Category Archives: novels
What’s the best book you’ve read this year?
Novels – I spent a lot of the year reading Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s long, in-depth epic set in the days of revolutionary France. His description of how the French lost at Borodino reminded me of Tolstoy’s description of the battle of Borodino, another Napoleonic battle just outside Moscow. Hugo suggested that in addition to the intelligence of the British commanders, the influential factors were a French general who turned up late, leaving Napoleon short-handed, and a sunken road which was not on the maps and which ended up swallowing a whole legion of french cavalry. Besides this, Les Miserables is of course wonderful and uplifting tale of faith, forgiveness, redemption, law and grace. It’s central character is unexpectedly given a second chance and uses the rest of his life making up for his past mistakes and showing the same grace to others that was shown to him.
I elso enjoyed a few more John Grisham novels – the Chamber, the Rainmaker – but the highlight being his debut, the Firm, which is excellently written and which keeps the suspense going all the way through. It’s quite different from the film so is well worth reading.
I would also highly recommend Enduring Love by Ian McEwan – an explosive beginning giving way to a tense tale of obsession – all the characters demonstrate their own obsessive behaviour with the ultimate being against the main character. The movie, which stars Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans, maintains the same degree of tension but changes some of the circumstances to better fit the movie format.
Non-fiction, I’ve enjoyed getting into Donald Miller’s insights into Christian Spirituality. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is about his search for a narrative out of the chaos of his life. I then read his earlier book, Blue Like Jazz: Non-religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality, which is about as accessible an overview of Christian living as you might find (although he comes at it from a different angle to most).
I did read Love Wins, the book that made all the fuss for Rob Bell back in March. I read it in August (but have not blogged about it since I read it!). It’s worth reading, if only to find out what the fuss is about. I think he only really steps outside the bounds to orthodox Christian belief in one chapter, but alludes to it is several others. The trouble with Rob is that he doesn’t like to be pinned down to any precise viewpoint in order to bring the most people into the conversation.
That’s about it. Check out my books tag for what else I’ve been reading this year.
So Much For That, Lionel Schriver
The most recent novel in our book club is from Lionel Schriver, the bestselling author of We Need to Talk about Kevin. I haven’t read that one, and after So Much for That! I don’t think I will.
Shep Knacker is the unlikely hero, who always dreamed of an early retirement with his wife Glynis to a cheaper part of the world. Taking the $800,000 he got from the sale of his Handyman business in New York, he planned to spend his last years in a hot climate where $800,000 is a fortune and he could live very comfortably for the rest of his days. This, he called the Afterlife.
After years of procrastinating, he finally books two one-way tickets to Pemba, Zanzibar, on an island off the coast of Tanzania. Only they can’t go. Shep’s wife Glynis has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
The back cover of the book shows a quote from the Literary Review which says ‘British readers will close this excellent novel feeling grateful for the NHS’. They are right. throughout the novel Shep and Glynis’ nest egg is gradually eaten up. Despite them having a comprehensive medical insurance policy from his job (Shep still works for the company he sold), there are fees for co-pays (insurance excesses) and out-of-coverage care. It turns out that to get an expert in Glynis’ rare cancer they have to turn to a doctor who is not one of the recommended care providers of the insurance company. I could rant on here about the absurdity of the American health insurance system, where doctors views of over-ruled by profit-making corporates and how, despite it’s deficiencies, the British NHS is far superior, but I won’t. I think that, as the author is an American living in London, she already knows this. As the main character laments:
For the sale of [my company] Knack alone I paid two hundred and eight thousand dollars in capital gains. Add up all I’ve shoveled those sons of bitches since high school, and it has to be somewhere between one and two million bucks. And that’s the same government who, when my wife has cancer, won’t buy her a single Tylenol.
The money is a backdrop to the story, but most of it deals with the gradual decline in the health of Glynis and of their nest egg. But there are also more medical issues. Shep’s father, Gabe, is slowly fading out. His best friend, Jackson, has a daughter with a rare genetic disease and another daughter on antidepressants (from years of being the ‘left out’ member of the family, as she has no such condition). Added to that, Jackson has taken an ill-advised course of cosmetic surgery which, when his wife finds out, adds strain to their marriage and finances.
It is good that a bestselling novel has decided to deal in depth with cancer and dying. It is not something that people like to engage with and the author has, I think, captured the reactions of friends and family. At first there is genuine compassion and offers to help, but after a while, as Glynis becomes more housebound and fades from public view, the visits become more infrequent. There is general awkwardness in some of the interactions as family members of the afflicted don’t know what to say. It is a more in-depth treatment than Jenny Downham’s Before I Die, but unsurprisingly, not as good as Tolstoy’s first person narrative in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Like, Downham, but unlike Tolstoy, there is no thought given to what might happen after death (she makes her thoughts on religion clear in the loss of faith of Shep’s father (p429)) or even on the fear of the process itself – the focus of Schriver is on what the life is like before it and in particular, a description from a carer’s point of view.
