Reading Matters

'The Maintenance of Headway' by Magnus Mills

 

 Fiction - hardcover; Bloomsbury; 152 pages; 2009.

You know you've really enjoyed a book when you titter your way through it, which is exactly what I did when I eagerly devoured Magnus Mills' latest novel, The Maintenance of Headway.

Mills, who is one of my favourite authors, is, admittedly, not for everyone. He writes in a deliberately understated way, with an almost childlike naivety. He doesn't bother with extraneous detail, because everything moves forward chiefly through dialogue. This allows him to really get to the heart of the matter, which, in most of his novels, is this simple premise: English life is plagued by bureaucracy and officialdom for no other reason than it keeps people in employment. 

In The Maintenance of Headway, Mills turns his scornful eye towards the running of the London bus network. (Mills himself was a bus driver when his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, was published.) Well, I suspect it's London for the city isn't named, but the description of the street system -- "The streets are higgledy-piggledy and narrow; there are countless squares and circuses, zebra crossings and pelicans. Go east from the arch and you've got twenty-three sets of traffic lights in a row" -- is unmistakable. I'm also convinced that the "bejewelled thoroughfare" ("a great canyon of flagship stores stretching side by side for nearly a mile") mentioned in the text is actually London's Oxford Street.

As to the story, there's not really much to it. In fact, it's pretty much devoid of plot. The book is essentially a satire that pokes fun at the overly regimented (and somewhat unsuccessful) way in which the Board of Transport runs its buses, where "there's no excuse for being early" and everyone bemoans the loss of the Venerable Platform Bus (which can only be another way of describing the now defunct but rather iconic Routemaster) with its conductors and no doors. It covers the running battle between the bus drivers, who just want to drive buses to their required destinations with a minimum of fuss, and the inspectors, who meddle with the timetables and routes under the guise of "maintaining headway" .

Much of it is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly if you have a dry sense of humour. The wit comes chiefly through the conversations held between drivers on their tea-breaks. I was rather partial to the rogue driver, Jason, with his reckless attitude to passenger safety. In a discussion about passenger's who deliberately ring the bell with no intention of getting off, Jason says:

'If they keep doing it on my bus I give them some treatment with the brake and the accelerator. Rough them up a bit:  teach them a lesson.' 
'What about all the innocent people?' I asked. 'The ones who haven't touched the
bell?' 
'Tough, isn't it?' said Jason.

If you've ever experienced the joys of being a bus passenger, there's a lot in this funny little novel you'll recognise. And next time you wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once, you'll know exactly who to blame.

'Poet and hack' at St Pancras International

• 
• 
• 

I took these photographs of Sir John Betjeman's statue at St. Pancras International (also known as St Pancras railway station) last week.

Sir John (1906-1984) was a poet, writer and broadcaster, who staunchly defended Victorian architecture and was largely responsible for ensuring the beautiful facade of this building was not pulled down when there was a move to do so in the 1960s.

This wonderful statue, by sculptor Martin Jennings, stands on the platform in the newly revamped station. It's a fitting tribute to him: from a distance he almost looks real, hand on hat to stop it blowing away, and his coat billowing in the wind, as he stands looking up at the the most glorious single span roof I've ever seen.

At his feet are lines from his own poetry, including: "Here where the cliffs alone prevail. I stand exultant, neutral, free,/ And from the cushion of the gale. Behold a huge consoling sea."

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.

A new genre?

I wondered how long it would take, but it looks like the "credit crunch" novels are starting to filter through...

In January Harvill Secker is publishing Henry Sutton's Get Me Out of Here, which is billed as "a darkly comic, state-of-the-nation odyssey set in Canary Wharf at the height of the financial crisis of autumn 2008."

Meanwhile, in March, Faber and Faber is publishing Alex Preston's This Bleeding City, which "picks over the carcass of the financial markets in the wake of the recent crash" while telling a "heartbreaking love story".

Anyone know any others on the radar?

'A romantic thriller about men not talking' scoops prize

Congratulations to Evie Wyld, who has won the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys literary prize for her debut novel -- and one that's been languishing in my TBR since September -- After the Fire, A Still Small Voice. The prize is worth £5,000.

