bukes #26-#39

Thanks to a general commotion of work, it's been a while since I've done a books update. The culmination of the frenzy came in the early hours of this morning, as I finished the last book proposal that I wanted to send to BookExpo America to be touted around eager publishers. So today I've decided to take a more relaxed approach to a few of the things that have been put to one side over the past few weeks — such as catching up with my LJ record of bukes read.

book #26: How I Became a Nun (2005) by Cesar Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

I came across an article somewhere that hotly recommended Aira's work — the most exciting Argentine novelist of our time, or words to that effect — so I thought I'd give him a try. Discovering that his novels are short — this one's barely more than a novella — encouraged my experimental zeal.

Despite the title, our narrator may be a boy rather than a girl: sometimes the text says one, sometimes the other. This is either annoying or amusing in a whimsical sort of a way, depending on the reader's mood/temperament; personally I rather enjoyed the uncertainty, as a sort of nose-thumbing at a very basic narrative convention. There's a far bigger nose-thumbing at narrative conventions later, but to find out what it is you'll have to either read the book or bribe me.

Whatever, the book starts with our hero(ine) being fed tainted ice cream by a negligent vendor; our hero(ine)'s father, irate, promptly smothers the vendor in his own poisoned confection. To say that the rest of the book is the tale of what happens to the child over the next few months/years as Dad's in prison would be technically accurate, but really the novel's overarching story isn't all that important — to the point that it's quite often lost sight of. Instead the main focus is on a succession of lesser stories, anecdote-style accounts of
some of the quirky events in the narrator's young life. And it's in these that Aira shows his real narrative power: I was both rapt and grinning a lot.

Overall, though, this is a fairly slight work. I enjoyed it, but I can't imagine I'll be making any concerted effort to hunt down other Aira novels . . . although if I see one on a shelf somewhere I might well pick it up.

book #27: The Eyre Affair (2001) by Jasper Fforde

People have been telling me from all over that I should read some of Fforde's work — that I'd love it, it was tailor-made for my tastes, etc. — so I finally got around to trying it. For the first half or two-thirds of this novel I agreed with them; by the end of the book, though, I found myself growing decidedly weary. It appeared to me that the author was suffering the same problem, because the number of misfiring conceits and tired wordplays seemed definitely to be far higher in the later pages; but it's possible this perception was just a product of my own ennui.

In an alternative UK where literature occupies the same sort of status in society that organized religion does in places like the US and Iran, a young(ish) woman called Tuesday Next is a LiteraTec, a cop specializing in literary detection, chasing literary forgers and the like. (One legendarily unsuccessful forgery Tuesday mentions in passing was called Rime II: The Mariner Returneth, which had me giggling a lot.) She's not really prepared for it when she comes up against a murderous, unkillable super-Moriarty named Acheron Hades, who has kidnapped the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit with the intent of blackmailing society to meet his demands (yada, yada) through threats to alter bits of the manuscript and thereby all printed copies of the book. Or he could just destroy it. As the case progresses, so do Hades's crimes escalate, until he commits the unthinkable and abducts Jane Eyre from her own novel. To restore normality Tuesday must enter the book herself and form a pact with Rochester . . .

Fforde has inventiveness to spare, both in wordplay and in all the trappings of his surrealistic alternative world. Perhaps that's the root of the problem I was referring to above: one begins to feel battered by the constant pow, pow, pow of superfluous ingenuity. The novel — at least for me — is like the guy at the party who initially cracks everyone up with his jokes but then keeps telling more and more of them long after
everyone else has lost interest.

Still, I have another Fforde novel waiting on my shelf, and I'll most certainly read it in due course. The joys of the first half of The Eyre Affair more than outweighed the doldrums of its later stages.

book #28: Death of a Mystery Writer (1978; originally titled Unruly Son) by Robert Barnard

Here's enormous fun. Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs is Britain's most successful thriller writer, even though it's generally agreed his books are bloody awful. And so is he: he's vile to his family (except his gold-digging, ghastly daughter) and everyone else around him. So it's not much of a surprise when someone  spikes his favorite after-dinner liqueur with nicotinic acid, bumping the old bastard off. Enter sleuth Inspector Meredith, not an especially literary man, who must trawl among the bitchy inhabitants of an English village out of Miss Marple's nightmares as well as the London offices of Sir Oliver's publishers, deep though they are in mourning for the loss of revenue the author's death implies. Could the answer to the mystery lie in the book Sir Oliver wrote years ago but never published, the manuscript that supposedly none but the writer and an ancient ex-secretary have ever seen? It could indeed . . .

