I have apparently now become the sort of person who occasionally reads mass market thrillers. Does this mean I am losing my youthful idealism? My mental energy? Or does it just mean I was in an airport and was facing flying back across the Atlantic for the fourth time in ten days? Anyway never mind, there it is: I’ve been reading a best seller.

It was kind of fun book, with a female central character who was, for once, not strong. Indeed, she is an unreliable narrator and that is where half the fun of the novel lies. Paula Hawkins is Zimbabwean, I’m proud to say, but she’s obviously lived in London:

We used to go to that pub all the time; I can’t remember why we stopped. I never liked it all that much, too many couples just the right side of 40 drinking too much and casting around for something better, wondering if they’d have the courage

.

Yes, that’s definitely a common London scene.. I won’t tell you too much else about the book. It’s a thriller so it’s hard not to give away spoilers. All I’ll let you know is that I read it, and I can’t decide what it means about me that I enjoyed it.

I didn’t like this book at first because it was so dreamlike and weird. Then I started to like it, because it was so dreamlike and weird.

Set in the near future, or what was the near future in the 1960s (which is now, I suppose, the past) it tells the story of a world grown too hot and of all the major cities underwater. It’s a pretty contemporary view of the apocalypse. The story centres on a man called Kerans, who is a scientist conducting tests. Most of humanity is clustered in the Arctic Circle, but he is way south, in England. His team is recalled as the water keeps rising. He refuses to return. Here is where it gets weird. The world is regressing to a past age – the Triassic – with huge plants appearing, alligators everywhere, etc. So human beings are apparently also regressing back to a more primal sort of life form. Kerans, and some of the other scientists, are beginning to lose their humanity, their individuality, and frankly they’re rather liking lettin it go. It’s the joy of the lower life form.

The key delight of this book is this vision of abandoned cities. Here they are in drained London:

They stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchins and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor, sand dollars flowering in the former ticket booth. Beatrice gathered her skirt in one hand, and they moved slowly down the line of cinemas, past cafes and amusement arcade, patronised now only by the bivalves and the molluscs

That sort of thing is the heart of the book really. But aware that this doesn’t fill very many pages, Ballard does a reasonable job of knocking together a few other characters and a bit of a plot. A bunch of pirates arrive, and managed to drain the city he is in. Leicester Square appears spookily out of the water, fountains full of weeds. In a half-hearted way Kerans falls in love with strange woman called Beatrice.

While Ballard may be prescient when it comes to rising seawater, he, like other science-fiction writers of the mid-20th century is extremely un-prescient about the rise of women. Beatrice is beautiful and useless, a woman of the 1940s stranded in what’s supposed to be the 21st-century. It’s an odd blindspot across vritually all classic science fiction that I can think of. They can imagine a flying car, a zombie apocalypse, a cyborg nation, but a lady with a mind of her own: let’s not be crazy.

I enjoyed this book, but it also annoyed me. Or to be more exact, the author annoyed me. She is 28, she’s just won the Booker, and she’s done it with an 800 page pastiche of the Victorian thriller. Who on earth thinks to themselves, I know – I’ll just write an 800 page pastiche of the Victorian thriller. That’s a good idea! That will get published! That will win the Booker! And yet it did. I guess in a way it reminds me of Donald Trump; and that almost in an inspirational kind of way. Now, hold your pitchforks: what I mean is, Donald Trump is almost inspirational, when looked at in a certain kind of way. It shows you that you can dream wild dreams, and no matter how improbable, how little qualified you are, how laughable they may be, they can still come true. But back to THE LUMINARIES.

The plot has many twists and turns, and I suspect this is what many people will most enjoy about this book. For me however, what I enjoyed was the confident Victoriana. I’m a great lover of the Victorian novel, and there’s something really fun about seeing a new one produced. One tends to think that the stock of Victorian novels is set; that once I get to the end of Dickens and Trollope and Collins and, scratching around a bit – Carlyle, there’s nothing left to read. But what do you know – here’s a new Catton! I’ll give you this, as a flavour of the whole book:

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck’s Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied – for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one’s arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction – but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.

Isn’t it charming? I also enjoy the idea, and think it’s true. Appearance can very much be manufactured, but it takes significant effort, and that effort needs to start early. I wish I’d known about this as a teenager. I wish I’d spent more time on it. I wasted my adolescence reading books, when I should have been looking in mirrors, practising my face. Too late now: the lines are all set, and getting deeper every year.

This book definitely had me at hello. Here is the opening:

Phil always did the castrating; firstly sliced of the cup of the scrotum and toast at the side; next to force down first one and then the other testicle, split the rainbow membrane that included, toilet out, and tossed into the fire where the branding iron glowed. There was surprisingly little blood. In a few moments the testicles exploded like huge popcorn.

Don’t pretend you don’t love it. Here is what it’s about: homophobia in the wild West. SOLD! The book tells the story of two brothers, one of whom is fat and ugly. He marries, and this marriage infuriates the other. I won’t tell you tell you to much more about the plot, as its full of interesting twists and unexpected turns but I will say that the homophobe gets what’s coming to him in satisfying Cowboy style.

