IT’S OUR TURN TO EAT by Michela Wrong

A friend kindly lent me this as I am moving to Kenya. It tells the true (as far as that’s possible) story of one John Githongo, who famously decided to blow the whistle on corruption in the Kenyan government.

Kenya used to be run by Daniel arap Moi, who presided over a fairly corrupt administration. (A contemporary joke was: l’etat, c’est moi). Eventually, he was voted out of power (and actually went – take a tip, ZANU), and replaced with Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki promised an end to the corruption, and hired John Githongo to head a special anti-graft unit. There was much hope throughout Kenya that a new dawn was genuinely on the horizon.

Githongo was a well-educated young man, a journalist who had worked for Transparency International, and he set to work with a will, believing that Kenya really could change. He uncovered a massive government scam, which became known as the Anglo-Leasing (or Anglo-Fleecing) scandal. He slowly realized however that neither President Kibaki, whom he had believed in so whole-heartedly, nor any of his ministers wanted the scandal uncovered, primarily because they were its’ main beneficiaries.

He taped incriminating conversations, and kept incriminating documents, and then in fear of his life fled to the UK, where he arrived on the doorstep of a journalist he barely knew asking for shelter. (Thus Michela Wrong our author enters the story). He eventually released his information, and while a huge scandal did unfold, very few heads rolled.

Wrong ties this to the growth of ethnic divisions in Kenya, pointing out that Moi was a Kalenjin, and his regime mainly assisted them, while the Kibaki regime, though it did preside over a growing economy, was perceived to mainly assist his people, the Kikuyu. John Githongo’s special crime was thought to lie particuarly in the fact that he was a Kikuyu, and thus ‘betrayed’ his own people. The book takes us up through the explosion of ethnic tensions that marked the last elections.

So, in some respects a very depressing story. Ms Wrong clearly finds it so, making much of how wasteful aid is, what a hopeless case most of Africa is, etc etc. Personally, I didn’t find it to be that way. The main point I think is that John Githongo did stand. And there were those who stood with him. As we see in North Africa at the moment (viva Benghazi, viva!) there has been an old way of doing things,and Africa is currently run by old people, familiar with these old ways. But I have hope: a new generation is coming. Perhaps it is just that it is a sunny morning, but look – Kibakis is one of these geriatrics, born 1931, Mugabe, 1924, Gbagbo 1945 – while John and all those with him are young.

Ms Wrong writes with a lovely clear lucid journalist’s voice, and has a lovely turn of phrase. She did get me down with her old-Africa-hand despair, and by her typical white British way of dismissing white Africans. But whatever, it was an interesting and informative book.

I only arrived in Nairobi yesterday, and on the way from the airport I already noticed one of the small businesses she mentioned. A good introduction.

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen

I read Franzen’s most recent novel, FREEDOM, a couple of months ago. I enjoyed it so much that when I saw this one, which was his first big hit, in the library, I fell upon it and devoured it. And I have to report, it is tasty.

From the Dept. of This Guy Can Write A Long Sentence Like Noone Else:
(It’s the thoughts of a son seeing his parents arrive at the airport)

He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags – either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building espirit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise, and, out a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising – before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

I find this hilarious and I love it. The story is about a fairly dysfunctional family. We have mum and dad, Alfred and Enid Lambert, who live in the Midwest, and their three grown children, who have all fled to the East Coast. This little bit, also from the opening pages, will give you a taste of the kind of family this is:

To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred’s straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labour Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid’s outslung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.

Chip feels a failure, having lost his job as an associate professor for sleeping with a student. His older brother Gary is rich and has a beautiful family but is finding success unexpectedly disappointing. His younger sister Denise is a chef whose career absorbed so much of her energy that she only late in life discovers that she is probably gay.

We move back and forth between the stories of each member of the family, each amazingly vividly imagined. The arc of the story is given by the father Alfred’s slow decline into dementia, which forces the family to face various feelings they have long hidden about each other. There’s also a strong strand of love and nostalgia for the Midwest, which I found quite compelling.

So, a very good book. But not quite as good as FREEDOM, I don’t think.

He wrote THE CORRECTIONS ten years before FREEDOM, and it shows. It’s clearly the work of a much younger writer, I think, being full of overly obvious metaphor, and rather overheated language on occasion (a season is described as “hurtling, hurtling towards winter” – oh dear). There’s also a very dubious section where the character of Chip goes to Lithuania, and Franzen spends a lot of time making fun of Lithunia. Now, the book in general is in a comic vein, and he makes a lot of fun of America too, but it’s very obvious he knows nothing about Lithuania, and I didn’t really enjoy seeing a developing country being mocked in an ill-educated way, when the rest of the comedy in the book is so intelligently observed and so detailed.

