booklit

There’s no mention made anywhere on Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Oscar And The Lady In Pink (2002) that it’s the third title of a loose series called Le Cycle de l’Invisible, four books that deal in some way with world religions. And, if the tone of this novella is consistent with the rest, they do it in a lighthearted way.

From a brief scouring of the internet, it seems only this and the second title, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, have been translated. Given their seeming brevity, it may have been wise to package them as a whole, and the US edition does this. But, at the same time, Oscar… stands fine on its own.

It’s an epistolary novel, the letters written by ten year old Oscar from his hospital bed. He writes the letters at the insistence of Granny Rose, an elderly nurse. What makes the letters interesting is that they are addressed to God.

To Oscar, writing is  “fluffy, sissy, frilly, prissy, et cetera….just a lie to make things look better” but he takes to the task, introducing himself nicely, before going on to add:

I could just as easily put: ‘People call me Egghead, I only look about seven, I live in hospital because I’ve got cancer and I’ve never spoken to you because I don’t even believe you exist.’

Sadly, for Oscar, his cancer is terminal, and he seems to be the only one able to face up to it, even if nobody is brave enough to tell him, not his parents (”they were cowards who thought I was a coward!”), or his doctor:

Basically, people here were really disappointed with my transplant. My chemo was disappointing too but that didn’t matter so much because they could still put their hope in a transplant. Now I get the feeling the doctors don’t know what to suggest, I even think they feel sorry for me…[Dr Düsseldorf] looks so sad, like a Father Christmas who’s got no more presents left in his sack.

The conceit of the letters to God is that he imagines each day as being ten years of his life and then writing about them. Even if a tad precocious, the way this is done works well, the lack-lustre events of hospital life made to mirror the paths our lives take as we fall in love, marry, conceive, grow old, and reflect back on who we are. (”It’s great, being in a relationship. Specially in your fifties when you’ve been through quite a lot.”)

Oscar’s ‘relationship’ is with Peggy Blue (”Snow White like those photos of snow when the snow’s blue and not white.”), a young girl on the children’s ward. Like Egghead, the cutesy nicknames work well in giving an innocence to the children while hinting at their specific complaint. (”He’s not really called Bacon, he’s Yves but we call him bacon because it suits him so much better, given how badly he’s burned.”)

In each of the letters Oscar lays himself bare to God, something that would have more of a heartbreaking quality had it more gravitas. But there are lines which highlight his innocence and capture well the inquisitive nature of a child faced by strange reactions around him:

‘My illness is part of me. They shouldn’t behave differently because I’m ill. Or can they only love me when I’m well?’

Sadly, this childlike voice is soon taken over by an Oscar who, in twelve days, sounds like he has literally lived the hundred-and-twenty years and is using all that cached wisdom to strike a conclusion, a stumble at the finishing line that ruins the novella’s credibility by leading to a nasty display of moralising. Of all things, in an enjoyable story about acceptance, that’s the hardest thing to accept.

Linda Grant comes to this year’s Booker longlist following on from her longlisting for this year’s Orange Prize, an accolade she won in 2000 with her second novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. Her third novel, Still Here, flirted with the Booker back in 2002, but never made it to the shortlist. The Clothes On Their Backs (2008), her fourth novel, might yet see her take one step further to the Booker, especially in a year where, judging by the discussions on the Booker site, the field seems average.

Although Grant’s family history is lodged in a distant Russian-Polish background, The Clothes On Their Backs imagines a Jewish Hungarian one.  And the Hungarian connection is here in force, with poet and translator Georges Szirtes appearing three times over: in the dedication, the acknowledgements, and an epigraph. Call it a three piece suit, which is fitting as The Clothes On Their Backs is a novel all about clothes and what it means to wear them.

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in. We are all trapped with these thick calves or pendulous breasts, our sunken chests, our dropping jowls. A million imperfections mar us. …So the most you can do is put on a new dress, a different tie. We are forever turning into someone else, and should never forget that someone else is always looking.

Putting on a new dress is Vivian Kovacs, the English born child of Hungarian immigrants. When she was growing up there was a wardrobe full of hand-me-down clothes in her parents’ house. Now, thinking back, there are no family photographs showing she ever wore them. (”As far as I knew, no evidence existed that I was ever a child.”) Denying Vivien a record of her past isn’t all they are guilty of - they deny her their past too.

Because my parents never answered any questions about the past - that’s finished, it’s over and done with, here you are in England, that other place has nothing to do with you, stop bothering your head with this rubbish, no, no, no - I learned to stop asking, and eventually I forgot all about wanting to ask. Suddenly, a treasure chest had opened out and spilled all these precious objects.

