Michael Johnston's Blog, page 12

Hilary Mantel’s second Tudor tale: “Bring up the Bodies”

From a 21st century perspective, the Tudor world of Thomas Cromwell was corrupt and venal, while from his, Cromwell’s, point of view, as we read it in Hilary Mantel‘s Bring up the Bodies, it was simply how things got done in the middle of the 16th century. Volume two of her planned trilogy covers the events of nine or ten months from September 1535 when the king is beginning to feel that, with time marching on and no son and heir produced, it might be time to move on to a third wife. Henry has had his eye on young and modest Jane Seymour since, as readers of Wolf Hall (see my previous blog) will remember, the court stopped there as part of its summer progress. But if the Seymours are brought in, the Boleyns and the Howards will be pushed out and, unsurprisingly, they don’t want to go. It will be Cromwell’s next project on behalf of Henry to create the circumstances in which the transfer can be made with an appearance of legality and also seem justifiable theologically to the Supreme Head of the Church in England who happens now to be the King himself, a monarch fearful for his immortal soul. Once more the events are unfolded as a combination of the interior monologue and the verbal encounters that Cromwell has with friends, foes and family.

These are the sounds of Austin Friars, in the autumn of 1535: the singing children rehearsing a motet, breaking off, beginning again. The voices of these children, small boys, calling out to each other from staircases, and nearer at hand the scrabbling of dogs’ paws on the boards. The chink of gold pieces into a chest. The sussuration, tapestry-muffled, of polyglot conversations. The whisper of ink across paper. Beyond the walls the noises of the city: the milling of the crowds at his gate, distant cries from the river. His inner monologue, running on, soft-voiced: it is in public rooms that he thinks of the cardinal, his footsteps echoing in lofty vaulted chambers. It is in private spaces that he thinks of his wife Elizabeth. She is a blur now in his mind, a whisk of skirts around a corner. That last morning of her life, as he left the house he thought he saw her following him, caught a flash of her white cap. He had half turned, saying to her, ‘Go back to bed’: but no one was there. By the time he came home that night her jaw was bound and there were candles at her head and feet.

As with the previous volume, Mantel writes only from within the mind of her protagonist who relishes the jobs he undertakes in the service of the King but now he is being asked to frame a case against Queen Anne, such that she might feel obliged, at the very least, to retire to a convent because, despite all that was sworn and deposed about her when Henry wanted to marry her, now the tide has turned and the King wants to discover that, with no male heir, it had all been a terrible mistake and that not only should he never have married Katherine but; surprise, surprise; neither ought he to have married Anne.

However, while in Wolf Hall the interior monologue has touches of Henry James and Katherine Mansfield, in Bring up the Bodies the text reads more like a 16th century John le Carré in which Thomas Cromwell is a precursor of George Smiley. He is all ears to allegations, rumours and confessions; and he has a long memory. He recalls those, still in the court, who had a hand in the downfall of his first patron, Cardinal Wolsey, and who, despite his powerful position, still mock him for his humble origins. As befits one who understands the recent invention of double-entry bookkeeping by the Italian monk, Pacioli, Cromwell now has the chance to balance the ledger with the downfall not only of the Queen but of those who brought down the cardinal.

As before, we enjoy Cromwell’s mordant wit and acerbic sense of humour; as when he invites the Queen’s lutinist, Mark Smeaton, to supper and a little pre-prandial close questioning. Cromwell does not need to use torture: he is so powerful, even the hint of the threat of it is credible and Mark has already made damaging admissions. When his assistant, Thomas Wriothesley, [pronounced Risley] suggests taking Smeaton to the Tower where there is a rack, Cromwell reproves him.

‘Wriothesley, may I have a word with you aside?’ He waves Call-me out of the room and on the threshold speaks in an undertone. ‘It is better not to specify the nature of the pain. As Juvenal says, the mind is its own best torturer. Besides, you should not make empty threats. I will not rack him. I do not want him carried to his trial in a chair. And if I needed to rack a sad little fellow like this … what next? Stamping on dormice?’

