September book reviews
Mockingjay (Hunger Games, #3) - Suzanne Collins (fiction, teen) (**)
SPOILERS
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The Hunger Games remains one of my favourite books of the last two years. It’s a taut and well-plotted novel. More to the point, its murky, dystopian setting provided a breath of fresh air after years of vampires vampires vampires in YA lit. And its unsettling twist on first love stood in contrast to the shrink-wrapped sexuality and abstinence porn of its competitors.
However, as Hunger drew to its dissatisfying conclusion, I became aware that Suzanne Collins had written herself into a corner. Of course, Katniss and Peeta had emerged (relatively) unscathed from the Games, but there wasn’t much of a happy ending for them to enjoy in a world that remained murky and dystopian. I understand, therefore, Collins’ decision to burn her world to the ground in the form of a rebellion and two more books. But, throughout Catching Fire and Mockingjay, I couldn’t help feeling that, rather than writing herself OUT of that corner, she was writing herself further and further into a storyline that couldn’t be resolved.
The result is a trilogy climax that bows under the weight of an incredible amount of exposition, before almost sinking beneath the surface of our prickly narrator’s misery and anger. It’s hard to begrudge Collins for concentrating on the complexities of war, where there are no good guys and bad guys, only uneasy alliances, or giving Katniss such a lot to think about. However, narratively, the result is a mess. It takes entirely too long to reach this novel’s requisite ‘Battle for Middle Earth’, and even then, the battle is weirdly constructed, and the action breaks off just as it’s getting good. After writing herself into that corner, it’s unsurprising that Collins has to resort to a series of dei ex machina to bring her trilogy to its end.
Prim’s death was what made me emotionally disconnect from the novel. It was a completely unearned shock twist. Death for either Gale or Peeta would have made narrative sense, but Prim (who I can’t imagine would ever, even as a result of manipulation, have ended up on the front line) seemed merely struck down by Author-God, who thought it would be poetic for the girl who was saved from the reaping to die anyway.
Mockingjay is ultimately a disappointing end to what had the potential to be a stellar trilogy. It also has the dubious honour of bearing the most pointless epilogue since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
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Watching the English - Kate Fox (non-fiction, anthropology) (***)
I was immediately charmed by Watching the English, wherein anthropologist Kate Fox turns an academic eye to why the English talk about the weather obsessively; use irony so rampantly; and otherwise indulge in other quirks that tend to baffle outsiders. The resulting book is very funny and, for the most part, quite a revelatory look at the unexamined social ‘rules’ that govern the English.
I saw a meme circulating on tumblr recently. It was entitled ‘How to have a lovely day’ and it included advice like ‘smile at everyone you meet’ and ‘compliment strangers’. I literally recoiled in horror. As I have learned from Kate Fox, it’s because I’m English, you see. To do such things would: (a) be overly earnest (we hate being earnest); (b) break the privacy bubble (we love our privacy); (c) involve being social in an unstructured way (quelle horreur!).
I heartily recommend this book to both English people and, particularly, non-English people. I also think it makes a pretty neat writing companion. For instance, it’s easy to fail to register that, while I have a settee in my lounge, an upper-class person has a sofa in their sitting room. The book is filled with lots of yummy class-distinctions to make you chortle and then realise you’re far more working/middle/upper class than you’d thought.
Although I enjoyed the book, it’s not without its flaws. Presumably as a result of a lifetime spent writing reports and academic papers, Fox chooses to finish each chapter by summing up what “we” have learned over the last few pages. It’s completely redundant, and I began automatically skipping the end of each chapter once I noticed this stylistic oddity. It’s no exaggeration to say you could cut 20% of the volume of this book and scarcely notice the difference.
I also don’t quite know what to make of Fox’s decision to continually quote Jilly Cooper(!) as a source of infinite wisdom about what it is to be English. I get that Fox was trying to make the book lighthearted in tone in order to boost crossover appeal, but it’s really quite silly to quote a low-brow novelist in an anthropology book. Similarly, she quotes Jeremy Paxman an awful lot, too. Another thing I began automatically skipping.
