The reader is Neville Jason who Washington Post called “the marathon man” after his 70 hour recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Jason is well equipped to [...]]]> Naxos, the renowned producer of classical music recordings is publishing a complete and unabridged recording of Marcel Proust’s epic work, Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu).

The reader is Neville Jason who Washington Post called “the marathon man” after his 70 hour recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Jason is well equipped to read this even longer work by Proust, having received the Sir John Gielgud prize for fiction while he was at RADA and having then gone on to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic Company.  Indeed, while reading an earlier abridged version of Proust he did the abrigement himself and also translated the final volume (see article in Audiofile magazine).

The first volume alone, Swann’s Way (amazon link here) is over 23 hours on 17 CDs –  - six more volumes are to be added to the project and will eventually run for 140 hours and will be completed in October of this year.

I have had a rather mixed relationship with Proust’s great work.  I’ve read three volumes of it so far, but as I began about fifteen years ago perhaps that’s not very good going.  While the book is fascinating, if it takes me a long time to get into each one and I know that by spreading it out over such a long period I lose some of the connections across each volume and have forgotten how the characters relate to each other.  The books are hugely detailed (as you would expect with their huge size) and it can be a daunting task to start another one.

Neville Jason

With this background I was wondering how I would cope with Swann’s Way on an audio recording.  I was pleasantly surprise to find myself totally absorbed, particularly while driving.  Jason’s voice is exactly right for Proust – as a professionally trained actor, his intonation and tone is perfect for the rhythmic cadences of the Scott Moncrieff translation.  My own version of Proust is the newer Penguin edition which uses different translators for each volume.  The translation is flatter and more colloquial, whereas Scott Moncrieff’s sounds slightly more “classical” – which Neville Jason’s voice suits rather well.

Of course, you have to wonder how exactly you would get through 140 hours of audio recording.  It almost seems like a life’s work – something that would accompany you over many years as you dipped in and out of it and kept coming back to it.  If I was still at the stage of my life where I was driving up and down motorways it would be ideal, but for now it’s going to be an occasional treat over the next few years.  What a lovely thing to own though, a rich resource for some point in the future when I have more time on my hands.

By the way, should you wish to read along with the audio version, the  text of Proust’s work in the Scott Moncrieff translation is available for free download in various ebook formats on Project Gutenburg here.

I am selling a few books on Amazon at the moment, most of which have been reviewed on these pages.  If you would like to look at them, please see my Amazon Storefront.

I’m starting this year with a book which isn’t available in the book stores until April.  However, I wanted to publish the review while the subject is so topical following the death last month of North Korean [...]]]> On this 1 January 2012, I wish a happy and prosperous New Year to all my readers.  

I’m starting this year with a book which isn’t available in the book stores until April.  However, I wanted to publish the review while the subject is so topical following the death last month of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

I started to read The Orphan Master’s Son just before Christmas not realising that our television screens would feature so many images of North Korea following the death of Kim Il Sung and his replacement as supreme leader by his young son Kim Il Un.  As I watched the news reports of weeping crowds and saw the podgy face of the new “supreme leader”, I found myself reading grim passages in Adam Johnson’s book about the pitiful state of the the bulk of the North Korean population as they face forced labour and near-starvation.

It is rare to find a book set in North Korea, that vast prison-house of a nation which seems to be a giant personality-cult backed-up by the fourth largest army in the world.  North Korea is such a closed-off land with such difficult access for Western people that very few books about North Korea have been published – one notable exception in recent years being Barbara Demick’s excellent Nothing to Envy which documents the accounts of six real-life citizens of the city of Chongin.

In order to write this highly detailed account of a life in North Korea, Adam Johnson immersed himself in  whatever information was available about the country including defectors’ oral histories and any other material he could get his hands on.  The first few pages of his book are the product of “a year’s investigation into North Korean orphanages, the floods of 1995 and the resulting famine, the city of Chongin, Soviet factories, Songun policy, military vehicles and so on”.  He has also travelled in North Korea (under the watchful eye of State-employed minders of course) and this has filled in some of the gaps left by eye-witness accounts and the written literature.

