Category: Reviews

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

1989, I’m sitting in a car in a shopping mall parking lot, waiting for a friend to get off work. I’m 17, reading the last 10 pages or so of Fried Green Tomatoes, crying my eyes out. Fast forward to a few days ago, me sitting my home offices, reading the last few pages of Pilgrimage, and for the first time in 23 years, crying my eyes out again. A moving story, touching, gentle, subtle, simple.

I came to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry via the 2012 Booker Prize longlist, and maybe I was on the rebound from reading a rather difficult book before, but I thoroughly enjoyed almost every page of this one. Here’s a man who, on a whim, decides to walk nonstop from the bottom of England to the top. An old man, retired, who never made much of himself except that his life could have been a whole lot worse, and there’s triumph in not succumbing to one’s circumstance. Through the course of the walk he doesn’t overcome personal tragedies as much as he finally addresses old injuries, breaking himself down emotionally so that he can heal up again.

Rachel Joyce isn’t the first author to write a story about somebody taking along walk. There’s Lawrence Block’s Random Walk, and of course Stephen King’s Long Walk, and I’m sure many others. I was also reminded of the cross-country running section of Forrest Gump, and the young man’s self-imposed austerity in Into the Wild. There’s something very compelling about this urge to just start walking, and let everything else disappear behind you. More than once I thought about a man I met in Sonora, CA, who owned a used bookstore and who, himself, had once walked across the United States.

As I said, the book is subtle, building up to reveal Harold’s past slowly, and along the way the simple descriptions of his daily progress don’t get too bogged down in the mileage. And Joyce does an excellent job of showing how one person, doing something as simple as walking, can have a profound effect on so many others.

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Skios: A Novel by Michael Frayn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here’s a fun, fast farce for you to read on a plane or a boat or a train, in a deck chair, or sprawled on your couch while the last of the summer breezes plays with your living room curtains. But maybe not curled up in your sweater and socks by a fire, cup of hot tea or cocoa nearby. Skios is more of a mai-tai or rum tiki kind of novel. It’s set on a fictional Greek island, you see, complete with accented natives, bubble-headed white people, a good looking ne’erdowell and a chubby, gruff old lecturer.

In other words, not a book for plumbing the depths of character development, or to peek a pique at the human condition. It was only after I read it that I discovered author Michael Frayn is a playwright, and a writer of farces, and this novel falls right into that niche as neatly as its characters fall into the absurdity of their assumptions.

Skios is a sort of a Comedy of Errors, but only sort of, as the situation is perpetuated not my mistaken identity and confusion so much as willful misrepresentation and ill-placed certainty. Coincidences stack on top of coincidences, near-misses abound, all of it heading towards an inevitable conclusion that, in the end, we’re saved from by some rather convenient deus ex machina.

But I guess that sort of thing is allowed in a farce. I guess if one’s going to take up the debris left behind by Comedy of Errors or even The Importance of Being Earnest, one’s allowed to make it all silly, then violently sweep away the anticipated conclusion. And I do mean violently.

Look for the movie based on this book at some point, starring whatever post-SNL (or the British equivalent) actor looking to bridge from comedy to something taken slightly more seriously. Look for Tom Stoppard to come in and do an emergency re-write, “saving” the story by actually giving it an ending. Look for the bartender when you’re half-way through the book, because even though it’s silly, you won’t want to put it down, but you will want another mai-tai.

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Communion Town by Sam Thompson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am giving Communion Town two stars for the simple reason that I did not enjoy it much. I can’t say that it is a good book, and I don’t want to be guilty of pandering to a kind of hive-intelligentsia just because it was chosen for the 2012 Booker long list. Let these ratings stand for how one liked the book, not how one assumes it will be received by literary critics. I’ve never read anything else by this author, and freely admit that maybe I just didn’t “get it.”

Ten stories, apparently, and according to some blurb somewhere, all of them about the same city. I guess. I didn’t feel any kind of cohesiveness between the stories at all. If this was a fictional town, I didn’t get any sense of its character. If it’s supposed to be a fictionalization of a real city, I have no idea which city. And, again, maybe that’s just me—I’m sure someone has written books about New York and London and Paris and LA and Tokyo. This was none of those.

The truth is I got stuck on one of the stories, and it took me a lot longer to read this than it should have. It was all so very atmospheric without having any atmosphere. So much descriptive meditation, with nothing described. And odd bits tossed in, unexplained and unexplored and even unexploited.

Which is why I’m giving it two stars, because normally, I just love a well-crafted sentence. Maybe these were supposed to be that, but I kept falling asleep. I found myself not picking up the book when I did have time, but choosing to do other things. Honestly, the only reason I finished is because I’ve committed myself to reading all the long list books this year.