You can hear Evie talk about her novel in the clip below.

'Books v. cigarettes' by George Orwell

Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin; 144 pages; 2008.

Books v. cigarettes is a small collection of essays by George Orwell brought together as part of Penguin's Great Ideas Series 3. The title of the book comes from an essay of the same name in which Orwell considers how much money he spends on his two vices, reading and smoking. This particular essay, first published in the Tribune on 8 February, 1946, will resonate with book lovers the world over, because how many of us have foregone some other pleasure (or necessity) in favour of a good book?

To prove that reading is not an expensive hobby out of the reach of ordinary citizens, Orwell counts all the books he owns (this sounds remarkably like what I have done in recent weeks, tackling my TBR piles) and adds up their total price to work out how much money he has spent on reading over a 15-year period. He discovers he has some 900 books and that it has cost him a little over £11 per year. 

He also includes his newspaper and periodicals intake, which is quite impressive: £8 per year on "two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines".  (I suspect if Orwell was around today he'd be a complete internet junkie, reading all the news sites, book blogs, Twitter feeds and so on.) He also spends roughly £6 per year on library subscriptions and cheap paperbacks, chiefly Penguins, "which one buys and then loses or throws away". 

All up, he estimates reading costs him £25 per year, which, according to this calculator, is the equivalent of £648 in today's money. By comparison, he spends £20 a year on cigarettes and beer.

In the grand scheme of things, he thinks this is quite reasonable although he points out that it is difficult to establish "any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them".

His second essay, Bookshop Memories, recalls his time spent working in a second-hand bookshop. His observations are both slightly snobby ("I doubt whether 10 per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one") and acutely funny:

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.

This quote made me laugh out loud, because I spent six years working in bookshops and used to get vague requests like this all the time!

Books v. cigarettes also includes a wonderful essay about reviewing books and another on the state of literature, which will appeal to bibliophiles. The rest of this slim volume tackles other non-bookish subjects: patriotism, the relationship between doctors and patients, and Orwell's childhood memoirs spent at an exclusive boarding school for which he obtained a scholarship.

All up, this is a perfect, effortless read, highly personable and quite bookish, if you like that sort of thing.

Completing "project TBR"

A week after I decided to sort out my TBR pile in order to work out what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw away, I've finally finished the exercise.

My TBR pile comprises around 350 books, which is roughly 100 more than I thought I owned! There's an additional 50 or so that have been weeded out to donate to Oxfam when I've got the energy to lug them up to my local store.

My TBR is now able to be housed entirely in my flat (hooray), instead of being put into storage, with a little help from Ikea's Expedit TV storage unit and a matching shelving unit. The shelves in both are so deep it is possible to double stack everything -- one "box" can effectively hold around 30 books.

The books that don't fit, about 100 of them, are stacked on top of my wardrobe, and I've created a little pile on my dresser of review copies waiting to be read. I've put all my hardcover books, about 20 or so, in a separate box. I feel much happier knowing that if I suddenly want to read a particular book, say Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin, I'll know roughly where it is in the house. This hasn't always been the case.

If you're interested in taking a peek at what's in the stack, the complete list is now available on "My TBR pile" page. Comments about what I should read next are more than welcome.

New Zealand Book Council promo

Words fail me. This is just brilliant.

Via @thefictiondesk

'Coming Up for Air' by George Orwell

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2001.

George Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air in 1939, a decade before his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a strange, beguiling and quite humorous novel, but there's a dark undertone that sums up the time period in which it was written, as Britain hovered on the edge of war.

The story, which is commonly thought to be thinly veiled autobiography, is narrated by George Bowling, a 45-year-old married man with two children who's bored with his life as an insurance salesman. He lives in the "inner-outer suburbs" in one of those streets that looks like every other, comprising a long, long row of "little semi-detached houses as much like council houses but generally uglier". He's just had a new set of false teeth fitted and his waistline is expanding at an alarming rate. Hmmm, sounds charming, doesn't he?

