Reading Matters

Scramble for free books

How amazing is this?

Book bites

• Waterstone's Books Quarterly, a magazine which is free to Waterstone's cardholders, is now available to view online.

• Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, one of my favourite reads from last year, wins first £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing.

• Joseph O'Neill's Netherland wins PEN/Faulkner award. The prize is worth £10,500.

• Remember The Guardian's 1000 books everyone must read which they published last month? Now the newspaper has added an extra 100 to the list thanks to recommendations submitted by readers.

• Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has signed a three-book deal worth $4million.

'Matrimony' by Joshua Henkin

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 294 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the author.

Late last year I asked readers to nominate their favourite read of 2008 as part of a competition I was running. And when Joshua Henkin saw that his novel Matrimony had been listed, he contacted me to see if I'd be interested in a review copy. It sounded like the type of book I'd enjoy, so I took him up on his very generous offer.

Matrimony tracks the lives of a young academic couple, Julian Wainwright and Mia Mendelsohn, over a 15-year-period, from their college courtship to the onset of middle-age. It's essentially a novel about domesticity, and how easily we fall into it, but it's also a story about friendship and how -- if you'll forgive me quoting John Lennon -- life happens to us while we're busy making other plans.

The book begins in 1986 with Julian, a rich kid from New York City, attending Graymont College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts. At the end of his first fiction-writing class under the uncompromising Professor Chesterfield, he is asked to stay behind with another student, Carter Heinz. "I like you guys," says Chesterfield. "You're the only two students in the class with even an ounce of talent. Not that you have much of it."

This conversation sets the course of Julian's life, for as well as confirming his promise as a writer it introduces him to Carter, who becomes a life-long friend despite the fact the pair appear to have little in common. Julian's wealthy background gives him "an indifference to wealth that only the wealthy could afford, a sense of entitlement, and a way of being in the world that was utterly at ease", while Carter's comparatively poor background gives him a burning desire to make money. "My father sits around trying to be clever instead of actually making a living," he tells Julian. "He dreams about becoming rich. I dream about becoming rich, too, but I'm going to do something about it." 

Later Carter finds a girlfriend -- in the college dining hall at breakfast -- and before long he "was staying at Pilar's most nights, sleeping there with such regularity that, upon interrogation, he was forced to admit he kept an extra pair of tennis sneakers in her dorm room, and a toothbrush, too". Before long Julian falls in love with Montreal-born Mia, and by their senior year the four are sharing a house on campus, doing everything together and leading relatively carefree lives. 

It is Mia, clever and confident, who first realises that student life can't carry on forever.

Mia felt in a deep way that she was growing up, that she'd become an adult without realising it. [...] She'd never really given marriage much thought, and more time passed the less seriously she took it, as if the fact that she was getting older, closer, presumably, to actually getting married, no longer accommodated the fantasy.

When Mia's mother develops breast cancer, the transformation from college student to adult becomes complete. Marriage to Julian shortly follows.

The book's section headings -- Northington, Massachusetts; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Berkeley, California; Iowa City, Iowa; New York, New York; and Northington, Massachusetts -- give some indication of the geographical distances the couple cover over the next decade or so. But the story also charts emotional highs and lows, career successes and career failures, health scares and friendship woes, and all the minutiae of busy lives lead under the weight of parental and spousal expectations.

It's a brilliant, completely absorbing read, one that takes you on a journey with all-too-real characters that are so believable it's easy to feel like you know them personally. Or at least that's the effect this highly ambitious novel had on me: I read Matrimony in two sittings because I was desperate to follow Julian and Mia's every footstep. To close the page meant I could not longer keep a close eye on them!

I can't fault the effortless prose style that races along at a cracking pace without skimping on detail. And nor can I fault the dialogue, for which Henkin has an astonishing and perceptive ear.

