Martin Amis
The Information
Brilliant beginning, OK ending, middling middle. The usual verbal fireworks from Amis, which keep us entertained up to about a third of the way through the book. I think Amis prefers scene-setting to story-telling; he's certainly much better at it. The aforementioned first third of the book introduces us to a menagerie of entertaining characters, mostly London low-lifes, giving a vivid, unsettling and very funny snapshot of suburban London in the early 1990s.
The problems come when Amis - reluctantly, one senses - finally tries to cajole the story into some kind of momentum. This story involves a somewhat pretentious and no longer successful author, Richard Tull, plotting revenge on his friend and rival Gwyn Barry for being much more successful than him, despite writing popular trash-novels.
My main problem with the novel was the lack of depth of its characterisation: Tull seems too ineffectual a character to go to the lengths he does to get one over on Barry - it's his very uncompetitiveness that hinders his success as a writer, so it's hard to imagine him trying so hard to defeat Barry in other ways.
A disappointment, all told. And the occasional attempts to be profound merely sound pretentious.
London Fields
Read this over 10 years ago so can remember nothing about it except that it's vaguely to do with impending nuclear war and big city low life. A Martin Amis novel, then. But unlike in some of his novels, he keeps the narrative momentum up throughout. It's also full of grotesque yet disturbingly believable characters.
Possibly the best novel I've read by Amis. Certainly, in its 500 pages, I didn't get bored.
Money
Pretty good, for a Martin Amis novel. Like most of the others, it's let down by half-hearted plotting and unconvincing attempts at profundity; but it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and the story, ultimately unsatisfying though it is, at least has had more thought put into it than, say, The Information.
The story is narrated by John Self, a partner in a London ad agency who is about to direct his first feature film. It follows him as he jets across to New York, makes contacts, meets actors, crawls about in drunken stupors and generally is a bad lad. It's all great fun, and it looks as though it is heading towards an interesting denouement as Self becomes increasingly dogged by the suspicion that he might be better off pursuing a more soulful existence. However, at the last moment the promising plot unravels in a pile-up of implausibilities, to leave the reader feeling somewhat short-changed.
Another gripe: Amis is pretty explicit about wanting to make Self's story a fable of the hollowness of the 'money conspiracy' - but ironically the story is as hollow and superficial as Self himself. An ingenious postmodern paradox? It would be nice to think so - and yet what serious writer would choose meretricious irony if they could manage genuine depth? There are plenty of signs of Amis straining for the latter, and yet in the end all he seems to be saying is, "Funny the hold money has over our lives, isn't it?"
As in his other novels, Amis seems to be aiming for the same pointedness at the narrative level that he manages so effortlessly in his incisive, drolly witty prose. But time after time, he fails to achieve it. He is essentially a comic writer; but the best comic writers (David Lodge, Douglas Adams) still have something to say - a genuine, felt vision of life. Amis's love is for words; his ultimate indifference to what he is describing with those words is something he can't cover up.
All that said, I thoroughly recommend reading this novel. It's not as thought-provoking as it tries to be, but if you want laughs, you can't do better.
Night Train
A tough talking US woman cop investigates the death of some girl. Atmospheric and superbly written, but missing something - tries too hard to be profound, in my opinion.
Paul Auster
City of Glass
A writer of detective novels, mistaken for a real detective, is hired to stop a man from being murdered by his deranged father. The man at risk, Peter Stillman, was locked up by said father as a child, and prevented from interacting with others so that the father could discover the presocial 'language of God'.
Sounds intriguing and profound? Maybe it is, but I couldn't make head or tail of it. Most reviews claim 'City of Glass' is some kind of attempt to challenge the notions of narrative coherence and characters (and authors) having watertight identities. (The protagonist, Quinn, an author of detective novels, is mistaken for Paul Auster, the author, who is mistaken for Paul Auster, a detective. Confused? I was.)
The question is: is challenging literary conventions in itself enough? After all, you can challenge the notion of narrative coherence by writing random words: but that doesn't make you a genius. Sure, Auster does more than that, and there appears to be a lot of thought behind 'City of Glass'; but it seems to me the same kind of thought that generates riddles and crossword puzzles: ingenious, but conveying no deeper meaning.
Clearly Auster is claiming to say something about how essentially deceptive language always must be, and how it can never really touch on truth, the 'language of God'. But that's hardly a new idea, and in my opinion neither is it accurate. Using language to convey the idea that language can't convey truth may be a funky paradox, but pretty soon language disappears up its own posterior and you're left with a 'metaphysical thriller' that is frustrating, incomprehensible and, what is worse, not all that thrilling to read.
Beryl Bainbridge
An Awfully Big Adventure NEW! (Added 14/06/2008)
In 1950s Liverpool, 15-year-old Stella gets work as an assistant stage manager at the local theatre. The theatre comany turns out to be a nest of sexual and emotional intrigue, in which Stella gets embroiled by falling for Meredith, the company director.
This is a book that anyone without a perfect memory will have to read twice, for things fall into place late on that cast earlier events and utterances in a new light. Personally, I don't feel inclined to do so. The characterisation I found sketchy and uncompelling, and Bainbridge's famously terse writing style, rather than uncluttering the narrative, simply makes it too dense to follow easily. There's very little physical description or analysis of the characters, of whom there are so many that their names remain mere markers; and their resemblance to one another in motivation and personality - they're almost all bitter, angry, vulnerable and manipulative - makes any attempt to distinguish them seem largely superfluous in any case.
Bainbridge clearly has a quick and retentive mind that keeps all the components of her stories in place while she writes, but she often misjudges how much of the information in her head she's conveying to the reader. This applies not just to the characters, but to the narrative: few scenes last more than two or three paragraphs, and the changes between them are abrupt and confusing.
In short, this is a novel that shows off more of Bainbridge's weaknesses than of her strengths. The latter - a mordant sense of humour, intuitive psychological understanding, and a quirky, sceptical take on the world - are better realised in The Bottle Factory Outing.
The Bottle Factory Outing
Two young out-of-work actresses who work in an Italian-owned bottle factory in London join their Italian male colleagues for a picnic and a trip to a safari park. However, something strange happens between one of the girls and one of the Italians, and events take a sinister turn.
A truly disturbing novel - all the more so because it's also very funny in places. An atmosphere of formless menace is sustained throughout. The product of a quirky and morbid mind.
My one beef about this novel is Bainbridge's occasionally elliptical writing style. She tends to jump from one scene to another, leaving the reader to infer what has happened in between; for me, this meant frequently having to interrupt my reading to recreate the unnarrated events in my head.