But honestly, I can forgive anything to a man who can write like this:
(About a girl being approached by boys at university)

Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody had stale bread in his pocket.

KNOTS AND CROSSES by Ian Rankin

I’ve read a number of Ian Rankin’s crime novels, which are all set in Edinburgh and feature Detective John Rebus as the central character. When I say, a number, I mean a LARGE number, and all have been read for work.

They are not as totally rubbish as most crime fiction.

KNOTS AND CROSSES was in fact Rankin’s first Rebus novel, and it is therefore interesting to read it last. Apparently, according to the author, he was attempting to write a modern Jeckyll and Hyde, and not a genre crime novel at all. This is odd, as in some ways it couldn’t be more genre:

-its about the murder of little girls (yawn)
-it features a hard drinking detective (sigh)
-it gets stupidly personal at the end (please)

In other ways however, it’s not especially genre. Rebus has complex emotional issues, and a full inner life, for example. For a while you are even supposed to think that he might be the murderer. He has a family life, he has gross sex scenes – he has all sorts of fallabilities that the Rebus of the later books, the genre Rebus, really does not.

It’s as if the hard inner seed of a genre writer is in the book, and it wants out. Rankin was a Literature Phd when he wrote it, and you can see it; but the genre writer is there, just waiting to cut himself out of all his early grad student constraints.

THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz

“Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?”
(Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol 1, No 49, April 1966)

And so begins this wonderful novel. Followed by, bizarrely, an entire poem by Derek Walcott, an important Caribbean poet.

This gives you a kind of sense of what a seriously loopy book this is, verging wildly from the highly literary, to pop culture, from English to Spanish, from Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to contemporary New Jersey.

Oscar Wao is a fat guy who loves sci-fi to an unhealthy degree, and is permanently in hope of finding love with a lady. His story is intercut with that of his sister, who flees the US for their ancestral homeland of Dominican Republic, and with the stories of his grandfather and mother, and of what made them flee the DR (as he calls it) for America.

Oscar’s grandfather was tortured and murdered by the Trujillo regime, because he refused to offer his oldest daughter up freely to Trujillo to be raped. Oscar’s mother, the youngest daughter, was thus left an orphan. She grew up and was eventually forced to flee the DR after getting entangled in a stupid relationship with the husband of Trujillo’s sister. Oscar’s own story eventually leads him back to the DR, where he finally finds love (with an elderly prostitute) and is eventually murdered by her boyfriend’s heavies.

Actually as I write it out it sounds like rather a miserable and melodramatic tale. But so sparkling and irreverent is the voice of the novelist, so sure the comedy, so accurate the observation – especially of the world of fat dorks – that in fact the book is a non-stop delight.

I was particularly struck by how Diaz managed to mix together the many aspects of his life – first and third world, pop and literary culture – into one coherent identity. This is something I certainly can’t seem to achieve.

The poem that begins the novel, after talking about Derek Walcott’s varied backgrounds, ends:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”

PS. Zimbabwean? Want to feel a certain someone’s not that bad? Check out Trujillo’s dictatorship here. He eventually died in an assassination, but I must point out he had serious prostate problems too. . . Holding thumbs!

JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby

This little book begins in a toilet.

Duncan has dragged his girlfriend Annie to America on holiday to see the toilet because he is obsessed with the musician Tucker Crowe, who has not recorded any music in twenty years, retiring soon after a mysterious incident in this same toilet.

Duncan and Annie have been together for fifteen years. Annie is beginning to feel that, just as she initially drifted into the relationship, she ought now to drift out of it.

A new album of old Tucker Crowe material is released, and, primarily to irritate Duncan, Annie comments on it in an online forum of which he is an obsessive member. This impels Duncan to cheat on her and then sort of half-heartedly leave her. It also impels Tucker Crowe, astonishingly, to contact her, and say how much he appreciated her review.

Not very believably, she begins a correspondence with Crowe, who eventually visits her in England.

You may find that my plot summary there ends rather oddly, and the reason for that would be that the book itself ends oddly. It just sort of stutters to a close. I was left slightly confused as to what I was supposed to understand about the characters. Perhaps I just need to understand that Mr Hornby suddenly realized he had to get to the cleaners before they closed?

I enjoyed the presentation of the dangers of an easy relationship, and of finding yourself settling without ever making the decision to do so. I also really enjoyed the character of Duncan, who is a wonderfully believable 40-something music dork.