The treasure chest is Vivien’s uncle, Sándor, a refugee from the Hungarian revolution who has set himself up as a slum landlord, based on Peter Rachman. Back in 1977, when she knew him, Sándor paid her to write up his memoirs, as he talked about growing up in Hungary, and the horrors faced there, the likes of which not even her father had experienced. In these recollections, her uncle deflects any responsibility to himself arguing that his actions, regardless of their immorality, were necessary. That he can face up to his actions and move on them puts him in direct opposition to Vivien’s father:

My father was terrified of change. When change was in the air anything could happen, and he already suffered from an anxiety: that any small disturbance in his circumstances would bring everything down - the flat, the wife, the job, the new daughter, London itself, then England, and he would slide down the map of the world, back to Hungary, clinging on uselessly, ridiculously, with his fingers clutching the smooth, rolling surface of the globe.

Something that could bring down everything down are events in 1977. Having escaped to England to escape fascism, the rise of the National Front provides worrying echoes of home. The uniformed goons that patrol the streets further add to the novel’s exploration of what clothes mean to the person wearing them. But, all extraneous characters aside, the novel’s main focus is the relationships between the members of the Kovacs family, and these are without doubt the most interesting parts of The Clothes On Their Back.

Sadly, Grant adds other touches to Vivien’s life - all verging on the ridiculous; all pertaining to equally doomed relationships - that detract from the story’s potential. Plus, while the flavour of her immigrants’ speech is speckled with the occasional grasp for a word, sometimes the words in their mouth come across feeling strained:

‘Vivien, I feel I am in that programme Perry Mason and you are the lawyer and I am the accused. What do you call it, cross-examination. I wish you would stop.’

But cross-examination may just be what The Clothes On Their Backs needs. The first chapter offers up many discussion points that don’t become clear until the book has unravelled its events and themes. Then, a passing mention of the London bombings, hints again at clothes and the pigeonholing of people in the interests of persecution. It’s a wardrobe of words made all the more interesting for the skeletons in its closet, although the experience for its narrator, recounted thirty years on, comes across as little more than second hand.

When the Booker longlist was announced late last month, I don’t think there was anyone who would have expected to see Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 make the cut, including Smith himself. It no doubt surprised many that the publisher even had the gall to submit it. Why? Because it’s a thriller and, with the old snobbery hat on, thrillers don’t belong in the Booker. However, that’s a straight out lie, since thrillers have been in the running before, but usually by writers for whom such books are not the only string to their bow. But, as Oscar Wilde said, books are either well written or badly written, and that is all. So which is Child 44?

A portentous cover, featuring praise limited to those also treading the crime genre, such as Lee Child and Nelson DeMille, rings alarm bells. Likewise an encomium from a screenwriter who, from his snippet, can’t seem to see past the action. And in reading Child 44, it’s no surprise to find that Tom Rob Smith is also a screenwriter.

The novel reads like a film and, as it turns out, it started life as a treatment but became a novel at the advice of Smith’s film agent. Sadly, it maintains the shallow depth of a script - dialogue, some scene setting - as Smith has written it with an eye - if not both - squarely on a big budget, big screen outing.

Opening with a scene in Ukraine in 1933, where a couple of young boys hunt for a cat to alleviate the starvation that has gripped the nation, the story then fast fowards twenty years and introduces us to Leo Demidov,  war hero and officer in the Ministry of State Security. Demidov is tasked with relaying to the grieving family of a young boy, found mutiltated by a railway lin, that the death was accidental. In this, Smith introduces us to the central conceit of his setting: there is no crime.

“Few people believed this absolutely. There were blemishes: this was a society still in transition, not perfect yet. As an MGB officer it was Leo’s duty to study the works of Lenin, in fact it was every citizen’s duty. He knew that social excesses - crime - would wither away as poverty and want disappeared. They hadn’t reached that plateau yet. Things were stolen, drunken disputes became violent: there were the urki - the criminal gangs. But people had to believe that they were moving to a better state of existence. To call this murder was to take a giant step backwards.

Of course, it’s definitely murder most foul, although similar incidents are treated as isolated ones, with innocents being tried  and executed to cover up the fact that Russia has a serial killer in its midst. While it opens with an interesting idea, of a man conflicted between adherence to state doctrine and what his own eyes tell him, these first two hundred plus pages - the events of which are are spelled out in the inside cover - are more a set up for what is to come, namely standard action fare.

