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.

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.

At first glance the book looks [...]]]> I’ve read countless books and its not often I come across one which is so unlike any I have read before.   Pub Walks in Underhill Country, Nat Segnit’s first novel, is unique, both in style and content and kept me engrossed for a couple of days last week.

At first glance the book looks to be as its title suggests, just a book of pub walks. I have a few similar books on my shelves and they have provided many a happy afternoon of walking in the countryside with the thought of a decent pint at the end of it.  Just by writing that I’m already beginning to sound like the fictional author of the pub walks, Graham Underhill, a true descendant of Charles Pooter of The Diary of a Nobody if ever there was one.

The book begins with a spoof introduction by the author in which he describes finding one of Graham Underhill’s earlier pamphlets of walks in a drawer full of timetables while he was staying in a writers’ retreat.  He commends Underhill as “a psycho-geographer, a cartographer of human consciousness” and writes that as a writer himself he had no option other than to find the complete set of six pamphlets and to take them to a publisher, with the volume before us being the result.

The table of contents reads:

A Note to the Rambler

1.  Malvern to Ledbury

2.  The Slad Valley

3.  The Brecon Horseshoe

etc, etc.

But there are some clues that not all may be as it seems for by the end we see:

12.  The Sea of Ice

13.  The Valley of Poison

14.  The Worst Journey in the World.

We start to read the first few paragraphs but don’t get far before encountering the voice which is going to accompany us around the fields and woods of Middle England:

Start by turning right out of the main entrance of Malvern Link railway station. Properly equipped walkers should note that there are often teenagers smoking in the car park here. While their presence can be intimidating, Malvern is by and large a respectable town, where the bulwark of family values still holds against the national tide; keep your eyes on the route ahead and you should escape with nothing so much as a snide remark about the gaiters, insulated jacket, or carbon-composite walking pole without which no attempt on high ground is advisable.

For Graham Underhill is not a little pedantic, and before long we are in for a few lectures on local history, flora and fauna and the dangers along the way (falling in lakes, slipping in mud, being hit by overhanging branches etc – Underhill has the soul of a Health and Safety Inspector (which is not surprising as his job in local government has well trained him for such a role).  We read that he is a widow who has recently re-married, and to a stunningly beautiful Bengali woman, a bossy and self-absorbed writer.

We had met by the loans desk at Malvern Library. Sunita had been refusing to pay a fine of £25.20 on the grounds that two pages were missing from one of the six books she had been three weeks late in returning. The librarian, a large woman in traditional African dress, was threatening to rescind Sunita’s tri-county library membership, and to avoid any further unpleasantness I took the liberty of stepping in and settling the fine, securing the librarian’s eternal contempt and Sunita’s agreement to join me at the Nags Head on Bank Street for a glass of whatever she fancied. . .

at forty-six I was nearly fifteen years Sunita’s senior, and in all honesty some distance shorter of the male physical ideal than she was of the female.  But I had persistence in my favour, and as a senior council officer, well-regarded local watercolourist and author of six successful self-published walking guides, I hope it doesn’t sound too conceited of me to say I represented a degree of stability and social standing to which, by her own admission, Sunita had long aspired.

But it soon becomes apparent that for Sunita, Graham is little more than a jumping-off point, a provider of home and income sufficient for her to go off on “Wild Writing Weekends” where she can mix with a far more interesting crowd than the small circle of dysfunctional friends which Graham meets in the pub from time to time.  Graham drags Sunita along on his walks, where she has her own personal photocopy of the route with its ramberly instructions:  At the top of the bank, keep a drystone wall on your right and continue in a north-easterly direction until a wide path crosses yours at right-angles. These passages are a brief counterpoint to the developing drama as Sunita gets more involved with fellow-workshop writer David, and takes a weekend off rambling in order to help him with his book:

And so it was that I set off for the Beacons tout seul, my inevitable disappointment set off by the knowledge not only that Sunita was prepared to forgo a weekend of pleasure to help a friend in need, but that in supplying David’s text she might get the chance to revive her own career as a writer.

