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Long ago I’d expressed an interest in reading the works of John Steinbeck in chronological order, starting with Cup Of Gold, his account of Sir Henry Morgan’s piratic life, and then immediately lost track of that aim. I’ve returned to it now, albeit with a slight ‘administrative’ error, in that I’ve come next to To A God Unknown (1933), rather than The Pastures Of Heaven, published the prior year.

Year of publication aside, To A God Unknown took Steinbeck the greatest number of years of any of his works to write, so if the year of publication doesn’t precede The Pastures Of Heaven, the idea certainly does. In fact, as Robert DeMott makes clear in his lengthy introduction, the novel has its origins in an unfinished play by one of his classmates, and over the years saw many drafts and titles as Steinbeck toiled to get it under wraps. It may not be the best of the books he wrote, but it was the one that, through the toil of writing it, made him as a writer.

The novel begins on the Wayne Farm in Vermont, where Joseph Wayne expresses to his father an interest in following the westering crowds and claiming himself some land. (”If I wait, the good land might all be taken.”) where it’s preferred that he stay home a while and find a wife.

“If you could wait a year,” the old man said at last, “a year or two is nothing when you’re thirty-five. If you could wait a year, not more than two surely, then I wouldn’t mind. You’re not the oldest, Joseph, but I’ve always thought of you as the one to have the blessing. Thomas and Burton are good men, good sons, but I’ve always intended the blessing for you, so you could take my place. I don’t know why. There’s something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward.”

In a Joseph, with brothers, singled out by his father there’s an nod to the Joseph of Genesis (no coat of many colours, though), enhanced by the skill of interpreting symbols and later incidents pertaining to the land he settles. On reaching this new pasture, verdant and teeming with life, Steinbeck foreshadows Joseph’s path and gives a first real taste of his intuitive ability:

The past, his home and all the events of his childhood were being lost, and he knew he owed them the duty of memory. This land might possess all of him if he were not careful. To combat the land a little, he thought of his father, of the calm and peace, the strength and eternal rightness of his father, and then in his thought the difference ended and he knew there was no quarrel, for his father and this new land were one. Joseph was frightened then. “He’s dead,” he whispered to himself. “My father must be dead.”

With his father indeed dead, the remainder of his brothers uproot their families to join him and together they farm this new promised land, raising cattle, breeding pigs. Joseph takes a young wife, an educated schoolteacher, and it’s all happy families for a time. Tensions rise, however, as one of the brothers, Burton, confronts Joseph on his pagan beliefs, namely his attitude toward a large tree that looms over the farmhouse:

“My father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to believe it.”

Through Joseph Wayne, almost shamanlike in his understanding of the land, we follow an exploration of man’s relationship to nature, for better and for worse. In he good days the livestock breeds, the crops grow, and the rains come; in the bad days, the opposite, and the land dries. When, knowing the harshness of the land, sticks are upped and people move to pastures new, all that remains is Wayne, stubborn to the last, which leads to a wonderfully ambiguous conclusion that leaves open a number of possible readings.

At times the abundance of description can, though evocative, be laid on thick, and the dialogue comes across as wooden, but there are still moments when Wayne reflects on the world around him that raise the book above mere catalogue of events and add a further depth to what could otherwise be a flat character:

High up on tremendous peak, towering over the ranges and the valleys, the brain of the world was set, and the eyes that looked down on the earth’s body. The brain could not understand the life on its body. It lay inert, knowing vaguely that it could shake off the life, the towns, the little houses of the fields with earthquake fury. But the brain was drowsed and the mountains lay still, and the fields were peaceful on their rounded cliff that went down to the abyss. And thus it stood a million years, unchanging and quiet, and the world-brain in its peak lay close to sleep. The world-brain sorrowed a little, for it knew that some time it would have to move, and then the life would be shaken and destroyed and the long work of tillage would be gone, and the houses in the valley would crumble. The brain was sorry, but it could change nothing.

While To A God Unknown is a minor Steinbeck, it’s important in light of the works that would come later. In its California setting, the hardship of a devastated land, and Biblical allusions we are given a dress rehearsal of major Steinbeck novels. Apparently less than six hundred copies of the novel sold on its initial release. Dress rehearsals were never meant for the public anyway.