A judicious editor could have bumped this up to a four-star read. As it is, it’s a bit too lumpy for me to heap unqualified praise upon. Still an enjoyable read that I got a lot out of, though.
Tabloid Girl - Sharon Marshall (non-fiction, memoir) (***)
I tore through Tabloid Girl at speed, and reading it certainly made a nice break from a glum, academic book I’d been plodding through at the same time. Sharon Marshall’s memoir of life as a tabloid journalist is undoubtedly amusing, giving great insight into the bonkers world of working for a red-top newspaper, but it also leaves a rather unpleasant aftertaste.
There are no two ways about it: tabloids are grimy, and even an irreverent look at the tabloid newsroom still makes the reader feel… grimy. It doesn’t help that Marshall splices in stories about her crap love life alongside her journalistic adventures. I think she fancies herself as a real-life Bridget Jones, but I found the stories more depressing than funny. I just kept thinking: why do you hate yourself so much just because you don’t have a boyfriend?
I love reading books about other people’s jobs, and the parts of this book that concerned life on Fleet Street fitted the bill nicely. The drunken cavorting, however… eh, I could have done without it.
Here To Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain - Colin Clark et al (non-fiction) (**)
According to a MORI poll quoted in Here To Stay, more than 30% of people in the UK admit to negative feelings towards Gypsies and Travellers. Thirty percent! And that's not including covert racism. (Ever used the word "gypped" to mean "cheated"?) With chapters written by a number of experts, Here To Stay positions itself as a thought-provoking attempt to dispel the tabloid sensationalism that had led anti-Gypsy feeling to be an 'acceptable' form of racism.
However, the resulting book is incredibly dry, academic and lacking detail about the everyday lives of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Despite its worthy and interesting subject matter, it reads more like a dissertation than a book that any layperson might wish to read to help them understand what it means to be a Gypsy in the 21st century.
The authors' attempts to be sensitive to the Gypsy plight also result in Here To Stay lacking a critical edge. (Critical in the academic sense, not the colloquial sense.) There's none of the social discourse that characterises other 'cultural studies' books. For example, there's no discussion of the impact of inbreeding that has become common, as members of tight-knit communities choose to marry their cousins because there are few other alternatives, or, indeed, the outdated patriarchal structure that characterises Gypsy life (women marrying young and then staying home with the children).
Personally, I'm torn. I know that racism against Gypsies is very real and ought to be stopped. But the amount of special pleading in Here To Stay is extraordinary. I completely agree that there should be higher-quality local authority sites available to Gypsies; and I think teachers, doctors and council workers should be more sensitive to their culture. But, at one point, an author suggests that one of the reasons Gypsies are more prone to poor health is that they struggle to attend doctors' appointments because 'they don't have the same concept of time' as the rest of society. The line of personal responsibility must be drawn somewhere, and I think it should be drawn at expecting Gypsies to buy a damn clock and calendar and attend appointments about their health!
The fact is, I find Gypsy life to be fundamentally outdated, and it is thus difficult for me to rationalise pouring public money into accommodating a small minority who live in this way. Travelling life belongs in an age when our tiny, overcrowded island still sported lush green spaces where Gypsies could stop and make camp without bothering anyone -- now most of those spaces have been developed or protected as green belt land. Gypsy life belongs to a time before congested roads and overflowing landfills. A time before wide-ranging government regulation.
I can't help thinking... are we just supposed to turn back the clock and undo our highly-regulated (but also highly-efficient) society because a tiny section of the population wish to roam the countryside in the same way as their elders?
The fact remains that anti-Gypsy feeling should not go unchecked. But, to be honest, I can’t see the situation with Gypsies and Travellers getting any better in the UK. Not when even a Guardian-reading bleeding heart like me finds their plight so unsustainable. I hoped to find convincing solutions in this book, but instead there was just a lot of special pleading.
Plus, as a book, it was boring. SO BORING. Why do academics couch all their arguments in such deathly prose?
