Sunday, March 31, 2013

Edward St Aubyn - Bad News

Wow. I read this book in as close to one go as is possible with a young, energetic boy to look after. I feel like I've been on drugs myself; emerging from this visceral world was like sobering up, finally, after having been on some kind of crazy trip.

This book revisits Patrick Melrose, the five year old boy whose horrific abuse was central to Never Mind, and who is now in his early twenties. Hardly surprisingly, Patrick has not grown up to become a happy, well-adjusted adult. Instead he is a full-blown drug addict, injecting heroin and cocaine, balancing highs with lows so that he can, to some small extent, continue to interact with the world. The novel opens on Patrick sitting on a plane - the Concord, no less - on his way to pick up the remains of his dead father in New York. The pressure of that gruesome task and the impact of his abusive father's death on Patrick's psyche send him into a downward spiral in the form of a massive bender that lasts until he is back on the Concord, on his way back to England in possession of a box full of ashes.

Like the first book of the series, this one takes place over the space of a short time, about 48 hours in Patrick's intense life. Unlike Never Mind, though, this is told entirely from Patrick's viewpoint, save for a very short episode towards the end of the book which is told from the perspective of a girl who unwisely agrees to have dinner with Patrick in his significantly altered state. I'm not sure why St Aubyn felt it necessary here to depart from the third person limited narrator he otherwise uses consistently throughout the book. Whilst it is interesting to get a glimpse of how other people view Patrick during this period, I don't think the departure was necessary - it is blatantly clear, from our knowledge of what Patrick is doing, thinking, absorbing, that his altered state would render him less than impressive to people whose lives are not on the same track as his.

Patrick, in this book, is not a likeable character. But he is well aware of that fact, and makes up for it somewhat by despising himself more than any other person possibly could. He is self-absorbed and unable to cope with anyone else's emotional needs, including those of his girlfriend, Debbie, who he has left behind in England. We learn that he is having an affair with another girl, and thinks nothing of also trying to have a fling during his short visit to New York. This is a broken person, someone who is so consumed by their own breakdown that they have nothing left over to give the rest of the world. This state of being, combined with his aristocratic upbringing, causes Patrick to express himself exclusively in the cynical, nasty way that appears to be peculiar to a particular class of English people: "What was the point of a book if you couldn't carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?" There is no joy in Patrick's self-expression, which is fitting as there is a clear absence of joy in his life.

As well as the colourful cast of underworld characters he encounters on his constant search for more and better drugs, Patrick meets up again with some of the friends his parents had over for dinner in the first book of this series, Never Mind. One of the interesting things about the Patrick Melrose novels is the way the world of the British aristocracy is portrayed as being quite small - Patrick encounters and interacts with his parents' friends, in the absence of his parents, more than most of us these days would with members of another generation. The feeling this evokes is the inevitability of that world, the knowledge that there is no escaping it; by virtue of his birth, Patrick will always belong to this society, no matter how far he runs or how low he sinks.

Really, though, Bad News is mainly a terribly confronting novel about an addict's full descent into life-threatening drug abuse. There were times when I had to look away from the book, gathering myself before reading on, because the descriptions of dirty syringes and injecting into disappearing veins were so potent and so disturbing. There was a passage in which Patrick's altered mind took on multiple personalities, taunting him with endlessly fractured conversations, and reading this was like experiencing Patrick's disturbing high along with him. There were times when Patrick toyed with the idea of suicide, and his blase attitude towards it impressed upon me just how depressed he is, underneath all of the drugs: "As the telephone rang he wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all." At several points during the book Patrick almost dies from the rush he so relentlessly pursues, a fact that he accepts without surprise, shock or fear. I found it terribly sad that the momentary but extreme high upon injecting is the one second of happiness Patrick can find in his life, and even he knows that it is not a real happiness, and that it comes at an enormous cost.

Some reviewers have said how much they disliked Patrick in this book. But all I felt for him was immense pity. Here is a person struggling against a past that will not let him go; struggling with the certainty that nothing good could possibly lie ahead for him. I looked up at one stage in my reading and said to Bibliohubby how relieved I was that I am not a drug addict! It must be just awful, that merciless and exhausting need, from which there is no escaping. St Aubyn's writing of this world is just extraordinary; I don't know how he could have done this, distilling the essence of addiction and depression and grief into a 48 hour period in his protagonist's life, unless he had been there himself.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I was blown away, again, by St Aubyn's electric writing, by the vividness of the characterisation, by the total immersion I felt in the prose and the story.

Pros / favourite passages: Even amidst the horror of Patrick's life St Aubyn manages to inject some of his characteristic caustic humour. When Patrick first makes his way to the funeral home where he is to pick up his father's ashes he is initially falsely directed to the wrong room, where a Jewish crowd is in mourning. St Aubyn writes: "Death was no doubt an overwhelming experience, but it must be even more powerful than he had imagined if it could transform his father into a small Jew with so many amusing new friends."

So much of this book is dedicated to the intricacies of drug addiction and the detailed mechanics of taking drugs, but St Aubyn still manages to illustrate the social milieu in which Patrick mixes, and the relationship between Patrick and his father since we last met him at five years old, using both to explore the themes of personal identity - how it is created, what creates it - and childhood, the failed raising of children amongst the British upper classes. When he meets a friend from England and stops to chat with her parents, they talk of Patrick's father, as one does about someone who has just died:

"But wouldn't we now say that he was just wery disturbed?" asked Eddy.
"So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a a pity if one of them is your father."
"I don't think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther's generation just didn't know how to express their love."
"Cruelty is the opposite of love," said Patrick, "not just some inarticulate version of it."

Cons: As with Never Mind, there are very few cons to mention here, except for the darkness of the topic, and the fact that the vivid imagery was difficult to stomach at times.


Wednesday, March 27, 2013

My Kindle Kometh!

After only a very short wait, my Kindle Paperwhite and my gorgeous Gelaskins artwork arrived on the same day - oh happy, happy day! How excited was I!

I waited until Iggy was asleep to open up my packages and apply my Gelaskin to the Kindle, and then place my Kindle into its protective cover. Amazon's Kindle packaging has developed in leaps and bounds since I received my first Kindle, and I was tempted to keep the sleek black box after opening it up. Similarly, the texture and feel of the Kindle itself is much nicer than on older models - it just feels pleasant in my hands.

I switched the machine on and started using it immediately, thrilled that it had arrived already charged up.