Every Man for Himself
A story about the Titanic.
Successfully conveys a sense of doom, as a group of Brits with too much money play emotional chess with each other on the ill-fated voyage.
While the emotional entanglements of the characters are convincingly portrayed, I felt the novel lacked focus. I assume the title is implying that in our relationships, as in a sinking ship, we're each alone and hoping to "survive" at the expense of others. But I didn't feel the parallel was very successfully established; in the end, it felt like two different novels welded rather unceremoniously together.
Still, worth reading.
Julian Barnes
Before She Met Me
A lecturer leaves his wife for an actress, but starts getting obsessively jealous of all her previous lovers, to the extent of watching all the sex scenes in her old films. Things don't work out.
A depressing book, for all its humour. I wasn't completely convinced by its philosophical ambitions - Barnes seems to be setting us up for a profound discourse on history and why what's happened in the past keeps bubbling up in the present; however, he doesn't deal with this theme nearly as persuasively or movingly as Graham Swift does in his novels.
Flaubert's Parrot
A retired doctor tells us all about his obsession with Flaubert. He also mentions that his wife committed suicide.
It's a long time since I read this. Its theme, if I remember rightly, is the importance/unknowability of the past - Barnes' favourite.
I can't say I hugely enjoyed this novel - even though it's the one that made Barnes' name. It's clever and wry - nothing wrong with that. But it seems to want to be moving as well, and it fails completely. The narrator's voice is simply too detached and droll to convey convincingly the supposed sadness of his life. It's as if Barnes' enjoyment of juggling ideas eclipses his larger purpose of touching on the transcendent. And this I've found to be a recurrent problem in his novels.
That said, it's not a bad novel; and it tries to be different by being a "fictional essay". But for me, the experiment doesn't really come off.
A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters
The facetious title sums up this novel: wry but ambitious. It's basically ten short stories/essays illuminating the human condition - the striving for meaning in a meaningless world. There's a half-chapter thrown in, in which Barnes bangs on about how much he loves his wife (the one, presumably, who later left him for Jeanette Winterson).
I read this when I was 19, and enjoyed it then, but I don't know what I'd make of it now. Perhaps not as moving as it ought to be, nevertheless it's full of stimulating ideas.
Love, etc
A sequel to Talking It Over. Loser Stuart returns from the States rich, self-confident and apparently wanting to build bridges with his ex-wife Gillian and his ex-friend Oliver. Needless to say, everything is much more complicated than it at first appears.
The form of the story is the same as Talking It Over: the characters are given turns at relating events from their own perspectives. (In fact, the similarity to the parts of reality TV shows where participants are given the chance to vent their spleen "privately" to the camera is rather alarming.) As a form, it works; perhaps most people prone to introspection spend time in their heads "justifying" themselves to an imaginary audience.
As ever with Barnes, this novel is full of interesting psychological insights, and almost over-full of wit. It deals with serious issues, and though you wouldn't describe the tone as flippant, there's still something disconcertingly detached about the characters' analyses of their situations and motives. A little like Henry James, Barnes, while being fascinated by emotion and clearly understanding it, doesn't often succeed in conveying it directly. There's, ultimately, nothing moving about this book: never does one feel Barnes really joining his characters in their suffering, in the way that, say, Thomas Hardy or Milan Kundera do. It's all a little too intellectual, even a little too smart, for its own good.
Metroland
Oddly enough, this first novel of Julian Barnes' is the one I've enjoyed most. Its ambitions may be more modest than his later novels', but importantly, it lives up to them.
Christopher and Toni are smartarse grammar school boys growing up in the 1960s, in love with ideas and the arts, and both ostentatiously francophile. The story traces their contrasting reactions to the encroachment of adulthood, love, sex and Real Life - Toni insisting on permanent rebellion against the Establishment, but Christopher finding that he really quite likes smug suburban family life.
I like this book because, while being presenting itself unashamedly as a novel of ideas, it is also rich in local and temporal detail, and quite atmospheric. One detects a strong element of autobiography in it - if not in the story, at least in the setting (mostly Middlesex).
I should also mention that it's very well-written, and full of affable but pointed humour.
The Porcupine
A short novel about the fall of a communist dictator (apparently based on Todor Zhivkov, the last communist ruler of Bulgaria).
Can't remember much about it now. It was OK, but nothing special. Once again, Barnes' detached interest in ideas rather robs the story of much drama.
Talking It Over
A very '90s novel, centring on the instability of modern relationships. Stuart is married to Gillian (or just going out with her - I can't remember). They have a friend, Oliver. Stuart is dependable but boring. Oliver is flambuoyant, unreliable and interesting. Gillian is a silly and leaves Stuart for Oliver. Stuart gets miserable.
It's a long time since I read this, but I seem to remember quite enjoying it. Barnes never quite succeeds, in this novel of ideas, in imbuing his characters with real life and independence - they're all just pegs to hang philosophical perspectives on. Fortunately they are interesting perspectives - but still, I found the unremitting wryness somewhat jarring: I wish Barnes could inject a little passion and drama into his work.
That said, for all its wryness, the general tone of the novel is quite bitter. One wonders if it's in any way based on Barnes' wife's leaving him for lesbian author Jeanette Winterson. Especially as, of all the characters, Gillian is probably the least sympathetically portrayed.
Jorge Luís Borges
Fictions
Jorge Luís Borges was an original and highly influential writer, his mercurial, fantastic imagination an inspiration to later authors, particularly in Latin America. This is a collection of his major short stories, generally considered to be his literary legacy.
In fact to refer to all these pieces as "stories" is somewhat misleading. Many of them represent a minor art form that Borges may well have invented, the fictional book review - that is, not a review of a book of fiction, but of a book that never existed. It's a quirky, even a kooky concept, but it's valid insofar as it saves Borges from having to bore himself - and possibly his readers - with entire novels given over to expressing ideas rather than character or narrative, in which he seems to have had little interest. Some of the fictional works are, in any case, unwritable - take the supposedly completely rewritten version of Don Quixote - rewritten: that is, not updated or copied, but recreated from scratch word-for-word by an author who had to "become" Cervantes for the purpose (while at the same time becoming "more" than Cervantes because he wrote in a different age and therefore multiplied the challenge to his imagination!).
Then there's the fictitious Danish writer Nils Runeberg, who proclaims Judas Iscariot a saint for his determined abjectness, his subversion of his own striving for saintliness; and the mysterious encyclopedia entry about the putative Middle Eastern country of Uqbar with its fanatastic literature set on the planet of Tlön, which takes us into a not just a second, but a third level of fantasy!
