SOME RAIN MUST FALL is Book 5 of 6, and as with the others nothing happens. Yet somehow you can’t stop reading, and when it’s over you feel awfully sad and lonely.

I pity the poor blurb writer, who tries to give it a plot, telling how the main character (i.e., the author) arrives at university “full of excitement and writerly aspirations. Soon though, he is stripped of youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile . . . and his social efforts are a dismal failure. Awkward in company and hopeless with women, he drowns his shame in drink and rock music.”

This is indeed sort of true, but also not true. It’s the kind of falsity that comes from trying to summarise any real life: imagine trying to summarise your own, even over a few years. It makes me feel sweaty just to consider it, an attempt to assign so much meaning. And Karl Ove has not attempted it. He tells us as usual his day by day, with us left to construct the story around it. It makes the books both boring and wonderful, much like real life.

He rarely steps out of his day to day, but here’s one time, which captures some sense of what I think he’s going for:

Once we were seventeen, once we were thirty-five, once we were fifty-four. Did we remember that day? 9 January 1997, when we went into REMA 1000 to do our shopping and came out again with a bag in each hand and walked down to the car, put the bags on the ground and unlocked the door, placed the bags on the back seat and got in? Beneath the darkening sky, by the sea, the forest behind, black and bare?

Or here talking about something else he refers to “. . .Life as it unfolded around me, with the trivial incidents that make up all lives and can suddenly shine bright in the dusk of meaninglessness; the door goes, she comes home, bends over and takes off her shoes . . .”

The early section has much to say on his issues with masturbation (I had mercifully forgotten about this problem) and the various horribly embarrassing social situations he creates (though in this book he finally admits what I had guessed from his author photo, but would never have guessed from the way he writes about himself: he is good looking). I’m blown away once again by his picture of life in Scandinavia, which seems wildly improbable to a Zimbabwean: his life story does not involve at any point revolve around government decisions, and his choices are largely funded by the state. At one point he says Rome is the most chaotic place he’s ever been to. Can you imagine Western Europe being your bar for chaos?

This book ends where book 1 began, so I am assuming the last book, Book 6, will take us into the present day. I haven’t even begun it yet, as it’s not out in English, but I’ve already begun mourning its end.

I’m not saying you can’t write novels of the First World War, but I kind of also am saying that.

Barker makes a strong effort here – it’s all there, the field hospital, the eyeballs swinging out of sockets, the deserter for execution, etc etc: but it’s hard going when you’re competing with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, with ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH, with someone who was actually there. LIFE CLASS has rather the air of cups of tea in Notting Hill, and of strenuous and detailed imaginings.

The book is stronger the further away it is from the Front. It begins with young men and women at London’s Slade art school, all agog with social change and the difficulties of working in charcoal. There’s sexual tension galore that comes to abrupt halt with conscription. The main male character, Paul, works at a field hospital, where he slowly becomes friends with a sweet-hearted young recruit. I am sure you will not be aghast to learn what happens to the young recruit: what always happens to young recruits in WWI novels, and indeed what happened pretty often in WWI itself, i.e., death.

It was a pretty good book, so I don’t know what I didn’t enjoy more. Maybe it’s just that the same story has been done so much better elsewhere: it couldn’t help but suffer by comparison. The same book, but about soemthing else – say – Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the Lord’s Resistance Army, or Brexit – might have been better.

This is a book with a lot of opinions, and I really enjoyed it. Here’s one, on some girlie magazines the main character finds at a dump: “The cover price was high, suggesting a wealthy man, but pornography is a classic payday splurge of the shiftless.” MISLAID is full of declarations of this kind, suggesting someone who has a lot to say, and, thankfully, the desire to say it in an entertaining way.

I understand Zink only published her first novel at fifty, and this is her second, and you certainly get the impression of someone who is writing what they damn well please. Having said that, I’m always doubtful of these outsiders, novelists who appear fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. They always have a drawer full of novels they’ve been working on for years and a great friendship with whoever literary superstar they met at AA. I won’t even google Nell Zink, but I guarantee it’s true. There’s virtually no actual outsiders in the fine arts; you have to go to professions with money for that, such as banking.

The novel is about a woman who leaves her husband and son behind and flees with her daughter to live in poverty. Sounds grim, but it’s really very entertaining. Here’s the mother, Meg, with the small daughter, Karen: “Meg’s first paycheck materialized as she drove to the grocery store early one morning. She saw a cardboard box on the shoulder. She stopped, because a box like that nearly always contains kittens. Not worth money, but tell that to Karen. Karen worshipped kittens as gods.”

We have a couple of issues with plot resolution at the end, it’s all a bit pat – “The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means” as Wilde has it – but endings are always hard. Great book overall.

This is an unusual book in being a sort of boring thriller. The first half is the description of the life of an art critic and his wife who develop a friendship with the artist and his wife who live upstairs from them in New York. There is a lot – and I mean pages – of description of art works. I can’t tell you too much about that, as I skipped it, this kind of stuff being almost as boring as descriptions of dreams.

