Book review: do we need another Second World War novel? First Time Solo by Iain Maloney

"Our time here is infinitesimally small in the span of geological time yet we fill it with such importance." So says one of the four trainee RAF pilots of First Time Solo, musing upon the nature of humanity in the midst of the Second World War. The question this may prompt the reader to ask is, in this infinitesimally small time we have is there really need for yet another novel set during the Second World War?

 

Iain Maloney’s debut to some extent justifies its existence with riffs on the relationship between war and music. His narrative follows Jack Devine, an aspiring pilot from a remote Aberdeenshire farm with an unusual zeal for jazz. This allows Maloney to play with the synchronicity between losing oneself in music and in flight, to juxtapose the liberation of music with the repression of war. He persuasively uses the mesmeric rhythms of jazz as a means by which to escape the terror of reality; Jack frees himself from the "barriers, frontiers, prison bars" of notation to play his trumpet with true abandon.

 

Jack befriends and forms a jazz band with fellow recruitees Joe, Terry and Doug – a union that gives them a tantalising picture of their potential future, were they not facing imminent death in the fight against "Jerry". The boredom, exhilaration, hard graft and horror of training are all present in this novel, but are never quite conjured with real potency. And as Joe becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous, the friendships break down and so does the legitimacy of the plot – the lethal tricks Joe plays begin to seem contrived simply to create dramatic urgency, not only tricking the characters but also the reader into thinking they should feel emotion rather than genuinely inducing it.

 

Maloney fluctuates between traditional narrative and stylistic play with short, sharp sentences, which disintegrate convincingly at points into fragmented half-thoughts as Jack struggles to process his experiences. Sometimes this works, sometimes it feels overly simplistic rather than poetic. Tellingly, the note at the back of the book in which Maloney cites his own grandfather’s experiences as the inspiration forFirst Time Solo retrospectively gives the whole narrative more emotional heft. But that impact just isn’t there in the novel itself, and after a rather anticlimactic ending it feels like Maloney never quite gets off the training blocks and truly takes flight.

This review was first published on We Love This Book.

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Book review: a 'puzzling' debut from Andrew Ladd

A quiet lament to a lost way of life haunts What Ends, Ladd’s debut novel chronicling the slow but inevitable decline of a small community living on the fictional Hebridean island Eilean Fìor. The guesthouse run by the McCloud family, last remaining inhabitants of the island, represents a complex nucleus of home comforts and uncomfortable entrapment that exist in constant conflict and eventually lead the family, and their home, to implode. 

The three children represent three wildly differing attitudes towards the island. Through them Ladd offers no judgement on the paths taken by them or their stubborn but goodhearted parents. Barry, bullied on a mainland school, is severed irrevocably from the innocence of the island. Flora remains conflicted between the artistic inspiration she draws from the island’s wildness and a need to validate her life by seeking approval beyond its shores. Only Trevor, the youngest, retains a sense of wonder at the human and natural history of his home, and a desire to explore and preserve it. 

Ladd's prose has flaws – there is some clunky dialogue and images bordering on cliché that undermine an otherwise thoughtful novel. In tone he evokes the quietude of John Banville (although does not reach Banville’s linguistic virtuosity). And Ladd’s angry, lyrical mourning of a lost community echoes Brian Friel’s great Irish play Translations, even in the shared storyline of starstruck lovers, one native trying to escape and one foreigner desperate to assimilate a dying way of life. 

It feels as though Ladd develops as a writer even through the course of the novel. At its beginning, he struggles to inhabit a young child’s mind convincingly; by the end, he presents a stunning vision of dementia, rendered stylistically with such precision and flair that it leaves the reader wishing he had exhibited this more. Using the trope of crossword clues once beloved of the afflicted character, the narrative intertwines his thoughts with poetically concise thoughts-as-clues, which are as multi-layered and satisfying to ponder as crossword puzzles themselves. A powerful end to an intriguing, understated debut. 

This review was first published on We Love This Book.

Book review: The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris

Published 13 February 2014 by Gollancz

In a world of gods, ice folk and dwarves, Joanne Harris chooses as her hero the trickster god Loki, bent upon making mischief throughout the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology.

Unfortunately for the reader, his tongue-in-cheek tone and irritating colloquialisms make him less an endearing anti-hero and more an annoying younger brother with a penchant for tall stories.

