Year: 2015

Watch out literature! The Africans are coming. Chigozi Obioma’s THE FISHERMEN is nominated for the Booker, and is a fine and frightening novel about the power of suggestion.

It tells the story of four brothers living in a high density area of a small town in Nigeria. Though it is expressly forbidden by their parents, they take to go fishing in the local river, and on one of their trips there the local madman tells the oldest son that he will be killed by one of his brothers. The idea slowly grows in his mind, and he begins to be angry with his brothers for their future treachery. Eventually a fight goes too far, and SPOILER ALERT the two youngest brothers find him dead in the kitchen apparently killed by the next oldest brother. This brother cannot be found for days, though eventually the taste of the well water reveals where he has ended his own life.

The two youngest brothers then hatch a plan to kill the madman they view as the source of all their troubles, and the novel proceeds down an ever darker pathway.

It’s a compelling read, with the horrible sense of doom of a Greek tragedy wrapped up in a very believable version of a corner of contemporary Nigeria. The writing itself is also unique, sounding as if it might be written by someone who does not have English as quite his first language, and all the more interesting for that. I’ll leave you with his description of the madman, who is the beginning and end of all their troubles:

I observed that he carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for so long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeks of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and waste. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, distched underwear he sometimes worse. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sane of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. . . But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things.

This is an absolutely fantastic series of three novels following a pair of female friends from their childhood in Naples through to their thirties. They grow up poor, in the 30s in Naples, and their lives take very different paths: one leaves school at 14, marries early, and divorces straight away; the other stays in school and becomes an author. Interestingly though it is the former that is the brilliant one, and her more successful friend feels permanently under her shadow.

It’s hard to say what makes these novels so compelling. I didn’t note down any particularly clever quotes, I can’t remember any brilliant concepts; and yet I inhaled these books in a single week. They’re so real that I feel as if I have friends from Naples; as if I can talk knowledgably about gender in pre-war Italy. There’s one more book to complete the series, and I can’t wait.

This book sounded like it might be good. First published in the 90s, it has recently been re-published, and re-publishing always suggests good things. I hesitated, however, and I should have hesitated some more. The summary told me that there was an unnamed narrator – BEE BAH BEE BAH – warning sign! Another major warning sign: It’s a novel about someone (unnamed) try to write a novel BEE BAH BEE BAH! The novel is about the end of her last relationship, which was, in the way of all tortured modern novels, naturally tortured.

I can’t quite summarise quite everything that annoyed me about this book, but in brief:
a) Narrator unnamed
b) Feelings about last boyfriend complex. So complex (ie. negative) are her feelings that after a while you wonder why she’s bothering to write a novel about him
c) Writing simple. I didn’t think this was possible, but apparently you can strip your writing down so far that all that it becomes irritating

Sorry Ms Davis; just not my sort of book.

Stella Gibbons wrote some twenty novels, but is famous for only one: COLD COMFORT FARM. It a fantastic, hilarious little novel, about finding a peaceable way to live in a complicated world, and I had high hopes for WESTWOOD. WESTWOOD it turns out is a complicated novel about a complicated world, and while I did not really enjoy it while I was reading it, I’m glad in retrospect that I did.

The novel is set in London at the tail end of the second world war, and captures the feel of the city at that time quite remarkably:

The fire-fighting people had made deep pools with walls round them in many of the streets. and here, in the heart of London, ducks came to live on these lakes that reflected the tall yellow ruins and the blue sky. Pink willow-herb grew over the white uneven ground where houses had stood, and there were acres of ground covered with deserted, shattered houses whose windows were filled torn black paper. . . And the country was beginning to run back to London; back into those grimy villages linked by featureless road from which it had never quite vanished, and which make up the largest city in the world. Weeds grey in the City itself; a hawk was seen hovering over the ruins of the Temple, and foxes raided the chicken roosts in the gardens of houses near Hampstead Heath.

