Book #10 We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

We Are Not Ourselves

My thanks to the publisher, Fourth Estate, for the complimentary copy

Eileen Tumilty is the child of proud Irish immigrants, a first generation Irish American, both parents struggle with alcoholism and she becomes a carer at a young age. Later, she marries Ed, but suddenly his behaviour becomes inexplicably erratic, leading them to a devastating diagnosis. 

This was a tough read for me. I felt an utter sense of detachment the vast majority of the time from any of the characters, I couldn't emotionally invest in anybody. Somehow the early years of Eileen Tumilty feel like a description of a person rather than a story with a character in it. I never really felt like I knew her. Even before Ed becomes ill, they don't have the greatest marriage, they did not seem particularly well suited and I didn't take to him as a character. Nor did I feel that I understood either of their behaviour in terms of their relationship with their son Connell.

At the books most dramatic moments, I failed to feel very moved at all, even though the story was sad, whereas normally, given the subject matter, and the events, I would have expected to cry.
Secondary characters didn't really come off the page either. I felt like characters such as Ruth, and Frank, and even cousin Pat, were not particularly fleshed out, and felt rather empty.

What is odd then, is that in spite of the fact that it's quite dry and certainly long, I did keep reading it, right through to the end, so something kept me reading. Because I never understood what made Eileen tick, I couldn't understand her decisions. Like choosing to pretty much force her declining husband out of the neighbourhood he knew for apparently racist reasons.

A puzzling experience, not a bad novel, certainly, but somehow a completely disengaging one.


Verdict : 6/10

2015 Challenge : A book set somewhere you want to visit (New York)

Books #31-33 The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness

The All Souls Trilogy

Oh, the All Souls Trilogy, how ridiculously stupid and outright naff you are, and yet how much I loved you and read you at breakneck speed.

The first of the books is A Discovery Of Witches, Diana Bishop is a witch from a strong bloodline. Yet she prefers to live in the real world, not use powers, and refuses to join a coven. A historian of science she is on sabbatical at Oxford University when she requests a manuscript 'Ashmole 782' from the Bodleian Library which has more to it than meets the eye and sets off a chain of events with dramatic consequences.

Matthew Clairmont is a vampire, and is a thousand years old, he's been watching Diana and after she finds the manuscript supernatural creatures descend upon Oxford, and he must protect her, because the manuscript is the book they've all been looking for.

With definite shades of Twilight and the Twilight inspired 50 Shades Of Grey, Matthew and Diana fall in love, and he whisks her off to his Tudor mansion and his French Chateau, remarkably they have very little sex, they don't even properly shag til halfway through Book 2 and instead seem to drink lots of wine, like a "grown ups version of Twilight" I would have said. He does however want to ravage her but is scared he will kill in her in the throes, and shows the same pathological abusive relationship warning signs exhibited by his literary forebears Edward Cullen and Christian Grey.

Book Two : Shadows Of Night, takes us to Elizabethan England with two goals in mind, find the book, and let Diana learn more about her powers. But frankly, it is more of a historical romp novel in which we can all marvel at the characters of the day like Raleigh and Marlowe; that in the end actually advances the story of mysterious manuscript Ashmole 782 precisely NO FURTHER. The paradox their adventures create and the resolution of this problem is also a complete nonsense, but enjoyable nonsense indeed.

The third book 'The Book Of Life' is a total mess, with new characters popping up all over the place, so that you barely know who anyone is anymore "It's Leonard!" says one character "Remember Leonard?!" (NOPE!)  In fact I'm firmly convinced Leonard had never been in it before, and nor was he essential to the plot. What was the point of you Leonard?
And in the end the actually quite intriguing mystery of Ashmole 782 just gets lost in lots of silliness and romance so cheesy you could put it on toast.  

And therein I guess is my problem, it is ludicrous and I know that I should have laughed it out of town, but I just devoured all three of them. Like a sugar high, or when you can't stop eating Pringles or something. Don't say you weren't warned....

10/10

Book #30 The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach

The Art Of Fielding

In The Art Of Fielding, promising young baseball player Henry Skrimshander is spotted by sporty college kid Mike Schwartz. Somewhat improbably for a person apparently in their second year at university, Mike has the power and influence to make sure Henry gets a scholarship to a minor New England college with a tenuous association to the novel Moby Dick. From there a novel about sports in college ensues.

In terms of the prose it flows well, and feels well written, it's not necessary to know anything much about baseball to know what is going on. The characters are in general likeable and Henry's journey from invincible to tormented can be compared to any number of successful sportsman. Alas, the problem is not prose nor characterization, but plot.

