booklit

When the first edition of John Boyne’s The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas appeared, the blurb gave little away, noting, “Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book.” On Chris Cleave’s second novel, The Other Hand (2008),  the blurb begins “We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book” and continues, cards close to its chest, to say “It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.” As oblique blurbs go, it’s not a patch on Boyne’s which hinted at the book’s content, rather than second guess the reader.

The cover - available in two colours - continues the gimmickry,  fetishising its collectability, noting that it’s a signed first edition. Most baffling is a page by Suzie Dooré (”I’m Chris Cleave’s editor, and I’m writing to tell you how extraordinary The Other Hand is…”). The intended effect is presumably drooling anticipation, but dislike seems more of a foregone conclusion.

Thankfully, the novel opens brightly, with Little Bee riffing on how she’d rather be a pound coin than an African girl:

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.

Rather than take that airport taxi, Little Bee has fled Nigeria for the United Kingdom by more illegal means and, having been stopped at immigration, has found herself detained for two years, an experience that has made her who she is today, a well-spoken young lady, in tune to the world around her:

I was born - no, I was reborn - in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your cast-offs, and it is your pound that makes my pocket ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of The Times, if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me.

As Little Bee tells her side of the story, the chapters alternate and intertwine with the story of Sarah O’Rourke, an editor for a women’s magazine that doesn’t quite know what it should be. At the outset Sarah tells us that her husband Andrew, himself a journalist, has taken his own life, for reasons unknown. Other than a young son - who dresses as Batman and quickly becomes tiresome - there doesn’t seem to be much understanding between the two, Andrew’s mind never being readable:

I had been standing on a bare concrete slab in our garden, asking Andrew exactly when the hell he planned to build his bloody glasshouse there. That was the biggest issue in my life - that glasshouse, or the lack of it. That absent glasshouse, and all other structures past and future that might hopefully be erected in the larger emotional absence between me and my husband.

Sarah regularly drops hints about her missing finger, never feeling the need to expand on them. It’s here that it becomes apparent that Cleave is telling the story rather than his characters - as the characters have little reason to hold back on expanding, the only reason can be that the author is deliberately withholding the information until he’s ready to share it. On page 132 we get the admission that “it was finally time to face up to what had happened on the beach”.

Similarly, Little Bee’s narrative, in constantly referring to how she learned the Queen’s English from newspapers, seems a cynical device to avoid the trouble of crafting a believable voice in a Nigerian dialect. Since usage of the Queen’s English only really features in two dealings with public servants, it can hardly be said that it’s crucial to the story, other than to raise her lingual skills above all around her. The question of what newspapers were read to get such a poetic flair to her voice lingers, too.

It’s clear to see that in writing The Other Hand Cleave wants to tackle hard hitting topics such as immigration and the effects of globalisation on the other cultures but he has a knack for unashamedly dropping his research into dialogue (”‘They gave you a pink form to write down what had happened to you. This was the grounds for your asylum application…’”)  Not to say that he doesn’t get things across more subtly, such as this exchange between Sarah and Lawrence, her lover, discussing Little Bee and British attitudes to immigration:

‘A detention centre? Christ, what did she do?’

‘Nothing. Asylum seekers, apparently they just lock them up when they arrive here.’

‘For two years?’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I don’t believe her. Two years in detention? She must have done something.’

‘She was African and she didn’t have any money. I suppose they gave her a year for each.’

At the heart of The Other Hand is the notion of identity and all of the characters are, like Sarah’s magazine, trying to find who they are. After the hyped beach scene - yes, it is grisly - the book does become more interesting, but it can’t get away from a slim thread of grating humour - the O’Rourke’s son; Little Bee’s observations - and a glaze of sentimentality that ensure this little bee is more the bumbling sort whose buzz precedes it.

The Deportees and Other Stories, began life, as Roddy Doyle notes in the foreword, as a series of fragmented short stories written for Metro Eireann, Ireland’s multicultural newspaper. Restricted to chapters of eight hundred words, the short stories here all focus on the different aspects of a modern Ireland, one where multiculturalism is the focus. The Deportees and Other Stories is Doyle’s first collection of short stories to see print. And with humour throughout, they are trademark Doyle.

There are eight in total, of varying length. They tackle, amongst other things, issues of friendship, exclusion, inclusion, prejudice, racism, and respect. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work and, as Doyle says in his introduction, he knows there are loose ends so we can’t really go into the collection expecting well crafted stores. But sometimes he gets it right. And this, as most characters herein would say, is grand.

The first tale, Guess Who’s Coming To The Dinner, follows Larry Linnane, a man who prides himself on how his daughters can have open sexual conversations around him. But when one brings a black man home to the table, Larry is forced to face up to the fact that he may be a racist, and Doyle captures his ignorance well and in hilarious circumstances. Even more hilarious is 57% Irish in which, after a phone call, Ray Brady further develops a test he has made that measures how Irish a person is - based on reactions to things like Riverdance, Irish porn, and Robbie Keane’s goal in the 2002 World Cup:

The idea - the thesis - had come to Ray in the minutes, three years before, just after Robbie Keane had actually scored that goal and Ray had hugged and kissed maybe fifteen people in the pub, and he’d found himself in the arms of a big lad from Poland. And he’d wondered. Why was this guy hugging Ray? Kissing his forehead. Punching the air. Throwing his head back and singing.

