Category: fiction

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle

I’m afraid I couldn’t finish this one, despite its truly wonderful cover and the fact that the edition I have is one of my favourite kinds, falling apart and with brown pages.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI tells about the Japanese use of Allied soldiers and forced labour to build a railway in WWII, a terrible project that killed about twenty thousand people. This fictionalized version had a tight plot in this interesting setting, but it was just too silly for me. It’s very much a mid-century male fantasy of tough geniuses.

Boulle was a veteran of forced labour himself, and I would have liked to read a book about his actual experiences. Apparently life being what it is, he did write one, called MY RIVER KWAI, but it has not endured enough to even merit a Wikipedia entry, while this kind of trashy version sold in the millions. Well done to him: I see he was so poor he was practically homeless after the war, so I’m glad he made some money. He then went on to write a wildly different book – wait for it – it’s PLANET OF THE APES (!?!) so he certainly sorted himself out

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey

Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?

It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly.  There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful.  Try this:

“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains.  Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day.  I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”

Or this, about a bushfire:

“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “

Or this:

 “. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank.  These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”

It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully.  He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police.  He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success.  I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners.  A fantastic book.

GREEN DOT by Madeleine Gray

Here is how this book begins:

“For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife.  For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be.

Having done well in school but having found little scope in which to win things since then, it is possible that my dedication to this relationship was in fact a dedication to my belief in myself – that I could make a man love me so much that he would leave what he had always known, all his so-called responsibilities, purely to attain my company forever.  I offered nothing but myself, you see.”

That, in two paragraphs, is what the book is about. It is pretty sad, overall.  Especially sad is the lack of cynicism of the man, who does genuinely seem to love her and to suffer over his inability to choose. 

As the author points out, one reason she got so interested in him was because she had no other interests.  This part, perhaps unfairly, I just found annoying. Here she is on how all her old schoolmates are getting jobs:

“Obviously we would all need money to feed and house ourselves when school was over; I didn’t not forsee that.  Maybe for most of us this would mean having to do stuff for companies or whatever happened in business. KPIs? P&Ls? Circling back? But why were we all talking like the way we wanted  to subsist was via indefinitely spending most of our waking hours doing something with very little relation to the formation and development of ourselves, a development which, until this point, we’d been told by our teachers and parents was very important?”

It is a bizarrely youthful contempt for a whole huge aspect of the human experience, which is world of commerce.  A not unimportant part of the world, if you happen to live in late capitalism.  And she does, oh god she does.  Here she is having lunch one day:

“Eating this dry sushi, I am utterly dejected”

So she has standards as to the wetness of her sushi but somehow still feels she should not be weighed down by such petty matters as making an income. 

It was a gripping story of terrible choices and I enjoyed it. 

THE INHERITORS by William Golding

Here is a book about the meeting of neanderthals and homo sapiens, told from the neanderthals perspective.  Unsurprisingly, our species does not come out of it looking good.   It really is incredible how our first instinct is to kill, and our second is to abduct.  You do feel sorry for these Neanderthals. 

The first part is the most successful, where you follow a band of 7 Neanderthals as they move from their winter to their summer locations.  There is an impressive inhabiting of a mind that (from our perspective) is sort of half-way there.  Then they meet the ‘bone-faced men,’ who surprise them by being bone-faced, and even more by existing, as the group had previously thought they were the only bipedals in the world. 

From very first meeting you know it is going to end badly for someone, with the Neanderthals watching with interest as ‘small straight twigs’ are thrown at them by the bone-faced men.  These are of course arrows, and it goes downhill from there.

I have to admit I gave up close to the end.  There was a very very long section in which the Neanderthals were watching the early humans go about daily life in a clearing.  I appreciate Golding was having fun sharing his research with us but I got bored.  However, that said, I still enjoyed it. 

PS: I learnt from the introduction – did you know Golding’s other book, LORD OF THE FLIES was widely rejected by agents while in draft?

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe

I am always struck by how vanishingly rare it is to read a book by a working class person before about 1950.  Here is one.  It’s a hair raising account of heavy boozing and factory work in Nottingham, and you know all you need to know when I tell you this book is where the expression ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’ comes from.  Try this sample:

“Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. . . .  Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”

‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken!’  I love that

This author began life as a factory worker, but then married a poet and used his army pension to move to Spain to write.   I was touched to hear he wrote this under a lemon tree at Robert Graves’ house, who was the person who encouraged him to write the life he knew.  I love Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,  a wonderful book about binning your life and becoming a bohemian, and it was sweet to meet him at second-hand through this other writer. 

THE WALL by John Lanchester

In this book set in the far (near?) future, England is surrounded by a wall which is perpetually guarded against ‘the enemy’ who are desperate to get in. 

The exact situation is not described, but you get the impression there has been a massive raise in sea levels globally, and that the enemy is desperate climate migrants.  Much of the book is a straightforward adventure / romance story, focused on one man who is serving his mandatory two years on the wall.  SPOILER His unit allows an incursion, so they are all set adrift in the ocean.  Despite it not really going anywhere in terms of plot after this, I still found it a compelling story of an all-too-possible world.  Probably my favourite part was how it was well understood by the entire culture that the older generation was entirely at fault and they were ostracized appropriately. 

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn.  It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub.  You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting.  This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story.  Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country –  might be being staged for her benefit.  Things get weirder from there.  It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice. 

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny.  For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.”   It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession.  At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again.  The lesson being: 

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.” 

I like this.

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none.  Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.