The sideswipes at the pretensions of the publishing world are obviously a part of what I found so entertaining about this romp, but the real glory is in its wry evisceration, through understated parody, of the conventions of the "cozy" murder mystery — and yet Barnard's triumph is that the novel functions extremely well as a "cozy" murder mystery itself.

book #29: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys

I remember well the literary hubbub that surrounded the first publication of this book, which is the tale of the mad wife of Jane Eyre's Rochester. Rhys had been something of a cult novelist earlier in the century but had dropped out of sight; now she'd emerged from reclusion with her first novel in decades.

At some stage in my late teens or early twenties I started on Wide Sargasso Sea and I confess didn't get very far with it. However, often enough a book that bores on first attempt is far more acceptable the second time round, so when I saw a copy at a book sale a while back I picked it up, as much for nostalgic reasons as anything else. (Perhaps it was because of having just read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair that I was moved to pull this novel off my shelf and read it; who knows? As The Twilight Zone has remarked, oo-ee-oo-ee-oo.)

Well . . .

This time I did manage to get through the book, but it was more stubbornness than anything else that kept me going. Characterization, atmosphere, dialogue, basic storytelling — all of these seem to be either banal or absent. A fascinating premise is just completely wasted: there may be readers who reach the end of the novel with their hearts in their mouths and tears in their eyes over the fate of this tragic heroine, but I'm not one of them. There are so many bits and pieces along the way that one feels could have been wonderful had they only been handled with competence, or even the slightest sign of interest on the part of the author. Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly this ain't; one can't help but sympathize with the screenwriters hired for the movie adaptation (which I haven't seen).

I'm scarred.

book #30: Rebecca's Tale (2001) by Sally Beauman

Reading Wide Sargasso Sea reminded me that years ago I'd bought a copy of Beauman's novel — which in effect gives the other side of the story about Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. Although chastened by the Rhys book, I plunged in anyway.

The novel has four narrators: Colonel Julyan, who was Maxim de Winter's old pal and who was keen not to raise too many questions about Rebecca's death; a young scholar who's come to snoop around Manderley for reasons of his own; Rebecca herself in a discovered diary from twenty years earlier; and Colonel Julyan's daughter Ellie.

It's something of a problem that the first narrator we encounter is Colonel Julyan. He's portrayed as a somewhat irascible, rather likable, slightly devious but in all truth pretty boring old fart — which is absolutely fine and dandy so far as Beauman's tale is concerned, but not for the poor reader who has to spend the first hundred pages or so in Colonel Julyan's company. It was here that I felt my training, as it were, with Wide Sargasso Sea came in especially useful, because I plowed on nevertheless.

And I'm extremely glad I did so. By the end of this longish book about three days later I was quite literally breathless. The unraveling of the mystery surrounding Rebecca — in her life as much as her death — makes absorbing reading, and the last quarter of the book is all the more compulsively readable because one spends it in the company of Julyan's daughter Ellie, easily the most attractive and sympathetic of the four narrators. Jolly good stuff.

book #31: Lemon in the Basket (1967) by Charlotte Armstrong

I seem to always end up feeling, when I read a Charlotte Armstrong novel, that I ought to have enjoyed it a lot more than I did, and the same is true with this one. The ghastly Tyler family are so brilliant, rich, privileged and charitably generous that it makes your gorge rise just to think about them. All except one, who's thick as two short planks; he and his even thicker wife are resentful as hell about the overweening ways of  his siblings, siblings-in-law, and parents. And now the family is hosting a visit by the ruler of some frightful repressive nation somewhere in the back of beyond. Are there sinister forces at work to try to bump off the ruler's youthful heir?

Well, yes, there are.

The New York Times, quoted on the cover, thought this was a "Wonderful thriller . . . Breathtaking!" Me, I thought it was somewhat plodding and unconvincing.

And so another few years will pass before I next pick up a Charlotte Armstrong novel thinking that perhaps this time I'll be able to find out what all the fuss was about . . .

book #32: The Intelligencer (2004) by Leslie Silbert

There's a 16th-century manuscript/compilation in this novel called The Anatomy of Secrets, and really it's the maguffin that holds the whole plot together. My bet is that Silbert originally called her novel The Anatomy of Secrets, but then some bright spark changed the title.