I read Graham Greene’s THE END OF THE AFFAIR a couple of years ago, in which I learnt that Graham Greene has a lot of issues with God. BRIGHTON ROCK is an earlier work, for me less successful, but still jam packed with Catholic anxiety.

It tells the story of a seventeen year old called Pinkie, who kills a man, and then has to keep on killing other people to keep it secret: “Christ! he thought. Have I got to massacre the world?”

Pinkie is something of a sociopath, so the murdering doesn’t worry him except as an inconvenience. What concerns him more is that he also has to marry a young girl to ensure she can’t testify against him, and he finds the idea of sex deeply repellent. His strange little sixteen year old wife agrees to marry him, though she regards a city hall wedding as – actually, literally, a mortal sin. It’s quite interesting how free your life can be once you have committed a mortal sin. I guess I’ve probably committed lots of mortal sins, but it’s not the same if you don’t believe in them.

Eventually Pinkie is brought to justice by a middle aged woman who hunts him down on the basic assumption that good ought to triumph. She is in an odd detective, particularly it seems to Greene, who is always on about her cleavage. Try this: “Her big breasts, which had never suckled a child of her own, felt a merciless compassion.” Very odd. I’d be willing to bet a large sum that no one reading that sentence could possibly doubt the gender of its author. She has a fantastic general principle in life though, often repeated, and which I really enjoy: “The world is a good place, as long you don’t weaken.” Wise advice.

All ends reasonably well, even for the strange little bride, who is comforted by her priest with the reflection that “You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of god.” And with that cheerful reflection, the relatively happy ending is upon us.

Given all the real problems that Eastern Europe faced in the twentieth century I’m not sure why so many twentieth century Eastern European books are about imaginary problems.

In this book a couple goes to Italy on their honeymoon. The husband, Mihaly, gets left behind by the train at a junction, and somehow decides that this is the ideal moment to leave his wife. The reason? Extreme nostalgia (?). Apparently he is nostalgic for his high school friends, especially one girl he was in love with and her brother who he nearly killed himself with because of death being so beautiful (??).

In an unlikely coincidence he meets one of his other high school friends who is now a monk. His advice is to go to Rome, but for no reason (???). In Rome, he meets an academic who tells him what he should do – the practice that will set him free – it’s obviously the study of religious history (????).

And that’s where I had to quit. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Though I do want to know where it ends. I suspect I was about ten pages off a talking cat.

I’m an enormous admirer of Gibbons’ classic COLD COMFORT FARM, a book about how not to take yourself too seriously, but I had this idea somehow that she was a bit of a one-hit-wonder, and so had not tried any of her other books. Last year I attempted so tried WESTWOOD, which was good, but not exactly a wonder; and now have tried THE BACHELOR, which while not close to her classic, was really pretty great.

THE BACHELOR tells the story of a brother and sister in their forties who have settled into their life in rural England and are gently rotting there, until the second world war brings with it change and – unexpectedly – romance. Most of the joy of this book is in the comedy. Here we are on a young woman who has been involved in a scandal:

Young men, on hearing that a young woman has been betrayed do not clench their fists and call the betrayer a villain. If they are good young men they make a note to avoid the young woman as a possible bore and if they are bad young men they make a note of her telephone number. While we are on this painful subject it may be added that a recitative on her sufferings from the young woman’s own lips to a new young man is about as favourable to her hopes as if she had proffered him arsenic

Or here’s a description of a woman:

Mrs Feilding had been the possessor of one of those personalities like an enormous old fashioned battlepiece, all over rearing horses and hussars hauling cannon out of the mud and soldiers expiring in the arms of their comrades with Napoleon or somebody of that sort in the middle of it; no one can ignore it, although it exhausts everybody to tears, and weaker spirits simply avoid the room where it hangs

Or there’s a bus, that’s since the war has been able to vary its schedule and is now so erratic it “generally behaves more like a medieval baron than a bus” Brilliant description of public transport everywhere (except in Switzerland, or so I’m told).

The book does have it unusual side, in showing a young woman actively planning to seduce a young man – rare in books of this period, that typically assume, with ISIS, that woman are utterly free of sexual interest. It also has its serious side. The brother has long been dismissed by his mothers and sisters as rather a lightweight, and he has tended to laugh along with them, and agree. They have also typically tried to disrupt his romantic endeavours, so at 45 he is unmarried. He’s not unhappy; or perhaps he is. That’s part of the interest: even he is not really sure.

He ends up engaged by the end of the story, but it’s interesting how near a thing it is; how close he is to not really caring one way or the other. As Gibbons puts it: “Another ten years, even another five, and Habit and Comfort and Humorous Self-depreciation, the great stones that lie on such roots and bleach and dry them, would have done their work.” It’s interesting that such a funny book should be so interested in the dangers of comedy.

This is a book like none other I’ve ever read. The characters behave so badly, and express themselves so bizarrely, that I can only think it comes direct from life. Reading it is a bit like drinking at the firehose of family life – and not a very happy family at that.