Aside from all the comedy, there’s a horror story (albeit, still funny in places) in the shape of The Pram, in which a Polish au pair decides to scare the older sisters of her young charge with a fairy tale, one for which their young minds are too practical for, leading to amusing questions about the nature of the story’s baddie, but ultimately ending in tragedy.

The main attraction is The Deportees, not only because it is the title story and lengthiest among the collection, but because it revisits the character of Jimmy Rabbitte, the man responsible for putting together The Commitments. In the years that have passed, Ireland has changed a great deal, but thankfully Jimmy hasn’t, even if he is a bit older:

Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff alright. Jimmy was slagging Moby before most people had started liking him. He once heard two kids on the DART talking about Leftfield, and he was able to lean over and tell them they were talking through their holes and know that he was absolutely right. Jimmy knew that Radiohead’s last album was so bad that it was cool to defend it - but he didn’t. Not Jimmy. It was too important for fashion.

One day Jimmy gets the urge to start a new band and this time white Irish need not apply. He puts ads in the paper, picking his new collective from the immigrant population via such criteria as whether they can play and if they like The Corrs. If not, they’re in. And when the band’s first gig comes together it all falls apart, but thankfully, in the spirit of the Barrytown Trilogy, it leaves Jimmy on an optimistic note.

Of the other other stories, I found them less effective. In New Boy, where a black child attends a new school in Ireland, there were shades of Richard Yates’ Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern and the narration of Black Hoodie, a story about prejudices, felt too laboured, the youthful ‘like’ being overused. Home To Harlem deals with a Irishman struggling, since he is black, to find his Irishness, and I Understand rounds off the stories based on the idea of immigrant exploitation.

Although I found The Deportees to be a hit and miss collection, I couldn’t help laughing throughout. Doyle’s prose - or moreso his dialogue, since that makes up most of his prose - is just funny. Even when the story isn’t going so well, there’s never a dull moment. It would be interesting to see other short stories that Doyle has written, ones without the word restriction of Metro Eireann and tackling other subjects. But for now, The Deportees and Other Stories is a good a slice of bite-size Doyle but not ultimately filling.

After the announcement of the Booker longlist, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani was the first of the thirteen that I picked up in my eagerness to find out what the chosen few were about. Had it not made the longlist I have no doubts that I would never have picked it up. The cover, you see, is rather ugly. If I were to hazard a guess at what it’s supposed to be then it’s a silhouette of a girl coupled with some stylized cumin, formed from numbers and other mathematical symbols. Gifted, it seems, does not extend to the minds behind this artistic faux pas.

But, as the old adage goes, one must not judge a book by its cover so it was between the pages of this, Lalwani’s debut novel, that I went. At first I wondered if this may have been a chicklit novel, but then, I’ve never read chicklit, so I have no way of knowing. But, beyond such notions, there’s a powerful story half-heartedly trying to get out.

Rumi Vasi is a child prodigy who, from an early age, has shown an aptitude for numbers, something which her father, Mahesh, is only too keen to progress. Originally from India, having taken a university position in Cardiff, he views Rumi’s success in their new country with great importance. To him, it’s about making an impact on society. So it goes that Rumi’s studies are manipulated by her overbearing father to the point where she has no friends and even spends Saturday nights practicing arithmetic.

Gifted follows the Vasi family over the following nine years as Rumi grows up wanting to be like another other kid but being controlled by the strict rules of her Indian household. Eventually, as was her father’s aim, she attains a bit of celebrity by entering Oxford University at a young age. But the seeds sown by Mahesh come back to haunt him when he realises that trying to protect someone from outside influences can lead to them being damaged by smothering love.

Gifted’s prose has a personality to it, leaping from a series of paragrahs into sections of lists then back to straight prose. Through this Lalwani gives us the character of Rumi, initially excited about mathematics, although there are hints that this enthusiasm is never going to last:

Under the burning tube lights, she attacked the numbers with speed and ferocity, as though she were playing Space Invaders, devouring the figures with the hunger in her belly and spitting out the remains. She worked feverishly, chewing pen tops down to sharp points. Then she had looked up - looked at the bored librarian at her desk, at the old man reading the paper - seen the thin tall rectangle of black sky through the doors and trembled with loneliness.

The problem I had is that Rumi is probably the least interesting character in the book. As she sits down to some calculus or rebels against it, her passage to Oxford has an air of artificiality about it. I’m even surprised that she got into such an establishment as her father’s guidance was limited to mathematics and there’s scant mention of her ability in other disciplines, such as English and history:

She felt stupid, devoid as she was of vocabulary for history - architecture, epic battles, eras, wars, kings and queens - none of it understood.

The conflict between Rumi’s parents, Mahesh and Shreene, provide the interesting parts of the novel although when the focus finally switches to them it’s a case of too little, too late. While Mahesh want’s nothing more than Rumi’s success in their adopted country, her mother judges her actions against the customs of the India she loves. It’s a sad affair that Mahesh is portrayed as the stern, father of few words, when in his daughter’s company and it’s only when the device of Whitefoot, a Scottish contemporary of Mahesh, is brought into the story that we get him waxing lyrical and sharing his opinions.

As a debut Gifted introduces Lalwani to us as a writer of promise but certainly not the finished article. While this novel approaches an interesting topic in heavy handed parenting it is full of characters uncomfortably dropped into the restrictions of a predetermined storyline. I doubt this will feature in the eventual shortlist but if it does I’m ready to eat humble pi.