This book is a reminder to me not to get sour in my old age. The story has nothing to do with old age, but it’s still the lesson I take: it’s more about the author than it is about her book. I expected to enjoy this novel, as it’s the third in a trilogy, and I have read and re-read the first two THE PURSUIT OF LOVE and LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE may times. They’re fatnastic, fun, clever books, great for reading when you can’t sleep, and I re-open them often.

I should have been wary of the fact that DON’T TELL ALFRED is not typically sold with the other two. The publishers clearly know that something’s not quite right. In this book the satire has become cruel, and the laughter unkind. The first books are set in the upper class English world Mitford grew up in, in 1920s Britain and are a charming account of a world that’s long gone. This latter book, written decades after the first two, is set in the 1960s, and Mitford is clearly not able to accept what she’s lost. She talks a great deal about the modern world, from eastern religion to rock ‘n’ roll, and comes across as nothing so much as bitter. Here she is on her son speaking: “Basil went on in this curious idiom, which consisted in superimposing, whenever he remembered to do so, cockney or American slang on the ordinary speech of an educated person.”

There’s lots of other humourless stuff like this, on Buddhism being obviously ‘bunkum’, and so on. All a bit much from a woman who accepted as a charming eccentricity her uncle’s love of the ‘child hunt’ (that is: when the foxes were not available for hunting, he’d use her and her cousins as prey, and chase them across the fields with dogs). Sorry Ms Mitford. It’s not such a big deal after all; there’s still the other two, and they’re fantastic, some of my favourite night time companions.

I’d never heard of Anne Tyler before, which surprised me, as she’s a prolific and well regarded author, and a Pulitzer prize winner. This novel tells the story of a long marriage, centred around a house that was built by the husband’s father.
I typically struggle with these very domestic stories, but this is as good an example as any, with believable characters and well observed moments. Here we are when they are young, with the husband-to-be watching his sister in irritation: “ (She) would be eagerly nodding her head in her demure new pillbox hat, giving a liquid laugh that any brother would know to be false”
And here’s a description of his family; “Their leanness was the rawboned kind, not the lithe elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not.”
For me in the end while I enjoyed the novel I cannot say it moved me. After watching the couple’s whole lives unfold I was left a little – blah. And yet still I can only admire Ms Tyler’s artistry. Here we are, at the end, with the husband in a car. The wife is dead, so the husband is moving into a care home, and his grandchildren have just had their last Haloween at the house. The decorations are not yet down: “Look past him out the rain-spattered window. Focus purely on the scenery, which had changed to open countryside now, leaving behind the blighted row houses, leaving behind the station under its weight of roiling dark clouds, and the empty city streets farther north with the trees turing inside out in the wind, and the house on Bouton Road where the filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch”
See what she did there? It’s a bit barf inducing but I admire it.

This book is based on the true story of a tiny Derbyshire village that was stricken with the plague. Rather than flee, the villagers decided to quarantine themselves, to avoid infecting neighbouring communities. They succeeded in saving their neighbours, but about two-thirds of the village died. In short, it’s kind of an apocalypse novel. And I love a good apocalypse novel. It’s chock full of terrible moral questions, which is of course the best part of the apocalypse (at least in fiction. In real life, the best bit will be still being alive).

Early on the villagers make the brilliant plan of killing the only people in the village with any kind of medical knowledge – the female herabists (aka, witches). You then begin to feel really grateful for modern medicine, as the villagers try and cure themselves by randomly eating various bits of leaves and bushes in the hopes that something will work. Big props to the Enlightenment, you guys. And big props also to Fleming, for the invention of antibiotics, which is still the only cure for the plague.

I enjoyed this book very much. However I struggled as I did with Brooks’ MARCH that it works more as an interesting collation of research than exactly as a novel. There’s a also a bit of challenge in how contemporary the characters feel. They are all busy enjoying roses and whatever, but I am quite sure that in reality the inner life of people of the seventeenth century was more along the lines of “it mislikes me not when the devil does be upon the bacon” or whatever: inscrutable historical weirdness.

This book is about a time travel machine repair man. I thought for sure I would like it. But I should have been warned by the fact that the protagonist’s name is Charles Yu, the same as the author’s. This kind of thing is always a RED ALERT that you are going to have a clever-clever novel. And indeed it is CLEVER-CLEVER. There is all sorts of pretty predictable stuff about selfhood and blah blah can I read a book before I have written it and blah blah. I had to give up part way through.

This book feels kind of imitative. Perhaps this is because it sparked a lot of imitators, and I read these imitators before the original. It tells of a dystopian future society where the populace is kept entranced by television (all four walls of the rooms), by fast cars, etc. Books and thought are basically planned, and the public don’t feel their loss very much. Cue joke about today.

Ray Bradbury had a long life, and in the Forward he reflects on the book FIFTY YEARS after he wrote it. Apparently he finished it off in nine days in some kind of typewriter room in the local YMCA. Imagine living so long that you wrote a major book half a century ago? It gives me hope I’ve still got time. For what, I’m not quite sure.

I’m afraid I couldn’t get past the first few chapters. I don’t know why people love this book so much. It just screamed: THE AUTHOR THINKS THIS IS SO EXOTIC. I hate that. He’s just loving that it’s JAPAN, and people are POOR, and oh god best of all they are SEX WORKERS WHO WEAR FACE PAINT. Snore.

Arthur Golden is a white American man writing about an Asian woman, so there will be a long line of people queuing up to complain that he’s a cultural imperialist suppressing the voice of the Other, and etc etc. I’m tempted to Google it right now just to see how many million hits I get on the novel title + ‘orientalist’. I am not one of these people. I think it’s great when writers stretch beyond their own tiny experience to write the world; but good god you’ve got to do it well – and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA: well, it’s not so good. Not in my experience anyway, but then it did spend two years on the New York Times bestseller list, so what do I know. (Actually I just googled to find out how long it was on the list, and guess what: the author is part of the family that owns the New York Times. No wonder he finds it deeply exotic that someone might be poor).

