Category: 1001 books

#10 – The Master

Finally, after weeks of reading, I have finished The Master. The Irish entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, Colm Tóibín’s majestic and utterly compelling novel reads more like a series of interlinked short stories that follow the life of writer Henry James through the latter part of his life. Told in a strikingly engaging yet cold third person, the narrative, as 1001 Books states, is episodic. The fictionalized biography, like Mothers and Sons, highlights Tóibín’s unparalleled storytelling ability.

I savoured this book like sipping fine wine, reading it in small parts rather than gulping it down like a pint at the pub. I got a little further each night, slowly working my way backwards and forwards through James’s life, having never read a single one of his novels (successfully avoiding them both through my undergraduate and graduate degrees), I can still feel like I know his style, form and function simply because Tóibín is so adept at working his way into the head of a writer.

An exercise that satisfies both my own curiosity about the writer (having always been more interested in the lives of the great writers than their work itself), and leads me to an even greater understanding of the scope and structure of James’s work, The Master truly deserved its 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This book made me long for a provincial life, to buy a small piece of property in France somewhere, made me long for a time when one “moved” in intellectual circles, and spent days in conversation. Of course, I would have to be a member of the terrible upper class, and all of the other less appealing things about the fantasy, including marrying for money and the like, but hell, let me wallow in a Merchant-Ivory fantasy for a moment. Like someone always says, you never imagine your ancestors to be of the lower classes, the same goes for my imagination…

Annywaaay. Spending so much time with one book means I’m well behind in my reading for this month, but it’s been a bit hectic too, finishing one job, finding another, finishing off my next Classic Starts with what’s beginning to feel like never ending edits, and watching way too much television (damn you Jack!), there never seems to be enough time in the day.

So, to sum up, while aspects of the novel were certainly heartbreaking, the book on the whole wasn’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t highly recommend it to anyone who might care to listen to be ramble on about the genius that is Colm Tóibín.

#23 – Amsterdam

I came late to Ian McEwan, reading Atonement first, and then the only other book of his that I’ve read is Saturday. I’ve never truly delved into the backlist, until now. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998, and it’s a swift, surefooted tale that reads more like a morality play (as reviews suggest) than a straightforward novel.

The book opens with the funeral of Molly Lane. Two of her former lovers, newspaperman Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, stand by and attend the bare bones service. In the pages that follow, as the friendship between the two men fails, so to do their respective careers. Everything thus orchestrated in some way by George Lane, Molly’s widower, a powerful man they both despise.

Amsterdam, keen on detail with McEwan’s sharp eye for the intrinsic and complex minutiae of everyday, reads almost like a precursor to Saturday. A lot of detail is spent on the day-to-day activities of each of the men, trapped in a way by their own success, and the fallout from midlife failures. One of the cut-out blurbs calls the novel “chilling”, and I’d agree, both in terms of what happens (I don’t want to give it away) but also in terms of how the story is told. There’s also a level of obvious detachment from the narrator, which makes the eventual underlying moral ambiguities all the more interesting.

It’s a short novel too, thankfully, because I’ve been finding the Book A Day challenge a bit rough the past few days. Now, I’ve got to get reading for tomorrow’s installment, as I’m shooting a movie all day, I doubt I’ll get a book finished. In fact, I’m going to take tomorrow off, if that’s okay with all of you.

#3 – Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go might just be the most well crafted piece of writing I have ever read. Not a sentence, not a word, not a single piece of punctuation is misplaced or out of step. In short, it’s a bloody brilliant book.

The book tells the story of three clones: Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. Each has a particular role in their lives; their destinies so to speak. Ruth and Tommy become ‘donors’ (of what is exquisitely left to your imagination), while Kathy is a carer, someone who spends her days taking care of the donors after they’ve, well, donated.

All three grow up in an extremely cloistered way at Halisham, a private boarding school for other clone children, designed for them to express their creativity and have a well-rounded upbringing. Once they’re finished at Halisham, the three end up at a place called the Cottages, where they spend a few years becoming adults before their real jobs begin.

There is a deep sense of suspense written into the novel. It’s a page turner in the purest sense, but the plot and the chapters are so intricately developed that you don’t feel like you’re being manipulated. The book moves along so quickly that it creates a world in your head even before you realize that your imagination has taken the story over and made it into something of your own. If that makes any sense.