It’s a treasure trove of nonsense that leads to the most risible modus operandi put in print. But in getting there, there’s much more to cringe at. Smith has chosen a pointless quirk of representing all dialogue in italics; his research rarely extends beyond a sprinkling of Russian words, each immediately explained; he has trouble maintaining viewpoint, sometimes even within a paragraph; and, most foul, he tells everything. Not at one point do you ever infer something - there’s no imagination required.

Smith bumbles in and out of characters heads, revealing their every thought (where action would be better suited) and it leaves the reader breathless with the book in hand wondering where they come into it. And that’s entertainment? Child 44, I think, is two novels in one, each extremely underdone: the potential conflict study of self and State, and the run of the mill thriller. I suspect Smith intended the latter, and could easily have done away with the first half of the book. But he’s a man who likes to pad out with scenes that would look good on screen, even if they serve nothing on the page.

Without the Booker I would never have read Child 44, and that’s what is most annoying about the book: that is a throwaway entertainment that fails to entertain. We can only guess as to the sanity of the Booker panel in selecting this book. But for a thriller that is supposed to have numerous shocking twists and turns, the biggest shock is that something with so much padding could still leave me so cold.

Florian Zeller is an author probably best marked as ‘one for the future’, given that he is still to reach thirty, but that hasn’t stopped him in recent years putting out a number of novels and plays. Julien Parme (2006), is the fourth of his novels and provides an interesting bit of trivia in that two translations have been released this year - one in the US by Other Press, translated by William Rodarmor, and the pictured edition, in the UK, translated by Christopher Moncrieff, and published by Pushkin Press.

His previous novels, also from Pushkin Press, include Lovers Or Something Like It, a paean to a generation confounded by the abundance of choices facing them, and The Fascination Of Evil, a response to the controversy surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s Platform. Both of these demonstrated a solid style reminiscent of Milan Kundera and Houellebecq himself, the narrative veering off at tangents. So it comes as a surprise to find, with Julien Parme, a change in style.

While you were always sure that Zeller was in charge in previous novels, dripping observations across each page while recounting his characters’ adventures, Julien Parme is told completely by its title character, a fourteen year old boy who dreams of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature by the time he’s twenty. (”Julien Parme, you’ve never heard of him? The great writer? No? Really? Because I forgot to tell you I’d like to be a great writer.”)

Julien begins his account wanting  “to tell you about the incredible thing that happened last year”, before going on to say something contradictory…

That sort of person has always made me want to puke. That’s why if someone says he’s got an incredible thing to tell you, I’d be more the sort to be wary, because someone who says that, you shouldn’t give him the chance to go any further. Never.

…and then going back on that (”But in my case it’s not the same, seeing it’s me who’s doing the telling…”) Zeller captures well this meandering teenage mind as it criss-crosses itself through the story, heading off on imaginative flights, usually around Julien’s future as a famous novelist, something that, given the unoriginality of his titles (The Night Ahead of Me, a take on Celine’s Journey To The End of the Night, and the more obvious A Thousand Years of Solitude).

Julien’s imagination is no doubt the sum of a having few friends and his mother’s relationship with François (”…the latest in the long line of muppets…”). When he gets caught smoking his mother grounds him, forbidding him to attend the birthday party of Émilie, older sister of Mathilde who he harbours a fancy for, even though  he daren’t speak to her. But, teens being teens, Julien goes to the party anyway, and the weekend from there becomes a chain of events, some perhaps a bit unlikely, that lead up to the predicament described at the start of the story: looking back on the past year, having been sent off to a family friend in Saint-Dié.

What finished me off more than anything was the feeling that they wanted to get rid of me. My mother, then my uncle. Basically, no one wanted me under their feet. As far as they were concerned I was a hopeless case. Especially my mother; on the platform I definitely sensed she was telling herself: ‘Come on, just another little effort and that’ll be the end of the nightmare’. It freaked me out that she didn’t even look unhappy.

Where previous Zeller novels would have used the incidents in Julien’s life to wax  on about topics such as romance, friendship, bravado, and more, there’s little of that here in Julien Parme. While we wouldn’t expect a fourteen year old to be spitting aphorisms left, right and centre (or good ones, at any rate) there’s little sense that, in the year since, Julien has grown at all. Being even more isolated than before, you would think, would stir up a stream of reflections on where he went wrong. But the novel tends to wallow in a straightforward account that, because the conclusion is gifted from the off, holds little surprise.

In its defence, Zeller hasn’t went the way of many writers who tackle the child narrator by giving Julien that common get-out-of-jail card: making him precocious. If anything he’s a danger to himself, unsure of the world and just beginning to get interested in its wonders, such as women:

Several minutes dragged by, while in my mind thousands of words were jostling around everywhere, trying to work out what to say. Then the moment came, and I leapt in with both feet.