The Queen is found guilty; it scarcely matters for what; and so are the men who may or may not have slept with her and all must die. But the king is a compassionate man and, just for the queen, sends for a French executioner who can behead with one sideways sweep of his broadsword rather than one or more downward chops of an axe. Politically, Cromwell takes his son to see the queen die so that his family can be seen to have been there. But now the Seymours are in and the surviving Boleyns and Howards are out and will be on the lookout for one slip by the architect of their misfortune. Meantime, the king makes him Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. But if that seems like the end, you are mistaken: it is only the beginning of the next but final stage of the life of Thomas Cromwell which Hilary Mantel will recount in the concluding volume, The Mirror & the Light. Bookmakers will not give you very long odds on this third novel winning a third Man Booker prize for Hilary Mantel.

The post Hilary Mantel’s second Tudor tale: “Bring up the Bodies” appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Read and enjoy “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, the first of her Tudor Trilogy

Hilary Mantel’s first in her planned trilogy of Tudor historical novels, Wolf Hall, is a reading challenge and a literary masterpiece. The reader has to tune in to the use of the historic present tense and to become used to identifying ‘he’ as Thomas Cromwell; for a few short years the most powerful man in England after the king.  The effort will be repaid many times over.

Wolf Hall, like William Shakespeare’s history plays, is destined to become, along with it’s two companion volumes, an accepted and highly respected literary interpretation of that period of Tudor court life when Henry VIII divorced Katherine, beheaded Anne and married Jane who would give him a son before she died. Many others died, including the man who was Henry’s loyal adviser and fixer, Thomas Cromwell.  I feel I can make this confident claim for Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and the still to come The Mirror & the Light. Without doubt, rights for stage and television versions of volume three are being negotiated. It might well win Hilary Mantel a third Man Booker prize; it is almost bound to be short-listed. If I am so full of praise for this trilogy, I had better make a good case for Wolf Hall in this review. Where to start?

Wolf Hall recounts the events over the period from around 1527 to 1533 when the king had fallen out of love with Katherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother, whom he could hardly wait to marry when Arthur, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly. He had had to obtain dispensations from the Church to allow him to marry his brother’s widow and, as was the custom of the time, had to buy his way to these permissions.  The Vatican was not above tailoring it’s interpetation of God’s will in return for money.  Some Catholic believers had more scruples, such as Thomas More, for a while Henry’s Lord Chancellor, who held the orthodox view that all law derived from God and that rules could not be set aside for anyone’s convenience, however eminent. Many readers will recall his noble and principled portrayal by Paul Schofield in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and the verbal jousts with Leo McKern playing Cromwell.  We are shown a very different More in Wolf Hall.  The verbal interplay between the two men is even better but More’s religious zeal is seen in a darker light while Cromwell’s pragmatism and persistence in the service of his monarch comes over well.  The dialogue throughout the novel is a delight, a land of milk and honey for lovers of language as antagonists knock spots off each other.  There is a treasure trove of different languages, showing off Cromwell as a polyglot as well as a polymath.

Some readers find initial difficulty with Mantel’s use of the historic present tense but this adds such urgency and immediacy to the narrative that I think it is the perfect choice. Others find themselves confused, wondering who ‘he’ is throughout the book.  Almost invariably it is Cromwell as the story unfolds from his perspective.  This is Mantel’s take on Cromwell’s point of view.  He comes over as a loving family man who suffers grievous blows from the loss of his wife and his daughters from the sicknesses for which there was then no cure.  He comes over as a tolerant Christian who wants Englishmen and women to read the Bible in their own language and not have Latin-speaking priests as their intermediary.  But above all he is a Tudor realist: this is the way it is, this is the way things get done in the 16th century. When Queen Katherine comments on the fine being levied on all clergymen for ‘usurping [Henry's] jurisdiction as ruler of England.’ Cromwell responds:

‘Not a fine. We call it a benevolence.’