With the country on the brink of war and bombing planes flying low overhead, George retreats into the world of nostalgia and spends most of the novel recalling his semi-idyllic childhood in a village outside of London. He gets so lost in this reverie, where he no longer has to worry about the 9-to-5 treadmill and his dreary commute, that he hits upon an idea: he'll take a secret holiday, sans kids and wife, to the village he grew up in to soak up that wonderful, happy atmosphere once again. But in the heat of the moment he forgets one important thing: the march of progress and its impact on the rural way of life he longs to revisit so keenly. What he finds when he arrives isn't quite what he expected...

If nothing else, Coming Up for Air pays homage to English country life at the turn of the 19th century and the ways in which little boys grew up, carefree and obsessed by egg-collecting, fishing and other wildlife pursuits, before the horrors of the First World War changed things forever.

But the most interesting aspect of this novel is seeing the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four buried in the narrative. For instance, before George escapes to the village of his childhood, he's fearful of the current political climate -- "Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, rubber truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Front, anti-Comintern pact" -- even though he believes no one else is much bothered.

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

When he attends a lecture in the local hall with his wife and her female companions (remember, this is in the days before TV and such lectures were common entertainment), he feels slightly detached from the speaker who, predictably, pitches "into Hitler and the Nazis". But for anyone who's read Nineteen Eighty-Four the following sounds very much like the germ of the idea of the "two minutes hate":

A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald-head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. Whats he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. [...] He means it. Not faking at all -- feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy.

But the book's not entirely humourless, because even if the narrator's not exactly likable, he does have a habit of taking the mickey out of himself and others. Here he describes the audience members at the lecture:

...a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One plain, two purl, drop one and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the Nazis chop people's heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh shot. There was another woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the teachers at the School Council, really listening, sitting forward with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in.

On the whole, though, this is a rather pessimistic novel about a man trying to come to terms with a lost Edwardian childhood while a war with Germany looms large on the horizon.

'Fugitive Pieces' by Anne Michaels

 

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury Publishing; 304 pages; 1997.

Sometimes I find myself unexpectedly reading one novel after another that share similar themes. I think this is what you call serendipity. Or maybe it's sheer coincidence. But whatever the case, I couldn't help but compare Anne Michaels' 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces with the book I'd just finished, Hugo Hamilton's more recent Disguise.

Both books tell the stories of young Polish boys, orphaned during the Second World War, who start afresh but are haunted by events of the past. But where Hamilton's novel fails to really pack any emotional punch, perhaps because of the understated writing style and his emphasis on telling not showing, Michaels delivers a hugely poignant story that reverberates long after you reach the final page.

There's something exceptional about Michaels use of language, which conveys the precise mood of a particular moment using prose that reads like poetry, not surprising given she's an award-winning poet. Here's an example:

White aspens make black shadows, a photographic negative. The sky wavers between snow and rain. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light.

And so it goes. Admittedly, I found this lyrical use of language a little off-putting to begin with, but once I got used to the rhythms and the pacing and let it wash over me I was held in its sway. In fact, I had to do everything in my power not to underline every second passage because I'd end up spending more time vandalising my book than reading it.

But what about the story, I hear you say. Well, it's just as beautiful and haunting, really. It's divided into two parts.

The first is narrated by Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old Jewish boy, who witnesses the Nazis storming his house, killing his parents and older sister. He flees and hides himself in the boggy marshes of a nearby wood, where he is later discovered by a Greek geologist, Athos, who takes him back to the sun-filled Greek island of Zakynthos and brings him up as his own son. Here, Jakob is given unconditional love and is schooled in everything from the English language to archaeology. The horrors of the war are never far away though, particular as the island is under German occupation.

Later, the pair immigrate to Canada, and set up home in Toronto. Jakob goes to university, falls in love, gets married, becomes a poet and translator. But all the while he mourns the loss of his parents and, in particular, his sister, whose ghostly presence he feels long into his old age.

