May 2009

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill's third novel, Netherland, is set in the aftermath of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Narrator Hans van den Broek is a wealthy Dutch financial analyst living in New York. His wife, Rachel, has left him, taking their young son back to England to live with her parents. Alone in the terrified city, struggling to understand why his loved ones left him, Hans seeks solace in his favourite childhood sport, cricket. He discovers that it is played all over the city, on scrubland, old baseball grounds and the like, by fellow immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the West Indies. At one game he meets a Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon, who tells Hans about his vision of building a national cricket stadium. Hans is intrigued, though sceptical, and is soon drawn into Chuck's world.

Hans tells the story in flashback. He is back in London, living with his wife again, so we know from the start that they have resolved their differences and that the period of the novel is a temporary hiatus in their lives. Furthermore, the novel begins with a telephone call informing Hans that Chuck's body has been found in a New York canal, his hands tied behind his back, so we know, too, that Chuck's dream never became a reality. The novel, therefore, is both a remembrance of his unusual friendship with Chuck, but also an opportunity for the analyst to examine this period of his own life. And, of course, there is a whodunit.

The group were divided about this book. Some found the lack of a clear plot frustrating. Hans' story meanders about through time and place, as he endlessly digresses in his quest for meaning. However, for many members of the group, this was exactly why the book appealed so much. Memory is far from linear, and meaning is often not easily teased out. The style is poetic and reflective, like a sophisticated 'stream of consciousness'. This is not to everyone's taste, and led to a certain amount of frustration among several group members.

O'Neill's central theme is the traditional one of 'man grows up' and learns to appreciate that others need to know how he feels about them - and also that others have feelings themselves. In fact, Hans discovers that others often have a side to them which he is shocked to discover and perhaps prefers not to see. There is a sense of alienation throughout the novel, something that some of the group members found off-putting. Hans distances himself from everyone, including his wife and his friend Chuck. This is compounded by the flat way he describes them. Some members of the group were critical of the way O'Neill drew his secondary characters, while others argued that it is Hans who does not flesh them out, not the writer. The reader should not forget that the novel is told from Hans' perspective only - and his is an unreliable commentary. The novel is in effect an exploration of the limitations of his responses to those around him. One member asked if Hans is autistic. This is probably not the case, but certainly the book is about a man with an entrenched sense of loss whose emotions have been 'frozen' by what has happened to him. Hans' journey in the book is to some extent what happens to him when he 'unfreezes' and realises that no one can control the world in which they live. Those who rated the novel saw this as an important post-9/11 lesson.

Netherland has received much critical attention, with some calling it a modern masterpiece. The novel has been linked to The Great Gatsby both by critics and the writer himself. The parallels are clearly there for anyone who cares to look for them and at least one member of the group saw this as a brave effort to update this classic novel about the limitations of the American Dream. Others were less convinced. For them, Netherland was too flawed to be a classic. We agreed to recommend the book, but not without pointing out that there were two very distinct and opposing responses to the book by members of this group.

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April 2009

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Australian writer Tim Winton is the author of nine novels, including Dirt Music and The Riders, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Winton has also written three collections of short stories and several children's novels. His latest book is Breath (2008). The Reading Group chose his third novel, Cloudstreet (1991), as our introduction to Winton's work.

Cloudstreet purports to be a big novel with big themes. One Australian reviewer said it "is chock-full, depicting birth, death, resurrection, marriage, miscarriage, gambling, drunkenness, adultery, anorexia, depression, love, and joy". It chronicles the lives of two working class Australian families who live together at One Cloud Street, Perth, over a period of twenty years (1943 - 1963). The Lambs are hardworking, God-fearing farmers whose lives are thrown off-kilter when a tragedy befalls their eldest son, Fish. Shortly afterwards, the parents, Lester and Oriel, lose their faith and move to the city. The Pickles, meanwhile, are much more happy-go-lucky; Sam likes a bet and Dolly likes a drink. They prefer to trust in the "hairy hand" of fate rather than hard graft. It is luck that brings the Pickles to Perth, where they become the owners of a house they cannot sell for twenty years. To make ends meet, they need to rent half the house. The Lambs become their first - and only - tenants.

Winton draws his inspiration from landscape and place, mostly coastal Western Australia, where he was born and still lives. Water is an abiding symbol throughout the novel, and many of the key scenes in Cloudstreet take place on or by the sea or the great Swan River, next to which Perth was built. Cloudstreet is set in a very clearly stated historic period and often draws on real events - World War Two, the Korean War, the premiership of Robert Menzies, but also local events like the four year reign of terror when a serial killer called Eric Edgar Cooke (called the "Nedlands monster" in the book) stalked Perth. It's a conservative time in Australian history, characterised by backyard barbecues, by wives consigned to the home, and by the growth of the Australian dream of owning a new home. Yet this is not what life is like for the Lambs and the Pickles. Perpetually poor, they live on the margins of this newly afluent society. The industrious Lambs set up a shop in their half of the house, while Sam Pickles takes a job (ironically) in the mint, then gambles away his wages at the races. Though initially resistant to each other, the two families soon find their lives inter-twining.

The Reading Group's response to this book was mixed. Some delighted in its complexity and multiple characterisations. Others were exasperated and found it incoherent. Almost all agreed that Winton's decision to dispense with plot was problematic. The novel is book ended by a family picnic, and all that happens between these two scenes are a series of chronologically recorded vignettes. Perspective shifts from Sam to Dolly, from Dolly to Lester, from Lester to Oriel, and so on, so that two overlapping impressionistic family portraits are painted, but no stories develop. For most of us, this was unsatisfactory, as the stop-start nature meant that many characters were never fully developed either. Some were simply caricatures, and others barely existed beyond their quirky names (Red, Hat, Chub etc). Furthermore, Winton's choice to write about peripheral characters within Australian society meant that the book felt inconsequential. Certainly, we did not agree with some critics who compared it to the likes of John Steinbeck and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Their novels are also populated by the so-called dregs of society, but no one would argue that the Joads are insignificant, whereas most of us came away from Cloudstreet caring little for the Lambs and the Pickles.

All in all, this was a disappointing choice for the Reading Group. Winton's status is high, not least as a stylist and chronicler of Australian life. Yet more than one member of the group described Cloudstreet as overwritten and self-consciously showy. One member said that at times, reading this book was like "running through treacle". Winton's use of magic realism only caused irritation, as it seemed to shed no new light on the novel's subject matter. We thought that Winton's Australia is superficially represented and that in this book he relies on too many stock characters and national stereotypes. We did not think that Cloudstreet lived up to its reputation as being a major historical novel. If anything, we thought that it was a minor domestic novel that was far too long, inconsistently written and containing far too many irrelevant characters. We speculated that Tim Winton may have written better books than this, but most of us weren't eager to read any more. With one notable exception, Cloudstreet isn't recommended by Blackwell's Reading Group.

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March 2009

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates' first novel. Hailed as a masterpiece at the time (Kurt Vonnegut called it "The Great Gatsby of my time"), it was out of print in the UK for many years until Methuen rediscovered and reprinted it in 2001. The book is now an established American classic, and with the release of the film version of Revolutionary Road this year, the reading group felt it was time to find out more about it.

Revolutionary Road is the story of a 1950s couple, Frank and April Wheeler. Both are just under thirty years of age, and live in a Connecticut suburb with their two young children. Frank commutes into New York City everyday, where he works in the marketing department of Knox Business Machines, the company his father also worked for. When the book begins, housewife April is about to star in the local amateur dramatics production of 'The Petrified Forest' (a play whose plot prefigures much that happens in Revolutionary Road).

This conjugal scene is far from blissful and the reader soon discovers that all is not what it seems. The play ends badly and is followed by an ugly altercation between the couple. It soon transpires that Frank and April are idealistic and privately despise the conventionality of their lives. They feel trapped in their current existence and long to escape. And therein lies the roots of their personal and marital problems. How are they going to break away from their current predicament? This yearning for freedom drives the actions of the novel, but also strikes fear into their hearts. If they are to get away from their suburban nightmare, where will they go? What will they do? And what will the neighbours think?

We all agreed that the book was bleak, but brilliant. Richard Yates perfectly balances comedy and tragedy to expose the rot at the heart of nineteen-fifties America. We felt that his prose was sharp and insightful, mixing social commentary with scathing satire. Though the novel is told largely from Frank's perspective, it is in the third person, so the reader never solely identifies with him. This is just as well, as Frank is far from likeable. Neither are the supporting characters, from their friends and neighbours, the Campbells and the Givings, to the men and women who work in Frank's office. All are depicted as playing their part in making the world they inhabit a living hell. And what are we to make of April, the daughter of two alcoholics, an aspiring actress who is reduced to a life of domestic drudgery? Yates deliberately shields her from the reader's gaze until the final scenes when she emerges like a tragic heroine from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Our discussion opened out into a broader look at American fiction. We observed that Frank Wheeler has much in common with many male American fictional characters who feel trapped by their surroundings, stretching back to Herman Melville's disgruntled office worker, Bartleby, the Scrivener; through to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt; and onwards to more recent incarnations such as John Updike's Harry Angstrom (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest) and Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe (The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land). We also talked about Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which updates the suburban nightmare to the 1970s, this time told from a teenager's perspective. We agreed that it's an area in which American authors seem to excel - a place where the twin American aspirations of rugged individualism and communal compliance meet and jar the most. Yates himself said that he "meant the title [of his novel] to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties." He saw his book as a damning indictment of "the general lust for conformity" in 1950s American life. The group wholeheartedly agreed with this, and highly recommend this outstanding novel.

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February 2009

The People's Act of Love by James Meek

Winter 1919. In a remote part of Siberia, a man walks out of the snowy wilderness and into the life of the inhabitants of Yazyk. First, though, he cuts off and buries the hand of a dead man. The town is occupied by two distinct groups of people. The first is a small Christian sect led by a man called Balashov. The second is a legion of Czech soldiers, who are desperate to return home to their newly formed country. Their leader, Matula, however wants to stay, and set up and rule a colony. This brings him into direct conflict with his second in command, Lieutenant Mutz. With the Reds moving in, both the Civil War and the possibility of mutiny come closer. Uncertainty prevails. Finally, there is a widow, Anna, who lives with the only child who remains in Yazyk. She, too, is beguiled by the stranger.

The first question that confronts the reader is who is this man, who calls himself Samarin? We are given a short biography of his early years in Russia before World War One broke out. We learn a little more about him when he meets and talks to Balashov on the road to Yazyk. Later, he tells his story of exile in a northern prison camp to a crowded courthouse. Yet none of these stories quite add up. Samarin remains an enigma, a malevolent mystery at the heart of a disturbing tale.

The People's Act of Love is hugely ambitious, taking in the Russian Revolution, the subsequent Civil War that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire, as well as the impact of the Great War that precipitated massive upheavals and scattered armies across the region. Author James Meek populates this vast canvas with many fascinating stories about different types of political and religious extremists, in an attempt to explore the love and hatred that motivates such people.

For the reading group, The People's Act of Love, was something of a disappointment. For a start, it felt to us that Meek had tried to do too much. It was as though he had constructed a novel around some little-known facts he had discovered, rather than from things that naturally inter-related. We didn't believe that Samarin was the unifying force he is meant to be, as neither his character nor his story is convincing. Samarin is meant to be perplexing, but in fact we considered that the lack of detail undermined any credibility. For example, five years of Samarin's life are explained away in a telegram, when we thought this was an ideal opportunity to explore how political idealism becomes corrupted, and how the subsequent criminalised behaviour impacts on revolutionary activities. This also suggested that Meek wasn't entirely in control of his material, or else didn't know how best to use it.

There was a general complaint that much of the book read like a pastiche of Russian literature. One can't help thinking of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, of the novels of Dostoyevsky, of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (the real life basis of Samarin's White Garden), and Conrad's Russia set Under Western Eyes. Mikhael Sholokov's epic And Quietly Flows the Don, which covers exactly the same period as The People's Act of Love, also towers over the book. Despite some occasionally impressive writing, James Meek's storytelling does not match these classics, nor are his characters as memorable. As a consequence of this, the group found The People's Act of Love compared badly to the above.

So, although some members of the group argued that the book was thought provoking, we agreed that it is not a successful novel. The various strands of the novel, and the characters that represented each, were all superficially engaging, but nothing was well enough developed to entirely satisfy. The general consensus of the group was that the parts that focused on the Czech soldiers, and Mutz in particular, worked best. Whilst acknowledging that the book's principal themes were up to date and interesting, we concluded that simply writing a book with the theme of extremism is not sufficient. This is a pity, as the book's premise promised so much.

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January 2009

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore is the story of a fifteen year old boy who runs away from home in order to escape his father's dark prophesy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and older sister. Both vanished when the boy was four, leaving him with his tyrannical father. The boy assumes the name of Kafka Tamura and spontaneously chooses to head for the city of Takamatsu on the island of Shikoku, a place he's never been to, and where he believes he knows no one and no one knows him. He thinks that "if somebody started looking for me - and I doubt they will - Shikoku would be the last place they'd think of."

Kafka on the Shore is also the story of an old man called Satoru Nakata, who traces lost cats for their owners. Following a weird incident during childhood Nakata lost all his memories and is unable to read or write. Yet he has acquired the extraordinary ability of talking to cats. This strange talent is but one of the many bizarre episodes in this dreamlike book, which parallels the two protagonists' journeys across modern day Japan. On the way, they encounter a deranged sculptor calling himself Johnny Walker, a boy named Crow, a grieving librarian, a man who is a woman, a baseball-mad lorry driver, a pimp called Colonel Saunders, and two World War Two soldiers trapped in an enchanted forest.

What is one to make of this? Indeed, what is Kafka on the Shore actually about? These were the questions that preoccupied the group when we met. Haruki Murakami employs a unique writing technique that is not quite magic realism, nor simply postmodern playfulness. It is heavily dependent on symbolism and metaphor. The boundary between outer and inner worlds are continually blurred, so that one is never quite sure whether what one is reading is "real" or not - and as this is a novel (that is to say, a work of fiction), what is "real" anyway?

Murakami's novel split the group, with half of us delighting in this surreal fantasy, while the rest rolled their eyes in despair and utter bemusement. Those in favour thought that Kafka on the Shore is a multi-layered novel that can be read in as many different ways as there are readers. They concurred that the book is a compelling page-turner, endlessly unexpected and imaginative. It could be enjoyed purely for the pleasure of finding out what happens next in the alternating stories. Pleasure might be derived from trying to unravel the mysteries at the heart of the book. Or the book could be viewed as like a riddle with no obvious solution.

These group members argued that Kafka on the Shore can be interpreted as a rites of passage novel, which explores the divide between adolescence and adulthood. It raises questions about identity and asks how relationships are formed, maintained and broken. It can be seen as an examination of the role of fate in our lives. On another level, it could be seen as an allegorical piece about Japan's efforts to escape, or at least come to terms with, its violent past. These readers felt that the book is both serious and light-hearted - evidenced by the many asides on both pop culture and high art. They argued that whichever way one interprets the book, ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide. They also said that the more one read this book, and other works by Murakami, the more one is likely to find new meanings and connections.

The detractors among the group were certainly not prepared to read the book more than once. For them, it was tiresome and laborious to read a novel that made no sense at all. They complained about the repetitiveness of the text, in particular Kafka's almost autistic obsession with describing his own cleanliness and fitness. They found the novel to be emotionally cold and were repelled by some of the more extreme descriptions of sex and violence.

Haruki Murakami is the author of 11 novels (including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood) and three non-fiction (most recently a book of essays entitled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running). His books have been described as easily accessible, yet profoundly complex. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. This distinguishes him from other contemporary Japanese writers such as Kōbō Abe or Kenzaburō Ōe, and perhaps accounts for his appeal in the West. For many of his fans, Murakami's use of Western references serve as a route into his otherwise strange and inimitable literary universe. Those members of the group who are more familiar with Murakami's work felt that Kafka on the Shore was an excellent introduction to that world. Some of those who were new were less impressed, while others were most enthusiastic. So, on balance this book is definitely recommended.

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December 2008

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Erica Jong's debut novel Fear of Flying was something of a cause célèbre when it first came out in 1973. The book's depiction of female sexuality resonated with many women who felt unfulfilled and trapped in unhappy relationships, and it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. We wondered if the book would still have the same impact 35 years later.

Fear of Flying is narrated by Isadora Wing, a twenty-nine-year-old poet. The book begins with Isadora and her second husband Bennett flying to Austria for a psychoanalysts' conference. She talks about her fear of flying (a recurring motif and metaphor), but also of her desire to have a sexual encounter with an anonymous stranger. This desire, which she calls the 'zipless f**k', is at this stage merely a fantasy. However, soon after arriving in Vienna, Isadora meets Adrian Goodlove, a British psychoanalyst and self-proclaimed existentialist who offers a salacious alternative to Isadora's silent and staid husband. Soon they are off on a freewheeling adventure around Europe together.

The reading group was in some disagreement about the merit of this book. On the one hand, most of us found Isadora to be a witty and engaging protagonist. Her profane thoughts and exploits are at once shocking and amusing. In some senses, Jong, through Isadora, is exploring the point at which a perfectly acceptable fantasy becomes an unpleasant reality. She'd like to be a sexual explorer, but in fact, finds that there is some merit in keeping one's desires to oneself. This discovery is a truly liberating side to her journey. Freedom is as much about how you think as how you act. For these members of the group, the pleasure the novel gave us was in following and laughing along with Isadora's escapades.

The other response to the novel was one of exasperation. Some of us felt that the book is disappointing because while the subject matter has merit, we thought it is very poorly constructed, and often reads as if it were published in an unedited form. Whole chapters were felt to be redundant digressions, and the style is wildly varied in quality. Jong sometimes writes cleverly and poetically. On other occasions, she resorts to clichés and tired phrasing that an editor could - and should - have cleaned up. Jong has denied that the novel is autobiographical but admits that it has autobiographical elements. There was a sense from these readers that the book was an exercise in pouring out ideas and experiences with little thought for the literary merit of such an undertaking. Isadora herself was viewed with irritation and a certain amount of dismay.

Whichever way one looks at it, there is no denying that Fear of Flying was a good final book choice for 2008. Our discussion was lively and even the detractors admitted to being entertained by parts of the book. Looking back after 35 years, the book definitely feels like a period piece, when life was both more innocent and more oppressive for women, but there are elements of Isadora's situation that still resonate today. The book is therefore recommended.

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November 2008

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Published in 1955, Lolita was immediately a sensation. It was banned in several countires, including France and Britain, where one reviewer described it as "the filthiest book I have ever read". Its author, Vladimir Nabokov, rated the book highly, saying "Lolita is a special favourite of mine. It was my most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real." With this kind of pedigree, the book was inevitably of great interest to the Reading Group.

So what is Lolita all about? Principally, the book is a confession by an imprisoned paedophile, Humbert Humbert, who tells the story of his life, and in particular his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl called Dolores Haze. Humbert tells us first about how he believes he came to be infatuated with young girls (who he calls nymphets). He then embarks upon a flamboyant account of his relationship with Dolores (who he nicknames Lolita) and her mother, Charlotte. The majority of the book is about the journey he takes with Lolita once he has kidnapped her.

Lolita is not a realist novel, and indeed Nabokov mocks that style of writing in his Afterword. Instead, it is highly stylised, with many literary allusions. The prose is often exquisite, in sharp contrast to the sordid subject matter. It should be remarked that Humbert is a highly unreliable narrator, who is prone to wordplay, poetic bursts and no end of dishonesty. Humbert is determined to portray himself as a victim, and goes to extreme lengths to convince us, for example, that it was he who was seduced by Lolita, not the other way round. He tries to deceive us again and again with accounts of other people's debauchery, all of which he claims are more serious than his own crimes. There are a number of deaths, at least one of which he admits to being responsible for, and long sections of the novel involve cat and mouse chases across the American landscape.

On the whole, the novel was greatly admired by the Reading Group. We thought it was an extraordinary book, full of unforgettable passages that leave an indelible imprint on the reader's mind. Lolita is a book that is infused with equal amounts of beauty and horror, laughter and sadness. We greatly admired the fact that Nabokov somehow manages to write an incredibly perceptive and sensitive tale of tyranny that can be read both as a literal account of paedophilia, and as an allegorical study of despotism. We noted that the book has resonated well throughout the world, for example, in Iran, where it was the subject of Azar Nafisi's memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which is about a covert women's reading group. For Nafisi, the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his attempts to erase Lolita's independent identity. Nabokov's genius is to reveal the real Dolores Haze behind the web of lies that Humbert spins. We agreed that it is not difficult to apply the wider lesson to modern Iran, and elsewhere.

In our meeting, we discussed the moral aspect of the book at some length. Nabokov rather confusingly claims in his Afterword that the book is not a moral tale. Some of us argued that this is simply a ruse on the author's part: it is a deeply moral tale. However, some critics have regarded Humbert as a weak adult corrupted by a cunning child, an interpretation of the novel that would have pleased its narrator. We were certainly not of this view.

At least one member of our group admitted that she was unable to finish the book because she found the subject matter so abhorrent. It was agreed that Humbert's account of his actions is repugnant, but for the majority of us we felt that this is perhaps the price one pays for reading this remarkable, insightful novel. Lolita is highly recommended.

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October 2008

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, Trinidad-born writer VS Naipaul is the author of The House of Mr Biswas, In A Free State, and more than 30 other books. Many deal with post-colonialism. The Nobel Committee called Naipaul "Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings." But Naipaul is a controversial writer, whose work has been labelled as racist by Edward Said and Paul Theroux, among others. The group chose to read and discuss Naipaul's 1979 novel, A Bend In The River.

A Bend In The River is set in an unnamed country in Africa and follows the life of its narrator, Salim, over a period of about 10 years. During this time, the country becomes independent and a great many changes occur. Salim is an ethnically Indian Muslim who leaves his home town on Africa's east coast to run a shop in a small but growing town on the bend of a great river. Salim buys the shop from his mentor, Nazruddin, who advises him that a good businessman always knows when to move on. Salim tells us that he has adopted this approach, but as his tale unfolds, it becomes apparent that he is not as wise as he would like us to believe him to be.

The first thing to be said about A Bend In The River is that the writing style is dense and full of symbolism. This made it often hard to read, and indeed some members of the group felt that Naipaul's prose was turgid and uninspiring. By contrast, one member of the group felt that Naipaul's style is a strength, as its "sticky claustrophobia" is appropriate to Salim's paranoia and sense of degradation. We all had great difficulty with the narrator's unrelenting racism, which is prominent throughout the book. We found his racist attitude towards black Africans (who he lumps together as one entity) and misogyny are hard to stomach, and yet there is little or no relief or alternative point of view shown. We found this lack of perspective gave the book a bleak and jaundiced tone. All secondary characterisation is filtered through Salim, and he is generally dismissive, even of his friends and lover. By giving the reader little insight into what these characters are really like, we said that it felt as if Naipaul wants us to see Africa through the mind and views of Salim alone.

The first sentence of the book is one that many consider to be representative of Naipaul's worldview: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." In many ways, "A Bend In The River" is a damning criticism of people that Naipaul considers to be weak and immoral. Naipaul's narrator is in every sense a man who is shown to be a fool and a "little man" who ends up with nowhere to go - he is bad at business, incapable of love, friendship or loyalty, and loses everything. The group had some difficulty with this attitude, which we felt is intensely misanthropic. Surely Naipaul isn't saying that some people do not deserve to live? Do people like Salim really have no redeeming features? And is Naipaul really saying that what applies to Salim also applies to the politicians (the "big men") who he portrays as ruining Africa?

Although A Bend In The River is clearly fictional, it is apparent from the outset that this is a book that is set in and about the Congo in the years that follow its independence from Belgium. "The Big Man" shares the same life history as Mobutu Sésé Seko, who was the President of Zaire for 32 years; the unnamed city in which the novel is set bears many similarities with the Zairean river port of Kisangani. In this respect, Naipaul deliberately aligns his book with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As in Conrad's novel, the book uses the Congo as a backdrop for a metaphysical tale that many see as racist in portraying Africans as "the other", the dark alternative to civilised life. Salim's representation of the Congolese as weak, corrupt and self-destructive is therefore deeply troubling because it often feels is if Naipaul is sympathetic to Salim's viewpoint. Our question again and again in our discussion was is Naipaul damning his narrator alone, or does he share some of these repulsive attitudes?