The insights into the human heart, the little tics and quirks of married couples, our foibles and our dreams, are all presented here with uncanny realism and much compassion. Of particular interest is Henkin's insights into the writing life, because poor Julian spends the course of the book grappling with his first novel: his struggles, his doubts, his crises of confidence all seem incredibly authentic. I can't imagine that Henkin himself would ever had to surmount such problems, because Matrimony is clearly one of the best modern American stories I've read in a long, long time. I highly recommend it.

Most popular posts on Reading Matters

I always find it fascinating to find out which of my posts receive the most traffic over the course of a week. I always know when certain books have become set texts or are being studied by school students because one of my reviews will suddenly become very popular for no apparent reason. 'The Tortilla Curtain' by T.C. Boyle and 'The Shark Net' by Robert Drewe are just two cases in point.

For interests sake, I thought I'd take a look at the most visited pages during 2008. According to my site stats, these were (in order of popularity):

• Top 10s: My favourite coming-of-age novels (3,716 page views)

• Top 10s: my favourite novels about Australia (1,963)

• 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' by Truman Capote (1,495)

• An oh-so brief guide to London bookstores  (1,341)

• Fiction index page (1,276)

• Book Group: Session 4 discussion - FALL ON YOUR KNEES by Ann-Marie MacDonald (1,238)

• 'Jessica' by Bryce Courtenay (1,230)

• The Angus & Robertson Top 100 List (1,172)

A Sunday cornucopia

• You know how Scandinavian crime fiction is all the rage? Well, apparently the Irish are going to be the next big thing, if you believe this article in the Irish Times. Tana French is leading the charge. I'm yet to read her debut novel In the Woods, but three other Irish authors I have read -- Benjamin Black (aka John Banville), Brian McGilloway and Gene Kerrigan -- are all name-checked.

• The Irish Times also has an interview with Irish author Roddy Doyle. The man who penned my favourite trilogy -- The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van -- will receive the prestigious Irish Pen award at a ceremony in Dublin this coming Friday.

• The Borders book chain in Australia is helping the Victorian bushfire appeal. It's accepting good-quality second-hand books or newly purchased books, which will be donated to schools and libraries in fire-affected communities. On top of this Borders will match the retail price of all donated books up to $200,000.

• The Sunday Times has published a wonderful feature in its travel section highlighting the best English walks for book lovers. Fans of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jane Eyre and Winnie-the-Pooh are in for a treat.

• The Guardian interviews English-born Japanese-based David Peace. The author of the Damn United (which I've never read) and Tokyo Year Zero (which is in my reading queue) is going to become a household name (if he isn't already) with the screening of Red Riding, a trilogy of films based on his books Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty Three, on Channel 4 next month. (For some reason Nineteen Seventy Seven has not been included.)

• Award-winning Irish author Christopher Nolan has died, aged 43. Nolan was almost completely paralysed by cerebral palsy and the only part of his body he could control was his head; he wrote by tapping a keyboard with a device strapped to his head. His first book, Damburst of Dreams, was published when he was just 15. He won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1988 for his novel Under the Eye of the Clock.

• RobAroundBooks has a great round-up of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize short list. The official website is here.

• Finally, remember how much I love the beautiful covers of those Penguin Modern Classics? Well, check out this blog, whose author is so obsessed he buys them to frame and hang on his wall. I'll admit the idea is very tempting...

'The Other Hand' by Chris Cleave

Fiction – paperback; Sceptre; 378 pages; 2009.

Chris Cleave's The Other Hand was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award. It is one of those books I kept picking up in bookstores and then putting down. I was intrigued but also skeptical. The blurb, surely, was a marketing ploy?

This is what the blurb on my edition says:

"We don't want to tell you what happens in this story. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice. Two years later, they meet again -- the story starts there... Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds."

And then Valerie, who reads my blog emailed me, to suggest I might like it. "I expected to see it listed as one of the books you have reviewed," she wrote. "And when I didn't, I decided to email you.  It is one of those books you want to tell a friend about..."