Speculation, of course. This is one of those novels where there are two parallel narrative strands, one relating derring-do going on in the historical past while the other concerns itself with derring-do going on in the present. The central figure of the "history" strand is Christopher Marlowe; major supporting cast members include Francis Walsingham. On the face of it, The Intelligencer would seem to be a novel designed with precisely me in mind.

Reader, my fingers trembled as I opened it.

And of course I was disappointed; but I was surprised by just quite how disappointed I was. The book isn't extraordinarily bad — please don't get that impression. It's just, well, flat. Silbert writes with the earnest worthiness of someone who's subscribed to one or two creative-writing correspondence courses too many. The result is that, while the words seem all to be there and in roughly the correct order, there's no conviction at all in the telling of her tale. I never caught a single whiff of 16th-century London, nor even of modern London and New York City, where the "present-day" strand is located.

It was a terrible pity, because Silbert clearly did her research and had lots of interesting ingredients to throw into the stewpot. Maybe it'll all work better next time.

book #33: Just a Corpse at Twilight (1994) by Janwillem van de Wetering

I've read little but good about van de Wetering, and have been meaning for ages to give him a try. I'm very glad that I've finally done so; I have more of his books on the to-be-read shelves, and they'll definitely get their turn.

De Wetering's series characters, the Amsterdam cops Grijpstra  and de Gier, have now left the force. Grijpstra is working as a P.I. in Amsterdam while de Gier is in a remote part of Maine, US, living off his half of the two cops' ill gotten proceeds from some shady business in a previous novel. One day Grijpstra gets a panicked transatlantic phone call from his erstwhile partner: the cops in Maine are accusing de Gier of having killed his girlfriend, and he was so blind drunk at the time that he can't claim with absolute certainty that he didn't. The only person he trusts to sort the whole mess out is his ol' buddy . . .

So, with a show of reluctance, Grijpstra sets off. What he finds is not just the answer to what happened to de Gier's girlfriend but also a nest of murderous corruption among the local law officers.

Just as with those of Nabokov's novels that he wrote in English, this book has the bracingly refreshing affect of being a translation, even though it isn't: English was van de Wetering's second language and, while he wrote it with more fluency and elegance than many a native speaker, still it shows. And his non-Anglo-Saxon origins show in the manner of the telling, too: the rambling of the narration, the frequent interruptions for backstory anecdotes, the quirkiness of the characters, the philosophical (and sometimes cod philosophical) musings — all of these elements, which might have been ruthlessly excised from the average homegrown mystery novel, are delights that just
about but don't quite overstay their welcome by book's end. The novel stops at exactly the right moment for it to be a perfectly satisfying concoction.

If it's straightforward suspense, thrill, horror or fisticuffs you're after, look elsewhere. Just a Corpse at Twilight has its own means of offering an absorbing journey.

book #34: Carrie (1974) by Stephen King

It was with some surprise I realized a little while ago that I'd never read this. Luckily I'd picked up a couple of years back the very natty-looking Collectors' Edition published in 1991 by Plume, so I grabbed it off the shelf and set to.

I was startled by how good the novel is. I won't outline the plot, because even people who've neither read the book nor seen the movie must surely by now know what it's about. What impressed me was how the young Stephen King was so ambitious in his use of different narrative techniques. Some of these, to be honest, might have worked more effectively had I been reading a different edition (see below on this); but even in instances where his selection of narrative style grated on me I was still pleased that he was actually trying these things. I kind of wish he'd think of learning from this novel himself; I gave up reading him a few years ago, at about the time of Dreamcatcher, because by then I'd read several recent novels in a row of his that hadn't been actually bad but had struck me as mediocre — by-the-numbers, sort of.