Other stories, such as The Lottery in Babylon and The Library of Babel, are quirky fables, somewhat reminiscent of Kafka without the extreme of existential despair and more intellectual in tone.
The central task Borges sets himself in many of these pieces seems to be the playful stretching of the imagination's possibilities: seeing how far he can take an idea and then examining what the world it throws up feels like. (This is perhaps truer of the earlier than the later stories, which become somewhat more conventional and in some cases, particularly the detective stories, a tad meretricious, at least to my mind.)
If Borges's work doesn't have the richness of that of the later Magic Realists whom he so strongly influenced, at its best it's fascinating to read. He's been described as a "writer's writer" - more than anything, perhaps, because he stimulates such creative thoughts in the reader's own imagination.
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita
A feast of traditional Russian buffoonery from the depths of Stalinist repression. The Devil makes a visit to Moscow and wreaks havoc among its inhabitants, accompanied by two demons, a huge black cat and a naked woman. The hero is called the Master, and his lover is Margarita; but I'm afraid I can't remember what they do or what the plot really is.
In a parallel story, a man called Yeshua - better known as Jesus - is sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate. The book ends with a fantasy scene in which these two - to say the least - contrasting strands are brought together.
The "meaning" of this novel is rather elusive, but it is clearly meant as more than a bit of surreal escapism. One way of looking at it is as an attempt to belittle the seriousness of the terrible things that happen in the world. Communist functionaries are made to appear harmless and foolish, and the dreariness of life under a repressive regime is suddenly lifted by the arrival of the Devil. In fact, the most remarkable thing of all about this book, given the environment of its genesis, is that it is so uplifting to read.
The inversion is clear: the modern world is turned into a fantasic circus, while the most mythologised life of all, that of Jesus Christ, becomes a simple, sober and moving story of an innocent man's persecution. What is to be made of this? Well, one rather glib spin to put on it might be that mankind should take the spiritual side of life more seriously, and the material side less so. Over and above this, though, this messy masterpiece is a celebration of the imagination and of the idea of art as escape from life. The sheer wackiness of it makes it well worth reading, regardless of any deeper meanings.
Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A middle-aged narrator reminisces about a girl, Holly Golightly, who used to live downstairs from him in his New York apartment block. She was a teenage runaway who, after flirting briefly with the idea of acting, ended up making a living performing "favours" for men.
There's no real plot as such - it's an affectionate character portrait of a free spirit unable, despite an essentially well-meaning nature, to return the devotion she inspires from others. Superficially carefree, Golightly is shown as possessing a self-destructive streak that is a reaction to a vague, subtly implied dissatisfaction with life.
The story is very well-written, with convincing, streetwise dialogue and many flashes of poetry in the physical description. Equally finely crafted are the three appended shorter stories - all of them rather strange, unsettling depictions of individuals cut off from the mainstream of respectable society.
Peter Carey
The Tax Inspector
A heavily pregnant tax inspector comes to audit a failing garage in a small town near Sydney. The family that runs the garage, the Catchprices, is largely dysfunctional and riven by internal antipathies. Most deranged of all its members is the teenaged Benny, who lives in a waterlogged cellar and is trying to become, simultaneously, a car salesman and an angel. Entering into the story late on is Jack Catchprice, a rich property developer and the one member of the family who - on the surface at least - has managed to put his miserable early environment behind him.
I didn't know quite how to take this novel. At first it seemed a study in social realism, but gradually it acquired a grotesque and rather surreal character - an obvious comparison is with Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. Like the latter novel, The Tax Inspector is well-paced and (for the most part) disturbingly convincing at the psychological level. A less happy similarity, though, is a certain flavour of meretriciousness about it: one doesn't come away with any sense of a message having been conveyed.
We get a glimpse of social commentary, as Maria the tax inspector, idealistically committed to the welfare state, comes into contact with Sydney's substantially corrupt high society and finds it uncomfortably appealing. But this strand is never fully developed and in no way ties in with the central thread of the narrative, which traces the dying throes of the Catchprice family business.
I guess you could say the novel is broadly about disappointed hopes, but that seems almost accidental - you feel what Carey really wanted to do was revel in the seedy psychological worlds of the characters. Which is fine, but I feel the book would therefore have been better as an all-out, unpretentious psychological thriller, without the narrative byways and background filling-in that hint at more "literary" ambitions.
It didn't surprise me to find out after reading this novel that Carey was once a high flier in advertising: there's flair here, but little real depth, and little real heart either.
Raymond Carver
Elephant
Carver's last collection of stories. Much less various in tone and subject matter than WYPBQ,P (q.v.): most of the narrators are middle-aged men with difficult marriages or relatives.
Carver had fully mastered his style by the time he came to write these stories. There is a broad sense of pathos, resignation and loneliness, which the spare style makes all the more poignant; there's never a hint of melodrama or self-pity. This really is writing in which "less is more", where the silences speak volumes, if you will. Highly recommended.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
An early collection of short stories by the "American Chekhov". Terse, pungent snapshots of life in modern American suburbia. Successfully conveys the boredom and disappointment of many American lives behind the glitzy facade. Not as assured as his later work, though.
Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep
Ian Fleming once said James Bond was simply a peg for him to hang a story on; Raymond Chandler takes the opposite approach, hanging the enigmatic, engaging character of his Californian sleuth Marlowe on a peg of a story held onto the wall of cohesion by a single rusty, loosening nail.
Marlowe is employed by dying millionaire General Sternwood to investigate a blackmail note he has received from a pornographer he's never heard of. Before long Marlowe is enmeshed in a seedy LA underworld of tarts, small-time crooks, dodgy casino owners and murders every time he walks into a room.
The plot is fairly intricate but not very convincing, relying extensively on absurd coincidence and Marlowe's apparently telepathic ability to put two and two together, get fifty, and turn out to be right.
This is a shame because in other respects Chandler is a brilliant writer. His characters are engaging and vivid; his dialogue is charmingly witty; and his poetic descriptions are a pleasure to read ("Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees.").
In the end these qualities carry the novel and create an atmospheric, Noir-ish world that just about convinces in spite of its absurdities.
Alice Thomas Ellis
The Birds of the Air
Can't remember much about this - it's about a family get-together where everybody really hates each other and the main (female) character's lover died a long while back. It's all a bit cryptic: we never learn much about the lover.
Frankly, I found this novel pretty boring. I can't say why; it's not badly written; it's just a bit meat-and-two-veg, the sort of book I felt any intelligent, moderately sensitive person could have written. Didn't have the spark of individuality.