Given the context in which A Bend In The River was written - the late '70s, when several African countries were being destroyed by corrupt dictators - one can understand Naipaul's pessimism. But he doesn't seem prepared to go beyond blaming Africans for the state of Africa, an incredibly naive view for a post-colonial writer. Naipaul may feel that Imperialism was rotten, but he portrays the Belgian colonialists as innocent fools (Father Huisman) or irrelevant academics (Raymond), who are cast aside by the new regime, rather than as in any way responsible for what was to follow. Moreover, Naipaul makes no attempt to analyse the malevolent influence of countries like USA and USSR on the turmoil that afflicted some post-colonial African states. And most alarming of all, he seems willing to generalise, as if the situation in the Congo were representative of a continent that is made up of 61 very different countries.

Ultimately, we found A Bend In The River to be challenging, exasperating but also strangely engaging. There is something to be said about reading from the perspective of a person with whom one does not agree, even though the bitter voice of Salim left a nasty taste in the mouth of many readers of this book. Nevertheless, the book is often heavy going, so readers of this review may feel that they are not missing out if they choose not to tackle it.

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September 2008

The Scent of the Night by Andrea Camilleri

The Scent of the Night is the sixth book in the Inspector Montalbano crime series by Andrea Camilleri. Like all its predecessors, it is set in Vigàta, an imaginary town on the island of Sicily. The story begins when an 80-year-old man holds a gun to the head of a secretary in a financial institution called King Midas. It transpires that he is angry that his investments have disappeared. Montalbano diffuses the situation, and at the same time finds he has a new case to solve. The proprietor, Gargano, is missing, along with several billion lire entrusted to him by the good citizens of Vigàta. The local opinion is that Gargano is either sleeping with the fishes, courtesy of the Mafia, or else is living it up on a tropical island at their expense. Montalbano soon discovers that one of the three employees has also vanished. Only the secretary, Mariastella, stays. She is in love with her boss, and unable to believe that he could be the thief.

Most of us were unfamiliar with Camilleri's work. We found the book to be amusing and at one level a satisfying satire on poor policing and the stereotype that the Mafia are behind every crime on Sicily. Some of us were at first sceptical about reading a crime novel as it is usually not our chosen genre. We were soon won over as we were drawn in to Montalbano's life and character from the very beginning. The opening scene of a cold Sicilian morning was very well evoked - a surprising and original way of portraying a Mediterranean country that avoids clichés about sun-kissed beaches. We also liked the way that the crime story and Montalbano's own life story were intertwined. Occasionally, Montalbano's relationships were a little hard to follow, but this was largely due to the fact that this is the sixth book in the series. For those interested, there's plenty of opportunity to find out more about him through the other novels, the first of which is The Shape of Water.

On the downside, however, was a general criticism of the style of the writing. Most of us were irritated by it, and after some discussion, put the blame squarely with the translator, Stephen Sartarelli. It was explained by an Italian member of our group that the series is written in Italian, but with a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar. A running joke for Italians is the mangled way in which one of the policemen, Catarella, speaks Italian. Sartarelli converts this into garbled English, but we felt the joke didn't translate. We also learnt that while Camilleri's books are steeped in Sicilian culture and cuisine, Sartarelli has opted to leave much of the meaning of this out. One member of the group even suggested that rather than setting the book on Sicily, but leaving out the Sicilian-ness, a more daring translator might have set it somewhere else, such as a Scottish island, substituting local references for the Sicilian ones.

A further criticism of the book was the poor quality of the plot. It was pedestrian, and ultimately rather predictable. We wondered if Camilleri was interested in this element of detective fiction - was it even relevant? One member of the group asked if the book is a spoof of detective fiction. It contains all the standard elements (for example, red herrings, the loner detective's with 'endearing' foibles, the detective's bad relationship with his boss, and sultry women attracting the detective despite himself). Yet it seems to be more about an individual's response to greed, murder, deception, fear, age, cruelty, and spite. The novel is full of almost insane destructiveness, both by the criminals and by the policemen. Montalbano is no exception, and indeed he is a detective who is prone to solving cases through impulsive actions rather than by logic and psychological insight. True to the conventions of the genre, order is restored at the end of this novel, but one doesn't feel that it will last. Is Camilleri ultimately commenting pessimistically on the 'Human Condition', and using the detective genre as a convenient vehicle?

To conclude, The Scent of the Night was an interesting departure for the group. We had not previously chosen a detective novel, so we inevitably talked at some length about the relative merits of this genre of fiction. From its beginnings with Edgar Allen Poe, through Arthur Conan Doyle to Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, and more recent exponents such as Ian Rankin and Henning Mankell, there are plenty of examples of writers who use this form of entertainment to great literary effect. As for Camilleri, some of us thought we would explore his other Montalbano stories. Others were less keen. For those who enjoy detective fiction, and have not yet tried him, this series is definitely recommended.

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August 2008

The Road Home by Rose Tremain.

Rose Tremain's latest novel, The Road Home, is the story of an economic migrant who comes to the UK from Eastern Europe in the hope that he will earn enough money to improve the lives of his family back home. It is an ambitious attempt to write about a controversial feature of contemporary life in Britain. Tremain also asks what we mean by "home" in the modern age. The book won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2008, and the group were keen to find out if it lived up to expectations.

Lev is in his early 40s. His old life in Auror (a small village in an unnamed Eastern European country) has collapsed following first the closing of the timber mill where he had worked all his life, and then by the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukaemia. Lev takes the decision to leave his elderly mother, his young daughter, and his friends, in order to find work in London. He naively believes that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, soon learns the truth and is before long sleeping rough whilst earning just a fiver a day by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. His luck changes when Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the bus journey to London, comes to his rescue. She helps him to find a room to rent in a house owned by the amiable Christy Slane, and a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef called GK Ashe. When Lev falls in love with Sophie, a colleague at the restaurant, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete. In reality, the story is much more complex, and Lev's journey has many more twists and turns to it.

The Road Home proved a very popular choice, not least because it elicited a long and fascinating discussion not only of the book, but also the issues explored within it. We admired Tremain's decision to tackle this subject, as well as her methods. She employs the classic device of an outsider viewing a familiar landscape. This is coupled with the use of unusual metaphors and striking imagery, both techniques "making strange" what we might otherwise take for granted. She also challenges the audience's own perceptions of immigration. The novel is packed with stereotypes that we felt she is generally success in busting.

Lev's journey is generally the most satisfying part of the book (though at least one of us felt it was more of a fairytale than perhaps is the usual case for economic migrants). He is a complicated and consistently interesting character, although not always loveable. We conceded that we did not always understand his motivation and behaviour. Some of the group struggled to understand his dark side - was his frustration a consequence of his Communist upbringing, the premature loss of his wife, or something deeper and perhaps not clearly explained by the author?

Less satisfying were the elements of satire that Tremain occasionally introduced to the narrative. This was aimed at Britain's celebrity culture, and there were a number of occasions when Tremain (through Lev) is very critical of contemporary artists and dramatists. Paradoxically, the celebrity chef is shown to be a real artist, and we detected a (somewhat conservative) message from the author that hard work and genuine talent will see you through. This seems to be borne out by the fairytale side of the book, although conversely, there was some discussion about whether Lev is truly happy at the end of the story. While Tremain seems to have written a credible novel about the impact of modern capitalism on everyday lives, she seems to be suggesting that our emotional side means that life is more complicated than the money = happiness equation. This might seem obvious when spelt out like this, but if Tremain's aim in writing this novel is to understand why people travel thousands of miles from their families in order to make a better life through the accumulation of wealth, then it needs to be explored in some detail.

All of this is not to say that there wasn't some dissent among the group members. One member did not believe in the situation at all, and found the book frustrating to read and ultimately irritating. This led us to question the apparent realism of the book, and in general the view was that Tremain is trying to get beyond the facts of the immigrant experience. Whether she is entirely successful is perhaps down to the individual reader to decide.

In the end we concluded that The Road Home is a fascinating if flawed novel. We felt that Tremain is to be congratulated for writing such an ambitious book, and indeed one member of the group claimed it was the best contemporary British novel she had read for some time. The book is therefore thoroughly recommended reading, even if some readers may find aspects of it exasperating at times.

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July 2008

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.

Grady Tripp is washed up at 41. He's been a successful writer, but has been writing his fourth novel, Wonder Boys, for seven years. At 2,000 pages and with no end in sight, it's become the novelist's equivalent of Coleridge's albatross. Tripp teaches creative writing at a Pittsburgh College, but with both his drug intake and his relationships spiralling increasingly out of control, it seems inevitable that his current position is about to become untenable. To make matters worse, his wayward agent, Terry Crabtree, is about to arrive in town for the college's annual WordFest. The lecherous Crabtree is looking for talent, and not just Tripp's latest literary offering. The scene is set for an insane and unforgettable weekend.

Michael Chabon is a bestselling author in the United States, who won the Pulitzer prize with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Less well known here in the UK, Wonder Boys was originally nominated by a member of the reading group who lives in San Francisco.

Like many comic novels, Wonder Boys elicited two distinct responses from the reading group. Many of us were highly amused by Tripp's antics. However, the book left some of the group cold. It's fair to say that you'll either love or loathe it.

Those who did enjoy Wonder Boys thought that it was a literary tour de force that is full of wit and verve. Chabon's eloquent linguistic skills are apparent from the first page, and his humour shines through from the off. We agreed that the self-destructive Tripp is a brilliant comic creation - a man who is his own worst enemy, who can't seem to help himself, and who inevitably winds up in some utterly absurd situations. He's also a man at a crossroads, who must decide where his priorities lie. Tripp is a larger than life anti-hero for sure, but one that is somehow loveable; we felt that one can't help but sympathise with him, even though he is something of a rogue who has brought most of this on himself. To be fair, though, it is perhaps not entirely his own fault that he is driving around with a tuba, a dead dog, a stolen jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe, and a black mamba in the boot of his car.

One member of the group argued that Wonder Boys is a very American book that illustrates what is best in American literature; the self-irony and understanding of life is funny and touching at the same time. Like all the best comic fiction, there is a serious side to it. Chabon takes Tripp and the reader on an hilarious and lyrical, but ultimately cathartic journey. Some members of the group felt that the book would not stick in their memory, but for others it is a poignant reminder of the short-lived nature of talent and the need for compromise. One group member likened its themes to The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece about another poor boy who reinvents himself, but ultimately fails to fit in. Whilst willing to accept that Wonder Boys is not in the same league as "Gatsby", it is fair to say that it is very much within the tradition of great American literature. The book is therefore thoroughly recommended, unless of course you don't find dead dogs all that funny!

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June 2008

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky.

Suite Française is the final novel of Irène Némirovsky, a Russian èmigré who had settled in France in the 1920s, publishing nine novels (including "David Golder"), before the invasion of France by Nazi Germany. She began writing Suite Française in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. In July 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died (aged 39) a month later. The manuscript for Suite Française lay unread among the family papers for 50 years before it was rediscovered in the 1990s. Finally published in 2004, the book has gone on to become an international bestseller.

Suite Française consists of two novellas, "Storm in June" and "Dolce". These portray life in France from 4 June 1940, when the German forces invaded, through to 1 July 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. At the end of these, the book contains a series of appendices and a biographical sketch about the author. From these, one learns that Némirovsky intended to write five novellas in total. Remarkably, the tales appear to have been written as the real events that form the backdrop of the story unfolded. This adds to the poignancy of her tragic death, long before the liberation of France and the end of the Nazi Era.

"Storm in June" describes the exodus of thousands of Parisians from the French capital. Némirovsky's chapters alternate between different groups of people, each of whom represent a type within French society. She portrays upper, middle and lower class characters, artists and artisans. By and large, all are unsympathetically drawn - the exception being the lower middle class Michauds. The novella ends with the fall of France and the return to the newly captured capital.

"Dolce" is set in the small town of Bussy in the French countryside. Again Némirovsky dissects the French class structure, in particular portraying the way in which the upper and middle classes begin to collaborate with the Germans. The central story is of the burgeoning love between Lucile Angellier, whose unfaithful husband is a prisoner of war, and Bruno von Falk, a German officer who is billeted at the Angellier farm. There are a few tenuous links to characters from "Storm in June", though in general the novellas are unrelated - the common link is the fall of France. Némirovsky's notes show how the third section (to be called "Captivity") would have brought characters from the first two novellas together. Sadly, this novella was never written.

The group agreed that this is an extraordinary book. It seems to have been written in order to document the response of the French to the invasion. There is nothing sentimental about Suite Française. Némirovsky lays bare French society, as she saw it, both during the capitulation and afterwards under occupation. It is startling that she never once refers to the Germans as Nazis. She does not seem to be interested in writing about the ideology of the Nazis, which to us was surprising given her own fate. Némirovsky's villains are the upper and middle classes, who she holds responsible for the defeat of France and what was to come afterwards. Interestingly, it is only a few of her working class characters that have redeeming qualities. Her notes suggest that she was aware of the beginnings of a resistance movement that was to play a crucial role in the subsequent liberation of France, and it is clear that it would be these working class characters who would join this struggle for freedom.

For all this, as a work of fiction, we were less impressed. The subject matter is fascinating, but we were disappointed with the delivery: the book is quite clearly a work in progress. Whilst acknowledging that some aspects of the novel are very good, we felt that the plotting of the two novellas in the book is weak (and in the case of "Storm in June", which is a series of often unrelated vignettes, virtually non-existent). We thought that the characterisation is often stereotyped or under-developed, with many of them disappearing from the story before they are given a chance to "come alive". Some characters are simply there to prove a point. We also agreed that the writing is generally unsatisfactory. It feels hurried, and sometimes comes across as clunky, clichéd and ultimately unrefined. Our overall impression was that in writing these stories, Némirovsky's anger had got the better of her artistry.

Némirovsky's notes indicate that these are first drafts and that she planned to revise the novellas. So it is perhaps harsh to criticise her too much, especially when they were produced under such difficult circumstances. We wondered why the publishers of this edition had not taken any decision to edit the text. Perhaps they felt that the book stands up as an important historical document. We conceded that this might be the case, but that it was not a satisfactory literary work.

As a result, we all felt a little frustrated by this book. It is not so much that Suite Française is a bad book, or indeed a bad choice for a book group discussion. Rather, we feel it should come with a warning that as it is an unfinished novel, it is not a polished piece of fiction, and therefore should not be judged as one.

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May 2008

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones.

Mister Pip purports to be a strikingly original book about the power and formative influence of literature. It is narrated by a young woman who is looking back on her early life growing up in a small village on a tropical island in the South Pacific.

It is eighty-six days since fourteen-year-old Matilda and her classmates last went to school. The year is 1991, and the once quiet and idyllic island of Bougainville is at war. Every day, the violence gets closer. One day, the island's only white man, Mr Watts, re-opens the school. The previously reclusive Mr Watts (whom the children nickname Pop Eye) explains that he will introduce the children to Mr Dickens. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the island and prepare a list of much needed items. They are shocked to discover their acquaintance with Mr Dickens will be through Mr Watts' reading of a book called Great Expectations.

New Zealand author Lloyd Jones originally set Mister Pip on a fictitious island. In a late amendment, he chose to locate his story on Bougainville Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea. Resentful of the physical and social damaged caused by copper mining on the island, a conflict broke out in 1990 when the islanders tried to declare independence. The bloody consequences of this brutal war are graphically described in Jones' book, and serve as a stark contrast to the idyll that he describes in earlier sections of the novel. This is then juxtaposed with Dickens' classic tale of social mobility and the story of the impact these have on Matilda's life and imagination.

There was perhaps too high an expectation among the group for Mister Pip. We had chosen the book because we thought it the most intriguing of last year's Booker Prize nominations (the prize was won by Anne Enright for The Gathering). There was much debate at our meeting about what exactly was wrong with the novel, but we all agreed that it was a book that promised much but we felt delivered little.

There were questions about the tone, pacing and in particular characterisation. We all agreed that Jones failed to capture the voice of a fourteen-year-old black island girl, which is fundamental given that she is both the central character and the narrator. In this respect, this month's book choice compares unfavourably with Purple Hibiscus, March's choice. Secondary characters, such as Matilda's mother and Mr Watts, were felt to be nothing more than caricatures; a major flaw given that the book's premise is that characters in fiction can take on lives of their own.

Overall, we found the story unconvincing and we were particularly unimpressed by Jones' efforts at putting the novel's events in the wider context of the war. Jones doesn't seem to have much to say about the civil war and there was a sense that the story could have happened anywhere (or nowhere) - this makes Jones' last minute decision to set the book on Bourgainville all the more puzzling. This was contrasted with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's brilliant and devastating book about the Biafran war, Half of a Yellow Sun. Does Jones have anything to say about what it is like to be a victim of violent forces beyond your control? We weren't convinced that he did. Indeed, all of this year's previous choices - A Fine Balance, Regeneration, Purple Hibiscus and The Road - were all cited as dealing with this theme better.

A major criticism of the book was the fact that the book dramatically shifts in time and place in the second half. Most group members thought that this did not work. It was as if the second half of the book was an extended epilogue, tacked on simply to make the book longer, or worse to try to explain what had gone on before to readers who should really be able to work this out for themselves. The latter explanation is in keeping with a more general criticism that Mister Pip is a book where the author continually "tells" the reader what is going on, or why he is writing what he is writing. This style was disliked by us all.

It perhaps goes without saying that Mister Pip was not a popular book, although it is fair to say that there were elements of the book that we did enjoy. We all agreed that it is at times both funny and extremely moving. We felt that Jones falls into the trap early on of being too pleased with himself for coming up with his "original idea", tries to be quirky, then in attempting to be serious ironically shows himself to be largely superficial. Several of us said we were surprised it wasn't a first novel, as the writing was so inconsistent - occasionally very good, but often really bad. One member of the group described the novel as "amateur": Jones has tried his best, produced an intriguing book, but ultimately doesn't have the skills as a writer to produce anything of great depth or lasting worth. In the end, we agreed that it was an interesting choice, even a book that some of us liked in spite of all its flaws, but ultimately it is was not one that any of us would be recommending.

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April 2008

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

About 250 million years ago, at the end of Permian Era, life on Earth nearly ended. Scientists believe that the catastrophe may have been caused by a massive volcanic eruption that released sulphate gases and triggered a deluge of acid rain which killed all plant life. Just 10% of all species survived and it set back evolution by millions of years.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy imagines what might happen to mankind should a similar event happen today. He does not specify the cause of the disaster, but throughout his novel, ash drifts across the scorched and dead earth, it is bitterly cold, and the sky is permanently grey. Most significantly, every species - animals and plants - is dead, apart from a handful of humans, who resort to ever increasingly desperate tactics to survive.

At the centre of the novel are two unnamed characters, a father and son. They trudge across the landscape in a country that was clearly once the United States. Civilisation has long been destroyed: only violent gangs and the occasional solitary refugee hang on. The man and boy try to remain alone as much as possible, avoiding the threats associated with contact with other humans. This is not easy, and they are constantly at risk of attack, as well as exposure and starvation. At the forefront of their minds is always the need for warmth and shelter, but above all the need to find food. This can only come from unearthing canned and bottled foodstuff left over from before the disaster, stocks that are scarcer and scarcer and eventually bound to run out. The only available alternative is human flesh.

On one level, The Road is an unremittingly bleak book. From the start it is clear that the cataclysm is complete and irreversible. One reads initially with dread as to what might happen. But McCarthy's intent is not just to catalogue the appalling depths man might be capable of sinking; he also wants to explore the positive side of our nature. So the central story is a touching account of the bond between the father and his son that attempts to pinpoint the very essence of our humanity. As a result, the book is a poetic and profound meditation on love rather than hate; goodness rather than evil; and beauty not ugliness.

The group were captivated by this challenging, but hugely rewarding book. We felt that McCarthy is a master storyteller, whose towering command of language finds ways of expressing the highs and lows of humankind. We were all deeply moved by the story of the relationship between the man and boy who, whilst never named, are very real. In trying to discover what it means to be human, we felt that McCarthy's ambition is to be applauded. The book is highly recommended, and we felt thoroughly deserving of the accolades it has received. The Road is a worthy winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and we believe it will become a major classic of 21st Century fiction.

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March 2008

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Purple Hibiscus is the debut novel of Nigerian-born writer Chimananda Ngozi Adichie. Set in Enugu, Nigeria, and beginning on the eve of a military coup, it tells the story of the prosperous Achike family, and is narrated by the quiet but observant daughter, fifteen-year-old Kambili. The head of the family, Eugene, is a successful businessman who, as well as owning a biscuit factory, is the proprietor of a newspaper that dares to stand up to the corrupt political regime that comes to rule Nigeria as a result of the coup. Outwardly, the family is well respected, and Eugene is regarded as politically courageous, as well as a generous pillar of his community. Indeed, in his home village, he is called "Omelora" (One Who Does For the Community). Yet there is another side to "Papa" that is much darker, and as the story unfolds, the truth comes out and so begins a train of events that leads to the downfall of the family.

From the very first pages, it is apparent that Papa is fanatically religious, to the extent that he is prepared to severely punish his own family for anything he regards as a 'sin'. He also refuses to speak to his father, whom he considers a heathen for declining to convert to Catholicism. The book begins on Palm Sunday with an incident when Kambili's brother, Jaja, openly defies his father. Kambili then returns the previous Christmas and tells the story of how she and her brother came to stay with her aunt and cousins in Nsukka. At once the novel's colours lighten as the reader is introduced to Aunty Ifeoma, Eugene's feisty sister, a widow who works at the university; Kambili and Jaja's spirited cousins, Amaka, Obiora and Chima; and Father Amadi, a young and handsome priest who takes a keen interest in Kambili. Gradually, Kambili and Jaja come out of their shells and begin to put their own repressed lives into some sort of perspective. Inevitably, the stage is set for a confrontation when they are reunited with their oppressive father, and we come to see why Jaja should choose to make his stand.

Generally speaking, the group enjoyed this novel. We felt that Adichie writes confidently and portrays her home country in an interesting and evocative way. We thought that she sensitively handles the painful awakening of a girl who has lived a sheltered life and suffered in an abusive home. Although Kambili's narrative is necessarily narrow in focus, Adichie's skill as a writer is such that at the same time as producing a convincing voice of a fifteen-year-old girl, the reader is able to see a bigger picture of life in Nigeria. The novel is never sensational, but does not shy away from the horror of the children's lives. The apparently benign domestic scenes are chillingly suffused with a feeling of tyranny that erupts into something real and terrifying. We also commented that Adichie balances well the two sides of Eugene's personality. He is never portrayed as an ogre or a "bad man", but rather as a flawed human being who makes some terrible mistakes in the belief that by insisting that they follow a strict religious doctrine he is protecting his children.

Purple Hibiscus is more than simply a domestic tale of abuse. From the opening sentence, which calls to mind Chinua Achebe's most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, Adichie flags her intention to write something big and important. The story pairs the collapse of the family's strong patriarch who physically abuses his family with the deterioration of Nigerian society as it undergoes a military coup. We thought this was an appealing aspect of the novel, but to a large degree this schematic illustrates the faults of the novel. The narrative structure, the characterisation, the political parallels were all too easily delineated by the discerning reader. Although this does not render the novel redundant, it does make it feel less accomplished. There were other niggles, but overall, our conclusion is that Purple Hibiscus is an interesting novel from a very promising and talented writer that we would certainly recommend. We hope that this debut novel marks the beginning of an illustrious career, and many of us are looking forward to reading Adichie's follow-up, Half of a Yellow Sun. This epic and ambitious tale about the end of colonialism, set in the 1960s during the Nigeria-Biafra War, unanimously won last year's Orange Prize.

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February 2008

Regeneration by Pat Barker.

Pat Barker's First World War Regeneration Trilogy was written in the 1990s. At the time, it coincided with a resurgence of interest in the so-called Great War, which had blighted a generation and left a deep impression on those that followed. Barker's approach was to write about the trauma of the trenches through the experiences of a number of well-known historical figures - most notably the writers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen - who were patients of the psychiatrist Dr. W.H.R. Rivers. The book, thus, both takes as a starting point, but also builds on the great contribution these writers made to our understanding of this terrible conflict. The book group chose the first of the trilogy, Regeneration as February's book choice.

