Booking a Room with a View

2011-07-24T23:44:00.000-06:00

The 2011 Booker Prize longlist will be announced this Tuesday, the 26th, and so I wanted (despite my longish absence from blogging) to post not predictions, but rather the titles of those novels that have been garnering buzz in this quarter and that I'm quite eager to read:

Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child
Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side
Tessa Hadley's The London Train
Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table
Ross Raisin's Waterline
Andrew Miller's Pure
Alexi Zentner's Touch

I'll be returning to blogging soon with a dual review of two novels that shared the prize: Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.

2010-12-22T11:56:00.004-07:00

First, let me express puzzlement that Schindler's List was claimed, marketed, received and won prizes as a novel. It's a fine book, if sometimes a bit awkwardly written (the occasional too-abrupt, and so initially confusing, transition or digression), but it doesn't read like a novel, in large part because it doesn't bring to bear "the texture and devices" of fiction that Keneally, in the introduction, claims it does. I find it telling that since publishing Schindler's List, and despite continuing to publish proper novels (e.g. Office of Innocence), Keneally is these days more commonly regarded as a writer of non-fiction, having written biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Sickles, as well two books on the origins of Australia, a book of Irish history, etc -- telling because Schindler's List is more a work of Holocaust Studies than a work of fiction (as such, the book that seemed to have set him on the path of writing non-fiction more often than fiction), however its dust jacket would have us situate it in its author's canon.

But to the book itself...

Having seen Spielberg's film upwards of a dozen or so times (including five times in the cinema), I felt very familiar with the story. That is, until I realized how unfamiliar with the story I actually was. In the understandable interest of cinematic expedience, a number of the personalities and events in Keneally's novel are conflated, or excised altogether, in Spielberg's film -- making reading the book an awakening. Certain of the details or developments new to me left me plumb thunderstruck, including the scene early on when the Nazi officers herd the Orthodox Jews and the Jewish gangster Max Redlicht into "the oldest of all Polish synagogues," forcing them to spit on the Torah scrolls before murdering them all regardless. What struck me most about this scene, and others in the book, was its depth of the tragic, was the way in which we seem encouraged to regard Redlicht's refusal to desecrate the scrolls as an act of heroism (which it is) only to realize a moment later how much more pressing it is that we regard these Jewish men being put in such a situation at gunpoint in the first place as a horror capable of relegating Redlicht's heroism to footnote status. The dawning of this larger, more complex, more poignant reading of the situation felt, to me, cut from the same cloth as Oscar's epiphany -- in the wake of having seen the Aktion in which the red girl wanders amidst carnage -- that the Nazis were permitting witnesses because the plan was to extinguish the witnesses, too. Keneally is quite good at pulling back veils of narrative, one at a time, so that the purview of atrocities so vast as to inure us instead startle us, despite the newsreels we've seen over the years or the accounts we've read. In other words, the way in which he has written the book somehow makes the Holocaust feel more like breaking news than old news -- which is precisely how a narrative like this should read. Twice, while reading the book in a cafe, I had to set it aside, so close was I to bursting into tears in full view of latte drinkers and cheesecake snackers. I wasn't expecting the book to leave me feeling bruised (again, given that I'd seen the film so many times over the years and as recently as three or four months earlier), but it did. Its power to shock, its insistence on (even inexplicable) light within the dark, its precise construction achieving theatrical effects in service of truth rather than artifice, its phrasing sometimes disarming me with its gift for framing (and so making comprehensible) that which had defied comprehension (I'm thinking particularly of Stern comparing Belzec and its manufacturing of death to Henry Ford's assembly line production of cars) -- for all of these reasons, it is a book that one hopes will always survive.

Its shortlist competition in 1982 (those I've read in italics): John Arden's (now out-of-print) Silence Among the Weapons; Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet; William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War; Lawrence Durrell's (now out-of-print) Constance, or Solitary Practices; Alice Thomas Ellis's The 27th Kingdom.

Reading: 1st
A deserving winner

2010-10-23T14:02:00.003-06:00

I've been M.I.A. for some little time now, having grown disenchanted with the notion of blogging (and pulling the plug on what had been my principal blog) in the face of so manic a life as mine (teaching, grading papers, working retail, church commitments, two book clubs, diligent dieting). (Indeed, I couldn't remember whether I'd pulled the plug on this one too!) So, then, what has happened in the world of the Booker Prize of late -- and what have the thoughts of this commentator been?