Shape-shifting and deceiving his way through the tale, Loki rises from the depths of Chaos to dwell among the gods of Asgard, ruled by the Allfather Odin who repeatedly (and inexplicably) gives him the benefit of the doubt. A series of misadventures, tricks and tussles each bear a chapter title relating to Loki’s attempted enlightenment of his reader, his gospel ‘Lokabrenna’. These consist of such platitudes as ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ and ‘Most problems can be solved through cake’. Tension builds as Loki pushes the boundaries of the gods’ – and the readers’ – patience, until finally he colludes in bringing about Ragnarok, the cataclysmic end of the gods.

Harris does succeed in constructing a vivid, convincing world in which cinematic set pieces shimmer with the ‘glam’ of runes and bristle with the looming dramatic compulsion of prophecy. But this world is so sullied by the incongruous cleaving to it of contemporary idioms that it feels inescapably artificial. The story should be a thrilling one, but somehow Loki’s infuriating slang (‘Chillax’, ‘Boom!’) and heavy-handed presaging of things to come (‘But that was a lesson I had yet to learn’; ‘Just proves how wrong you can be I guess’) turns his adventures into a succession of contrived vignettes that do not fuse together into a satisfying whole.

AS Byatt’s recent foray into Norse Mythology, Ragnarok, proves how compelling and poetic this world of gods can be. She sums Loki up in one succinct, beautiful phrase: ‘Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself.’ Joanne Harris has taken an entire novel to do the same, with less success. The dust jacket sells The Gospel of Loki as a retelling of history, as its hero’s ‘turn to take the stage’. Perhaps this incarnation of Loki failed to make his voice heard for a reason; perhaps he should have stayed in the wings.

This review was originally published on We Love This Book.

'The poeticism of the prose is exquisite': a review of The Tilted World

By Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Published 1st October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

Husband and wife writers, poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin, have composed a poem of devotion to their land and to love in the form of lyrical novel The Tilted World. They weave a tender tale of lost souls in the Deep South and of discovered solace amidst the cataclysm of the great 1927 Mississippi flood.

The palpable threat of the flood is manifested through the prism of Dixie Clay – already emotionally drowned by her unhappy marriage to a bootlegger making whisky in defiance of prohibition law – and through Ingersoll, an emotionally stagnated prohibition agent, come to Mississippi as the flood waters threaten to burst the levees. When this strange, mud-caked man appears through the rain to leave a baby on Dixie’s doorstep, the world will tilt and warp the boundaries of law, friendship, community and love.

The Tilted World takes time to absorb the reader in its delicately rendered tale. The structure, which inhabits Dixie’s and Ingersoll’s thoughts episodically, does not immediately fully realise their psychologies, and boredom occasionally threatens in the opening chapters. The syntax can seem almost wilfully excluding – it is not clear from the start that the narrative voice has sprinklings of southern American phrasing, so the lack or direct and indirect objects and unnatural verb uses can be confusing. But slowly the lives of Dixie and Ingersoll become compelling, and representative of the lives of all those who lived through prohibition, who lived through the war, and through the upheavals of the Deep South at the turn of the century.

The poeticism of the prose is exquisite; metaphors are sprinkled through the book, giving you pause even as the plot surges on like the flood that propels it. Beautiful images that conjure a very specific time and place are simultaneously timeless: in the heavy wind of a low-flying navy plane ‘the corn [is] blown into italics all around’; when the Mississippi river is at breaking point Ingersoll can ‘feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork’; the sky is ‘gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom’.

The Tilted World is a deeply-felt, elegiac homage to a particular time and to the endurance of love, unafraid to shy away from the mundane realities of life, rewarding the reader’s commitment to its tilted world.

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A universal tale of mystery and enlightenment: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Published 1 October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

From the author of the multi-million bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, comes something quite its opposite. The Signature of All Things is an epic, universal tale traversing the 19th century on a voyage of mystery and enlightenment, taking in multiple continents, scientific theories on evolution and the entire spectrum of human experience – including birth, love, death, heartbreak, religious doubt and sexual turmoil.

The novel tells of the bold, brilliant Alma Whittaker, blessed not with beauty but with a formidable intellect and a voracious desire for knowledge. As she immerses herself in scientific pursuits, her botanical specialism in mosses leads her to revelatory ideas about time and evolution. These ideas are challenged by the man she falls in love with, and Alma’s all-encompassing need to seek answers impels her to investigate the enigmas of her own lover’s past.

Gilbert uses Alma’s science to enrich her human plight, rendering one person’s instinctive, evolutionary battle for survival into a compassionate, tender account of unerring fortitude. There is something of Jane Eyre in Gilbert’s heroine; Alma’s plainness is negated by her resilience and enduring faith in life.

