La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust - Volume One

My second great read has caused me to rethink a statement I made in an earlier book review.  I wrote that I had little time for 'magical realism' and 'fantasy' writing.  That would be true for a large part of the body of literature in this genre.  But when it is good, really really good, then the genre can enthral and transport the reader into a world of surreality which feels plausible.  So it is with: 

La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust (Volume One) by Philip Pullman
This is a fantasy novel, a prequel, the first volume in a planned trilogy named The Book of Dust. Set around 12 years before the start of His Dark Materials, Pullman's previous trilogy, the story covers the events leading up to Lyra Belacqua's arrival as a six-month-old baby at Jordan College, Oxford. 

Amazon says:  

Malcolm Polstead's Oxford life has been one of routine, ordinary even.

He is happiest playing with his daemon, Asta, in their canoe, La Belle Sauvage. But now as the rain builds, the world around Malcolm and Asta is, it seems, set to become increasingly far from ordinary.

Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua, Malcolm is forced to undertake the challenge of his life and to make a dangerous journey that will change him and Lyra for ever . . .

Setting

The setting is a world dominated by the Magisterium, also commonly called "the Church", an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In this world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons", in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. An important plot device is the alethiometer, or symbol reader, of which just six are known to exist. By setting three of the alethiometer's hands to point to symbols around a dial a skilled practitioner can pose questions, which are answered by the automatic movement around the dial of a fourth hand. 

Interestingly Pullman conceived The Book of Dust before the publication of Lyra's Oxford in 2003, originally as a single volume. Writing was under way by 2005, but by 2011 Pullman said that he was considering splitting the novel into two volumes, one set before His Dark Materials and the other set afterwards. In February 2017, Pullman announced that The Book of Dust had become a 'companion' trilogy.

Reception

The novel received positive reviews. The Guardian described it as "worth the wait", calling it "old-fashioned and comfy". The Independent said that "La Belle Sauvage has the feel of an extended preface; thrillingly entertaining and beautifully written, but ultimately something of an introduction to the story proper we know follows thereafter". The Washington Post was extremely positive, stating that "too few things in our own world are worth a 17-year-wait: The Book of Dust is one of them". The A.V. Club said that "even without the deep well of context of those other books of Dust, La Belle Sauvage stands on its own as a singularly beguiling work of fantasy. It's sure to be devoured by readers young and old alike". 

The New York Times felt the book to be "full of wonder" in spite of some longueurs and long stretches of flat dialogue. While acknowledging that "as a tale of flight and pursuit, it’s altogether enjoyable", The Spectator suggested that Pullman's larger aspiration — 'to see off Christianity' — was an impediment to his storytelling, and that the metaphysical ideas around which the narrative revolves were its least successful part.

Postscript: It is a rare thing these days for reviewers in periodicals to be quite so unanimous in their largely unqualified praise for a book.  After all, a 17-year wait brings huge expectations.  That La Belle Sauvage has proved to be a delight to readers is accolade indeed.

A Gentleman in Moscow

In the past month I have read two brilliant books.  By my reckoning.  The first took me a good while to get through.  Four hundred and fifty plus pages of text in a small font, and beautiful, rich writing to savour.  This is not a book you speed through.  

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

There is an old world elegance about this novel, which is set in an era a few years after the Russian an Revolution in a period of violent upheaval. A handsome count named Alexander Rostov has been summoned before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and accused of writing a counter-revolutionary poem. The trial transcript offers an indication of the count’s blithe resistance to the spirit of the times.  Asked to state his occupation, he replies, “It is not the business of a gentleman to have occupations.” Only high-ranking friends keep him from being thrown against a wall and shot. Instead, he’s declared a “Former Person” and sentenced to life imprisonment in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol.   Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity. 

The Hotel Metropol is a grand Art Nouveau palace — an actual place, still standing. It was constructed at the turn of the century and soon seized by the communists to house bureaucrats and impress foreign guests. The count, though, is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates. This is a character who has “opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed.” He was raised to appreciate the great conveniences of life, such as keeping “a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another.” Now, that extravagant life must somehow be adjusted to the tight confines of a servant’s bedroom. No matter: The man makes the home, not the other way around, and the count is convinced that “by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.” 

Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope."

This is not a novel of thrilling conflicts so much as charming encounters.  As the years pass, the count always behaves as a perfect gentleman. He never complains about his confinement — never even admits that it is a confinement. He entertains attractive guests. He spars good-naturedly with a staff member who resents his refined manner. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. It is the relationship with Nina that ultimately delivers to the reader a suspenseful and thrilling denouement with an ending that allows the reader to speculate as to the fate of the two principal characters in the book.

 

Not Exactly a Tour de Force

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

This was a popular choice for my Dorset Book Group, Splinter, and was suggested by Gina, as we had all read The Dry by Jane Harper as a set book for an earlier meeting.  That was Harper's debut novel and won awards.  We enjoyed that read although I seem to recall we had some minor quibbles with it.  But essentially the plotting was good and we did not guess the perpetrator of the crime.

Sadly I found Jane Harper's second novel a disappointment, a damp squib of a crime thriller.  The premise seemed to start well, five women go into The Bush and four come out.  In a nutshell you have a plot and the potential to build engagement with characters and suspense.  But it was such a slow boiler and the narrative got bogged down in minutiae both in terms of conversations between characters, and the flitting between chapters, the Searched and the Searchers, far from building suspense just became frustrating.  I wanted to get on with it, after all this was no great work of literature.  It was a whodunnit, let's keep it moving.  So it was all rather dull.

When a body did not turn up fairly promptly I thought well this is getting interesting, there is a mystery to unpick.  You can usually expect the body fairly early on, then it is about solving the identity of the perpetrator.  But no, just the unrelenting squabbling and bitching going on between the women with some fuzzy sub-plots relating to the company they all worked for.  Throw in a history of substance abuse and drinking on the part of the one flawed twin, an anorexic daughter, an explicit video shared by teenage schoolchildren on their mobile phones.  Some of the usual suspects to inject a bit of drama.  But it did not spice up an essentially very plain dish.  Even the death of Alice, had to be a composite effort by the various women in the party.  It seemed to me that the author was trying to make the denouement a bit complex but it did not work for me.  And ultimately I thought the showdown at the waterfall was just silly.

Oh dear, I do sound rather pompous about this but I just feel it was all a disappointment.

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

The Light of Day by Graham Swift

Graham Swift is a writer who is held in very high regard by his peers. He was born on 4 May 1949 in London, educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993) and Last Orders (1996). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The prize-winning Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. 

Of The Light of Day Amazon says:  On a cold but dazzling November morning George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, prepares to visit Sarah, a prisoner and the woman he loves. As he goes about the business of the day he relives the catastrophic events of two years ago that have both bound them together and kept them apart.
 
Making atmospheric use of its suburban setting and shot through with a plain man’s unwitting poetry and rueful humour, The Light of Day is a powerful and moving tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us.


Synopsis - contains spoilers!
George Webb's detective agency is run from an office above a tanning studio on Wimbledon Broadway. He's used to snooping: as a child, he spied on his father's adultery. His assistant, Rita, is also, occasionally, his mistress, and he hasn't missed his opportunities with some of his lady clients. No St George in shining armour, then, but a "corrupt" cop thrown out of the force for coercing a witness, his marriage a failure, his daughter only recently back in his life after a long estrangement. (He makes her nice dinners; he's a "cooking detective".) Sarah Nash, a language teacher and translator, enters his life, and changes it for ever, when she comes to ask him to spy on her husband. He's a gynaecologist who's been having an affair with a Croatian refugee they've taken in. The affair is over, Kristina is going back to her war-scarred country, but Sarah wants them followed to see if she really does get on the plane. Slowly, and, it seems, inexorably, this chain of events leads to a death. Now, two years on, George is putting flowers on a grave and visiting Sarah in prison.

What I thought:
Of this novel a Guardian reviewer wrote:  

The Light of Day has a brilliantly slow, precise, careful structure, covering "every hour, every minute, every detail" of its case with as much control as it lays out its geography and deals with its parts of speech. Within this tight little map, the story it has to tell is wildly extreme, sensational and romantic: completely out of hand. Its characters "cross a line" into savage places. In this banal surburbia, they "fall through space"; in this quiet corner of the civilised world, there are no safe houses. 