As we all know, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question walked off with the 2010 Booker Prize, a week after Ladbrokes betting had been suspended on winner predictions (thanks to a suspicious rash of wagers on Tom McCarthy's apparently divisive novel C) and a day before we found out that Jacobson's novel edged out Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America with a 3-2 vote in the final judging. This, of course, pained me no end, given my proselytizing admiration of Carey's fiction and that a 3-2 vote in his favor would've made him the one and only three-time winner of the Booker Prize. (Consolation for Carey came in his having been named a 2010 finalist for the National Book Award the day after he lost to Jacobson.) But I felt the need to thank someone -- anyone -- involved in bringing him mere inches from making literary history, and so I tracked down an e-mail address for Andrew Motion (former Poet Laureate of England and chair of the judging panel) and did just that. (His response was brief and gracious -- and glowing with praise for Carey's work.)

As for my own reading: look for a review of Keneally's Schindler's List in the coming week.

Glad to be back.

2010-07-19T23:46:00.004-06:00

This year's Booker Prize longlist will be announced on the 28th, but in anticipation of it, I wanted to predict what I feel are four certainties to make the longlist:

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America
David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
James Robertson's And the Land Lay Still
Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean

Time will tell...

2010-06-15T17:13:00.002-06:00

Regarding my comment, in a post last September, on what I had perceived to be Adam Thorpe, as a citizen of France (he was born there and lives there), being ineligible for the Booker Prize:

I have it on good authority (a friend of mine was fortunate enough to meet Thorpe a few months back) that he is both very kind and very irritated that his novel Hodd didn't so much as make the Booker Prize longlist last fall. All of which tells me that he must have dual citizenship -- for what reason would he have to be miffed if he were, as I'd supposed, ineligible for the prize in the first place?

Leading me -- given the accolades Ulverton earned upon its publication and the brilliance of Hodd (I'm reading, and loving, the latter right now) -- to wonder as to the reason Thorpe's work is continually passed over. Hmm.

2010-06-14T10:16:00.010-06:00

I first read Heat and Dust almost 15 years ago and have just finished re-reading it for this blog project. Despite having earlier read it, and having seen the film based on it, I couldn't have told you -- going into the re-read -- what it was about, so slight was its impression on me in my early 20s. And now I find I dislike the book for largely different reasons altogether!

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is best known as the screenwriter of most of the much-lauded Merchant-Ivory films (the best known of which are The Remains of the Day and Howards End). Indeed, she is among the greatest living screenwriters. (There has been much dragging of Merchant-Ivory Productions through the dirt in the last decade, as tastes in cinema have changed, but I'll have no truck with it; I've been an enormous fan of their work, Heat and Dust and a few others notwithstanding, for a long time.) But as a novelist -- in conceiving an original narrative (her glorious scripts have notably been adaptations) -- her narrative gifts sometimes lack conscientious underpinning. Her scenes are often quite moving (e.g. the narrator and Maji remaining with Leelavati, the beggar woman, over the hours of her dying) and her prose is elegant and clean -- and sometimes quite beautiful (e.g. "She stuck out her hand to see if the rain had started. It had, but so softly that it was both invisible and inaudible, and everything -- the garden pavilions, the pearl-grey walls, the mosque -- seemed to be dissolving of its own accord like sugar in water.") -- but the book has no serious commitment to its serious ideas. Its characters have no, or little, moral definition, and so we have no, or little, sense of their motives.