The couples have sons of about the same age, so they boys become friends. Then the art critic’s son dies in a boating accident, and there is a lot of grieving. I was sort of starting to wonder where the book was going – and then it went somewhere: the other child, it slowly emerges, is a sociopath. He appears to have feelings, but in reality he has none, and his whole life is a series of strange lies and diversions to get whatever he impulsively happens to want. He gets involved with a young artist who turns out to be a murderer, he becomes a drug addict, he starts threatening his parents – it’s all getting most interesting – and then, wait for it . . . . the parents decide to cut him off as he is not safe to be around. So they do that successfully and everything is fine. I mean ????? That’s it? This is not the exciting conclusion centuries of development of the novel form had led me to expect.

I know the novel was not trying to be what I wanted it to be. I’m pretty sure that the exciting conclusion was supposed to be a bit more around theme than plot – I won’t go into it for you, but basically the art critic goes blind (snore) – but I just refuse to engage with all that. For me, there was a really great thriller in here, but somehow it got buried in someone’s MFA writing group.

I don’t know if I’m getting less disciplined in my old age, less interested in the wider world, or if everything’s just getting more crap. I’ve been abandoning books left and right. Here’s an overview:

PORTRAIT OF A LADY by Henry James: This should be the sort of book I like. I love a fat old novel. I’ve tried it before, one singular Christmas in Tallahassee when I was nineteen, and abandoned it then, but I thought I should try again, because the credentials are so good. But God, it was hard going. No using one word when ten would do, no need for a plot if you can put in a description. So I gave up.

TOM JONES by Henry Feilding: In a depressing turn on events, someone seeing the title asked me if it was a biography of the singer. I felt very literary, and yet I just couldn’t make it all the way through. It was fun, but all very dawn of the novel, lots of disconnected episodes and a strong supposition that we don’t need any background on the political machinations of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

THE LONG VIEW by Elizabeth Jane Howard: I love the ‘Staff Picks’at London’s bookstore Foyle’s (independent: I’m in hourly expectation of its closing), so when the cashier was moist eyed with enthusiasm when I bought this novel I was ready to be excited. The beginning was great: “This, then, was the situation. Eight people were to dine that evening in the house at Campden Hill Square. Mrs Fleming had arranged the party (it was the kind of unoriginal thought expected of her, and she sank obediently to the occasion) to celebrate her son’s engagement to June Stoker.” Unfortunately while well written, I found it hard to get engaged. It’s about an unhappy marriage in the 30s, and I can only think that this was all perceived as more tragic back then. I spent most of the book thinking JUST GET A DIVORCE THEN JESUS. So I had to give up

THE LEOPARD by Guiseppe de Lampedusa: I actually read this in college, after a professor specifically recommended it to me, and thought I’d re-try it now. It’s a story of a decadent old nobleman at the time of Italian unification, and while interesting in many ways there was way too much pontificating about how ‘Sicily is weighed down by history’ and ‘Sicilians are an exhausted people,’ and so on. Once has to listen to a lot of addled political talk from people who don’t know what they’re on about in daily life; it’s not what I need from literature

Time for the annual review of what I read this year – and guys, it’s big news, because for the first time ever I actually read more books by women than men this year. Admittedly this is because in a fit of despair I did some major re-reading, mostly Jane Austen and of Nancy Mitford, who are always very cheering. However! It’s still something: 33 of the 60.

Best of the year is obviously lead by Austen. But it’s hardly fair to put her in the race, like running a race horse against chickens. So the best of the rest: the quarter from Elena Ferrente of MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY, and THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD. It’s a magnificent series on a pair of friends from Naples in the early twentieth century. In a sign that it truly is the end of days, the publishers have felt it necessary to brand this major literary achievement as chick lit. I pity those who buy it as chick lit, as they will be horrified – its all about how boring your children are and how to abandon old friends who aren’t working for you anymore. REUNION by Fred Uhlman is a wonderful novella about the effect of the rise of the Nazis on a pair of high school boys; THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P Jones is a fantastic huge story of slavery in the American South; and A NOTABLE WOMAN by Jean Lucey Pratt is a set of real life diaries covering fifty years in the life of an ordinary woman that had me blubbing in Luxor airport.

Worst of the year is I’m sorry to say THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailor, which is a very young man’s view of the glamour of war; the terrible MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA by Arthur Golden, which is insulting to Asian prostitutes everywhere, and OSCAR AND LUCINDA by Peter Carey, which is just misery without a purpose. Here’s the list