Regeneration begins with Sassoon's declaration against the continuation of the war, which was read in the House of Commons and then published in the Times newspaper. Sassoon wants to be court-martialled, in order for his views to be publicly debated, but his friend Robert Graves persuades a Medical Board that Sassoon is suffering from shell shock, and he is sent to Craiglockhart Military Hospital where he becomes Rivers' patient. To a large extent what follows is a study of Rivers approach to "rehabilitating" trauma patients. This "talking cure" is contrasted with, for example, the fictional Dr Yealland's use of electro-shock therapy to force patients to recover quickly from shell shock. Barker also uses the metaphor of nerve regeneration, based on Rivers' earlier experiments with another real-life character, the neurologist Henry Head.

Barker's novel develops around this story the tales of other patients, some real, but most fictional. Another character, who becomes central to the trilogy, is Billy Prior, a working-class officer who has risen to the rank of officer, and who on arrival at Craiglockhart is suffering from mutism and asthma. Prior's views and life experiences contrast sharply with the other officers, who are largely from public school backgrounds. This allows Barker to explore the impact of the class system on the conduct of the war.

Regeneration is in many ways a challenging novel because it asks the reader to think deeply about a period in history that is both well-known and shrouded in secrets and mystery. Few who returned home talked openly about the war, a cataclysmic conflict that touched the lives of millions. These facts alone are shocking: 60 million Europeans fought in the war; 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed; and there were 40 million casualties in total. Many veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, called shell shock at the time, yet there was a reluctance to accept that it existed, especially during the war itself, when the aim was to return as many casualties to the frontline as possible. Barker's book attempts to explore the phenomenon, but to go beyond this to understand its impact on a generation of idealistic young men who thought they were fighting for a better world, but instead encountered horror, pain and disillusionment.

The group were very impressed with Regeneration. We thought the book was well written, engrossing and touching. It manages to convey the horrors of the trenches without being patronising, a common pitfall, and to illustrate various view points impartially. One group member commented that she found herself wondering what she would have thought of Sassoon's declaration had she been around at the time. River's way of treating patients, which we now take for granted, must have been quite revolutionary at the time and this was fascinating to discover, especially when contrasted with other more common barbaric methods as described in the book, not to mention the accusations of cowardice. We thought Barker was good at her central character portrayals, but we did concede that we found some of the minor characters who are patients were less well drawn. This was a pity, as the novel has clearly been thoroughly researched and these patients' case studies were interesting in their own right, if not essential to the furtherance of the plot. There were some of us who felt that Barker's female characters were peripheral. Barker herself has stated that in the trilogy she wanted to give voice to working class women who have otherwise not been heard and yet played an important role in the war. In her depiction of the munitions workers in Regeneration, she certainly manages to do this, though by the third part of the trilogy we deemed these characters to have been side-lined. Those disappointed by this aspect of the novels might also want to read Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth.

In spite of these small criticisms, the group agreed that Regeneration is an important and very satisfying novel. Barker's book (and indeed the whole trilogy) is hugely ambitious. It is about madness, both personal and collective; about patriotism, parenthood, masculinity, homosexuality; and it is a political novel about war, peace, and class. Barker builds on these themes as the trilogy progresses. Those of us who had read all three books felt that we would highly recommend both Regeneration and The Ghost Road, the third part of the trilogy. We were less impressed by the middle book, The Eye in the Door, though many who choose to read these books may feel that, for the sake of completeness, they should read this one, too.

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January 2008

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

Rohinton Mistry's second novel, A Fine Balance, is the story of four people - Mrs Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow who has fallen on hard times; her lodger Maneck Kohlah, a student; and Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, two "untouchable" tailors who have fled the caste system and are employed by Mrs Dalal. It is also the story of a city (Bombay), and a country (India) at a very specific time that has become one of the most controversial periods in that country's history.

For 21 months, between June 1975 and March 1977, a State of Emergency was declared in India, which effectively bestowed on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the power to rule by decree. She suspended elections and civil liberties. During the Emergency, many opposition leaders were jailed or murdered, while freedom of the press and the powers of the judiciary were curtailed. For the poor, it was a terrifying time, a time of mass forced sterilisation and compulsory slum clearances (known as beautification programmes). Rohinton Mistry's intricately plotted novel ingeniously draws together a host of disparate characters, who represent the many sides of Indian life, so that he is able to write about the impact of this disreputable decision on his country.

Spirited Dina Shroff rebels against her wealthy family to marry for love. When husband Rustom Dalal is killed in a traffic accident, she is forced to choose between accepting her brother Nusswan's hospitality (thereby giving up any hope of living independently) or remaining in her husband's apartment. To do the latter, she will need an income to pay the rent. Two former schoolfriends come to her rescue - Aban sends her son, Maneck, to live as a tenant; Zenobia offers her a chance to make dresses for an export company. But with failing eyesight, Dina must find some tailors to do the work. Her quest for suitable employees proves difficult until she meets Ishvar Darji and his nephew, Om. Thus the four are brought together, and in the process their lives are changed forever.

The group agreed that A Fine Balance is one of the most powerful and satisfying contemporary novels we have read. Once read, we felt that it quite literally changes your understanding of Indian life. Every aspect of Indian life is represented, from beggars to businessmen, slum-dwellers to slum-landlords, militant students to corrupt politicians. We felt that Mistry's characterisation was wonderful. Dina, Maneck, Ishvar and Om are so real, but so too are the more peripheral characters, each of whom were fully formed in their own right. Mistry gets under the skin of all these characters, representing them as people, not types. This adds depth to his social commentary, as well as creating empathy.

Unlike the postmodernist Salman Rushdie (who also wrote about the Emergency in "Midnight's Children") Mistry employs a realist style, reminiscent of the best nineteenth century fiction (think Balzac, Flaubert and Zola), and applies it to a modern setting. In keeping with this style, A Fine Balance is an exploration of human values and fate. Mistry's sweeping narrative brilliantly captures the cruelty of India during the Emergency. It also shows the warmth and compassion that can exist between human beings, even in the most desperate of times. Mistry's prose is crystal clear, yet subtle, too, allowing the reader to draw out meaning, thus enriching the experience of interpreting the novel.

There is so much to enjoy in Mistry's book, and our discussion reflected this. What I don't want to do here is to give away too much of the story. What I will say is that from the light-hearted prologue to the heart-breaking epilogue, Mistry's audience will be captivated by his epic tale. The simple message of this review is to 'go and read it'. A Fine Balance, our first book choice of 2008, is highly recommended and we hope it will set the standard for an enjoyable year of reading that is ahead of us.

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December 2007

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster.

Blackwell's Reading Group chose as its final book of the year a recent novel by Paul Auster. Since the publication of The New York Trilogy in 1987, Auster has developed a reputation as one of America's finest literary novelists. His books are rarely set outside of the Big Apple, and our choice, The Brooklyn Follies, as its title suggests, was no exception.

The Brooklyn Follies opens with the stark declaration by its narrator, 60-year-old Nathan Glass, that he has returned to Brooklyn because he is looking for a quiet place to die. A retired insurance salesman, Nathan is recovering from lung cancer. His wife has recently left him, fed up with his infidelities, and although he tries to sound upbeat, it is clear that he suffers from a bad case of self-pity, leading to self-absorption. To wile away the time, Nathan is writing a book of human follies which appears to be largely autobiographical.

Not long after arriving in Brooklyn he meets his nephew, Tom Wood, whom he has not seen for several years. Although not long out of university, Tom seems to have given up on life and has been doing a string of meaningless jobs, most recently as a nightshift taxi-driver. The two men soon develop a close friendship, entertaining each other over long lunches in their favourite restaurant, lusting after unobtainable women, and generally avoiding taking part in life. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives a bridge suddenly appears between their past and their future that offers both Tom and Nathan an opportunity to re-engage with the world.

"The Brooklyn Follies" contains all the classic elements of a Paul Auster novel. The main character is a lonely man, who has suffered a series of misfortunes, and who is trying to define himself through writing. The narrative is based on sudden and random events and coincidences. The characters are by-and-large failures in life who lose everything before reconnecting with the world and accepting themselves for what they are. And in keeping with its predecessors, The Brooklyn Follies is liberally peppered with riffs on Auster's favourite writers, in particular Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau and Kafka.

So, what did we make of it? Interestingly, we all began by saying that we had enjoyed the book, but very quickly we began to pick holes in it. Whilst acknowledging that Auster is an entertaining and often very funny storyteller, we all struggled to accept the constant twists and turns, outrageous coincidences, and especially the way Auster starts and then abandons subplots. He has no higher regard for characterisation. There are so many characters in the novel, yet the majority are thinly sketched and often disappear a few pages after first appearing. The dialogue was often wooden and in particular we singled out one monologue that was utterly implausible. On top of this, Auster's New York is a catalogue of clichés, and indeed his whole outlook is folksy at best. The sincerity that followers of his novels might have come to expect has been replaced by a smugness that grated after a while.

The more we examined The Brooklyn Follies, the more we found this book wanting. All Auster's usual themes are there, yet he did not seem to have made the effort to explore them this time. Auster introduces issues about writing and philosophy, references his book to other writers' works, but then doesn't follow through. As a result, these elements of the book are unsatisfactory, and felt tacked on. It is almost as if he didn't want or was able to develop the ideas - and if he didn't want to follow them through, why did he introduce them? Was it simply to make the novel appear more "serious"?

Many of Paul Auster's novels take the form of detective fiction. More fundamentally they are quests, and in particular quests for identity. The Brooklyn Follies does not depart from this formula, yet it is much lighter in touch than its predecessors. The result is that Auster's tenth novel is something of a New York fairytale, though one that lacks the profundity of the best folklore. The book's saving grace is that it kept us amused while we read it, but we did not feel that this is enough from an author with such a reputation. We felt that we would recommend the author, as he has written many other more satisfying novels, though we would not necessarily advise that the reader starts with The Brooklyn Follies.

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November 2007

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

Graham Greene is one of the most famous 20th Century British authors. His novels continue to be widely read 16 years after his death, and recent films of "The Quiet American" and "The End of the Affair" fuel this interest. There is also an industry developing which specialises in his life - Graham Greene A Life in Letters was published this year and Norman Sherry has written a three volume Life of Graham Green. In the 1940s Greene wrote four career-defining novels that explore Catholic religious themes. These books, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and "The End of the Affair", are also among the best known and most highly regarded of his long and prolific career. The reading group chose "The Heart of the Matter" as its November choice.

Set in West Africa during the Second World War, The Heart of the Matter is clearly autobiographical in origin. Greene worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Sierra Leone during the war and draws on this for inspiration. The novel tells the story of Major Henry Scobie, a long-serving police inspector in a British colonial town on the west coast of an unnamed African country. He is known to be incorruptible and is responsible for providing both local and wartime security, as well as controlling smuggling. He is unhappily married to Louise. They had a daughter, Catherine, who died at school in England several years before. Both are to a degree still mourning this loss. Scobie feels responsible for Louise's happiness, but does not love her, and indeed feels that he is unable to love anyone, including himself. When an opportunity to become the Commissioner comes along, Louise hopes that this will transform their stultifying lives. However, Scobie has no desire to take on further responsibilities in his life, so is relieved when he is passed over for the promotion. This precipitates the events of the novel, as Louise reacts by demanding that Scobie find the money to send her away to South Africa to start a new life, with or without him.

Like Greene himself, Scobie is a convert to Catholicism. Also like Greene, he has done this initially to please his devout wife, but in the novel this becomes a defining aspect of his life and guides all his actions. Greene draws on his experience as a thriller writer to build up the tension in The Heart of the Matter, as multiple plots unfurl that draw Scobie into a series of moral dilemmas. Without wishing to give too much of the story away, these include how to obtain the money for Louise's passage to South Africa, blackmail, adultery, murder and even suicide.

The group's reaction to The Heart of the Matter was mixed, although the underlying view was that it was a deeply disturbing and ultimately depressing tale that didn't entirely satisfy. Interestingly, and this perhaps made the discussion so lively, we didn't all agree on what worked and what didn't. For example, the characterisation was seen by some to be rather limited, with only Scobie fully fleshed out. Others believed that this was a strong point of the novel - the behaviour and psychology of Scobie in particular being cited as utterly convincing. One thing we did all agree on was that Greene is excellent at conveying the oppressive and sticky heat of equatorial Africa.

Inevitably there was much talk about the religious theme of the book. We did not all feel that we could relate to Scobie's religious dilemmas and it is interesting that Greene himself chose to emphasise the theme of pride in his autobiography, Ways of Escape. Greene also thought the book a failure. Ironically, it is the feeling of failure that pervades the novel itself. Each character in the novel fails in their ultimate goals by the end of the book. This left most of us feeling rather dispirited by the book, but we did agree that the main value of the novel is that by depicting a character, Scobie, who is increasingly cut off from the world in which he inhabits, Greene successfully portrays the price to be paid for our individualism and the impossibility of truly understanding another person. In the end, the book ceases to be a religious text about hell and damnation, but rather about the consequences of one's actions on others in the world we live in.

At the end of our discussion, we were all in agreement that Greene is an important and still relevant writer. His major works are all challenging, and even if one does not share his religious convictions, he deals with universal issues in an intellectually engaging way. Greene is also an entertaining writer. We singled out Our Man in Havana as a particularly enjoyable satire. The Heart of the Matter, sombre though it is, is not without its humour - and indeed, we thought it at its best when Greene was at his lightest. In later novels, like "The Quiet American" and "The Comedians", Greene sheds his overt Catholic themes and delivers sharp political novels that combine humour with deep insights into what it means to be human. We felt that we would recommend these books to newcomers of Greene, but also agreed that for those who want to learn more about 'Greeneland', as it is known, The Heart of the Matter is essential reading.

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October 2007

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende.

Isabel Allende is one of Latin America's leading writers. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1942, but moved to Chile at the age of three. After her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was assassinated in 1973, she fled Chile with her husband and children to Venezuela. She now lives in the United States. Her first two novels, The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows, were set in Chile and dealt with the impact of the Pinochet coup and its aftermath. Eva Luna, her third novel, and the reading group's October choice, was set in Venezuela. Like its predecessors, it shows the effects of political violence on the lives of ordinary people.

Allende prefaces Eva Luna with a quotation from One Thousand and One Nights. As in her first novel, The House of the Spirits, she adopts the style of this Arabian classic as a means of recounting both the personal stories of a number of individuals and the history of an unnamed but clearly recognisable country. Eva is her Queen Scheherazade, who tells her seemingly limitless stories in an exuberant and flamboyant fashion.

It begins with the story of her birth; of her mother, Consuelo's union with Eva's unnamed father. Both quickly depart this world, leaving the orphan girl at the mercy of a series of surrogate parents. The reader follows Eva's adventures as she comes to live first with her unhinged godmother and her mother's master, an eccentric professor. Later she moves in with a spinster and her bachelor brother. It soon transpires that the latter appears to be sexually molesting her and she flees their house. After running away, she meets a street urchin, Huberto Naranjo, who introduces her to a brothel-keeper (La Señora) and a transexual (Melesio/Mimi). Later still, she is found wandering the streets and is taken to the country by a Turk with a harelip. And so it goes on, each episode adding colour and detail to the broader canvas.

In general, Eva Luna was a popular choice. We were carried along by the energy of the tales, and commented that we thought it an excellent and fluent translation. Eva and her entourage are never less than interesting, their adventures both funny and moving. She draws the reader into all sorts of situations, while skilfully threading them together to create a greater whole. We spoke about our admiration for Allende's inventiveness, her apparently effortless ability to conjure up scenes and characters who are at once unique while at the same time representative of society as a whole. We felt that Eva Luna is a thoroughly enthralling and enjoyable novel, in spite of its seriousness. We agreed that it requires great skill to write in this way, and that Allende accomplishes this difficult blend with great verve.

In many ways, Eva Luna is a typical picaresque tale: Eva is born poor, orphaned early, passes through several strata of society (both upwards and downwards) before eventually rising to a position of unique influence, from which she tells her tale. Allende adopts magical realist techniques, most specifically in Eva's use of stories to invent - and reinvent - herself. In this respect, we thought it was a typical product of its time. Clearly inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum, Allende's nineteen eighties novels share much in common with other postmodern novels of that era, such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. These books challenge the status quo, in particular received ideas about the history of their countries.

Allende adds gender to this mix. She exposes the gender imbalance that was and still is present in most Latin American countries. Women are shown to be regarded as objects, entities that are repressed by men. Allende's protagonist, Eva (meaning life) Luna (meaning moon) is both a symbol of the matriarchal power that women possess and a manifestation of how women can both survive and prevail in the harsh conditions of Latin America. One reader confessed to being unable to finish the book, having been put off by the sexual content of the book. It is true that there is plenty of sordid sex in the book, although this is in no way gratuitous. Allende's point is to show how easily and how often women are exploited in Latin American life.

To conclude, Eva Luna is thoroughly recommended. Although there was a slight doubt amongst us that Eva Luna is perhaps not as heartfelt as her Chile set novels, we all agreed that one finishes Eva Luna feeling uplifted and hopeful, as well as enlightened and entertained.

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September 2007

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.

David Mitchell is the author of three idiosyncratic novels, "Ghostwritten", "number9dream" and "Cloud Atlas". His considerable literary talents have attracted many accolades, prizes and a loyal readership. Indeed, several members of the Blackwell's Reading Group were familiar with these earlier novels. Black Swan Green marks something of a departure for Mitchell. Dispensing with multiple plotlines, it centres on a year in the life of a sole individual, thirteen year old Jason Taylor, as he makes the awkward transition from child to teenager. The group were intrigued, and chose this coming of age novel as September's book choice.

Strictly speaking, Black Swan Green is a year and a month in Jason's life. Beginning in January 1982, Jason narrates his own story. Secretly a budding poet with a stammer, Jason's one desire is to be normal. He and his family live in the quiet village of Black Swan Green in Gloucestershire. Father, Michael, is an area manager for a supermarket, who travels regularly; mother, Helena, is a bored housewife; and sister Julia is about to take her A levels. From the outside, one couldn't imagine a more "normal" middle class family, but Jason doesn't see it that way. And the family have some dark secrets that even the sensitive Jason is unaware of.

For Jason, normality means fitting in with the other boys at his school. Acutely aware of his stammer, which he calls "Hangman", Jason will do anything to join the local gang. To do this, he must hide his disability, and pass an initiation rite that involves crossing seven gardens without being seen or caught. This is one of the many challenges that Mitchell sets his narrator in his episodic tale of growing up in Thatcher's Britain. As the year progresses, Jason feels that his life is becoming harder and harder, unless he does something to address the underlying causes of his suffering.

Mitchell draws his readership in straightaway. Who is making the mystery 'phone calls at Jason's house? From the early pages of "Black Swan Green, our group were gripped and we all agreed that as well as wanting to know what was coming next, we could not help but like Jason. His life is so identifiable and so sympathetically drawn throughout the book; the reader lives with his anxieties and pains, as well as his joy (when it comes). The book is both funny and sad, and we all agreed that one of Mitchell's real triumphs is to give his readers a true sense of what it must be like to live with a stammer. We also liked his use of "alter egos" - Hangman, Maggot, Unborn Twin - to convey the different states of mind of his young hero.

The 1980s are a continuous and omnipresent backdrop to the book. The Falklands War comes and goes, impacting on the villagers lives in ways they could not have imagined; Jason endlessly names consumer items from the period - Casio watches, Adidas bags, crispy pancakes and angel delight - as well as pop songs and other cultural signifiers. This caused some discussions. We wondered if a thirteen year old in 1982 would be this self-conscious. Indeed, this brought up a more general discussion on Jason's prodigious vocabulary and linguistic dexterity. We thought that even though he was a poet with a stammer, Jason seemed far too good at using language. This did not detract from the pleasure we derived from the book, but it did call into question the authenticity of the narrative voice.

This in turn led on to ask further questions about Mitchell's craft as a writer. Although immensely enjoyable, the book lacks a unifying plot and there are long sections of the book that seem quite self-indulgent and indeed irrelevant. In particular, we highlighted the episode when Jason meets the Belgian émigré who teaches him about European literature. We found this section of the book to be utterly implausible and agreed that had it not been included the novel would probably have been better not worse off.

We also questioned the scope of the novel. Mitchell is brilliant at conveying a teenager's life, but he does not seem to have much to say about the period in which he sets his novel (in spite of taking the trouble to signpost the period almost ad nauseum). In this respect, we felt that "Black Swan Green" was not as good at describing the 1980s as, for example, Jonathan Coe's "The Rotter's Club" and Hanif Kureishi's "The Buddha of Suburbia" are in capturing the 1970's. This is a shame, and we ended our discussion by saying that we felt Mitchell has not yet matured into the important writer he perhaps hopes to be. This is not to say that Black Swan Green is not recommended - on the contrary, it is a very agreeable novel that we hope will be widely read. What we look forward to is for his books to get better as he combines his ambitions with his impressive talents as a writer.

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August 2007

Digging to America by Anne Tyler.

Anne Tyler is renowned for her domestic dramas, which are all set in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Perhaps the most famous of these is The Accidental Tourist, which was also made into a successful film. Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons in 1989, and has since developed an enviable reputation. She is often ranked alongside America's great contemporary writers such as John Updike, Philip Roth and Richard Ford. Digging to America is Tyler's 17th novel, and the group were keen to find out what makes her books so special.

The novel opens in Baltimore airport, on Friday 15th August, 1997, when two families converge to meet two Korean baby girls, whom they are adopting. Tiny, delicate Susan has been adopted by an Iranian family, the Yazdans; wholesome, stocky Jin-ho by the "all-American" Donaldsons. Although the two families appear to have no more in common than this, they soon begin to meet regularly. Every year, on the anniversary of 'Arrival Day', their two extended families gather and celebrate together. Each party is more and more elaborately competitive, but at the same time some unexpected friendships develop, and love blossoms between members of the older generation.

Digging to America is ostensibly a novel about what it means to be American. Tyler's two families are first and foremost archetypes, representing the old and the new America. She contrasts the experiences and values of the two families, and weaves into this the story of the little girls, as they adapt to their new homes. Of the older characters, Tyler in particular focuses on Maryam, who after thirty-five years in the United States, has still not come to terms with the "otherness" of Americans. By bringing her into contact with the Donaldsons, Tyler is able to explore the nature of "foreignness" in the United States during the years immediately before and after the events of September 11th 2001; events that have radically changed the way America perceives and treats its immigrant population.

On paper, Digging to America sounds as if it might be an important state of the nation novel. In reality, the group felt, Tyler's novel never met the challenge and for the majority of us, this novel didn't really rise above the very ordinary. We felt that themes weren't fully explored, characters were often little more than stereotypes, and worst of all, Tyler's simple prose style lacked flare, making it a plodding read. We agreed that it was as if she had sketched out some ideas for a novel, but not taken the time to fully develop them. Several members of the group expressed their frustration that the book was "mis-sold" to them, which is to say that it wasn't really about becoming an American so much as a series of set pieces about hosting different types of parties. We wondered if Tyler had had a change of heart and fallen back into her comfort zone of describing domesticity, rather than tackling the big issues she might have explored.

Having said all this, we agreed that Digging to America was an easy read that had its moments and brought a few smiles of recognition to our faces. It was just a pity that it was far from being the insightful and "achingly funny" novel that we were led to believe by the book's blurb. Tyler may well have written some important novels over the years, but we thought Digging to America was not one of them. Furthermore, it could not be said to be in the same league as recent novels by Roth (The Plot Against America), and Updike (Terrorist), both of which deal with foreignness and domestic terror in a far more interesting and satisfactory way. Digging to America is not recommended, but we conceded that we wouldn't write Tyler off entirely until we had found out more about this prolific and well-respected writer's backlist of award-winning novels.

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July 2007

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar.