Adulteries loom large in Heat and Dust, but Jhabvala seems to regard them less as matters of consequence or ethical puzzles than as feminist opportunities meant to be seized and rejoiced in. Flannery O'Connor (a novelist whose sense of the distinction between that which is moral, and so necessary, and that which is moralizing, and so to be shunned, was as keen as those senses come) once wrote: "It is one thing for a [person] to read about adultery in the Bible or in Anna Karenina, and quite another for him to read about it in most modern fiction. This is [in part] because in both the former instances adultery is considered a sin, and in the latter, at most, an inconvenience." A novel addressing adulteries should never resort to preachiness, but neither should it cavalierly ignore the power of adulteries to reduce lives to rubble. In short, a novel that confronts such freighted themes (irrespective of whether it recognizes sin in the actions of its characters) must concede that such themes demand grave attention, and it is in this respect that Heat and Dust (which treats both extramarital affairs and the decision to have an abortion as casual stepping stones on the road to discovering oneself) falls precipitously short of masterpieces including Bronte's Jane Eyre, Greene's The End of the Affair and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (all novels concerned with duplicities in matters both emotional and sexual, and all novels that treat the subject with appropriate moment -- one might acknowledge Josephine Hart's Damage here, too, the title saying it all).

I don't want the novels I read in squeaking-clean, Pleasantvillean denial of the hurt we do one another, but I do want them to acknowledge those hurts as hurts. Heat and Dust, whatever its merits and apart from Olivia and the Nawab being so damn unlikable (she for her naivete, he for his selfishness and his belief that certain others deserve his contempt, both for their lack of concern for those in their circles), gives us characters who disregard their sin and seems to celebrate that disregard. Jhabvala's (correct) critique of proposed moral justification for the British imperial presence in India -- at one point the Nawab tells Olivia that the British "make themselves into judges over others, saying this is good, this bad, as if they are all-knowing," while at another point we learn that Dr. Saunders (representing the British Empire and thinking it his prerogative to strike the Indian women who come to his clinic with complications from their abortions) has "strong ideas about morality and how to uphold it" -- swings too far in the opposite direction and becomes an unfortunate championing of moral relativism, permitting her moments in which, for instance, we're encouraged to see nothing amiss or strange about a woman who is sleeping with a married man telling that man that he is a good husband to his wife (!), or in which the narrator initially consents ("out of curiosity" -- as one might order an exotic new condiment on one's hamburger) to a massage intended to bring about a miscarriage of her child.

Its shortlist competition in 1975 (italics indicating I've read it): Thomas Keneally's (now out-of-print) Gossip from the Forest.

Reading: 2nd
An undeserving winner

2009-11-19T11:41:00.014-07:00

Having finished Wolf Hall a week or so ago, I thought it was high time to post -- lest memories of the book grow dim. Not, of course, that I see there being much chance of that: Mantel's novel reads like a smoking orange brand on one's imagination.

There has been much fuss from the book's admirers and detractors in the British press about British familiarities with the corners of the Tudor histories it relates -- on the one hand, critics argue that Mantel breathes vibrant and re-considered life into a past grown threadbare with yawning overhandling in grammar school lessons (or, as John Mullan has noted, that she has "unstitched" that past), whereas on the other, critics accuse her of copping out in telling a tale so often told, of cheating readers of encounters with the unknown. All of which brings me to what was, perhaps, the greatest thrill for me in reading Wolf Hall: that I know almost nothing of the historical record from which Mantel has written. Growing up in southeastern Wyoming, one's grade school histories are those of the Oregon Trail, trading posts, bison massacres and Wild West shows. I, of course, went into Mantel's splendid imagining of Henry VIII's court knowing a fair bit about Elizabethan England (from the numerous Shakespeare biographies I'd read and documentaries I'd seen), but next to nothing about the the political landscape that preceded, and gave rise to, it. Sure, I knew something about the dubious origins of the Church of England (belonging, as I do, to the Episcopal Church, its American counterpart), but had neither heard nor read the name "Thomas Cromwell" (the main character in Wolf Hall, and architect of the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, through whose all-seeing vision and intuition Mantel imagines this world -- indeed, her appropriation of his perspective proves to be an act of ventriloquism every bit as convincing and enchanting, in its way, as Peter Carey's assumption of Ned Kelly's voice in his 2001 Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang) before reviews of the novel began appearing in the Spring. I turned page after page, discovering (most of) its cast of characters and their tangles of relationships for the first time and couldn't have been -- as a result -- more transported than I was.