The exchanges between Cromwell and More show two men, from completely different backgrounds, both at the top of their game and both, despite almost diametrically opposed points of view, able to debate with a wry sense of humour. They are well matched but, seen from the narrative’s point of view, Cromwell is the more humane and More is the uncomproming hunter down of heretics, willing (even eager) to use torture.

The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God. When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the torture is applied. It is reported that in his gatehouse at Chelsea he keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and harries them; the name of your printer, the name of the master of the ship that brought these books into England. They say he uses the whip, the manacles and the torture-frame they call Skeffington’s Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded, knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack. It takes art to make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything he knows is lost.

By contrast, when challenged by one of his own staff that he strings men up in manacles too, Cromwell says that he only threatens that, but it seems his threats are seen as credible.

The weather of the period seems to match the mood of the events of the novel as reflected in Mantel’s description of Cromwell’s early spring journey to see the infant Princess Elizabeth and her step-sister living at Hatfield House; with it’s perfect final metaphor.

He had not wanted to leave London during such a busy Parliament, but the king persuaded him: two days and you can be back, I want your eye on things. The route out of the city was running with thaw water, and in copses shielded from the sun the standing pools were still iced. A weak sun blinked at them as they crossed into Hertfordshire, and here and there a ragged blackthorn blossomed, waving at him a petition against the length of the winter.

Scattered through the book are passing references to Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymours. Jane, daughter of Sir John, is a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. One has the impression that widower Thomas Cromwell has a very soft spot for her. Whether that is so or not, we do not learn in this novel but, as it draws to a close, the king’s summer progress is being planned and we learn it will spend time there.

He writes it down.

Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.

And that is where the next novel, Bring up the Bodies will begin. Do read both now and book to see the RSC’s wonderful adaptations at Stratford-upon-Avon, playing to capacity houses and with an almost certain transfer to London. You can also look out for the television adaptations from the BBC. What a feast!

 

 

 

The post Read and enjoy “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, the first of her Tudor Trilogy appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë

This is a video adaptation of my recent text blog, reviewing this mid-19th Century novel, the second published novel by Charlotte Brontë.

The post Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Drawing “A map of Tulsa”: Benjamin Lytal’s first novel does that and much more

Oklahoma is one of the almost mythical Mid-Western states of the Union, running down through the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas above, and only Texas below.  The very word ‘OOOOklahoma’ starts music ringing in your ears; but Tulsa?  Hands up anyone who’s been there!  But reading Benjamin Lytal’s debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, [London: And Other Stories, 2014] you could begin to feel it might be worth the detour.

This is a book about young love ending in sorrow; and love of one’s hometown that can exercise a lifetime’s magnetic attraction as time and distance grow.  It’s a book that brings home how large and how different are each region and state.  The short back cover blurb says: A novel in two parts, A Map of Tulsa is love story and elegy, a meditation on mobility and its consequences, a book about the distances inside America.  But like the famous river of Heraclitus, you can never enter the same Tulsa twice: the mistake Jim Praley, the narrator, tries to make.  Since the author has lived in Berlin, I think we could safely label this book a Bildungsroman.  

Nineteen-year old Jim, reading English at college, is back home at his teacher parents’ house for the summer vacation.  

I remember the heat the day I came home, I leaned my forehead against my parents’ picture window and the heat came through the glass.  Tulsa.  For a few days I drove, sailing south on 169 and coming back, sweeping across on the Broken Arrow, retracing old lines, bearing down with new force.  My parents were very kind.  But I had decided to go to bars.

And in those bars he meets with old high school friends and finishes up at someone’s birthday party in a wealthy neighbourhood.  It’s not the birthday girl’s house but it’s where the party is.  Jim meets Adrienne.  She’s different; not just beautiful but a free spirit who has dropped out of high school to paint and to sing in rock bands.  They pop a pill and duck out of the party and, like a couple of wild teenagers, run across the gardens of several houses to reach a park where, being healthy young heterosexuals, they ‘make out’.  That’s how that summer begins and there is more ‘making out’ to come.  

