booklit

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.

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.