The central character is Margaret, a young teacher, and the story is largely about her obsession with the home and family of a famous playwright, Mr Challis, who happens to live near her in Hampstead. On the one hand, this obsession is about a hankering for beauty/meaning/etc; on the other, to a modern reader in any case, it appears to be a weird fascination with the upper classes. Margaret attempts to insert herself into their lives by ‘helping’ the nanny with the children – basically becoming an unpaid nanny herself – which everyone seems to view as extremely normal. She is ‘allowed’ to have tea with the servant as a great favour, while doing lots of manual labour for free; and she is happy about it. Here she is with the playwright:

“Please forgive me for saying it, but I do want you to know that this is the greatest moment of my life.”
“Thank you, my child,” replied Mr Challis, promptly and with grace.

Mr Challis meanwhile is secretly trying to have an affair with Margaret’s very pretty friend Hilda, who he met during a blackout. Hilda however is not interested:

Unlike the working-girl of fifty years ago, whose desire for luxury and comfort was often the cause of her downfall, Hilda was not tempted by luxury. She had as part of her everyday life the cosmetics, clothes and amusements which fifty years ago had been reserved for ladies or unfortunates, and to which poor chaste girls could never hope to aspire to . . .

See what I mean about this being a difficult book for a modern reader?

In an odd twist, Margaret starts looking after the developmentally disabled child of her father’s colleague, and for a while it looks like the novel might resolve into a traditional romance; but this ends in a doorstep kiss, never repeated. Eventually Margaret discovers Mr Challis’ plans for Hilda, which ends her desire for him, but does not stop her desire for some larger and more beautiful life; and that’s where we leave her: still as lost as she was at the beginning, still yearning, though she’s not sure for what. So it’s a very strange book over all, hard to categorise; apparently at first a romance, or coming of age story, but in the end something larger and much more complex.

I’ve read one other book by Vargas Llosa, the wonderful terrifying THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, which I bought because it was the only English language book on sale in Acapulco airport. I then read in one stint over a twelve hour bus ride through Mexico. A book that frightening should not be read on your own, and certainly not without any breaks. It’s about the Dominican Republic, making it my second favourite book about a country I can’t even find on a map. (Favourite: THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO).

THE FEAST OF THE GOAT has that great essential of a good novel: a plot. AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, unfortunately, does not. It alternates, chapter by chapter, between a quite acceptable premise – 18 year old man falls in love with his much older aunt – with a selection of short stories which are unrelated and annoyingly unfinished. Vargas Llosa is so talented that unwillingly I kept getting interested in the short stories, even though I knew they would not end. I think it’s all just showing off. What’s he trying to say? Surprise surprise, life lacks narrative coherence? WE KNOW THAT. That’s why we read novels.

MANSFIELD PARK was one of my A-level set books, and being an anxious student, I probably read it nine or ten times over the period of that course. Once I’d written the exam, just seeing the Penguin cover was enough to make me nauseous. I therefore haven’t opened it since I skimmed it on that exam day, which, horrifyingly, is now almost twenty years ago, though I can still easily call up that exam room smell as if I was there last week.

MANSFIELD PARK has always been my least favourite Austen, largely because it contains my least favourite Austen heroine, Fanny, who is a total drip. This is not helped by the fact that Austen likes to refer to her as “my dear Fanny” – actually wait maybe that does help a bit. Books do tend to change over the years, so I was surprised to find that this one was actually much as I remembered it – Fanny’s still a drip, I’m afraid. The only thing which struck me anew on this reading was how very moral a story it is. It’s very much about the value of stillness, and stern principle, and about how seductive and charming and finally dangerous is the reverse. I don’t know why this didn’t strike me as a teenager? Perhaps I was more convinced then of the value of principle, and so it struck me as simply true, rather than as a moral position. But it’s very clear. Here’s Austen’s summary, near the end: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly at fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” Jeez.

Let’s be clear here people. I say it’s my least favourite Austen. That’s still puts it among the best books ever written.

This book proves that originality is not needed for success. It’s a very basic concept of opposites attracting: socially awkward boy meets socially able girl. Various misunderstanding accrue, they get together in the end.