Adrienne Booker is a poor little rich girl, living in her long absent father’s penthouse on top of the Booker Oil building.  Booker Oil is the family business which is run, apparently very well, by her aunt Lydie.  It is not long before Jim moves in to the penthouse and, every morning, walks (yes! walks, which in itself is not common practice round there) with her to her studio.  He finds he can spend the day just looking at her pondering where to place her next brushstroke while he tries rather ineffectually to write.  They can spend whole nights walking around Tulsa.  Seems all very matter-of-fact but what lifts this story out of the ordinary is quite simply the quality of Lytal’s writing.  For example, when Jim buys Adrienne a gun for her birthday, and they both fire at the glass bricks that make up the windows of her studio.

The rest of the story is too private to make sense: Nothing happened.  Adrienne got back to work.  I lay down.  Soon the only thing out of the ordinary was the wind that trickled in through the chinks that we’d made.  Neither of us remarked on it.  Neither of us felt that we should break the silence.  As I was drifting off – I was abashed enough to feel a kind of pressure on my eyes, like sleepiness – I formed the improbable concern that this air from the window was going to affect her paint, dry it or sort of blow it sideways on the canvas.

It had become my habit, at the studio, to lie still for a while after naps, with the unaired taste of my own saliva in my mouth.  I did some of my longest thinking that way.  It was how I had dreamed up the gun thing.  I had had second thoughts, but ultimately had decided not to go back on something that had been so gleamingly intuitive.

Only now (back on the couch, after the smoke had cleared) did the intuition shine forth again, dumb and blue.  I saw it for what it was: not love, but jealousy.  Over that short courtship I had grown envious of this person, Adrienne, and, impatient to be like her, I had attempted this stunt.

As the long, hot summer progresses towards the Fall, Jim wonders about not going back to college and simply living an anarchic life with Adrienne but, and it is the first of Jim’s several buts, as the fever pitch of romance cools off, he does go back, and, over time, they communicate less and less.  He graduates and moves to New York while his parents retire to Galveston, Texas, meaning there is no automatic reason for returning to Tulsa.  He still thinks of Adrienne.  He sometimes thinks he sees her among his fellow-commuters.  And that’s when he gets the alarming news that, on an impulse, takes him back to Tulsa.  Never mind what the news is – this blog doesn’t do spoilers – but it gives Jim the chance to consider returning to his roots, coming back (home?) to Tulsa permanently, to have a change of career.  Part II of the book takes place over a much shorter time span than Part I and as the events unroll in those few days he has to make another decision.  The spread of time and the quality of the writing over the pages in the second part of the novel allows this reviewer to make a prediction about the author.  If he goes on writing like this, I think we have the next ‘Richard Ford’ coming along.  His observation and description of detail; his accurate rendering of speech patterns and his ability to put thought processes down on paper with the thought and the analysis of that thought running in parallel are all impressive.  I rate this at 8.5 out of 10 and I will be looking out for more from Benjamin Lytal.

The post Drawing “A map of Tulsa”: Benjamin Lytal’s first novel does that and much more appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

A neglected classic: “Shirley” by Charlotte Brontë reflects the struggle between Reason and Passion, Imagination and Reality in the mid 19th Century.

Charlotte Brontë is mostly known today as the author of Jane Eyre, the battle of one passionate young woman against the cramping conventions of nineteenth century society.  In Shirley, the same author tells the story of two heroines, Shirley and Caroline, fighting the same sort of battles against a background of industrial revolution, poor harvests and the economic privations of the Napoleonic wars, all played out in the Yorkshire dales.  It was published in the usual format for the period, three volumes issued at intervals; and if there is a disadvantage to that format it is that it encouraged authors to write enough to fill three volumes.  Just maybe Shirley suffers a little, by contemporary standards, from this.

The book opens with a humorous and uncomplimentary picture of three curates who seem willing to abuse the respect with which society treated even the most junior members of the cloth; but, being set in Yorkshire, it moves swiftly on to consider manufacturers of cloth who are up against hard times.  Set in 1811-12, it is the time of mechanisation in the mills; the industrial revolution that would, in time, make good wool cloth affordable for the many rather than the rich few but which, at the time, inflicted hardship, grinding poverty and even starvation on workers displaced by these machines; before the economy (to use a phrase in present day use) was rebalanced.  With Europe at war and the government’s ‘Orders in Council’ preventing exports to the Americas, the outlook for both manufacturers and their workers was bleak.