Schriver is also very perceptive in the language that is used in the treatment of cancer and, whether this is helpful or not. In the book, as in the UK, we fight against cancer, battle it, struggle against it. Whist the doctors think this is important to keep up the patients resolve, this shows through in Glynis being unable to face up to her own death. While she is continually battling it, there is always a chance, however tiny, that she will recover. The doctors always want to try the next new drug (which, incidentally, is very costly) regardless of the side-effects or the probability of success. Near the end of the book (and at the end of his resources), Shep has a showdown with the doctor over what her struggles and his money has bought them. The response is that she has lived ‘a good two or three months longer than expected’. Shep questions whether, with so much medial intrusion, they have in fact been a good three months at all. They merely served to displace Glynis’ attention so she didn’t actually face up to the fact that she was dying.
Whilst it raised some interesting points, I would not recommend this book, primarily because it drags. At 530 pages it is a good 200 pages too long. I do not say this because I’m against long books – I’ve read War and Peace and Les Miserables among others, however Lionel Shriver could have got her point across in fewer words. She was over indulgent in her own writing.
Not a writer I immediately connect with, but I can see that the book has been written with thought, especially for those caring for others with illnesses. I’ll give it 6/10 but suggest you spend your time reading something else instead.
Thinking about Atonement
I’m preparing a sermon on atonement, and brainstorming what comes to mind with that word, one of the first things is the novel by Ian McEwan of the same name, which I read some years ago.
The shorter definition of the word ‘atonement’ is to make “satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends”.
Set in 1934, McEwan’s novel, Atonement, follows an upper class family who are enjoying a hot day in their country house whilst being visited by their friends. The oldest daughter, Cecilia is back from Cambridge for the summer, as is Robbie, her childhood friend and the son of one of the estate workers. There is an attraction between them which grows on this summers day. Thirteen year old Briony is trying to prepare a short drama to perform with her cousins… and is feeling decidedly left out by the attention that Cecilia and her shortly-to-return older brother are getting.
That day Briony witnesses a number of things which she was not meant to see, and which she was not able to understand. First, she reads a letter from Robbie to Cecilia declaring his love – in a very brusque fashion. Then, she stumbles into the library interrupting a passionate embrace between them and thinks it may be some sort of attack. Finally, in the dim light of dusk in the garden, she sees the part of a sexual assault on her fifteen year old cousin, Lola. She did not get a good view of the perpetrator, but in her mind it had to be Robbie. That is the story she becomes convinced of and sticks to. Robbie is arrested and taken away, and Cecilia doesn’t talk to her sister again. This wrong conclusion, which Briony was only too happy to jump to, has dramatic implications for Robbie and Cecilia’s lives.
The book then jumps forward a number of years to narrate Robbie in the retreat from Dunkirk, and then further again when Briony has trained as a nurse and is looking after returning wounded soldiers – spurred on to do this by the memory of what she had done. Working for good can surely undo the mistakes of the past. This third section of the novel is dominated by Briony attempting to make amends for the hardship she has caused to Cecilia and Robbie. It is quite simply an attempt at self-atonement for her thirteen-year-old mistake. The novel ends with peace – Robbie and Cecilia on the banks of the Thames, war and confusion behind them, looking towards a happier future.
The twist in the tale comes in the epilogue when the story leaps forward to 1999. A now aged Briony is just about to publish her novel (memoirs?), with the Robbie and Cecilia story dominating. What he have been reading until that point is, in fact, not Ian McEwan’s prose, but the story written by one of his creations, Briony Tallis. Robbie did not survive the retreat at Dunkirk, succumbing to fever on the beach. Cecilia died in a bomb shelter in London during an air raid. Briony’s novel is the only way she, who has been battling guilt all her life, can come to atone for her mistake and give Robbie and Cecilia a happy ending.
“how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity of higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”
The irony is that there was no atonement either in the fictional story that Briony dreamed up, or in the real post-epilogue twist of McEwan. There can be no atonement as the only ones capable of giving it to Briony are dead, and she knows it. The atheist McEwan knows it too.
Book club averages so far
Here’s what our book group has thought of the novels we have read so far. The links take you to my reviews which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the group!
Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd – average of 8/10
Generation A, Douglas Coupland – average of 6.6/10
16 Lighthouse Road, Debbie Macomber – average of 5/10
next, we’ll be reading: So Much for That, Lionel Shriver
and then: The Novel in the Viola, Natasha Solomon
The Secret Life of Bees
Having just finished the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd in advance of our book group meeting tonight, it just leaves me enough time to write a quick review of it. I have actually read this book before, about five years ago after coming back from a long summer of work experience and holiday in South Carolina, where the book is based and where the novel is set.
It is also, following Generation A by Douglas Coupland, the second book running that our group has read where some of the major developments rely on bees.
Set in the deep south the 1964 , the year the civil rights act was passed, it follows a young teenage girl called Lily Owens who lost her mum when she was four. Her father was a bitter and angry man who ran a peach farm. Since her mother died she was being brought up by Rosaleen, one of her father’s black workers who he plucked out of the fields to work as a nanny. Lily misses her mother and misses real love and affection from anyone except Rosaleen and she treasures the few trinkets she has as a memory of her mother – including an icon of the black Madonna which bears a handwritten inscription, Tiburon, SC.
One day when Lily was about 14, she was accompanying Rosaleen into the nearby town to register to vote. Many of the white men didn’t want blacks registering and Rosaleen gets herself into a scrape which results in her being charged, beaten up and jailed. That night, afraid of the fury from her father, Lily breaks Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is being held and they run away - towards Tiburon.
There, they stumble into the place which was the origin of her mother’s Black Madonna icon, a pink house of middle-aged black sisters, August, June and May, who keep bees and make Black Madonna honey. Lily lies about who she is but it later transpires that they knew from the outset – as her mother had been there ten years earlier. She is welcomed and is slowly healed of her hurts and pain, and gradually learns the truth about her mother and the accident that killed her.
It is beautifully written, with deep characters and rich descriptions of the pink house, the process of keeping the bees, and the rather odd rituals of the sisterhood of women. There are also two scenes of racial tension which transport you into the mood of the time. The novel speaks of out need to be loved and accepted right from early on in our lives. When this isn’t there it pervades and colours everything else and one cannot really move on until it is dealt with. In the house, Lily is loved and accepted. There is no pressure for her to tell the truth about who she is but the sisters allow that to come out in her own good time, only after she knows she is safe. Lily had to learn how to trust, receive love without feeling undeserving, and ultimately, to forgive herself for her unwitting part in her mother’s death.
There are many phrases and quotes of the book which I liked. For example, when Lily first enters Tiburon and finds herself staring face-to-face with the same picture of the Black Madonna which is adorning a honey jar in the general store, Lily muses:
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.
Some of this mystery comes alive in the author’s description of keeping the bees.
She was also looking for herself. As August was telling the story of a statue of the Black Mary whilst they were both preparing the honey jars, Lily reflects:
I was so caught up with what August was saying I had stopped wetting labels. I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope, and not the story I did have about ending my mother’s life and sort of ending my own at the same time.
Everyone needs a story greater than themselves: this is, I believe, a universal truth of human nature. However, so often, the stories we do construct for ourselves are uninspiring or unhelpful and merely obscure the person we were created to be. Lily learned that she had to own parts of her true story and come to terms with it, as the same time as realising that this story didn’t define her. There was another story of who she was and what she could become.
Ultimately, the novel is about healing, redemption, self-awareness, forgiveness and love. Not romantic love, but the everyday love and stability of a close-knit community that does wonders for an individual’s self-worth and self-perception – the simple act of living life alongside each other. Lily needed to love herself and know that she was loved.
Score 4.5/5. I wonder what the group will think this evening!
There is also a rather fine movie of the book starring Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifa, Alicia Keys, and Sophie Okenedo
Like this:
Generation A in his own words
Our book group is discussing Douglas Coupland’s Generation A tonight (which I have reviewed). I just found this question and answer session about it. Some weird questions but he does give us an insight into how his brain works and what was behind the book. Some of what he says about story remind me of what Donald Miller wrote in ‘A million miles in a thousand years‘ about our lives needing to be story. Perhaps this is what Coupland thinks we have lost.
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
The second book for our bookgroup was Douglas Coupland’s generation A, which I chose. I have read a number of Coupland’s books, and although most of them are weird in terms of plotline, he tries to say something about society, the search to identity, the search for meaning (and God) and the state of the world. The phrase ‘Generation X’ describes the post-babyboom generation, born from the early 60s to late 70s. It was not coined by Coupland, but it was popularized by him in his 1991 novel of the same name which followed a group of people in their early 20s working unsatisfying ‘McJobs’ and trying to make sense of their lives.