I relented and bought myself a copy the next day. I'll admit I still wasn't convinced, and the letter from the editor, on the very first page, only raised my hackles. "Dear Reader," it began. "You don't know me. I'm Chris Cleave's editor, and I'm writing to tell you how extraordinary The Other Hand is. As publishers, naturally we only publish  books that we love, but every now and then something comes along that is so special it gives us goosebumps."

She then compares the novel to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark. By this stage the phrase "she doth protest to much" was running through my head.

Still, I was prepared to banish my preconceptions and give the book a fair go, and I raced through it in a matter of days.

Obviously, I can't tell you much about the plot, but I can tell you what I thought of the story.

Quite frankly, I didn't think it lived up to the hype. It's an interesting story and it moves along at a fair old pace. There are scenes that are truly shocking and others that are good for a giggle. The characterisation is good, although not entirely believable, and there's enough social commentary to give the illusion that you're reading something deep and meaningful.

But on the whole this is a book that feels manipulative. The "reveals" -- almost one per chapter -- are cheap tricks designed to give you a fright or challenge your assumptions. While they might add some excitement to the novel, they end up trivialising quite important subject matter -- illegal immigration, suicide and violence, to name but a few.

Perhaps Cleave didn't want to write a hard-hitting novel and that's fine, but as soon as your editor starts comparing you to Schindler's Ark, one of the most hard-hitting novels of the past 40 years, it creates a pretty monumental and, dare I say it, unrealistic expectation in the average reader's mind.

I suspect The Other Hand, which has been published in the USA and Canada under the title Little Bee, will resonate with readers who like quick, accessible reads about unfamiliar subjects, but for me it was too superficial, too cartoonish and too calculating to deliver on its promises. If you've read it I'd be interested in knowing what you thought. I've got a sneaking suspicion I may well be the only person in the world who didn't love it to bits...

'In a Summer Season' by Elizabeth Taylor

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 224 pages; 2006.

Before I discovered the wonderful world of book blogs I had never heard of the English writer Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). I simply associated the name with the Hollywood actress. 

I made a mental note to read something from her extensive bibliography, but it wasn't until very recently that I acquired my first Taylor novel. I'm not sure why I picked In a Summer Season, her eighth novel (first published in 1961), to begin with, but I spied a cheap copy on Amazon Marketplace and the deal was done. (Apparently the book is regarded as her raunchiest, although I did not know that at the time!)

The story revolves around a wealthy widow, Kate Heron, who marries Dermot, a man ten years her junior. The couple live in a large house in the picturesque Thames Valley, within sight of Windsor Castle, with Kate's elderly aunt, the housekeeper Mrs Meacock and Kate's two children, Tom, 22, and Louisa, 16.

But despite this cosy little world, it is clear that all is not well, that Dermot views the arrangement as claustrophobic and that Kate is all too aware of this:

At this time of evening Kate felt that he was restless. He had too many years of pubs and clubs and pleasing himself. Not be free to walk out of the house when he wanted to must seem a monstrous tyranny. She, herself, sometimes in the course of this second marriage, found it a tyranny, too; found other people's presence irksome.

While nothing much seems to happen -- there's no real plot to speak of -- the narrative inches forward by a series of largely domestic scenes that are filled with delicate nuances and innuendo. You soon learn that everyone is working at cross-purposes, that everyone is wearing a mask to protect others from their real feelings. These tensions build and build until a rather tragic, and unexpected, climax is reached.

But while the story might lack a certain -- how shall we say it? -- page-turning quality, it is a wonderful psychological portrait of a middle-aged woman coming to terms with a new identity, because within In a Summer Season we find the protagonist desperate to be true to herself rather than conform to society's unwritten moral code. Her friends cut her off because they regard Dermot as a parasite only interested in her money and even her Aunt Ethel thinks the marriage will last "five years at most". Her teenage daughter sums it up even better:

I think my mother gets jealous [of my brother's girlfriends], and that's why she married Dermot; perhaps she thought that she would be getting someone quite young; who would be a bit like her son, but who would have to take her everywhere with him.