Gilbert’s prose is not perfect – she occasionally labours a metaphor or employs a clunky turn of phrase that seems almost to complement Alma’s own unwieldy demeanour. And the plot is absorbing, but occasionally one can feel a little like Alma, adrift in a tempestuous sea of subtle narrative hints: ‘all she had ever wanted was to know things, yet […] all she did was ponder and wonder and guess’. That said, however, The Signature of All Things is an accomplished and irresistible novel. Expertly researched and exquisitely realised, it compels the reader to adopt Alma’s own unquenchable need to know everything, from the minutiae of her world to the grand narratives that inform it.

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Book review: Man Booker Prize longlisted novel The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publishes 26 September
Review first appeared on We Love This Book

'at once blisteringly specific and edifyingly universal'

Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful account of two boys growing up in 1970s Calcutta,The Lowland, has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize. It tackles the nature of memory, the mutability of time and the impossibility of true communication, while examining how the boys' tragic experiences echo through generations to come.

Amid the growing allure of Naxalite Marxism, inseparable brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra mature to lead very different lives, with different ideals. As Udayan becomes embroiled in communist politics and Subhash forsakes his roots to move to America, their bond undergoes a partition that begins an ineluctable series of partitions – physical, emotional, political and psychological – which punctuate Lahiri’s intricate exploration of what it means to feel isolated, to feel whole and to feel loved.

To read the rest of the review, see here.

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Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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Book launch: protecting the primates at Barbican's conservatory

King Bruno by Paul Glynn

Barbican Conservatory, Wednesday 6^th February

In aid of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone

Walking into the Barbican’s conservatory, atmospherically lit to illuminate palm tree fronds and enliven birds of paradise, I could almost convince myself I was in Sierra Leone’s heady, breathing forests, a chimpanzee watching me from the camouflaging shadows. If you’ve been to the conservatory in the daytime, you’ll know that the plants don’t quite succeed in disguising the building’s brutalist concrete architecture – the place is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of organic oasis and urban asceticism. But at night, the ugly linear austerity recedes and the flora flourishes.

A perfect setting, then, for an evening celebrating the work of Sierra Leone’s Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, founded twenty years ago by the then-accountant Bala Amarasekaran. Bala’s adoption of one orphaned chimpanzee lead inexorably to his rescuing myriad more and working tirelessly against the chimpanzee pet and meat trades. King Bruno is Paul Glynn's gentle, honest account of that first adopted chimp. Through Bruno’s eyes, we witness his happy but conflicted life with Bala, his endurance through the terrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war and his flight from the sanctuary into the wild (which has now become the potent stuff of local legend).

A particularly brilliant passage was read at the launch by Aminatta Forna, one of Sierra Leone’s most celebrated writers (her exquisite novel The Memory of Love is an intricate, elegiac lament on the catastrophic trauma wreaked in her country by the civil war). Forna's astute reading brought out all the elements of humour, bemusement and poignancy in the young Bruno’s accidental poo on Bala’s carpet:

He wanted to be human, clean and dainty. And so, when he turned around one day and saw the neat, perfect poo he had left on the carpet, Bruno grunted anxiously.

In the forest, no-one would have minded. In the forest, you went to the toilet anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in your own nest. You could even pick your poo up and throw it around.

Bruno had lived in Bala and Sharmila’s house for nearly a year now, and he had never once seen Bala throw his own poo around. […] Bruno fidgeted. He had to do something about it before Bala returned home. Then he remembered. Upstairs, in a small room, stood a bowl with a puddle of water and a roll of paper beside it. He panted in excitement, dashed up the stairs and grabbed the paper. […]

It was harder than it looked. The roll of toilet paper was big and Bruno’s hands were small. When he wiped at his poo, it just seemed to spread everywhere. But in the end it was gone. The carpet was brown and sticky and piles of brown paper lay everywhere. Bruno clapped and jumped up and down. Bala would be happy.

Bala wasn’t happy.

The book is written for children but it holds just as much appeal for adults - I was captivated by its subtle, elegant, wonderfully humane tone that reminds us just how similar chimps and people really are. Bruno’s view of the world is at once faithfully animalistic and engagingly anthropomorphic – the narrative naturally elicits our empathy but simultaneously divorces us from our blinkered human outlook, reminding us just how contrary our baffling species must seem. This is a hugely important book for raising our awareness of the plight of these animals, with an authentic, sincere appeal to the heart that is more effective than any list of facts about the threats to chimpanzee populations (which are horrifying). King Bruno brings to life a chimpanzee whose voice is as unique and believable as the horse narrating Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. We can only hope Handspring Puppet Company pick it up, marvel at the writing and the beautiful illustrations (also done by the author) and turn it into their next theatrical masterpiece.