From the outset, the prose is all one would hope it to be in a Booker Prize-winning novel. Whether relating the beating a teenage Cromwell takes from his father in the opening pages -- "Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet." -- or, later, describing "[a] wash of sunlight [...] over [a] river, pale as the flesh of a lemon," Mantel's ear is perfect. (I read one sentence that made me wince with its tinniness, its rattle -- one in a book of 650 pages.) But the moment I knew that Wolf Hall was something rare and overwhelming came during the scene in which Cromwell's daughters succumb to the plague: the prose in those two pages is so gorgeous, and Mantel's empathies so profound, I was reminded of nothing so much as the Gospels and the masterpiece that secured Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize for Literature (and a candidate for the best novel I've ever read), Kristin Lavransdatter (in, it must be stressed, the Tiina Nunnally translation).

And how unexpected that a British novel -- from an agnostic's pen and published in 2009 -- should consider religion with the gravitas it deserves (modern and postmodern British novelists tending so often to treat religion as a subject for dismissive ridicule and contempt, as the butt of some humanist joke making the rounds among the intelligentsia)? It is cause for celebration. As is this novel -- for all it attempts and all it accomplishes.

Its shortlist competition in 2009 (those I've read in italics): AS Byatt's The Children's Book, JM Coetzee's Summertime, Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger.

Reading: 1st

A deserving winner

2009-10-06T09:22:00.004-06:00

Here in six hours or so, the 2009 Booker Prize winner will be announced. I'm almost 200 pages into Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall -- and it has my vote. I've never correctly predicted a winner, but she's the odds-on favorite to win, and it's a smashing good read: prose like stained glass, plot that crackles with tension, characters one loves and characters one hates, a world that feels real down to the cuts of its jewels and the salt in its sweat. Not to mention how moved I've been at certain of its passages (indeed, I'm reminded at times of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, which is about as high a compliment as can be paid a novel).

2009-09-08T08:57:00.005-06:00

And the 2009 Man Booker Prize shortlist is:

AS Byatt's The Children's Book
JM Coetzee's Summertime
Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer's The Glass Room
Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger

Of these, I've read The Little Stranger and while I found it quite spooky, I also thought it might have benefited from the shifts in perspective that gave her two previous shortlisted novels (Fingersmith and The Night Watch) such architectural and empathetic depth (although it must be said that Waters's strict adherence to Dr Faraday's interpretation of events does lend the narrative a kind of claustrophobia which, in turn, heightens the terror of the piece -- which may have been her aim). I've purchased the Byatt and Mantel novels from Amazon UK and will be reading Wolf Hall while my wife is in Paris later this month. Coetzee's novel -- because I haven't read, and am indifferent to the idea of reading, its predecessors Boyhood and Youth -- doesn't interest me. Mawer's hadn't interested me, but the extravagant praise from those readers and bloggers who made it a point to read all thirteen longlisted novels has made me, at least, curious. I almost gave in and ordered the Foulds novel alongside the Mantel and Byatt as it hasn't (yet) secured an American publication date (whereas both The Children's Book and Wolf Hall will be published stateside in October), but went with Adam Thorpe's Hodd (which, in all likelihood, will never be published in America -- and, owing to Thorpe's French citizenship, was ineligible for the Booker Prize) instead.

The winner will be announced 6 October.

2009-07-28T10:01:00.006-06:00

There has been a great deal of news on the Booker Prize front this morning, both exciting and melancholic.

To begin: Booker Prize-winner Stanley Middleton has died at age 89 following a long fight with cancer. I haven't read his novel Holiday (co-winner in 1974) yet, but am looking forward to doing so. An article about his life and death can be found here.

In other news, 2009's judges have announced the Booker Prize longlist and it is as follows:

A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book
J.M. Coetzee's Summertime
Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall's How to paint a dead man
Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness
James Lever's Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer's The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore's Heliopolis
Colm Toibin's Brooklyn
William Trevor's Love and Summer
Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger

My wife and I bought the Byatt novel for my brother last month, and I'm looking forward to buying it for myself once the resolution moratorium is at an end. I'm a little surprised at the inclusion of Sarah Hall's book as -- from the little I've read in the press -- it sounds more like a collection of stories than a novel. But a number of writers these days (including last year's winner Aravind Adiga with his recent Between the Assassinations) seem to be marketing their short fiction collections as novels, perhaps in an effort to shoehorn in on prize eligibilities (including the Booker's) from which they'd otherwise be excluded. I've read a lot about Mantel's new novel, and I've been arguing for months now that it will be the one to beat; I'm most excited to read it, I think. Lever's "novel" seems off-putting and bizarre, the kind of book it would take an act of God to make me read. Toibin's has earned fine reviews, but hasn't interested me (I have it in proof -- if anyone reading this would like it, leave a comment letting me know as much and an e-mail address, if I don't have already it). Trevor's new one sounds wonderful -- his fiction never fails to move me. Waters's newest novel is good (I read it in proof), but lacks the virtuosic narrative pull of her previous two books (both Booker Prize nominees).