• OSCAR AND LUCINDA by Peter Carey
• A KISS BEFORE DYING by Ira Levin
• STATION ELEVEN by Emily St John Mandel
• DEATH ON THE NILE by Agatha Christie
• TROLLOPE by Victoria Glendinning
• TOBACCO ROAD by Eskine Caldwell
• REQUIEM FOR A WREN by Nevil Shute
• TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE by John Steinbeck
• THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa al Aswany
• BEING MORTAL: ILLNESS, MEDICINE, AND WHAT MATTERS AT THE END by Atul Gawande
• WHEN THE DOVES DISAPPEARED by Sofi Oksanen
• A NOTABLE WOMAN: THE ROMANTIC JOURNALS OF JEAN LUCEY PRATT ed. Simon Garfield
• BOOK OF MEMORY by Petina Gappah
• DON’T TELL ALFRED by Nancy Mitford
• A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD by Anne Tyler
• YEAR OF WONDERS by Geraldine Brooks
• HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE by Charles Yu
• FARENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury
• MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA by Arthur Golden
• THE LONEY by Andrew Michael Hurley
• THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir
• A SUNDAY AT THE POOL IN KIGALI BY Gil Courtemanche
• MARCH by Geraldine Brooks
• ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews
• REUNION by Fred Uhlman
• THE ROYAL WE by Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks
• THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT by Elena Ferrante
• THE DISCOMFORT ZONE by Jonathan Franzen
• THE FISHERMEN by Chigozi Obioma
• MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, and THE STORY OF A NEW NAME and THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD by Elena Ferrante
• THE END OF THE STORY by Lydia Davis
• WESTWOOD by Stella Gibbons
• AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER by Mario Vargas Llosa
• MANSFIELD PARK by Jane Austen
• THE ROSIE PROJECT by Graeme Simsion
• EQUAL RITES by Terry Pratchett
• THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt
• LEAVING BEFORE THE RAIN COMES by Alexandra Fuller
• FIRE IN THE BLOOD by Irene Nemirovsky
• NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen
• AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE by Hilary Mantel
• JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN by Margaret Drabble
• SENSE AND SENSIBILITY by Jane Austen
• DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY (and its sequels) by EM Delafield
• DANCING IN THE DARK by Karl Ove Knausgaard
• THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
• A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
• HOME by Marilynne Robinson
• UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
• PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen
• THE BLESSING by Nancy Mitford
• LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE by Nancy Mitford
• THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
• THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY by Michael Chabon
• THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford
• THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P Jones
• WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
• KITTY AND THE PRINCE by Ben Shephard
• LAKE WOBEGON DAYS by Garrison Keillor

Just a re-read of this, because I had nothing else on my Kindle and because it’s fantastic.

This is extraordinarily well written novel about glass manufacture, religion, and Australia. Yet I fail to be able to drum up much enthusiasm for it. For a start, there are a lot of minor characters, who, while uniformly interesting, tend to slow down the narrative. And what narrative there is very much in a depressing direction: Oscar and Lucinda are both gambling addicts, and so from the beginning you struggle to see a happy ending. You feel sorry for them, but you also feel annoyed.

Also, they keep making terrible business decisions, such as investing huge sums in building a glass church for a tiny village in the Outback which is not served by any roads.

In summary, it’s a horrible, cruel book. The author spends 500 pages using all his great talent to get you to care about his large array of characters, and then has it all end badly for each of them, in an array of different ways. Rest assured, Oscar and Lucinda do not end up together. As an added bonus, Oscar even dies. I can only conclude that Carey was born in the First World. One shouldn’t stereotype, but you don’t lay out this kind of misery and despair in art unless your own reality is pretty freaking fantastic.

Apparently I am becoming a fan of Levin’s. I read his STEPFORD WIVES and ROSEMARY’S BABY, and now A KISS BEFORE DYING. They’re fun books – tightly plotted and hard to predict. I notice now as I write this blog and look back over the titles that they also all deal very much with gender issues. They’re about women being tricked by men. A KISS BEFORE DYING was his first novel (a massive success when he was only twenty three) and is his least sophisticated iteration on the theme. It tells the story of a man who courts a wealthy young woman in the interests of securing her inheritance. She (spoiler) becomes pregnant and so will be disinherited. When she refuses an abortion he decides to kill her so as to escape marrying her. It all goes downhill from there. A clever, twisty little story. I wish I had written it at twenty three.

I do not recommend reading a book about a flu pandemic while on a long fligh next to a woman with the snuffles. It was overnight Dallas to London, and I felt ready for the end of days when we reached Heathrow. In the book the pandemic takes just a few days to spread around the world. It’s airborne and kills in under twenty four hours. People survive if they are able to stay away from others for the first weeks, as everyone who is not immune dies very quickly.

The story follows a group of people who were all loosely connected with a production of King Lear in Toronto on what is called ‘Day 1’ of the pandemic. Mostly the story follows one of the child actors in Lear, who in the post-apocalyptic world tours with a group of performers mostly showing Shakespeare and Mozart. I struggle to believe that in those harsh times there’d be much appetite for this. I’d think there’d be more money in horrific dog fighting or gladiatorial displays or something. But perhaps I am a terrible person with insufficient respect for the human spirit.

Another strand of the story follows a group who survive because their plane is forced to land at a remote airport, where they all go on to live for the next few decades, with romances blossoming between jaded business travellers and Lufthansa cabin attendants. It’s an interesting novel, and I recommend it, though the apocalyptic setting is more engaging than the various individual plots. It certainly made the flight seem short, though it also made the snuffler terrifying.