The story tells the life of Jun Do, the son of an orphan master.  Because he was brought up in an orphanage, he tends to be thought of as an orphan – something which apparently makes for a life-long stigma.  Life in the orphanage was grim in the extreme and Jun Do’s father granted him no favours, “When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spend the night locked in it.  When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor”.

Collective Farm - image from MSN

Occasionally a factory would adopt a group of boys and employ them as a ready-made labour force. Indeed, anyone who could feed the boys and provide a bottle for the Orphan Master could have them for the day as an impromptu work-gang.  At the age of fourteen many of the boys were recruited into the army and Jun Do became a tunnel soldier, trained to patrol the border with South Korea deep inside the vast network of tunnels that extend under the border into South Korea.

Eventually he is recruited as a low-level intelligence officer and is sent to work as a radio operator on a fishing vessel.  The ramshackle trawler had another job to do – abducting innocent Japanese citizens from the beaches where they walked at night (yes, this really happened – see the Wikipedia article).  During one of the ship’s voyages they are stopped and boarded by an American naval vessel, an event of such humiliation for the proud North Koreans that they dread returning home to account for themselves.  Inevitably, the return to North Korea is traumatic for Jun Do for he faces one of many brutal interrogations which leaves him seriously injured.

Eventually Jun Do is sent on a trade visit to Texas – perhaps an unlikely scenario, but one which gives the author the opportunity to highlight the contrast between the two cultures.  I was reminded of Chuck Palahniuk’s hilarious novel Pygmy in which a North Korean child is sent on a cultural exchange to the USA.

In the course of the book we read much of daily life in North Korea.  The slightest deviation from the rules of citizenship can result in the appearance of a military vehicle at the door of the apartment block to whisk its occupants away to a labour camp (a whole family is punished for the transgression of an individual). Life in the camps is so terrible often involving labour in mines with no tools of equipment other than bare hands.

Even ordinary citizens can be conscripted to a day’s labour in the fields, which has to be undertaken with heroic enthusiasm – lorries cruise the streets of the cities and collect anyone they find even though they may be on their way to work or returning home for their evening meal.

A united nation!

The second part of the book, “The Biography of Commander Ga” shows what life is like for a senior military officer with the privileges of rank – but with the ever-present threat of being purged by the regime.  Jun Do plays a major part in this story too, and we even meet up with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, a fascinating narrative which seems all too credible.  Its impossible to give more details of the story at this point without spoiling it, but its enough to say that it is almost bewildering in its ingenuity.

This is a big book (450 large-format pages) and took me quite a few days to read over Christmas.  The reading experience was not among the happiest I have had recently because while there is much humour in the book the story is at times harrowing and Adam Johnson does not stint on the graphic detail.

We read of forced organ donations, life in the Gulag prison camps and numerous brutalising interrogation sessions.  While these are not lengthy passages in themselves, they show what awaits any North Korean who attracts the attention of the authorities for the wrong reasons (something it is only too easy to do when every block of apartments has a warden with responsibility for ideological correctness).  In some ways the book has echoes of Alexandr Solzhenytzin’s work such as The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, but at least the Orphan Master’s Son has a fast-moving story and plenty of humour to lighten the tone.

The book is a remarkable achievement and perhaps give more idea about daily life in North Korea than anything else on the market.  It is a work on an epic scale and I think it is going to attract a lot of attention in 2012.

Rating:  8/10 –  A unique, ” must-have” read for those with an interest in these topics

Before the disaster, numbers of the concerned emigrated to Siberia, a blank canvas of a land, where environmentalists, Quakers and [...]]]> In Far North, we read of a world in which the inevitable results of consumerism, global warming and the environmental exploitation of poorer nations has come full cycle.  The disaster has long been and gone.

