Mohsin Hamid - How to Get FILTHY RICH in Rising Asia

Finally, finally, here it is - the review I promised you so many months ago.

I stumbled across this book by accident. I loved Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist but had no idea Hamid had published other books since. I was looking for a new book to read and trawled through my go-to book-related sites (which include various book blogs, Amazon, the Guardian books section, the New York Times and Goodreads). And I started hearing good things about this book with a funny title. In a Booker discussion group on Goodreads, for example, this book joined members in unanimity - they all thought it was a shoe-in for the longlist (in fact it was NOT longlisted, though Hamid has previously been on the shortlist for TRF).  When I saw that it was by Mohsin Hamid, my mind was made up and I lifted my finger for that all-important 'click' which is the simple action of purchasing a Kindle book on Amazon.

It was soon obvious this was a good choice. After reading only a few pages I was in. The story moves at a galloping pace and the portrait depicted of Pakistan is neon vivid. Bearing some initial resemblance to Aravind Adiga's book White Tiger (though that was set in India), How to Get Filthy Rich is the story of a poor boy rising to the heights of corporate success in Asia.

Hamid chooses to tell the story in the second-person, which is quite rare, and he uses an unusual conceit: the book is written as though it were a self-help book. Each chapter doles out a different piece of advice about how to transform oneself from a peasant living in an impoverished rural environment to a wealthy entrepreneur in a big city. There are chapters entitled 'Learn from a Master', 'Work for Yourself' and 'Befriend a Bureaucrat'. Hamid is heavy on the irony and much of the book is darkly comical.

Initially I was resistant to both the second-person narration and the self-help lingo, but I soon fell into the story. The thing about second-person narration is that it forces the reader to become subjectively involved in the story. It personalizes everything. You become the hero. So that when something happens to 'you', we feel like it might be happening to us. It works.

The facade of the self-help book, however, is potentially a different story. Yes, it provides Hamid with the ability to comment, at the start of each chapter, on the plight of those living in modern-day Asia, on the notion of self-help books as a genre (a genre which is parodied here with brutal accuracy), and on the notion of selfhood itself - 'the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one'. It allows him, in short, to ruminate on bigger political and philosophical issues, outside of the story he is telling at the book's core. The obvious problem with this is that it takes him (and us) outside of the story. But the conceit also allows Hamid to tell a story that is bigger than the characters. The characters are devices, in some way; their story is a synecdoche for the greater story, that of Pakistan itself.

Hamid is such an effective story teller that I was never weighed down by lofty political commentary. I was quickly caught up in the vivid coming-of-age story at the centre of the narrative, about a man (whose name we never learn), his quest for success, and the woman he has always loved. It is a tale about what it takes to succeed in a land still weighed down by a deeply entrenched class system and systemic corruption. The frequent interruptions for philosophical musings didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in retrospect, they probably enhanced it. What might seem clunky and contrived at the start becomes contextual enrichment by the end. Reviewing the book now I realize that it is about so many things - Hamid does so much, so well. This is a love story and a political story. It is a farcical self-help book. It is a book about the notion of 'self', about how fast life moves and how critical it is to seize what is important to you when you have the time to do so. It is also a book about writing and creating fiction. All of this works to keep us readers distanced, to some degree, from the characters central to the Bildungsroman around which all of this is constructed. And yet by the end I was surprised at the extent of my engagement with that story. I was so engaged, in fact, that I was moved to tears by the final scenes.

This is such an original book and, mostly, it works. Hamid is a wonderful writer. I thought of the book several times during our travels, so it has stayed with me. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, to anyone who likes a good story told in a new voice, to anyone who enjoys a bit of politics spicing up their fiction.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.

Favourite Passages: 'We are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.'

'But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you'll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.'

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.

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.