But Kate feels she can overlook the gossip and rumours about her because she's found a man with whom she can enjoy a passionate sexual life. Her lust is such that she can even overlook Dermot's flaws: his lack of career, his drinking, his lack of "cultural awareness".

But what Kate refuses to acknowledge is that erotica is no substitute for companionship and a peaceful domestic life. It is only when her old friend Charles -- refined, cultured and now widowed -- returns to the village that she can begin to see what she might have lost...

In a Summer Season is a fascinating portrait of domestic life from another, more innocent era and how the choices we make impact on our own lives and the lives of others.

What I'm reading

I'm afraid I've become a bit of a sucker for those newly designed Penguin Modern Classics. I'm not sure whether it's the lovely matt covers, the striking images or the use of my favourite font (Helvetica) which does it, but regardless I seem to be snapping them up left, right and centre lately.

A few weeks ago I pre-ordered this one (pictured above): Randolph Stow's 1965 classic The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, which was re-issued on January 29. This morning, en route to work, I picked it up from the post depot (Amazon had tried to deliver it yesterday), cracked open the package and began reading it on the train.

Wow. Sometimes you start reading a book and by the end of the first page you already know you are going to love it. This is what happened this morning.

I've been itching to get back to the story ever since, and managed to snatch an all-too-brief 20 minutes at lunch time, but now I can't wait to get back into it again.

I've never read any Stow before, which is probably a crime for an Australian, but I've already decided I'm going to have to get my hands on copies of everything else he's ever written. I love it when you discover a new-to-you author, don't you?

So, who have you discovered recently?

Monday miscellany

• Abe Books has published a list of 30 novels worth buying for the cover alone.

• The best translated novel of the year is due to be announced later this week. [Via Ivebeenreadinglately]

• Australian author Susan Johnson is getting behind an initiative to donate books for bushfire relief. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me. [Thanks, Jenny, for the tip-off]

• Members of BookMooch, my favourite non-commercial book-swapping site, are being asked to donate money towards a new server so that the site can continue to run free-of-charge. Given I've mooched some 135 books (and given away 158!!) during my two-year membership I think I better dip into my pocket!

• Julia Gregson's East of the Sun, set in 1920s India, has won the Romantic Novel of the Year 2009. I haven't read the book myself but it does have a rather adorable cover so I'm a little tempted...

'A Mere Interlude' by Thomas Hardy

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 125 pages; 2007.

Ahh, Thomas Hardy, how I love thee! It has been far too long since I last read anything by you. I think it was probably Jude the Obscure, way back in 1996, after I had seen the heartbreaking Michael Winterbottom film Jude. But I also have fond memories of Tess of the d'Urbervilles read during my final year at school as part of my HSC (Higher School Certificate) back in 1987.

More recently, I have seen the church you helped to restore in north-eastern Cornwall and the Hardy Tree in St Pancras Old Church, a short walk from King's Cross tube station, so I have to confess that part of me is intrigued by your life (and loves). I tend to feel guilty that I have not read more of your work, and so when I discovered A Mere Interlude in Penguin's Great Loves collection I had a chance to rectify this a little.

I am so glad I read this slim volume -- as a short story writer you are so very skilled. All three stories presented here -- A Mere Interlude, An Imaginative Woman and The Withered Arm -- are so very tragic. Perhaps this is why Penguin has billed this particular book as "love can be heartbreaking".

What is it that happened in your life that allowed you to render the female heart so realistically?

In the first story I could feel the pain of the protagonist, Baptista, who is travelling home to marry her parents' old neighbour. Enroute she bumps into her long lost lover and elopes with him. But then tragedy strikes and he dies unexpectedly. Under any circumstances this would be devastating, but Baptista has to pick herself up, dust herself off and return home as if nothing has happened. She marries the old man she has been betrothed to and then spends an inordinate amount of time worrying that someone somewhere will discover her tragic secret...

