Book #57 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Fingersmith

It was late when I finished Ann Patchett's State Of Wonder, but, I was suffering from insomnia and decided to start Fingersmith. I didn't sleep last night. At all. I've always thought that reviewers who claimed a book kept them up all night were at best sycophantic and at worst writing pieces of wild cliches and hyperbole. And then I read Fingersmith.

Right from the start you feel not as reader but as genuine observer. The dialogue makes the voices ring clear and true in your mind. I've always loved nineteenth century literature, and Fingersmith feels like reading a cross between a Dickens and an Austen. All the rogues normally found in the works of either writer are present and correct, drawing room society, damsels in distress, low level ne'er do wells and the charming Gentleman fallen upon hard times who may not be all he seems; but Waters is able by writing in the modern era to turn things up a notch by writing about topics with a frankness unthinkable from her literary forebears.

The plot is just magnificent, a confidence trick within a confidence trick within a...like a set of Russian Dolls. It begins with Sue: raised by scam artists who do what they must to get by, Sue is enlisted by  "Gentleman" to assist him in the ensnaring of a young lady of good fortune by posing as a lady's maid. That alone sets us off on a fascinating adventure of both guile and cruelty, but the turns that await Sue and her mistress Maud are as unexpected for the reader as they are for the characters.

It would be spoiling it to give any further information on the plot than this, I don't even really want to comment on some of the revelations that await for fear of giving some of the enjoyment away.
The story told in part by Sue and in part by Maud is charmingly done in both parts, and in the end you feel for both girls equally.

The world of nineteenth century London is revealed to be a truly sinister and hellish place for women particularly and there is a real sense of the macabre, especially when the tricks begin to pay off for the truly villainous "Gentleman"and his associates.  

I must confess that when Sarah Waters first began to gain notice, I somewhat wrote her off as somebody who was (apparently) attempting to pass off overt erotica as literature for headlines and notoriety. Sex for the sake of sex. The experience of reading Fingersmith ought to teach me once and for all to always ignore the views of The Daily Fail. The sexual elements of this novel are not only essential to both plot and characterisation, but are reflected in a tasteful and legitimately artistic way.

Sometime ago, a friend and I were in Waterstones one night when Sarah Waters made an appearance for an evening Q and A. Having not read any of her work, I was disinterested in her and it. Having just spent the last 24 hours engrossed in her novel and thrilled by every page, I must confess myself completely and utterly gutted at having missed an opportunity of meeting her, but to have met her without having read Fingersmith would be akin to meeting a hero who was yet to save you, you would have no idea just how great they would be one day, and so would not remark upon them at all. Hindsight is a great if bittersweet thing.

A new literary hero. Wonderful. Now, I need sleep. Read This Now: 10/10

Book #56 State Of Wonder by Ann Patchett

State Of Wonder

Some years ago I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett an unusual but affecting story of a hostage scenario in a government building in an unnamed South American country. It had some beautiful prose and lingered with me afterwards. In the course of 30 years I have read so many books that I couldn't name them all, but if pressed to try I would remember Bel Canto for its strangely affecting qualities, somehow magical in the midst of crisis.

In State Of Wonder, Patchett again returns to South America but via a different route. Marina Singh works for a prestigious pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, and is engaged in an affair with her boss Mr Fox. Suddenly both their courses are changed by the shock news that their colleague Anders Eckman has died in the Amazon after being sent there on assignment by Fox.

Eckman was sent there on the trail of the aloof, imperious Annick Swenson who though employed by the company refuses to be in any way answerable to them and Singh is sent after him to establish what went wrong. What she finds there will change her forever.....

This novel has shades of Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, Theroux's Mosquito Coast and Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, the last of the three being among my favourite novels, dealing with the issues of being a 'stranger in a strange land'. Marina makes a likeable central character and the dynamic she shares with Swenson is made all the more intense by their unspoken shared past. Surrounding characters with the exception of beautifully realised deaf orphan Easter, are a little thin, it is the single minded, slightly scary Swenson, who will stop at nothing to succeed who stands out.