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Post script:

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary’s work has now extended beyond its own boundaries, and the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone announced at the launch that, thanks to Bala’s indefatigable efforts, the forests around Tacugama are to become protected National Park. So hopefully Tacugama will soon be able to release more chimps to join their King Bruno in the knowledge that the wild is a safe place for them to thrive. And in the meantime, thank god that there are self-sacrificing souls like Bala among our truly baffling species.

For more information about Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, see here.
Also, there's a great little Q&A with author Paul Glynn here.

Curious cardboard cut-outs in Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales

Philip Pullman, Grimm Tales for Young and Old, Penguin, 2012

Walking on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a shock of white hair emanating from his temples, a slight limp to his gait, Philip Pullman could be a character straight out of his own Grimm Tales for Young and Old. And he enthrals even more than they do – his readings held me spellbound, with perfectly-pitched accents creating unforgettable dialogue and the ability to conjure an aura of mystery in just a few suspenseful sentences.

Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old (out now in hardback) is undoubtedly a skilful example of scholarly and imaginative creative writing. And he is a consummate speaker - he enlightens the audience about his writing and answers questions with wit and sensitivity, while never quite shedding the cloak of affable inscrutability in which he shrouds himself. But there remains for me a question about whether this new collection truly inspires the imagination, whether it speaks to the contemporary reader in a stimulating and relevant way, in the manner of his own award-winning literature.

Pullman’s fascinating introduction to the collection proves his extensive research and his dedicated admiration of the tales and their tellers. And his own tellings are indeed inventive and exquisitely crafted. ‘The Juniper Tree’, which Pullman admits is his own favourite, is also one of mine. It is a story with unusual aesthetic delicacy and a moving, multi-layered narrative. Another, ‘The Three Snake Leaves’, from which he read at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, also has a dramatic intensity that makes it entirely compelling, and there are many tales with moments of memorable elation, horror, poignancy and provocation.

But the plainness of the writing, which Pullman consciously cultivates to harmonise with his concept of the tales’ characters as the ‘little cardboard cut-out figures that come with the toy theatre’, ultimately undermines the power of this book. The same fault can be found in his The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010). In it, Pullman similarly remains faithful to his source and evokes The Bible’s austere prose, but thereby creates a rather unsubtle, dull and worthy book. By writing the Grimm stories in language that is concise and economic, he loses the profound, galvanising appeal to one's very sense of humanity that he so superlatively achieves in the His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). For that series is, in essence, a retelling of the most well-known tale of them all, Genesis’s account of Adam and Eve and the Fall (or, in Pullman’s eyes, the Awakening) of Man.

So I accept the belief Pullman articulated in his talk, that the cut-out nature of the Grimm characters allows the tales to be ‘more gruesome and yet still palatable, rooting them in the reality of terrible social situations and making them into stories’. But as stories, there can still be no comparison between the perils undergone by the Grimm brothers’ human silhouettes and Lyra and Will’s humanising of what the author would see as another kind of fairytale. Which I suppose is a tribute to Pullman himself, to his ability to create the very best kind of story.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall he said he wrote Grimm Tales for Young and Old because he fears ‘in the splintering of our world that fairytales will be lost’. And I do believe Pullman has continued valuably the enduring, treasured tradition of retelling and reshaping these tales. But it is his own contribution to our splintering world, not with fairytales but with his own stunning novels, that will remain the lasting testament to his brilliance as a storyteller.

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Casual cruelty in The Casual Vacancy

On JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

Launched at Southbank Centre, September 2012

A disclaimer: I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I have read the books more times than I care to admit, and may or may not have dressed up as a snitch: golden sandwich-board-ball, wings and all.

That said, I went to see JK Rowling launch her new novel The Casual Vacancy with slight scepticism, partly because I had seen past interviews in which she appeared somewhat lacking in charisma, or at least forced to forgo charisma for the sake of discretion. But for the launch of her novel at Southbank Centre last month she came across as extremely genuine, engaging and honest. Her desire for the book to be well-received was palpable, as was her acceptance that there could be no discussion of it without reference to the behemoth that is her fantasy series.