And my assessment thus far: I absolutely love it! It is everything I hoped it would be and more. It is slightly smaller and more compact than I thought it would be, but with the cover on, the size of it and the substance of the cover still allows me to hold the Kindle just as I would a book - propped open by my thumb and little finger, or clasped in between the fingers and thumb of one hand (see below for illustration of said comfy reading positions). The light is just what I wanted - when the brightness is reduced, it is very easy on the eyes, even whilst reading in complete darkness, and Bibliohubby has told me that it disturbs him far less than when I use my iPhone at night.

The response time of the Kindle Paperwhite is also very good (though it is not as immediate as an iPad, I must admit), and the touchscreen works very well and easily for one-handed page-turning. It took me a little while to get used to the highlighting function on this screen, as it is slightly different to what I'm used to on Apple devices, but now that I know how to do it, it's easy. Yesterday I used the touchscreen keyboard to make a note or two, and found that to be convenient. I have already downloaded a book from the Kindle store and that, too, worked easily and quickly, through the 3G connection. And when it did come time to charge my Kindle for the first time, I was relieved to find that it charges much faster than my old Kindle and the battery power is far better.

I also love the screensavers on this international version - no ads for us in Australia. There are artistic black and white renderings of pen nibs, inkwells, typewriter keys, pencils - for a writer / reader, all very apt and pleasing. The cover is attractive and I love that its magnetic closure automatically puts the Kindle to sleep when it is closed, and wakens it when it is opened.

Essentially I am happy with this product, and delighted with my purchase. It was well worth waiting for and I think I will be using this to read for a long time.

Now, as promised, some photos of my new toy!

This is what the Paperwhite looks like from the front, with Gelaskin artwork applied and one of the Kindle screensavers in place:


This is what my Kindle looks like from the back, with the Gelaskin applied:



How gorgeous is that! You can't see it in these pictures, but the names of the books featured in this artwork are beautifully whimsical - King Pear instead of King Lear, The Merchant of Guiness, A Prune with a View, A Tale of Two Lychees, The Taming of the Cue and so on. There is so much detail here I could gaze at it for ages, and it really does enhance my enjoyment of the Kindle itself.

Here is a picture that gives you an idea of the size of the Kindle Paperwhite, once encased in the custom Kindle cover I bought from Amazon - not too much bigger than my oversized sunglasses, a perfect fit for most handbags:


And here is what I mean when I say the size is just right for my two favourite book-holding positions:


Anyone considering a similar purchase - I say, go for it!

Edward St Aubyn - Never Mind

This is the first book in a five-part series, and I felt after finishing it that I had really just read an extraordinary introduction to a larger story. Which is not to say that this book is not satisfying in and of itself - it is, deeply so - it just left me ready to immediately plunge into book two (which I did, by the way - with the next review to follow promptly).

I have had two people (one of them my erudite, extremely well-read mother) recently recommend St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series to me, in particularly glowing terms. Maybe it was that hype which influenced my reading of the first few chapters, so that I was initially disappointed. Although the writing was spectacular from the beginning, for me the story unfolded slowly, like the earliest budding of a spring bloom. The exception, of course, was a scene in the first chapter describing a date which involved an extraordinary request by David Melrose, one of the protagonists, for a repulsive act of submission from the woman who would later become his wife. As it turns out, this was not even close to the most disturbing scene in the book.

St Aubyn chooses to tell Never Mind from the perspective of a third person omniscient narrator, and he employs this style to its hilt, by rushing in and out of the minds of different characters at dazzling speed. Very few writers can pull this off so convincincly - St Aubyn is one of them. I think the chopping and changing of the narrative threw me off initially, so that it took me a few chapeters to become fully immersed - but then, all of a sudden - whoosh! After three chapters or so of umm-ing and ah-ing, I was sucked in so thoroughly that the next time I looked up I was only a few pages away from finishing the book! Very odd indeed. I felt like I had been pulled into a vortex and then cast out the other side gasping for air, and gasping for more. I don't know if that has ever happened to me before, with a book. It was truly a bizarre reading experience, and I already know that more of the same awaits, in the next books of the series.

Never Mind covers a period of about 24 hours in the lives of exceptionally well-off British aristocrats who represent the very worst of English arrogance. David Melrose and his wife, Eleonor, live in Lacoste, France, and are hosting a dinner party for some of their 'closest friends' - none of whom escape David's scathing tongue or social critique. The book follows the various invitees in the lead-up to the dinner party, and during the party itself, but central to the story - although he is too young to attend the dinner - is the five year old son of David and Eleonor, Patrick Melrose. I have never read such a heartbreaking account of the abuse and pure neglect of a child. For St Aubyn to have conveyed this bleak, desperately sad childhood through the detail and description of just one day in the life of young Patrick, is quite remarkable.

Patrick is a loner because he has no choice in the matter. His father is a sociopath and his mother is a drug-addled alcoholic who is too weak to leave his father and too insecure to exert even the most basic maternal effort. He once had a nanny, but she has died by the time the book begins and his father has asserted that - at five - Patrick is too old to have another one. Patrick's valiant attempts to overcome these significant obstacles, by resorting to the very essence of boyhood, running around outside, taking daredevil risks as he climbs and scrapes his way through the forest landscape, making up his own games, stealing food from the kitchen, are thwarted in the period St Aubyn writes of by his father's indescribable offences against his person which escalate on this particular day to an abuse from which Patrick will never recover.

All of the people depicted in this book (other than Patrick Melrose, and perhaps the American, Anne, who seems to exist in order to provide a cultural counterpoint to the British upper crust) are thoroughly despicable, and they are described doing horrific things: sado-masochism without explicit consent, violent rape, child abuse, paedophilia. Yet once the pull of St Aubyn's narrative current sets in, it is impossible to stop reading about them. This was one of those books that kept me awake after lights-out, hiding like a child again with my book under the bedcovers so as not to disturb Bibliohubby, fighting against fatigue in order to read just one more page, one more page after that, and so on. Extraordinary.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5

Pros / favourite passages: The writing is achingly beautiful, and stands in stark contrast to the dark subjects St Aubyn explores. It is also funny, exhibiting a dry wit peculiar to the English: in describing a school friend's current occupation, David Melrose says he was "a civil servant who was widely thought to be a spy because his job sounded too dull to exist." David himself is described with great subtlety, including observations like this: "To break even the smallest rules by which others convinced themselves that they were behaving correctly gave him great pleasure." And this: "David grinned. He was in the mood for fun. After all, what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about."

The particular class of people who populate the novel are rendered with great care, not just through physical descriptions but also through the philosophies they espouse: "'What one aims for', said David, 'is ennui.' 'Of course,' said Anne, 'it's more than just French for our old friend boredom. It's boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It's I-find-everything-boring, therefore I'm fascinating.'" And from David's wife: "Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how 'boring' it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness."