Don’t get me wrong—bits of it were good. I liked the one about the city of the mind and the almost cartoonish detectives. The one about the semi-invalid woman had potential, and the one about the serial killer and the abattoir. That all sounds like juicy stuff, right? But like I said, unexplained and unexploited.

Maybe it’s time for me to admit I’m no literarian myself, and that I just like a good story. If that’s so, then, two stars for Communion Town, as there’s really no story there at all.

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Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So you tell me, is it high praise or subtle insult to call a book “better than I thought it would be?” I mean to praise, but to also couch that praise in my own inadequacies, just in case you want to judge the message by the messenger. Sometimes that’s necessary, in as much as one reads “reviews” to justify one’s own decision to read a book or not. You should read this one (book, not review) if you’ve already decided to. If you don’t want to, don’t bother, although to be fair, I probably wouldn’t have, and I’m glad I did.

I have to admit that I only read Bring Up the Bodies because it’s on the Booker Prize long list, and because a friend whom I have challenged to read the list with me suggested this book first. Then I saw that this was going to be about Henry VIII, specifically about his secretary, and that gave me some motivation. Then I saw that this is actually a sequel to the author’s 2009 Booker Prize winner, and I almost gave up again before I’d even started.

Hilary Mantel says that the book can stand alone on its own, but she would, as she wants it to sell. But I have to say, she’s right, and that’s especially true if you know a thing or two about Henry’s court and life. I don’t, so I found myself rereading his pages on Wikipedia often. Not to get the facts, but just to keep some of the names straight. There are a lot of people in this book, a lot of intrigues, a lot of palace politics.

All of which are handled with a subtlety and a grace that makes for a very readable novel. Unfortunately, I did not do the book much justice, reading in fits and starts. This is one to sit down for extended periods and absorb. But here, let me offer my highest praise: I am very much looking forward to reading the first book, rereading this one, and reading her planned third book. I’m looking forward to keeping notes of who’s who as I go, looking forward to reading some more history to contextualize it all.

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The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is what I do, I sometimes find myself in the vicinity of a bookstore, so I go in, wander about use my phone to take pictures of intriguing titles, go home, enter them into Goodreads, and when I don’t know what to read next, download the samples onto my e-reader. That’s how I came across Domino Men, but then it wasn’t available in an e-version. Then I discovered it is the sequel to The Somnambulist, which was also on my to-read list, and also not available in an e-version. When I happened upon a used copy of The Somnambulist, I snatched it right up.

So much work for so little reward. I didn’t enjoy this book much. I did at first—I liked the language of it, liked the mystery and the intrigue. But once again I was let down by not knowing, ahead of time, that I was reading fantasy. I assumed everything would be explained, and of course it wasn’t. I like genre fiction as much as anyone, but The Somnambulist was only even “fantasy” in the sense that there were a few non-real conveniences that allowed the “story” to work.

What story there was. Read other people’s reviews, you’ll see the same complaint: it just started going downhill around the halfway point or so. Some have suggested that The Somnambulist is a “steampunk” novel, but, again, only in the sense that a convenience was tossed in and that convenience was made with a bit of brass. Genre fiction has its tropes, and I suppose we might allow for a lack of everything else if the tropes are good enough. But there weren’t even enough tropes.

Here’s a big spoiler: at no point is there any indication of what the title of the novel has to do with anything. Yes, there’s a character called “The Somnambulist,” but unless I’m supposed to understand that the author was sleepwalking his way through this novel, I just don’t get it.

And I am now going to strike Domino Men off my to-read list.

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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

aMy reviews tend to be about provenance and coincidence, are therefore deeply personal, and should therefore by skipped if you’re looking for synopsis and approval. Not that there’s anything wrong with synopsis and approval. I just don’t feel like summarizing, and I don’t have the reputation or wisdom required for my approval carry any weight.

My wife’s cousin recommended a TV show that we are finding we like quite a bit, so when she recommended The Sense of an Ending, it was an easy decision to give the book a try. That it is a mere 163 pages was a plus, too. I don’t have much of an attention span. And I had just struggled to finish a book that I did not like at all, so I jumped into Sense with a lot enthusiasm. I wasn’t disappointed. Read it less than 18 hours. Not quite one sitting, but would have been had I started on a morning instead of bed time.

And it turns out this is the third Man Booker Prize 2011 Shortlist book I’ve read, along with Snowdrops and The Sister Brothers. Three books that I would have never compared to one another, except for their treatments of existentialism, although sometimes I think every book written in the modern era is a treatment of existentialism.

Sense is about time, documents, suicide, class, and England. In more or less that order. One character invokes Camus, reminding us that: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” Match that against my favorite quote from Camus: “One sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers” and you’ve got the tone of the book. It’s “to be or not to be” for the modern age.