Since then the term Generation Y has come along to describe those born in the 80s and 80s. There was no Generation Z. This book is called Generation A as a response to a quote in the mid-nineties in a university commencement speech at Syracuse University:
Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago
Generation A is set in the near future, maybe 20 years or so, in a world where bees have become extinct. That is, until five people, Zack, Samantha, Diana, Harj and Julien, all young adults, are stung in different parts of the world, Iowa, New Zealand, France, Sri Lanka and Canada, within a few weeks of each other. The narration switches between the perspective of each one.
There is immediately a worldwide uproar. The places where they were stung are immediately scoured to see if the hive can be found (it can’t) and the five young people are whisked off into solitary confinement under the authority of their handler, Serge. Was there something about these five people that helped them to be stung? They are kept in an underground, completely white, sterile room for up to a month, fed a strange jelly-like substance and kept away from anything that might contaminate their mind, such as reading material, brand logos etc.
They are eventually released and a little surprised to find that they are worldwide celebrities. They enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame before they are all called together by Serge to meet on a remote island off the coast of Canada at Haida Gwaii, near the site of the last recorded bee hive. They are to live together and tell stories to each other for the next few days. The stories are supposed to be a catalyst for something.
It is typical of a Douglas Coupland storyline – quirky, but the characters are interesting enough and the tech-aware humourous asides are enough to keep you reading. All through the book you are wondering, why did the bees pick them? Here’s my suggestions:
The world as it is inhabited is addicted to a new wonder drug called Solon. This drug has no side effects acts like a mild anti-depressant. It makes you float along in a contented state. However, it also makes you forget about the future, the bigger picture, setting goals and working for things. Almost everyone has begun taking this drug to add to their general wellbeing. All five of the stingees have never taken Solon. They each had had some difficulties in their lives, some family rejection, and there was an element of loner-ness about them, but still, they had not taken Solon. At the moment of their sting, they were all involved in something that had a global effect. It may have been something mundane, but it was global nonetheless.
The stories they were telling each other were supposed to bring out what they had in common. Each of the stories were all quite different yet they had quite definite similarities. They were all, in one way or another, about the breakdown of society, the breakdown of communication, and the preference to stay in an isolated inner-world fuelled by cyber-knowledge of everything you want to know, rather than have the highs and lows of real relationship.
In these stories, Coupland is painting a picture of where our culture could go. The seeds of self-obsessed, self-realisation and self-satisfaction are there. A future like this, he posits indirectly, is less concerned about others. The world is turning into the consumerist relationship – service provider/customer interaction – and it is killing its soul.
It may be worth saying, the Telegraph hated it , the Independent disliked it and the Guardian merely tolerated it, but I rather enjoyed reading Generation A.
Who do you write like?
Apparently I write like David Foster Wallace, which is a surprise as before the analysis tool, I write like… told me, I hadn’t actually heard of him:
But his novels sound interesting. The most praised, Infinite Jest, is set in the near future during a time of dystopian North American unification with all the accompanying separatist and terrorist movements. The terrorists try to get their hands on a film which is so perfect and so funny that viewers lose all ability and desire to do anything apart from view the film. Sounds like the sort of plot Douglas Coupland would come up with.
Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 leaving an unfinished novel, recently published posthumously.
So, has anyone read his stuff?
Notes on Death: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
This short story is usually published alongside other short stories of Tolstoy’s that deal with issues of marriage, happiness, life and death. At about 70 pages (roughly the same length as some contemporary novels such as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach), it is minute compared to Tolstoy’s other epics, but is certainly long enough to develop character and to lure you into it.
I’m going to give the game away. In the book, Ivan Ilyich dies. I was rather surprised to find that he actually died in the second paragraph, because it is the nature and significance of death that Tolstoy wants to discuss. The book begins with effect that Ivan’s death has on others. To two of his work colleagues, the death is an opportunity and an irritation. Someone will need to fill Ivan’s role and Pyotr Ivanavich thinks he might be the one. So the opportunity for promotion is there. At the same time there is the irritation of visiting the family, consoling the widow, and staying for the wake which only delays Pyotr’s preferred way of spending the evening, at poker with friends.
Only then does Tolstoy turn to to dealing, in retrospect, with the life and death of Ivan Ilyich. We are treated to a fairly leisurely description of Ivan’s life – of how he floated through life enjoying his position, taking the opportunity for work advancement when it was there, marrying well and fathering two children. The marriage is not described in glowing terms. The initial attraction wore off quickly and the marriage was simply a given – not particularly good or bad, just there. However familiarity bred irritation followed by annoyance and hate. In this time Ivan wanted to climb the rungs of government advocacy and he succeeds, resulting in a move to St. Petersburg.