David justifies to himself his cruel and inhumane treatment of Patrick by the viewpoint he expresses in a conversation over dinner: "The proposition I want to make, is that education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything." His friend Nicholas later chimes in: "I may be a frightful reactionary, but I think that all you have to do for children is hire a reasonable nanny and put them down for Eaton."

These views are beautifully borne out by the fact that we as readers know that while this conversation is occurring, poor little five year old Patrick is sitting miserably on the stairs, waiting for his mother to come and comfort him after having lived the worst day in his young life. But she never does come.

After reading this book I held Iggy closer and cuddled him tighter, and was reluctant to let go of him even so that he could sleep in his own bed. What a devastation it is when love is withheld from a child, and what an inevitability it surely is when that child subsequently grows to become an adult who is capable of living only on the very edges of society.

Cons: I am hard-pressed to find them, though I have given this just shy of 5 stars because its subject matter is so very dark. I was left after reading this feeling shell-shocked, and now that I have read the second one too, that feeling is only enhanced.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Sunday Salon - e-readers



Another reason I need to stop buying hard-copy books for a while: I just ordered a new Kindle from Amazon. I already own one - the original Kindle, from several years ago - but it is no longer functional. I tried to take it on our recent trip but after charging it just before we left, I found it had already run out of battery power by the time I took it out on the plane. So I didn't use it once, the entire trip. This was incredibly frustrating; whilst I had brought several hard-copy books with me, I was also deeply engrossed in another book on my Kindle, and I couldn't access it except on my phone, and even then I had to wait to access it until we reached a location with wi-fi.

We have an iPad, and we traveled with it. When it was first purchased, it was kinda-sorta 'my' iPad - I was the one who had really pushed for one. I downloaded the Kindle app and thought I was good to go. But that lasted oh, all of five minutes. Bibliohubby's home computer is a clunky old beast that takes a good half hour to churn into action, so unless he is doing something substantial, the iPad has (understandably) become his electronic gadget of choice. I don't begrudge him this, particularly as I have a flashy Macbook Pro which I bought just before little Iggy was born, about two years ago now. But a 13-inch laptop is not a handy bedtime reading companion, especially when much of my reading is done after lights-out, and I am trying to cause minimal disruption to the other occupant(s) in bed. Of course the iPad has also been co-opted by Iggy. Anyone with a child will know that Apple devices are like crack cocaine to children. On our trip we downloaded several episodes of Curious George, Iggy's favourite show, to the iPad, and this is how we lulled him to sleep on flight after flight. Very useful, but again, not terribly conducive to fulfilling my reading needs.

I thought I might purchase either a (functioning) dedicated e-reader or a tablet with e-reader functionality on our trip. Initially what I really wanted was an iPad Mini (confession: I'm a bit of an Apple junkie. I can't walk past an Apple store without wanting to buy a new iPod or a new accessory, even though I have plenty of both). But I was a little concerned that it wouldn't take long before the same fate that befell 'my' iPad would also befall the Mini. So I decided to do some considered research before making a purchase. Here is the list of what I was looking for in my device:

  • good e-reader capability (goes without saying);
  • a backlight of some kind so that I can read at night without disturbing Bibliohubby, and whilst breastfeeding baby number two when she comes along;
  • a backlight that is relatively easy on my eyes and does not disturb my sleep (I know, it's a lot to ask);
  • ability to switch from black-on-grey to white-on-black writing, and to alter size of letters, brightness etc;
  • good battery power;
  • easy charging;
  • a touchscreen;
  • ability to use Kindle app and / or access Kindle e-books (vital as I already have a Kindle library);
  • ideally, the device itself should be pretty, and have colour capability;
  • also ideally, I would also be able to access limited non e-reader apps - such as Goodreads, Blogger etc, so that I could do all book-related things on the one device.
Here are the conclusions I came to:

  • There are a confusing number of dedicated e-readers on the market today. Even if one decides on a Nook, or a Kobo, or a Kindle, deciding which unit to purchase within the suite of products available under the umbrella each of those brands is in itself confusing. In Canada, I was tempted by the Kobo. The Kobo Glo seemed to have what I was looking for in terms of touchscreen and backlight, but when I caught sight of the Kobo Mini I was seduced by its size (bigger than an iPhone, smaller than your typical e-reader). Of course, the Kobo Mini doesn't have a backlight, so that was that. In the States, I liked the display for the Nook in Barnes & Noble and might have been sold on one, especially as the available covers were gorgeous - vintage New Yorker cartoons, etc. But customer service was awful and then I heard that Barnes & Noble might soon be following Borders to liquidation land (sniff!). And the Nook, too, came in so many sizes and varieties that I couldn't commit to any one of them. 
  • Buying a dedicated e-reader, for the most part, restricts you to reading and purchasing e-books from the online bookshop affiliated with that e-reader. That means that I was not going to be able to use a Nook or a Kobo and continue to read my Kindle books, or purchase from Amazon's Kindle store. Some e-readers allow you to download books in other formats onto the e-reader from a computer, but I wanted the more direct, user-friendly ability to be able to purchase and download with one click from my e-reader itself.
  • Almost all e-reader brands now also have colour versions available with internet access - but these are actually tablets, rather than dedicated e-readers. So what was the difference between purchasing one of these and purchasing an iPad Mini?
  • I then came across this excellent e-reader comparison on ChamberFour, which strongly asserts that the iPad and iPad Mini outclass all other tablets. I read that with relief because at least I could now disregard all tablets in the e-reader brands, so the Kindle Fire (which had been tempting me) was no longer an option.
  • It has been widely reported recently that the kind of light emitted by gadgets such as iPads, smart phones and laptop computers interfere with your sleep. This makes sense to me - when I turn my iPhone on at night to read it takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust, and those few minutes can be quite painful. Apparently the effect is similar to daylight and sends the same signals to the brain, making it harder to resume sleeping after using a device that emits this kind of light.
  • I love so many things about the iPad Mini. Bibliohubby teases me that I'm like Goldilocks - my iPhone is too small, the iPad is too big, but the iPad Mini is ju-ust right! It's true! And in addition to its perfect size, I love the look of it, I love its functionality, I love that it is in the 'same family' as my other devices which means that, if I purchased one, I could use the same charger across the board, for my phone, my reader, my laptop - so much easier than carrying multiple chargers on flights. BUT: it is twice as expensive as dedicated e-readers and it didn't seem to be much cheaper in duty free or in North America than it is in Australia. Not worth buying on the trip. And I couldn't stop thinking about what would happen if I did buy it: soon I will have two children. Next trip, they will both have their own favourite shows. And their own favourite games. Yup - it would be co-opted. And did I really need access to the internet on my reading device? I do after all have a phone and a laptop, both of which can be used for that purpose. Sure, it would be convenient, but if the cost is losing control of the device down the track then that convenience is lost.
  • Unlike the iPad Mini, which emits the sleep-interrupting light, it started to sound like the Kindle Paperwhite had devised a new kind of backlight, which was easier on the eyes and, potentially, easier on our sleep. I read this entry at Chamber Four about why someone who had always been anti-Kindle ended up buying a Kindle Paperwhite and I was intrigued.
  • I have been an Amazon user since day dot. Seriously, well before it was a publicly listed company (one of my major regrets is not buying shares the day they announced on their homepage that they were going public). When I was a young undergraduate student, I used to trawl Amazon and write reviews. This was in the early '90s, folks. I know that people are anti-Amazon for various reasons including their DRM scheme (heavy rights restrictions on digital content). But I have a Kindle library and an Amazon loyalty and the reality is, I will keep using them and I love the Kindle app too much to change to another e-book-buying platform. I especially love the fact that the Kindle app keeps my place in whatever book I'm reading so that if I put down my iPhone and pick up the iPad, I can keep reading from the same place I left off and vice versa. I also love the highlighting feature, which has become increasingly useful as I have started writing reviews. So when it came down to it, I needed something that was Kindle-compatible.
  • The Kindle Paperwhite is more expensive in its international version but it is still half the price of an iPad Mini. It has a touchscreen as well as a backlight. The battery power is supposed to be great - much better than the iPad's. And the backlight is easier on the eyes. And... (hopefully) it wouldn't be co-opted by my family members.
And there you go! Decision made. But I didn't end up making my purchase on our trip. I was too overwhelmed by the choices on offer and by my own churning thought processes, and too underwhelmed by the cost differentiation.