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.

When it comes to reputations, Ismail Kadare’s is one that certainly precedes him. Having come from nowhere (well, I hadn’t heard of him, at least) to scoop the inaugural MAN Booker International Prize in 2005, his works have steadily appeared in larger scales on book shop shelves. A couple of years back I sampled one of his books at random - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, if you must know - and didn’t feel I got much out of it, which I put down to my own cultural ignorance.

That same ignorance showed up again when I read his novella, Agamemnon’s Daughter (1985), and I found myself plodding through page after page unengaged. And then the ending came along, with its explosive epiphany, and, tying everything together, hit the mark. It was just a pity I didn’t really see how it had come to this. So, after a bit of research on the subject matter I decided to read the story again and this time round everything fell into place. Or fell into step, as the cover nicely implies.

Beginning with an unnamed narrator patiently awaiting his lover we enter into 1980s Albania, a country so staunchly sticking to Marxist-Leninist ideals that even the Soviet world around it has left it behind and China is its only ally. Such are the sacrifices for sticking to one’s guns. And sacrifice is precisely what Agamemnon’s Daughter is all about, the narrator analogising his current situatution with that of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father in order to bring the wind so that the Aechaean fleet could sail.

The sacrifice of the story’s events concerns the narrator’s lover, Suzana, giving him up for her father’s career:

It was getting harder and harder for her to see me, she said. Papa’s career was on the rise…Their family was more than ever in the limelight…Two weeks before, at the last plenum of the Central Committee, Papa had gone up another rung…So it was obvious she would have to make changes to her way of life, to her wardrobe, to the people she saw. Otherwise she might hurt his career.

To soften the blow, the narrator has been invited to the grandstand for the May Day celebrations. It’s a privilege that others wish upon themselves, so to receive such a calling evokes jealousy and disbelief:

It was the first time I had been entitled to sit in the grandstand at the May Day parade, and I still could not quite believe that it was my own name written on the card. When I first received it, the Party secretary seemed as stunned as I was. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the only emotion in his eyes was that of envy: there was also stupefaction.

It’s the journey to the grandstand and the ultimate understanding of the Agamemnon analogy that move the book along. While not much action can be said to happen in the present, Kadare uses the man’s journey to criticise Albania and its policies. To do so he uses layers of myth that strengthen the narrative, recounting incidents about the absurdity of the Socialist agenda as characters are spotted amongst the May Day crowds.

It’s the loss of Suzanna, though, that continues to bring the narrator back to the idea of Iphigenia and of sacrifice. He resigns the idea that maybe he is stretching it, pushing the notion too far:

I’d got hold of the word sacrifice and then used it to contrive an analogy I’d taken further than was warranted. I was no better than a novice poet who manages after much effort to spawn a metaphor, then falls for it entirely and constructs an entire poetic work on a foundation no more solid than sand.

But, come the end, the sacrifice is certainly there but the offering is not what he thought.

Bundled with Agamemnon’s Daughter are a further two stories that also take sacrifice as their theme. While neither of these are as interesting as the title story, or carry the same level of depth. Of the two, The Blinding Order, set during the Ottoman Empire’s reorganisation, is the stronger piece, delivering a story that is, on the surface, absurd but equally frightening. Closing off the collection, The Great Wall tells the story of China from both sides, and while the analogies are interesting, the story is the weakest aspect.

While it’s good piece of literature I daresay it would be hard to enjoy the story of Agamemnon’s Daughter, for its tone never truly excites. What it does do, though, is provide an interesting insight into the world of Albania, the people stifled and oppressed by its politics. A suitable example of such would be the book itself which, due to its criticism of Albania, had to be smuggled out of the country a few pages at a time. Unfortunately, the translation is from French rather than Albanian and so there’s a sense that, with the story having been through the wringer twice, some of the translation has echoes of the French.

But the language is still engaging and once in line with Kadare’s writing, curiousity drives the reader on. It’s an absorbing read - and there’s plenty to absorb - as we follow one man’s journey in an oppressed nation where the will to survive, no matter how hard it becomes, wins through. So four Marx out of five and, in the spirit of socialism, everyone should read it.