You might at first be forgiven for imagining that the book should have been called “Caroline” rather than “Shirley” since we read through many early chapters dealing with Caroline Helstone, abandoned child of an abused governess, who lives with her uncle, a Church of England Rector with a narrow, High Tory attitude to life and to women’s place in it.  She is friendly with an Anglo-Belgian family, the Moores, and especially Hortense Moore, the spinster sister of handsome Robert Gérard Moore, the tenant of Hollow’s Mill.  Hortense teaches Caroline French and she enjoys her frequent visits there and the occasional time spent with Robert whom she finds very handsome if rather remote since he is taken up with the problems of finding money to invest in machinery, and fighting off the local Luddites who want to destroy his machines and his mill.  

In due course, about one third of the way through the book, we meet an exceptional young woman, the heiress Shirley Keeldar who is the proprietrix of the Fieldhead estate and landlord of Hollow’s Mill.  Unmarried, with no surviving parents, she can style herself ‘Captain’ Keeldar since she is both lord and lady of her particular manor.  She has independent means, an independent caste of mind, and does not take kindly to the conventions that encourage almost any man to think himself her social and mental superior.  She is related to the Sympsons of Sympson Grove who come for an extended visit with the aim of seeing her married off.  This is Brontë’s ironic description of the Mr and Mrs Sympson, her uncle and aunt:

Mr Sympson proved to be a man of spotless respectability, worrying temper, pious principles, and worldly views; his lady was a very good woman, patient, kind, well-bred.  She had been brought up on a narrow system of views – starved on a few prejudices: a mere handful of bitter herbs; a few preferences, soaked till their natural flavour was extracted, and with no seasoning added in the cooking; some excellent principles, made up in a stiff raised-crust of bigotry, difficult to digest: far too submissive was she to complain of this diet, or to ask for a crumb beyond it.

The daughters fare no better under the barbs of her descriptions but there is a very gentle young son, Henry, a cripple, whose tutor turns out to be Louis Moore, younger brother of Robert.  Over the course of the Sympson’s extended stay, Shirley turns down several offers of marriage, culminating in passing up a baronet who writes a little poetry and has a great deal of wealth and position.  This incenses Mr Sympson who firmly believes Shirley is outraging convention by not meekly accepting eligible suitors and his authority on the subject.  We begin to wonder if Shirley’s affections are really for Louis and, as we read his diary, his feelings for her become plain.

After the unsuccessful Luddite attack on the mill, Robert Moore successfully tracks down the ringleaders and we learn they have been sentenced to transportation.  He has to be away from Yorkshire for many months and Caroline, who in her own quiet way has fallen deeply in love with him, feels she has lost him and all but succumbs to a fever.  In the one somewhat Dickensian coincidence in the book, it is her discovery that she is being nursed by her own mother that revives Caroline’s spirits and saves her life.  The hardness of Robert Moore’s character alters dramatically after a near-successful attempt on his life in revenge for his pursuit of the Luddites.  As he is nursed back to health, he becomes a gentler, more rounded character.  Caroline visits his sick bed and it is obvious they have a mutual attraction.

The whole of the book deals with the issues, dear to Charlotte Brontë, of the battle between conventional reason, i.e. the status quo, and the freedom, especially for women, to feel passionately and to make their own decisions.  This is another way of contrasting imagination of the range of possibility with the reality of a rigid, convention-bound society.  There are some significant passages and chapters that debate these issues.  Rather than a romance such as Jane Eyre, it really ought to be seen as another ‘condition of England’ novel, like the works of Mrs Gaskell.  Brontë herself felt that Gaskell’s Mary Barton anticipated some of her arguments.  It is also the case, as literary critics Andrew and Judith Hook argue convincingly, that the characters of Shirley and Caroline reflect very much Charlotte’s sisters Emily and Anne.  In many passages of lively dialogue interspersed throughout the book, the speakers knock spots of each other very effectively.