In the Country of Men starts on a hot summer's day in Tripoli, Libya. Nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother. Suleiman believes that his father is away on business, yet he sees him standing across the street in a pair of dark glasses. How can this be, and why doesn't he acknowledge his wife and child? With this premise, Hisham Matar begins his account of a Libyan childhood under the Gaddafi regime in the 1970s.

Suleiman's life is dominated by his young, unhappy mother. Forced into an arranged marriage aged just 14, she has descended into a life of alcohol and melancholy, while her husband travels the world. Yet in spite of the stories she tells her son to denigrate her husband, Suleiman adores both parents equally. He has no real comprehension of their lives, as might be expected for a nine-year old boy, but he knows that he loves them both dearly. But as their lives begin to fall apart, Suleiman's and his parents' loyalties are tested to the extreme.

On one level, In the Country of Men is a typical rites of passage novel. It follows the tradition of such novels as The Go-Between, Michael Frayn's Spies and Ian McEwan's Atonement in that the young protagonist witnesses adult behaviour that he doesn't fully comprehend, but that will affect him throughout his life. At the same time, Suleiman's story is a way of showing what life was like for those who lived through the politically brutal years of Gaddafi's dictatorship. Matar's characters experience the terrible impact of despotism on both public and private life.

When we discussed In the Country of Men at our meeting, our initial comments tended to be favourable. Matar took us into a previously unknown world, while at the same time using a familiar and therefore comfortable Western format of storytelling. We agreed that we enjoyed Matar's descriptions of the everyday life of his characters and while we felt that his prose style was uneven, we liked his more poetic passages.

Yet, as we delved deeper into the novel's themes and style, we became increasingly dissatisfied with the book. We felt that most of his characters were under-written, and many topics within the book were only alluded to rather than fully developed. The central criticism we had was with Matar's narrator. Suleiman is a 24 year old man looking back at his younger self, and yet Matar didn't convince us that he knows what either aged character might be capable of thinking. The nine-year old boy's observations are sometimes too sophisticated to feel genuine, while at the same time, the 24 year old Suleiman relates the story's events with minimal appreciation of what is going on. In particular, he does not seem to understand what his father and his comrades were trying to achieve, surely something that he would have gained in the intervening period. The result is that Matar's novel provides its readers with little or no real insights into Libyan politics of the period. More crucially, the book does not generate any real sympathy for its characters, especially the dissidents, whose suffering nine-year old Suleiman seems oblivious to.

Matar ends his novel by bringing the story up-to-date. This works well in terms of concluding the story of the love Suleiman continues to feel for his parents, but in this section, the writer chooses not to include any mature analysis of the events that have been described previously. This is both odd and unsatisfactory. One is almost left wondering why Matar has set the novel in Libya, if he has nothing to say about the country. The only possible conclusion we came up with is that as Matar himself shares many biographical details with his protagonist, he has fallen back on the familiar in order to write his book. At the end of the novel he is at pains to state that the book is in no way autobiographical. We were not convinced, and felt that this might be the root cause of this novel's ultimate failure to fully gratify. Matar seems to have fallen into the trap of many first-time novelists in that he has not trusted his imagination as much as he should. Nevertheless, we felt that he is a writer with some promise.

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June 2007

The Book of Dave by Will Self.

Imagine a time when the United Kingdom has been flooded, possibly as a result of global warming. What will the island look like? An archipelago of smaller islands, perhaps? And what of London? Once the Thames flood barrier has been breached, what will be left? Will high up Hampstead become the island of Ham instead? In Will Self's latest novel, he imagines just this. And intertwined with his tale of the six families who inhabit Ham in the distant future, Self tells another story, one set in the recent past, but which is intrinsic to the island dwellers' fates.

Self subtitles his twin storied novel as a revelation, but from the start the reader soon realises that in this long novel, all will be revealed slowly and with a great deal of effort on the part of the reader. To begin with, the people of Ham speak their own language, a dialect called Mokni that is a distant cousin of today's cockney. Spelt phonetically, it is sometimes necessary to read the dialogue in the futuristic chapters out loud in order to ascertain meaning. In addition, the Hamsters have their own vocabulary, which is only partially explained in Self's glossary. Women are mummies, men are daddies, teenage girls are opares, but what are motos, for example? And how did these words evolve?

The futuristic chapters of The Book of Dave begin by describing incidents in the everyday lives of the Hamsters, much of it initially mystifying. A moto is ritually slaughtered; a Changeover takes place mid blob; a Driver calls the runs and points of the Dävinanity. But what do they signify? A plot begins to unfold when Cal Dévúsh and Antonë Böm leave the island and go on a quest in search of the Geezer, who they believe may be living in Nú Lundun. The reader's understanding of the lives of the islanders begins to become focussed as the two travellers journey towards their destination and their destiny.

In the recent past, Self tells the story of Dave Rudman, a London taxi driver, whose disastrous marriage to upwardly mobile Michelle has ended with the cabbie being denied the right to see his son, Carl, and being excluded from travelling to Hampstead, where his ex-wife lives with her lover, Cal Devenish. Increasingly unstable, Dave's aim has always been to be downwardly mobile. Rather than following his friends into university, he preferred to emulate his grandfather and became a taxi driver. The great certainty in his life is the Knowledge that guides him and his kind around the streets of London. But what use is the Knowledge without a son to pass it on to?

The Book of Dave is a dense and complicated novel about marriage, parenthood, childhood, and also about society and the role of religion. It is hard to summarise how Self explores his themes, but equally, to summarise it would be to reveal some of the many delights that are revealed slowly to the new reader. But it would not be fair on the uninitiated to fail to say that this is a difficult book that demands time and the reader's full attention. It's a fascinating attempt at a state of the nation novel, which combines an all too familiar domestic drama with a post-apocalyptic quest in a strange but not entirely unfamiliar land.

Most of the group were new to Will Self, and we were willing to admit that we all initially struggled to read The Book of Dave . This is not to say that we did not come to enjoy the experience, nor that we all failed to finish it. Self's grand designs become clearer as the novel progresses, and we also ventured to say that his deliberately difficult style is in fact moderated, so that the book becomes increasingly readable as the plots unfold.

So, what did we make of The Book of Dave ? I think that both despite of and because of its challenges, we felt it to be a rewarding read. There is much to appreciate in this funny and clever book, but for all that, we were not all entirely sure how successful Self is. His portrayal of modern day London is ferocious and satirical, but we wondered if it might not also be too narrowly focussed on a failed marriage between dysfunctional people. Dave's rants and raving was at times quite extreme, using both unpleasant language but also graphic descriptions of violence and self-destructive behaviour to hammer home a point. At the same time, Self's mockery of religion and its role within society is so savage that it seems to have nothing positive to say about the subject. This reductive approach will perhaps put off some readers, and as a methodology we wondered if it might not provide the rounded enquiry into the subject matter that Self wants.

The Book of Dave is Will Self's fifth novel. In it he demonstrates that he is an extraordinarily talented wordsmith with a dazzling imagination. He gamely tackles many important issues, but we felt that he only partially succeeds in achieving what he sets out to do, and this is to a degree because of his failure to create fully rounded characters to inhabit his finely defined worlds. Self could not have written this book without obvious precursors such as JG Ballard's "Drowned World", Anthony Burgess' "Clockwork Orange" and Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker". To aspire to emulate such illustrious achievements is no bad thing and therefore this book is recommended.

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May 2007

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney.

The Tenderness of Wolves is the debut novel of Stef Penney, a young screenwriter. The book tells the story of a murder, a disappearance, and a journey to find both the missing boy and the murderer. It won the inaugural Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Award in 2006, which has catapulted the book into the bestseller lists. The group were eager to find out what all the fuss is about.

Set in Canada in 1867 during a bitterly cold spell in the heart of winter, The Tenderness of Wolves tells the story of the community of Dove River, who are rocked by the violent death of one of its inhabitants, Laurent Jammet, a trapper. That same night, Jammet's 17 year old neighbour, Francis Ross, vanishes. The only clues are two tracks from Jammet's cabin out into the frozen wilds. It is not long before three men from the Hudson Bay Company arrive to track down the killer. They are followed by an ageing journalist, Thomas Sturrock, whose visit to Dove River revives memories of another disappearance that took place many years before.

Told partly in the third person, and partly in the first person from the perspective of Mrs Ross, Francis' mother, The Tenderness of Wolves is a multi-stranded novel that sets out to explore the lives of the many settlers and native inhabitants who chose to live in the harsh environs of a Canadian frontier town. The cast of characters is huge, ranging from trappers and Indians to magistrates and traders. At the heart of the novel is a compelling story of the hunt for Jammet's killer, which draws all these people together.

In general, our response to The Tenderness of Wolves was not favourable. While acknowledging that the detective structure of this book gave it a momentum that kept us all reading, the general feeling about it was that it was not a particularly good book. During our discussion we again and again commented that while we enjoyed reading the book at the time, we put it down feeling dissatisfied. We were disappointed that there are no real surprises in the plot, which in the end is content to plod along, much like the multitude of searchers who follow the tracks in the snow. We found the romance elements of the book to be implausible. More frustratingly, we felt that Penney creates far too many characters, some of whom are engaging at first, but don't develop beyond the archetypal - or are simply poorly drawn (this is especially true of the Indian characters). The result is that the majority of her subplots are abandoned long before the novel reaches its unsatisfactory conclusion.

The group's overall opinion of The Tenderness of Wolves is that it is clearly a first novel, which falls into many of the typical pitfalls of a first novel. We felt that Penney has no real feel for the period in which she is writing, and so her book is full of inappropriate phrasing and anachronisms. Furthermore, the mentality of many of the characters is very modern, not least in their attitude towards religion, homosexuality and in particular freedom of women. We questioned why an editor had not pointed these things out to the writer, or at the very least corrected glaring mistakes (such as some characters' ages changing, or the fact that one character reads a book that was not published until 30 years after The Tenderness of Wolves is set). It also came as no surprise to us to learn that the manuscript had been rejected by a number of publishers before being accepted by the small independent publisher, Quercus.

Having said all this, it is worth recording that one member of the group who was unable to attend the meeting emailed to say that she had enjoyed the book a great deal. She highlighted the evocative descriptions of a cold place, although conceded that she was not convinced that Penney had specifically described Canadian geography (Penney herself is famously agoraphobic and has never been to Canada). This reader said the book gave a real sense of people living on the edge of the world, and of a cluster of pioneers trying to eke out their own existence in the mid-Nineteenth Century. She particularly liked the way the book evoked a 'New World', in which groups of people (Norwegian religious community, indigenous people, company traders and trackers) all tried to co-exist independently and yet were forced to intermingle as the story progressed.

These comments shed new light on the group discussion, which was perhaps too quick to criticise a long and not entirely unsuccessful novel. Overall, though, the group felt that the book is a surprising and unworthy prize-winner (especially when compared to previous winners of the Whitbread Prize, such as Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, and Andrea Levy's Small Island, both of which are far more accomplished and significant novels. We also wondered how William Boyd, whose riveting spy-thriller, Restless, was the main competitor for the award, must have felt about losing out to The Tenderness of Wolves). At our meeting, we were unanimous in our dismissal of this book as a poorly executed novel. With hindsight it is perhaps fairer to say that this book has some merit and that it will appeal to readers who are looking for a diverting read, but we are in agreement that our own expectations for a literary novel are higher than this book reaches.

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April 2007

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez.

The history of Argentina is one that may not be widely known in the UK, but which is littered with coups, conflicts, uprisings and dictatorships. Argentinian author Tomás Eloy Martínez has made it his life work to bring a novelists eye to this troubled history. He has written two novels about the rise and fall of his country's most famous rulers, Juan and Eva Peron, in "The Peron Novel" and "Santa Evita". Martinez became an exile after fleeing the military juntas that ruled Argentina in the 1970s. Now living in North America, he metaphorically 'returns' to Buenos Aires in April's book choice, The Tango Singer , a novel set at the end of 2001, during a period of economic collapse and civil unrest.

Martínez's protagonist is an American student, Bruno Cadogan, who is writing his doctoral thesis on the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. He is particularly interested in Borges' essay on "The History of the Tango". A colleague (real life cultural historian Jean Franco) suggests that Bruno visits Buenos Aires to find Julio Martel, a mysterious tango singer, whom she considers to be better than the legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel. Bruno secures a grant to pay for his trip and sets off a few days after the twin towers of the World Trade Center are destroyed in September 2001 (this detail puts the story we are about to read into ironic perspective, contrasting as it does a unique threat to the United States of America against the continuing history of upheaval in Argentina).

Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, Bruno finds a city in meltdown as hyper-inflation threatens to bring the Argentinian economy to a standstill. His hotel reservation has evaporated, and so instead he is taken by a man he meets at the airport, who is known as El Tucumán, to the guesthouse where Borges set his story "The Aleph". It is the beginning of a series of surreal events and encounters that propel Bruno and the reader through the many labyrinths that constitute both the city of Buenos Aires and also its history, and therefore that of Argentina.

We all agreed that Bruno's search for Martel is fascinating. It is a brilliant method for developing Martínez's primary interest in documenting the unknown history of Buenos Aires. Martel is a frail old man who has never recorded his unique voice. Nearing the end of his life, he travels through the city, singing tangos in particular places to commemorate specific people in Argentina's history. All these people have until now been unsung - factory workers, prostitutes, political prisoners. Bruno is convinced there is a pattern to the impromptu concerts and so he sets about not only trying to find Martel, but also to unlock the key to Martel's choices.

At the same time, Bruno's friend El Tucumán tries to persuade him that if they can find the real aleph (a point in space that contains all points, so that anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion) they will be able to make money from the Western tourists who visit Buenos Aires in search of the 'real' Borges. El Tucumán believes that the aleph is in the basement of the guesthouse (just as it is in Borges' tale), and that if they can just find a way of evicting the current occupant, a librarian called Bonorino, they will find it. At a time when money is rapidly losing its value, Bruno is forced to decide what he is morally prepared to do to help his friend.

The Tango Singer was a popular choice for all of us. It is a highly entertaining literary novel that is at the same time a riveting 'page-turner' that centres around a compelling quest. This proved to be enormously satisfying to us all, as the book is both exhilarating to read as a story, but also full of wonderful descriptions and beautiful poetic passages. As well as evoking Borges and his "Labyrinths", the book also brings to mind the work of such writers as Kafka ("The Castle", in particular), Paul Auster (for example, "The New York Trilogy") and JG Ballard. More than this, the book opens up to the reader a whole country - its history, its politics and its culture. Indeed, many of us chose to find out more about Argentina as a consequence of reading The Tango Singer . Our only criticism, and we agreed it was a minor one, was that the character of Bruno seemed rather underwritten. He almost acted as a cipher for the story, rather than participating fully in it himself. This was a pity, as there were hints that he, too, had an interesting story to tell. Nevertheless, the book is thoroughly recommended - a great discovery for us all, and one we hope to share with readers of this column.

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March 2007

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

Slaughterhouse 5 is Kurt Vonnegut's most celebrated novel. First published in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, it combines elements of science fiction with a graphic account of the bombing of Dresden by the Allies at the end of World War Two. A cult classic since its publication, the group were keen to find out why.

The book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a wealthy optometrist who becomes "unstuck" in time and travels back and forth between events in his own life, as well as through galaxies in the company of the inhabitants of the planet Tralfamadore. At the heart of the book is the story of Billy's experiences as an American prisoner of war who survives the firestorm that devastated Dresden in February 1945 by sheltering in the abattoir that gives the book its name. Vonnegut himself was a prisoner in Dresden at the time of the bombing and from the start of the book, he makes it clear that by writing Slaughterhouse 5 he is trying to explore and come to terms with this terrible experience. By publishing his book at the height of the Vietnam War, when more bombs were dropped than during World War Two, it is also apparent that Vonnegut also wants his examination of the morality behind the technique of killing civilians en masse during times of war to have contemporary resonance.

Trying to summarise the plot of Slaughterhouse 5 is potentially futile. Vonnegut mashes up time and therefore chronology, positing in its place an idea, expressed by the Tralfamadorian aliens that Billy encounters, that events simultaneously exist in the past, present and future. This technique keeps the reader guessing as to what might happen next (or before), and indeed which order he or she will find out about things. Vonnegut's style is potentially disorienting, but there is a serious purpose to it. He asks how much control we have of our lives, and hence, to what extent do we have free will in a world where the big events seem to happen without our being able to influence them?

Slaughterhouse 5 provoked an interesting discussion. Given that there are so many strands, as well as themes, to the book, this was not surprising. On one level, Slaughterhouse 5 is a serious attempt to understand the place of war in relation to the human condition. On another, it is an absurdist comic novel that questions the meaning of life itself. We talked about Vonnegut's ideas about time, free will vs. determinism, and whether life has meaning or is inconsequential. We were all interested in his assertion "that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book." To what extent is he being ironic? Vonnegut may be correct in saying that you cannot stop wars happening, but you can certainly publicise what happens during times of war, and highlight the impact of the techniques employed. By writing Slaughterhouse 5, the first book to draw the bombing of Dresden to the attention of the wider reader, surely Vonnegut has contributed to the debate about the appropriateness of killing civilians as a method for winning wars?

We also discussed Vonnegut's use of style in writing Slaughterhouse 5. He combines many different genres of writing - from realism to poetry, science fiction to documentary. He also uses metafiction, which is when the writer directly addresses the reader, and indeed participates in his own book. By drawing attention to the novel's status as an artifact Vonnegut poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, and indeed about the nature of reality. We found the employment of these literary devices enhanced our enjoyment of the novel. They also contributed to the philosophical debates that underpin the book.

The majority of the group enjoyed reading Slaughterhouse 5. Most of us were new to Vonnegut's inimitable approach to novel writing and unique perspective on the world. On the whole it was viewed favourably. There was some debate about the profundity of Slaughterhouse 5, especially when compared to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (another cult novel from the same period that is set during World War Two), but much less about Vonnegut's ability to make us laugh in the face of even the most senseless tragedy. A non-conformist who has the distinction of being one of the most banned authors in the USA, Vonnegut's socialism and atheism have continually upset the American establishment. Yet he is hugely popular and one of America's best-known novelists. He has often been ahead of his time in writing about consumerism, environmentalism and even climate change years before it was taken seriously. Now over eighty, Vonnegut continues to write provocative books: his latest, A Man without a Country takes a critical look at life in America under the Bush administration. At the end of our meeting, several members of the group said they were already considering reading other books by Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night and Cat's Cradle were all singled out as of particular note. All in all, Slaughterhouse 5 can be considered a good choice, and is thoroughly recommended.

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February 2007

Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

Cry, The Beloved Country caused a sensation when it was published in 1948, the year that South Africa formally adopted Apartheid was in law as a system of racial segregation. It was the debut novel of Alan Paton, and as well as making him famous, it shaped his life as a politician and spokesman for the anti-Apartheid movement rather than a novelist. The reading group was keen to explore this landmark novel about the impact of social and racial injustices on everyday life in South Africa.

The book begins with the arrival of a letter. A black pastor, Reverend Stephen Kumalo, learns that his younger sister, who has gone to Johannesburg, is sick, and he is urged to come to help her by another priest, Reverend Msimangu. For the first time in his life Kumalo leaves the village of Ndotsheni, Natal, to find Gertrude, as well as his son, Absalom, who had gone to the city to look for Gertrude but never came home. Upon arriving in Johannesburg, Kumalo learns that Gertrude has become a prostitute. He persuades her to return to Ndotsheni with her young son, but not before he searches for his own missing child. With Msimangu, Kumalo sets off on a journey into the underbelly of the city that is to expose both him and the reader to the harsh reality of life in segregated South Africa.

The story that is at the heart of Cry, The Beloved Country is a gripping one, but it would be unfair to describe it further in this review. Instead, I will focus on the response of the group to this book. Our reaction was entirely favourable, with one after another of the group members expressing their deep admiration for the novel. It was almost as if we had stumbled across a transcendent text that not only exposed the horrors of Apartheid that were to dominate South Africa for forty-six years, but also which continues to resonate for anyone who knows about or is interested in life in Africa. On top of that, we agreed that it is a hugely rewarding work of literature that is beautifully written and which contains many memorable characters and scenes, as well as an unforgettable story.

Paton, a devout Christian, often uses a Biblical style of writing to convey the experience of a father in search of his lost son. The obvious allusion is the story of the Prodigal son, but it is not a book with a conventional happy ending. Instead, Paton attempts to conjure a vision of hope in a land on the brink of destruction from man-made laws . His story is interspersed with social commentary that for all Paton's own liberal leanings, evoke the economic and social analysis of Marx and his followers. Again and again, Paton shows that political and economic decisions by the elite few directly impact upon the well-being (or rather lack of) of the many. Always even-handed, he describes both the impact on the wealthy, privileged white Soputh Africans as well as the poor, disenfranchised blacks to devastating effect.

In spite of containing some powerful and insightful accounts of life in both rural and urban South Africa, Cry, The Beloved Country is not just a book of reportage. It is also the work of a visionary, and we all commented on the radical nature of this book. Not only was Paton one of the first people to write about such matters, his book became a key text for anyone interested in or opposed to Apartheid. Even more incredible is the fact that the book's analysis of slum life is as true today as it was in 1948, and that the debates on how to feed and help the rural farmers are the same today as they were then. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that although Apartheid ended in 1994, racially rooted social injustice continues to be rife in South Africa now as it was then.

This book cannot be recommended highly enough. We all agreed that Cry, The Beloved Country is more than simply a good read; it is an essential novel that deserves to continue to influence lives today and long into the future.

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January 2007

The Sportwriter by Richard Ford.

The Sportswriter is the first of a series of novels by Richard Ford about Frank Bascombe. In this 1980s set novel, Frank is coming to terms with the death of his eldest son, Ralph, and the subsequent divorce from his wife, who he refers to as X. Once a promising writer, at thirty-eight Frank has settled into a career as a sportswriter for a nationally syndicated magazine. He lives in Haddam, New Jersey and it here that the majority of Ford's suburban tale takes place.

The Sportswriter begins early one morning, when Frank meets his ex-wife by the grave of their son. It is the beginning of the Easter weekend, and the date is Ralph's birthday. It quickly becomes apparent that Frank's relationship with X is frosty, and after exchanging a few words, they part company. Frank is unconcerned. He is looking forward to taking his new girlfriend, Vicki Arcenault, to Detroit, where he is interviewing Herb Wallagher, a paraplegic former professional football star, for what has been conceived as a standard spiritual-courage-triumphs-over-bodily-injury story. But Frank soon discovers that Herb is insane, the drugged, bitter opposite of what an American sports hero is supposed to be. It is the first of many illusions to be shattered over the course of the weekend.

The Sportswriter is a book about relationships - between men and women, men and other men, and between men and children. In one strand of the story, Frank recounts his relationship with the troubled Walter Luckett, a fellow member of Haddam's Divorced Men's Club, who is destined to dog Frank's footsteps throughout the weekend. Frank also encounters his surviving children, Paul and Clarissa, who are also coming to terms with the loss of their brother and father. Frank's Easter vacation is a time in which he is forced to take stock of his life, and not everything that happens is to his liking. Yet the book ends, as perhaps might be expected for one set during Easter, with a promise of renewal.

The book divided the group between those who found Frank Bascombe's world a fascinating place, and those who would rather have been anywhere else but there. Ford's narrator tells his life story at a leisurely pace and in a highly stylised way. All agreed that Ford's command of language is quite amazing, and he is a real wordsmith. However, Frank's commentary on and interpretation of the world he inhabits was not always appreciated.

There was some discussion as to whether we identified with Frank's character. Some of us felt that we did, though what most of us found more difficult was coping with self-absorption and what he calls his "dreaminess". Bascombe is a complicated man who is trying to hide from his pain by looking for an ordinary life, with no ambition. He is determined to portray himself as an ordinary and unthreatening man living in an ordinary unthreatening world. Unfortunately, this world is filtered through a series of deceptions that ultimately unravel to expose Frank as something other than he would wish to be perceived.

There was some disagreement about the distance between Ford and Frank, but the majority felt that Ford represented Frank's journey to self-awareness ironically. Sometimes the events took on tragic proportions, and at other times they were treated comically. Most notable of the latter is the episode at Sweet Lou's roadside diner, where Frank pretends to know the owner, a former footballer. Frank contemplates conducting a "where-are-they-now?" interview, only to discover that Sweet Lou was gunned down 30 years before by gangsters and that his widow, the bartender, hates the sound of his name.