The second story is as equally disturbing, in that a young married woman falls in love with a poet she has never met. Pretending to be a male poet, she strikes up a correspondence with her heart's desire, only to discover this form of communication is no substitute for the real thing. She tries to engineer a meeting with him, but tragedy strikes before the pair can meet face to face.

The third and final story is the closest thing to a Gothic horror story that I have read for a long time. When a local farmer marries a young woman, one of the older milkmaids feels she has been usurped. Then the milkmaid has a disturbing and incredibly realistic dream in which she grabs the arm of the farmer's wife and "whirled it backwards to the floor" so violently that she awakes in a cold sweat. On the morning after the milkmaid's dream the farmer's wife discovers strange and painful marks on her arm which will not go away. Over the course of time her limb begins to slowly wither away and there seems little that can be done to stop this, until she visits a local witchdoctor who suggests a rather creepy solution...

Thank-you, Mr Hardy, for these truly memorable stories that got stuck in my brain and will no doubt stay there for a long, long time to come. I enjoyed reading them and found myself admiring -- not for the first time -- your talent, your skill and your imagination.

Today's bookish links

• If you've read Kate Grenville's The Secret River you might be interested in this Guardian book club podcast. (If you live in the UK you can listen to another interview, this one about her latest book The Lieutenant by Mariella Frostrup on Open Book via the BBC iPlayer, for a limited time only -- thanks to Margaret of BooksPlease for the tip-off.)

• If you haven't read Helen Garner's The Spare Room this review in the New York Times might just encourage you to do so.

• A fascinating interview with Amos Oz.

• I'm not sure what I think about this: Tories condemn prisoners' freedom to read criminal memoirs. Surely it's a good thing that prisoners are actually using their brainpower and reading books. Some of the titles available are not glorifying crime or violence but doing the exact opposite. Gitta Sereny's powerful Cries Unheard: the Story of Mary Bell is one of them.

Firestorm

I'm not much in the mood for reading -- and here's why.  My own thoughts here.

Stories that have amused and entertained me this weekend...

• Horror writer Stephen King has slagged off Twilight author Stephanie Meyer, fellow horror author Dean Koontz and prolific thriller author James Patterson. He says Myer "can't write worth a darn", Koontz is "just awful" and Patterson is "a terrible writer". I wish he'd say what he really thinks! You can read the whole story here.

• Some readers wince when favourite books are reissued with a glossy movie image on the cover. What do you think of movie tie-in editions? Personally, I hate them, but if it encourages people who don't normally read to pick up a good book then I guess they have an important role to play.

• Have you heard all the fuss about Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, described by the New Statesman as "another dirty book"? Publicity for it has been everywhere for weeks now but I'm not sure I'm interested enough to read such a taboo-busting book just yet...

• Google and Amazon are planning to make more books available to read on mobile phones. I like the idea but in practice it must be very tiresome on the eyes to read something that is back-lit on such a small device. Give me my (admittedly not very often used) Sony Reader any day.

• Australian author Kate Grenville tells The Independent that she's on a mission to rake up Australia's murky past. I've got a review copy of her latest book, The Lieutenant, so will be bumping that up the queue now...

'A Woman of My Age' by Nina Bawden

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 160 pages; 1992.

Until very recently I had Nina Bawden pegged as a children's author. Then, while browsing BookMooch a week or so ago, I accidentally discovered she had a rather extensive back catalogue of adult fiction that I simply did not know about. I promptly acquired a rather battered copy of A Woman of My Age (Virago Modern Classic Number 366) and set about reading it.

First published in 1967, this short novel reminded me very much of Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark  in that it tells the story of one woman's emotional journey -- figuratively and physically -- as she struggles to come to terms with growing older and finding her rightful place in the world.