For all that it’s charming.

It seems I can’t turn my back on a book for even a decade or so without it changing. Who is rewriting these things in my absence? SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: When did that become such a morality tale? MIDDLEMARCH: what’s this new plot? EQUAL RITES: Well, we won’t bother with the plot, because Pratchett is never about the plot; but sadly, so sadly, it’s not as funny as I remember. I loved Terry Pratchett as a teenager, and it’s sad to see that he or I have changed. It almost makes me scared to go back to other much loved books; I think I’d rather have my memory of the book I loved, rather than the book itself.

Well here’s a book I gobbled up over a couple of nights. It’s that very unusual thing, a smart and worthwhile book that’s also a serious page turner. Here’s how it begins: ‘Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

I mean a longing for sex, yes. Money, yes. Power, definitely. But the picturesque? And yet that’s what this story is about. The plot may be summarized as: young man becomes overly involved with his classics class.

The young man in question is a freshman in college when he gains admission to a tight little clique focused on the Ancient Greeks, and over time we learn that they harbour a big secret. They have been trying to live the life of the Ancient Greeks, up to and including attempting to meet with Dionysus in the woods of Vermont, and as part of this bizarre project have unintentionally killed a farmer. One member of the group, Bunny, a somewhat unstable young man, begins to suggest he is going to tell people about the murder. The group try and placate him by pandering to all of his whims, but slowly they realise that they are going to need to find a more permanent solution. So this time it’s an intentional killing – but it doesn’t end their problems, because now they all begin to fear that the others will tell. I won’t give away what goes on after that, except to say that the book carries on to explore what it would mean if we really tried to live the life of the Ancient Greeks – sibling sex and all.

The key lesson I learned is: always commit your murders on your own.

I’ve read all Fuller’s books of memoir about her life in southern Africa. This sounds like an endorsement. It is, and it isn’t. They’re reasonably good books, but I think I’ve read them not so much for their quality as for their rarity. If you are American, or British, or Indian, or from any other large group, there are many novels about your experience. If you are Zimbabwean, not so much. The only white Zimbabwean I’ve ever seen portrayed on screen for example is Leonardo DiCaprio, doing a horrible South African accent.

There’s much in Fuller’s life that I can identify with, from the dirty to the malaria:

the Fullers . . drank whatever they could find, lukewarm if need be, and had no compunction about using ice made from unboiled water. ‘A few germs never hurt anyone,’ Dad always said. And if a bout of diarrhea ensued, it simply proved his point. ‘See? Keeps you from getting all blocked up.

and

Like most drinking families, we usually aired our feelings late at night.

But I struggle with some of it; the Fullers are clearly somewhat new arrivals in Africa, so there is a sense of foreignness that I struggle to understand: (We) were alone in the house. Although truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity”

This novel is the story of the author’s divorce. She married young, to an American named Charlie. As with many Africans, she imagined an American could give her stability.

Charlie was a gallant one-man intervention wanting to save us from our recklessness, quietly stepping in whenever he thought we were drinking excessively, ruining our health with cigarettes, or courting intestinal disaster with undercooked chicken. This made the Fullers howl with laughter and did nothing to make them behave differently.

They began their lives in rural Zambia, and unsurprisingly being twenty two and living in a remote location with a small screaming baby did make make for immediate bliss. They therefore moved to America, where they had two more children in short order. They have financial troubles, and their marriage starts to unravel. It’s very sad. It’s also somewhat annoying. She claims repeatedly that she ‘can’t understand the accounts’ which is an frustratingly female way of dodging responsibility. The financial trouble seems all very American – the poverty of having too much. As she puts it:

True, we had a house, a cabin, some investments, but it turned out we didn’t own any of the roofs over our heads, the bank did. We had three horses on some pasture in Idaho, those were ours . . .

Two residences and three horses and you wonder why you’re in debt?

Anyway, this is a sweet and touching novel. I recommend it.