The book touches on some issues which are interesting but doesn't overly develop them, such as the difficult relationship between students, and teachers who seem more like Gods to their faculty; and also, the difficult decisions Western outsiders must make when deciding to intervene in a society where they do not belong. I think it's a shame that these interesting topics were not further explored.

The prose is very accessible, and, I think in this case, I liked the inconclusiveness of the ending because there were so many ways in which the lives of the characters concerned could change or stay the same. It gives the reader something to imagine, and in the act of imagining what might happen next, you discover that actually, you really care. 8/10

Book #55 The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas

The End Of Mr Y

I want to say right from the start that I thought The End Of Mr Y was brilliant. As soon as I started reading it I felt like this was a book I was meant to read. To borrow a popular film quote : "It had me at hello". The protagonist Ariel Monto is an English Literature graduate, with a recent burgeoning interest in theoretical physics. This immediately struck a chord with me on a personal level. When we meet Ariel she is a Phd student at an unnamed London university with an interest in little-known 18th century author Thomas E Lumas. Lumas wrote among others a novel called The End Of Mr Y, after which our novel takes its title. The novel is rare and there are but few copies in existence, it is also rumoured to be cursed.

The first section of the book is really the novel at its best. I was taken with much of the writing, and enjoyed many individual quotes about physics and other things, for example :

I didn't go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything there'll be something to actually believe in.

 Or this description about the weather :

Monday morning and the sky is the colour of sad weddings.

Or the description of a feeling Ariel experiences :

On days like this I do not feel afraid of death or pain. I don't know if it's tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today as I walk through this housing estate, there's a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I'm so hyped up that suddenly I want to fuck the world or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood.

I don't know whether others will like these quotes, but personally I found them insightful. I could have sat here and listed many other quotes but I decided to stop at 3.

There was just a lot I liked about the opening of this book, the elusive cursed book, the academic setting and the character of Ariel herself, someone I felt I understood. I believe that detractors of this book have called it pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, but, having so recently levelled that accusation at Ali Smith's 'There But For The' I can safely say that Scarlett Thomas's 'The End Of Mr Y' bears no comparison to it. Instead, my position is that the book is incredibly intelligent and so is, clearly, its author. Where it succeeds and mightily over the former book, is that its storytelling is king. It is not a book trying to be clever, making some redundant point about society that might have been interesting ten years ago, it is actually genuinely clever. For there to be a fictional tale about a woman on a journey of discovery in a fourth dimension, a fantasy, magical realism tale; that pulls off discussions on quantum physics and philosophy, existential and otherwise, making them integral to as opposed to harming the story is a feat indeed. However, if you don't want your mind seriously taxed by difficult questions of science and existence, it would be best avoided.

The middle third is somewhat difficult bearing the similarities it did to 1980's computer games and virtual reality with shades of the 1999 film 'The Matrix'. It faltered somewhat for me in this section, though I did like the concept of "Pedesis" which is brought in at this stage.

Though I have seen criticism of the ending and expected something awful I was blown away by it. Whilst looking back near the beginning of the book after completion, I noticed a foreshadowing that I had not done on the first read. This book is ABSOLUTELY a novel which bears re-reading, not least for its philosophical and theoretical concepts which are worth further exploration. I read Paradise Lost about a year ago, and this book along with others I have read this year including Mirror, Mirror and The Vintner's Luck has clearly taken some inspiration from Milton's epic poem. I think once you've read a classic like Milton you start to see his impact everywhere. I loved the ending, loved it, and would argue down and defend it against detractors.

Responses to The End Of Mr Y are very clearly polarised and I would say that this is a book you will either fall in love with or detest, fortunately I am of the former camp. And though reader responses to Thomas's other novels 'Popco' and 'Our Tragic Universe' are equally polarised I look forward to reading them with serious enthusiasm.

For me this is a Read This: 10/10 book, but I have the objectivity to recognise that for some people this book may be the exact opposite.

Book #37 The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried

After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.

In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.

The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.

If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.

There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At it's core perhaps war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive, the grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living and you among them and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There's a kind of largeness to it a kind of godliness. Though it's odd you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly as if for the first time you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.    

I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please.  10/10