As to the vaunted Collectors' Edition? I'm kind of spitting about it. I don't blame it for the fact that it has an intensely tedious introduction by Tabitha King — that's the kind of thing you expect in posh reissues — but I do resent the profusion of typos (I did get to laugh aloud at mention of "the hideous three-lobbed Eye" — one for basketball fans, maybe?) and I also resent the crap-headed design. The pages are biggish and the font fairly small, which means that the lines are kind of longer than they should be. (Presumably Plume wanted to keep the page count down to save money; after all, they weren't likely to sell too many copies of a King reissue, were they? Yeah, right.) For some parts of the text the font becomes even smaller — which would be a perfectly reasonable typographical gambit if it weren't for the fact that the font was almost too small already. As it was, I found myself having to pick my way with care through sections that were sometimes several pages long: not only was I having to peer at the tiny type, there were too many words in a full line for the eye to be able to scan in the normal fashion. It's Typography 101 that you don't make this sort of error; clearly someone at Plume didn't give a damn about creating a functional book — just an object that looks good (which it does) from a distance. Grr.

book #35: An Expert in Murder (2008) by Nicola Upson

Josephine Tey is an author whose all-too-few novels I reread every few years, especially Brat Farrar, The Franchise Affair and of course The Daughter of Time. Upson has had the wonderful idea of creating a detective novel in which the central character is Tey herself, with the setting being London's theatreland during the closing weeks of the West End run of her phenomenally successful play Richard of Bordeaux. Tey meets a young fan on the train down from Scotland to London, and almost immediately the fan is murdered; Tey helps her old friend Detective Inspector Archie Penrose of the Yard sort out not only this crime but a passel of related ones.

The trouble is that if you're going to do this sort of thing properly you need to maintain a certain measure of historical veracity, and this Upson — perhaps in part for legal reasons — clearly feels unable to do. At the time of this novel Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, hadn't yet invented the Josephine Tey pseudonym; she was writing under the name Gordon Daviot. Yet in the novel everyone seems to think she's called Josephine. This was obviously a deliberate decision on Upson's part, because she explains the facts of the matter (I'd remembered them only dimly) in an Afterword. And then all the actors who played in the real West End run of Richard of Bordeaux have been replaced by fictional ones; would it not have been possible to have adjusted the plot such that Gielgud and the rest were peripheral figures while the actors engaged in yer actual skullduggery (yes, I can understand why you might want to invent these out of whole cloth) were extras or understudies or something? One of the characters murdered is the play's producer, who has to be fictionalized because the real producer lived on long after the play had closed. And so on.

In other words, what we have here is a historical novel in which so much of the history has been invented that you can't really call it a historical novel. It's essentially just a confection into which the author has tossed the name Josephine Tey. To be fair, Upson seems to have caught Elizabeth Mackintosh's personality very well; confusion of naming aside, this is definitely the same figure who emerges from everything else I've read about her. And Upson also conveys brilliantly a milieu in which the memory of World War I still squats heavily over everyone's consciousness: none of her characters can really escape those recalled horrors, or the losses of loved ones — especially now that the Nazis are on the rise in Germany. But otherwise the book is a historical jumble.

As a detective novel, on the other hand, it functions quite well — although it's maybe a shade longer than it should be. I gather there are more Archie Penrose mysteries on the way, and I'd not be at all surprised if I found myself reading them.

book #36: The Ghost (2007) by Robert Harris

I enjoyed Harris's first novel, Fatherland, and adored his second, Enigma; I can't quite work out why it's taken me so long to read another. Whatever, the wait was worth it.

Our nameless protagonist/narrator is called in as ghostwriter for the memoirs of a recently retired British Prime Minister who is Not Tony Bliar: you know he's Not Tony Bliar because his name is Adam Lang. However, this PM is widely loathed in the UK, not least because he was craven poodle to a war-criminal US Administration that invaded a Middle Eastern country for corrupt reasons; bells might be ringing, no? Because the Brits have come to hate his guts, Adam Lang and his wife Ruth (who is Not Cherie), plus entourage, are holed up in Martha's Vineyard. Our hero flies across to join them and prepares to do his stuff; but then he stumbles across the notes and documentation used by his predecessor in the job, who was mysteriously drowned. There are conniptions galore and lots of wonderfully catty observations from our narrator until it becomes evident to all that Adam Lang was a CIA plant, the most successful of all such moles placed into the UK political structure by the shady organization. It's a great conspiracy theory, but, evident or not, is it in fact the final truth? Our narrator discovers that, no, it isn't . . .

Gotta confess I found the conspiracy theory pretty convincing.

This is a spiffy book at every level: it functions well as a page-turning thriller, you bet; and it's a wonderfully biting, often laugh-out-loud funny piece of social/political satire.

book #37: Slow River (1995) by Nicola Griffith

People have been telling me for years I should be reading some Nicola Griffith. They were right.

