This book tells the story of some Malaysians trying to make it in China. The stories are largely separate, with only occasional overlaps, apparently a most fashionable form at the moment.

What can I tell you? I kind of hated it. The characters are very varied – a migrant factory worker, a successful business woman, a pop star – but they are also all very similar. They all want money, or, perhaps to put it more fairly, they all want the symbols of money. They all find solace in the internet. They all think Shanghai is big. I can’t tell you too much about it as I’ve already forgotten most of it.

FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE has received some good reviews, so perhaps I am being uncharitable. I guess it was sort of interesting to learn about contemporary China, but if that’s what China is like – dull and money grubbing – I’m not sure I’m very interested.

THE AFRICA HOUSE tells the true and bizarre story of one Stewart Gore-Browne, who arrived in Zambia in 1910, fell in love with a lake in the middle of nowhere, and dedicated the rest of his life to building an English country estate there. Over the course of his long life he went from wildly colonial figure – the local people used to lie face down when he walked past; his first act was to shoot a rhino – to someone who Kenneth Kaunda would describe as: “one of the most visionary people of Africa – He was born an English gentlemen and died a Zambian gentlemen.”

The book itself is perhaps not impeccably written – here’s a sample of the kind of cliché you need to wade through: “Above us the equatorial sun beat down from an endless blue sky” – but it’s a very interesting story, and one I found oddly inspirational. This is not so much because Gore-Browne did everything right, but because he really did so many things – packed so much in – and because so many of those things were plainly crazy. He was an original thinker, as many people are, but where he differed from most was in his willingness to actually do what he dreamed. And what he dreamed was pretty crazy: he was going to have a country estate, in the best tradition of the English country estate, in the middle of darkest Africa, by the lake where Livingstone’s dog had recently been eaten by a crocodile.

There were diversions: he fought in the First World War, for example; but he went on with his plan, slowing building an eccentric mansion, and trying to create an estate that might eventually make the place economically self sustaining (orange orchards, perfume oils, cattle: all failures). He loved the place, but he was lonely, and madly in love with a woman twenty years old than him who was unfortunately married. Even more unfortunately, she was also his aunt. Eventually he married a young girl he barely knew, which marriage ended in two children and floods of tears.

Gore-Browne, while never a liberal in the way we would recognize today, understood the local people very well, and increasingly found himself their protector. For example, here he is to a British policeman trying to shut down an illegal shebeen “While you are stuffing your fat faces with beer and chicken and slurping your whiskey sodas, they are surviving on one bowl of watery porridge. And you begrudge them one bowl of millet beer you wouldn’t even let your dog drink!” He knew Kenneth Kaunda, who often stayed at his house, and when Independence came, renounced his British citizenship for Zambian.

He was disappointed to have no role in the state after independence, Kaunda finding him inconveniently white, and he spent his last years alone in his house with his servant and friend Henry. His house now is crumbling, and his son, interviewed by the author, called in a monument to one man’s suffocating vanity. What a whiny little bitch. Children are so uncharitable to their parents. Here’s the end of Gore-Browne’s last letter: “Yes, 84 years are plenty . . . I find my memory is quite childishly feeble now. . . However I’ve had a good life and lots to be thankful for. Henry sends his respectful regards.” This is a great epitaph, and I hope I can say the same for myself at 84. So what that his house is crumbling, and the idea never really worked out. He had a great time trying.

As a side note, here’s a little selection of the handwritten notes I found on the last pages of this book, which I bought in one of Joburg’s many second hand book shops: NO TV ON THE WARD
My bed neighbor ‘hears voices’
4 ward mates have been to Sterkfontein
1 young chap (30) has tried to kill himself 8 times in the last year (certified twice)
FOOD AWFUL
B/fast – warm sweetcorn, porridge awful

Oh Beryl! Beryl! Here I was all ready to be in love with you and read everything you ever wrote. I very rarely read the same author back to back, or even close together, but MASTER GEORGIE was so wonderful and so short I decided to risk it, and picked up AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE. It’s not awful, but it’s no adventure, and it’s certainly not GEORGIE.

The novel tells the story of a young woman apprenticed to a theatre repertory company in the 1960s. It’s a world not so much changed today, and is one I know well. The young woman is in love with the company’s director, who is, not amazingly, not interested in women. She engages in an affair with the star of the show (Captain Hook, in a lackluster PETER PAN), and there’s a strange twist at the end, which I won’t give away, involving this relationship. So it sounds like it should be pretty interesting, right? But it gets bogged down in a sort of heightened poetry that drains it of character of incident.