“The music, it’s not bad is it?”

“You think? I don’t like it much, me.”

“Yeah, that’s true mind you, it’s not brilliant this music…It’s the kind of thing they play on the radio…”

I let it go for a moment, unsure even whether to add: “You’re right frankly, it’s useless this music. I haven’t really been listening. It’s crazy.” But I thought it best to change the subject, so I wouldn’t seem like a guy who’s easily influenced.

It’s a convincing piece of ventriloquism, the way Julien’s mind wanders, and the scrapes he bumbles into set up some interestng scenes, but it really does feel like Zeller’s taken his foot off the brake with this one. The change in style is certainly interesting and I hope that Julien Parme is a halfway house between the two as, I think, a blend of his last novel and this could push him to a larger audience. Florian Zeller, you’ve never heard of him? No? Really? But I already told you, he could be a great writer.

If you are tired of Indian novels built on a blend of saffron and saris then Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) may just be the antidote required. It’s take on modern India is one more grounded in reality than romantic idealism, straddling the thin line between the historical hangovers of British rule and ingrained caste system with the thriving industry of entrepreneurship now prevalent in outsourced business, such as information technology and call centres.

One such entrepreneur is Balram Halwai, “Bangalore’s least known success story”, from a caste of sweet-makers, who wants to share the story of his personal struggle. Interestingly, he has decided to share it with Wen Jiabao, Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” who, it is announced on the radio, is coming to Bangalore in the next week. Rather than the falsity of handshakes and namastes between political leaders, Balram opts to show India warts and all through a series of lengthy letters.

Balram’s path to entrepreneurship, as he tells Wen Jiabao near the beginning, has begun by slitting his master’s throat. His master, incidentally, is one of the four landlords who run the area around Laxmangarh, known as the Animals. (”…the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on.”) As a driver in the service of the Stork and his sons, Balram picks up snippets of information he hears both at home and behind the wheel. And it’s the rise from teashop boy to modern Indian man (via murderer) that is recounted for the benefit of the Chinese Premier. (”…sir, you are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs.”)

What has allowed Balram the audicity to speak are the changes in India. Many years before, the country was like a zoo, where people of certain castes were confined to their cage.

And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up.

But, for all those that don’t rise up, there’s the millions left in the Darkness, of which Balram’s home of Laxmangarh is “a typical Indian village paradise”:

Electricity poles - defunct.

Water tap - broken.

Children - too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

Balram’s chances of escaping such poverty don’t look so good, his family having taken him out of school and putting him to work in a teashop.

Go to a teashop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’. But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Ghandi would have done it, no doubt.

If doing your job well means enduring it for life, Balram proves himself to be, as a school inspector once noted, “the rarest of animals - the creature that comes along only once in a generation” - a white tiger. Rather than live a life at the bottom, Balram takes fate into his own hands and takes a different path to Ghandi’s, because only with dishonesty and insincerity can you plot to reach for higher grounds. (”…the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”)

What is good about Balram’s letters are his ignorance of the man and the country he is addressing (”Now, since I doubt that you have rickshaw-pullers in China - or in any other civilised nation on earth - you will have to see one for yourself.”), having picked up his knowledge from a book entitled Exciting Tales of the Exotic East. This is indicative of the nature of entrepreneurs, who are “made from half-baked clay”:

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks…sentences about politics read in a newspaper…bits of All India Radio news bulletins…all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

In the telling, The White Tiger is reminiscent of last year’s Booker nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, give that we are left to wonder at Wen Jiabao’s reaction to Balram’s letters, assuming he even gets them. And in it’s getting down and dirty with the downtrodden of India, and sparks of east meets west, there’s a dotted line to be drawn to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, although the book that springs to mind most is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, purely for the parallel of a man, his master, and the oblivion between.

Its players, being drawn from the the top to bottom of Indian society, are tight in scope, allowing Adiga to get to grips well with them and how they interact with each other, whether it be the relationships between master and servant, between family members, or between the state and civilians. In all, The White Tiger provides an evocative and miserable landscape stripped of any exoticism one might expect, where everyone is greasing the palms of others, and anyone with the stomach for it can make their mark. And being easily digestible, your own stomach need not worry, for the novel is anything but half-baked.

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2008 has been announced.

• The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)
• Girl In A Blue Dress, Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street)
• The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)
• From A To X, John Berger (Verso)
• The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser (Chatto & Windus)
• Sea Of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)
• The Clothes On Their Backs, Linda Grant (Virago)
• A Case Of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif (Jonathan Cape)
• The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate)
• Netherland, Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)
• The Enchantress Of Florence, Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)
• Child 44, Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)
• A Fraction Of The Whole, Steve Toltz (Hamish Hamilton)

The shortlist will be announced six weeks from now, on 9th September, 2008, with the winner being declared on 14th October, 2008.