That’s the tone, anyway, although the plot, in the end, vindicates the coward’s life. In more than one place Barnes has lines like “if this was a novel” or “if this was fiction” and that he also mentions masturbation more than a few times shows how playfully he regards all of this angsty stuff. His main character talks about “the littleness of life that art exaggerates,” and since the line comes from Flaubert, perhaps we’re supposed to compare this character to Madame Bovary.

So be it. It’s not that were disconnected that makes us miserable, it’s that we’re bored. Kill yourself for a good reason, or a bad one. But don’t pretend it’s noble, because once you’ve removed yourself from time’s exegesis, you no longer get to participate in the meaning of life.

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Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I have not finished Deadfall Hotel yet, and the only reason I was even going to try and finish was for the sake of writing this review. I was struggling to read it last week, and skipped last Monday’s review, and I fear the same will happen again today, unless I just get my thoughts down, finally. I don’t expect there to be anything in the last 20 pages that will change my impressions much. Simply put: awful book.

Now, that’s just my opinion, of course, and you should read others’ reviews, because some people liked the novel. They were intrigued by the setting, as was I, initially, intrigued by some of the characters. But Deadfall Hotel is written too much to be like a dream, and I can’t stand that kind of thing. I think dream sequences in books are a huge waste of time, the very worst aspect of deus ex machina shoved down the reader’s eyeballs. And this entire novel is meant to be a dream, a shifting, unexplained and unexplainable, entirely unsatisfying experience.

Page after page are filled with inconsistencies, made-up-on-the-spot conveniences, last-minute explanations. And maybe such a thing is acceptable if all one wants is to get into mood or atmosphere, let plot and character development be damned. I just can’t stand blood and guts for blood and guts’ sake. If a book is going to be visceral, I need to know what the organs were doing in the first place. To call this book gratuitous is an understatement.

Nothing provided is believable, and that this is “fantasy” is no excuse. Fantasy has to work even harder to achieve a kind of believability, and author Steve Rasnic Tem doesn’t even bother. I only managed to get through the novel as far as I got by allowing myself to scan some of pages when nothing was happening except interpretation of impression of feeling. And even then I was stuck with nothing else to do and no other reading options.

And all of that is too bad, because as I said, the idea was very intriguing: a widower and his daughter are asked to come run a large, rambling, mysterious resort with more than a few “special” guests. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Shining are inevitable, but without merit, as the two books have nothing to do with one another other than being set in a remote hotel. Unless, like the Overlook, the Deadfall Hotel explodes at the end too; I don’t know if I’m going to bother reading that far to find out.

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The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the great things about Goodreads is the variety of opinions given about a book. I didn’t care much for The End of Mr. Y, and there are plenty of reviews that say what I want to say; but there are also plenty of folks who liked the book just fine. On the one hand, this is not very helpful, in that you might not know whether to read the book or not. On the other, it’s great because the onus is no longer on the reviewer to recommend as much as to share an experience. That’s what I want to do. I want to tell you why I didn’t like the book, even though I might not be able to tell you it wasn’t any good.

The first half of the novel is just a mystery about the discovery and provenance of a strange book, and satisfies in that sense. The small college town in a cold England winter is atmospheric, edging on haunting. Her main character, Ariel, is interesting enough, though secondary characters are sort of glossed over, sounding boards for Ariel to bounces theories against.

But then it goes all “fantasy” in the second half, which I didn’t expect, and since I didn’t know I was supposed to ramp up my willing suspension of disbelief, I found myself scowling much of the time. Maybe that’s my fault. But fantasy requires a very rigid consistency, lest we feel the writer is just, literally, creating conflict (and resolution) out of nothing. Lost, utterly, was all that atmosphere. There’s plenty of mystery, but it’s of the “wtf” variety, with no hope of explanation or justification.

Scarlett Thomas takes the “what if” of post-structural linguistics and applies it to the “what if” of quantum mechanics. That’s fine, and for an idle browser of both subjects such as myself, her exploration has potential. But it’s a potential ramrodded in the last eight of the book into a conclusion that’s a little too inevitable—instead of opening up a world of possibility, paradoxes of time travel are used to justify a lack of free will, a numbing experience for the reader, peppered with, in my opinion, ridiculous sex scenes.

Honestly, it was the sex scenes throughout that really bored me. I just don’t see how they were required—one character is nothing more than an ATM for cash and shame, except the shame is utterly unconvincing, doesn’t develop Ariel’s character all, and has no impact on the plot whatsoever.

I’m giving this two stars, begrudgingly. At least Thomas knows how to handle a sentence, and like I said, there was all of that wonderful atmosphere in the first half of the book. And it did remind me that I want to go read up on Baudrillard, not to mention my having read The End of Mr. Y right around the time the CERN folks were revealing their evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson.