The book tells the story of a family slowly losing their money. The father Sam is an idealist, selfish and self-centred as only idealists can be; the mother Henny is a bitter former debutante. The story mostly focuses on the eldest child, Louie, daughter of her father’s first marriage, and half-sister to the other five children in the family. Here’s a taster, the mother speaking of her step-daughter to the father:

She wanted to know whether Sam knew that his beautiful genius’ clothes were smeared with filth and that most of the time the great big overgrown wretch with her great lolloping breasts looked as if she’d rolled in pigsty or a slaughter house, and that she couldn’t stand the streams of blood that poured from her fat belly and that he must get someone else to look after such an unnatural big beast.

Sam had come into the house when Henny began her screams and stood their goggling, while Louie, going paer, stood petrified with horror and pride, looking reproachfully at her father and expecting him to scold Henny. But Sam goggled like some insignificant wretch crept in secretly on the Eleusinian mysteries, frightened but licking his lips.

Or here’s the mother – Henny on her inlaws:

Henny smirked even more, seeing the wilcat, hedgerow, wild-weed, slum-artisan, cheap-Baltimore family grow more jolly; seeing Ebby, poor ship’s carpenter, who had an imbecile for a wife and one doddle-headed child, and gaptoothed Benbow, with that strumpet girl, Leslie (as Henny put it), and two dumb boys, and old soak Charles, and garage owner Peter (who had actually begun with a junk car and three cowbells collecting old bedsprings and fat women’s bulging corsets!), and Bonnie (obviously sleeping with some man who was doing her the dirt) and Jinny (whose pert daughter Essie needed her face slapped) and Jo (whose hair was like a haystack in a fit) and all their weedy, rank children getting merrier and merrier on the dungheap that was their life. Born in the muck, thriving in the muck, and proud of the muck, thought Henrietta!

The narrative is full of invention. Here’s the children, running from their parents fighting: ” . . . seemed not to take the slightest interest in the obscene drama played daily in their eyes and ears, but, like little fish scuttling before the disturbing oar, would disappear mentally and physically into the open air or into odd corner of the house”. Or here’s how she describes a note arriving to Louie during class: “by desk express”

It’s a fabulous book. It ends SPOILER ALERT with Louie attempting to kill her parents with poison, and succeeding with her step-mother. A tribute to the quality of the book is that this seems completely like a realistic and understandable thing to do, rather than like unhinged melodrama.

Jonathan Franzen said this about the novel: “This novel . . . is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century. I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

I think I agree with him. I am not sure why THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN is not better known. Perhaps it’s proof, if more were needed, that life is after all not fair.

This won the Pulitzer in 1934, when the author was 24. It was her first novel. Can you imagine? I haven’t read any of her other eleven novels, but I think we can rest assured that the rest of her writing life was basically one long case of that-difficult-second-album.

The book tells the story of a family who are impoverished during the Great Depression and have to move out of the city. They end up as small scale farmers, and the novel covers a long and terrible period of drought. It is a stark reminder of how brutal agriculture is, and what a miracle food can be.

It’s an extraordinarily lyrical novel of the natural world and I veered wildly between loving and hating it. Here’s an example: “In the thought and strangeness of self we could spend hours as traveling through a labyrinth, and it was a riddle sufficient in those day to keep the mind quick and seeking, hungry and never fed; and in the mystery of the turnip, you forgot the turnip leaf”

What? Anyway, an interesting reminder of what hard work actually is, and of the value of rain. Probably useful for me to think about as I head into the London winter.

I went to an exhibit recently about 19th century Russian portraiture, and suddenly found a great gap looming in my knowledge of the western cannon. In the same breath as Tolstoy and Dostoevesky, the captions spoke of someone called Turgenev. Who is this Turgenev? I’ve never read any Turgenev! What am I missing?

Not a whole hell of a lot, based on FATHERS AND SONS. A young man, Akardy returns home from medical school with a friend, Bazarov, who he admires. Bazarov is a nihilist, and his disavowal of traditional Russian values is as thrilling to Arkady as it is horrifying to Arkady’s parents. Bazarov meets a lovely young lady and a powerful struggle ensues between his hormones and his nihlism. Nihilism briefly triumphs, and then – just when he is beginning to regret this – he conducts an autopsy without careful enough hygiene. This is the nineteenth century, so he dies. Arkady meanwhile has been busy falling in love with the lovely young lady’s sister, and due to his lower commitment to nihilism, and higher commitment to hygiene, he lives to marry her.

It actually sounds like a pretty good book in this summary, and I guess it was. It was the novel that really established the word ‘nihilism,’ and the character of Bazarov was hugely influential in the development of that idea. Perhaps it now seems rather tired and elderly simply because it created so very many imitators. Now, to a new reader, it seems like an imitation of something else; and that something else is itself. Now that people have truly given up on the idea of life having a meaning, Bazarov’s early gestures in that direction seem a bit half-hearted. He’s so full of ideas and hopes and passions that by our standards it’s hardly nihilism at all. I can’t decide whether or not to feel sad about this. I think perhaps I do.