The shortlist will be announced 8 September.

2009-03-31T11:28:00.008-06:00

Confession time: I've had a singular hiccup in my New Year's resolution to not purchase books for myself. No, I didn't go on some spree, unable to stand it any longer, filling three baskets at Barnes & Noble with titles I have the vaguest interest in. No, it wasn't that at all.

Last week, my wife and I were driving around Missoula when I told her: "You know what book, more than any other book, I'd like to see Folio publish? Oscar and Lucinda." When I returned home later that morning after dropping Kelly at work, I checked my e-mail, and there it was: an e-mail from Folio announcing the publication of four new books, including Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, in celebration of the Booker Prize. I couldn't believe my eyes. And because it was this book (one of two on which I wrote my M.A. thesis) -- and after so wistful a thought, an hour prior, that Folio might one day see fit to recognize it for the masterpiece it is -- we decided I should and could be permitted this one wrinkle in the resolution. And so I ordered it the next day.

Reading that e-mail was one of the most unexpected thrills I've ever felt, and ordering the book perhaps the most satisfying book purchase I've ever made. Indeed, I'm all a-shiver with the prospect of owning so beautiful an edition of so beautiful a book.

And now: back to the business of no books.

2009-03-31T09:34:00.007-06:00

I finished William Golding's Rites of Passage late last week and have to admit mild disappointment with it. I'd never read him before -- not even Lord of the Flies (I know, I know) -- but thought: a Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature must bode well, right? And I've always had a keen interest in seafaring tales, so where could it have gone wrong?

The novel is the journal of Edmund Talbot, written as a gift to his godfather (that the latter might live a vicariously youthful life) and meant to be a document of the comings and goings aboard the vessel. Golding, for his part, succeeds in the voice of the novel -- it feels authentic to the literature and correspondences of the Regency period -- but in too little else. One would think that the sea would fan the flames of an author's powers of description, but there was very little prose in Rites of Passage noteworthy for either its observational precision or its striking beauties. One exception would be a passage early on in which the sailors -- on deck, in their oilskins, during a mighty gale -- "resemble nothing so much as rocks with the tide washing over them." I felt, with this passage, that I saw precisely what Golding intended me to see, that he was -- in that moment -- the captain of a narrative ship capable of inspiring envy in other writers and gratitude in careful readers. But the book almost never sees such piercing and lovely descriptions again. Still, though I'm a reader who loves language above even character and the spinning of the yarn, I've learned to recognize, over the years, that a fine novel needn't luxuriate in alliterative language or flights of metaphor to be a fine novel. In short, not every writer has the poetic sensibility of Sebastian Barry or Peter Carey or Iris Murdoch. Two of my very favorite novelists -- Rohinton Mistry and Sarah Waters -- mine their genius (and genius it is) elsewhere: in depth of character, or startling empathies, or byzantine plotting, or sensitivities to period and politics, or experiments in perspective. In their cases, the prose serves ends more foundational than itself -- the brilliance is in the bricks. And while this was nearly the case with Rites of Passage -- Golding's tweaking of perspectives (giving us, in the journal, Talbot's view of Colley and then, in the letter, Colley's view of Talbot's behavior towards Colley) deepens the pathos manyfold and makes characters of caricatures (until we're allowed his voice, Colley seems like a thin unflattering riff on Austen's Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice) -- the book has too much going against it (e.g. a too-awkward mishmash of horror and humor, a narrator it seems Golding wants us to like despite his giving us little or no good reason to) for it to sing as a Booker Prize-winner should.

I liked Rites of Passage well enough, but shouldn't the novel that saunters off with the most prestigious literary prize in England be liked better than well enough?