The Shining - Stephen King (fiction, horror) (**)
I can’t help but suspect that Stephen King’s editor said to him, upon receiving this manuscript, “Stephen, we can’t possibly publish a commercial novel that’s longer than 500 pages.”
And, then, after painstakingly whittling his book down to 497 pages, I imagine King returned triumphantly to the editor and said, “Dunnit!”
Then the editor probably wept openly, because s/he knew that 497 pages (497 pages!) was about as good as it was going to get.
This is my way of saying that The Shining is weighed down by dozens of hopelessly banal scenes, each of which could have been reduced to 200 words of summary narrative. If you were able to scoop this bloated mass of wordage out of the novel, you’d have a reasonably compelling haunted house story about an ‘everyman’ driven to murder by a hotel filled malevolent spirits. Alas, we cannot, so prepare to do a lot of skim-reading if you pick up this novel.
Aspects of The Shining have so completely entered the pop cultural lexicon that it’s now hard to judge them on their own merits. Would I have found “redrum! REDRUM!” so eerie otherwise? It’s hard to tell, but I’ll give King the benefit of the doubt and say that the novel’s story and set-pieces are narratively solid and, occasionally, genuinely frightening.
But.
But.
We’re back to that banality again. Each and every character in the novel is just hopelessly, hopelessly banal. Protagonist Jack is so much the ‘everyman’ that he has no character of his own. Son Danny seems wise beyond his years not because of any deliberate characterization, but so that King can more easily use him as a mouthpiece. Wife Wendy is a shadow of a woman who seems to have no agency beyond caring for her husband and son. That the spirits within the hotel prey mercilessly on the minds of Jack and Danny, while completely overlooking Wendy provides a rather apt parallel: King, too, completely overlooks Wendy as a character. Plucky cook, Dick Hallorann, although presented with more warmth and humour than the rest of the cast, is uncomfortably close to being a Magical Negro.
I haven’t actually seen Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation, but I imagine it’s probably a better bet to watch that than to read this. It’d take you less time, anyway. (497 pages!)
SPOILERS
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
The Hunger Games remains one of my favourite books of the last two years. It’s a taut and well-plotted novel. More to the point, its murky, dystopian setting provided a breath of fresh air after years of vampires vampires vampires in YA lit. And its unsettling twist on first love stood in contrast to the shrink-wrapped sexuality and abstinence porn of its competitors.
However, as Hunger drew to its dissatisfying conclusion, I became aware that Suzanne Collins had written herself into a corner. Of course, Katniss and Peeta had emerged (relatively) unscathed from the Games, but there wasn’t much of a happy ending for them to enjoy in a world that remained murky and dystopian. I understand, therefore, Collins’ decision to burn her world to the ground in the form of a rebellion and two more books. But, throughout Catching Fire and Mockingjay, I couldn’t help feeling that, rather than writing herself OUT of that corner, she was writing herself further and further into a storyline that couldn’t be resolved.
The result is a trilogy climax that bows under the weight of an incredible amount of exposition, before almost sinking beneath the surface of our prickly narrator’s misery and anger. It’s hard to begrudge Collins for concentrating on the complexities of war, where there are no good guys and bad guys, only uneasy alliances, or giving Katniss such a lot to think about. However, narratively, the result is a mess. It takes entirely too long to reach this novel’s requisite ‘Battle for Middle Earth’, and even then, the battle is weirdly constructed, and the action breaks off just as it’s getting good. After writing herself into that corner, it’s unsurprising that Collins has to resort to a series of dei ex machina to bring her trilogy to its end.
Prim’s death was what made me emotionally disconnect from the novel. It was a completely unearned shock twist. Death for either Gale or Peeta would have made narrative sense, but Prim (who I can’t imagine would ever, even as a result of manipulation, have ended up on the front line) seemed merely struck down by Author-God, who thought it would be poetic for the girl who was saved from the reaping to die anyway.