The walks continue week by week, but Graham finds himself increasingly alone as Sunita’s social world gets more complicated.  He consistently believes the best of Sunita and tries to involve her in shorter walks by taking her away on weekend breaks in hotels, but these are not always welcome.  Clearly Sunita’s mind is elsewhere.

It would spoil the story were I to continue, but I will just say that not all is as it seems, and Nat Segnit is a good plotter, not averse to some surprising denouements.  Graham ends up travelling far beyond rural Worcestershire and his pedantry and blindness to Sunita’s faults turn out to be one faults which are the obverse of a number of qualities including faithfulness and thinking well of people.  By the end, we end up almost admiring Graham despite his obsessions and long-windedness.

I enjoyed the way that the walks continue despite the awful events which are going on in Graham’s life.  He is always able to tell his readers about the path before them and the things they will see along the way.  He is not the first to take refuge in country-walking as a counter to the storms of life, and ultimately the book reminded this reader at least that those who ramble are often good-natured people who can be relied on in times of need.

This is the funniest book I have read in a long time and was a welcome break from some of the more serious books I have been reading lately.

Its 1786, and Jerusalem College, Cambridge is experiencing some troubled times – a ghost has been prowling the grounds and a couple of drownings have occurred.  In [...]]]> In Anatomy of Ghosts, Andrew Taylor has created a thoroughly entertaining read which was a nice change from some of the more serious books I’ve been reading lately.

Its 1786, and Jerusalem College, Cambridge is experiencing some troubled times – a ghost has been prowling the grounds and a couple of drownings have occurred.  In addition, a wealthy under-graduate, Frank Oldershaw,  has gone mad and has been committed to a private mental clinic (where the treatment seems to be to harshly punish the patients for their insanity).

Frank’s mother, Lady Anne employs John Holdsworth, the author of a tract against the supernatural to investigate and the journey through the intrigues and mysteries of the university town commence.

Andrew Taylor has created a believable impression of life in 18th century Cambridge.  The colleges are a closed community with strict hierarchies of professors and students, with the good old English class system being the usual dividing factor.  College life revolves around its very own hellfire club, the Holy Ghost Club, which specialises in initiating young men into the pleasures and vices of gentlemanly life.

Jesus College Cloister - image from Wikimedia Commons - click on image for details

When Holdsworth arrives in the college to carry out his investigations, he finds that recent meeting of the Holy Ghost Club have gone badly wrong and Lady Anne’s son Frank’s exile to the asylum is closely linked to recent goings on.   Holdsworth brings the power of his independence to the investigation.  He has his own nightmares to deal with – not least the deaths of his wife and child through drowning.  His business has failed and it is only because of the success of his tract against ghosts that this lucrative commission has come his way.

He has a modern scepticism about all things supernatural, and this enables him to bring a rational and calm mind to the more histrionic claims of some of those involved.  Perhaps the “ghost” is a product of guilty consciences and attempts to cover up some very shady dealings?

The book moves along beautifully from one mystery to another.  Taylor shows his skills by allowing his story to develop gradually, while controlling the flow of revelations.  We read of college intrigues, illicit relationships and hidden vices, the more serious passages being lightened by a cast of comic characters such as Tom Turdman the night-soil man, the details of whose job are too disgusting to describe here.  It is a long and convoluted journey to a very satisfactory ending, and it is easy to see how Andrew Taylor has won so many awards for his previous novels.  Doubtless Anatomy of Ghosts will soon provide him with more.

I was unimpressed with Gerard Woodward’s collection of short [...]]]> One of my favourite reading experiences was discovering Gerard Woodward’s trilogy about the dysfunctional Jones family, which reached a conclusion in its final part A Curious Earth which generated a long-lasting “Ahhh” and that rare feeling of total satisfaction that only a good book can bring.