Since returning to Australia and during this late stage of pregnancy, when I am waking up every single night restless and needing to read before getting back to sleep again, I have been using my iPhone at night and the small bright screen is driving me crazy. So just the other day, I bit the bullet. I ordered an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. And I am so excited about it.

I lost out on access to other apps, but I got, more or less, everything else that I wanted. And then I came across this excellent site, and discovered that I could even prettify my Kindle! So I have now ordered my Paperwhite and some artwork for it, and I am awaiting the arrival of both with great anticipation. I will post pictures and let you know what I think when it is up and working.

In the meantime: I posted this because in my search for the perfect e-reader for me I found that it was incredibly helpful to read about the experiences of other people who had been on the same journey. It's a vast, confusing landscape out there. I hope this does help someone.

Anyone care to share their own e-reader travails? What do you use to download and read e-books?

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Derek B Miller - Norwegian by Night

I have to confess something shameful: I would not usually have picked up this book because the name of the author, Derek B Miller, for me evokes the image of a crass kind of stereotypical American male - over-confident, overweight, over-loud. He sounds to me like the kind of writer who would pen thrillers in which there is less-than-credible action on every page, and none of the characters develop, but all of them pull together at the end for the protection of the American way. 

Grossly unfair of me.

I took up the book on the recommendation of a friend and was immediately intrigued when I learned it was set in Norway.  Last winter Bibliohubby and I became deeply engrossed in the first season of Danish television series The Killing, and I have since developed a taste for Scandinavian crime fiction. Although Derek B Miller is American, he currently lives in Norway and has lived in Europe for many years. With this book he pulls off the twin feats of writing convincingly in the genre of Scandinavian crime fiction and creating a multi-faceted all-American protagonist. I found myself inevitably picturing The Killing's enigmatic Sarah Lund during scenes that were focused on Police Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard, at the same time as I warmed to 82-year old ex-Marine Sheldon Horowitz, who feels entirely out of place in Norway because he is both American and Jewish.

Don't get me wrong; the book is a thriller, through and through. It is a page-turner with an archetypal villain who is blessed with no shades of grey. Enver's first person account of raping the woman who ends up bearing his child is disturbing not just because of the pleasure he derives from it - when he finds her hiding alongside 'a soft little one' he believes it to be a gift from God - but because of his interpretation of the sounds she makes as he rapes her, some of which he believes are sounds of 'confused pleasure'. Charming.

But Norwegian by Night is more than this, too.

Sheldon Horowitz has moved to Norway from Manhatten after the death of his wife to spend time with his granddaughter Rhea, who has just announced she is pregnant with her first child to her Norwegian husband Lars. Rhea is convinced that Sheldon is suffering from a dementia which causes him to believe that he was a sniper during the Korean war, rather than a mere clerk as he had informed his family upon his return. One day when Rhea and Lars are out of the house Sheldon witnesses an awful crime in which the mother of a small boy is killed. He hides the boy to protect him from the fate that has already befallen his mother, and then, sceptical of the integrity of the police in a country that is foreign to him, Sheldon decides to run away with the boy rather than turn him in. So begins a journey across the lakes and wooded hills and vales of Oslo and surrounding areas. Anticipation and excitement builds as the police close in on the perpetrators, who themselves are closing in on the summer cabin to which Rhea and Lars have retreated, and to which Sheldon and the boy are also headed.

The tale is told from various perspectives and it moves at pace, although Sheldon's flashbacks to Korea, and his imaginary flashbacks to the war in Vietnam, where his son Saul (Rhea's father) was killed many years before, have the effect of slowing things up from time to time. The flashbacks to Vietnam in particular are jarring because we are aware, as readers, that they are entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, for the most part these scenes work, largely because the theme we are asked to explore alongside the 'action' is the veracity of memory. As readers we know that Rhea believes her father is suffering from dementia, and we know that Sheldon's wife believed it too. But we are asked to decide for ourselves whether or not his memories are true, a decision we must make based on Sheldon's actions and the inner workings of his mind, which include these flashbacks to war as the inevitable side-effects of an ex-Marine going undercover and on-the-run in a foreign country with a boy whose language he does not share. The only time I resented these interruptions to the flow of story was towards the end, when Miller had expertly pulled together the various elements so that Rhea and Lars, the boy, Sheldon, the bad guys and the police were all descending on the summer house at the same time. I wanted to know what was going to happen, dammit! When the narrative moved from this fantastic set-up to another Sheldon flashback, I literally sighed outloud and put the book down. Very frustrating. But for the most part I think the device worked.

Miller writes extremely well and in spite of the one-sided villain, this is more than your run-of-the-mill thriller. It is an exploration of culture, the after-effects of war - World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Balkan War - and the effects of grief and age on the mind. And it's a pretty great story, to boot. I shed a small tear on the last page, because by then I cared about the boy who is central to this book, and I cared about Sheldon. It doesn't surprise me to learn that this ending (don't worry, no spoilers here) came to Miller as he waited in hospital for the birth of his son.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5. A great read.