Mockingjay is ultimately a disappointing end to what had the potential to be a stellar trilogy. It also has the dubious honour of bearing the most pointless epilogue since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
/
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
Watching the English - Kate Fox (non-fiction, anthropology) (***)
I was immediately charmed by Watching the English, wherein anthropologist Kate Fox turns an academic eye to why the English talk about the weather obsessively; use irony so rampantly; and otherwise indulge in other quirks that tend to baffle outsiders. The resulting book is very funny and, for the most part, quite a revelatory look at the unexamined social ‘rules’ that govern the English.
I saw a meme circulating on tumblr recently. It was entitled ‘How to have a lovely day’ and it included advice like ‘smile at everyone you meet’ and ‘compliment strangers’. I literally recoiled in horror. As I have learned from Kate Fox, it’s because I’m English, you see. To do such things would: (a) be overly earnest (we hate being earnest); (b) break the privacy bubble (we love our privacy); (c) involve being social in an unstructured way (quelle horreur!).
I heartily recommend this book to both English people and, particularly, non-English people. I also think it makes a pretty neat writing companion. For instance, it’s easy to fail to register that, while I have a settee in my lounge, an upper-class person has a sofa in their sitting room. The book is filled with lots of yummy class-distinctions to make you chortle and then realise you’re far more working/middle/upper class than you’d thought.
Although I enjoyed the book, it’s not without its flaws. Presumably as a result of a lifetime spent writing reports and academic papers, Fox chooses to finish each chapter by summing up what “we” have learned over the last few pages. It’s completely redundant, and I began automatically skipping the end of each chapter once I noticed this stylistic oddity. It’s no exaggeration to say you could cut 20% of the volume of this book and scarcely notice the difference.
I also don’t quite know what to make of Fox’s decision to continually quote Jilly Cooper(!) as a source of infinite wisdom about what it is to be English. I get that Fox was trying to make the book lighthearted in tone in order to boost crossover appeal, but it’s really quite silly to quote a low-brow novelist in an anthropology book. Similarly, she quotes Jeremy Paxman an awful lot, too. Another thing I began automatically skipping.
A judicious editor could have bumped this up to a four-star read. As it is, it’s a bit too lumpy for me to heap unqualified praise upon. Still an enjoyable read that I got a lot out of, though.
Tabloid Girl - Sharon Marshall (non-fiction, memoir) (***)
I tore through Tabloid Girl at speed, and reading it certainly made a nice break from a glum, academic book I’d been plodding through at the same time. Sharon Marshall’s memoir of life as a tabloid journalist is undoubtedly amusing, giving great insight into the bonkers world of working for a red-top newspaper, but it also leaves a rather unpleasant aftertaste.
There are no two ways about it: tabloids are grimy, and even an irreverent look at the tabloid newsroom still makes the reader feel… grimy. It doesn’t help that Marshall splices in stories about her crap love life alongside her journalistic adventures. I think she fancies herself as a real-life Bridget Jones, but I found the stories more depressing than funny. I just kept thinking: why do you hate yourself so much just because you don’t have a boyfriend?
I love reading books about other people’s jobs, and the parts of this book that concerned life on Fleet Street fitted the bill nicely. The drunken cavorting, however… eh, I could have done without it.
Here To Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain - Colin Clark et al (non-fiction) (**)
According to a MORI poll quoted in Here To Stay, more than 30% of people in the UK admit to negative feelings towards Gypsies and Travellers. Thirty percent! And that's not including covert racism. (Ever used the word "gypped" to mean "cheated"?) With chapters written by a number of experts, Here To Stay positions itself as a thought-provoking attempt to dispel the tabloid sensationalism that had led anti-Gypsy feeling to be an 'acceptable' form of racism.
However, the resulting book is incredibly dry, academic and lacking detail about the everyday lives of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Despite its worthy and interesting subject matter, it reads more like a dissertation than a book that any layperson might wish to read to help them understand what it means to be a Gypsy in the 21st century.