On the plus side, it's short.
F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
I didn't know what to make of this. It's supposed to be one of the classics of American literature, but I wasn't fully convinced of its stature.
The plot, for a start, is slight, and in many places unconvincing. Gatsby is a mysterious Long Island millionaire who befriends the narrator, Nick, in a bid to approach a mutual acquaintance called Daisy. Gatsby had a passionate affair with Daisy in his youth and is still besotted with her, although she is now married to an affluent brute called Tom.
Gatsby throws lavish parties in his garden, aiming to lure Daisy there - but his determined attempt to bring to fruition a happiness that he tasted in the past fails tragically.
At its most basic level, the novel is a simple portrayal of yearning for a state of transcendent bliss. I would say that on the whole, the attempt to capture this yearning, in the person of Gatsby, is successful. Daisy has unwittingly become the focus of his idealism, but one can safely say that if it hadn't been her, it would have been someone else.
But the sense of yearning also finds a focus in the atmosphere of Gatsby's parties, where money, glamour and alcohol combine to intoxicate the narrator Nick, almost as much as the image of Daisy intoxicates Gatsby. In fact, Gatsby's wealth and sophistication are not all they seem, and the ultimate irony of the book lies in Gatsby's attempt to attain transcendent bliss by crassly material means (using his dubiously obtained wealth). As Tony Tanner's introduction (Penguin edition) points out, this can be regarded as symbolic of the outlook of America as a nation, its optimism founded on the hope that materialism should ultimately yield a happiness that transcends the material.
So far, so interesting: but there remains something brittle and contrived about the novel. For example, there must surely have been easier ways for Gatsby to woo Daisy than via befriending his anonymous neighbour and throwing his opulent parties. A more resourceful novelist would have found ways to retain the novel's symbolism while also making it narratively convincing. And the denouement, contrived and melodramatic, completely failed to move me.
So this is a flawed novel, but it does have its good qualities. In places, at least, Fitzgerald manages to conjure up an atmosphere of louche, elusive glamour, and the novel also partakes of the crepuscular melancholy that pervades so much literature from the 1920s and 1930s. And at his best, Fitzgerald is a fine prose stylist; I particularly like his description of the discovery of America, by man "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder". It's a shame that Fitzgerald's greatness, like the luminous truth his characters seek, only comes through in such tantalising glimpses.
E M Forster
A Passage to India
A difficult novel to categorise: partly realistic, partly a novel of ideas, partly, apparently, a ghost story.
The novel centres on a group of characters in the Indian Raj - Adela Quested, an open-minded but mildly self-satisfied young Englishwoman; her wise, elderly friend Mrs. Moore; Dr. Aziz, a thoughtful, temperamental Indian Moslem; and Dr. Fielding, a free-thinking English schoolteacher whose fraternising with the natives has earned him the suspicion and contempt of his compatriots.
The centrepiece of the story is a trip several of the characters make to the Marabar caves, near the (fictitious) city of Chandrapore where most of the action is set. In one of the caves, something or someone attempts to attack Adela Quested. The incident is used by both the British and the Indians to attempt to discredit one another, the British accusing Dr. Aziz of attempted rape, the Indians blaming the British for making the whole thing up as an excuse to harden their regime.
This is a very ambitious novel, which for the most part is very successful. It deals with big themes: cultural conflict; bigotry; the scope and limits of friendship; and at bottom, perhaps, the emptiness of existence, symbolised by the terrible echoes the characters hear in the Marabar caves.
In a way, perhaps the sheer amount of material Forster manages to cram into this not particularly long novel mitigates against formal perfection; it doesn't have the smoothness, the unity and focus of many less ambitious works. But given that its prevailing theme is the very absence of smoothness and unity in the world, is this such a flaw? In its structural "lumpiness", the novel mirrors the ragbag of religions and persectives competing in the India it describes.
Forster emerges from this novel as a deep, judicious and humane thinker, troubled by the inability of civilisation to accept and adjust to what it doesn't understand, but with an abiding faith that individual displays of tolerance and good will can make a difference.
Other impressive features of this novel, beyond its subject matter, are its beautifully vivid physical desriptions; its subtle characterisation (particularly of Dr. Aziz); and Forster's style, always readable and lucid.
Michael Frayn
The Russian Interpreter
It's the 1960s, and during the thaw in the Cold War, a naive young English graduate, Gordon Proctor-Gould, finds himself an unlikely entrepreneur, being paid to find ordinary Soviet citizens to "show off" to the West. Working in Moscow, he takes on an interpreter, fellow Englishman Paul Manning, and proceeds to fall in love with a Russian girl who speaks no English. Manning ends up in the ludicrous position of being interpreter in their affair, which very quickly turns complicated. Gradually, relationships both professional and amorous acquire layers of ambiguity, with both Manning and Proctor-Gould losing their confidence in who they can and can't trust.
The book is humorous and well-written, and gives an interesting insight into the flavour of Russian life in the 1960s. (Frayn himself had worked as an interpreter in Moscow.) However, the plotting and dialogue are often contrived, and the story is not, on the whole, as funny as one feels it was intended to be. Still, it's not a long novel and therefore carries its flaws relatively lightly.
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Few people who've read One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to dispute that it's one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century, and I wouldn't deviate from that consensus. It tells the story of several generations of the Buendías family, who inhabit a town in an unspecified South American country that is no doubt largely modelled on Colombia.
I interpreted this novel as a broad allegory of the development of human civilisation - which isn't to say that the events described, many of them supernatural, are intended as corollaries of real historical events; rather, I think, they suggest human consciousness in its various stages of development, from wonder, through prosperity and suffering, to final resignation. Each generation of the Buendías family makes the same mistakes as its predecessors - and this is an accurate reflection of real human behaviour, I think; it's not that the characters lack wisdom, but rather that they have no control over their compulsions, and no real sense of how to move forward.
Although this is one of my all-time favourite novels, I wouldn't exactly call it a page-turner. This is partly because most of the characters have very similar names - a deliberate method used by García Márquez to emphasise their inability to escape their genetic heritage. This means one has to refer frequently to the family tree that is helpfully provided at the front of the book (Penguin edition) - which slows down the reading process somewhat.
But this is most definitely a book that stays with you. It's essentially a poetic novel, whose meaning is absorbed rather than apprehended intellectually. The "magic" of it isn't simply in the strange, often unexplicable events it describes, but also in the transforming effect it has on the reader's mind.
Does that sound a bit pretentious? Please yerself. Anyway, read this book - you won't regret it.
