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.

For the last few years, I’ve been aware of Robin Jenkins’s books, notably his best known work, The Cone Gatherers, as they were perennials on the Scottish Books shelves of local stores. Of the man, however, I knew nothing and was surprised to find that he died as recently as 2005. Surprised for the silly reason that his books were in the Canongate Classics series, which also featured Scotland’s favourite book, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who died way back in the 1930s.

Now, with a 21st Century makeover, a number of Jenkins’ books seem destined to light up the aforementioned store shelves, taking their bleak covers and injecting a bit of needed colour. One such title is The Changeling (1958), set around the time of writing that, fifty years on, now seems a world away. But while the world it describes has passed into history, its themes remain as constant as…as…well, Jenkins’ books on store shelves.

The life of Charlie Forbes, a middle-aged English teacher, has amounted to little more than dreams of promotion. Mocked by others for his ability to see the good in everyone, his altruistic nature, like that of the Good Samaritan in the book’s opening sentence, lends itself to the needs of others, even if it brings further disdain:

‘I’ve come to the conclusion, Mr Fisher, that it isn’t enough to draw my salary, and at four o’clock each day turn my back and retreat to my suburban sanctuary.’

‘I’m sure none of us do, Charlie.’

‘I have done so. I speak only for myself. Here, as I see it, is my chance to atone. Mr Fisher, I propose to take Tom Curdie with my family to Towellan this summer. It seems to me the experience might give the boy some support in the battle he has constantly to wage against corruption. I am here to seek your advice.’

Faced with that vast, sanctimonious, aggressive pout, the headmaster grew peeved. Originality of most kinds he distrusted, but original goodness most of all.

Tom Curdie is one of Forbes’ pupils, a “deprived morsel of humanity”, who unlike all the others in his class comes from Donaldson’s Court, “one of the worst slums in one of the worst slum districts in Europe”. While everyone believes Curdie’s smile is that “of a certified delinquent”, Forbes sees it as stoic, the smile of a boy intent on not letting his lot get him down. To give the boy a taste of a better life, and despite much derision, Forbes hits on a plan to take the boy away with his family to their summer retreat at Towellan.

The notion of summer sits bizarrely alongside the novel’s content - where a Glaswegian holiday ‘doon the water’ conjures up images of sandcastles, rock, and pestering rock pools, The Changeling is like a rock pool where turning over stones reveals nastiness in the dark. And each subsequent overturning only adds to events, leading up to the bleak conclusion.

Within the novel there are mentions of the title, referring to young Curdie, likening him to

…the changeling of Highland legend, that creature introduced by the malevolent folk of the other world into a man’s home, to pollute the joy and faith of family.

Pollute it, he does, though not directly. One incident where Curdie shoplifts, so as not to get to comfortable with this new taste of life, leads the family into a descent that they’ll do well to get out of. While his daughter, Gillian, finds complicity with the boy she initially dislikes, Forbes finds his own prejudices exposed, and his wife grieves over the lack of trust shown to his own children apropos the introduction of the slum child.

To his credit is the way that Jenkins manages to get inside the head of each of his characters, flitting between them unsentimentally, letting us know what they think and how they feel. But, sometimes telling every last detail without leaving hidden depths to the characters, lets the novel down in areas, as does, having dated a bit, the grandfatherly tone:

Tom knew very well that the majority of children were far more fortunate than he, but he had never envied them. Envy, like pity, was not in his creed. What he hoped to do or to become was apart altogether from what others did or became. To have been envious would have been to become involved and so weakened. His success, if ever it came, must owe nothing to anyone.

With Jenkins’ unrelenting grip on his characters in The Changeling, he tugs the narrative’s strings so tight that you wonder how he crams so much in, be it the exploration of the changeling legend by way of myxomatosis or of showing the class differences and attitudes in each direction. But it’s the questions that the novel throws up that make it an interesting read. Having given Curdie a taste of a better life, is it right to return him to the slums of Donaldson’s Court? Where else could he go? And even if Jenkins’ denouement is a tad unconvincing, it certainly feels right.