From the outset it is clear that our narrator is not content:

I find this so difficult. When I look in the mirror -- not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting, but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why -- I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my situation: I am Elizabeth Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle-aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don't really believe it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.

Now, on holiday in Morocco with Richard, Elizabeth longs for the desert because her life was "crowded, cluttered up". But the journey is far from the calm, peaceful one for which she longs. Alongside the heat, there are other English travellers with whom she must contend: the delightfully eccentric and elderly Mr and Mrs Hobbs, and the slightly vain, thrice-married Flora and her much younger lover, Adam.

While Elizabeth enjoys the Hobbs' company, because they remind her of the parents she never had, she finds Flora irritating. Indeed, Flora had gone to Oxford with Richard, and there are suggestions that they pair may have been lovers in the distant past and that their accidental meeting in Fez may have been pre-arranged. These niggling suspicions eat away at Elizabeth, who finds herself analysing her own marriage with a man she barely knew when she married him, aged 20, some 18 years ago.

Her somewhat melancholy recollections of their life together are seamlessly interspersed with what is happening in the present time, as the couple travel from Fez to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. The reader soon begins to realise that Elizabeth has made far too many compromises in order that the marriage can work, and now, in a foreign country, the cracks in their relationship can no longer be smoothed over. The tension, some of it tragi-comical, builds and builds until it comes to a devastating head...

A Woman of My Age is definitely a product of its times, when women married young and were expected to stay at home and raise a family. But in Elizabeth Jourdelay, Bawden has created a headstrong and independent character who rails against society's "rules" and constraints. Raised by two spinster aunts, one of whom brought her up "to give too much importance to careers and causes and things of the mind", Elizabeth finds marriage and motherhood constricting.

A highly political creature -- "I was very unsure of myself except in matters of political opinion" -- she longs to become a local councillor but Richard thought it a "dirty game and he could not understand how I could endure it" .

Later, when she raises the subject of getting a job, the response from her mother-in-law is crushing:

She said, first, 'Do you really want one, dear? Richard and I thought you had settled so nicely' -- as if I was some sort of jelly -- and then, 'Well, if you really want to, I suppose it would be nice for you to earn some pin money.'

Unfortunately, it does not pan out as planned.

Perhaps it was stupid of me, but I had expected so much, if in a rather a vague way, that the reality was a bitter shock: I was unqualified, I had no degree, I wasn't even trained as a secretary. It soon became clear that nothing which came up to my expectations was open to me. When I realised this, the walls seemed to close in. I became a gloomily devoted mother.

There's something very sad about Elizabeth reconciling her expectations with keeping her family happy, because it's clear that her husband has not had to do the same thing. Of course, we only hear Elizabeth's side of the story, but as the narrative progresses you begin to understand that Richard is not the saintly school teacher husband he purports to be.

And while Bawden deftly captures all the tensions and betrayals and compromises that married people make, she also does a nice line in setting the mood. Her descriptions of Morocco are particularly vivid.

The terrace of the casbah fell away down the hill, dovetailed into one another like the streets and courts of a medieval city, all enclosed in a wall of the same red earth. At one end there was a little tower where cranes were nesting. Beyond the wall was the palm-grove, a chess-board of different coloured grasses, and beyond the oasis, the flat, ochre colour of the desert. The air quivered, not just far in a heat haze, but close by me on the parapet, in a kind of vibrating brightness that hurt my eyes. 

In fact, setting the book in Morocco is a clever touch, because it allows Elizabeth to compare the subjugation of women in North African societies with her own situation. Indeed, when Flora points out that "their men shut them up at home; even if you visit the house, the women don't appear socially. Just to serve the food" the point seemingly goes over Elizabeth's head, but it did not go over mine.

Having read my first Nina Bawden adult novel I'm keen to read the others -- there's certainly plenty to keep me occupied as you can see by this and this. Next on the rank is The Birds in the Trees or maybe I will try Afternoon of a Good Women, two books I mooched even before I'd come to the end of this one. If they are half as good as A Woman of My Age I am sure to be in for a treat.