The second part is narrated by Ben, a 20-something married man, who has long admired Jakob's poetry, and goes on a mission to find Jakob's long lost personal journals. It is this second part that allows the reader to view Jakob from a different perspective, to see how a certain kind of sadness has permeated his life, and how he has long struggled to find his rightful place in the world.

In many ways this book is about Jakob's desire to put the past behind him in order to move into the future. It's a heartfelt tale about one man's search for happiness in the face of such enormous personal loss.

Fugitive Pieces won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1996, the Trillium Book Award in 1996, the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1997 and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1997.

From around the blogs

I have read loads of wonderful posts on other blogs this week. Here's a rundown of the ones that have caught my attention:

Petrona takes a look at the outfall of the Borders shakedown and suggests that we needn't worry that eBooks will overtake the world. "One good aspect of all of this is that we still read lots of books, in whatever format," she says. "I think that there is still plenty of lateral thinking that can be applied to the writing, production, selling and, indeed, reading of books."

The Fiction Desk reveals that a new online bookshop dedicated to independent publishers will be launched on Tuesday.  I'm really looking forward to visiting the site when it goes live and seeing exactly what's on offer.

Danielle from A Work in Progress reviews Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity and calls it a "distressing read." She adds:"Pity is the main theme running through the story, but as well Zweig writes about responsibility, compassion, cowardice and hypocrisy." It sounds just like my cup of tea!

Whispering Gums highlights the magic of William Trevor's short story The Woman of the House, which was published last year in the New Yorker. I printed off the story (via the link on WG's post) and read it on my tube journey home tonight and was captured from the word go. It's a real little gem of a story, with a slightly menacing undertone.

Litlove reviews a Persephone classic, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle, which has been languishing in my TBR pile for at least a year, and calls it "a time capsule from a very different era". She adds: "This is another book that I loved enormously for its admirable heroine and its equally admirable intent – weak, twisted men are trounced by lionhearted women, the sickly inbred power of the British aristocracy is trumped by the fresh moneyed energies of America, and the history and buildings of two nation’s ancestors are restored by the vigorous dollar."

Simon from Savidge Reads falls prey to the Stefanie Myer phenomenon. He's a brave man to admit it!

The Writer's Pet interviews David Vann (author of the very wonderful Legend of a Suicide) and elicits some frank admissions from him. "Fish are so specialized and odd," he claims, "there’s one out there to represent each of our human traits.  I think everything human can be mapped onto one fish or another and made clearer by the exaggeration of the fish’s adaptation."

Finally, at the risk of massaging my own ego, KevinfromCanada writes a very kind tribute to my blog. I'm just chuffed he's discovered the wonders of John McGahern's prose for himself.

The 'joy' of comments, part 2. Otherwise entitled 'I hate Twilight'

As I've mentioned in the past, I do get some strange comments on this blog at times. I thought I'd share the latest with you.

It was added to a post I wrote way back in 2006 called "Why do we read fiction?" in which I shared a few "answers" I'd found in novels I had been reading at the time. The initial post attracted a handful of comments, all quite intriguing, from readers sharing the reasons why they read.

Fast forward almost four years later and someone calling themselves "I HATE TWILIGHT" (yes, all in caps) leaves the following comment on Monday morning:

READING IS A WASTE OF TIME I TELL U

SPECIALLY FICTION

ALL THAT TIME U WASTE READING

TRUST ME ADD IT UP

It honestly made me laugh. This particular person has a couple of issues, right? Did they read Twilight and hate it? Are all their friends reading it and therefore ignoring them? I mean, the mind boggles...

Together, or separate?

 

So, progress on the book piles is going very slowly. I can already see the rest of this week's evenings stretching out into a giant sorting exercise, because as I sift through these books, working out what to keep and what to ditch, I'm also compiling a spreadsheet so that I can keep track of what I own. It's a slow process.

The photograph above shows my 'A' pile -- all these books were written by authors whose surnames begin with the first letter of the alphabet. (There's also a couple of 'Bs' there right at the end. You can click the image to see the full size.)

Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether I should shelve my non-fiction titles separate to my fiction titles. Mind you, only about one-percent of my books are non-fiction -- in fact, they're mainly memoirs.