Rowling opened up about her preoccupation with death, which presented itself with increasing ruthlessness throughout Harry Potter. She admitted to a crippling sense that, as she says inThe Casual Vacancy, ‘tiny ghosts of your living children haunt your heart’; that life is a constant process of mourning the past. This is something Rowling acknowledged no child would want to know of their parent, and which she followed with an immediate apology to her daughter in the audience. Such frankness is indicative of just how personal she is being in this book – The Casual Vacancy is not simply a ‘500 page socialist manifesto’ as Jan Moir has unforgivingly labelled it, but is a novel that addresses Rowling’s own emotional as well as political concerns. She affirmed that she had been experimenting with adult novels before Harry Potter materialised, fully formed and bespectacled, on that famous napkin, and that this is not a cynical, provocative career move to wrong-foot the critics but is something she ‘couldn’t help but write’.

I was pleasantly surprised, after mediocre reviews, to find that the novel feels on the whole well-written; her slight clunkiness-of-phrase (to employ a somewhat clunky phrase) is offset by the engaging structure and plot. But I have to say that I am now 200 pages in and struggling, not because I don’t think the novel is of a high enough quality but because it is relentlessly depressing.

There is no lovable character to root for. The reader is subject to a constant barrage of insidious suggestions that no one in our country, across the spectrum of the class system and for myriad miserable reasons, is happy. There are some characters with subtle redeeming qualities: the well-meaning but ineffectual school councillor, the ‘f***ed up’ but sympathetically-drawn daughter of a heroin addict. But most are almost entirely, fundamentally unpleasant; from the sinisterly abusive middle-class father to the subtly psychotic teenage boy, all the characters lead you lose faith in humanity.

So, as much as I admire the book, enjoy the writing and respect the writer, I hereby think I will have to abandon it. Perhaps I'll turn to Cider with Rosie instead, another West Country story of a different time and of a very different kind.

Will Self's self-indulgent modernism

On Will Self at Southbank Centre, September 2012.

Will Self’s concept of 'modernism' in the novel (can we even call it modernism anymore? Should that term not have been confined to the early 20^th century along with the modernists who first expounded it?) is flawed.

Perhaps within the parameters Self sets out, it is legitimate. But those parameters are far too rigidly delineated. When I went to see him talk about his new novel Umbrella, his propounding of, let’s call it experimentalism, in the novel was erudite and well-informed, and is well-executed in the novel. But I can’t help feeling he is a little too blinkered in the unforgiving nature of his philosophy. Yes, it is essential that creative writing in both form and content continues to push the boundaries of what has yet to be attempted in literature. And it is important that the multifarious nature of our world and of humanity can be linguistically encapsulated in the multifarious nature of the novelistic internal voice. But does that mean that the ‘realist’ tradition, honed by George Eliot and Jane Austen and now typified by the likes of Amis, McEwan et al, should be eschewed in favour of an attempt to conduct the darting meanderings of consciousness into language? And isn’t this language by its very nature carefully structured by the novelist and thus, ironically, ‘unreal’?

For what is language but a constrictive conduit through which we must necessarily articulate our abstract thoughts and emotions, and by which we are thus restricted within the very boundaries of that language and the limited manipulations upon it that we attempt to enact? Self’s argument that the novel should aspire to communicate the ‘reality’ of our thoughts and their infinite tributaries and deviations is valid, and has to an extent been executed by the 20^th century greats: Joyce, Woolf and so on. Self experiments in Umbrella with shifting time-periods mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and with the expression of what he calls ‘condensed thought’ via italics. And I do believe that such experimentation should be valued and acknowledged as a progression of the artform. But I cannot help but feel that his dogmatic insistence that this is the only way, or at least the closest way, of authentically conveying our inner thoughts is flawed.

Because for me novels express the most fundamental truths, emotions and expressions of being. And they can do this despite, or even due to, being composed of chapters, cohesive sentences and linear narratives. Not all novels achieve this veracity of course, but some do it to at least an equally potent effect as the stream of consciousness and some, I would argue, more so. Marshall Brown is speaking of poetry when he invokes ‘the vital round dance that lets form give life and meaning to content and lets content give substance and expression to form’ but I think this can apply equally to the novel and its form, be it experimental or traditional.

Think of Dickens in Great Expectations when he entreats the reader to ‘Think of the long chain of iron or gold, thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day’. Dickens is a proven master of the chapter, of the slow materialisation of the links that join together and form unbreakable nexuses around which an entire world can be created. Or think of Will Self’s contemporary David Mitchell, a fine example of experimentalism through the very distinct chapter partitions of his masterpiece Cloud Atlas, whose first character says: ‘Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent’.

These truer truths may be latent within the simulacrum of the realist novel just as much as within the simulacrum of the continuous stream of thought; they can be found not just in the attempted realism of the mind’s nebulous internal iterations but in the marshalling of these thoughts into something less ‘real’, perhaps, but equally true.