This is a book with a great set-up, but poor pay-off. Much like the average person’s life, I guess.

It tells the story of a family’s annual religious pilgrimage to the English coast, to a place called the Loney.

It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit St Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter. Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied and made Coldbarrow . . . into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. . . Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint

It’s all so very promising! The protagonist’s brother has some kind of developmental disorder, so he cannot speak, and their mother is convinced that they can pray him well. In the best tradition of this kind of novel they run into local rural people who are obviously involved in creepy rural stuff: sheep’s hearts turn up in cow’s skulls, pregnant teenage girls disappear, community theatre is obviously a satanic ritual, and etc. Why are rural people always doing this kind of thing? Probably they are bored because internet speeds are too slow for youtube.

Anyway, eventually the brother is healed after the locals do something not too fantastic with a baby. Somehow this manages to be anti-climactic.

This book which is now a bestseller and – apogee of literary achievement – a movie, began life as a self-published pdf. I read a very charming interview with its author who explained that he had an irrational fear that the whole thing was set up, some kind of big joke, because the path from pdf to blockbuster seemed so unlikely.

The book tells the story of an astronaut who is left behind on Mars and has to survive for almost a year on his own. The interest of the story is not at all psychological – the astronaut remains implausibly chipper throughout – but more in the way he – as he puts it – ‘sciences the shit’ out of his situation. He comes up with all kinds of inventive solutions to apparently impossible problems – growing food, getting water, etc – which are very interesting to read about. It made me wish I’d studied science in school, and I hope it does that too for the kids still in school who see the movie. Somewhat unintentionally, I‘ve also seen the movie, and it’s better than the book – shorter, more psychologically believable, with added bonus of Matt Damon being mostly bare chested.

This is certainly the most highly sexed account of the Rwandan genocide I’ve ever read. It tells the story of an older Canadian journalist who is in Rwanda over the period of the genocide, living in the famous ‘Hotel Rwanda’. He begins a relationship with a much younger waitress, and we learn almost as much about the curve of her butt and the perkiness of her breasts as we do about the genocidal violence. It’s mid-life crisis meets mass murder. In a deeply unlikely plot twist, he marries her. In a more likely plot twist, despite her being Tutsi, he refuses to leave the country with her because ‘he likes Rwanda.’ He likes it less later on when the poor woman is abducted and gang raped.

The book is excellent as an account of the real feel of this period, as the author was there for much of the time. It reminded me once again how horrifyingly well planned the genocide was, and how many countries and international bodies were fully aware of what was going to happen. I do think though that it’s a little odd, how much energy is given to condemning the UN in Rwanda. Surely, condemnation should be primarily for those who committed the crime. This is clearly how it operates with the Nazis and the Holocaust; so I’m not clear why it doesn’t work that way in Rwanda. I’m going to go ahead and say it’s kind of racist, as if the press feels that Rwandas are in some mysterious way not capable of planning and executing their own genocide, just as well as the Germans.

The journalist thinks the waitress is dead after the gang rape, but then later finds out she is alive. Apparently this was not uncommon in the genocide, as while men were dispatched quickly, women were often raped and tortured and left to die slowly (e.g., as in her case, having yours breasts hacked off). He finds the waitress in a market, but she says he should leave her as she is ‘no longer a woman’. He does so immediately. Apparently we are supposed to think this is romantic? I just find it fairly believable. Always nice to have that Canadian passport when the breasts are no longer perky, or indeed existent.

In my endless quest for something to read I have taken to studying past winners of literary prizes. I thought of the Pulitzer recently and was disappointed to learn that I have in fact already read virtually all the winners of the last two decades. MARCH was the exception.

Those familiar with LM Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN will recall the book tells the story of a mother and her four daughters over the course of a year while the father is away, serving the Union in the Civil War. This is the story of the father’s year. It’s a fiction based on the real experiences of LM Alcott’s own father.
Alcott in real life was an impressively free thinker. Born to barely literate farmers, he entirely self-created a very unusual vision for his life: His radicalism took many forms.

“Vegetarian from childhood, he founded a commune, Fruitlands, so extreme in its Utopianism that members neither wore wool nor used aminal manures, as both were considered property of the beasts from which they came. One reason the venture failed in its first winter was that when canker worms got into the apple crop, the nonviolent Fruitlanders refused to take measures to kill them.”

He was not willing to fight in the war, though many pacifists put aside their ideals in order to join what they saw as a fight against slavery. He therefore became a non-denominational chaplain, before such a concept existed, much to the confusion of the men he sought to help. Cue horrifying if familiar scenes of civil war butchery. Later, he got involved in an aspect of the war I’d never heard about – that is, trying to rescue that year’s cotton crop. As the Union troops advanced, more and more cotton fields came behind their lines. The owners had obviously fled, leaving behind the now freed slaves. Now the Union had a problem – how to produce cotton, which they needed, and how to introduce previously enslaved people into the formal economy. They ended up finding Northern men with capital, but without farming experience, to take over leases on the farms and try to get the crops out. It was as you can imagine a difficult project. In March’s case, it was made worse by the fact that some former slaves had chosen to join the confederates, and they burned down the cotton crop, and re-captured the slaves, right before the harvest.

I can’t say I cared very much about the characters in this novel, or about the plot, but the setting was extremely interesting. I was particularly fascinated by the attempt to move slaves into employees, and by how very fragile that distinction can be.