The gorgeous Bainbridge style is still there, but someone I just don’t care. Try:

The dance floor, wreathed in blue smoke, was crowded with revellers foxtrotting to the magnified beat of the paper-hatted band perspiring beneath a trembling canopy of holly boughs and mistletoe

Lush, isn’t it? Or this, the description of her first time with the star. Note she had just been in a play about Cleopatra:

It was unusual, that was for sure. She felt a certain sad excitement, a little discomfort and much embarrassment, the latter concerned with the removal of clothing. I am dying, Egypt, dying, her mind gabbled when (her) brassiere fell to the dusty floor. She hadn’t been prepared for the way poetry came into this fitting together of parts, Shall I believe that unsubstantial Death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour, she recited in her head, as O’Hara climbed on top and humped her beneath the rude unshaded bulb.

Okay typing this out is making me feel like I liked it. But really I didn’t. Sorry Beryl!

I read 33 books in 2013, which is less than at any time since I started this blog four years ago. It’s a quarter of what I read in 2011! Pesky, pesky real life, getting in the way of more important activities. Here’s the 33:

HALF A LIFE by VS Naipaul
NW by Zadie Smith
GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn
MIDDLEMARCH by George Elliott
PERSUASION by Jane Austen
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER by Junot Diaz
SWIMMING HOME by Deborah Levy
PENELOPE by Rebecca Harrington
THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN by Anthony Trollope
SWEET TOOTH by Ian McEwan
YOUNG BLOOD by Sifiso Mzobe
CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC by Sophie Kinsella
CLOUDSTREET by Tim Winton
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John Le Carre
LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS by David Sedaris
MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS and GOODBYE TO BERLIN by Christopher Isherwood
A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY by Hilary Mantel
DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY by Hans Kneilson
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by AM Holmes
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL by John Cheever
STONER by John Williams
MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively
THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA by Elspeth Huxley
MASTER GEORGIE by Beryl Bainbridge
LOVE, NINA by Nina Stibbe
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman
THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer
ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin
STEPFORD WIVES by Ira Levin
COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS by Alexandra Fuller
A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki
CHESS by Stefan Zweig
THE SON by Phillip Meyer

Highlights include STONER by John Williams, which tells the story of the ordinary life of a mediocre university professor. If it’s true that simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve, then this book must have been incredibly hard to write. It is perhaps the simplest, and certainly close to the most perfect novel I’ve ever read. It made the the three or four novels after it – all quite serviceable – seem hokey and overwritten. Also wonderful was THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, about the dating life of a New York writer, which gave me much to think about and saw me recommending it repetitively and boringly at social events. GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn also gets an honourable mention, for being a genuinely thrilling thriller. Of course I do not include the Austen or the Elliot here – it’s hardly fair to put them into the competition.

Lowlights were HALF A LIFE, with our old friend VS Naipaul even more far gone than ever, with his weird novel involving African child prostitutes, and CLOUDSTREET, which was as complex and baggy as STONER was neat and simple.

For the first time ever, over half the books I read – 17 of the 33 – were by women! This is a big improvement on any year previously. I guess this is pretty obviously because I’m reading more contemporary writing now, and it’s only in recent years that women have been able to look up from the cooking/washing/birthing long enough to dream up a plot.

So that was 2013. 2014, let’s be having you!

I read this book in honour of being in Austria, as Stefan Zweig in a notable Austrian author. CHESS tells the story of a man on a cruise ship who witnesses a match in which the world chess champion is beaten by an amateur. The amateur then reveals that he was kept in solitary confinement during WWI, and for many months played imaginary chess to keep himself sane. The one match he plays on the cruise ship almost destroys his sanity, taking him back to his old chess mania. There’s not much too it, really, being a novella; and I always struggle to enjoy very short books – they are over before you really start to care, like bad relationships.

THE SON is a sweeping novel of the history of Texas. It follows three members of a single family across three generations. The only truly successful character is the grandfather. This is largely because his story is by far the most interesting. As a young man he is captured by the Comanches, who apparently frequently adopted captives into their tribe. He is one of them until they are wiped out by the Europeans, at which point he returns to his people, and becomes fabulously wealthy. I learnt a lot about Native American life from his story. As for example, this, on arrows:

The best shafts were grooved along their length. We used two grooves and the Lapan used four. This prevented the arrow from stanching the wound it had just cut, but it also kept the shaft from warping. The blades of hunting arrows were fixed vertically, as the ribs of game animals are vertical to the earth. The blades of war arrows were fixed parallel to the earth, the same as human ribs. Hunting points were made without barbs and tired tightly to the shaft so they could be pulled from an animal and reused. War arrows had barbs and the blades were tied loosely, so that if the arrow was pulled, the head would remain lodged in the enemy’s body.