Its shortlist competition in 1980: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, Barry Unsworth's Pascali's Island

Reading: 1st
An undeserving winner

2009-03-23T07:35:00.014-06:00

In 2005, the people over at the (Man) Booker Prize gave out the first ever Man Booker International Prize -- an award given every two years to a writer for his or her entire body of work. Unlike the Booker Prize proper (which is open to no one but British or Commonwealth writers of novels in English -- not even short fiction collections are eligible -- and is given to an individual book), the Man Booker International Prize is open to writers from around the globe, writing in all languages and genres, and is intended to rival the Nobel Prize for Literature in prestige. As with the Nobel, controversies abound over the writers who make the shortlist, fail to make the shortlist, are chosen as winners, are passed over as winners. (Philip Roth -- whose following couldn't be more devoted and whose tally of prizes across his almost 50-year career is unsurpassed -- was nominated for his work in 2005 and 2007, but lost first to Ismail Kadare and then to Chinua Achebe. I haven't read Achebe -- I know, I know -- but I have read Kadare's novel Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, and it comes nowhere near the brilliance of even Roth's second-tier fiction, let alone a book like American Pastoral. Hence the controversies.)

In recent weeks, 2009's committee, chaired by novelist Jane Smiley, announced its shortlist nominees for the Man International Booker Prize:

Peter Carey
Evan S. Connell
Mahasweta Devi
E.L. Doctorow
James Kelman
Mario Vargas Llosa
Arnost Lustig
Alice Munro
V.S. Naipaul
Joyce Carol Oates
Antonio Tabucchi
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O
Dubravka Ugresic
Ludmila Ulitskaya

Of these, believe it or not, the only two writers I've read are Carey and Doctorow. Carey -- on whose work I wrote my M.A. thesis -- is my favorite living novelist. Doctorow (who has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, the National Book Award once and the National Book Critics Circle Award three times) is splendid in his own right -- I've only read his City of God, but it blew my fuses, to be sure.

The winner will be announced on 27 May.

2009-03-09T16:31:00.005-06:00

At long last! Our postman has just delivered the Folio Society edition of A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning Possession that I pre-ordered last fall (this and another Folio edition, also arrived, because ordered in 2008, were the express caveats to my 2009 resolution to abstain from buying books for myself)! As expected, the edition is gorgeous...

In further news of note to this blog: I expect to begin William Golding's Rites of Passage before the month is out. I have William Vollmann's sometimes-fascinating, often-interminable Fathers and Crows, and Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne, to finish first.

2009-01-12T07:20:00.025-07:00

I finished Graham Swift's Last Orders the night before last and found it as moving as any novel I think I've ever read. It certainly more thoroughly reduced to me tears than any novel since I read Ian McEwan's Atonement in 2003, and while I know a novel's plucking effect on its reader's heartstrings is no measure of its greatness, per se, its having earned those tears (when it does) is.

My wife Kelly and I recently took a brief holiday (recovering from having spent yet another Christmas in the world of retail) -- four days and three nights at a little bed & breakfast in the mountains west of Missoula -- during which I thought it would suit me best to amble from book to book. And so I finished Libba Bray's Rebel Angels, started Lee Child's Killing Floor (which I've likewise since finished) and cranked out the first 60 pages of Last Orders in one sitting. Having read and admired (with some reserve) Swift's Waterland in 2005, I was prepared for his disinclination to sensual portraiture -- the identities of his characters are rooted in their dialogue, their thoughts, their environments and their situations, not at all in hair color, whether their skin is freckled, etc. And for a reader who loves sensual description of place and person as much as I do, Swift's habit of suggesting characters in lieu of painting them -- my friend Christian, lamenting this very thing in Waterland, once commented: "When I think of Mary, I think of her hole..." because Swift gives us little but her vagina with which to imagine her -- can be problematic (I actually take similar issue with Jane Austen's prose). But something about Last Orders hooked me from the outset.