But what, I hear you ask, about the end of the book? [Spoiler alert! Skip the rest of this blog.]

Well; to adapt Charlotte’s own authorial interjection in Jane Eyre, Reader; they married them!  But it is worth reading through to the end of the book to find out just how this all comes about.

The post A neglected classic: “Shirley” by Charlotte Brontë reflects the struggle between Reason and Passion, Imagination and Reality in the mid 19th Century. appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Best Books of 2013 that I have read, reviewed and enjoyed.

Just to show how efficient I can be when I want to, here is a table of the baker’s dozen best reads of 2013 with links through to the reviews.  I have taken time to marginally adjust the scores out of 100.  I see that one publisher, Sandstone Press up in the north of Scotland, has two runners.  Well done Bob!  My top three, and six out of thirteen are American writers.  Let’s see how my massive reading programme for 2014 works out.

Pts

Author

Title

Publisher, etc.

95

Kingsolver, Barbara

The Poisonwood Bible

London: Faber and Faber, 1999

92

Sloan, Robin

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore

London: Atlantic Books, 2013

90

Williams, John

Stoner

London: Vintage, 2012

88

Douglas-Home, Mark

The Woman who walked into the Sea

Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2013

85

Catton, Eleanor

The Luminaries

London: Granta, 2013

85

Ford, Richard

Canada

London: Bloomsbury, 2012

85

Harris, Eve

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2012

80

Barberry, Muriel

Une Gourmandise

Paris: Gallimard, 2000

80

Crace, Jim

Harvest

London: Picador, 2013

80

Ozeki, Ruth

A Tale for the Time Being

Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013

80

Palliser, Charles

Rustication

London: W W Norton, 2014

80

Pynchon, Thomas

Bleeding Edge

New York: Penguin Press, 2013

80

Shapiro, B A

The Art Forger

Chapel Hill NC: Algonquin Books, 2012

 A Happy New Year to all my readers.  I hope you will enjoy the travel in time and space that only books can afford.

Seasonally yours

Michael

The post Best Books of 2013 that I have read, reviewed and enjoyed. appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Three to spend your book tokens on; set in South Africa, the Carolinas and the north of England; a Michael Johnston end-of-year book review.

There are several shelves worth of novels telling the grim story of South Africa’s apartheid years – Alan Paton, Doris Lessing, André Brink, J M Coetzee and many more – but not so many that explore the Mandela years.  One book of the new wave of post-apartheid novels is the excellent fictional memoir by Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative [London: & Other Stories, 2013].  The narrator is Neville Lister whom we meet in his teenage dropout years.  When he quits university, his frustrated father arranges for him to spend a day with fictional famous photographer Saul Auerbach; a day which affects the rest of his life.  To avoid conscription and being sent to fight on the country’s borders Lister, like many others, ‘escapes’ to London but, as the cliché puts it, you can take Lister out of South Africa but you cannot take South Africa out of Lister.  Ten years later he returns to pick up some of the threads of his life that have become unravelled.  Finally, we encounter him in later middle age, now a professional photographer and hence an acute observer of what has changed, what has morphed and what has not altered.  This is a case of still waters that run deeply.  On the surface the pace and the language is gentle but, thanks to the skill of writing, the reader becomes more and more aware of the turbulence beneath the surface.  I will rate this 7.5 out of 10 (and declare an interest; I am a subscriber-supporter of the publisher And Other Stories.)

 If you want a real page turner to wallop through in a couple of days, you need to read the newly published thriller by Wiley Cash, This Dark Road to Mercy [London: Doubleday, 2014].  There are multiple narrators each with his or her own agenda, and Cash captures the different voices extremely well.  Set mainly in the Carolinas, the story follows the events that surround and involve a 12-year-old girl in care with her sister, their failed father, their flawed guardian ad litem, and a hit man pursuing the father for private as well as ‘professional’ motives.  The action is fast with the back-stories told in flashbacks.  The descriptions of the country’s baseball obsession, the malls, gas stations and fast food outlets, motels and boardwalks ring very true.  The tension builds steadily and peaks with only a few pages to go.  Just possibly, the ending is on the gentle side but since the heroine is only twelve I can forgive the author for that.  Verdict: 7 out of 10 and the book came to me through the good offices of the Litro book club and Transworld.