It was also interesting to hear a view of what it must have been like to see the entire society collapse. As the white people don’t seem to know anything – about growing maize, or killing buffalo – the Comanche are mystified as to why they are not succeeding in killing them: “Toshaway always said that white women laid crops of eggs like ducks, which hatched every night, so it didn’t matter how many you killed.”

The grandfather character is also successful because it is told in the straight-forward third person. The story of his son is unfortunately in diary format, which is rarely successful in any novel, and is certainly not so here. In addition, the son is suspiciously modern in his views. Here he is on Mexicans: “Nearly pointed out that we are wetbacks, having swum our horses across the Nueces a century after the Garcias first settled here.”

The final character is the granddaughter. Her entire story is a flashback told as she lays dying OH DOUBLE DEAR, IT’S WORSE THAN THE DIARY THING. But I’m glad they managed to squeeze a daughter into THE SON; there is only so much testosterone one can handle in a single book, and this novel is dripping with it. It’s yet another of these laments for a lost West, of which I seem to have read a lot recently, which is deeply tied up with mourning for some kind of idea of masculinity, about which I can only say: meh.

THE FLAME TREES OF THIKA is famous as a memoir of an African childhood. It deserves its fame, I would say, being a simple and heartfelt account of a unique time and place.

The story begins with a five year old girl arriving in Kenya with her parents in 1912. Her father buys some land, on impulse, while drinking one night, and the family bizarrely decides to move out there – to land they’ve never seen – to start farming coffee. Don’t be misled by this into thinking that they are doing this because they have experience in coffee farming; or indeed experience in any farming; these are aristocratic people of very small means but apparently very large balls. One is reminded how insanely brave/stupid early settlers were.

The local Kikuyu certainly lean towards finding them on the stupid end of the spectrum. They can’t understand why the white man thinks they will want to work for him, as they have no use for formal money. They are fascinated however by the paraffin lamps, and eventually agree to work in exchange for a lamp each, after they have been convinced that they are not the spirits of dead men, caged up in glass. The farm slowly takes shape, and we are introduced, through the eyes of the little girl, to the small community, both European and Kikuyu.

Here is one of the first meetings between the Europeans and Kikuyu community, with one English gent very embarrassed by the exposed genitals of the Kikuyu men.

“Perhaps we should not have brought the ladies on this expedition,” he murmured to Alec; but Tilly overheard.
“Perhaps we should not have brought the gentlemen,” she suggested, indicating a number of well-greased, shaven-headed girls who had nothing on but very small triangles of leather and strings of beads . . .

Much of the joy in the book is the evocation of a lost world. Here for example is the child’s account of the response of an old Kikuyu man as he agrees to look after her pony when she eventually has to leave Thika: “Good. When we see this white pony, we shall say: here is the toto of bawana bad hat, she will have this pony in her head as a man herds his cattle there, so we will think of you when we see him.”

Huxley does a remarkable job of creating a believable child’s voice, which is I think quite an achievement, most children in literature being either fakey or annoying. The writing is often very lyrical:

One morning I surprised two dikdik in the glade, standing among grass that countless quivering cobwebs had silvered all over, each one – and each strand of every cobweb – beaded with dew. It was amazing to think of all the untold millions of cobwebs in all the forest glades, and all across the bush and plains of Africa, and of the number of spiders, more numerous even than the stars, patiently weaving their tents of filament to satisfy their appetites, and of all the even greater millions of flies and bees and butterflies that must go to nourish them; and for what end, no one can say.

The question is, how had I not heard of Beryl Bainbridge before now? I have a sort of suspicion that her dreadful home counties name had put me off, making me think she likely wrote detective fiction of the murder-on-the-village-green description. GOOD GOD I WAS TOTALLY WRONG. This is a ravishing novel, technically perfect, it’s only fault being that it is too short.

MASTER GEORGIE tells the story of a surgeon and amateur photographer who travels to the Crimean War. The story is however not told in his voice, but in that of three of his associates: an orphan girl who is in love with him, his academic brother-in-law, and a poor young man who is his assistant. The genius of the book lies very much in how beautifully evoked these three characters’ internal lives are, with never a false note. They create the atmosphere of the Crimean war beautifully, and while much research has clearly gone into this book, it is worn lightly. The Crimean war is famous for being the first war to be really photgraphed, which means it is the first war in which civilians at home got a true sense of what war really meant, and much has been written as to its significance. To write an entire novel about a photographer in the Crimean without ever once bring up this dead horse for a beating is a real achievement.

There are many snippets I found charming, but here is one from the voice of the poor young man, who is great pragmatist:

“Should I obtain a post at Scuratri,” he (George) said, “it would give me great peace of mind if you would stay here and arrange passage home for Annie and the children.” I agreed, of course. How could I refuse? He then began a rambling discourse to do with his past life, regrets, wasted opportunities, lack of application, etc, and how he felt, in some mysterious way, that the war would at last provide him with the prop he needed.