We discussed whether the book's ending was a genuinely hopeful one or not. One member of the group liked the ending because she felt that the real man finally came out of his shell to find a life that was his and that was worth living. She felt that it was a positive and sunny ending, compared to the greyness of the rest of the book, and it made sense to her. Other members of the group only saw a man escaping from one unsatisfactory world into another equally uncertain one. To these readers, the book ended with many questions unanswered, and it is therefore fortunate that Ford should have returned to Frank Bascombe a decade later to write the sequel, Independence Day.

Frank's story continues in The Lay of the Land, which was published last year. It takes place almost 20 years after The Sportswriter, as Frank nears 60. Like John Updike's Rabbit series, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe books are an attempt to shed light on the American national character through the experiences of one individual. Such ambition may or may not appeal to the English reader. In our group, we were divided in our opinion of The Sportswriter, but there were plenty of us who would urge readers of the column to try one of Ford's Bascombe novels. Whether you are interested in reading about contemporary America, or about the complexity of modern relationships, The Sportswriter is recommended.

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December 2006

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps the most well-known author writing in the Spanish language today. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he has taken on an almost celebrity status in literary circles. His work is often described as "magical realism", a literary style that combines fantastical elements with an otherwise realistic storytelling. One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published in 1967, is his most famous novel, and was selected as Blackwell's Reading Group final book choice of 2006.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of one family, the Buendía's. Márquez does not name the country in which his story is set, although it is clearly Colombia. He also doesn't date his tale, though the book covers a period of about one hundred years from the early 19th Century to the mid 1930s. Although sometimes disguised, historical events are clearly discernible, even to the lay reader. The novel thus encompasses both grand history and the intimacy of family life in the country of Márquez's birth, which gives the novel its epic status.

Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía is a colossus who not only founds the town of Macondo, but also effectively runs it until his authority is challenged by outsiders, and he goes insane. When not leading his people, his great interest in life is solving the mysteries of life. His two sons, José Arcadio and Colonel Aureliano, reflect different aspects of their father's character. José Arcadio is all brawn, while the slighter son becomes a military leader of some distinction during the civil war, before taking up the scientific enquiry of his father. As the story progresses, new generations are born, and the family changes, just as the town and country they inhabit alters.

It would be impossible to summarise the many strands of this highly imaginative and infinitely complicated story here. However, what can be said is that Márquez is particularly interested in the effect of time on all strata of society - individuals, families, communities and nation states. Much of the story is cyclical, which is reflected in the repetition of names in the book (there are 22 characters called Aureliano) as well as the characteristics. Events are also repeated, exaggerated, or else achievements reversed. Márquez's characters sometimes live impossibly long lives - José Arcadio Buendía's wife, Úrsula Iguarán, is at least 120 years old when she dies. There are also many premature deaths, some very bizarre, and several sightings of ghosts. In short, Márquez's world is one of endless creation and destruction.

With so much in this novel, it was inevitable that there was much to talk about at our meeting. Broadly speaking, as so often with the group, we were split between loving and loathing it, but we all agreed that we respected the writer of this remarkable novel. Some of us were blown away by the extraordinary narrative style of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez has said that he wrote this book the way his grandmother used to tell stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her stories, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. To some of us, this was exhilarating and hugely entertaining, while others found it preposterous and were exasperated.

We asked ourselves what Márquez was trying to achieve with this novel and that style. After much discussion, we agreed that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a form of myth-making. We did not always understand the allusions in the book, but likened Macondo with William Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, in which 16 of Faulkner's novels are set. Both authors have created a world in which to explore the many aspects of life in their respective countries.

The group, in spite of some individual reservations, recommends One Hundred Years of Solitude. We all reacted strongly to it, but none of us regretted reading this landmark book. Anyone interested in contemporary fiction cannot ignore Márquez. He has been hugely influential, both among South American writers like Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), Mario Vargas Lhosa (The War of the End of the World) and Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) as well as authors as different as Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children), Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry) and Yann Martel (The Life of Pi).

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November 2006

The Secret River by Kate Grenville.

Founded as a penal colony in the 18th Century, Australia's first settlers were almost entirely made up of convicts. They had escaped execution in England to a possibly worse fate in an inhospitable country that was only reached after a long and sometimes fatal sea journey. To many modern Australians, the story of the country's early years is one of pride and embarrassment. The pride comes from the fact that this relatively young country has now become a rich industrialised nation. The embarrassment is not only at the lowly status of many early settlers, but also of the way in which the continent's original inhabitants, the aborigines, were treated. Kate Grenville's novel, The Secret River, tackles all these issues and more.

The story begins in London in 1807. Born into the lowest rank of society, William Thornhill has worked hard to become a waterman on the River Thames. Poverty and crime go hand in hand, but Thornhill has turned his back on thieving to build a stable life with his childhood sweetheart, Sal. The temptation to steal is too great, though, and one night William makes a bad mistake and is caught. At first sentenced to be hanged, he appeals and is instead transported to New South Wales, along with his family, for the term of his natural life.

The Thornhills arrive in this harsh and alien land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence. But, for hardworking convicts there is the possibility that they can buy their freedom. Furthermore, rumours start circulating that 'unclaimed' land up the Hawkesbury River offers an opportunity to start afresh, far away from the township of Sydney. William dreams of owning land, and eventually buys one hundred acres for himself. Despite having no farming experience, and with Sal having grave doubts, he sets to work cultivating the land. Soon, however, he is shocked to find that Aboriginal people already live on his stretch of the river. His neighbours - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs. Herring - all have their own ways to respond to them. Thornhill, too, must decide how he will deal with this "problem".

The Secret River proved popular with the group. From the outset, Grenville establishes herself as an eloquent and informative writer. In the opening chapters she powerfully conveys the hardship of life in London at that time. She also establishes characters quickly. Thornhill is in many ways an everyman, who represents the plight of so many transported convicts. But he is more than that - Grenville develops every aspect of his character so that we care deeply about his plight. We learn all about his life, his struggles to find work, his love for Sal and his children, his hopes and fears, first in London and then in Sydney.

Grenville's descriptive powers are a real asset. The Secret River evokes time and place incredibly well. One member of the group commented how she could see and feel the Sydney described - so different from the modern image, yet rendered so real and so human by Grenville's prose.

A major attraction of the book was the fact that it describes a system that perpetuates such obvious injustices, and humanises them through the Thornhill's experiences. Before she takes us to Australia, Grenville highlights the desperation of the poor in London, a crucial part of the story. She artfully portrays the misery of the convicts' lives both before and after they have had their sentences commuted. In addition to this, she addresses the plight of the aborigines in stark terms. We were both moved and appalled by the graphic descriptions of the injustices perpetrated against the aborigines.

In recent years a series of exceptional novels have been written about Australia's origins. These include Thomas Kenneally's The Playmaker, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and Matthew Kneale's English Passengers. We all agreed that The Secret River is as good as these books. It is a powerful and profound account of early life for Australia's first European settlers. Insightful, interesting and enlightening, The Secret River is highly recommended by us all.

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October 2006

Fateless by Irmre Kertesz.

Written in 1975, Fateless was Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz's first novel. In it he fictionalised his own experience of being a Hungarian-Jew who, in the summer of 1944, was picked up in Budapest and transported to Auschwitz. Like Gyuri, his protagonist, Kertesz was fourteen years old.

Gyuri is from a middle-class class family that has assimilated itself into Hungarian society. Being Jewish does not mean much to him. He is not particularly religious, although some of his relatives are. He speaks neither Hebrew nor Yiddish and cannot recite the Kaddish. The novel begins with the news that his father, a businessman, has been called up for "labour service". Gyuri takes the day off school, and witnesses the transference of the family timber business to Mr Suto, an employee who is not Jewish. Gyuri does not seem to be particularly upset by the loss of his father, and indeed is soon revelling in his own new life working at a factory on the outskirts of Budapest (a position he obtains thanks for the yellow star he must wear on his coat).

One day, Gyuri is unexpectedly pulled off the bus to work, along with a group of friends. They are taken to a train yard, and soon find themselves - along with thousands of others - bound for Poland. It does not take Gyuri long to realise what is happening at Auschwitz, as the weak are separated from the strong before being sent to a shower room that sends down a poisonous gas instead of water. Gyuri has passed himself off as a sixteen year old, and following his own shower, is transferred first to Buchenwald, then on to Zeitz, where he is put to work. The rest of the book traces what happens to the boy over a period of about a year, as his health deteriorates and his 'usefulness' at the camp comes into question. The final chapter recounts his experiences when he returns to Budapest to find that everything has changed.

The first thing that strikes the reader of Fateless is the flatness of the prose. Gyuri is curiously detached from the events around him. Rather than emotionally engaging with what is happening, he simply describes things and focuses on accommodating them. This is a means of survival that takes the reader a while to adjust to. It becomes apparent that Kertesz is not interested in writing an accessible tale for his readership, but rather in finding a way of addressing the horrifying experiences of the Holocaust that he and many others have lived through. As the novel progresses, Gyuri's account becomes increasingly philosophical, which at times seems to be well beyond the capabilities of its teenage narrator. Yet the reader must accept this aspect of the novel, as it is Kertesz's way of exploring his central premise - that humans are governed not by fate, but by a form of freedom he calls "fatelessness". If this is true, what are the consequences for everyone who by living through it has been a part of the genocide we call the Holocaust? Are they all complicit, whether perpetrator, victim or passive by-stander? And how, if ever, can they move on beyond this terrible time?

It is perhaps unsurprising that some members of the reading group found Fateless to be a difficult book to read. One even went so far as to say that they 'hated' the way it was written. Kertesz's narrative techniques are truly alienating and his decision not to create rounded characters we can relate to is particularly challenging. Gyuri's neutral descriptions of everyday life in a death camp is startling and yet powerful, but the way in which the events are described not in terms of their emotional impact on Gyuri (indeed, they don't seem to have any emotional impact on him) is hard to take as it makes empathy almost impossible. Indeed, we all found Gyuri's tendency to describe the effects of disease and depravation alongside mundane facts about, for example, the double shifts the potato-peelers must work, to be truly shocking.

Yet for all this, we also talked about how much we admired the 'brilliance' of the novel. We all agreed that Fateless is an extraordinary work of literature. In some ways it is a defiant challenge to those who glibly talk about the dehumanising effect of the Holocaust. Kertesz seems to be saying that on the contrary, the human spirit survived in all its facets, even in terms of laughter and happiness, a word one would not normally expect to associate with the horrors of Auschwitz and the other death camps. There is little doubt that Fateless is a challenging book, but we feel that it is one that, like Primo Levi's autobiographical book about his time in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man, should be widely read. It is not often that a book has a lasting impact on one's life, but readers of Fateless will find that Kertesz's novel does just that. It is therefore highly recommended.

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September 2006

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

Kevin Khatchadourian is a mass murderer. Two years ago he killed seven of his fellow high-school students, along with a cafeteria worker and a popular teacher, in the gym at his high school. He carried the atrocity out four days before his sixteenth birthday, so is now languishing in a juvenile detention centre rather than serving a life sentence. His mother, Eva, tries to understand why this atrocity happened by writing a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, about their lives. Lionel Shriver's Orange Prize winning novel We Need To Talk About Kevin is a provocative and controversial enquiry into parenthood. It also seeks to explore why in a culture where a middle-class child can have anything, a life without a mother's love can lead to tragedy.

Eva is a successful writer of a series of travel books. Brought up by her Armenian mother, following the death in World War Two of her father while she was still in the womb, she has grown to be a fiercely independent and somewhat cold adult. The great love of her life is Franklin, a photographer. Franklin is an all-American alpha-male, the epitome of everything that Eva despises about the country in which she was born. She is a well-travelled Europhile, whereas he is steadfastly insular with no desire to engage with the world outside America. Yet the marriage seems to work, and for many years the couple are happy together.

Then, in their thirties, they start to think about having children. Franklin is for it; Eva is against. Slowly, she comes round to the idea and so becomes pregnant. Yet her fear of motherhood does not subside, and when her son is born, she feels no love for him, nor he for her. Thus begins a long catalogue of increasingly disturbing events that lead up to the high school shooting that comes to define both their lives.

We Need To Talk About Kevin begins slowly, but builds quickly as the two central characters of the book - Eva and Kevin - lock horns and do battle with each other. Kevin is always portrayed as a loveless child who goes out of his way to make his mother's, and then sister's, lives hell. However, there may be another perspective, and Franklin is shown to be a loving father who engages in 'normal' activities with his son. Yet the book builds to its unsavoury conclusion, leaving little doubt that Kevin is capable of the worst of crimes.

Generally, the book was well liked by the Reading Group. Indeed, some members of the group went so far as to say it was the best they have read this year. The book contains some fine writing, is well plotted, and peopled by some unforgettable characters. More than anything, it is highly thought provoking. The group agreed that Lionel Shriver is most interested in parenthood and in particular the parenting of the middle-classes. Shriver dares to ask her readers what it means to be a parent, and especially what it means if that parent does not love its offspring. What are the implications for the child, the mother, and indeed for the father/husband, too? That it contains a Columbine-like killing was seen as secondary, although Shriver is also clearly interested in the social implications of her scenario, too.

However, the novel was not universally liked. It is always harder to like a novel that centres on such unlikeable characters as Eva and her son. The main criticism levelled at Shriver was that she had an agenda - to portray motherhood as a ruinous choice that is not worth it. Shriver herself has said of the book that she wrote about her worst fear - that had she chosen to bear a child she might not have loved it, and that eventually it would have become a killer. The view was that this is fatuous nonsense, and that in focussing only on the negative aspects of the mother-son relationship in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Shriver writes out a self-fulfilling prophecy that fails to understand the true nature of parenting.

On the whole, the book was very popular, and even those who did not like it agreed that it is a highly readable and challenging novel. It would be impossible to read We Need To Talk About Kevin and not to have an opinion on it, so readers of this column are advised to read the book and form their own.

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August 2006

The Darling by Russell Banks.

Hannah Musgrave is a middle-aged farmer in upstate New York. She works hard with her four colleagues, all younger women with a past, who have taken shelter on Hannah's farm. Hannah, too, has a past. During the sixties she was a political radical and member of a Weather Underground cell, living in New Bedford, Massachusetts, under the name of Dawn Carrington. In the early seventies she was forced to flee America to avoid arrest. After flying first to Ghana with her companion, Zack, she travelled to Liberia alone where she was courted by a junior cabinet minister, Woodrow Sundiata, whom she subsequently married. The Darling opens with Hannah dreaming of Africa, and tells both of her return there in 2001, as well as the story of her earlier experiences in Liberia and beyond. It also weaves fact and fiction to provide a chilling history of this troubled West African state.

Although born into a life of privilege, Hannah is unhappy with the life she is expected to lead. Her father is a celebrated paediatrician, with liberal views and famous friends. The advent of the sixties offers her a chance to abandon her medical career and rebel against her upbringing. As her political views move from championing civil rights to becoming something more extreme, so she becomes estranged from her parents and contemporaries. Yet the more she becomes embroiled in terrorist activities, the more it becomes apparent to the reader that she is dabbling: she prints fake passports rather than plants bombs. In her mind she may believe that terrorist actions are the logical conclusions to her ideological views, but she will not take this action herself. Yet the FBI does not make this distinction, and she is soon on the run.

In Liberia, Hannah changes far less than might be expected. At the same time as leading a life of luxury as the white American wife of a cabinet minister in an increasingly corrupt and violent dictatorship, she leads another life caring for abandoned chimpanzees. These creatures are her "dreamers", innocents caught up in a violent human world. Yet Hannah is unable to protect them, any more than she is able to protect her own family. When called to do so, she simply cannot act on her intentions. Her own dreaming is far less innocent than the chimps' and Banks is able to draw a telling parallel between the well-intentioned activities of this American abroad and the foreign policy of the country she so despises.

On the whole The Darling was a popular choice. Most of us thought it was beautifully written, with strong characterisation and fascinating subject matter. Russell Banks wrestles with big questions: war, ideology, colonialism, evil, poverty, and the seemingly unbridgeable gaps between people of different classes or cultures. We felt that he did it in an original and interesting way. All of us agreed that we learnt a great deal about a side of American history that is rarely discussed - the formation of an African state that would be used to off-load former slaves in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Propped up by American funding for a century, the country fell into its own bloody civil war, as a succession of dictators - William Tolbert, Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor - looted the country and led it into anarchic chaos, while its former benefactor looked away. Hannah's "eye-witness" account is all the more extraordinary when one learns that Banks himself was unable to visit Liberia during the writing of The Darling because of the security risks involved.

In purely literary terms, The Darling is not a difficult novel: its language is clear, its structure is straightforward. Yet in emotional terms, readers may find the book incredibly troubling. Hannah's detachment, even from her parents and children, is truly shocking, yet wholly convincing. Hannah's voice is distinctive and mesmerising, her story of youthful idealism destroyed by the real world made all the more poignant by the ironic distance Banks has created between his narrator and the reader. This makes the book all the more satisfying. The Darling is not a political book with a message, but it is a novel that sheds light on contemporary history, upon relationships both personal and political. In a nutshell, we thought it was a book that gets the reader thinking. A novelist cannot do more than that.

The main problem we all had was with the ending, which some of us felt cast into question some of the earlier plotting. Even if we allow for the discrepancy between Hannah's views and Banks' views, we felt that the final pages of the book do not ring true to the rest of the book. This is a pity, as Russell Banks was a new writer to all of us, and he is clearly very talented. Although not particularly well known in the UK, Banks is a highly respected author in his native United States. He has written a number of powerful and challenging novels, such as The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction and Rule of the Bone. The Darling joins these ranks, and is highly recommended.

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July 2006

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes.

Julian Barnes first made his name in the 1980s with a string of postmodern novels that provided a refreshing alternative to the increasingly parochial English novels of the previous decade. Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters were critical successes as well as being bestsellers, and revealed a Francophilia that was to dominate Barnes' writing for the next decade. At the end of the nineties, he wrote a satire of Englishness called simply England, England. His first book of the new century, Arthur and George, also concerns itself with Englishness.

Arthur and George grow up in parallel but very different worlds in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a famous crime writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham, and then an infamous criminal, who is thought to be the mastermind behind The Great Wyrley Outrages. Their paths cross when the freshly released George writes to Sherlock Holmes' creator asking him to help clear his name. The short-lived relationship that develops is to have a lasting impact on both their lives.

Arthur and George is written in alternating chapters from the perspective of its two principal characters. Barnes skilfully recreates the life and times of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, in fluent and very readable prose. Like Doyle's own novels, the book is well plotted and engrossing, not least because it recounts an extraordinary true story. Yet the power of the novel is not in that it is a superior thriller, but rather in that it is a fascinating character study. Furthermore, it tells the reader much about both the period in which it is set and about present times, too. A novel that explores a notorious miscarriage of justice that occurred 100 years ago cannot fail but to bring to mind the many other miscarriages of justice that dominate the public imagination (examples we discussed included the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six). Barnes uses this story as a means by which to understand what it is in the "English" character that perpetuates these injustices.

At the heart of the book are quintessential English themes, including class, religion and racism. Although George always maintains that his race is not relevant to the persecution he and his family endured both from the criminals and from the police, it is hard to agree with him. This is complicated by Arthur's ambivalent attitude towards race. Whilst it might seem incredulous to think that such institutional racism exists in 21st Century Britain, one has only to think about issues such as asylum, immigration and the "war on terror" to know that it still affects all stratas of British society.

Barnes, an atheist, also explores faith in an intelligent and refreshing way. Arthur's attitude towards religion at a time when everyone went to church is interesting. He is unwilling to accept the institutionalised religion he was brought up to believe in. Instead, he toys with spiritualism and attends many séances. This approach is contrasted with George, a vicar's son, who loses his faith due to the total inadequacy of conventional religious teachings in offering an explanation for his undeserved persecution.

Arthur and George was a resounding success with the reading group. Everyone said they enjoyed it. One member described it as "a thumping good read", and indeed if it weren't so literary, it could be described, in keeping with popular novels of the late 19th Century, as a ripping yarn. Barnes is careful to keep the ambiguity in the tale. Many questions are left without answers, although it would be unfair to say which ones. Our only real reservation was with the pacing of the book. One sub-plot in particular seemed to divert the reader from the tale at the centre of the book, and slowed the story-telling down. In the end, though, we agreed that this did not matter so much. The book is too good - some of us called it un-put-downable - and therefore it is thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in reading about England's past, present and future.

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June 2006

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

First published in 1952, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man caused a sensation and has had a lasting effect on American society. It is a devastating and unflinching exploration of how prejudice and discrimination shape black identity. More than that, it offered a new way of looking at race relations within America. In particular, it criticised the "social equality" model that Booker T. Washington had prescribed, branding it as a passive approach to race that perpetuated social injustice whereby African Americans were condemned to remain second-class citizens. More radically, Ellison argued that until black Americans were viewed differently, both by themselves and by others, they would remain "invisible" within mainstream society.

Invisible Man begins with a prologue by its unnamed narrator. He describes his predicament, living outside of society, holed up in a basement that is lit by 1,369 light bulbs because "the truth is the light and light is the truth." He then proceeds to tell the story of how he came to be there, in an attempt to make sense of his life, experiences and position in American society.

Ellison's novel takes the reader on a picaresque journey through a series of scenarios that represent the various paths that were available to black Americans in the 1930s. A successful student at his Georgia high school, the narrator wins a competition to make a public speech in front of local businessmen. First he is forced to take part in a "battle royal" where, he has to box blindfolded with other black students for the spectators' entertainment. The narrator then moves to a college, which epitomises Washington's approach, and is clearly based on Tuskagee University in Alabama. After a series of misadventures in the segregated South, the narrator moves north to New York with renewed hope and a number of letters of introduction in his pocket. As with the rest of the novel, nothing goes quite as he might have expected or hoped.

Invisible Man generated a fascinating discussion. Everyone in the group enjoyed this thought provoking book. The narrator is a naïf whose thoughts and actions occasionally grate, but at the same time, he takes the reader into a world of racial prejudice that is truly shocking. Ellison also challenges his readers to think about the choices available for black Americans from an intellectual as well as emotional point-of-view. He brilliantly describes the alienating effect of racism before positing the startling theory that because black people are seen in terms of their colour rather than for what they are, they are in fact "invisible". A groundbreaking novel in every sense, that tackles many taboo subjects, it is at its heart a novel of ideas that is not afraid to criticise some of the leading political movements of the day. As well as addressing Washington's reformism, it also appraises the Marxist Brotherhood. And though written in the 1950s Ellison pre-empts the black nationalism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam through his character Ras the Exhorter, a man who rejects integration and later metamorphoses into Ras the Destroyer, with devastating results.

Ellison's novel is not only challenging in content; its style is demanding, too. The first thing one realises it that it a not a straightforward realist text. Ellison mixes naturalism with symbolism, especially making ironic use of stereotyped colour and "negro" imagery. His novel often takes on a surreal stream of consciousness as we enter the mind of the narrator. He also mimics and parodies many styles of both writing and oral communication, including gospel, blues and pulpit preaching. All this can make the book at times taxing for the reader, and we admitted that sometimes it was hard to fathom. Nevertheless, we all agreed that is was also deeply satisfying. Though we all agreed that we felt Ellison's female characters to be weaker than his male characters, it is his portrayal of his narrator that is his greatest triumph. He is vivid and visceral, articulate and outspoken. In short, unnamed, but unforgettable.

It is very pleasing to be able to read a classic of this calibre as part of a monthly reading group which concentrates largely on contemporary fiction. Reading such a novel helps put into perspective many modern novels. It demonstrates what a novelist can accomplish both in terms of social engagement as well as literary achievement. Ellison's Invisible Man has literary precursors that include Dostoevsky's anonymous Underground Man in Notes From Underground, Karl Rossman in Kafka's Amerika and Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea. It is a testament to Ellison's skills that his first, and only completed novel, stands up well next to these heavyweight pedigrees and continues to find a broad readership more than 50 years after it was published. Even more gratifying, it is a novel that was embraced by us all, and is thoroughly recommended to readers of this column.