Pros / favourite passages: Miller's use of language is lovely and evocative; the landscape through which Sheldon escapes and the bizarre (yet brilliant) tactics he uses to evade police and bad guys alike were painted in vibrant colours in my mind. And Sheldon himself is a wonderful hero - a father whose grief at losing his own son has never quite left him, and whose strategic brilliance is inevitably compromised by the weaknesses of his ageing body. I also loved the occasional wisdom Sheldon spouts, even if most of his musing is never shared, but restricted to his own mind:

"Only the educated stop to look for words - having enough to occasionally misplace them."

On his wife Mabel's approach to ageing: "Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again, and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. Those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much lost love and not fear it - who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves - those are our saints. Ir is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs."

On whether or not his memories are true: "It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing - from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowed the present and past to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention."

Cons: Occasionally the flashbacks to Vietnam, in particular, dragged on a bit.




They arrived!


We have been back in the country for several weeks now, and I have to admit I was secretly worried that my lovely shipment of books from Powell's in Portland would not arrive. But here they are! I'm so excited I don't even want to throw away the box! My very own hard copy of Rules of Civility, which I can't wait to re-read. A beautiful rough-edge edition of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, one of my favourites. A lovely paperback copy of Little Bee, another fave. And two new books: The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, an Italian writer, and Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, a Norwegian writer. I seem to be on a bit of a European kick at the moment.

Don't you think getting packages of books in the mail is one of the happiest things that can happen in a regular day? I just love it, although after our trip I need to put the brakes on: no more book-buying for a little while, I have plenty to read! Let's see how long I can keep that one up...

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists

I loved this book. I bought it in Portland, at Powell's Bookstore, which is now amongst my favourite bookstores in the world, where this was displayed prominently in the fiction section and classified as an 'Old Favourite'. It was published in 2011, so really it's not so old; but I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Presumably if I lived in the United States I would have. It was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times Bestseller.

Rachman is a journalist who has been both a foreign correspondent and an editor of The International Herald Tribune. This book is loosely based on the heritage of that paper. It is set largely in Rome, and describes the lives of ex-pat journos working on the paper whilst leading ordinary human existences in Europe.

For me, the astonishing success of this book is the fact that Rachman pulls off a novel about the newspaper industry which tells simultaneously the story of the historical rise and fall of a particular paper, and the story of the journalists and staffers employed by that paper at a given point in time (the present, as it were). Each chapter title consists of a headline, and each chapter focuses in on the life of one of the staffers. But at the end of each chapter is another mini-chapter which follows the historical life of the paper from the 1950s to its demise in the present day, as it changes hands, as its publishers grow old and hand the paper over to the next generation, as the print media environment undergoes major shifts and changes. By the end, we have in effect read two books in one. As Christopher Buckley of the New York Times Book Review says, "I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off." For such a young man, Rachman is extraordinarily accomplished.

My grandfather worked in print media (magazines), and newspapers and magazines (as well as books) were ever-present in my European childhood home. The newspaper we read as a family was The International Herald Tribune. So I suppose I was always going to be a sucker for this book, also because the best job I have ever had was working in newspapers. I am a lawyer, not a journalist, but working as an editorial lawyer alongside editors and writers seemed to fulfil several of my career ambitions at once and I absolutely loved it. I loved the buzz of the newsroom floor and the frantic rush as the print deadline approached each day, and I loved the fact that history hung tangibly in the air. It was easily possible, looking around the newsroom, to envisage the olden days of typewriters and the haze of cigarette smoke. After being taken on a tour of the offsite printing presses (a memory I will always treasure), it was possible, also, to imagine what it used to be like in the building I worked in, when the printing presses sat in the basement (which now houses a library), and staff throughout the building could hear and feel them running, and when it was in fact possible to run downstairs and yell "Stop the presses!" and have that mean something.

Losing that job to the same fate that Rachman describes in his book (financial struggles of the paper at the hands of a rapidly changing media environment, and a re-structure that had editorial legals outsourced to an external law firm) was heart-breaking, and I found reaching the end of this book similarly emotional.

Rachman is a brilliant writer. I became deeply absorbed in every chapter of the book. He writes extraordinarily well in a cacophony of voices - young girl, older woman, old men, younger men. All perspectives were convincing. Not an easy feat for any writer. I started caring about each character almost as soon as a new chapter started. Leo Ott, the wealthy entrepeneur who started the paper as a labour of love for a woman who would never know, even after his death, just how much she was adored. Arthur Gopal, the obituary writer whose job is unimportant to him whilst he is in the company of his young daughter Pickle, who reminds him of the more visceral joys in life, but whose life changes irrevocably in the most heart-wrenching way. Winston Cheung, the rookie journo trying to make a go of it reporting from Cairo, only to be bulldozed by veteran hack Snyder. Ornella de Montericchi, a woman whose lonely life gains meaning from her methodical reading of every word in every edition of the paper, and whose world collapses when the paper does, too. And finally Oliver Ott, the grandson of the paper's founder, whose only friend is a dog by the name of Schopenhauer.

It was interesting to read this novel so soon after reading Egan's a visit from the goon squad, which I enjoyed immensely but failed to wholeheartedly connect with on account of the unusual and disjointed way the story was told. Rachman too uses a method that might have readers proclaiming the book to be a series of short stories rather than a novel, but because the protagonists of all of his stories occupy the same space (the newspaper) and the same narrative present, they are united in a way that Egan's characters were not. And in any case, the protagonist of this novel is actually the newspaper itself, a device that works wonderfully well.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I loved it. Of course, it may have resonated with me more than with most people, so perhaps take that into account if you are considering picking it up.

Cons: The last chapter ends with an event that is brutal and shocking and unexpected. I think the brutality here is intended by Rachman to provide a mirror image of some sort between life itself and the life of the paper - so that the impact of the death of the paper - on the characters who populate it, but also as a deeply significant cultural development - is felt keenly even by readers without a newspaper background or a particular interest in print media. It works, but it is deeply unsettling and I think some readers might be put off by it.

Note: The edition I read has an interview at the end between Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell, a hero of mine. What a fabulous bonus! This is a terrific interview and such a worthwhile read. So many great observations were made by these erudite men in conversation, on the topic of writing, in particular.

For example: "Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives." Beautiful! And the two men then proceed to discuss whether or not this sympathy for fictional characters translates into greater sympathy for people in life. A great defence of fiction. 