Also quite charmingly, the romantic heroine is the orphan girl, Mrytle, and everyone is surprised to learn that Master George might be interested in her: “he being the shallow sort of fellow susceptible to more obvious charms – a rosy complexion, sparkling eyes, splendid bust, etc. Myrtle was smallish, pale, had a chest as flat as a board . . It’s true that when she engaged one in conversation, or was observed playing with the children, or she smiled, it was a different story. Then I do believe she cast a spell.” I think I might start a collection of all the times a female novelist tells us her heroine, while not conventionally pretty, is lit up by her intellect, or her heart, which in the end wins everyone over. Total wish fulfillment on the part of novelists, and I think we can trace a straight line from the mother of them all- Jane Eyre – straight through to Bridget Jones.

Though I did love this book, I also feel resentful of it. Within the first couple of pages I was already slowing down my reading, dreading the end; and now I’ve finished it, I feel mad at the wonderfully talented Beryl Bainbridge for sucking me in and then dumping me out so abruptly.

Nina Stibbe worked as a nanny in the early 80s, and this book is made up of the letters she wrote to her sister during this period. The family she worked for were literary celebrities (Stephen Frears’ ex-wife and her two children, with Alan Bennett over for dinner every night) which adds a sort of historical interest, but the primary charm of this book is Nina’s lively sense of humour, and the warm sense of community that was evidently a large part of her life at that time.

Here she is on Brighton: “Arriving at railway station is good. It’s downhill into town and you feel energetic, striding down to the sea front – as opposed to an uphill work at the start of a place. But then, before you get anywhere charming, you’re surrounded by WH Smith and Boots and people wanting a haircut and you might as well be in Loughbough. Beach disappointing and the whole place pleased with itself for no reason.” Totally accurate assessment.

Very enjoyably, there is much talk about language in the family she works for:
AB: This is tasty.
MK: Do you have to say tasty?
AB: It is tasty.
MK: I’m not denying it, but there’s no need to say tasty.

I like this. While I don’t have a big problem with the word tasty, I definitely don’t like the word meal. And particularly I can’t bear a hearty meal. A tasty meal is also pretty bad, now I come to think of it. I am glad to see others also dislike common words and aren’t shy to control their acquaintances’ usage of them.

A charming and strangely comforting short read.

This book is so good it makes me feel bad. I just want to go and sit in a dark room and think about how I can improve my life and complete worthwhile projects.

Pretty much everything is good about THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. First of all, its written in a believable male voice. Or at least I think it’s believable: but then I’m not a male, so I wouldn’t know. And there in lies much of the genius of the book. Wadman’s story is about the love life of a Brooklyn writer, called Nate, and makes the remarkable effort to jump across the gender divide and understand what men are thinking in their relationships with women.

He meets a smart, fun woman named Hannah, and they start dating. Slowly however their relationship begins to fall apart, a collapse which is beautifully and subtly written. As in real life, it is hard to pin down what is going wrong. One view could be that Nate’s a misogynist. He does certainly like to bang on about what ‘women’ want, and what ‘women’ think. Example: “He also thought that women as a general category seemed less capable of (or interested in) the disinterested aesthetic appraisal of literature or art: they were more likely to base judgments on a things message, whether or not it was one they approved of, whether it was something that ‘needed saying.'”

Thus, he regards writing about relationships as not particularly worthwhile, which is ironic given the novel in which he appears. His female friend Aurit argues:

“Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact – to keep from becoming cold and callous – and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. But who cares, right? It’s just girl stuff.”

Nate responds:

“Classic Aurit. Take whatever she was personally interested in and apply all her ingenuity to turning it into Something Important.”

I do tend to think that Nate is a bit of a mysoginist; but let’s face it: so are most people, including most women. The book also just suggests that perhaps Nate and Hannah are just not well matched. He wants to have fun, and Hannah wants to have a relationship. As he puts it

“When he was twenty-five, everywhere he turned he saw a woman he already had, or else didn’t want a boyfriend. Some were taking breaks from men to give women or celibacy a try. Others were busy applying to grad school, or planning yearlong trips to Indian ashrams, or touring the country with their all-girl rock bands. . . But in his thirties everything was different. The world seem populated to an alarming degree, by women whose careers, whether soaring or sputtering along, no longer pre-occupied them. No matter what they claimed, they seemed, in practice, to care about little except relationships.”

In short, he freaking loves it that the high volume ticking of the ovary clocks has put the odds very much in his favour.

And here’s an interesting insight: “As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honour too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of wriitng, was that too oftens he wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as it if mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a ‘rushed job’ or an ‘editor who’d mess it up anyway’ . . .”

So an insightful and clever little book. Well done Ms Wadman.