The style of the writing gives the impression of spoken word.  A stream of consciousness, the events that the novel describes being played and replayed in the narrator's head.  The book is crafted in such a way that it moves back and forth in time to build suspense.   It makes for open text on the page, deceptively accessible and an invitation to read at speed.  But that would be to lose the sense of the rather flat and repetitious narration with spare use of vocabulary.  I am not sure if this is a consequence but the reading of this novel had a lowering of mood as I followed the text and absorbed the story.  Lugubrious is the word that springs to mind.  The style does not suit everyone.  One reviewer wrote:  

"It is difficult to reconcile the fact of so much writerly achievement with the feeling that the novel is somewhat underpowered" and that the author "has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and suspense. The pages turn, but the pulse never quickens."

A Page of Quickies

Here follows a series of concise reviews of books that I have read. They did not warrant my normal treatment because either they were books I did not quite manage to fathom, or were what one might classify as 'holiday' reads - what I would call fast food novels.

First up is Conclave by Robert Harris.

Even a seasoned reviewer in The Guardian was moved to write "I am about to use a word I have never knowingly used in any review of any book ever. During my 25-odd years of writing about books I have done my best to avoid cliches, slipshod summaries, oracular pronouncements and indeed anything else that might appear emblazoned on a book jacket. Nonetheless, there is only one possible word to describe Robert Harris’s new novel, and it is this: unputdownable."

In a nutshell, the pope is dead and cardinals are gathering to elect his successor in this portrait of power, corruption and deceit.  There you have it.  With a fabulous denouement.  I recommended this to my discerning doctor friend, in French translation.  

                                                                   ↝↝↝↝↝

When I was browsing bookshelves in a charity shop I spotted 

After Me Comes The Flood by Sarah Perry.

I recognised it as the debut novel of Sarah Perry.  She of The Essex Serpent fame.  It is a short novel and looked accessible 200+ pages, pages not densely printed.  For me the novel was a conundrum which I never got into because I could not quite make sense of the story, such as it is.  There is one section which takes place on a beach, near a saltmarsh which involves a lost child.  Here Perry is clearly at home: saltmarshes, tides which ebb and flow, once again an upturned rowing boat.  This environment in the natural world is clearly familiar to her.  (Perry grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, alongside the Thames Funnel)  When she is in that milieu where the land meets the sea she is utterly at home in her writing.  Later she describes a powerful rainstorm which brings about the climax of the novel, again her powers of description of natural phenomena are on show.  

The novel garnered some favourable comment from the likes of Sophie Hannah, Sarah Waters (whose writing I rate highly).  Adjectives like unsettling, intriguing, eerie, dream-like, creeping, gripping are used by reviewers.  I think the novel might warrant a second reading with attention to the calibre of the writing and less focus on a search for a story.  But not just now!

My Purple Scented Novel by Ian McEwan

Amazon says:  
A jewel of a book: a brand new short story from the author of Atonement. My Purple Scented Novel follows the perfect crime of literary betrayal, scrupulously wrought yet unscrupulously executed, published to celebrate Ian McEwan’s 70th birthday.

"You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade…You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline… I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession.

This is short story published as a stand-alone booklet.  It's a quick read and deals with plagiarism.  Everything you ever wanted to know to pull it off!

It was first published in The NewYorker Magazine in March 2016.  You can read a full transcript here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/my-purple-scented-novel-fiction-by-ian-mcewan

And the transcript of an interview with McEwan about the story in the same periodical here:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-ian-mcewan-2016-03-28

Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

A caveat for members of Val de Saire Book Club for whom this title is the November read: this review contains Spoilers

I had a love hate relationship with this novel as I read it. I started to read it rather grudgingly; it is a book club choice and my respect for the code of conduct in a book group means that I will read it.  Even though the person who chose it has left the group! 

It is described as a tale of morals and motherhood and there is an awful lot of Anne Tyler about it.  I have read most of Tyler's novels and I could feel that I am somewhat played out on small town American domesticity and family sagas.  Tyler has written about different families but I sometimes feel, and especially with so many books out there that I want to read, that once you have read one you have read them all. 

Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America’s first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. The author spent some of her formative years growing up there and this helps to reinforce a sense of time and place -the 1990s. 

Someone has burned down the Richardson's house, the youngest of four children is blamed. We wait until the end to find out who the culprit is and what motivated the act of arson. 

Because the novel is more about babies and the extremes of busybodiness and meddling which can be an overarching part of the lives of some self-righteous people. Namely Mrs Richardson. There is the matter of an abandoned baby, an adoption which might not have taken place as it should have done,  through the proper channels. There is a custody battle which goes to court. During this process I found some of the writing on motherhood overly sentimental and cloying. I allowed myself to be irritated by this and then I questioned my ability to feel compassion. (I had to question myself on this when I read Eleanor Oliphant)  Was I being unfeeling? I think it is within the power of writers to connect with the feelings of their readers and extract the reactions that they themselves recognise and feel to be appropriate. Or to fail in that and leave the reader cold. Certainly though as Ng writes about the custody issue she left me feeling ambivalent as to for whose plea the judge should find favour, the birth mother or the adoptive parents. 

There are many aspects to the narrative: race, class, privilege, teenage sex, abortion, surrogacy. It's all in there. It is a rich list of ingredients but I did not ultimately find it a tasty dish.

Nocturnes

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguru

Warning: Contains spoilers.....

Preamble:  The Observer called this work 'Heartbreak in Five Movements'.  I think that is a bit bleak and an exaggeration; each story has a character who is a victim, who is let down, betrayed perhaps but surely not heartbroken?  

Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative.  There is also linkage of one character across some of the stories. 

In Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro writes about a cast of characters who range from young dreamers to café musicians to faded stars.  This quintet of short stories deals with some of the superficialities in human behaviour and there is manipulation by some characters of others which gave each story at least one 'victim'   At times I thought why can these victims not see through the opportunists, that they are being used and played with? 

In the opening story, "Crooner", a mood of quiet melancholy is established and this mood pervades the book. From the moment you meet Tony Gardner's wife, Lindy, and from the cleverly constructed dialogue between her and Tony you know that things between the couple are not good. Jan, the narrator, is a guitarist with a band who are street performing and he is thrilled to be in Gardner's company; his records, he tells Gardner effusively, were one of the only sources of comfort to his beleaguered single mother as she was raising him in communist Poland. The Gardner's trip to Venice is not as the musician supposes it to be, it is not an anniversary, probably more of a rescue mission.  No wonder Tony Gardner is amused at the idea.  We find out why towards the end of the story.  In the end it is a moment of disillusionment for the musician who has been delighted to meet a musical hero.  

In 'Come Rain or Shine' Raymond is dragged into a sordid bit of theatre played out by Charlie and Emily whose marriage is apparently a bit wobbly.  There were moments of high farce in this story that made me laugh out loud, at the same time as I was willing Raymond to grow a backbone and stand up to the couple's devious actions.   

In 'Malvern Hills', the third story, I heard the Ishiguro's voice clearly in that of the narrator.  Told in the first person I heard the questioning introspection  and self justification that Ishiguro conveyed in his portrayal of the butler in The Remains of the Day.

The fourth story, "Nocturne", reintroduces an element of absurdity where a talented saxophonist, whose wife has left him, is persuaded to have facial surgery to make him more marketable. He meets Lindy Gardner from the opening story (recently divorced from Tony) in the exclusive wing of the hotel where they have both been sent to recuperate. The story contains the collection's funniest moment, as the saxophonist finds himself embarrassed on a stage with one arm up a turkey.  This was reminiscent of a scene in one of the Mr Bean episodes - the Christmas one - where Rowan Atkinson is obliged to answer the front door wearing a turkey on his head!

In "Cellists", the final story, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. "You have to understand, I am a virtuoso," she tells him. "But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped." But she is a shallow person. In the end, she marries someone she does not love, while the young Hungarian takes a second-rate job playing in a chamber group at a hotel restaurant. They both remain unfulfilled. This is, perhaps, what most binds these stories: the conflict between what life might have promised and what life ultimately delivers.