'Diary of a Bad Year' by J.M. Coetzee

 

Fiction – paperback; Vintage; 231 pages; 2008.

The shock of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had novelists scrabbling for cover. How could they possibly come up with invented characters, invented plots that could match this horrific event? All fiction suddenly seemed pithy and irrelevant by comparison.

But instead of sounding the death knell for literature, 9/11 ushered in a whole host of novels that addressed the event or, at least, used it as backdrop. The subsequent War on Terror has also became a common theme. I've read -- and enjoyed -- a handful of these post-9/11 novels, including Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist, Yasmina Khadra's The Sirens of Baghdad, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I was therefore intrigued to see how J.M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, would deal with this theme.

Like Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World, which is a strange hybrid between fiction and non-fiction, Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year treads a similar path.

Here we have a main character, an elderly South African writer living in Sydney, called Juan Coetzee (which I understand to be a thinly veiled version of JM Coetzee himself), writing a series of essays pronouncing "what is wrong with today's world". These essays cover all kinds of post-9/11 subjects -- Al Quaida, terrorism, democracy, Tony Blair and political life in Australia -- and are to be part of an anthology called Strong Opinions commissioned by a German publisher. These essays, quite succinct and imminently readable, are published in full in Diary of a Bad Year and form the heart of the novel.

Then we have a second narrative thread in which Juan develops a crush on Anya, a young, attractive Filipino woman, who lives in the penthouse of his apartment block. Sick of "devising felicitous coincidences" to keep bumping into her in the laundry room, where their conversational exchanges are far too brief for his liking, Juan approaches her in a local park with an offer he thinks will be too good to refuse: will she be his personal typist?

The third and final narrative thread is told from Anya's point of view. Acutely aware of her attractiveness, she is at first wary of Juan's motivations, because she's far from an expert typist. But as she works on transcribing "the old man's" manuscript from notes and audio tape, she finds herself becoming increasingly curious of his past. Slowly, she develops a platonic friendship with her boss, but Anya's live-in-boyfriend, the exceedingly dull Alan, an investment consultant, is suspicious and hatches a devious plan...

As far as substance is concerned, this might all sound rather straightforward, but it's not. Coetzee does strange things with structure in this novel, so that all three narratives run parallel to one another. This means each page is divided into three unequal parts, with the essays running along the top, Juan's narrative in the middle, and Anya's at the bottom. This poses a dilemma for the reader: do you follow it page by page, or narrative by narrative? 

I did it page by page, until part way through, I realised I was now reading the narratives out of sequence, because they don't all flow at the same pace. I ended up juggling three different storylines in my head all at once, which made for a challenging read, but one I found particularly stimulating.

I rather suspect that Diary of a Bad Year won't be for everyone, particularly if you like your novels to be structured in a traditional manner. But I very much enjoyed the polemics presented here, even if I didn't much like the character -- too creepy, too much like a dirty old man -- purporting to be telling them.

I also found it fascinating to witness the growth in Anya's character, as she comes to terms with the fact that both the men in her life -- Juan and Alan -- are not the people she thought they were.

This is an interesting book: one that encapsulates the dangerous times in which we live, and experiments with the novel's traditional form. It's intellectual, sexual and playful by turns, a great read if you're looking for something meaty and clever.

Link round-up

Bookish stuff that has amused me today:

• Interview with Costa Prize-winner Sebastian Barry.

• An interactive look at Charing Cross Road, the traditional home of London bookstores.

• A literary quiz all about snow.

• A review of the New Annotated Dracula, which also looks at why vampire fiction has become so popular.

• The ten best history books.

• The French award JK Rowling with the medal of Knight in the Legion of Honor.

Cold comfort

We interrupt this blog to issue a severe weather warning!

Yes, it's been snowing here in ye olde London town for some 24 hours. We've had eight inches, the most snow in two decades, according to some reports.