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May 2006

The Accidental by Ali Smith.

Scottish writer Ali Smith has steadily been building a reputation as one of the UK's most original and exciting writers. She had written a number of short story collections, before publishing Hotel World in 2001. Set during the course of one night, the narrative follows the adventures of five different characters, one of whom is the ghost of a chambermaid killed in a bizarre accident. There was some debate as to whether the book was a novel or a series of inter-related short stories, but it was nominated for several literary prizes and found a wide audience. With her follow-up, The Accidental, Smith continues to experiment with narrative. Her most acclaimed book to date, The Accidental recently won the 'Whitbread Best Novel Award'.

Set in Norfolk in 2003, The Accidental is the story of the Smart family, who are spending the summer in a holiday cottage, a retreat from their busy London lives. There, a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door. Parents Eve and Michael each believe that Amber is the guest of the other. By the time their mistake is discovered, Amber has become a regular part of the family.

Michael is an English lecturer, obsessed with clichés, but living one himself. He regularly sleeps with his female students. Is Amber young enough to spark his interest? And how long can he maintain his Lothario existence? Eve is a writer with writers' block, who spends her time not writing her latest book in the summerhouse, but rather lying on the floor in quiet desperation. She claims not to be taken in by Amber at all, and wonders what this woman is doing in her holiday home. What possible impact can Amber have on Eve's life?

The Smart children are no less complicated, and both are drawn to Amber because of the promise she offers. Astrid is an introspective twelve-year-old, on the cusp of her teenage years and beginning to show the trademark signs of that difficult age. She resents her parents' divorce, has been bullied at school, and has retreated into a world where she video records every aspect of her life. Amber becomes a confidante who shares her problems and offers solutions to her difficulties. Seventeen-year-old Magnus has a dark secret. A prank email at school has led to the death of a fellow pupil. Wracked with guilt, he is on the verge of suicide when Amber walks into his life, offering comfort and sexual initiation.

One thing that strikes the reader immediately is the formal way in which the novel is structured. Smith's novel is neatly divided into three sections of equal length: Beginning, Middle and End. Within these sections are four sub-sections, each narrated by a member of the family. Again, each section is of identical length, as if to show that all four characters have equal say in the book. The sections are then framed by short interludes by Amber herself. Conceived in a cinema called the Alhambra, her thoughts are filtered through descriptions of the films she has watched over the years. She is perhaps the hardest character for the reader to understand, as she takes on a protean form throughout the book. Who exactly is she, and what is she doing in the Smart's holiday home?

At the reading group meeting, we each took turns in expressing our frustrations with this book. On the one hand, Smith is clearly a skilled writer and observer: there was much to admire in what is a clever and often very funny book. The problem was that for us the book didn't cohere. Four separate stories are told, and yet whilst the incidents happen to four members of the same family, they don't affect more than the individual involved. To one member of the group, this suggested an almost total lack of understanding by Smith of the dynamics of families.

In general, we felt that the relationship between Amber and Astrid was the most successful part, with one member of the group calling this portion of the book a "Mary Poppins" for adults. More than one reviewer has commented that Smith seems to have taken much less time developing her other characters. The group agreed that the sections seen through the eyes of Magnus, Amber herself and the Smart parents lacked the same depth and therefore didn't work. Again and again, Smith fell back on clichéd situations, and her characters (especially the males) were often little more than stereotypes. As a result, after a while, the book became exasperating to read.

Our main problem with The Accidental was the lack of clarity of purpose. Again and again we came back to one question: what is the book about? One would imagine that the novel would be about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves. However, there is little or no character development, and by the final section of the novel, the characters show little sign of having changed. We even speculated as to whether Amber existed at all - if she did what was she for, if not a catalyst for change? If she didn't exist, how could four people have imagined the same character? It is true that her malleability makes her appear to be a fantasy figure but it is completely implausible that four members of the same family could all have simultaneous fantasies.

We concluded by saying that we found The Accidental an interesting, occasionally challenging but ultimately infuriating read. While there is some clever writing and sharp observations in the book, there is not enough to sustain the reader, and the pretentious use of parody soon grated. Smith didn't seem to have taken the trouble to dream up a convincing plot nor credible characters, which seem to us to be fundamental requirements of a good novel. The ending was felt to be utterly implausible, a fatuous ending to a novel that had not lived up to its promise and long outgrown its welcome. At the end, we were left wondering what exactly Ali Smith had aimed to achieve - was it merely to show off her ability to mimic others, rather than to create her own style from which to explore family lives? On all counts, we regarded the book as a failure. No one said they would be tempted to read other books by Ali Smith as a consequence of reading this one, and therefore, The Accidental is not recommended.

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April 2006

Ice Road by Gillian Slovo.

Gillian Slovo is a South African who has lived in London for 40 years. Her father was the anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo. After initially writing detective fiction, she wrote a powerful autobiographical book about her family, Every Secret Thing. She then wrote Red Dust, a courtroom drama set in contemporary South Africa, which explores the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in the aftermath of the Apartheid era. Ice Road is a complete departure, and it will be interesting to see where her muse takes her next.

Ice Road is a novel about the relationship between individuals and history. It begins in 1933 with Irina Davydovna recounting her experience as a survivor of the ice ship Chelyuskin, which sank in the Arctic Circle. Irina is the ship's cleaner, and it soon transpires that it is Communist Party bureaucrat Boris Aleksandrovich who has literally plucked Irina from a cleaning cupboard in order to place her on this historic journey. The novel itself becomes an historic journey as Irina narrates the experiences of a series of interacting characters as they struggle to survive the political minefield, and then an actual battlefield of Soviet controlled Leningrad in the lead up to and during World War II.

Following the events on the ice, Boris feels that it is his duty to Irina to help her, so he brings her into his family circle. She comes to work for his oldest friend, Anton Antonovich, an academic who has uncharacteristically adopted a street urchin called Anna. Irina is charged with looking after both Anton and Anna. She also finds herself increasingly involved with Boris' daughter, Natasha. Natasha is a free spirit who has chosen marriage to an idealistic Soviet worker, Kolya, ahead of the loyal Party bureaucrat Dmitry Fedorovich.

Boris is a pragmatist at a time when ideology dictates all and idealism means nothing if not imprisonment. Unlike his son-in-law, Kolya, Boris knows that to survive, one has to compromise, and that can sometimes mean sacrificing one's own friends and family. When Stalin turns against his favourite, Sergei Kirov, governor of Leningrad, a clear signal has been sent that no one is safe from the purges that are to dominate 1930s Soviet Russia. Each character must change or be changed if they are to stay alive. By the final section of the book, set in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad, idealism is as dead as its exponents. Survival is all that matters as the Nazi guns pound the city into snow covered dust, and its inhabitants survive by burning books and boiling leather belts for food.

In this book, the Ice Road is both a metaphor and a tangible reality. Metaphorically, Slovo's novel can be read as an account of the chilling journey the Russian people have travelled from idealism to survivalism. Literally, the Ice Road is the last escape route east out of besieged Leningrad across the frozen Lake Lagoda. Narrated in the present tense, which adds to the book's tension, the reader follows Slovo's characters as they move through history towards their individual destinies.

As so often happens in a group discussion, the book divided its audience. Whilst there was little disagreement that Gillian Slovo's novel is a serious attempt to address important literary and historical subjects, the real argument was about her ability to carry this off. Those in favour found the book to be full of humanity, compassion and real understanding of people and life. Those against felt that Slovo's characterisation was wooden, and that the book showed itself to be little more than a well-researched rendition of the facts. Her plot and what they saw as a plodding prose style were also questioned, as was the length of the book. How could Slovo justify writing such a long novel when all she was doing was draping facts across the shoulders of partially realised characters?

The Russian Revolution, and the years following it, is currently providing British authors with a rich seam of material. James Meek's The People's Act of Love, Martin Booth's The Industry of Souls and James Fleming's White Blood are all recent examples of British authors writing convincingly about the Soviet experience. Helen Dunmore's The Siege was a brilliant depiction of the Siege of Leningrad. Slovo, to an extent, took a risk in tackling the same subject matter. That she does it with a fresh angle is to her credit, extending the story to broaden the historical scope of her characters' experiences. The Soviet era clearly fascinates both authors and readers. Those of us who liked the novel felt that Slovo has succeeded in bringing something new to the topic. Indeed, the whole group agreed that this competent if not universally liked novel will find a wide audience.

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March 2006

The Inheritors by William Golding.

The Inheritors was William Golding's second novel. It followed a debut that has become one of the most celebrated in modern English literature, The Lord of the Flies. Where that book explored the way in which our civilised society has the potential to disintegrate, The Inheritors looks back at the dawn of civilisation, and more poignantly, the last days of the Neanderthals.

Taking as a point of departure, HG Wells' assertion that Neanderthals were an ugly and brutish race, Golding imagines what it must have been like for this little known predecessor of Homo Sapiens, eking out the simplest of lives, barely surviving. In the opening chapter we see the family trying to cross a river when they discover that the log that acts as a bridge has gone missing. The old man, Mal, who is their leader falls in the water and soon after dies in their mountain cave. These elements allow Golding to depict a close family unit who work together to achieve a common goal. This includes hunting for meat and gathering both fuel and berries. Relationships are also revealed - the old woman is Lok's mother; Lok is Liku's father, Fa is Lok's partner, and so on. To survive, they must co-operate. While it is difficult for the modern reader to empathise with the Neanderthals because they are so different from us, Golding's portrait is a sympathetic one. This allows us to care about the plight of the Neanderthal characters.

The old man's death triggers a series of catastrophic disasters. Ha and Nil disappear, and are almost certainly dead, killed by a group of strange outsiders. These people look dissimilar and act differently from the Neanderthals. They communicate with each other by making incomprehensible noises, travel on the water in hollow logs, and drink a liquid that makes them first appear crazed and then sends them to sleep. They then steal their children, leaving Lok and Fa alone and in fear for their lives.

Golding's approach to his subject is to try to literally enter the mind of an unknowable race. He finds a way of portraying the strangeness of the Neanderthals' way of life by making Lok the central focus. Lok, the reluctant new leader, is not as intelligent as Fa, and to a degree he follows her lead. As soon as the children are kidnapped, Lok and Fa hide in a tree, smelling the new smells, listening to the new sounds, and watching the new behaviours of these unimaginable creatures. But for how long can they observe these new people before their fate is sealed by discovery? Or can they find a way of rescuing the children and escaping to safety?

The Inheritors polarised opinion. Some members of the group found Golding's approach to be fascinating, while others were deeply frustrated. Golding adapts language so that a canoe becomes a hollow log, an arrow becomes a barbed stick, and so on. The Neanderthals' own language is limited to a few words. Instead they share pictures, which we interpreted to mean memories of the past. Some have claimed that Neanderthals were telepathic, though clearly this is unprovable. Golding's chosen style makes the novel inherently ambiguous, so that even after multiple readings it is not always possible to identify clearly what has happened. Some of us admired this feat of imagination, while others professed to find it both confusing and irritating.

All of this might not matter if there was a common consensus that The Inheritors is an important novel that sheds light on a lost world. Again, opinion was divided. Some thought that Golding had found an interesting way of exploring the Neanderthals' lives; others felt that more important was the metaphoric depiction of the loss of innocence that prefigures the arrival of mankind. In exploring ways in which The Inheritors can be interpreted, even science fiction was invoked: a group of alien creatures, carefully shown to be non-human, meet a monstrous threat that destroys them - man. The other side of the argument was that even allowing that The Inheritors was written 50 years ago, Golding's portrayal of Neanderthals did not follow what anthropologists and archaeologists know about these creatures. How can we take seriously his book, when it lacks the integrity and gravitas of a well researched historically accurate novel?

William Golding's favourite novel certainly created a lively debate at the Reading Group discussion. Everyone had a strong opinion about the book. Some saw it as a challenging work of experimental genius, while others felt it was a self-indulgent and virtually incomprehensible failure to imagine the life of the last Neanderthals. Would we recommend it? I think the group members would give two distinct answers depending on which of the above categories they fell into. However, even the readers most reluctant to embrace The Inheritors would concede that it is a unique and unusual book, that is not likely to be forgotten once read.

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February 2006

The Dancer Upstairs by Nicholas Shakespeare.

In 1992 Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, was captured. His final hiding place had been in an apartment above a dance studio in Lima. From there he had directed a series of attacks on the capital. The capture of "President Gonzalo", as his followers called him, effectively marked the end of the Maoist movement's resistance. Over a period of almost 30 years the Shining Path guerrillas had wreaked havoc, killing at least 12,000 people and severely disrupting the country in their attempts to bring about a revolution in Peru.

Nicholas Shakespeare takes these facts as the basis for his novel The Dancer Upstairs. He creates a gripping account of the hunt for Guzman, tells a touching love story, and explores the nature of why people join such organisations.

The Dancer Upstairs begins with a chance encounter between an English journalist, Dyer, and Rejas, the policeman who tracked down "President" Ezequiel, the elusive leader of a terrorist organisation in an unnamed South American country that is clearly Peru. Dyer is about to leave his position as a UK newspaper's sole reporter on South American affairs (for which there is no audience). He is looking for one last story and wants to track down Captain Calderón, the President's right hand man, and the person responsible for displaying the incarcerated Ezequiel in a cage. Calderón is the lover of Dyer's aunt Vivien. Aunt Vivien is reluctant to speak to him, and leaves a message saying she has gone to Brazil. So it is by chance that he is in Pará when he is approached by Rejas.

Rejas has been in hiding himself following the capture of Ezequiel. Inevitably such a momentous event has political implications, and Rejas is uncomfortable with the role he has been cast in. He is also unhappy about some of the consequences of his success and it is this that he wishes to reveal to Dyer. The scene is thus set for the telling of the story of the capture of the most dangerous revolutionary leader in Peruvian history, and the love story that has entangled itself in the tale.

The Dancer Upstairs is a well-written and riveting account of the last days of a terrorist leader. Shakespeare creates in Rejas and Yolanda, the dance teacher, two realistic characters caught up in the bigger story. Their burgeoning love is sympathetically drawn, while at the same time the impending tragedy of the book builds well. Where he is less successful, we thought, is in his portrayal of secondary characters such as Sylvina, Rejas' wife, who was unconvincing drawn. Furthermore, the reading group thought that while the book was a pacy and engrossing read, the mix of thriller, romance and psychological enquiry was not entirely successful. We felt that Shakespeare was unsure what he was trying to achieve and therefore spread himself too thinly.

Our main criticism of the book was what Shakespeare didn't write about. He offers no counterpoint to Rejas' criticism of the guerrilla movement. There is no attempt to explain why the guerrillas might appeal to the peasants. He shows that the Peruvian military carried out atrocities, but he does not explain why the Peruvian government's policies were so damaging to ordinary people - and thus so unpopular. Shakespeare focuses in at the end of the book on why educated middle class men and women join revolutionary organisations, but not on who the majority of their supporters are. It thus felt as if The Dancer Upstairs told only half the story.

One member of the group raised an interesting point. She said she felt uncomfortable when novelists take real people and fictionalise their lives. This raises a whole set of questions about the nature of novel writing. When is a book purely imaginary, and what can be considered a legitimate subject for a novel?

At the end of the discussion, we all agreed that The Dancer Upstairs had been an interesting and worthwhile choice. We all felt that Shakespeare's depiction of South America is excellent, and that his prose style is impressive. The story is well worth reading, not only as an insight into this period of Peruvian history, but also because it is a very relevant one today. It asks many questions about why revolutionary movements arise, who joins them, and why these groups so often resort to terrorism to further their aims. The trouble with the book, we felt, was that Shakespeare doesn't do his material the justice it deserves. Even a cursory glance at the history of the Shining Path guerrilla movement will tell you that the story is more complex than the one Shakespeare chose to tell. So, while we all enjoyed The Dancer Upstairs, the final conclusion was that it could have been much better.

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January 2006

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

Philip Roth's latest novel, The Plot Against America takes as its subject a moment in history, and then re-imagines it. It takes place in the 1940s in an alternative America, one where Franklin D. Roosevelt has failed to secure an historic third term as president. In his place is Charles A. Lindbergh, the renowned aviation hero and a rabid isolationist determined to keep America out of the Second World War. Roth tells the story of the consequences of this presidential decision through the eyes of "Philip Roth", a seven year old living, like the author did, in the Jewish quarter of Newark, New Jersey. The book skilfully contrasts the grand scheme of History with the personal history of the Roth family. Young Philip learns to recognise the difference between history as taught in school - harmless and inevitable - and history as it's lived through, "the relentless unforeseen".

In real life Charles A. Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America towards a war with Nazi Germany. In Roth's novel, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler that America will not support the Allies in the "European" war. Naturally, Newark's Jewish community are alarmed, and the power of Roth's novel is how he imagines the impact on America of such a policy. In particular, Roth explores how Philip, his brother Sandy, his cousin Alvin, and his parents Herman and Bess respond to the creeping anti-Semitism that begins to make itself manifest across America.

Roth himself has claimed that "Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends." Looking back over his oeuvre, from the controversial sexual antics of Portnoy's Complaint, through the postmodern playfulness of The Counterlife to his recent post-war trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain), it is hard to argue with him. Certainly, The Plot Against America fits this description. The Roth family share much in common with the author's own family, yet of course are fictional; Lindbergh never stood for President, yet made many of the anti-Semitic speeches quoted in the book; America never went fascist, yet this novel brings together many actual events, people and attitudes to demonstrate just how plausible it could be.

All but one member of the group thought The Plot Against America was a fascinating, if not entirely successful novel from a great American writer. We were impressed to be reading such an ambitious and absorbing novel, which has a strong resonance in the post 9/11 era. However, we felt that Roth let himself down towards the end by losing his nerve and pulling his characters back from the brink of disaster. It would be unfair in this review to reveal too many details of the novel's plot, so I won't try to explain this reservation in detail here.

We felt that Roth's great strength is his ability to create very believable characters and situations. The Roth family, and the broader Jewish community they are a part of, in particular were expertly drawn. Their life, as seen through the eyes of a young boy, was skilfully evoked, providing an insight into this now vanished world. Unfortunately, we felt that Roth occasionally lets his love of the period detail get in the way of his story-telling. This slowed the narrative drive down, though it didn't entirely spoil it for the group.

Most of the group were new to Philip Roth's work. Those who had read him before were keen to encourage the others to read more. Roth first achieved fame with his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, written in 1959. All the themes of his subsequent books can be found in this volume, and it is a good place to start. By the nineteen nineties, Roth was tackling big historical subjects from contemporary American history, such as the Vietnam War and the McCarthy Era. The Plot Against America may not be as successful a novel as the Pulitzer Prize winning American Pastoral, for example, but nevertheless, it is thoroughly recommended, as is Roth's work in general.

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December 2005

Transmission by Hari Kunzru.

Hari Kunzru's second novel, Transmission, is an inter-connected tale of three lives, set in a recognisable if subtly mutated present. Arjun Mehta is a gifted but unemployed young computer programmer, wasting his talents in a New Delhi suburb. Then one day, he applies for and obtains a position working for an American computer company, Databodies. He heads for Silicon Valley in California, only to find that the firm isn't quite what it makes itself out to be. He rooms with an ever-changing number of software engineers as they vie for minor jobs in far-flung corners of the United States. Of course, he doesn't tell his parents this. They believe that he is living well and working hard, regularly gaining promotion and making a name for himself. Eventually, his luck changes when he is offered a job at Virugenix, a company that specialises in identifying and neutralising computer viruses. The innocent abroad is about to start learning some important life lessons.

The second strand of the story revolves around Guy Swift, the ultra suave managing director of Tomorrow*, a London based PR company. A millionaire on paper, Guy is an image creator, a brand-master in the glamorous world of the new economy. He and his girlfriend, Gabriella Caro, a sexy, if rather remote, Italian film publicist, live in the coolest apartment building in Chelsea. Guy epitomises the cutting edge of cool - he says that he is a man so far ahead of the curve that he lives in the future! He is also paranoid about losing it, as are his Belgian financial backers, Transcendenta.

Finally, there is Leela Zahir, the gorgeous new star of Bollywood, who is filming her new movie "Tender Tough" in Scotland. Arjun adores her from a distance, and it is her that he turns to when he is threatened with redundancy as the Internet bubble bursts. What happens next is to have repercussions for all these characters and many more around the world.

We all agreed that Transmission is a highly enjoyable and entertaining novel. The three elements of the story work well and are expertly interwoven. Kunzru's prose is cool and clever, as well as utterly engaging. Kunzru writes well about his themes, and has plenty to say about the world in which we all live. His characterisation is good, especially in his portrayal of Arjun, Guy and Gaby. We felt that he only really falls down when describing minor characters, such as Arjun's parents, who are little more than stereotypes. This was a pity, though not fatal to the readers' enjoyment.

Transmission is a satire that brought belly laughs from the members of the reading group. Kunzru's targets are many - the world of computer, business and Bollywood being just three. He writes critically and convincingly about globalisation, terrorism, and above all, the immigration policies of both the United States and of Europe, where people are expendable, especially if they do not have white faces. Arjun and his sister, Priti, are cyber coolies, working in call centres and for foreign computer agencies. When huge swathes of people are so dispensable, whether at the bottom end of the labour market or at the top (as Guy is), one has to question the mechanics of the economic marketplace in which they - and we - all work.

On the whole, we felt that the book is enormously satisfying. So much of it works for this group of readers that it almost felt incongruous to look for faults. However, there was some discussion about the seriousness of the book. Whilst he is able to take precise pot shots at the world of technology and marketing, we thought that Kunzru seems also to be in part enthralled by the glamour of these fairly soft targets. His accounts are almost too affectionate, leaving us laughing, but not feeling disgusted by the behaviour of the book's characters. As a satirist he has a long way to go before he can be compared to J.G. Ballard, never mind a master like Jonathan Swift. No matter, Transmission is an excellent novel that is thoroughly recommended. Many of us said we plan to read The Impressionist, Kunzru's first novel, when we have the opportunity so we can explore this talented writer's work further.

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November 2005

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan.

Enduring Love begins with one of the most famous openings in modern fiction. The narrator, Joe Rose, is picnicking in the Chilterns with his girlfriend. He is about to open a bottle of wine, when a cry interrupts the tranquil scene. A hot-air balloon with a child in its basket has become unmoored and an adult is being dragged behind it. Joe and a number of other people race to the balloon to try to bring it back into control.

The aftermath of this incident is to reverberate through the lives of Joe, his common-law wife Clarissa, and Jed Parry, one of the other bystanders who attempted to anchor the balloon. It begins with a late night phone call to Joe from Jed, in which the latter declares his love for Joe. Joe, a science writer, initially dismisses the call as a one-off from a crank, and does not tell Clarissa about it. But he becomes increasingly unnerved as Jed makes regular appearances in his life, each time telling him that they love each other, and that this is God's will. Joe becomes convinced that Jed is stalking him, which disrupts and then begins to threaten his relationship with Clarissa. After carrying out some research, Joe believes that he has come up with an explanation: Jed is suffering from a pathological condition known as de Clérambault's Syndrome. He decides to inform the police.

To begin with, Joe, who has failed to make a career as a scientist but who has made a successful career from writing about science, dismisses the religious overtones of Jed's advances. Yet Jed manages to undermine the very values that have been at the core of Joe's life's work as well as his relationship with Clarissa, leaving him questioning both his principles and his feelings. Ian McEwan's story allows him to explore themes that are at the heart of much of his fiction, that is, the conflict between rationalism and emotionalism. To what extent can art, science or religion help explain events and emotions in our lives? Are we able to control our own destiny?

On the whole, the group felt that Enduring Love was a gripping novel, though ultimately it promised more than it delivered. The quality of the writing was high, as one might expect from McEwan, both in terms of style and suspense. There were also some fine insights into behaviour and psychology. However, the group felt that the Jed Parry character and storyline weren't completely successful. McEwan's decision to tell the story from Joe's perspective meant that Parry only appeared through Joe's eyes and a number of unbelievable as well as unbelievably long letters. In the end, we felt that he is just too much of the archetypal dangerous stalker from a hundred different thriller movies, and not enough of a rounded character. This was a shame, especially when the story took an interesting turn as Clarissa realised that Jed and Joe's handwriting is very similar, opening up the possibility that Joe's obsession may be solely a symptom of his own psychosis or schizophrenia. At this point, the reader suspects that Joe has imagined the whole thing. If Jed is really stalking him, why has no one else seen Jed standing outside his flat, and why did Joe erase the phone messages he could have used as evidence?

