Books no longer in my possession
The following reviews may be a little hazy on details (or even wrong) due to a) the title of this entry and b) the fact that while somewhere on my harddrive there are some partial reviews of some of these, I appear to have given the relevant word document a completely unrelated title. Anyway.
Marian Keyes, This Charming Man. I think I’ve read all of Keyes’ novels, because unlike much of the other stuff in the chick-lit pastel covers with cheerful font section, they have great characters, with evidence of a sense of proportion (i.e. not all about me, for both character and author) as well as a sense of humour. Not all of the books work equally well - I wasn’t wild about Sushi for Beginners or The Other Side of the Story (which I think I successfully managed to give away to someone), but Rachel’s Holiday was very good (unreliable narrator addiction memoir, I suppose, but very well done) and this was excellent. Four (I think) women who’ve all been involved with one charming - and dangerous - man. One of the pov is in diary entries done believably, which is so vanishingly rare that I went on about it to complete strangers - short, almost text-speak like entries, which don’t quote massive chunks of direct speech and instead paraphrase people’s spoken dialogue in a way that still gives you a sense of their character (I would contrast this with the latest Reginald Hill, which has hugely lengthy emails that include vast amounts of supposedly accurately remembered conversation). The other thing I like about this is that there’s an attempted final confrontation that goes wrong, which again is unusual - in many books there is only one possible solution, and therefore it must succeed.
Junot Diaz, The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I really liked parts of this, but other parts did not work for me and I’m at best ambivalent about the ending (it does not help that the ending references Alan Moore’s Watchmen so heavily that I found myself wishing that I was reading that instead). The bits that work are the writing, which is great, and the mixing of registers and content - the history of the Dominican republic with classic 80s sf, D&D, other popular culture references… Where it didn’t work for me was the misogyny, which I think is deliberate but is still very hard to deal with as a reader, particularly when I was in Oscar’s viewpoint - in terms of pop culture references, I have so much in common with him, but every time he thinks about women it kicked me out again. And when the book jumps to female narrators their lives are so miserable, and so constrained by men, that it didn’t really help.
I went to an interview at the writers’ festival between Junot Diaz and a very annoying man (“You reference a lot of pop culture in this story. Of course, I’ve never read a comic, but I was wondering…”) who started off by asking Diaz an appalling question about failure and then seemed determined to pry into every single aspect of his life under the flimsy cover of analysing his writing (“This story has a man who turns out to have had a secret family. I gather your own father also had another wife and children. How do you feel that influenced this?”), which might possibly have worked if they’d had any rapport. When there was a genre fiction question from the audience Diaz did go for the “literary fiction is inherently superior” answer, but I’m not sure whether by that stage he was just disagreeing with everyone in the hope of it all being over soon. However, while I do think he genuinely likes the references he includes in Oscar, the whole book is so full of self-hatred that this becomes an ambivalent value.
Catriona McCloud. This is one of those books that has ended up in the wrong marketing category (it has one of those chick-lit covers), as it’s not about romance but family and time travel. After the main character’s relationship collapses she suddenly finds herself back in her teenage self - obviously, she sets out to do things right on a domestic level, but there are also some really nice broader changes that she attempts (it’s set in the UK, so one of the first things she does is charge off to a function being attended by the engaged Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, and hold up a sign saying, basically, ASK HIM ABOUT CAMILLA!, which results in the wedding being cancelled) and the consequences of her interventions are not always the obvious ones. The underlying gimmick is a bit weak but works well enough, and I enjoyed this quite a lot up until the ending, which is - hmm. Problematic. One of those moments, in fact, where one is inclined to swear at the page, and when I googled for other reviews that’s exactly what I found. It’s an unfair ending for the story the book’s been telling, and for the place where it happens - if there were less before or more after it could work, but as it stands I am left irked. I would definitely read another by this author, but I would be cautious.