Everything has ground to a halt and getting in to work this morning proved somewhat problematic with no buses and a very limited tube service. Unfortunately, I couldn't just stay at home, like so many other people, because Mondays are press days and I had some eight pages to send to the printers!

When it was time to head home, several hours earlier than normal, I took a diversion to the tube station so that I could photograph St Paul's cathedral.

Now, snuggled up at home, I think it might be time to dig out some books for an evening of reading...

UPDATE:  Have posted all my photographs in an online gallery, if you are interested.

'Bad Traffic' by Simon Lewis

Fiction – paperback; Sort Of Books; 372 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Last year Bad Traffic was named as one of 50 books that publishers felt deserved a wider audience. This week, mid-way through the book, I discovered that that list had been whittled down to 10 books to talk about and Bad Traffic had made the cut. I'm not in the least surprised. This is a brilliant edge-of-your-seat thriller and one that presents the English countryside in a dark and disturbing new light.

Set in modern day Britain, the book is about a Chinese policeman, Inspector Jian, prowling the mean streets of rural Norfolk looking for the gangster he believes has murdered his daughter. He is accompanied by an illegal immigrant, Ding Ming, who was smuggled into the country in the back of a lorry with his wife as part of a human trafficking operation. Now forcibly separated from his wife -- she has been made to "pick flowers" in an unspecified location -- a young and naive Ding Ming finds himself on the run from his captors.

Together the Chinese duo make for a hapless pair of vigilantes. Jian, who does not speak English, finds everything about Britain rather sinister and foreboding, and regards the local police force with much suspicion. Despite his own police badge, he becomes a kind of foreign outlaw, with just one goal in mind: to deal out his own form of justice regardless of the consequences.

Meanwhile, Ding Ming, struggles to come to terms with the fact that he's been sold a lie. He had thought coming to England would allow him to earn a lot of money to help his struggling family at home -- after he had paid the exorbitant fee to his smugglers first -- but now realises he has been caught up in a corrupt system run by corrupt men. 

And while Jian is hell bent on finding Black Fort, the man at the head of the smuggling ring, Ding Ming wants to keep his distance from him. This tension between the two characters makes the narrative work on a new level, because, as a reader, you're not sure which man to support and cheer on.

At times the plot strays into comedic territory as one or the other deals with an unfamiliar culture. For example, Ding Ming is especially scared of anyone in uniform, believing English police trade body parts of criminals for organ donation, until Jian points out that one set of uniforms belongs to an automobile roadside rescue firm and there's nothing to be frightened of.

I also enjoyed this exchange between the pair while travelling by car along a motorway. Jian begins by asking, "What are you looking at?":

"Cows."
"Where?"
"They're all over. You spot one and then you see lots, like mushrooms. I don't like them. They look selfish."
"What are you talking about?"
"One of those cows has more land than a Chinese family. It's disgusting. And another thing. I look out and all I see are cow fields. Where are the vegetables? And where are the factories and the mines? It doesn't add up."
"The fields and factories and mines are in other countries."
"They're cow people."
"What are you talking about now?"
"They're like their big stupid cows. Their life is the easiest it is possible to imagine: they wander around their lovely park all day  going munch munch munch. Nothing to worry about, just munching the stupid grass all day long in a lovely big field. And people like me, we are the rats. We live in the ditch and eat shit and watch out for the hawks, and our life is bitterness and struggle, and we're terrified all the time."
"Rats don't eat shit."

Ultimately, Bad Traffic is a brilliantly paced and well constructed story that speeds along at a terrific pace. It has plenty of thrills and spills throughout, but underpinning it all is a quietly disturbing and shocking expose on an issue I've not ever read about in contemporary fiction -- that of human trafficking and the terrible fate so many desperate people find themselves in. This is great entertainment, but there's a dark moral to this story and one that leaves a deep impression long after the heart-hammering conclusion has been reached. This is definitely a story that deserves a wider audience -- read it if you get a chance.