Instead of exploring this possibility, the plot developments become too melodramatic and the final resolutions were just a little too clichéd for our tastes. This was a shame, as, by about half way through the novel, we were hooked and felt the tale could continue to develop into something quite searching and profound. In the end, the story of Joe and Jed was anti-climactic and the more convincing aspect of the novel, that is the treatment of Joe and Clarissa's deteriorating relationship, fizzled out, leaving us all feeling badly let down by the bland ending.

Overall, the group felt that they would recommend Enduring Love as an engrossing read - particularly for travel or for a time when the reader may have the leisure to devour it in a few sittings. We considered it to be something of a page-turner, and there was one particularly funny sequence that we all enjoyed, but the general feeling was that the story was fairly implausible and ultimately McEwan didn't really have much to say about either love or fate. We felt that this was a shame as we have all enjoyed many of his earlier novels, such as The Cement Garden and The Child in Time, and everybody who have read McEwan's latest, Saturday, think it is his best yet. Saturday is a serious novel that tackles big themes; Enduring Love is a very parochial novel that perhaps works best as an entertaining piece of escapism, albeit one with an unforgettable opening chapter.

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October 2005

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

"It was love at first sight." Like many of the memorable phrases in Joseph Heller's cult classic, the opening line of Catch-22 is hard to forget. The question for many members of the Blackwell's Reading Group was, would it be love at first sight for us?

Catch-22 concerns the lives - and deaths - of a group of American bomber crews who are stationed on the fictional island of Pianosa during the later stages of the Second World War. Their commander, Colonel Cathcart, is determined to impress his commander, General Dreedle, by ordering his crews to fly more and more missions over Italy and France. The pilots, in particular Yossarian, fear that they will be killed and are therefore determined to be sent home. The trouble is that as Colonel Cathcart keeps raising the number of missions, so the chances of being sent home are constantly being reduced. The alternative, to be sent home sick, is equally difficult to achieve. As Doc Daneeka explains to Yossarian, there is a catch - Catch-22: "Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

Catch-22 is an episodic novel. Each chapter is named after, but not necessarily about one of the many characters in the book. Yossarian is something of an outsider, a thorn in his commander's side, though he has plenty of friends. He shares a tent with Orr, who is crazy enough to want to keep flying combat missions. For some respite, Yossarian and his friend Dunbar regularly check themselves into the hospital (which is where Yossarian first meets the Chaplain, the object of his love). The chaplain, like Yossarian and many others, does not feel that he belongs in the sphere of war. Neither does Doc Daneeka, the hypochondriac doctor, although he lives in fear of being sent to the Pacific Front, which he believes will be much worse.

The flip side of the story is that of the bureaucrats who run the American Air Force. Colonel Cathcart does everything to impress his superiors, to earn "a feather in his cap", while being careful to avoid "black eyes". Generals Dreedle and Peckem are constantly at loggerheads, trying to outdo each other. Lieutenant Scheisskopf (no translation necessary) cares for nothing except parades, yet is constantly being promoted. Then there is the unfortunately named Major Major Major, who because of a clerical error is made a Major. Hopelessly out of his depth, he just wants to be left alone, and leaves orders that he is not to be disturbed when he is in his office, and for people to only be admitted to his office when he is out.

"Catch-22" has become a byword for the paradoxical madness of modern life. While ostensibly an anti-war novel, it is really a book about the crazy nature of society. Heller satirises everyone, although he is most scathing of the fools who make war their business. And, of course, business from war, as Milo Minderbender does. The epitome of the capitalist system, Milo is even prepared to bomb his own side if there is money to be made from it. Ironically, his victims are happy with this arrangement when they learn that they are entitled to a cut in the profits.

So what did the group make of Catch-22? For those who were new to the book, it was indeed love at first sight. The book contains so much joyous (and riotous) writing, that it is hard not to be carried away by Heller's genius. His characters are unforgettable, his situations are often so absurd as to become etched in one's mind forever. Beneath the humour are some important and insightful messages about the nature of war, the nature of society and indeed human nature itself. For those who were re-reading the book, the pleasure came in being reminded of what we had once cherished but perhaps put out of our minds.

There was only one dissenter, who challenged us by asking if the book stood up as a novel, or merely as a collection of admittedly brilliant ideas. Our answer was an emphatic yes. Heller mixes up his chronology, twisting and turning like a fighter plane trying to shake its enemy in a dogfight. At times it is easy to forget that there is a plot, but rather to enjoy the hilarious vignettes that make up each chapter. Yet we felt that the story of Yossarian's struggle to remain human in the face of such collective madness is richly imagined and artfully executed. We felt that the final scenes, in particular the death of Snowden, are some of the most moving we've read. In keeping with all great novels, it leaves the reader feeling as if he or she has learned something new and profound about life.

First published in 1961, Joseph Heller's novel, for so long a bestselling cult novel, has now entered the canon of great 20th century novels. Reading it today, in 2005, we felt that the book is as relevant as ever and it was clear to us that the novel will be read for many years to come. My Corgi edition describes the book as both brilliantly funny and deeply serious. This is pretty much how the group felt about this book. What more can one want from a novel?

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September 2005

A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips.

"England has changed." So begins Caryl Phillips' award winning novel A Distant Shore. Such a bold statement surely indicates serious intentions to explore modern life in the United Kingdom.

Philips' book is a story of change, and of how people respond to change. He alternates between two characters' stories. The first is that of a middle-aged white woman, Dorothy, who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, taken early retirement from her teaching job, and moved to Stoneleigh, a new development on the edge of a northern town called Weston. The second story is that of Gabriel, who begins as a soldier fighting in a gruesome African civil war, before fleeing to Europe where he becomes an illegal immigrant to England following a treacherous Channel boat crossing. Once he has his papers, he changes his name and takes a job as the night watchman on Dorothy's estate. Here the stories converge as an unusual friendship begins between these two very different, but lonely people. Both face hostility from members of the local community. How will they deal with it? Can they overcome it together?

This short summary should show the promise of this novel. The themes are clear and contemporary - race, immigration, ageing, loneliness, mental illness, and above all prejudice. Yet the reading group felt that Phillips' novel failed to engage in any of these issues in a satisfying way.

To try to explain why we think Phillips' book is so disappointing, one needs to look at the different aspects of the novel. To begin with the writing, we felt that the prose was flat and pedestrian. It plods along in the most mundane fashion, providing few linguistic pleasures to the reader. Sometimes the book is written in the first person, sometimes in the third person, yet there is little discernible change in tone or style. Phillips uses generic locations (a northern town, an African nation gripped by civil war), presumably to universalise his story, yet we thought that this works in his disfavour as it reads as if he has failed to imagine what these places are actually like. We agreed that we would have liked Phillips to have written in detail of the lives of African people living through a civil war but he didn't.

We thought that Phillips' characterisation, too, is weak. Neither Dorothy nor Gabriel are particularly well drawn, and when they narrate sections of the book their voices are unconvincing. The book's secondary characters, like Dorothy's sister, Gabriel's friend Mike, or the racists are simply types (a lesbian, a saviour, thugs). Finally, the stories themselves are predictable and uninsightful. It is as if Phillips wants to tell us that England has changed, yet he has no idea how to express it.

Needless to say, we did not think that reading this novel was worthwhile, and therefore it is not recommended by the group. We would instead like to offer some alternatives to readers of this column.

Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation and Delia Jarrett-Macauley's Moses, Citizen and Me are both powerful and considered novels about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Maggie Gee's The White Family brilliantly takes its readers into the dark world of a racist family. Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary sensitively explores a friendship between two lonely Londoners. A favourite choice of ours last year, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, is a far better book about the lonely and bewildering life of an immigrant in today's Britain. And earlier this year we enjoyed Andrea Levy's Small Island, a book which cleverly interweaves the stories and thoughts of four characters, two who are immigrants from the Caribbean and two who are English, in post war Britain. All these novels contain original voices, perceptively portray contemporary lives, and leave a lasting impression on the reader. They are full of details that open up a world to the reader, and tell them things they never knew. Phillips wants to do that with A Distant Shore, but didn't seem to know enough about his chosen subject to convince the members of this reading group. This is a shame for him, but most of all a shame for us.

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August 2005

The Promise of Happiness by Justin Cartwright.

The Promise of Happiness is a family drama. It's a novel that explores the cavernous gap that exists between projected domestic bliss and actual familial dysfunction. Set mainly in Cornwall and London, structurally and thematically it owes much to some of the finest American novels of recent times, including Philip Roth's American Pastoral and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Like these novelists, Cartwright attempts to peel back the veneer that families paint over their smiling family portraits to show what is at the heart of the nuclear family. The Promise of Happiness focuses on a middle-class family whose lives have been torn apart by a personal tragedy that forces each member to confront what it is that brings meaning - and happiness - to their lives, both separately and together as a family.

Charles Judd is a retired accountant who lives in Padstow, the village his family holidayed in for many years. Retirement for him constitutes golf, pubs and long walks with his dog. His wife Daphne takes cooking lessons from Rick Stein, and arranges the flowers at the local church. They have three children: Juliet, a New York based academic who has specialised in art; Charlie, an internet entrepreneur; and Sophie, a PA in the advertising industry. Three years before the book begins, the family is rocked by the revelation that Juliet was to be tried for her involvement in an art theft; we learn that consequently she was sentenced to two years in prison. The book begins shortly before she is due to leave the prison.

Cartwright approaches his family by shifting perspectives between the different members. Gradually it becomes apparent that any external happiness is merely a façade. Charles is haunted by his dismissal from his job; Daphne has to come to terms with her husband's infidelities, and her own hatred of fish; Charlie's girlfriend is pregnant, yet he does not love her and is uncertain that he should marry her; and Sophie is wrestling with years of drug addiction, as well as a messy affair with a middle-aged married man. Central to all the pain is each member's relationship with Juliet, the family favourite. How could she of all people have become involved in a crime that has jeopardised her career, as well as cast a dark shadow across the family's reputation? As the novel progresses, each member of the family tries to come to terms with Juliet's return, while confronting their own dark secrets.

The Reading Group members had differing views on The Promise of Happiness. Most enjoyed the experience of reading this book although there was one vociferous dissenter who despised it. Broadly speaking, the discussion centred on two issues, the treatment of the subject matter, and the writing. On the whole, it was agreed that Cartwright's take on such a familiar subject as the family was refreshing. The novel's title is infused with irony, yet there is an ambivalence towards the Judds that keeps the reader from becoming complacent. Characterisation is generally strong, moving beyond the sketched stereotypes presented in this synopsis. No one is entirely likeable, yet their sadness is rendered genuinely, and sympathy therefore follows. The novel's open-ending wasn't liked by all, but we agreed that it does allow for a certain amount of speculation from the reader. The emphasis shifts to the reader to decide how happily the family members may live once the book finishes.

The main criticism that was shared by all group members was in the presentation of the material. We all agreed that while the novel was well constructed, the style in which it was written left much to be desired. One member contrasted The Promise of Happiness with Ian McEwan's recent novel Saturday, a contemporary book that deals with a family's troubles but in beautifully constructed prose. Cartwright's prose contains none of McEwan's poetry, nor precision. His dialogue in particular caused some derision. Much of it is flat and unconvincing. No one could quite believe in the amount of swearing that the characters did, especially between parents and children. This might seem like a trivial example of bad writing stretching credulity, but it serves to illustrate the problems we had with the book. If a character's voice is implausible it undermines the suspension of disbelief necessary in creating convincing characters. Cartwright sends up his stock characters well, making direct allusion to the pantomime existence of the Judds in retirement. He takes his characters beyond mere caricature, an improvement on last month's choice, The Line of Beauty, but he does not display any of the elegant prose style of Alan Hollinghurst. This was acknowledged as a pity, as that book was universally disliked, whereas The Promise of Happiness was felt to have some merit.

Justin Cartwright, who is South African but based in the UK, was a new writer to the members of the Reading Group. He has won several book awards, including the Whitbread Novel Award for Half in Love. The group had different feelings about reading further novels by Cartwright. Some wanted to investigate other titles in his oeuvre, while others felt that they had read plenty enough with this book. No one felt that Cartwright is in the same league as Roth, McEwan or Franzen, and all three of these writers' above mentioned books come recommended before this book. On the whole, though, The Promise of Happiness is a title that the group recommends, albeit with the reservations outlined above.

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July 2005

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst's fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, takes place over a very specific period in the nineteen eighties (1983-87). He's written about this decade before (in The Swimming Pool Library), and from the outset, it is apparent that he is attempting to define a period in history. 20-year old Nick Guest has just completed a degree at Oxford University, and for want of somewhere to go moves to London. He moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: rising Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolised at Oxford - and Catherine. Nick has recently come out, and from the outset, it appears that one of Hollinghurst's themes will be homosexuality during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Set against the background of rich and nouveau riche in the very heart of Thatcherite Britain, the novel immediately grabbed the attention of the reading group when it won the Booker Prize in 2004. That it was described as a social satire on the cover, made it all the more appealing.

The Line of Beauty is divided into three sections. The first recounts Nick's early homosexual experiences, as he answers a personal ad and begins a relationship with a black council worker called Leo. In the second section, he is sleeping with Antoine Ouradi ("Wani"), a fabulously wealthy playboy who is heir to a supermarket fortune. In the final section we learn that Leo has died from AIDS, and that Wani is dying from this disease. The hedonism that the characters initially enjoyed has turned to tragedy.

The trouble with this, we felt, was that Hollinghurst provides the reader with nothing but stereotypes and clichés about the gay scene. The reader is given endless graphic descriptions of every kind of gay sex act, as well as drug abuse, yet gain no access to the inner lives of the characters. Even Nick, around whom the entire novel exists, is almost a hollow shell. He begins the book studying for a PhD, but later seems to be helping Wani to produce a glossy art magazine. We learn little of his feelings and motivations, only his aesthetic snobbery. When tragedy occurs, he is unable to articulate his emotions and falls back on a pompous quote by Henry James about the death of Edgar Allan Poe.

Hollinghurst is no better at dissecting the political dimension of the book. The politicians in the book are by and large depicted as money grabbing opportunists; they never quite emerge as rounded characters and therefore we don't learn anything new about the Thatcher years. Nick floats around on the periphery of the grubby world of the Conservative government, even dancing with Margaret Thatcher at a party, yet he has no opinion of them, and they none of him. The Feddens accept his presence and his silent adoration without questioning it until his lifestyle causes public embarrassment and he is forced to move out.

Has Hollinghurst himself no opinion of the behaviour of the rich and powerful in this period? It is hard to say. What little satire there is consists of the worst kinds of clichés about Tory MPs having affairs with their secretaries and getting caught doing insider deals on the stock market. Hollinghurst may be telling us that he finds this world loathsome, but none of us were grateful to him for writing such a long book in order to remind us of what we already knew to be true.

The whole group was very disappointed with The Line of Beauty. Weak on character, plot (which is virtually non-existent) and inconsistently written, this pretentious and self-regarding book had little to say about politics, homosexuality or the class system. Much has been written about Hollinghurst's writing abilities. There is no doubt that his descriptive powers are at times impressive, although a good editor could have tidied up some of the more arcane and empty prose. The trouble is that he doesn't appear to have anything to say about his subject, concentrating his efforts on describing surface and providing little or no depth. To make matters worse, he doesn't seem to know what to keep in and what to leave out. Dinner conversations went on for pages and pages, where the guests talked and talked but said very little. This shows nothing other than how tiresome it is to read transcribed dinner conversations. Nick, and one must presume, Hollinghurst, witters on adoringly about Henry James, but Hollinghurst has none of that writer's skills in dissecting the social scene in which he sets his story. His understanding of the psychology of his characters was almost non-existent, as he never bothers to develop them beyond caricatures.

In the end, The Line of Beauty is as empty as the lives of the characters it portrays. Perhaps Hollinghurst is implying that this is what the era deserves, but by focusing on one narrow section of society, we felt that the richness and complexity of much of British life in the eighties is unfairly ignored. Ultimately, we were left wondering why the book has received such accolades. We thought it was a very poor novel whose Booker Prize winning success mystified us. The book is therefore not recommended.

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June 2005

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland.

Hey Nostradamus! is Canadian writer, Douglas Coupland's exploration of the aftermath of a Columbine style school shooting. Set in Vancouver, it begins with a description of the massacre by one of its victims, Cheryl Anway. Cheryl is a born-again Christian whose message "God is nowhere, god is now here", written on her school binder, is later adopted by many in the town as a divine message. Cheryl narrates her story from a state of limbo as she waits for her god to take her to heaven.

The massacre, carried out by three dysfunctional classmates, is to resonate through the lives of the townsfolk for some time. Saints and sinners are soon selected, then the town moves on. But of course, the lives of those most closely affected do not. The book's second narrator, Jason, was secretly married to Cheryl. His life is both privately and publicly shattered. He loses both his wife and his good name, as he is wrongly suspected of being involved in the massacre. We meet him ten years on from the massacre, still suffering. His relationships are dysfunctional and he works sporadically as a decorator. To compound his misery, his brother Kent has been killed in a car accident, leaving him partly responsible for the upbringing of Kent and Barb's twins. Later sections are narrated by Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father Reg, a cruelly religious man, who has alienated all those around him. Each narrator wrestles with God, self-defeat and a crippling inability to hold on to those they love.

Hey Nostradamus! is a serious book. Anchored in a real life horror story, Coupland's novel tries to dig deeply into the psyche of those who suffer as a direct result of an atrocity. He is not so much interested in why a massacre like this could take place, but what impact it has on the community and individuals affected. At the heart of the novel is an attempt to place the inability of human beings' attempts to explain such horrors against the increasing inadequacy of religion to come up with satisfactory answers. Coupland's is a world in which belief in God is questioned. It should be said that it is hard to imagine an American novelist attempting such a thing, as religion is playing a greater and greater role in US society. It is a credit to Coupland that he chose to write about such a quintessentially American topic in a Canadian context, and found an appropriate and convincing way of doing it.

Readers in the group were split between those who were absorbed and thrilled by what they saw as a fresh and original study of grief, and those who found it morbidly self-absorbed, depressing and hard to stick with. After much discussion, we felt that this reflected personal tastes as much as Coupland's abilities as a writer. Coupland's writing skills were never in question, though he was not seen as a great stylist.

All agreed that Coupland's characterisation was strong. His four narrators were distinctive and memorable. Some expressed doubt about the choice of "voice" for Reg. His inarticulate rage, as shown in previous sections, made way for an eloquent inner voice that somehow did not ring true.

A main criticism was that on occasions the plot lacked credibility. This was particularly so in the section Jason narrates. Coupland places his character in a number of wildly improbable situations that we could not believe in. It was as if he knew he wanted to get Jason from A to B, but did not know how to get him there. We even questioned the need for several of these journeys at all. This spoilt this section for many members of the group, although others preferred to overlook this shortcoming in their desire to read on.

On the whole, the group agreed that Hey Nostradamus! was a good choice, especially in terms of generating an interesting discussion about the treatment of the subject matter. It was felt that Hey Nostradamus! is an interesting companion piece to Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre's Booker Prize winning novel about a High School massacre in Texas. However, we were divided about the stature of the novelist. Some said they would like to read more of Coupland's books, while others said that would not be rushing to read him again in a hurry. It cannot be denied that Coupland's reputation as a writer has grown with the publication of this novel. His earlier novels, such as Generation X and Microserfs deliberately attempted to capture the zeitgeist of the 1990s, but often did this at the expense of literary quality. Coupland's love of all things quirky has not been entirely erased in Hey Nostradamus! but there is no doubt that he is determined to embrace serious subjects. Most of us thought that he did that very well.

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May 2005

Ignorance by Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera is perhaps the most well known of a group of Czech writers who emerged from the Prague Spring in 1968. His first novel, The Joke, was a scathing attack on the communist era. Following the Russian invasion, Kundera was one of many intellectuals who left. Once in France he found a receptive audience, as he became renowned for articulating the dehumanising effects of Communism. His fame grew as he wrote classic novels about life under Communism like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When the Velvet Revolution swept away the old Communist guard in 1989 many returned to Czechoslovakia. Kundera, meanwhile, stayed in Paris. His subject matter changed as he moved away from writing about his homeland. That changed in 2002 with the publication of Ignorance, the story of two exiled Czechs who decide to return.

Ignorance begins with Czech émigré Irena being challenged by one of her French friends as to why she has not returned to Prague. She feels settled in France, and does not feel the need. Yet the seed is sewn and it is not long before she is on a flight to Prague. At the airport she meets, Josef, a man she once knew in Prague. He too is returning after a long exile in Denmark. They arrange to meet up.

Milan Kundera is a most philosophical writer. He assuages conventional realism, often stepping into the narrative in order to muse about his themes. Ignorance is about memory, forgetting, and of course ignorance. Kundera defines this as "derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss)." He links it, etymologically, with the word nostalgia, from the Greek nostos (return) and algos (suffering). Nostalgia, Kundera postulates is "suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return", which "seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away," he continues, "and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there." Underpinning the novel is the story of Odysseus, and the myth of the "Great Return", as Kundera calls it.

By writing about two returning émigrés, Kundera allows himself to revisit "Czechoslovakia", now split into two countries, but which he himself refers to as Bohemia. He has little favourable to say about the newly re-capitalised country, and this is borne out by his characters' experiences. Both Irena and Josef are frustrated that no one seems to want to discuss and therefore remember the past two decades. In particular no one asks why each of them left the country or even what they did while away. It is as if none of this ever happened. Their own experiences of alienation are exacerbated by the fact that the two of them seem only able to look back.

Irena and Josef cling to the past, to their own memories. Josef is driven by memories both of his youth and also of his recently deceased Danish wife, whom he comes to appreciate only after her death. Irena, whose exile from Prague also represented an escape from her overbearing mother, ironically, has been driven for decades by a fleeting romantic memory of Josef. Can she rekindle the flame that shone so brightly so long ago?

On the whole, the group enjoyed this short novel, but felt that perhaps it was too short and lacked rounded characters. Kundera's style is such that he dispenses with descriptive passages, from which the reader can build up pictures of how the characters act and believe, and prefers to tell us what they do and think. As a result, his arguments are foregrounded, and his characterisation is minimalised. The group had a sense that Kundera's characters were simply vehicles from which to explore his themes. They were clearly the creations of their master. Kundera, who is notoriously cagey about interpretations of his work, may like it that way, but as readers, we were unsatisfied with this aspect of the novel.

On the other hand, the novel's themes are consistently interesting. Kundera has written before about exile and return, and memory and forgetting. In this book he updates the story, and finds something new to say. He challenges the assumption that exile brings misery, and return joy. At the same time, he shows how porous our memories can be, both of our former homeland and of other people. Memory often distorts the past to the extent that we can make calamitous mistakes based on false pretences. We felt that Kundera's scepticism about human relations can make for uncomfortable reading. Ironically, we also agreed that it is a pleasure to read the thoughts of a great writer and thinker like Kundera, even if one does not always like the conclusions that he draws.

To conclude, the group felt that Ignorance was a good book choice, but we also agreed that in recommending a novel to a first time reader of this great European writer, we would choose The Joke or The Unbearable Lightness of Being over this later, and to some extent, lesser work.

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April 2005

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

The English Patient tells the stories of four disparate characters who are thrown together at the end of World War II. In an isolated and war damaged Tuscan villa Hana, a young Canadian nurse, is looking after a man who has been burnt beyond recognition. The villa had been used as a military hospital, but now only this one patient and one nurse remain. They are joined first by David Caravaggio, a spy who has been tortured and had his thumbs cut off. He was a friend of Hana's father, and knew her as a child. Finally, Kirpal Singh, a young Sikh sapper known as Kip, billets in the grounds of the villa. As the war comes to an end, and history reaches a definitive turning point, these four characters wrestle with their own destinies. Stories and memories from their pasts intermingle with the present and unknown futures to provide a moving and powerful investigation into the effects of war.