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth

I have read nine of his 12 novels and several of his short stories, so it is fair to say that I am a McEwan fan. One of the things I love about his writing is the fact that, like my favourite writer Paul Auster, he is concerned in his novels both with telling a compelling story and with the intellectual exploration of ideas. Certainly Sweet Tooth delivers on both fronts, although for me this is not his best book.

Kurt Anderson of the NY Times Sunday Book Review writes that McEwan's work falls into two distinct periods: "His early stories and novels were all cool post-1960s perversity, a high-end parade of deadpan macabre and kink and sideshow eccentricity: ghastly death, corpses and butchery, bestiality, incest and pedophilia, insanity, dwarves. But since he turned 50, around the turn of the century, he’s published lovely historical fiction about the disastrous sexual misunderstandings of youth (“Atonement,” “On Chesil Beach”), and contemporary fiction about an ­alternative-energy researcher (“Solar”) and a deeply sane, happily married surgeon (“Saturday”). It’s as if Johnny Rotten had changed into Bono." (emphasis mine, I love that last line)

I agree with Anderson and must say that from a personal perspective, I have tended to enjoy his earlier novels better - save for Atonement, which is one of his masterpieces.

One of the things that usually characterises a McEwan novel is the major event or disturbance which upsets or ends each book. This is so much a part of what I have come to expect from him that I was surprised, when I got more than halfway through Sweet Tooth, to find that nothing alarming had yet happened. When I read Atonement I had to put the book down at one stage in order to process the disturbing series of events he had outlined. When I finished The Comfort of Strangers I had to physically put the book out of sight so that I could turn my mind to something else instead of allowing it to come back, again and again, to the horrific scenes McEwan is so very good at describing. As my mother says, one generally needs to bolster oneself before picking up one of his novels.

Sweet Tooth is different. Anderson calls it McEwan's "most cheerful book by far", which says something about the rest of his work given that this is a book about espionage during the Cold War.

Selena Frome is a voracious reader and lover of books. Because she is also, by fluke, rather good at mathematics, her mother encourages her to read maths at Cambridge rather than English at a lesser university. Surprisingly, after earning a rather poor degree, Serena is then recruited by MI5, where she is soon assigned a case. Operation Sweet Tooth involves the confidential funding by MI5 of writers who, the Government hopes, will one day become known for works that espouse anti-communist values, and Tom Haley is the writer assigned to Selena. They fall in love and have an affair that destroys any hope she has of career success - not that this was a real possibility anyway in the intensely chauvinistic environment of MI5 during the 1970s. The love affair is central to the book and we are kept wondering until the very end whether it is a relationship with any hope of survival.

Like many of McEwan's novels, it is difficult to review Sweet Tooth properly without giving too much away. Only at the end is one rewarded with the signature McEwan playfulness, and the twist in this novel changes the reader's outlook on the whole book. It is a testament to his skill as a writer that the giveaway in the first paragraph does not in fact tell us much about the ending:

"My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost 40 years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn't return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing."

In some ways this is actually a very quiet book. Nothing much happens, except that Selena drifts, with an unsatisfying lack of agency, in and out of a number of flawed and sexually questionable relationships, including the one at the start of the book which gives her the entry intro MI5. A few times I thought we were being set up for a twist that would take us in the direction of a more traditional spy novel - for example when Serena, on a 'mission' involving the thorough cleaning of a safe house, finds a small piece of paper upon which are written the initials of her ex-lover (now dead) and the obscure island where he died. But none of this leads to any excitement or intrigue; in fact, the opposite is true. The explanation ends up being so banal that I suspect McEwan was setting us up deliberately in order to thwart our expectations. Indeed, espionage in the '70s is portrayed overall as a rather dull endeavour. I think providing a realistic description of what is essentially a bureaucratic department might have been one of McEwan's objectives in writing the book. He has previously written another spy novel, The Innocent, and whilst that also does not unfold as one would expect - it's McEwan, of course it doesn't - it does contain the anticipated hit of violence. Whereas this book, really, is not a spy novel at all; it is a novel about the power of writing and the motivations for reading, and the intersections between truth and fiction. For example, Tom Haley's short stories are summarised in some detail throughout the book and both we and Serena get to know Tom largely through his fiction. This idea of a writer whose life and character are inextricably intertwined with his writing in a way that makes it impossible to distinguish between the writing and the writer, is central to the novel.

Of course, the interest of any voracious reader will be immediately piqued by a protagonist whose love of books defines her, and a plot in which one of the consistent ideas explored is that of an ideological war fought on the cultural front. I was fascinated by the descriptions of cultural warfare, as well as by the many passages on reading and writing, and what it means to be a writer. My interest in these subjects is what kept me reading.

However, without wanting to reveal the ending, I was left with mixed feelings after finishing the book. I felt that McEwan had been playing with us all along, and moreover, that he had been playing with us in a way that he had explicitly promised not to. I think he had a lot of fun with this one, which is perhaps why Anderson can accurately describe it as 'cheerful'. But I don't know whether to feel betrayed or inspired by his cleverness at the expense of us, his dear readers.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5. He is a brilliant writer, but this didn't quite achieve the heights of earlier books such as Atonement or Enduring Love.

Pros / Favourite passages: There are so many noteworthy passages here, about reading and writing. A few for your enjoyment:

Serena describing herself as a reader: "My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end. Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. Conrad was beyond my consideration, as were most stories by Kipling and Hemingway. Nor was I impressed by reputations. I read anytihng I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment." And then later: "I caused amusement among my Newnham friends studying English when I told them that Valley of the Dolls was as good as anything Jane Austen ever wrote."

Serena on what it is to be a writer: "As I lay in the dak, waiting for sleep, I thought I was beginning to grasp something about invention. As a reader, a speed-reader, I took it for granted, it was a process I never troubled myself with. You pulled a book from the shelf and there was an invented, peopled world, as obvious as the one you lived in. But now... I thought I had the measure of the artifice, or I almost had it. Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat trasforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of the parts." She then goes through the various elements of Tom's real life that make their way into his writing, followed by: "At one level it was obvious enough how these separate parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into something cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious."

An excerpt from one of Tom's stories: "There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust."

Cons: I have read some reviews of this book in which McEwan is praised for writing so effectively from the perspective of a female protagonist. I was surprised to read these reviews because there are places in this book where the female voice really failed. For example, early on, when Serena is wondering whether a man in whom she has a romantic interest might be gay, as one of her ex-boyfriends turned out to be, she is described as being so interested in nevertheless pursuing a physical relationship with him that she believes she could be happy if he simply took care of her needs, even if it was impossible for her to do the same for him. I believe this is a very masculine point of view. I don't know of many women who seek out their own pleasure so selfishly that it would not trouble them if they were unable to satisfy the man they loved. Surely her pride would be hurt! More than that, surely her self-esteem would be severely shaken by the knowledge that the man she loved could not love her back in the same way. McEwan's very straight, rational writing does not consistently or adequately convey the emotional inner-world of a woman who engages in several romantic relationships throughout the course of the book, and yet these romances are central to the plot. However, without giving too much away, I can say that these criticisms are essentially met and answered in the last chapter of the novel. I'm not sure whether this excuses him entirely, but it does give McEwan a way out of having to worry too profoundly about his weaknesses in characterising a complex woman.