Susan Hill is a well-respected and talented writer and since it is only 154 pages long I am cross with myself for only just getting round to reading it.  What seems like a straightforward family saga focused around The Beacon, [London: Chatto & Windus, 2008] a bleak North Country farmhouse, and centred on the older daughter May, becomes progressively more and more bleak with each successive chapters.  It seems that into every one of the characters’ lives rather a lot of rain must fall.  The story opens with the death of May’s widowed mother in the farmhouse that is no longer surrounded by a working farm.  Hill paces the action and the events and drops hints that Frank has done something that puts him beyond the pale but keeps the reader waiting for two-thirds of the book to find out exactly what and, just maybe, why.  The prose is lyrical; an elegy for the lives of those who were born and lived in The Beacon.  The book closes with the funeral of Bertha and the unexpected consequences that flow from her death.  This polished gem rates 8 out of 10.

My next post will begin my review of the best reads of 2013.

The post Three to spend your book tokens on; set in South Africa, the Carolinas and the north of England; a Michael Johnston end-of-year book review. appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Making a drama out of a crisis: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge”

With eight novels over fifty years (plus other non-fiction and serious critical articles) Thomas Pynchon (one of Harold Bloom’s four-strong Pantheon of American majors; the others being Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy) has not crowded our bookshelves but each of his books has involved a rich text and a complex plot structure. With a background in engineering and technical writing, Pynchon is something of a polymath but he is also blessed with a rich and complex imagination, and, thank goodness, a wicked sense of humour.  All of this comes together in his latest novel, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin Press, 2013).  As with his earlier Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon generates dramatic tension by having his protagonist operating entirely within the actual time frame of her story so that seemingly innocent observations made at the time have a much greater impact for today’s readers who know what actually went on to happen.  This time, Pynchon sets his story in New York City and covers around one year before and after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, not in itself a lot of laughs but as with all good humour the wit develops out of the situation and the temperament of the characters. Pynchon has the ability to get inside the characters and live out their stories, although he is open to the criticism that they can be two-dimensional and too similar.  With a cast of ‘thousands’ it can make following a multi-strand plot quite difficult.

The central character in Bleeding Edge is Maxine Tarnow, Jewish mother of two bright young boys and a pistol-packing, certified fraud investigator who has lost her official licence thanks to taking too many unapproved short cuts with too many investigations.  Rather than cramping her style, this has led to her being offered more work by clients who appreciate getting results and don’t have any beef about her methods.  However, this takes her into enquiries that involve more personal and even family risk.  And, more important for the reader, it allows Pynchon to explore conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 event, which he keeps referring to as 11 September, and the conspiratorial theorists who then as now blog about it relentlessly.

Being a 21st century novel about events at the start of this millennium, the story involves computing, the internet and a so-called Deep Web that is only accessible to geeks, code-writers and hackers who escape through the meshes of the world-wide web into regions where rules and conventions, never mind regulations, seem not apply.  Indeed, where, as a recent issue of Time magazine says, “[S]ome prosecutors and government agencies think [it is] just the thin edge of the wedge and that the Deep Web is a potential nightmare, an electronic haven for thieves, child pornographers, human traffickers, forgers, assassins and peddlers of state secrets and loose nukes.”  This is the bleeding-edge technology from which the book’s title derives and which one character labels as having “no proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”

Pynchon manages to combine both passages of lyrical literary language that evoke the spirit of that far-off time, half a generation ago already, and dialogue to captures the idiom of those pre- and early post-9/11 days as this passage from the opening page reveals.

It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school.  Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple of blocks, it’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?