Before the disaster, numbers of the concerned emigrated to Siberia, a blank canvas of a land, where environmentalists, Quakers and free-thinkers could build Ark-like communities where they would be safe from the worst awaiting mankind.

Alas, their isolation was not enough to protect them, for when the world fell apart, other, more mean-spirited groups came into their communities and sowed dissension and brought back the old ways of competitiveness and greed.   An adult “Lord of the Flies” was enacted and only a few survived.

One of the survivors tells the story of what happened next.  Named “Makepeace” by her Quaker father, she suffered terrible abuse from the rougher incomers and now presents herself as a man.  Never a very feminine woman, she finds safety in her new persona. Her struggle for survival has in any case given her the full range of skills of any mountain survivalist.  Makepeace’s family are long-gone, the victims of terrible times which leached their idealism away from them and left them prey to evil.

Makepeace drip-feeds her story to us, saving some of the more important revelations of her life to the later portions of her book (a set of old exercise books which she manages to hide in her remote cabin).  She was appointed a Constable under the old order, and grimly clings to her law-keeping role for the residual status it still brings her when dealing with the hostile folk around her.  But all law has gone, as has trust in one another.  Makepeace’s ability to maintain a stock of weaponry and to make her own bullets is her only real security.

The world has turned very ugly.  The Soviet Gulag system has re-emerged and slave labourers work in blighted landscapes and ruined cities, recovering polluted artefacts from a better civilisation now long gone.  Is this a solar-powered iPod? -

. . .  a silver stone, about the size of an apple, but flatter and hard and cold. It lay there, dead and unresponsive. ‘Not working,’ she said. She took it out of the room and lay it somewhere . . . she went out of the room and brought the stone back. ‘I just hope there’s enough sun today,’ she said as she set it back down in front of me. It was warm to the touch now from having laid out in the sun, and on the skin of it you could see little shapes in light, like the outline of stars in the dark, but green . . .  I prodded it again and the stone seemed to leap into life. A picture appeared on it, but not flat and painted, lit up on one whole side of it, and moving, and speaking. It was of girls, six or seven of them, and a bit drunk.

There have been many other dystopian books in which we read a vision of a hopelessly corrupted future.  This one offers the usual mix of blighted landscapes, renegade gangs living in a lawless civilisation, a few good people struggling to keep the old ways going.  The genre is shared by all forms of pioneering stories whether in the Wild West, Australia or Africa quite apart from the many post-nuclear holocaust stories. Far North reminded me of Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen Baxter’s Flood.  I think it reminded me most of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain which is set in the aftermath of the American Civil War and is equally well-written.

But our world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it, could only spin hopelessly in its binnacle. North had melted right off the map. North was every which way. North was nowhere.

Marcel Theroux has written a fine novel here.  It is harrowing at times, but is written so beautifully that we are drawn on despite the horrors.  Marcel Theroux’s father is of course the travel-writer and novelist Paul Theroux and I would say that the son writes as well as the father.  The reviewer in the New York Times called Far North “an unbearably sad yet often sublime novel” and I think that sums it up well enough.

I am grateful to Gaskella for writing about this book in her blog and bringing it to my attention.

Norwegian writer Per Petterson writes in a sparse, restrained style which somehow mirrors the bleak Scandinavian towns and landscapes he describes in his novels.  In I Curse the River of Time, we meet Arvid Janse, a character who features in other Petterson novels, a tired man who has failed to fulfil his potential and [...]]]>

Norwegian writer Per Petterson writes in a sparse, restrained style which somehow mirrors the bleak Scandinavian towns and landscapes he describes in his novels.  In I Curse the River of Time, we meet Arvid Janse, a character who features in other Petterson novels, a tired man who has failed to fulfil his potential and has a propensity to cheap whisky and memories of better times.