Book club pick: This was the first book picked for my new book club. It was a fun way to start my literary relationship with these woman. I was the most positive of all of us about the book - possibly because I write as well as read, which means that McEwan's musings on the subject probably interested me on a deeper level. The others did not like it, but it provoked much interesting conversation, and for that reason I would recommend it as a book club read.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Where in the World is... Your Comfy Reading Spot?


This month's Where in the World Are You Reading? was hosted by Kelly, here. Unfortunately I was running a little bit late to enter this one officially, but I thought I would post about it anyway.

Like almost everyone else, I love to read in bed, and will try to seize a few moments each night to read there before sleep knocks me out. But my other favourite comfy place is this beautiful leather chair, currently located in my study at home:


My parents gave me the chair as a congratulatory gift when I graduated from high school. It was custom-made in England and then flown to Munich, which is where I grew up. Since then, it has come with me wherever I've moved, so it dominated the small spaces I had to myself in residence at University in Ontario, where I did my undergraduate degrees. It dignified the otherwise rather uninteresting space that was my first solo apartment in Alberta, while I was doing my Masters. And it has moved from home to home with me in Sydney. Whilst sitting in this chair I have studied for countless exams - in psychology, philosophy, history, English, sociology, anthropology and law; I have researched endless essays in the aforementioned subject matters; and I have read a huge amount of fiction.

Our family is spread all over the world, but when I sit in this chair, no matter how far I am from my parents, I feel like they are right here surrounding me with their love. This chair is like a giant hug.

What is your favourite comfy place to read?

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness


I had never heard of this book, but it caught my eye when I first walked into Chapters in Toronto where it was prominently displayed. I studied psychology as one half of a double major in an undergraduate degree, and was always particularly interested in neuroscience and how the brain worked, so when I read the blurb on the jacket I was fascinated: a girl on the brink of successful adulthood, having graduated from college and started work as a journalist at the New York Post, wakes up one day to find a month of her life is missing from her memory, and discovers that she had quite literally descended into madness during that month. As a concept, it's terrifying but also gripping. As a true story, it is chilling. I am generally not much of a non-fiction reader - I don't mind it, as such, but as I prefer fiction and there are so many books to read, I don't often find myself thrown off course into the world of non-fiction. But this tempted me away from my usual fare.

The first part of the book is enthralling, I couldn't put it down. After becoming convinced that she has been bitten by a bed bug, and that her apartment is in fact overrun by bugs (in spite of evidence from an exterminator that this is not the case) journalist Susannah Cahalan finds herself behaving strangely out of character, - forgetting to prepare for important meetings, caring so little about important interviews that she neglects to do any research beforehand, snooping on her boyfriend's computer, crying at the office for no discernible reason. And then it gets worse. Her speech becomes impaired and she starts having seizures, from which she has never previously suffered. She lashes out at people she loves and imagines she can hear them saying vicious things about her. She starts to lose herself. And when her family seeks medical assistance on her behalf, the doctors all turn her away - one of them, in spite of Cahalan's assertion that her alcohol intake, whilst not ideal, is limited to two glasses of wine a night, dismisses her as a young alcoholic suffering from withdrawal.

Eventually Cahalan's mother commits her to hospital, where she is housed on the epilepsy ward, and where doctor after doctor tries and fails to identify her symptoms and diagnose her with anything beyond full psychiatric breakdown. This forms part two of the book, where Cahalan's journalistic training really comes into play. The book continues to be interesting, but not in the un-put-downable manner of part one. Cahalan herself doesn't remember the month she spent in hospital, so she has had to re-create the sequence of events through her parents' journal entries, interviews with doctors and video taken of her whilst in hospital. And because Cahalan is a journalist and this is a book about a medical phenomenon, the text becomes increasingly peppered with detailed scientific information about what was happening in her body and in her brain. I was quite pleased to be re-visiting and re-learning some basic anatomy and functions of the brain, but I suspect many readers will find these scientific passages to be rather dull, and certainly they do not pull the reader in like the earlier vivid descriptions of a normal person in the throws of a breakdown. The reading was slower here, and continued to be so for me until the end of the book, when a new doctor finally diagnoses Cahalan with a disease that is only just becoming known, and she receives treatment to ease her towards gradual recovery.

But the thing that will probably be my take-home point from this book is only discussed briefly at the end: the illness Cahalan suffered from, in which the body essentially attacks the brain, may well be responsible for many incidents recorded throughout history of people being 'possessed' by evil spirits. The behaviour recorded on video while Cahalan was in hospital is not unlike that experienced by Regan, the possessed child in The Exorcist: at times she spoke in a voice much deeper than her own; she occasionally moved suddenly from a prone position to sit fully upright in her bed, arms rigidly out in front of her; she would yell expletives and attack those close to her. And other people who have been diagnosed with the same disease - many of whom are children - have been known to crab-walk, to speak in foreign or unusual accents, and so on. It would be all too easy, I imagine, when faced with the apparent disappearance of a person one knows from their own body and the appearance instead of a collection of such unexplained symptoms, to interpret the resulting state as a spiritual evil. I find this fascinating. I would love to read a book that took this as a starting point and compared reports of demonic possession throughout the ages with what we now know is symptomatic of the brain being under attack. It takes the sting out of those nasty Paranormal Activity movies, doesn't it? God I hate those films, they haunt me for months afterwards. And did you know there is a full-time exorcist on staff at The Vatican? Possession is a notion that has captivated people forever, and it makes such beautiful sense to me that it all comes back to the brain. It makes me wish I had pursued neuroscience at a higher level, to better understand this kind of thing.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. This is a book that should appeal to most people in the sense that it describes the true story of a regular person 's literal descent into madness - something that touches a vulnerable, fearful place in all of us. But because much of it is necessarily journalistic and scientific, it is not as absorbing as I had hoped it would be based on the first few chapters.