André Gide
L'immoraliste
André Gide was a very interesting writer who, despite his stature, seems not to enjoy a particularly wide readership in the Anglo-Saxon world. Perhaps we find his Gallic penchant for obsessive navel-gazing self-indulgent; or perhaps, coming a generation before the brilliant - and more fashionable - Camus and Sartre, he is undeservedly seen as standing in their shadow.
L'immoraliste is a what Gide called a 'récit' – a short novel in the first person, in which the narrator relates a sequence of events that took place in his past, and tries to understand, and to an extent to justify, patterns of behaviour that had tragic consequences - for others if not for himself.
The narrator of L'immoraliste is Michel, a classical scholar who, after recovering from a serious illness on his honeymoon in Algeria, suddenly perceives the real value of life, and begins to cultivate a philosophy of living through his senses rather than primarily in books, which he comes more and more to despise.
Increasingly, Michel finds pleasure in indulging his less socially acceptable impulses, seeking out the company of poachers on his estate in Normandy, and neglecting his wife Marceline, who devotedly nursed him through his illness. His preference for the company of men to that of women also becomes increasingly apparent.
When Marceline falls ill, the implications of Michel's cultivated egoism are brought out in full, and in the book's chilling denouement the aridity of a philosophy of complete self-abandonment and denial of individual responsibility is laid bare.
Like all Gide's novels, L'immoraliste is painstakingly crafted, rich in symbolism and symmetries that probably can't all be appreciated in one reading. I first read the book for my ill-fated Oxford entrance exam, 18 years ago, and if anything was still more enthused by it the second time round. I was particularly struck by Gide's ability to evoke a sense of place vividly yet economically - the austere splendour of Algeria's landscape, the lush richness of Normandy's.
Gide described Michel in L'immoraliste as the unrestrained expression of one side of his personality: the part that was strong, wilful, intolerant and drawn to evil - but that at the same time was sensual and life-loving. In a 'companion' recit called La porte étroite, Gide portrayed the unrestrained expression of the opposing side of his personality in Alissa, a spiritual and self-denying girl whose attempt to repress all egoism from her behaviour has equally negative consequences.
Kazuo Ishiguro
An Artist of the Floating World
Having enjoyed The Remains of the Day, I decided to sample this earlier novel by Ishiguro. It was something of a disappointment; not that it's a bad novel by any means. It's just a bit slow-moving and uneventful.
An elderly painter (if I recall correctly) reminisces about his life before the war. He muses on the current state of Japan, and the differences in attitude between the old and the young generations. I think, anyway; I read this back in 1989 so can't remember much about it.
It's very worthy, and readers with a higher boredom threshold than me might enjoy it, as it is well-written.
The Remains of the Day
Everybody and their dog has read this book, so there's not much point in describing it. But I'll do so anyway.
An elderly butler, Stevens, makes a car trip to the west country - his first holiday in many years (possibly ever, I can't remember). The novel is an internal monologue, as he thinks back on his past, trying to justify his having devoted his life to serving a man who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser. A pattern of self-deception and repression emerges, which extends to all aspects of his life; most tragically, he spurned the advances of an attractive maid with whom he shared duties, ostensibly out of a sense of duty to his vocation, but in reality, it seems, to chronic emotional constipation.
As Stevens nears his destination, the truth about his wasted life becomes painfully clear to him.
A sad and powerful book, now justifiably famous.
Milan Kundera
The Farewell Party
An early comic novel by Kundera. Much less philosophising than in his later books, and a much lighter tone generally (though much of the humour is black, and some may find it distastefully flippant). Set on a Czech fertility spa where a randy jazz musician gets a nurse pregnant (if I remember rightly) and has trouble persuading her to get an abortion.
Not a classic, but very readable. Probably not one for the feminists.
L'identité (Identity)
A portrayal of a love relationship between two needy but independent people - familiar Kundera territory. As far as I could tell, the question the novel tries to ask is: what makes a lover special? Is it their appearance, their character, or simply the fact that we call them 'ours'? An interesting subject, but Kundera's treatment of it is strangely half-hearted. The old 'essayistic' style is largely absent, and as a result this seems a very conventional novel compared with The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Immortality. Conventional, that is, except for the wilful blurring of dream and reality, a device that I couldn't make any sense of at all except - and perhaps I'm being too harsh here - as an exuse for the narrative's fundamental incoherence.
Since my French is rather rusty, it's possible that I didn't pick up on some hidden brilliance in this book. But I still can't get over the feeling that Kundera said everything he had to say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and that he has struggled since then to find new material, both narrative and philosophical, to feed his work with; which would certainly explain the brevity of his recent novels.
La Lenteur (Slowness)
Yes, I read this in the original French, don't you know. (Well, a language degree has to be good for something.) Can't remember much about it - the usual philosophical musings set in the context of an entomologists' conference in some French chateau. Certainly readable, though I did feel at several points that Kundera was starting to repeat himself, using a new philosophical polarity (slowness versus speed) to say the same things about life as in many of his other novels.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Kundera's best novel, in my opinion, and an all-time classic. Czech doctor Tomas meets emotionally vulnerable Tereza in a bar and ends up marrying her. He's constantly torn between his desire to bed every woman he meets and his love for Tereza. Their relationship is both happy and sad.
Tomas's independence extends to his professional life, and when he refuses to back down over a claim that a letter he sent to a magazine was disingenuously edited on publication, he incurs the wrath of the communist Czech regime and ends up losing his job. But somehow, he and Tereza muddle through.
TULOB asks, in a nutshell: How much does our freedom to choose our actions really give us control over our lives? Is control over our lives even what we want? Doesn't a time come when we feel the need to commit ourselves to a course of action we can never turn back from? And in the end, is it a cause for celebration or regret that nothing matters, that we are all burdened by the "lightness of being"?
This may make TULOB sound arid and abstract, but on the contrary, it's one of the most moving novels I've read. There is very little physical desciption - we don't even find out what the characters look like - but this gives the novel a dreamlike vagueness of atmosphere which reinforces the themes of endless possibility and the impossibility of ever knowing where our actions will lead us, or whether they will procure us what we want.
I'm afraid I really can't praise this book enough: it's about life, love, chance, sex, politics - all human life is there.
That said, I've known several people who haven't liked it. Hardened pragmatists will claim it says nothing about real life. And feminists may find Kundera's old school view of sexual relations hard to take.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian nobleman who published nothing during his lifetime, but bequeathed (among other works) this impressive novel to posterity.