It soon emerges that the patient is not English at all. Caravaggio is convinced he knows him as a German spy. When finally the patient's meandering monologues begin to cohere, he tells his own story. We learn that he is Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a Hungarian explorer of the Libyan deserts. A fifth member joins the cast: Katharine Clifton, the wife of another explorer. Almásy has had an affair with this woman. Their lost love story contrasts with Hana's growing love for Kip.

The main theme of the novel is a reflection on identity: the English patient has to come to terms with his past and eventually accept who he is and what he has done. Hana, who has refused to look at herself in a mirror for a year, must rebuild her now rootless life, following the death of her father. Caravaggio, who is a thief, must redefine himself now that the tools of his trade have been removed. Kip must face up to his choice to serve the British Empire when so many of his fellow Indians are struggling for independence. Ondaatje skillfully interweaves these four lives forever changed by war to create a masterful enquiry into the romance and tragedies at the heart of human existence.

The English Patient was a very popular choice. Beautifully written by a novelist who is at once a great poet and a fine storyteller, we admired Ondaatje's linguistic and narrative skills. His novel is a mosaic of memories, a book of fragments that build up multiple layers of imagery and meanings. Just as the English patient pasted pieces of other stories into his copy of Herodotus's "Histories", so Ondaatje collects together and collages the tales of his protagonists. The result is a deeply satisfying and unique novel from an exceptional writer.

Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992 with The English Patient. It was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1996, and to some the success of the film has overshadowed the achievement of the book. In that version of the book, the story of Katherine and Almásy dominates while the other characters' stories take second place or are omitted. In Ondaatje's scheme of things, this story is one of many that make up a greater whole. For those of us reading the book for the first time, we were able to reclaim the novel from the film-makers. For others, re-reading it allowed us to rediscover and reaffirm its greatness as a novel about the effects of love, loss and war. In short, we all thought that it is a masterpiece, and recommend it wholeheartedly.

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February 2005

Small Island by Andrea Levy.

On 22 June 1948 the SS Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks, London having sailed from the Caribbean to bring the first immigrants from the West Indies. 492 people disembarked, many ex-servicemen thinking that they would be able to rejoin the RAF they had served during the Second World War. Instead, they discovered that they were only wanted as menial workmen, for example in the postal service or on London Transport. Yet this small group were to become the first historic "wave" of migrants that would soon be classed as an "invasion" from Britain's rapidly diminishing colonies. British culture would be changed forever.

Andrea Levy's fourth novel, Small Island, is the tale of four people affected by this moment in history. The book is split into two time zones, 1948 and "Before". The 1948 sections take place six months after ex-RAF serviceman Gilbert Joseph has arrived on the Empire Windrush. Now that he is settled in London, Gilbert has summoned his wife, Hortense, from Jamaica. The book begins with Hortense's arrival at the house where Gilbert lodges. Gilbert's landlady is Queenie, a woman who Gilbert first met in Lincolnshire when he was stationed there during the war. Queenie has started taking in lodgers after all but giving up hope of seeing her husband, Bernard Bligh, who has not returned from India, where he fought in the war. The book is narrated by all four of these characters. The "Before" sections portray their early lives and show how these four people's lives interlink and overlap. More importantly, the book shows how these characters react to each other. In this respect, Levy has created a microcosm from which to explore the two sides of immigration.

Levy asks a number of key questions: can Gilbert and Hortense's dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face? And can Queenie and Bernard overcome their prejudice against people like Gilbert and Hortense and the perceived threat to their British identity? How will they adapt to the changes the migrants will bring to the small island that is the United Kingdom? And how much of their own small island will Gilbert and Hortense bring to their new home?

The group had mixed feelings about Andrea Levy's double prize winner (Orange and Whitbread). On the one hand, we thought it told an important story - that is, the prejudice faced by West Indians arriving in post-war Britain - but the way in which it was told was felt to vary in quality. Levy takes us into a world we are likely to know very little about, and does it well. We thought that Levy was excellent on period details, brilliantly bringing to life both the Blitz and the shabbiness of post-war London. But by being vague about specific historical times and places she left the reader feeling that the book lacked the means by which to anchor it to an historical context that would have given it greater depth and significance.

The main characters were on the whole thought to be well rounded, and Gilbert and Queenie were particularly liked. However, it was felt that at times they were rather inconsistently drawn, and minor characters lacked depth. The contrast between inarticulate dialogue and sophisticated and sometimes poetic internal monologues was noted. Queenie's cockney accent was in particular singled out for criticism, especially as she was born and bred in Lincolnshire and we are told she went to elocution classes upon arriving in London.

Our main criticism of the book was that we didn't like the structure of the novel, which split the narration into four distinct sections. We agreed that we would have preferred Levy to have interweaved the narratives of Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard. One result of the structure was that each section felt as if it were too long, relying heavily on the replication of researched information, rather than in plot or character development. Levy's desire to expose the all-pervading racism of this period is admirable, but at times she stretches credibility by putting her characters into improbable situations. Bringing in Bernard at the end as a twist seemed to us to weaken the book, especially as his section was poorly depicted when compared to the others. The novel's ending split the group. Some of us thought it fitting and hopeful, while others felt Levy slipped into melodrama to the detriment of the overall emotional impact of her story.

Andrea Levy's novel has catapulted both book and writer into the bestseller list. We felt that Small Island is definitely worth reading, and indeed many of us thoroughly enjoyed it. However, we did not think it the masterpiece all the awards might imply. Members of the group who had read other West Indian writers recommended books like The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon and Caryl Phillips' The Final Passage as being novels that explore the same subject matter in a more profound way. Nevertheless, it was agreed that Small Island evokes an important landmark in the history of modern Britain that deserves to be more widely known.

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January 2005

Star of The Sea by Joseph O'Connor.

Star of the Sea has leapt off the bookshelves thanks to a celebrity endorsement by Richard and Judy. Over half a million copies of Joseph O'Connor's historical novel have sold so far. The group was curious to find out what we thought of it.

The novel begins at the end, with a preface to a 100th edition of a memoir, An American Abroad by Grantley Dixon. The memoir is a fake, of course, but the story within provides an insight into a very real and tumultuous event, the Irish potato famine. Though Dixon is the narrator, he tells the story from multiple perspectives. By adopting this technique, Dixon (and hence O'Connor) is able to shift the story between different people from different strata of society who have been affected by the disaster. Principal among these are nobleman David Merridith aka Lord Kingscourt, servant girl Mary Duane and the ghostly Pius Mulvey.

Set in 1847, Star of the Sea tells of the last journey of a leaking old ship called Star of the Sea, as it limps across the Atlantic Ocean with a handful of first-class passengers and a hold full of destitute Irish people fleeing the horrors of the potato famine. The ship's captain Josias Lockwood provides the readers with the "facts" of the voyage. The rest has been pieced together by Dixon from letters, interviews, ballads, cartoons and illustrations, and even a fragment of a novel by Dixon himself. Lord Kingscourt tells the story of his family's long and troubled ownership of Kingscourt Estate in Ireland. Mulvey, a former tenant, flees Ireland to live first in London and then to travel through England on an ever downward spiral into drunkenness and crime, before returning to Ireland to fulfil a date with destiny. Mary, too, was a tenant, but her tale is very different from Mulvey's, as she stays in Ireland as mass starvation sets in. O'Connor cleverly contrasts these characters' stories with that of Grantley Dixon, the brash representative of the New World. His loud and often self-righteous outbursts regularly put down the ways of the Old World and its aristocrats, but ironically he has his own guilt to deal with in the form of the wealth he has obtained through his family's slave owning past. In Star of the Sea no one can claim to hold the moral high ground.

On one level, Joseph O'Connor's novel is a clever Victorian pastiche. It is full of Dickensian characters and situations. He adds a touch of the Wilkie Collins, too, by telling us early on that the story is a murder story. The question we are asked to consider is the perennial one, who done it? On top of that, he has fun including one or two Victorian authors in the text, including Emily Bronte and Dickens himself. But for all this, Star of the Sea is more than pastiche. It is a serious enquiry into an historical period, which has important lessons to impart on the evils of serfdom and exploitation. Given that it is a contemporary novel, the writer can tackle the more unseemly side of Victorian life that could never have appeared in Dickens' time. To this end, the reader is reminded of modern 'Victorian' dramas such as Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, Sarah Waters' Fingersmith and John Fowles' The French Lieutenants' Woman. The last of these two have been popular Reading Group choices in the past.

So, what did we think of Star of the Sea? Unusually, we decided to give the novel marks out of 10 at the beginning of the discussion. People then defended their position, and inevitably some changed their minds. Broadly speaking, the group divided between those who thought it very good, and those who were not so keen. All agreed that it was very good on social history; characterisation and dialogue were strong; and O'Connor's detailed and evocative descriptions of Victorian life were singled out for praise; but the plot was felt to be over-complicated, and reliant upon melodramatic twists and coincidences. Some of us didn't mind this, but others felt it spoilt their overall enjoyment of the novel. Given how controversial the topic is, the treatment of the potato famine was felt to be even handed and stereotype free. The book's ending was particularly contentious, with some finding the final twist hard to swallow, but again it divided the group. One point that all agreed on was that the construction of the novel was found to be unconvincing, as it was not felt to be credible that Dixon could have obtained all the strands of the story through journalistic endeavour. Some felt that this didn't matter - the book is, after all, a work of fiction. On the whole, it made for a good choice in terms of talking points. Some of us would strongly recommend it, while others were glad to see the back of it. By the end of the meeting some of the cynics had been won over, and the novel comes recommended to readers of this review with an average of 7 out of 10.

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December 2004

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien.

To end the year, Blackwell's Reading Group chose a comic novel. At Swim-Two-Birds was first published in 1939 by Flann O'Brien. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds is a groundbreaking example of metafiction, that is to say fiction about writing fiction. But the book is not just an academic exercise in avant-garde writing, it is an uproarious comedy that has become a classic in modern literature.

The unnamed narrator is a highly sophisticated but suspiciously idle university student, who lives with his moralising uncle. He spends his time smoking and drinking with friends, skipping classes, perusing his manuscript (he wants to be a writer), and recovering from hangovers. The novel he is writing deals with an eccentric recluse named Dermott Trellis who is himself writing a didactic novel meant to illustrate the corrupting power of vice. As the book develops, Trellis' characters rebel against their own author by drugging him: once asleep he cannot control their world.

Slug and Shorty are two characters from American Western fiction now forced to make it as cowpunchers in Dublin. A Good Fairy and a devil called a Pooka, who is an evil spirit, roam through the book. The mad King Sweeney from Irish lore also puts in an appearance, as does a legendary Irish hero named Finn MacCool. Other characters include Antony and Sheila Lamont, Paul Shanahan, John Furriskey, and Peggy, all of whom are more journeyman than their fantastical counterparts. In another part of the novel, there is a Western writer called Tracy, who may or may not be the invention of Trellis.

This reviewer confesses to finding the "plot" extremely difficult to follow, so isn't clear how the different strands of the book interlink. To summarise the plot would be virtually impossible. However, the group as a whole found the book a delight and did not seem to mind whether there was a plot to follow or not. Though the feeling was not universal, many felt that O'Brien's mastery of different generic modes and of the language of different classes and novelistic types made for some of the most hilarious pages of dialogue they had read. Certainly even the dissenters, who longed for a recognisable plot, conceded that the writing was sharp and funny. On the whole, this book choice was considered a success and is therefore recommended.

Flann O'Brien was the pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan, an Irish civil servant. For many years he wrote a political column called "Cruiskeen Lawn" for The Irish Times. His biting, satiric commentaries made him the conscience of the Irish government. As Flann O'Brien, he published three comic novels, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Dalkey Archive and The Third Policeman, all of which have a strong cult following. Several members of the group has also read the last of these, and recommended it, too.

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November 2004

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

"I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid, overcast day in the winter of 1975." So begins The Kite Runner, the first Afghan novel to be written in English. The book is set against the devastating history of Afghanistan over the past thirty years through the experiences of two boys, wealthy Amir and poor Hassan. Told in flashback in 2001, Amir, now living safely in California, USA looks back on that fateful day when the two friends' destinies forked, as class, ethnicity and jealousy separated them forever. Their story doesn't end there, though, as Amir is drawn back to contemporary Afghanistan by a phone call from an old friend who tells him that "there is a way to be good again." So Amir returns to a country now dominated by the Taliban in search of a way to atone for the past.

Twelve-year-old Amir lives what appears to be a charmed life in Kabul. His father, Baba, is a successful businessman who drives a Ford Mustang. A widower, his home is run by servant Ali, with whom Baba grew up. Their children, Amir and Hassan, are inseparable, though Amir never quite considers Hassan to be his friend. Ali and Hassan are Hazaras, whereas Baba and Amir are Pashtun: caste prejudice runs deep. Amir, who is bookish and therefore considered a weakling, is desperate to win the approval of his father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament to prove that he has the makings of a man. Champion kite runner Hassan promises to help him, but the day is to end in personal tragedy for the boys, and to destroy the idyll. Afghanistan itself is changing, too, as the old king is deposed. Four years later, the Russians invade and so Baba and Amir use their wealth and influence to flee first to Pakistan and then onto America, leaving Ali and Hassan behind.

Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner offered a revealing insight into life in Afghanistan both pre-revolution and under the Taliban. The reading group members thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book, but also found it to be an absorbing tale of betrayal, guilt and redemption. We felt that the novel was not without its flaws, but on the whole it was very well received. The first section of the novel in particular was singled out for praise. Hosseini's descriptions of life in Kabul in the 1970s were clearly drawn from memory, and brilliantly evoked that time from the perspective of the boys. His characters were well realised and their situations thoroughly engaging. The group members felt that Hosseini's command of his material slipped once he took Amir back to Afghanistan in 2001. We felt that the writer perhaps knew less about Afghanistan during this period, so fell back on melodrama. This section of the novel was full of plot contrivances and coincidences, stereotypes and worst of all a two dimensional baddy no one could believe in. It was as if Hosseini was trying to show that the Taliban were sociopaths who had no interest in religion, just brutalising the population. We felt that this wasn't especially accurate, nor helpful in developing our understanding of that period of Afghan history. Ultimately then, the novel must be considered a personal story first and foremost, rather than a fully realised history of modern Afghanistan. Perhaps it is asking too much of a first-time novelist to do both.

For all its faults, the group concluded that The Kite Runner was well worth reading. Khalid Hosseini's narrative is fast-paced, full of beautifully observed prose, and his sensitive portrayal of childhood with all its fears and tensions is particularly satisfying. We thought that he wrote about the exile experience in California well, with wealthy Baba reduced to pumping gas while his son tries to obtain an education. This section also enables Hosseini to contrast the experiences of the two families, as they inhabit two such dissimilar cultures. Ironically it may be this dual focus that is the root of the later problems in the book. Hosseini's attempts to reconnect the characters in modern-day Afghanistan result in poor structural decisions. Despite some narrative clumsiness, however, we agreed that the novel is a moving, dramatic, personal, and compelling read, fascinating in its setting and in its development of the father-son relationship. It is therefore recommended.

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October 2004

The Light of Day by Graham Swift.

"The Light of Day" is the first novel written by celebrated author, Graham Swift, in seven years. Following the success of Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize and was made into a popular film, expectations among the group were high.

"The Light of Day" is narrated by George Webb, a disgraced police officer turned private detective. He runs his own agency from above a tanning salon in Wimbledon High Street. From here he largely deals with marital break-ups. It's a seedy world, in keeping with many detective novels. George's monologue is the recounting of his experiences on one day when he visits a former client, Sarah Nash, who is now languishing in jail for murdering her ex-husband. The day is the second anniversary of Robert Nash's murder, and George recounts that fateful day in detail as he makes his way to the prison to see the murderer.

Initially, "The Light of Day" appears to be a detective novel. It contains many of the stock characters that make up so many detective stories: the cheating husband, the betrayed wife, and the detective who falls for the female client. The reader is drawn into the story in two ways. Firstly, why did Sarah kill her husband, and secondly why is George so attached to a client he only met twice? Yet Swift is a sophisticated literary author whose main themes are time and memory, the search for human identity and knowledge of others. One would not expect him to follow genre conventions and indeed he does not. He dispenses with much of the suspense that sustains most detective fiction. He ignores both of the questions outlined above. Sarah kills her husband. End of story. George is in love with Sarah. No explanation of why is given. In its place is a studied series of observations on the minutiae of ordinary life, as George reflects on everything from park benches to golf courses. Swift adopts a stream-of-consciousness style whereby Webb's thoughts are described as they take place throughout a single day, in no particular order and without adhering to any strict structure. Past and present are interwoven as Webb's memories flood out, sweeping the reader along with him.

The reading group members were not impressed with "The Light of Day". By ignoring the two fundamental questions the plot throws up, the readers felt that they were left with precious little to enjoy in an otherwise plodding book. We did not like being soaked in George Webb's mundane memories. Being inside George Webb's head simply wasn't enough to sustain a 300 page novel. We considered that the story of his life was unsatisfying on its own and were unhappy that his motivations were never made clear.

To compound our misery, we thought that Swift's characterisation was poor. Ordinary George comes alive through his memories of his own past, but the ethereal Sarah was never described in a way that would make her more than a name, an object that George loves and worships, but never a rounded person. At the meeting we struggled to remember the names of the other characters, again, indicative of their failure to come alive to us.

Those of us who had read Swift's novels before admitted to being very let down that such an accomplished writer should have produced such a thin and dull piece of writing. We agreed that Waterland and Last Orders are two of the best English novels written in the last twenty years. We thought that it was as if Swift had felt obliged to publish a novel, when he only had enough material for a short story.

In the end, the one compensation was that the meeting prompted us to discuss many literary thrillers that we thought were so much better. Examples of books we liked included Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, and Secret History by Donna Tartt, which was June's choice. And we thought that literary detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Inspector Morse provide much more sustenance for the reader than Swift's underwritten tale of George Webb, PI, will ever do. The novel was no doubt meant to be read as an investigation into the mysterious way in which we make decisions in our lives. Yet for all of the above reasons we felt it fell short of being a satisfying psychological meditation on time and the inability to understand our choices. "The Light of Day" was a disappointing choice that is not recommended.

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September 2004

Brick Lane by Monica Ali.

Brick Lane, Monica Ali's debut novel, has been a publishing sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and garnering both praise and prizes galore. It tells the story of a Bangladeshi family in London's East End, a subject rarely explored in contemporary fiction. The closest British writing have come to this theme have been through books by former favourites of the group, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal. Following the success of White Teeth and Anita and Me as previous book choices, the group decided to find out what Ali had to say about the immigrant experience in multi-cultural Britain.

Brick Lane tells the story of Bangladeshi born Nazneen who, while still in her teenage years, finds herself in an arranged marriage in a cramped flat in a high-rise block in Tower Hamlets. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her middle-aged husband, Chanu. Chanu is a dreamer, convinced that education is the route out of poverty, yet frustrated by lack of opportunities in the casually racist British society. Knowing of no alternatives, Nazneen settles into domestic life, producing delicious meals for her ever more disillusioned - and increasingly obese - husband. Years pass and they have two children, boisterous Shahana and silent Bibi. Chanu's dreams recede until he has but one aim - to return to his homeland with his family. They are not so sold on the idea.

Nazneen keeps in touch with her sister Hasina back in Bangladesh through a series of letters. Throughout the book, Hasina's letters punctuate the narrative (we do not read Nazneen's). The rebellious Hasina has kicked against cultural tradition and run off in a 'love marriage' with the man of her dreams. When he suddenly turns violent, she is forced into the job of garment worker in a clothes factory. Confined in her flat, Nazneen also sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings. Nazneen's life seems to have been dictated by a Fate over which she has no control until Karim, a young radical, enters into her life. Politicised by the events leading up to the September 11th atrocities in New York, Karim offers an alternative life for Nazneen, one where hope has not entirely been extinguished. But she will first have to take control of her Fate, something her mother has instilled into her is not possible.

The group thought that Brick Lane was a beautifully written novel. It conjured up first Bangladesh then London's East End with great clarity. Ali cleverly compares the two through Nazneen's habit of using similes from her village upbringing to describe her London life. Furthermore, the inclusion of Hasina's letters added a valuable extra dimension to the book and we felt this juxtaposition of two very different worlds was highly effective. The group agreed that Ali's characters are vividly and sympathetically drawn, especially Nazneen and her sister. Even Chanu, who is in many ways a repulsive character (his self-importance, his obesity, his corns), is shown to grow wise as the novel progresses, and it is clear that he cares for his family in his own way.

One of the main attractions of Brick Lane is that it took us into a world that is rarely mentioned in the media and brought it to life brilliantly. We all liked the fact that it tackles 'important' social issues with great subtlety, and we all agreed that this is in part due to Ali's skilful storytelling. Strikingly imagined, gracious and often very funny, this novel is both epic and intimate. It explores the role of Fate in our lives - contrasting those who accept it with those who defy it. The transformation of Nazneen from cautious and shy to a bold and dignified woman was both memorable and satisfying, and perhaps most importantly, entirely convincing.

The group's main criticism of Brick Lane was that at 500 pages we felt it was too long. We thought that the book could have perhaps been more powerful with less of the detail, some of which was repetitious and added little to the overall purpose of the book. We also thought that some aspects of the book were underwritten and therefore implausible, for example, Karim's seduction of Nazneen. A more experienced writer would have dealt with this differently. On the whole, though, there is no doubt that Monica Ali has great promise. She is a competent and serious writer with plenty to say. The group found Brick Lane to be absorbing and readable, as well as a well written social commentary that gave us an insight into a side of British life about which we knew very little. The book is therefore recommended.

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August 2004

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

In 1986 Margaret Atwood wrote a chilling tale of female oppression in a fundamentalist futuristic country. The novel, The Handmaid's Tale, has entered the literary canon, and stands as one of the great dystopian novels, alongside Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and Huxley's Brave New World. Perhaps more poignant, her vision became a reality in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, is her first foray into science fiction since The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood herself prefers to call it "speculative fiction"). The reading group was keen to see how it compared.

Oryx and Crake takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. The earth's destruction appears to have been caused not by nuclear war but by global warming. The apparent only survivor is Snowman, whose world is weird and extremely dangerous. Genetically engineered humanoids (the "crakers") dwell by the seashore, while Snowman lives in a tree to avoid carnivorous hybrids known as wolfhogs and pigoons, who have turned on their creators and now feed on human flesh. In between foraging for his own food, Snowman tells strange stories to the crakers about the mythical Oryx and Crake.

Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we read another story, one about two school friends called Jimmy and Glenn. They live in a privileged world of corporate compounds, safely shut away from the "pleeblands", where the workers live. As the boys grow up it becomes clear that Glenn is likely to follow in their fathers' footsteps and become a successful scientist, reshaping the universe, while Jimmy is a mediocre non-entity, haunted by the disappearance of his mother, and condemned to write copy for the companys who run this postmodern world.

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Snowman and Jimmy share much in common, and indeed that the godlike Crake is in fact Glenn. So the scene is set for the telling of the story of the destruction of the world, and of how Snowman may or may not find a way out of the nightmare he is in part responsible for.

Margaret Atwood's novel is a fine piece of creative writing, drawing on the tradition of science fiction from HG Wells to JG Ballard. It is also a very angry novel that takes on many of the social issues of today. Jimmy and Crake's world of Internet porn, casual mediated violence and synthetic emotional experience is frighteningly possible now. Genetic experiments and bio-technology are advancing at speed, and plastic surgery is commonplace. The corporate takeover is a reality in the era of globalisation, and gated communities are the norm among the rich and powerful. Atwood's vision of the future is perhaps more disturbing than that of The Handmaid's Tale because it is so recognisable. And at the centre is the pathetic, damaged voice of Snowman, an ordinary man who has become the last remnant of humanity, trying to understand how it could have happened.

The group thoroughly enjoyed this book. We all agreed that it was a gripping read, superbly imagined, wonderfully written and with a convincing array of characters. It is unusual for Atwood to write from the male perspective, but she does so with aplomb. Atwood, once again, is at the top of her game, writing important fiction that will be read for many years to come.

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