I should add, however, that Cahalan's motive in writing this book is broader than I have suggested above. Because this illness is still relatively unknown, she hopes that giving a public voice to her own experience might allow for the earlier diagnosis of future sufferers. Had Cahalan not been correctly diagnosed, it is likely she would have died. The psychotic state into which she entered eventually gave way to a catatonic one, and some of those affected by this illness do not recover fully if they are not diagnosed early. Cahalan describes towards the end of the book a moment that touches her deeply, when she receives a letter from a father whose daughter exhibited symptoms similar to Cahalan's. Had it not been for the fact that this father had read an article Cahalan had published in the New York Post detailing her own experiences, his daughter would not have been diagnosed and treated, and in all likelihood she would have died. But because he had read Cahalan's story, he was able to raise the alarm with his daughter's doctors, and she was saved. So I feel that assessing this book on the grounds of pure literary merit or enjoyment of reading is unfair. It is a book that should be read regardless, if only to spread awareness of anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis (phew, what a mouthful!).



Sunday, March 3, 2013

Sunday Salon - do female writers get the short end of the stick?


Apologies to those of you who have read versions of this discussion on other blogs or have followed a similar debate in the newspapers - this will likely be a watered-down re-hash of the arguments made in those forums. In which case, why am I choosing to raise the subject as a Sunday Salon topic?

I mentioned a week or so ago that I had noticed recently that my list of favourite writers was significantly skewed towards the male end of the spectrum. As a female writer myself, this worries me, especially because there is no easy answer as to why this should be the case.

Recent research, though, has shown that I am not alone in my gender bias. Although women buy the majority of novels, and whilst approximately the same number of men and women are published each year, it seems that women are vastly underrepresented in award-wins and reviews.

Here are some statistics, gathered by Bookseller & Publisher in 2012 and published that year in Crikey, which demonstrate a decided gender bias towards male authors having their books reviewed in influential newspapers, magazines and literary journals. In Australia, 70% of the authors reviewed in the Weekend Australian in 2011 were male, and of the authors reviewed in the now defunct Australian Literary Review in 2011, 81% were male. In the same year, The London Review of Books reviewed 504 males to only 117 female writers, whilst The New York Review of Books reviewed 627 men to only 143 women.

This pattern stands for other years, too. And those numbers should shock all of us.

From a personal perspective, it makes me wonder whether I am more inclined towards male writers because I read more of them, or because I read more about them in the literary pages. I don't think the former is true. I tend to read a fair spectrum of literature including relatively equal numbers of male and female writers. But it is certainly true that I am probably influenced by reviews I read, and if it were the case that, say, The Guardian online over-represented male writers in its positive reviews, that might subconsciously influence my preferences. And of course most of us are probably influenced to some extent by the short-lists of writers chosen for annual literary prizes. When writers receive such prestigious public accolades it is hardly surprising that the rest of us therefore assume their literary worth must be higher than that of other writers.

But none of this explains why prizes are awarded more often to male writers, or why male writers are more frequently reviewed. The statistics are particularly puzzling given that women make up the majority of the readers, unless it is also true that more men than women sit on the judging panels of literary prizes, and more men than women write the reviews. I have yet to see those numbers.

My guess is that all of this comes back to the invisible standards that still form the backbone of our society, much as we like to pretend things have changed. As a whole, society still elevates certain subject matters above others, and art that concerns itself with the preferred subject matters is considered to be 'high-brow'. Broadly speaking, these subject matters are what we might also call 'public' issues, and they include politics, war, philosophy, religion, sport, education. In contrast, art that concerns itself with the private sphere is classified as low-brow, or 'popular'. The subject matters that fall under the rubric of the private sphere include romance, sex, sexuality, childbirth and child-rearing, relationships. Laundry. Traditionally,  the private sphere is seen as a female space, whilst the public sphere is assumed to be inhabited largely by men.

When was the last time you can remember a romance novel winning one of the major literary prizes?

Tara Moss, who has written eloquently on this subject, quotes Dr. Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former editor of Australian Book Review and a former member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, as saying: ‘Most of the unconscious bias I have seen in the literary world, and I have seen a great deal, has been to do with the male-centered values of a dominant culture whose values most people wrongly think are universal and gender-neutral.’

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that literary prizes are still generally handed out to writers who deal eloquently with traditionally male-centred values, even if this is not a conscious bias by the judging panel, and that prominent reviews, in turn, are given to those books which critics believe may stand a chance of winning a prize.

The last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction were Jennifer Egan, for a disjointed novel on the abstract theme of time, and Paul Harding, for a novel about death and dying and time.

The last two winners of the Man Booker Prize were Hilary Mantel, for a novel about the political world of Thomas Cromwell, and Julian Barnes, for a story concerned with how our notion of selfhood changes over time.

The philosophical discussion of time is clearly a winning subject matter these days, ding ding ding! Take note, novelists! (And don't think it has escaped my notice that three out of four winning writers cited above are female...)

Of course, it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that the private sphere is female and the public is male, but the vestigal belief that these distinctions still exist appears to hover prominently in our subconscious. Jonathan Franzen deals with relationships and love and romance; but he does so in the context of political discourse, and in a voice that is less overtly emotional than the voice which dominates genre novels that are classified as 'romance'. Margaret Atwood also writes about relationships and love and romance, but she frequently does so (these days) in the context of philosophical discourse about the future. Both writers grapple with the intersection of private and public values, and I would argue that this is largely the case with most good writers. Certainly Egan, Harding, Mantel and Barnes all deal intimately with the minutiae of people's private lives at the same time as they tackle big picture philosophical and political themes. To assert that there was ever really a strict divide between the public and the private in art is to take a limited view of it; and to put any weight whatsoever on 'high-brow' versus 'low-brow' classifications is, these days, to miss out on a wealth of good reads.

Furthermore, there is no reason why a discussion about motherhood could not in and of itself also be considered inherently political. Or why men would or should be less interested, these days, in that discussion than they are in other political topics. The traditional roles and identifiers of men and women in society these days are themselves dissolving into one another.

But it is true, for example, that I read a book by Marian Keyes on holiday recently and it didn't occur to me to review it here. Why? Because I viewed it as indulgent holiday reading, something a bit lighter, a bit frivolous. How unfair to Keyes, who is in fact a very good writer. Although had I read a crime novel by a male writer I think my instinct would have been the same.

So what to do about all of this?

Inspired by recent discussions of this topic, some female bloggers have banded together to establish the 
Australian Women’s Writers Challenge.  I am too fickle with my reading to be able to stick to a geographically limited challenge such as this, unfortunately, but I am personally going to make a conscious effort to read a wider variety of female writers this year and to try to ensure that I assess them fairly alongside the male writers I read.

I promise to keep you updated as the year progresses, but in the meantime I would be interested in your views: DO female writers get the short end of the stick, or is all of this just a lot of hullabaloo about nothing?