The authors' attempts to be sensitive to the Gypsy plight also result in Here To Stay lacking a critical edge. (Critical in the academic sense, not the colloquial sense.) There's none of the social discourse that characterises other 'cultural studies' books. For example, there's no discussion of the impact of inbreeding that has become common, as members of tight-knit communities choose to marry their cousins because there are few other alternatives, or, indeed, the outdated patriarchal structure that characterises Gypsy life (women marrying young and then staying home with the children).
Personally, I'm torn. I know that racism against Gypsies is very real and ought to be stopped. But the amount of special pleading in Here To Stay is extraordinary. I completely agree that there should be higher-quality local authority sites available to Gypsies; and I think teachers, doctors and council workers should be more sensitive to their culture. But, at one point, an author suggests that one of the reasons Gypsies are more prone to poor health is that they struggle to attend doctors' appointments because 'they don't have the same concept of time' as the rest of society. The line of personal responsibility must be drawn somewhere, and I think it should be drawn at expecting Gypsies to buy a damn clock and calendar and attend appointments about their health!
The fact is, I find Gypsy life to be fundamentally outdated, and it is thus difficult for me to rationalise pouring public money into accommodating a small minority who live in this way. Travelling life belongs in an age when our tiny, overcrowded island still sported lush green spaces where Gypsies could stop and make camp without bothering anyone -- now most of those spaces have been developed or protected as green belt land. Gypsy life belongs to a time before congested roads and overflowing landfills. A time before wide-ranging government regulation.
I can't help thinking... are we just supposed to turn back the clock and undo our highly-regulated (but also highly-efficient) society because a tiny section of the population wish to roam the countryside in the same way as their elders?
The fact remains that anti-Gypsy feeling should not go unchecked. But, to be honest, I can’t see the situation with Gypsies and Travellers getting any better in the UK. Not when even a Guardian-reading bleeding heart like me finds their plight so unsustainable. I hoped to find convincing solutions in this book, but instead there was just a lot of special pleading.
Plus, as a book, it was boring. SO BORING. Why do academics couch all their arguments in such deathly prose?
The Shining - Stephen King (fiction, horror) (**)
I can’t help but suspect that Stephen King’s editor said to him, upon receiving this manuscript, “Stephen, we can’t possibly publish a commercial novel that’s longer than 500 pages.”
And, then, after painstakingly whittling his book down to 497 pages, I imagine King returned triumphantly to the editor and said, “Dunnit!”
Then the editor probably wept openly, because s/he knew that 497 pages (497 pages!) was about as good as it was going to get.
This is my way of saying that The Shining is weighed down by dozens of hopelessly banal scenes, each of which could have been reduced to 200 words of summary narrative. If you were able to scoop this bloated mass of wordage out of the novel, you’d have a reasonably compelling haunted house story about an ‘everyman’ driven to murder by a hotel filled malevolent spirits. Alas, we cannot, so prepare to do a lot of skim-reading if you pick up this novel.
Aspects of The Shining have so completely entered the pop cultural lexicon that it’s now hard to judge them on their own merits. Would I have found “redrum! REDRUM!” so eerie otherwise? It’s hard to tell, but I’ll give King the benefit of the doubt and say that the novel’s story and set-pieces are narratively solid and, occasionally, genuinely frightening.
But.
But.
We’re back to that banality again. Each and every character in the novel is just hopelessly, hopelessly banal. Protagonist Jack is so much the ‘everyman’ that he has no character of his own. Son Danny seems wise beyond his years not because of any deliberate characterization, but so that King can more easily use him as a mouthpiece. Wife Wendy is a shadow of a woman who seems to have no agency beyond caring for her husband and son. That the spirits within the hotel prey mercilessly on the minds of Jack and Danny, while completely overlooking Wendy provides a rather apt parallel: King, too, completely overlooks Wendy as a character. Plucky cook, Dick Hallorann, although presented with more warmth and humour than the rest of the cast, is uncomfortably close to being a Magical Negro.
I haven’t actually seen Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation, but I imagine it’s probably a better bet to watch that than to read this. It’d take you less time, anyway. (497 pages!)