Shortly afterwards he develops an illness. Although at first it did not seem like an illness. An uncomfortableness developed into an irritation. Doctors were summoned and consulted and second opinions were had. Diets were followed and medicine was prescribed. The ache got worse. Tolstoy describes it as a loose kidney. With the deterioration of his condition came the decline in Ivan’s mood. Only the kindness of Gerasim, one of his servants, gives him any comfort. This kindness is shown in the hope that someone might do the same for Gerasim when his time comes, and it affects Ivan. Lesson one: We Will All Die.
Ivan doesn’t do illness well. The realisation sets in that he will not recover and be becomes prone to depression, analysing his life. Looking back, Ivan couldn’t think of anything noteworthy nor much that was particularly bad in his life. Yet he cannot shake the uneasiness that something has been missed and that he has not lived as he should. Again he cannot think that he could have lived any other way. He remained upright in society and, well, only treated others as well as other of his class did. The story climaxes not with a great confession or conversion, just an acknowledgment that he has been living for the wrong thing – that his life has in some sense been inauthentic as he lived it for himself. At the moment of his realisation he experienced an end to his loathing for his family and a cessation of his pain as he embraced the joyous white light that was enveloping him.
There is a quote from the South American Missionary and martyr Jim Elliot who was killed at the hands of the people he went to serve in 1956:
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
It seems that this is the lesson that Ivan finally grasped in his final moments. As soon as he realised he could not hang onto life, onto himself, he was embraced by a love and joy that he had never known.
Update 28/07/11: Following a recent newly published edition of this story along with another of Tolstoy’s short stories The Devil, The Guardian have also published a review here.
My Recommended Novels of 2010
It’s that time again were we often review what has gone on over the previous year. Here are some books I enjoyed reading.
This year I have read a lot of John Grisham. I only discovered him a couple of years ago when I won The Broker in a book competition and I’ve been reading a lot of him since. Fast-paced well-written switch off mostly legal novels. The Last Juror is definitely my favourite as the character development is deeper than in the others as the novel covers a period of ten years in one small town from the perspective of the new local newspaper editor. In The Partner a former law partner who had been in hiding after faking his own death reveals himself and is immediately hit with a chain of huge corporate law suits. I’m sure the aftermath of the BP Oil spill will turn into a legal mess like this one. The Appeal had tension from start to finish (although it didn’t necessarily end as you would have wanted). In The Associate a young law students past exploits catch up with him as he gets caught in a game of bribery. Another of Grisham’s best. The King of Torts chartered the rise and fall of a small time lawyer after following some bad advice. Character development in this one was a bit weaker than his others but it’s a fun read nonetheless. I’ve just finished The Testament about the search for a reclusive missionary who has just inherited 11 Billion Dollars. The book is really about the redemption of the lawyer who is send to the jungles of Brazil to find her. The Street Lawyer is another about a man who recently discovered a conscience. The Client follows a young boy who had unexpectedly found himself in the middle of a mafia court case after inadvertently finding out where a body was hidden. There are two others I’ve read this year that aren’t about law – Bleachers, which I would only really recommend if you don’t mind reading about American Football, and the more ponderous A Painted House which gives insight into cotton farming in the Deep South in the 1950s. In almost all of the Grisham books I’ve read, at least one character either comes to faith or becomes a Christian. You can’t fail to read The Testament without finding out all about what the Christian faith means and what difference it makes. Surely this is the way to write Christian novels – well written pieces that aren’t patronizing or preachy.
Moving away from Grisham into more weighty fiction I’d also recommend Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated from Spanish). Set in early fascist Spain in the 1930s, it follows the mystery of a novelist as a young boy tries to unravel it. Wonerfully written and tense to the end. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, about a slave ship on its way down the Ganges, has excellent character depth is essentially a book about race and the search for identity as several characters struggle to fit in to their surroundings. It is written in authentic sea-faring 19th Century language!
But by far the best novel of 2010 that I’ve read is Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy. Prince Dimitri Nekhlyudov is a well respected member of the Russian upper class who has been called for jury service. Sitting in the jury box he recognises the defendant as a girl who he once had a flirtation with, and to his dismay he realises that he behaviour all those years ago has led directly to her being in that dock before him. This leads to a journey of introspection as he tries to put right what has gone wrong. In the process he experiences not just forgiveness and redemption but, as the title suggests, a resurrection into a new kind of life. Tolstoy’s faith comes shining through this novel.
I’m currently reading Nick Hornby’s latest book, Juliet, Naked, which thankfully returns to his earlier high standard found in A Long Way Down and How to be Good after the disappointing Slam.