This year’s panel of judges tasked with whittling down over a hundred titles to the thirteen above, and ultimately to the winner, are:

Michael Portillo (Chair)
Alex Clark
Louise Doughty
James Heneage
Hardeep Singh Kohli

Personally, my first reaction was what?! Admittedly I’ve not read any of these but the inclusion of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 seems so odd, perhaps even anti-Booker, given that I’ve never viewed it as anything more than an over-hyped thriller. Some titles - the Arnold, the Grant - come so far out of left field as to be exciting, while the absence of the bigger hitters - no Carey, no Coetzee, no Crumey, no Galgut, no Winton - allows for some lesser known names in Hanif, Adiga, and Toltz. And even the lure of a sixteen year hiatus wasn’t enough for Helen Garner’s The Spare Room to see her onto the list.

A tip for anyone, especially those outside of the United Kingdom, looking to secure these titles: you’ll get free delivery worldwide from The Book Depository.

Helen Garner is a new name to me, having recently discovered a number of her books were available in the Penguin Modern Classics range, albeit only in her native Australia. Reading around, it seems her work deals autobiographically with elements of her life. But after her 1992 novel, Cosmo Cosmolino, she effectively stopped writing fiction and now, sixteen years later, has returned with The Spare Room (2008), another take on her life, and, given that the narrator shares her name, lifestyle, and talents, it may just be her most personal yet.

While the novel has moments of comic relief, one can’t ignore that death underlies it. Opening with Helen preparing her spare room, plumping pillows and airing it out, it may hint at a new beginning, but she’s doing this because her friend Nicola, diagnosed with bowel cancer, is coming to Melbourne to stay for three weeks while receiving alternative treatment from the Theodore Institute, a local clinic.

Said clinic, charging two thousand dollars a week and manned by unprofessional staff, runs on the ideas of its founder, Professor Theodore, a quack with some strange ideas about medicine:

‘High dosage vitamin C will kill off lumps of cancer and boost the immune system. And our ozone sauna treatment is based on the old natural-therapy approach to cancer - sweating out the toxins. Most doctors don’t know this stuff. But it’s good science.’

Outfits like this, as Helen notes, “tended to keep people linked to them in cloudy hope, right to the end.” And linked to it Nicola most certainly is, walking around with a permanent smile on her face, worrying for others rather than herself, and flat out refusing to acknowledge the truth that she’s going to die. (”‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s the treatments causing the pain - that’s how I know they’re working. It’s just the toxins coming out.’”)

The relationship between the two women is in turns comic (on the subject of coffee enemas) and downright heart-breaking. Helen’s journey as friend and carer is punctuated by ugly thoughts, worryingly detailed, as Nicola infuriates her again and again with her embracing of dodgy treatments and her mustn’t-grumble attitude. It’s certainly a far cry from Helen’s sister, herself dead from cancer:

She accepted her death sentence quietly, without mutiny; perhaps, we thought in awe, she even welcomed it. She laid down her gun. She let us cherish her.

In further contrast, Helen’s sister was a nurse who believe in western medicine, whereas:

…in recent years, shortly before [Nicola] became ill, Buddhist terms had entered her discourse. She knew how to pronounce rinpoche and where to get a ticket when the famous ones were coming to town. She subjected herself to ten-day vipassana boot camps in the Blue Mountains: her account of these speechless ordeals were shaped to make me laugh, but she always came back to the city elated. She referred casually to weekend teachings, and to new friends with names that sounded made up; she had taken to wearing little thread bangles, or a string of knobbly, dark red wooden beads. So I imagined that somewhere in her free-wheeling nature she was quietly equipping herself, as everyone must, with whatever it is one needs to die.

In The Spare Room there’s lessons for both sides, although being told from Helen’s perspective, we never truly get inside Nicola’s mind, but this is skillfully circumvented by the right portion of dialogue or crisp description that hints at unreachable depths. In anger, there’s the need to be kind (”Dying was frightening.”) and in that no matter if you look the other way, you can’t cheat death:

To try is grandiose. it drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

While the story between the two women works extremely well, the inclusion of too much of Garner’s non-fictional life, such as her ukulele playing, feels a tad superfluous, even if it is a comfort to her fictional self. But to document one’s feelings on a heart wrenching topic, and to do it in such a warts-and-all way, creates an real empathy for the narrator and, by extensions, Garner herself, who expertly conjures up the memory of a friend to fleetingly fill the room she left spare.