Arvid is going through a divorce, and his mother is dying of stomach cancer.  We join the story with his mother leaving Oslo on a ferry to sail small town in Jutland where she grew up, and where the family have a beach house near a remote village.

Petterson plays tricks with his readers straight-away as we read Arvid’s detailed description of his mother’s voyage complete with her thoughts and actions, down to the way she twisted the top off a bottle of whisky and filled her glass half-full – actions which her son, the first person narrator could not possibly have seen.  However, it all creates atmosphere: the cold sea and the bleak landscape of North Jutland with it marram grass, pine trees and sea-mist.

We then find ourselves in a car with Arvid and his two young daughters.  They are going for an aimless drive, one of many which they call “field-watching”.  Far from asking “Are we nearly there yet?”, the girls seem to enjoy their travels through the gloomy landscape, singing Beatles songs as they speed across bare fields and over treeless hills.

And then the early dark descended and there was nothing more to see. Inside the car it grew dark around our shoulders and dark around our hands. Only the girls’ hair was shining in the glow from the lights along the road, in red and in yellow, and the numbers glowed on the speedometer and the tiny blue light for the main beam went on and off with the oncoming traffic and we stopped our singing on the way past Skjetten and were silent on the bridge by the station at Strømmen.

Of course, the trouble with first-person narratives like this is that you spend the whole book inside the head of the narrator.  We get carried along with the thoughts of the character so far, then sometimes we think, hang on a minute, do I really want to be here?  For Arvid Jansen expresses himself beautifully but he is not always the most uplifting company being prone to a depressive outlook on life and an overwhelming sense of defeat.

No act of will would get me out of this state, no leap of thought pull me up. At times the only option was to sit in a chair and wait for the worst ravages to calm down so I could perform the most basic tasks: cut a slice of bread, go to the toilet, or drag myself all those exhausting metres through the hallway to lie down on my bed.

The book moves easily back and forth between the present day and earlier times when Arvid dropped out of college because he wanted to bring a Maoist form of socialism to the industrial workers of his town.  His studies in socialism have created in his head an idealised vision of the working class, but,  “I could not shake off the feeling that the working class I spoke of was not quite the same as the one my mother and father belonged to on a daily basis”.  When he tells his mother that he is going to leave college, her reaction, perhaps unsurprisingly, is to strike his cheek with the flat of her hand.  If you have spent your days working in a factory in order to support you son through college you could be a little disappointed when he throws it back in your face.

He gets a job in a factory, but finds that there is a void between him and the other workers:  “every single time I tried to turn the conversation from football to the factions in the trade union movement – the red, revolutionary, and the blue, conservative – they would simply pat me on the shoulder, laugh and walk away”.

North Denmark

As the book progresses (if that’s the right word for this meander through Arvid’s life) we learn that although he was not his mother’s favourite son.  He seems to have a deep feeling for her , and when he hears of her departure for Jutland, he follows her to the remote beach house.  He finds her sitting on the beach looking out to sea and smoking a cigarette.  She seems underwhelmed to see him,

“It’s me”, I said

“I know who it is.  I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down the road. Are you broke?”

They return to the house and Arvid cuts down a huge pine tree, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.  As far as I can tell, he intends to cut the pine tree into logs but never gets round to it – perhaps showing that Arvid is prone to grand gestures but never seems able to bring anything to a successful conclusion – his marriage, his fathering of the girls, his career as a Maoist.

These events happen in the late 1980s, and towards the end of the book, Arvid hears that the Berlin Wall has fallen.  He is alone on a beach in Jutland, while momentous events are happening at which he is not present (and which perhaps show the bankruptcy of his socialist ideals).  He meditates on death, realising his fear of “that moment when you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever”.  I think you would only feel like that if you had consistently taken the wrong route through your life, which Arvid has of course done.  He has left little mark on the planet and at the age of 37 the reader suspects he never will.

