondered why a murderer would confess to his crimes in a 300-page letter to the Chinese Premier? Balram is uneducated, but he is not an idiot, and to some of us, this illogical premise undermines the credibility of the whole story. For all this, the group agreed to recommend The White Tiger, flaws and all, because Aravind Adiga has written an important book about modern India that we feel deserves to be widely read.

View the complete Readers' Corner review archive here

Future Choices
April 2011: Amongst Women by John McGahern Add to basket Moran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past.