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The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

Just finished The Twin, literally minutes ago, and want to get my thoughts down as quickly as possible. Not because I’m so very excited. It’s just that I know I have a problem doing a proper review after a few days have passed, and the truth is I don’t even know what I think of this book right now. Maybe I should let it marinate, but just in case, here goes.

The original title in Dutch is Boven Is Het Stil, which translates roughly to “Above Is Quiet.” I would have liked to have known that, as the novel begins with the main character, Helmer, swapping rooms with his dying father, moving the old man into a room upstairs in the house they share. And then there’s the metaphor for heaven that “Above” suggests… not the heaven of paradise, but the heaven of where dead people go. Helmer is a man who, now in his fifties, is largely defined by the dead—his mother, his twin brother, his soon to be dead father. Not to mention a surfeit of dead animals throughout, which has only now occurred to me, upon reflection. If Helmer is defined by these deaths, and the dead are quiet, then Helmer is quiet too.

Quiet in the sense of silent, and Bakker repeatedly mentions sounds: a buzzing electric clock, a small radio playing jazz… but I don’t recall his making much of barnyard animals sounds, the sheep and chickens and cows. Helmer has no voice, can’t express his desires, doesn’t even know what his desires may be. His best hoping at finding desire at all is in putting a map on the wall of his bedroom.

And quiet in the sense of still, in that Helmer is unmoving, frozen by the deaths of those around him. At the moment when he would have become his own person, going off into the world to make himself into whatever he could, his brother dies, forcing him to return to the farm and take up the role his brother would have taken. Not exactly a square peg in a round hole, but nevertheless not the life he might have led, and certainly not the son his father would have chosen.

But this is not a maudlin story, a tale of tragedy and bitterness and regret. It’s sad, yes, the kind of sad you accept because that’s the way of life. Bakker, in Colmer’s translation, is gentle, simple, contemplative, without being barren or terse or merely laconic. Dutch winters are cold without being harsh, and spring is just another season, without being lush or refreshing. Sheep give birth to lambs, and some of them are stillborn—that’s the way of things.

This is a book that is rich with symbols and images, and plenty of opportunity for any given reader to bring as much as he or she wants to a reading. What do you make of the two donkeys, the television set, the binoculars, the broken bicycle, the windmill… I could go on. I mean this as only high praise, that this is a book that will be read and taught and examined and cherished.

Or, take it as it stands—a simple story about a sad man.

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Machine Man by Max Barry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In my reviews of Barry’s Jennifer Government and Company, I called his style “a bit stark, a bit plain, matter-of-fact.” Here in Machine Man, the narration is in first person, so this same style comes across as slightly autistic (or as if the narrator has Asperger’s, for those who insist on term for the popular understanding of socially functional autism). Perhaps a bit of a stereotype for lab engineer, but then Barry doesn’t seem interested in bogging down his novel in superfluous details, so why should his narrator. And that’s not just a quip on my part—at one point, his character stops even going home, choosing to live at work instead. This doesn’t have much to do with the story; it’s as much a convenience for the author and the reader as it is for the character.

What we have here is Flowers for Algernon by way of Frankenstein by way of Robocop. And while my personal critical point of view has never been of the historical variety, I can’t help but think how Barry’s novel changes how I see each of those other texts. Or even a story like that laughable movie Limitless (which I just found out was based on a book, so maybe I’ll add it my to-read list, if only for yet another perspective on this type of tale). Combine the basic Greek tragedy, with its heroes and hubris and falls from grace, but attach a good-old-fashioned self-made man story at the beginning. That the main character in Machine Man is literally self-made is even more compelling.

Again, I’m drawn to a more historical analysis than anything else. The self-made-man story is very much an American ideal, and thus it begs the question if Machine Man (or Flowers or Frank or Robo) is a cautionary tale about where the United States is heading. Certainly in these times of economic struggle, it’s looking more and more like “The Great Experiment” has run its course and we’re all doomed to become Canadians. But then I can’t think of a time when we didn’t say we were struggling with a difficult economy, so this is, like those Greek tragedies, a timeless story.

That’s reading way too much into it, of course, and this is supposed to be a review, not a sophomore essay. Fine. I thought Jennifer Government was clever and Company exploited a sense of irony, but here in Machine Man Barry trades in those forces to instead write something a little more human, which itself is ironic given what the main character goes through, not mention clever. And he achieves it, as I said above, within a very matter-of-fact style of narration, holding us emotionally at arm’s length which nevertheless makes us feel even more for the main character. His flaws are our own.

A magnum opus, then? Not quite. I think Barry’s got chops, and I think his greatest work is still to come. And if nothing else, reading Machine Man will lend that much more perspective to his other work. Max Barry is still building himself, and I’m looking forward to the results.

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