On the one hand you've got Henry's story, and all in all that side of it works well, but the blurb reads something like "when a throw goes wrong, 5 lives are changed" and the idea that they were changed simply by that ball and not by the disastrous choices made by the individuals themselves which aren't particularly related to the foul ball, is silly at best.

The other side of the plot-coin is the Dean, Guert, his fractured relationship with daughter Pella, and his dangerous obsession with one of his students. On the one hand it reminded me in tone of John Williams' Stoner. On the other hand this novel is two different college stories, in which a poor effort has been made to shoehorn them into one and establish tenuous links between Guert and Pella and Henry and Mike. They just don't connect. Even the plot twist that brings this side of the story to crisis point doesn't hold much water and feels quite forced. The denouement, after a character passes away, belongs in a much lesser, much more melodramatic novel

That said, did I enjoy it as I read it? Yes. It was only after I closed the book, and thought about writing a review that it just seemed faulty somehow. And it didn't 'stay with me' as other recommendations assured me it would. I am behind with the blog and read this in August and I had to look up what some of the characters names were because I just didn't remember.

7/10  

Book #45 When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman

When God Was A Rabbit

Length Of Time In Possession : Roughly 8 months 

Two years ago, Amazon must have emailed me suggesting I buy When God Was A Rabbit more than ten times. I got annoyed, and decided never to read it on that basis. I also thought its title was incredibly twee and irritating.

If one should not judge a book by its cover one should also not judge a book by its title, a friend insisted on my lending it, promising it was good, and actually, though it almost embarrasses me to admit it, given how ill disposed I was to it, it is!

I've seen complaints around the internet that it was disappointing and didn't live up to the hype, but, as I entered it with incredibly low expectations, the novel had the opposite effect on me.

It is a coming of age story about Elly, a quirky off beat damaged little girl who feels she doesn't belong anywhere or to anyone except her brother Joe. Their father struggles with depression, believing he is cursed and their mother is openly in love with both their father and their aunt.   

Both Joe and Elly have one special friend in Joe's case Charlie and in Elly's, Jenny Penny and for them, that is enough. The novel moves through their childhood into adulthood, and, like Elly's later newspaper column is about 'Lost And Found' that which we lose and find again, in the best of ways.
It is about love too, and love in all the forms it exists within. I felt envious of what Elly and Joe had within each other, a relationship special and vital to each.

Throughout the prose there is this sad nostalgia, but a kind of beautiful sadness if that makes any sense? Thoroughly engaging, I'm not sorry I read it, and perhaps ought to have listened to Amazon's automated recommendations, damn you for knowing me too well!!!

Verdict : 9/10

Destination : Return to Owner
  

Book #50 The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale

The Blasphemer

The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Book Award, and frankly, it rather beats me as to how that happened. It isn't that it is a BAD book, dreadful to read or anything like that; it's a book which if it were a person would suffer from multiple personality disorder. It doesn't seem to know what it is, or what it wants to be. There are about five storylines:

1) Daniel and Nancy go on an exotic holiday for their anniversary and events permanently change their  relationship.

2) Andrew, a young soldier fights in WW1, whilst his grandson Philip tries to piece together his story

3) Wetherby, an embittered, pious, dried up academic seeks to destroy a colleagues career out of jealousy and spite 

4) Hamdi, an innocent Muslim teacher is labelled as a 'clean-skin' and potential terrorist by the Security Services when he is accidentally caught up in a demonstration.

5) Martha, an overly mature 9 year old, begins behaving oddly and then goes missing.

The link between all these strands is Daniel: Philip is his father, Martha his daughter, Hamdi her teacher and Wetherby his colleague. But it just doesn't work. What frustrated me whilst reading this book is that each strand, taken alone, is a brilliant premise for a novel.

The first storyline could have been a brilliant examination of the effect of a being a disaster survivor upon a relationship, the second a great historical novel about love, cowardice and the folly of war. The third a creepy, atmospheric tale about a sinister saboteur who sets out to destroy an oblivious friend. The fourth a commentary about the treatment of Muslims in a post 9/11 and 7/7 world, and the last a look at the modern world in which parents live in a culture of fear with regard to child safety.

Instead, the novel is none and all of these things, an awful mish-mash of half ideas, concepts imagined and left hanging. It really feels as though Farndale started five separate novels, got writers block and in the end just bunged them all together. It's really odd, and feels like not just a wasted opportunity but five wasted opportunities. Particularly, I felt, in the character of Wetherby alone there was real potential for deep character development and a dark psychological thriller, in the vein of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love or Zoe Heller's Notes On A Scandal, but this does not occur. 