So, what do you reckon? Keep together, or separate? What do you do?

The state of my TBR pile(s)

 

Does anyone else get crazy ideas like this? I thought I'd sort through all my unread books today, given the weather was pretty rubbish and I had no other plans.

As most of you know, I live in a poky little flat in London, so I have very limited space to keep books. About 150 titles were put into storage when we had the kitchen and living room refurbished at Easter, so I managed to bring them back into the house for the first time since then. I then gathered all the other unread books stockpiled on top of my wardrobe, my bedside table, my chest of drawers, my TV unit and my big cane basket, and dumped them on the living room floor. 

I'm not sure how many books are here, but I expect it's around 250. Very few of them are full-priced, brand-new books. Most are secondhand copies picked up at Oxfam or "mooched" from BookMooch. I reckon about ten of them are review copies sent to me by publishers.

I've now put them into alphabetical order (how sad) according to author's surname and in the process weeded out a few rogue books I'd already read and three bags of books I haven't read (and don't plan to), which will be donated to Oxfam next weekend.

Oh and the fun and joy of a bibliophile, eh?

'Disguise' by Hugo Hamilton

 

Fiction - paperback; Fourth Estate; 288 pages; 2009.

Disguise, the fifth novel by Irish writer Hugo Hamilton, is a story about lost identity.

It opens in war-torn Germany at the height of the Second World War. Mara Leidman's young son, Gregor, is killed during the bombing of Berlin -- "He was almost three years old and went straight from his dream into death" -- and so, bereft and shocked, she flees south, into the arms of her father, Emil, a war deserter who drives a delivery truck collecting defective weapons. When Emil presents her, shockingly, with a refugee orphan (given to him by an old woman he meets on the road) to replace her dead son, Mara looks at the boy with revulsion. 

He was frightened and cold, snivelling and coughing. His eyes were infected. He was holding his ear and sucking a button on the shoulder of his woollen jumper at the same time, staring into the dark outside the windscreen, worried what was keeping his mother and why she was not coming to collect him.

Mara does not really want anything to do with this new replacement who understands little German, but when she is unexpectedly interrogated by the Gestapo, circumstances force her to pretend that this is her real son, for to suggest otherwise would surely result in her own execution.

The book then fast forwards 60 years and Gregor, now an elderly man, with an estranged wife and adult son of his own, reflects on his life living in the "borderlands", never quite sure of his roots and never feeling like he belongs anywhere in particular. Over the course of a day, surrounded by family and friends, picking fruit on an orchard outside Berlin, he sifts through his memories. As the narrative flickers seamlessly between the past and the present, we learn about Gregor's lonely and complicated life.

As a 17-year-old he deliberately cuts himself off from his parents, when his Uncle Max accidentally lets slip that Gregor had been "found" as a toddler. But his mother, who hasn't even told her husband about the "swap" (he was fighting on the Russian front at the time) denies all knowledge.

Over the course of the next 40 or so years, Gregor becomes a musician, reinvents himself as a Jew (he even goes so far as to arrange a circumcision), and drifts from Berlin to Ireland to Toronto.

Gregor had turned his life into a search for belonging, though it always remained a distant thing, a vague, utopian memory.

His marriage slowly flounders because he cannot truly open up to his wife, Maria, about the things that trouble him. Then when Maria makes contact with his "adopted" mother behind his back, she begins to doubt his claim that he was a Jewish foundling. Surely his mother isn't lying? Could it be that Gregor's convinced himself he's Jewish in order to alleviate some kind of German guilt?

There's a lot of big themes and issues in this book about memory, loss, belonging and the ways in which Germans dealt with the aftermath of the war. And while Disguise had the potential to be absolutely heart-wrenching in places, I found the prose style so distant and removed -- there's a lot of telling and not much showing -- that it made very little emotional impact at all. This is a shame, because the opening chapter is one of the saddest and most exciting, and morally troubling, pieces of fiction I've ever read. But the rest of the book fails to live up to this promise and, as a result, Disguise, while an enjoyable read, doesn't deliver the truly emotional wallop that would have elevated it to something really special.