China Mieville, Un Lun Dun. I’d heard all this stuff about how it subverts the Chosen Saviour fantasy trope, and was somewhat disappointed to find out that this a) happens really early, so not all that much saving or otherwise is going on and b) well, it’s still the Fantasy World gets Saved by Earth Hero, so not all that subverted. I liked the short-cutting of the quest, and the milk carton, but everything else felt more like a travelogue than a story.
Alan Gatz, Samurai Shortstop. Teenage boy in 1890 Tokyo (immediately post disestablishment of the samurai) attends prestigious all-male military style school while being obsessed with baseball and learning bushido from his father. I know more about bushido than I do about baseball (mainly because I know almost nothing about baseball!), but this book is very much written for an audience for whom the reverse is true - all the sports scenes are baffling (and I say this as someone who can read rugby or cricket sequences and at least have some idea of what’s going on, although I wouldn’t watching an actual game), but with regard to bushido or, indeed, broader Japanese issues, the main character appears to have spent all his life so far in a bubble and needs everything explained to him, which is convenient for the equally ignorant reader but irritating as a writing technique. I was particularly annoyed when he was unfamiliar with the concept of fires after earthquakes (having grown up in Tokyo? What was he doing?), as I grew up in an earthquake area and tend to assume that basic earthquake safety is common knowledge. I think this would actually have worked better for me as a short story about a Japanese school team defeating the American military at a single match. Game. Innings? I am also slightly baffled as to how, in the triumphant conclusion incorporating the values of bushido and this new-fangled baseball thing the main character can adapt a stroke for cleaving the head of a kneeling opponent into hitting a home run, but possibly this is why I suck at Wii baseball.
Nancy Farmer, The ear, the eye and the arm. The title characters are three mutated private detectives, hired to track down the children of very high powered people (a general and her husband, I think) in a future Zimbabwe. Fun, imaginative and different, with quite a bit to think about (the enclave dedicated to recreating historic tribal life raises a number of interesting gender issues, for example) and, really, the only complaint I have about this at all is that the title detectives aren’t really all that important, and having three of them almost seems like over-kill - I was wondering if they reference a folk-tale or something similar. Enjoyable.
Marian Keyes, This Charming Man. I think I’ve read all of Keyes’ novels, because unlike much of the other stuff in the chick-lit pastel covers with cheerful font section, they have great characters, with evidence of a sense of proportion (i.e. not all about me, for both character and author) as well as a sense of humour. Not all of the books work equally well - I wasn’t wild about Sushi for Beginners or The Other Side of the Story (which I think I successfully managed to give away to someone), but Rachel’s Holiday was very good (unreliable narrator addiction memoir, I suppose, but very well done) and this was excellent. Four (I think) women who’ve all been involved with one charming - and dangerous - man. One of the pov is in diary entries done believably, which is so vanishingly rare that I went on about it to complete strangers - short, almost text-speak like entries, which don’t quote massive chunks of direct speech and instead paraphrase people’s spoken dialogue in a way that still gives you a sense of their character (I would contrast this with the latest Reginald Hill, which has hugely lengthy emails that include vast amounts of supposedly accurately remembered conversation). The other thing I like about this is that there’s an attempted final confrontation that goes wrong, which again is unusual - in many books there is only one possible solution, and therefore it must succeed.
Junot Diaz, The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I really liked parts of this, but other parts did not work for me and I’m at best ambivalent about the ending (it does not help that the ending references Alan Moore’s Watchmen so heavily that I found myself wishing that I was reading that instead). The bits that work are the writing, which is great, and the mixing of registers and content - the history of the Dominican republic with classic 80s sf, D&D, other popular culture references… Where it didn’t work for me was the misogyny, which I think is deliberate but is still very hard to deal with as a reader, particularly when I was in Oscar’s viewpoint - in terms of pop culture references, I have so much in common with him, but every time he thinks about women it kicked me out again. And when the book jumps to female narrators their lives are so miserable, and so constrained by men, that it didn’t really help.