The Leopard portrays the decline of a branch of the Sicilian aristocracy during the unification of Italy in the mid-19th Century. It centres around the thoughts of the generous but introspective Prince Fabrizio di Salena as he watches his heritage being written out of history, resigned to the new order but never finding a home in it.
The novel is remarkably undramatic, less a narrative than a sequence of scenes from the Salena household during this tumultuous period. Almost all the action happens, as it were, 'off-stage'. The scenes portrayed - hunting trips, dinners, visits by clerics - are used by the author to throw history into relief, suggesting through the evocation of local atmosphere and subtle symbolism the great changes taking place in the wider world.
This is a short novel but extremely dense in its description and its symbolism - not a book that can easily be digested in one sitting. It's very finely written, full of keen insights and conveying a strong sense of the atmosphere both of the eerie Sicilian landscape and of the lives of the last 'proper' Italian aristocrats. A subtly haunting work.
Philip Larkin
Jill
A shy Oxford undergraduate is envious of his peers' sexual savoir-faire and retreats into a dream-world, inventing a sister/girlfriend called Jill with whom he has highly ambiguous relationship. In real life, women ridicule him and nothing really gets resolved. As one would expect from Larkin, a profoundly depressing novel (and from one so young! - 21), but alarmingly accomplished and also alarmingly portentous of the bitter, regretful tone of the poems he would write in middle age.
D H Lawrence
Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel grows up in a mining village in Nottinghamshire. His father drinks; his mother smothers him. He gets to know about women and acquires a job in town.
Can't remember much about this book, I'm afraid. I have to confess, I was somewhat disappointed by it, given its classic status. It's very well-written and its portrayal of community and family life is convincing; I just found it rather slow-moving. A matter of taste, no doubt.
Penelope Lively
Moon Tiger
Claudia Hampton, a elderly, successful popular historian, is dying in hospital. She tells her nurses of her plan to write a history of the world, but what she comes up with, we are led to assume, is this memoir of her own life, incorporating reflections on human history and fate.
The book is not technically orignal, but is none the worse for that. Hampton's reminiscences flit from one part of her life to another, with detail gradually filled in about her relationships with, among others, her brother, daughter, on-off lover and, over and above these, the one man, Tom, with whom she found, working as a journalist in Egypt during the Second World War, all too brief romantic fulfilment.
Lively is a skilled wordsmith, her descriptions of the beauty and the horror of wartime Egypt being particularly vivid. This is a novel of reflection rather than of ideas, as such: ideas are extrapolated from a life, rather than governing the novel's structure. The life and character of Hampton are convincingly portrayed, and Lively's view of human relationships is observant and subtle. On balance, although life-affirming, this is a sad book, acknowledging the impossibility of life or love ever matching up to our ideals for more than brief periods, and contemplating head-on the unfairness of fate in deciding to whom it distributes suffering and blessings.
I found this a very moving and stimulating novel; also, in places, it's highly erotic. It won the Booker Prize in 1987.
David Lodge
Changing Places
The campus novel par excellence. Bumbling British lecturer Philip Swallow swaps jobs for a year with his American counterpart Maurice Zapp. Each starts to acquire some of the characteristics of the other, Swallow letting his hair down with Californian hippies, Zapp becoming strangely attracted to Swallow's dowdy, domesticated wife.
A tongue-in-cheek, yet incisive study of the American and the English characters. Above all, very entertaining - Lodge couldn't not write a funny sentence if he tried.
Nice Work
The Arts Faculty of the University of Rummidge sends feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose to spend a day a week in a factory, in a bid to boost the University's relevance credentials. Penrose reluctantly shadows factory boss Vic Wilcox as he goes about his business, and to begin with, each has little knowledge of or interest in the other's world. However, Penrose and Wilcox gradually come to appreciate how limited their horizons have hitherto been, and a certain mutual respect - and more - emerges.
This is an excellent novel, quickly-paced, unpretentious and fun, yet also thought-provoking. Lodge has a talent for making quite arcane social and philosophical debates - What is the value of education for its own sake? Do academe and business owe anything to each other? - seem interesting and of common concern.
The main characters are flawed but likeable (if, in the case of Wilcox the factory boss, rather unconvincingly articulate), and the tone of the book, despite its largely (and justifiably) gloomy portrait of academic life in the mid-1980s, never capitulates to the pull of pessimism.
Author, Author NEW! (Added 07/06/2008)
Renowned for his verbosity and his convoluted syntactical style, Henry James is generally more respected than loved as a writer, and many would approach a longish biographical novel devoted to him with trepidation. However, I tend to trust David Lodge implicitly with his material, and I'm glad to say my trust was vindicated by this excellent novel.
Author, Author centres on the five-year period during which James, disappointed by low sales of his novels, turned his creative attention to the theatre. The diversion was, by and large, a very unhappy one, culminating in the disastrous first night of his play Guy Domville, which was doomed by misjudgements in its action, poor costume design and hecklers possibly hired by a jealous literary rival.
The novel contrasts James' disappointment in a milieu not his own with the extraordinary success of a novel by his friend George du Maurier, a cartoonist obliged by failing eyesight to make a living by other means. The mediocre Trilby made du Maurier his fortune, its success, however, mystifying its author and coming too late for him to be able to enjoy it properly.
Lodge portrays his characters convincingly and sympathetically: James dignified, honest, attentive, somewhat vain; du Maurier modest, parsimonious and quietly louche; and James' fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson as devoted and lonely. The book is, at root, a study of the artistic life, its insecurities and consolations, its rivalries and its alliances.
I finished Author, Author liking James more than before I started it: whether Lodge manipulated me into doing so, or whether his portrayal of him as a man shows a real side to him that's less evident in the novels, perhaps doesn't matter.
Therapy
Laurence "Tubby" Passmore is a successful sitcom writer undergoing a midlife crisis and trying to see it off with all the treatments the modern age and his money make available: psychotherapy, aromatherapy, acupuncture, physiotherapy. However, it's Kierkegaard, deep thought and a self-initiated analysis of his own past that finally show signs of pointing him towards resolution.
As usual with Lodge, this is a satisfying and cleverly constructed book. Although its humour is one of its outstanding qualities, it gets more serious as it progresses and ends up being decidedly poignant. Its ultimate message is of heavily qualified optimism: that it's never too late to sort one's head out. An entertaining and thought-provoking effort; highly recommended.
Thinks...
