books
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst. Starts off with a section about country houses and poets in the early twentieth century, and is followed by sections that are variations on this theme, punctuating the twentieth century. I think it's quite good at doing what it sets out to do, but I don't think it bypasses the lack of emotional involvement that comes with the lack of a central narrative. I like the way it deals with generations reusing the past for their own purposes, and how things become a Thing when they were never really a Thing, and how hard it is to truly get in touch in the past. The poet who gets mythologised is supposed to be pretty mediocre, only seized on because his work captures picturesque Englishness and nostalgia, but if Hollinghurst was going to include some of this poetry I think he should have made it slightly better -- it really didn't seem good enough even for that purpose. What Hollingurst is really good at, I think, is conversation and the minutiae of interaction; all the little pitfalls when one person is at a disadvantage or trying too hard and the other person isn't helping them, when people say insincere crap they kind of despise themselves for just to make the conversation go, the small things that make people feel they've connected. That was what I noticed most about The Line of Beauty as well.
The Blue Book by A. L. Kennedy. Beth used to be in a relationship with Arthur, a fake psychic, and now she is on a cruise ship with another boyfriend, and Arthur, who wants her to take him back. I've read a couple of other books by this author, but neither of them reminded me so intensely of intellific, both in the language and the intensely romantic focus. She uses those combination words and everything. It wasn't really what I expected, and it's quite a hardgoing book. Kennedy is so insistent in her attempts to capture intimacy and overwhelming desire and affinity and the relief of coming home to a person that it felt awkward to hold out and I wanted to give in, but it didn't quite work. It's not the kind of book where the characters are sympathetic, but I do think Arthur was a failure. I wonder if he is Kennedy's idea of a remotely attractive male character. It was very hard to imagine that anyone wouldn't smile awkwardly and move away if he spoke to them. The other thing with this book was the way Kennedy tries to bring in social issues when she talks about Arthur's job; it was supposed to be awkward and exploitative regarding his part in it, but I wasn't sure it didn't come off that way re Kennedy's as well.
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. Probably my favourite book so far this year. I was always just so interested. The central theme is shell shock in the First World War. Barker is interested in the time period and attitudes to class and gender in it, but in a way it's less about the First World War and more simply about human psychology and how people react and deal with things, coming up with coping strategies that may seem bizarre but also have their own logic. The first book is the most purely about the treatment of shell shock, but it does suffer from excessive italics use, and also I wasn't quite sure about Siegfried Sassoon. I imagine the contradictions come from life, but I never really understood what he wanted or what made him tick. The other two books have more exploration of the character of Billy Prior. He's a good observer character, prickly, often detached, a sympathetically unsympathetic type. I'm glad I read an omnibus edition and didn't try the second or third book by themselves, as I easily might have done; it really does read like one work. Books always seem to show soldiers in this war as having a compulsion to return to the Front; I don't know if that's something that's apparent when you read up on it or if it's just literarily convenient but Barker did it quite well. I'm not a particularly visual reader, and I didn't notice Barker as a particularly visual writer, but my memory of this book includes much more visualising of particular scenes than usual.
There But For The by Ali Smith. Oh dear. I hated The Accidental, reread it for university and hated it a little less, decided to read this, and loathed it. The central conceit is that a man goes to a dinner party, which nearly ends in a punch up over whether Damien Hurst is art, and at some point disappears upstairs. He locks himself in a spare room and doesn't come out for months. To explain why he isn't forcibly evicted, the hostess has to be very anxious about her antique door. The man in the spare room becomes a sensation; a play is written about him and he becomes the centre of a kind of Occupy movement. I've noticed that authors are very fond of the idea of writing about media phenomenoms, but so far I haven't read any who seem to have the slightest bit of convincing intuition about what does and doesn't catch the popular imagination. I've never been able to buy that the nation is so passionately interested in whatever character/plot they've created. Anyway, for all that that's the central conceit, the novel isn't about the man in the spare room or the people whose house it is at all.
Literary novels seem quite fond of splitting the narrative among several slightly connected people and gradually trying to convince us that not only their characters, but all of us, are ~connected~ by life. I'm used to that, but this is the most "Who are these people? Why should I care? Why are they in a novel together and not in short stories?" example I've read. There is no accumulative effect of their narratives working together, as the character's visions come together to create a whole, the author's vision. And then there's Brooke, I believe she's ten. You can tell she's a real child and not the author's mouthpiece because she says "duh" so often. She's the kind of child who's so sensitive to words she can't sleep for three nights for wondering why the person who previously owned a second-hand copy of a book underlined the words they did. She gets taken to a dinner party without the hosts being previously informed of her attendance, and their lack of pleasure at her delightful and insightful contributions to the conversation seems to be one of their negative traits. I have a high tolerance for precocious literary children and I've never previously seriously wanted to take away an author's child-writing license. Some of the awful characters could have been funny, but just when I could have laughed she'd overcook it into stale stereotype.
Apart from the fact that I didn't like The Accidental, perhaps I should have taken into consideration my lack of appreciation for puns before reading this, because it's all about how wordplay reveals interesting new ways of looking at the world. I don't think it's just that, though, I think the puns in this are actually pretty shoddy. Smith's last two novels puzzle me because they're both very critical of the intellectual pretensions of the middle class, while, as far as I can see, being very much of that aesthetic themselves. It's that whole "when is it satire and when is it just reproduction" thing, I think. Hotel World, in my memory, seems so much better than this. Lol nothing like hatred to bring out the verbosity!
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan. A guy called Jacob has been miserably killing and eating people for the last two hundred years, and evading capture by the obligatory organisation that hunts down supernatural creatures. He's the last werewolf and now he thinks he's okay about this organisation catching up with him. Opinion seems to vary whether this is very literary indeed or hardly at all, but some degree of literariness is attempted. I feel Duncan is the kind of writer who would describe the effect he was going for as werewolf-appropriately "lewd and raw", which he often tries to establish by being tasteless. I think Duncan undermined himself by choosing the ironising tactic which he uses to try and downplay the corny elements -- the enmity between vampires and werewolves, talking about "the wulf" inside Jacob wanting things, the whole moodiness of being the last werewolf -- in that it ultimately ended up being more about soul-searching than whole-hearted excitement, yet the irony ended up covering that too. The characters don't have enough dignity. There are lots of emotive devices we're positively encouraged not to be moved by. Anyway, it's a perfectly good read and everything, until I wondered why I should care.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré. About British spies being unhappy in their work and trying to prove there is a mole in a high-up position. Main character a moping, undashing sort of man, though naturally insightful in his way. Slightly odd experience, but I think I liked it. Atmospheric in its way. I was expecting a fast-paced thriller, but I'm not sure anything really happens except that we find out who the mole is in the end. Apparently the first of a trilogy, but it feels like the last -- it feels like a wrap-up of everything that happened before the book begun and explanations take a while. It's a very "emotionally repressed men" type book; it has that half just empty, half subtly so feel. I think the tropes of spy fiction are so emotive -- artifice and incessant precautions and peril and betrayal -- that they're quite good at speaking for themselves.