The whole book however was a bit like eating unsalted popcorn. It went down easy and was kind of fun, but didn’t leave much of a mark.

THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins (30th Anniversary Edition)

This book made a big splash when it was first published in the 1970s, and it is now in its 3rd edition.

Essentially, the book argues that evolution does not work on a family, group, or species level, but on the level of the gene.

Humanitarian feeling, by this measure, is not occasioned by a desire on the part of humans for humanity to survive, and it is certainly not (perish the thought) occasioned by some higher, non-biological feeling we might have (what! something non-biological, never!).

Dawkins takes us back to the primordial soup in which loose bits and pieces slowly formed molecules. The molecules which survived, were the molecules which were successful. They formed sacs to keep themselves safe, or learnt how to push chemicals away, or whatever. And slowly they developed into full organisms. However, the driver is still those early small organisms, which are now recognisable as DNA. So, for example, the DNA for two legs survived because giving a creatre two legs made that creature more likely to survive and thus produce DNA. We are, in Dawkins view, just robots created by our DNA to carry our DNA around and keep it safe.

I actually find this quite a believable theory. Though, why should we care what I think? I don’t know squat about biology.

He includes a very interesting section on how the basic rule of most religions – do as you would be done by – might have been shaped by evolution. More here if you’re interested.

Dawkins can’t bear religious fundamentalism, which is I find hilarious, because he is such a biological fundamentalist. He is so insistent on the whole nothing-beyond-biology argument, it gets a bit embarrassing. I think insisting loudly that there is not a god is just as silly as insisting loudly that there is one. You can really only weigh in on that one when you’re dead.

It does explain family feeling in an interesting way: in essence, his argument is that we protect members of our family because they share so much of our DNA. But where I struggled a bit was: we share like 99%of our genes with chimps. Surely therefore we should be conditioned to work for their survival too? But this is clearly not the case.

BILLY BROWN I’LL TELL YOUR MOTHER by Bill Brown

This is an autobiographical tale of growing up in the years immediately after the second World War.

Some aspects of it are quite interesting: the aspirational nature of council housing (that really bends the mind, today); the sense of community; the fun to be had in bombed out houses. It’s also an engaging and pleasant read, and you find yourself caring for the characters, and believing in their world.

In general however I have to confess I found it a tiny bit cheesy. Apparently, immediately after the war, no one ever had any complex or contradictory feelings, and no arguments were ever serious.

I suspect that it is perhaps read and loved by people who remember that time, and in particular perhaps by those who like to tut tut about today.

FEAR OF FLYING by Erica Jong

This book tells the story of Isadora Wing, who while at a conference with her second husband, the psychologist Bennett, falls madly in love with another psychologist, Adrian. She is confused about her feelings for Bennett, but certainly knows that she is bored and unfulfilled sexually, so she decides to run away with Adrian.

She and Adrian drive around Europe drunkenly and pointlessly, and the novel begins to move back in time. We learn about Isadora’s past relationships, with special emphasis on all the sex she was or wasn’t having. Eventually left on her own in Paris, Isadora has a sort of crisis of confidence regarding her inability to be by her self. She decides in the end to go to London to find Bennett, but the suggestion is very much that the most important peace that she has made is with herself, more than with any man.

Apparently this book was a massive bestseller when it first appeared in 1973 (it has since sold 12.5 million copies in 27 languages), and spoke in particular to women, who rejoiced in its sexual frankness and open discussion of female freedom.

Frankly, this response puzzles me a bit. I was kind of like: what? She doesn’t want to get married. She wants to have a career. She likes to have sex. I don’t really see the big deal.

But I guess that shows that we have come a long way since 1973, and that a lot of women before me had to fight a very long hard road, for me to be able to read this book, and find it simply puzzling.

It reminded me quite a lot of Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, another book about a woman’s valiant struggle, that now seems to me unimpressive. It’s also similar to THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK in it’s interest in psychiatry, in recounting dreams in detail (NB Authors: this is always boring), and in banging on in great detail about periods, as if no one’s ever written about them before. Which, maybe nobody had.

With all the sex stuff it also reminded me of the other old friend of this blog, Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER, but let’s not hold that against it.

Anyway, I admired the book. It’s impressively honest, the style is informal and fun, and the story compelling. It’s also rich with quotable quotes:

“Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

“Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were helplessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky.”

“ . . . in some fashionable sell-out profession like advertising . . .”

“All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”

Martin Amis, on it’s release, called it “horrible and embarrassing.” That’s also very much in it’s favour.