Slow River is the story of stratospherically rich kid Lore, who has just escaped from the seemingly homicidal maniacs who kidnapped her. She finds herself abandoned, severely injured, in a city; she's taken in by Spanner, a data pirate living not so much on the criminal fringes of society as some way beyond them. After Lore has recovered from her injury she naturally becomes Spanner's apprentice in all sorts of illegal activities — data piracy when times are good, prostitution when they're not. But really Lore wants to make her way in the world honestly. Her family are this world's equivalents of Monsanto, except working in the field of sewage disposal rather than genetic modification; and so Lore gets herself a job at a sewage plant. There ensue some of the most exciting passages — I kid you not — that I've ever read set in a sewage plant! Of course, it's necessary that Lore's life get properly sorted out . . .

In a way this is the half — or far more than half — of the story that Ayn Rand never thought to tell in her clunky great doorstop Atlas Shrugged: it's the corollary nightmare, if you like, to Rand's fascistic wet dream. Lore's extended family forms part of the hyper-rich plutocracy for whom virtually anything is possible and/or obtainable; they and their kind essentially live in a different universe from the one occupied by the rest of the population, who must struggle to survive while carrying not just the burdens of their own lives but also, in effect, the plutocrats' burdens — the consequences of the plutocrats' failure to fulfil their own personal responsibilities. In a sense, then, this is a very political novel; but it doesn't read that way. Instead, it comes across as a very human tale, as we follow the fortunes of the by-no-means-flawless Lore.

And the book is really quite beautifully written. The prose is a joy to read. More, please.

book #38: The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1942) by Erle Stanley Gardner

Over the years I've probably read most of the books in Gardner's long Perry Mason series, but I'm not sure I've read any others before in his shorter, less famous D.A. series. Doug Selby, a D.A. in rural Southern California, is in effect a clone of Perry Mason but working the other side of the aisle: he's a babe magnet of fundamental decency who's not averse to shaving the edges of the law if the result justifies it. In
this book he sorts out a complicated entanglement involving an inheritance, murder, a marriage that should never have been, and more. As always with Gardner, it's a fast, fun read that doesn't leave much of an impression behind it.

book #39: Boy Still Missing (2001) by John Searles

Teenaged Dominick Pindle is the sole scion of a dysfunctional family in a Massachusetts small town: his father spends all his time boozing and fornicating while his mother tries to keep up a pretense of normalcy, even though many an evening must be spent cruising the local bars in search of hubby. Dad gets really serious about one of his mistresses, Edie, although the affair falls violently apart when Edie becomes pregnant — which is not before Dominick has met her and fallen violently in lust with her. Once Dad's out of the picture, and once it's clear Edie intends to have the baby anyway, she and Dominick enter a curious relationship that psychologically has a sexual foundation even though physically there's no sex involved. What is involved is theft, however: Edie needs money to get her through her pregnancy and set herself up in a new life in New York, and an infatuated Dominick lends it to her from his mother's hidden stashes of cash at home — her life savings.

But then there comes a time when his mother needs that money, and of course it isn't there. Out of the consequent disaster Dominick emerges intent on revenge against Edie, for disappearing without repaying the dough, and against his never-met stepbrother, illegally adopted by a wealthy family and now too snotty to acknowledge his real parentage.

But very little is truly as Dominick believes it to be. By the time the story's over he's discovered the love of his life and also his own adult self.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. Some of the writing is enormously self-indulgent, and should have received the attention of an editor. (Consider this partial piece of scene-setting for a wake: "On the kitchen table they had set out platters of food. Eggs with yolks whipped fluffy, sprinkled with a blood-colored spice. Lunch meats curled into finger-sized slices, fleshy and damp. Hard squares of cheese, orange as the sun . . ." And it goes on, laden with useful information for readers who've forgotten the color of American cheese.) I found myself frequently filled with a mixture of irritation and boredom, and yet at the same time it was an indubitable fact that the pages kept turning. I really did become involved with Dominick and Jeannie, the wonderful girlfriend he's lucky enough to be acquired by (Searles handles particularly well the way that it takes Dominick a while to realize just quite how fortunate he is), and I was pressing ahead urgently to make sure that they both came out of the ever-broadening mess okay. On balance, then, the book was a success so far as this humble reader was concerned; but I did feel I'd been forced to work far harder than I should have had to in order to reach the payoff.