I know I’ve only read 3 books so far this year (well, I have read 4 but I can’t talk about the other one until it’s been published, which isn’t until March), but it’s the best book I’ve read in a long, long while. Truly deserving of its Booker nomination, and later on this year when I read The Sea, I’ll be able to compare the two—but something in my mind tells me Ishiguro will come out on top.

#63 – Tipping the Velvet

Let me get something straight, I have nothing against velvet, nor do I fear any tipping of it, but lord, this is the first book in a long, long time I really didn’t like. The story felt so contrived and soap-opera-inspired that I was bored mid-way through. And considering Sarah Waters’s epic is over 400 pages, that’s a lot of trudging to get to the end.

Generally, I love a good Victorian thriller, but this is neither thrilling nor purely Victorian. Oh, it’s chalk full of great historical tidbits—if I truly wanted to know that dildos existed in 1985, which I really didn’t need to know. And if tons of hideously cliched sex scenes get you off, well Tipping the Velvet is the book for you. Because it certainly wasn’t for me.

I don’t like it when books feel contrived. When they set out to prove a point more than tell a story. The story itself was a good one, a young girl in Victorian England leaves home when she falls in love with a music hall singer named Kitty Butler. When Kitty can’t face what life would be like coming out in that century, she betrays Nan, the protagonist, who then runs away.

A lot of other things happen to Nan before the story comes full circle toward the end as Nan joins a burgeoning socialist movement at the behest of her ‘sweetheart,’ a very noble and dedicated woman named Florence. But in the end, it felt too much like the author’s voice was interfering with Nan’s story. That characters were simply devices for her to explore the lesbian community in the 1890s, which I think is a fabulous goal, and if it felt organic, I’d be the first one to cheer from the rafters.

All in all I finished the book because it was a book club choice and I’m looking forward to debating why I hated it so much at our next meeting! After loving Fingersmith so much I was convinced I couldn’t go wrong suggesting the book, whew, how wrong was I.

Edited to add: Is a sex scene any less contrived because it takes place between women? Just because the sex in the novel is lesbian sex should I hold it to different literary standards? I don’t think I should, but this book, if you look at it in terms of shows like Queer as Folk where the point of the matter was to bash the viewer over the head with the idea of gay sex until they came to accept it, maybe I should be more sympathetic to the book. But if it’s badly written with ‘torn bodices’ and ‘panting’, it’s bad writing, regardless of its subject matter. However, the fact that it was her first novel might be worth mentioning. And Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is truly excellent; there’s not a cliche in sight.

#14 – Saturday

The extraordinary success of McEwan’s last novel, Atonement, is already starting to be seen in the power of the sales of his latest, Saturday. They are two very different books, but with McEwan’s keen sense for detail and the ability to create almost a perfect story, in that the plot, characters and/or situation seem to entertwine without anything seeming awkward or out of place, Saturday seems more self-contained and close-knit, despite being essentially a family drama, like Atonement.

I loved Atonement. It was a brilliant, bittersweet novel about loss and regret; in Saturday McEwan doesn’t sweep the timespan, but rather keeps his focus on one, seemingly normal Saturday. Henry Perowne, successful neurosurgeon, wakes up early, heads to the window and sees a plane crash in the distance. This tragic event becomes an overarching symbol for the events of the day: the criminal asapect involved in the crash; the near-death experience for the pilots; and the absolute almost absurdity of watching a plane crash in downtown London.

A strange start to a strange, but yet somehow still absolutely normal Saturday. As Perowne goes through the motions of the morning, falling back asleep, having something for breakfast, preparing for his squash game, McEwan fills up the book with far-reaching and intimate details of the man’s life. How he met his wife, whom he loves to distraction; how his children will both be at dinner, one a poet living abroad in Paris, the other an upcoming blues musician.

It’s almost as if McEwan challenges the reader to find the mundane in this everyday life–that is until a minor traffic accident derails not only his perfect day, but it somehow comes back to haunt Perowne much later that night.

To say that it’s an excellent book would be a glossy adjective that doesn’t necessarily exploit the success of the novel. It’s almost Hemingway-esque, not in it’s prose, for McEwan writes long, luxurious sentence, but in structure. It’s a book obsessed with building a character and looking at the world from one day from his perspective, watching that perspective change, and then watching everything float back to normal, but with one of those moments, those ever-changing moments that affect your life forever, behind him.