I was unimpressed with Gerard Woodward’s collection of short stories Caravan Thieves despite glowing newspaper reviews and wondered whether I was missing something.  Now Nourishment has appeared and I found it another disappointing read – so much so that its hard to believe that its written by the same author as the wonderful trilogy.  I don’t think this one is going to help Woodward with his “shortlist syndrome” (2001 Whitbread First Novel Award, 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize) and this time, newspaper reviewers tend to agree with me (see links at end of this article).

Nourishment is the story of Tory Pace (Tory, being short for Victoria), who’s husband Donald has been captured by the Germans while serving in the deserts of Libya and has been incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp.  Tory lives in suburban south London and takes her part in the war effort by working in a gelatine factory – fortunately for her she is assigned to the packing department rather than the more disgusting areas where blue-bottles swarm and calves heads are boiled down to extract the desired substances.

Tory’s children have been evacuated to the Cotswolds and her mother, Mrs Head, has returned from Suffolk to live with her to provide unwanted support for her daughter.  Poor Tory finds herself inexorably drawn back into a child/parent relationship as her mother gradually dominates her life.

There is a hint of cannibalism early in the novel when Mrs Head scavenges a leg of pork from the remains of a bombed-out butchers shop and Tory wonders how her mother can be sure that it is not the leg of the butcher himself -

“Were there any casualties in the air-raid?  I heard people on the tram saying there had been some . . .”

“Its a leg of pork, Tory trust me.  I have been visiting butchers’ shops for more than forty years and I know my cuts of meat”.

The meat turns out to be “nourishing” – which I think is the theme throughout the book, Woodward picking out items throughout which provide unexpected nourishment, whether magic vitamin pills or illicit off-ration roast dinners.

And Tory’s husband Donald also needs nourishment of a rather different kind.  Suddenly, after six months of believing him to be missing in action, a letter arrives from a German Prisoner of War camp.  Both mother and daughter are astonished to hear from Donald after hearing that he had been lost, but they are taken aback by the final paragraph of the letter -

Could you write me a dirty letter by return of post? I mean really filthy, full of all the dirtiest words and deed you can think of.

Tory is thrown into emotional turmoil by this request and refuses to even think about complying.  She tells Donald that she was insulted by his letter and can only think that it is due to a moment of brain fever brought on by the stress of wartime.  Donald is not to be put off however and repeats his question even more fervently and adds a request for a photograph of her naked, even going so far as to supply the address of a photographic shop who will develop it for her.

Eventually Tory finds a way of satisfying Donald’s needs for salacious letters, by entering into a relationship which provides her with personal experiences far beyond those the marriage bed provided.  She finds herself willing to write letters to Donald as a way of reliving the excitement of her new relationship.

All changes when Donald returns from the war and is confronted with tangible evidence of her war-time adventures.  The book then takes various bizarre and semi-comic turns, with Tory eventually finding a way to deal with her unpleasant husband and forming a supportive friendship in the most unlikely circumstances.

My problem with the book is somewhere around a lack of depth.  It comes across as “just a story”, with none of the heart-stopping insights into the human condition which marked out Woodward’s Jones family trilogy.  I wrote about his earlier work, “if ever writing can speak realistically to the human condition then this is it and the reader will end the series having encountered in Gerard Woodward a compassionate and thoughtful mind who brings the poets eye to this tragi-comic history”.

In Nourishment, Woodward seems to have abandoned these qualities in favour of a light-hearted narrative with little in its favour other than a few surprises and some bizarre events.  It feels like a book in which the author started to write without much idea of where he was going to go, and kept on writing, introducing whatever came into his mind until he felt he’s written enough, and then stopped.  And at this point, I’ll end this review and hope that the author can re-capture some of his earlier abilities in this next novel.

Newspaper reviews:
James Lasden in The Guardian
Sam Kitchener in The Spectator
Sam Leith in The Financial Times

Other book blog reviews:
John Self Asylum
Bookmunch