I am not sure what the term “Scandinavian” means in terms of describing literature, but if its something to do with bleak landscapes, an eternal dark winter, depressed characters, recourse to alcohol to provide an escape, a slow meandering style of writing then this book is definitely Scandinavian.  However, despite the fact that Arvid is hardly good company to be with, Petterson’s writing is at all times beautiful and it is that kept me reading to the end – and probably open to reading more of his books at a later date. I also reviewed Petterson’s book, To Siberia back in 2009 and wrote, “overall, the grey skies and bleak aspect of the landscape infect the narrative a little more than makes for an enjoyable read” which is not too far from what I’m saying about this one.

I am indebted to Reading Matters for bringing this book to my attention.  Kim gave the book four stars and wrote, “I Curse the River of Time is far from an uplifting novel . . . it has a quiet, understated power that makes you feel as if your life has been enriched by the simple, all-consuming act of reading it”.  I think that gets it just about right.

I write a lot of reviews and while I only usually only write about books I enjoy, sometimes I have the pleasure of writing about something really special.  Andrew Miller’s Pure is in this category of “five-star plus”, a book which I hope will be nominated for a prize, being both literary and readable [...]]]>

I write a lot of reviews and while I only usually only write about books I enjoy, sometimes I have the pleasure of writing about something really special.  Andrew Miller’s Pure is in this category of “five-star plus”, a book which I hope will be nominated for a prize, being both literary and readable – two qualities which don’t always go together.

Andrew Miller was a new writer to me when I read his last book, One Morning Like a Bird.  I was impressed by the author’s ability to get under the skin of a young Japanese writer in 1940′s Tokyo and it was no surprise to me to learn that an earlier book, Oxygen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  Evidently a writer to watch.

I was therefore very pleased to have the opportunity to read his new book Pure last week.  Miller is obviously someone who likes to cover completely different eras and locations in his books, for we now find ourselves in pre-Revolutionary Paris in the company of a young engineer, Jean-Baptiste Barratte, who has been commissioned by a government minister to clear a graveyard.

The church, Les Innocents was closed by Louis XVI leaving behind an overflowing burial ground, the stink from which infests the whole neighbourhood with vile odours, even tainting the food and clothing of those who live nearby.  Barratte is told in his commissioning interview that “during a single outbreak of the plague fifty thousand corpses were buried at Les Innocents . . . corpse upon corpse, the death-carts queuing along the rue Sain-Denis”.  Barratte is told by the Minister that he has to clear, “every last knuckle-bone.  It will require a man unafraid of a little unpleasantness.  Someone not afraid of the barking of priests.  Not given to superstitions”.

In an article in The Guardian, How to Write Fiction, Andrew Miller wrote, “let it be loudly asserted that character, strong characters, are at the heart of all great literature and always will be. Plot, even in detective fiction, is a very secondary matter . . .  a writer who does not create convincing characters will fail. A writer who creates thrilling, troubling, seductive, insistent characters need not worry too much about any other aspect of writing”.

Few readers will find fault with that – just think of Charles Dickens for example (if you live in the UK listen to Claire Tomalin’s biography being read on BBC iPlayer while there’s still time) whose characters, Fagin, Pickwick, Micawber, Scrooge, have almost entered the language as descriptors of the qualities and faults they represent.

Miller ably demonstrates his emphasis on characterisation in Pure.  The book is peopled with a wonderful cast of colourful characters, from Jean-Baptiste himself, to the eccentric organist Armand Saint Méard who still inhabits the old church and becomes Barrette’s right-hand man, via a broad cast of landladies, tradesmen, prostitutes, sextons, tailors, labourers and quite a few others whose memory lingers in the mind long after the reader finishes the book.  I couldn’t help be reminded of Patrick Suskind’s book Perfume which is also set in Paris in the same era and is also peopled by a range of memorable citizens of that teeming city.  Miller’s story is equally vivid and comes into the category of “if you liked that you’ll enjoy this” (so beloved of Amazon and other online book-sellers).