Another humorous study of the complexities of adult relationships from Lodge, this time featuring a womanising cognitive scientist and a recently widowed lady novelist. It’s a very perceptive portrayal of the different ways in which the typical male and the typical female minds, and hearts, operate. The narration has three strands: the taped musings of the cognitive scientist, Ralph Messenger, undertaken initially as a piece of semi-serious research; the diary of Helen Reed, the novelist; and good old-fashioned third-person omniscience.
The switching of perspectives helps keep the pace flowing and also has some bearing on one of the themes of the novel, the nature of consciousness and subjectivity. That said, it would be more accurate to describe this as the framework of the novel rather than a theme as such: this isn’t fundamentally a Kundera-esque philosophical work, but an empirical consideration of human relationships and differing perspectives. Lodge’s interest is more in the ways the two main characters think - Ralph analytically but somewhat meretriciously, Helen intuitively but vaguely - than in the validity of either of their actual views.
The story is expertly plotted, plausible without being predictable, and intricate without being confusing. Lodge is also relatively rare among male novelists, I think, in being able to write convincingly from the female perspective. Like most of Lodge’s books, this one is really easy to read, funny, thought-provoking and, despite having its dark moments, rather cheering.
Ian McEwan
The Cement Garden
A bizarre and rather disturbing novel. Four young siblings are left to their own devices after their parents die. Without supervision, and living in a solitary house in the middle of wasteland, they are free to indulge their less socially acceptable fantasies and impulses.
Formally, this novel is hard to fault. It is well-paced, with events slowly building up to an appropriately shocking climax; and the siblings' characters develop convincingly as they confront the adult issues of death and sex while simultaneously regressing into childish amorality. As for the style, it is always lucid and precise, with McEwan revelling in sensual detail as perceived by the narrator, Jack, in a kind of intense but unreflective eternal present.
For all its accomplishment, however, the novel leaves a slightly nasty taste in the mouth. This is due mainly to the deliberately titillating and shocking ending, around which one can't help but wonder whether McEwan had built the whole story - a talented young writer trying to give his debut novel a publicity head start.
I don't know. Anyway, meretricious or not, this very well-written book. Read it and make up your own mind.
Iris Murdoch
The Bell
A very strange novel, and a very good one too. It describes a group of misfits who live in a religious commune in an old country house. Under the happy-clappy exterior, complex emotional and sexual undercurrents become apparent, as characters struggle with conflicting desires and ideals.
My memory is so bad that I can't say much more about it than that. Particularly good, I thought, was the characterisation; and the novel also has a strange, ghostly atmosphere about it.
My only criticism is that the symbolism becomes perhaps a bit laboured towards the end, when improbabilities creep into the plot. But on the whole, it's an intriguing, compelling read.
Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
This book won the Booker Prize in 1997. I was half-expecting a mushy, unremarkable work from yet another good-looking ex-colonial who knew exactly which multiculturalist buttons to press. Actually it's one of the best contemporary novels I've read (or started) in ages. I'm not sure if it's quite a masterpiece, but it is brilliantly written: witty, poetic, clever, moving, and angry.
The non-linear narrative gradually exposes two parallel and interrelated tragedies in the lives of a divorced Syrian Christian woman Ammu, and her twin children, Rahel and Estha (girl and boy respectively). Roy employs a playful, at times experimental prose style, characterised by pseudo-proper names, adjective-noun concatenations and verbless sentences, that occasionally seems mannered and laboured, but on the whole lends surprise and vividness to a story that more conventional language couldn't supply. Her creative way with words also helps us to see both life and language through the eyes of the two child protagonists: as indefinitely extensible resources, not things to be channelled and constrained. This aspect of the writing is particularly poignant, given the sense of doom and constraint the narrative conveys almost from the first page.
Roy has stated unequivocally that this novel is "about caste", though to me this seems an overstatement that actually does a disservice to the book's scope. Of the two terrible events around which the narrative centres, one could have happened in any country where children take their games too far, unaware of the dangers that lurk outside the walls of their homes. And as for the caste issue, Roy seems to me to be looking at it from the wider point of view of the opportunities it gives to the vilest characteristics of human nature - jealousy, cruelty, arrogance, cowardice, brutality, self-deceit - to express themselves. Only the central characters - Ammu, the twins, Ammu's brother Chacko, and the young Untouchable Velutha - are portrayed with much sympathy; human society and human nature at large appear as utterly dark and corrupt.
Arguably Roy could have made more of the thematic opportunities offered by a time and a place (south-west India in the 1960s) in which several "big ideas" - Hinduism, Marxism, and Christianity - were competing, sometimes violently. But this is still a compelling and important book, a classic tale of lost innocence, of two children being initiated prematurely into the dark and ever-narrowing tunnel of adult grief and guilt.
Arthur Schnitzler
Fräulein Else
Else, the daughter of a distinguished Viennese lawyer, is on holiday with her aunt and cousin Paul in San Morino. She receives a telegram from her mother, who reveals that her father has embezzled money which he has thrown away on gambling and stocks. Her mother presses Else to ask a family friend, who is staying at the same hotel, to "lend" her father 30000 Guilders to pay off his debts, otherwise he faces prison.
The family friend, middle-aged sleazeball Herr von Dorsday, agrees to the request on condition that Else strip for him. Most of the latter part of the novella follows Else's thoughts as she agonises over whether to comply with his condition.
The sequence of events is conveyed through Else's internal monologue. It is a bleak, well-written and quite powerful story, but in my opinion not as good as it could have been. Several interesting themes are suggested, but none of them are fully brought out: the loneliness of the human condition; whether it is honourable to debase oneself for one's family; what we owe loved ones who are dishonourable and take us for granted; the tension between pride and the urge towards sexual profligacy. One could be generous and say that Schnitzler didn't want to hammer these things home; but I can't help thinking he rather couldn't be bothered stretching himself intellectually. Many German-language writers seem to exhibit this tendency.
That said, the novel is well-paced and is a skillful depiction of a mind in crisis.
The edition I read (Fischer) also contains two shorter stories,Blumen Flowers) andDer Andere The Other). Neither of these struck me as particularly interesting.
Graham Swift
Ever After
Far too long since I read this to say anything about it, except that it was quite good, but not as good as Waterland or Last Orders. It's something to do with academics in Oxford, if I remember rightly.
Last Orders
A group of working class Londoners drive off to Margate to throw their dead mate's ashes out to sea. They take turns to muse on their friendships and romances, and complex emotional entanglements gradually unfold. Moving, profound, well-paced - but the story is not told linearly, so is quite confusing for the easily confused (like me). Some day I intend to re-read it.
Won the Booker Prize a few years back, deservedly.