I went to an interview at the writers’ festival between Junot Diaz and a very annoying man (“You reference a lot of pop culture in this story. Of course, I’ve never read a comic, but I was wondering…”) who started off by asking Diaz an appalling question about failure and then seemed determined to pry into every single aspect of his life under the flimsy cover of analysing his writing (“This story has a man who turns out to have had a secret family. I gather your own father also had another wife and children. How do you feel that influenced this?”), which might possibly have worked if they’d had any rapport. When there was a genre fiction question from the audience Diaz did go for the “literary fiction is inherently superior” answer, but I’m not sure whether by that stage he was just disagreeing with everyone in the hope of it all being over soon. However, while I do think he genuinely likes the references he includes in Oscar, the whole book is so full of self-hatred that this becomes an ambivalent value.
Catriona McCloud. This is one of those books that has ended up in the wrong marketing category (it has one of those chick-lit covers), as it’s not about romance but family and time travel. After the main character’s relationship collapses she suddenly finds herself back in her teenage self - obviously, she sets out to do things right on a domestic level, but there are also some really nice broader changes that she attempts (it’s set in the UK, so one of the first things she does is charge off to a function being attended by the engaged Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, and hold up a sign saying, basically, ASK HIM ABOUT CAMILLA!, which results in the wedding being cancelled) and the consequences of her interventions are not always the obvious ones. The underlying gimmick is a bit weak but works well enough, and I enjoyed this quite a lot up until the ending, which is - hmm. Problematic. One of those moments, in fact, where one is inclined to swear at the page, and when I googled for other reviews that’s exactly what I found. It’s an unfair ending for the story the book’s been telling, and for the place where it happens - if there were less before or more after it could work, but as it stands I am left irked. I would definitely read another by this author, but I would be cautious.
China Mieville, Un Lun Dun. I’d heard all this stuff about how it subverts the Chosen Saviour fantasy trope, and was somewhat disappointed to find out that this a) happens really early, so not all that much saving or otherwise is going on and b) well, it’s still the Fantasy World gets Saved by Earth Hero, so not all that subverted. I liked the short-cutting of the quest, and the milk carton, but everything else felt more like a travelogue than a story.
Alan Gatz, Samurai Shortstop. Teenage boy in 1890 Tokyo (immediately post disestablishment of the samurai) attends prestigious all-male military style school while being obsessed with baseball and learning bushido from his father. I know more about bushido than I do about baseball (mainly because I know almost nothing about baseball!), but this book is very much written for an audience for whom the reverse is true - all the sports scenes are baffling (and I say this as someone who can read rugby or cricket sequences and at least have some idea of what’s going on, although I wouldn’t watching an actual game), but with regard to bushido or, indeed, broader Japanese issues, the main character appears to have spent all his life so far in a bubble and needs everything explained to him, which is convenient for the equally ignorant reader but irritating as a writing technique. I was particularly annoyed when he was unfamiliar with the concept of fires after earthquakes (having grown up in Tokyo? What was he doing?), as I grew up in an earthquake area and tend to assume that basic earthquake safety is common knowledge. I think this would actually have worked better for me as a short story about a Japanese school team defeating the American military at a single match. Game. Innings? I am also slightly baffled as to how, in the triumphant conclusion incorporating the values of bushido and this new-fangled baseball thing the main character can adapt a stroke for cleaving the head of a kneeling opponent into hitting a home run, but possibly this is why I suck at Wii baseball.
Nancy Farmer, The ear, the eye and the arm. The title characters are three mutated private detectives, hired to track down the children of very high powered people (a general and her husband, I think) in a future Zimbabwe. Fun, imaginative and different, with quite a bit to think about (the enclave dedicated to recreating historic tribal life raises a number of interesting gender issues, for example) and, really, the only complaint I have about this at all is that the title detectives aren’t really all that important, and having three of them almost seems like over-kill - I was wondering if they reference a folk-tale or something similar. Enjoyable.