I found this book to be a vivid portrayal of 18th century Paris.  The author has created several scenes where I felt drawn into this filthy yet always fascinating city.  Armand takes Barrette for a tour of the local galleries – an area of teeming crowds in narrow passages with shops, bars and freak-shows where they bond over three bottles of wine before buying a new green suit for Barrette – which features on the cover of the book and turns out to be an unbearably gaudy item of clothing for Barrette as the troubles of his project almost overwhelm him.

Barrette has the idea that the best way to clear the graveyard would be to recruit a team of miners from his home town near Valenciennes. He returns to Normandy and meets up with his old friend Lecouer, a mine manager who is delighted to have the opportunity to go to Paris as foreman of the thirty miners selected as labourers.  The miners are a hard working but self-contained crowd.  Speaking an old form of Flemish, they form a tribe of their own in the city with their own habits and code of honour. Lecouer does a good job of managing them but is subject to his own demons which will bring disaster on himself and others.

There are many strands to this account of the project, but for every solemn passage there is humour elsewhere to balance it, not least in the lodging house where the Monnards and their daughter Ziguette host dinner every evening.

A particularly memorable passage is a five page section in chapter 8 when Miller takes us on a night-tour of the people we have met so far as they prepare for bed or already slumber. I was reminded of Dylan Thomas’s opening to Under Milk Wood where he describes the residents of Llaregyb as they sleep.  Miller also demonstrates a similarly lyrical voice while compiling his own catalogue of the sleepers and the still-awake,

Over Paris, the stars are fragments of a glass ball flung at the sky.  The temperature is falling.  In an hour or two the first frost flowers will bloom on the grass of parade grounds, parks royal gardens, cemetries.  The streetlamps are guttering.  For their last half-hour they burn a smoky orange and illuminate nothing but themselves.  In the faubourgs of the rich, the watchmen call the hour.

In the rookeries of the poor, blunt figures try to hid in each other’s warmth.  At the Monnards’ in the box-room, under the slates, the servant Maries is kneeling in the dark.  She has rolled up a rug and has her eye to the knothole above the lodger’s room, the lodger’s bed . . .

Ten quiet streets to the east . . . Armand Saint Méard is sprawled in a large bed with a large woman, his landlady and paramour Lisa Saget widowed mother of two children and two who went into the ground.  More asleep than awake, she slips from the bed, squats over a bucket , pisses, dabs herself with the rag, gets back into bed. . .

Leo Robson, reviewing this book in the Guardian, felt that Miller’s plotting was not equal to his characterisation.  I disagree.  I found quite enough plot to keep me going and in any case, the story is about how the vast and nauseous project affects Barrette’s mind.  We see him develop as a character from an unsophisticated engineer from a deeply rural Normandy, to a man who has become a Parisian, acquainted with the compromises with corruption required of those who live in the city.

Over the months Barrette finds an inner strength which enables him to get by under extremely adverse circumstances and I was reminded of some of Thomas Hardy’s characters who are transformed from mundaneness to a sort of heroism by their suffering.  The project has its dramas and crises in abundance and while the book is humorous throughout, there is plenty of pathos to balance out the more farcical episodes.  The possibly flat ending is all part of what I feel is Miller’s liking of understatement and I thought it worked rather well, enabling those who worked so hard to find a resting place for the thousands of corpses to be replaced by a new cast of those who would inhabit the bustling new market place built on top of the old graveyard.

I think it is unnecessary to view historical novels as “historical”.  Modern writers cannot hope to enter the minds of characters from three centuries ago and from a different culture.  The important feature is plausability,  for we will never be able to judge authenticity unless we  immerse ourselves in the history of the era. In his book Pure, Andrew Miller has created an entirely plausible scenario and Jean-Baptiste Barratte is to me a convincing creation who fits bravely into the repellent situations he finds himself in.