There is such warmth in the Cockney voices shot through the novel that it feels burnished, like wood polished to a glow. Unlike certain other novels written in dialect (Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God comes to mind), it never alienates. And the shuttling back and forth between perspectives in the book -- from Ray to Vince to Amy to Lenny to Ray, etc -- allows Swift to exercise tremendous patience and precision in connecting dots, in braiding these lives one to another. In the end, each character's decisions echo -- and move us -- because we've been given such a profound sense of context. Such a dense knitting together of these lives might seem a contrivance -- indeed, it does to some (including my friend Sarah, who hated the book for what she calls its phoniness) -- and leveled criticisms along those lines would be valid, I think, in part because the book is such a tangle of histories. But, again, because the novel's voices feel so broken-in and lived -- as though Swift has not written them so much as recorded them -- and because I've experienced (with the men with whom I've been friends between 16 and 28 years) something like the calibre of masculine friendship seen here and have lived (not unlike Jack Dodds) in perfect willful and shameful ignorance of a disabled relative who would, I'm sure, have liked (when I lived unbelievably in the same town) to see me and have been seen by me more than once every two years or so, it all just rings true.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can make to Last Orders is that I felt, in the end, as though I'd been, throughout the book, the fifth man in the car on the drive to Margate to spread Jack's ashes in the sea.

Its shortlist competition in 1996 (those I've read in italics): Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Shena Mackay's The Orchard on Fire, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

Reading: 1st
A deserving winner

2009-01-05T12:50:00.009-07:00

A review of Last Orders is forthcoming. My wife and I have just returned from four days at a bed and breakfast way up a mountain outside Missoula, during which I started the Swift novel and am making swift progress through it. (The case with the Better Business Bureau has gone nowhere -- indeed, it looks as if Printer's Row has fleeced me. At least it'll be a stain -- even if not Concord grapes on pearl silk -- on their record. I'm reading an American trade paperback purchased with credit from a used bookshop here in town.)

2008-11-23T09:40:00.006-07:00

Some time has passed since the initial post heralding the launch of Booking a Room with a View with Graham Swift's Last Orders -- and I thought it best to let the few readers I have, at this point, know the reasons behind it remaining unread in all these weeks.

I'm a sucker for the perfect cover, a reader with a hang-up on aesthetics, and have long coveted the British cover of Swift's novel. Having seen the Fred Schepisi film based on the book, the foam from a pint seems to me the perfect image. I once almost bought the novel while in England and have countless times come this close to ordering it online, but all editions featuring this cover are now out-of-print and so it fell to me to order what turned out to be a first edition from a rare book dealer in Chicago -- $25 with free shipping seemed a reasonable amount for a first edition hardcover in fine condition. Except that -- according to the book dealer -- it shipped almost five weeks ago and has yet to arrive in my mailbox. I've sent three e-mails inquiring after tracking data, none of which have brought a response. The first time I called, half a week after having no luck with the e-mails, the seller picked up the phone and knew what order I was asking about before I even had the sentence spoken (imparting to me the above shipping date and promising an e-mail with tracking details) -- a sure sign he has caller ID. All three or four further phone calls I went on to make (when the tracking e-mail never arrived) going unanswered and unreturned can, in all likelihood, be attributed to the caller ID. The last message I left on the seller's machine was a diplomatic demand that my $25 be refunded -- which it still hasn't.

So the reading of Last Orders is on hiatus until an edition is in my possession. Should no refund appear on my charge card statement, I'll be contacting the Better Business Bureau in Chicago about Printer's Row Fine & Rare Books.

2008-10-17T07:58:00.010-06:00

My wife, who is in the midst of reading each Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction (and has crossed the midpoint in doing so), inspired me to this similar end in taking the Booker Prize as a challenge. I've followed it for a long time now and have just as long thought it the gold standard, the height to which novels should aspire in the English-speaking world. Granted, as a Commonwealth prize, it excludes American writers (unless, as was the case with Carol Shields, those writers have dual citizenships) -- meaning the National Book Critics Circle Award (open to all works of English-language fiction, American or Commonwealth) is closer to being an objective gold standard. But we all have our preferences, and I'm a Booker Prize man.

I'll make clear up front that while I've read a number of these titles before, all will be read, for this venture, anew. Despite having read Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda seven times in the past, for instance, I'll read it an eighth time for the purpose of commenting on it here. In addition, please note that I'll do my best to keep reviews free of spoilers and ask that readers of this blog do the same in their comments (and I hope there are comments -- I'm just as anxious to hear your thoughts on the Booker Prize-winners I read as I am to offer mine).

Let it begin -- as I begin with Graham Swift's Last Orders.