The Light of Day
Another very good effort from one of England's most consistent and conscientious novelists. The Light of Day follows a day in the life of private detective George Webb as he visits Sarah Nash, a former client with whom he has fallen in love, in prison. He 'calls in' on the grave of her ex-husband on the way. While he does these things he reflects on the bizarre twist his life has taken, and recalls the events that led him and Sarah to their current unenviable predicament.
Swift employs his usual technique of telling several stories simultaneously, each of which takes place at a different period in the past, but all of them crucial in having brought the narrator to his current situation. Swift's extravagant use of flashbacks starts out by being rather wearing, but gradually builds up a very effective head of suspense as factual details are filled in and the portrayal of the characters' emotional worlds deepens.
The Light of Day is written in a very plain style - even plainer than Last Orders, which at least could employ working-class vernacular to add colour to the narrative. It is always difficult for a novelist to make a first-person narrator sound like anything other than a novelist; after all, how can you write a good novel without writing 'good' prose? Only an extremely subtle application of craftsmanship can overcome this self-imposed handicap, persuading the reader of extraordinary depths beneath an ordinary surface texture. And does Swift succeed? On the whole, I think he does, even if the barrages of staccato verbless sentences sometimes sound rather too convincingly like the amateurish fumblings of a half-educated ex-cop struggling to express himself artistically; and even if, conversely, the touches of sharp lyricism and astute psychological analysis sound rather too much like a first-rank novelist indulging his artistic gifts at the expense of strict realism.
So it's not 100% successful, and probably never could be; but The Light of Day is undeniably a beautifully conceived novel. And its real centre of interest is not, in any case, the grey character of Webb himself, but rather the account of the sudden, unexpected breakdown of Sarah Nash's happy marriage when she and her husband take in a female refugee from Croatia. I've read few novels that capture so convincingly how stable relationships that seemed set to last for life can collapse overnight.
Waterland
Sordid teenage sexual goings-on in the Norfolk Fens. Theme (if I remember rightly) is that we have to understand our past (both personal and historic) to understand ourselves and move forward. Though that makes it sound more life-affirming than it is - in fact, it's one of the most depressing books I've read. But superbly atmospheric.
Swift's passionate insistence on our duty to understand our lives and to make peace with our sorrows render him one of most moving and profound British writers of the late twentieth century. And his feeling for drama, tragedy and place is positively Hardyesque.
Read this novel - it's a classic!
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse 5
A brief novel describing the experiences of US soldier Billy Pilgrim as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. There are also jumps to Billy's later life as a husband, father, optometrist and exhibit in an alien zoo - jumps that take place owing to Billy's having come somehow "unstuck in time". He is an everyman, or, to put it another way, a nobody: physically weak, intellectually average, morally irresolute. But he is a survivor, an innocent onlooker as both fellow Americans and - during the bombing of Dresden - Germans are senselessly slaughtered around him.
The aliens who abduct him reveal to Billy that time does not really run in the way that humans experience it, but that - at least to them, the Tralfamadorians - each moment exists eternally and can be visited and revisited. Everything is determined in advance: there is no free will, but rather we are all "the listless playthings of enormous forces".
The chief aim of the book is to convey the sheer horror and senselessness of war as it is experienced by those in the thick of it: that all war can ever teach is the value of peace. It's a strange mixture of exuberant wackiness, sardonic wit, humanity and grim pessimism. A chilling, funny and moving read.
Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
My love of this book may stem from the TV adaptation, which I saw 17 years before I actually read the novel. Said TV adaptation follows the book very closely - in fact John Mortimer, the screenwriter, had most of the script already written for him, as the book is (at a rough guess) about 60% dialogue.
At any rate, the novel certainly wasn't a disappointment. It is a lot shorter than you'd guess from the TV series, because very little was left out of the latter. Nevertheless, it has the same epic feel to it, and is an effective portrayal of the power of nostalgia and regret - as well as being a vivid evocation of Britain, and indeed, the world, in the grip of change before, during and after the war.
The narrator is Charles Ryder, who befriends frivolous but troubled toff Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, and becomes becomes intoxicated with the atmosphere of life at Brideshead, the Flytes' family home. Over the years, Sebastian descends into alcoholism and Charles starts an affair with his sister Julia. Charles and Julia make plans to divorce their respective spouses and grab for themselves the happiness they feel they'd be assured of as man and wife. The question is: can Julia reconcile her (as she sees it) wanton behaviour with her Catholic faith? Ah ha! That would be telling!
Waugh himself regarded the novel as flawed, and someone else (can't remember who) described it as "lush and arid". I think that is rather harsh. Waugh's extremely high standards caused him to make too much of the novel's - very minor - deficiencies; and those who allege that it "sucks up to" the aristocracy are surely missing the point. You don't have to have any personal regret for the decline of the British upper classes to be moved by Waugh's own regret for it; for he puts it in the context of real-seeming lives, loves, memories, hopes and disappointments with which the reader can instinctively empathise. Not less impressive is Waugh's bringing in of broader historical themes: the post-war decline of a set of old values and the moving of the world's political and cultural fulcrum moving away from Europe towards America - superbly personified in Julia's shrewd, obtuse husband Rex.
The characterisation is rich and convincing (despite Waugh's assertion that he had "no technical psychological interest"); Waugh's ear for dialogue is well-nigh infallible; and the story is superbly paced. Unmistakably the work of a master.
A Handful of Dust
Can't remember much about this, but it was very good. Tony Last is a well-meaning upper class buffoon whose marriage to shallow, selfish Lady Brenda unravels before his eyes. In the end he clears off to Brazil, where an extraordinary, and disturbing, fate awaits him.
A Handful of Dust shares many of the merits of Brideshead Revisite - good characterisation, masterful dialogue, and a consistent rightness of phrase and readability. Humour is more to the fore than in Brideshead, but this is more than a mere comedy: rather, it dramatically justaposes the ridiculousness of human beings with their nastiness and unhappiness.
Stefan Zweig
Schachnovelle (Chess Story)
An ad hoc chess match takes place on an ocean liner between a world-famous grandmaster and an Austrian lawyer who has been traumatised by a year of solitary confinement at the hands of the Nazis.
In true Austrian style, this short novel is quirky and morbid. It's a reasonably interesting study of the contrast between two types of genius - the phlegmatic and the feverish. Ultimately, though, it lacks psychological depth. The tormented lawyer, playing imaginary games of chess against himself in his hotel room, is clearly his own adversary in more ways that one; but this clever parallel is is kept at a superficial, schematic level, rather than being used to penetrate more deeply into the mechanics of mental breakdown.
Readable nonetheless.