The overarching theme of The Changeling is that of misplaced charity. Forbes seems to live in a cocoon, safe from everyone else, convinced that his way is right. While others scoff at his big heart, that big heart isn’t always considering appropriate reasons and, as the old adage goes, what goes around comes around, proving you don’t need “malevolent folk of the other world [to] pollute the joy and faith of family.”

With the Man Booker 2007 being over, and Self Help (Pravda, to US readers) long since fallen from the competition I approached Edward Docx’s second novel with indifference. The cover, being as basic as it is, didn’t scream out to be read and at over five hundred pages I wasn’t exactly looking forward to ploughing through it. I’m glad I did, if only for completism as regards my (unenforcable) pledge to read all thirteen longlisted titles. But I’m left to leave this novel the same way in which I came to it: indifferent.

Set in varying stages across London, Paris, and St Petersburg, it tells the story of the Glover family, scattered as far afield as the story itself. There’s the twins, Gabriel and Isabella, in London and New York, respectively. Over in Paris is their estranged father, Nicholas. And, in St Petersburg, the twins’ mother, Maria. Also skulking about in the storyline is a Russian named Arkady Artamenkov, for whom life has been spent growing up in orphanages.

With all these characters Self Help takes a serious number of pages just to introduce them and it does so using with the predicament that Maria has died. And so it goes that these scattered players come to look at their lives, make plans - sometimes, even, make changes - and come together to find that:

…when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat, but rise from their sarcophagi instead, and move out across the borders of the mind…

Gabriel has two women in his life, Isabella is prone to giving up on things - jobs, relationships - at a whim, and Nicholas, since separating with Maria ten years previous, has been enjoying a bi-curious and lavish lifestyle. And Arkady? Well, even the dead have secrets.

The storyline, for the most part, is enjoyable and believable; the dialogue between similarly. There are occasional flashbacks given chapters in their own right to fill in history - and there’s even more backstory when attempting to flesh out minor characters. Ultimately, given all the strands making up this story, Docx does a fine job of seeing them all to a logical and apt conclusion with some fine plotting.

But my biggest problem with Self Help was Docx’s writing. There’s no doubt skill there but he likes to indulge - strain, sometimes - in over elaborate metaphors and similes:

The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapours of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

And, when not indulging, Docx has the habit of thickly layering his metaphors, one atop the other, as if asking the reader to pick whatever suits them best. A better writer would pick the most illustrative example, discard the others, and move on. Here, the many instances of said deed pad out the novel way beyond necessity. Further padding comes by way of overlong meditations and an annoying stylistic tic that frequently sees the author either repeat or run through all permutations of a phrase. But there are many occasions when the writing works, to capture the sense of a place, such as a Russian bar where :

…there were no drinks on display save single example cans or bottles of the range available - one Russian beer, one Polish beer, vodka, vodka, vodka, cheap, cheaper, cheapest - each standing strangely spaced across the solitary shelf.

While none of the characters in Self Help are likeable, their story is interesting enough although there was one character, an Englishman living in St Petersburg, who felt extraneous - as if he were only there to help Arkady move the plot forward. There’s a suspicion that Gabriel may be a cipher for Docx himself, the twin of Isabella being there to balance whatever history he’s working out - no doubt a bad father. It makes the writing of Self Help seem cathartic compared to the Self Help! (note the exclamation mark) magazine that Gabriel works on.

Given its length and serial verbosity, it’s easy to see why Self Help didn’t make it to the eventual shortlist. While it’s a hard hitting story of identity, family, and relationships touching upon exile, drug addiction, and career disatisfaction, its cast of selfish bourgeoisie types makes it hard to give a damn about them. Unless that’s your thing then you’re better off helping yourself to something other than Self Help.

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.