In addition there is an examination of faith versus atheism underpinning the novel, but this again feels 'thrown in for good measure', underdeveloped and lacking in anything new to say. The end twist involving Hamdi does raise a small smile, but then the epilogue feels superfluous after this denouement.

One of the reasons I bought this novel was because of the amount of 5 star reviews it had on Amazon, which, I must say I'm a bit baffled by. One reviewer on Amazon said this :

Farndale has been compared by many to Sebastian Faulks; both for his descriptions of WW1 and tying together contemporary themes, such as fundamantalism, (sic) science and faith. Having read both 'Birdsong' and 'One week in December' (sic), I think The Blasphemer does it better.

There is NO comparison in my eyes between this book and the sublime Birdsong, or between Farndale and Faulks. I find myself slightly horrified by the suggestion. I feel like she should wash her mouth out to be honest, as should any of these 'many' making comparisons. Yes, I thought 'A Week In December' was dreadful, but that book is the exception to my experience with Faulks as a writer. Faulks, at least, takes one idea and develops it, whereas Farndale can't seem to decide what the hell he wants his book to be about. There are some ridiculous 'as if' coincidences at the end too, such as the conclusion of the Wetherby storyline and the Martha storyline.

A book of opportunities wasted, I'm going to give this 5/10 a point for every great novel it could so easily have been.

Book #46 In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut

In A Strange Room

In A Strange Room was a runner up alongside C, Room, The Long Song, and Parrot and Olivier in America, for the 2010 Man Booker Prize eventually won by Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question which I reviewed earlier in the challenge.

Although it is a novel it feels strangely unlike one. The protagonist is a South African writer, also named Damon, although this is a work of fiction, the character and the writer share their story. It bears more comparison to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried however than to Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, which is a blessing. Like those two books, this novel also feels more like connected short stories than a traditional novel. Again, as with those books I started it with no idea what it was about. Metafiction, and I believe this counts, seems to be following me.

The story or rather stories, are travel stories, tapping into the new culture of going travelling, taking a gap year or going off to India to find oneself, which has so very nearly become a cliche. In these stories, Galgut exams the experience of the solo traveller, who by necessity almost, becomes involved in the lives of other travellers met along the road, and the potential artificiality or depth of those short-lived intimacies.

Each story has a different title, 'The Follower', 'The Lover' and 'The Guardian' and it seems to me that Galgut examines the different selves you become around different people, either by the role you play in their life or the self you make yourself be to fit in with them. It also makes the clear point that the relationships you create via travelling become unsustainable in the real world, or will break down under the pressures of existing in a foreign land. The moral of the tale is almost travel and friendship don't mix, and also that the friendships you leave behind are damaged by the alterations that take place within you during experiences they haven't shared. There is really something rather bleak about the story, but it is still a good story.

Damon meets Reiner in Greece, unable to define the parameters of their relationship, the two succumb to a damaging power struggle. He meets three Swiss friends in Zimbabwe and travels through Africa with them and is again damaged by his inability to express his feelings and seize the moment. In the final story, Damon takes old friend Anna to India seeking to improve her mental state, when things take a dramatic turn. The stories are by no means underwritten, but they are sparsely told, allowing for a lot of reading between the lines. Damon seems to constantly travel, unable to settle, looking for something, but wherever he goes, there he is, as the saying goes, his location changes but he doesn't, continuing to make attachments that can't or won't last. The stories are much more about his psyche than any of the destinations he visits.

The odd thing about the style was that the narrative voice mostly spoke in the third person but occasionally switched to the first, giving the impression that he is viewing his own actions remotely from afar. This has a very haunting quality, as though Galgut both has and hasn't the power to control events, a passing traveller within his own story, just as he is through all these countries. Rather, it should have been 'odd' but I quite liked it.

I'm not sure it's Booker winner worthy, but I did prefer it to both Room, for which I had misgivings and The Finkler Question whose comic status I question. I can imagine myself recommending this to people as interesting short stories that examine the complexities and frailties of human relationships; or to someone who has perhaps returned from lengthy overseas travel and feels rather disillusioned.

It is short, and I had it read in under 2 hours, but I liked the feel of it and admired the writing 7/10

*I would very much appreciate it if somebody could tell me why this post is so popular it has been viewed almost 700 times as of the end of September 2011*