This morning, all up and down the streets, what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West side has popped overnight into clusters of white pear blossoms. As Maxine watches, sunlight finds its way past rooflines and water tanks to the end of the block and into one particular tree, which all at once is filled with light.

“Mom?” Ziggy in the usual hurry.  “Yo.”

“Guys, check it out, that tree?”

Otis takes a minute to look.  “Awesome, Mom.”

“Doesn’t suck,” Zig agrees.

Read on and enjoy. This is a book for serious readers with a sense of humour and repays the time invested in it.  I give it 8 out of 10.

The post Making a drama out of a crisis: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Book-readers of Latin American novels in translation should try “Paradises” by Iosi Havilio

There have been many Paradise books – by Milton, Toni Morrison and Abdulrazak Gurnah to name and recommend but a few – but this one promises more than one paradise and they turn out to be trees!  In a very clear and contemporary realisation by prize-winning translator Beth Fowler, Paradises by Iosi Havilio is a sequel to his first novel Open Door.  Open Door is a rural village in Argentina from which the unnamed narrator ‘escapes’ to a seedy suburb of Buenos Aires with her four-year-old son Simón.  After a period of stability, her partner Jaime has been killed in a hit-and-run accident which leads to her being evicted from their farm with minimal compensation.

In Buenos Aires, and living in a squat, called el Buti after a young man who dies resisting eviction, she pays ‘rent’ to the squat matriarch Tosca by injecting her with heroin.  She manages to get work at the zoo and scratches a living.  The other characters at the zoo and el Buti all have their peculiarities which are a foil to the narrator and food for her feelings and reactions.  Out of the blue, a friend from Open Door, sexually adventurous Eloísa, now living in the luxury family home of Axel a gay drug addict, turns up and invites the narrator to take advantage of life in her way.  The narrator resists yet cannot resist her either.

The narrator recounts her days in short chapters much like diary entries using mostly the present tense, except that such acuteness of observation, self-analysis and quality of language are not found in many diaries not written for publication.  In another book (in another world, indeed) the chapters might be short stories by Virginia Woolf, or indeed, as other critics have remarked, author Havilio can be compared with writers as diverse as Camus (say La Peste) or Michel Houellebecq (Atomnised).  It is an easy-to-read, matter-of-fact prose that makes the events seem more credible: like, for example, the minutiae of getting that job at the zoo which includes cutting and pasting a concoction of a CV, taking her fevered son to hospital because he may have swallowed the seeds of the paradise tree and then secretly giving the shamanic antidote of a tincture of the bark of the tree from which the seeds came (no other will do!), stealing and later burying a baby iguana from the zoo, and wildly sexual dreams.

I think I tried at first to resist the qualities of this book because I was not on the narrator’s wavelength but, as page succeeded page, I found myself drawn in by the language and my growing anxiety to know what was coming next; whether action or meditation

Morning in the plaza.  Swings, slides, taxi drivers drinking coffee, too much sky for the city.  Sitting in the sand, I take off my shoes and entertain myself burying and exposing my feet.  My toes are covered in grains of sand that pile up on the skin like miniscule human beings.  Thousands of blond little men with the singular mission of sinking and allowing themselves to sink.  And at that moment, passing from one state to another, when the toes stop being toes, the instant at which the knuckles have no beginning or end, the deformity is revealed.  My deformity.  A different kind of deformity, through concealment, that leads to the same nothing, the same mystery as ever: A horn beeps and it’s goodbye abstraction.  Simón is carefully swinging his motorcycling cat back and forth until suddenly he ducks his head and gives it a hard push, launching it like a rocket.

The voice of Havilio’s narrator has grown on me but, I have to admit, not enough to lure me to the book’s prequel, Open Door, so I will finish up by giving Paradises (London: And Other Stories, 2013) 6.5 out of 10.

The post Book-readers of Latin American novels in translation should try “Paradises” by Iosi Havilio appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Rustication, by Charles Palliser

This is a video adaptation of my recent text blog, reviewing the latest Victorian-style mystery novel by Charles Palliser.

The post Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Rustication, by Charles Palliser appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).