Reading Matters

'The Death of Bunny Munro' by Nick Cave

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 304 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If modern fiction has produced a more deluded, creepy, sex-obsessed "hero" than Bunny Munro I've yet to encounter him. If you'll forgive the crudity, Bunny Munro is a wanker -- a literal wanker. He's obsessed with "beating off", as he puts it, and he doesn't particularly care where he does it or how often.

If that's not enough, he sleeps with prostitutes, waitresses, clients, in fact anyone who succumbs to his lecherous ways and sexual magnetism.

And yet Bunny Munro is a married man, and, by his own account, a very happily married man, who loves his wife deeply but fails to truly understand her "medical condition". The book opens with her suicide, which seems to have very little emotional impact on Bunny -- when he discovers her body he notes that "her tits look good". It gets worse. Midway through her funeral, after eying up all the female guests, he's in the toilets masturbating. Later he has unsatisfying sex with the girlfriend of his best friend. 

But while he seems unable to feel any grief over the loss of his wife, as a reader you can't help but feel some sympathy for him. Perhaps the shock has rendered him emotionally crippled? Has her death not yet hit home?

It's when Bunny takes to the road, his nine-year-old son, Bunny Junior, in tow, that you get the true measure of the man. As he peddles cosmetics door to door, making desperate attempts to jump in the pants of countless depressed housewives up and down England's south-east coast, you begin to understand he's losing his grip. He's been a bad husband, a bad father and a truly awful salesman, but his shocking lack of self-awareness means he never truly realises what a terrible, treacherous human being he really is. It is you, the reader, who comes to realise he's unhinged, that his psychopathic tendencies are becoming more and more pronounced, and yet he's been so sympathetically drawn it's difficult to hate him.

Cave achieves this measure of pity by painting a much worse character in the form of the "Horned Devil", a knife-wielding murderer whose trail of death is being reported on the nightly news, and whom Bunny himself finds scary and unbelievable.

And it also helps that Bunny is a father, a terrible wayward father, but a father nonetheless, and that his son, a smart, academically inclined kid, hero-worships him. Bunny might be a creep who preys on vulnerable women, but he's human and even though you know he's going to meet his end at some point -- hence the book's title -- there's hope of redemption.

While The Death of Bunny Munro treads some dark territory, it's incredibly funny in places, which means you end up laughing at the "hero" rather than wincing at his every ridiculously audacious move. And those who are familiar with Cave's long musical career and Australian background will appreciate his in-house joke (although it does wear thin after several repetitions) in which Bunny Munro has a "thing" for Australian songstress Kylie Minogue. (There's an apology to her at the end of the novel.)

Reading this book is a bit like riding a rollercoaster, full of immense ups and downs, with unexpected twists and turns, and a cracking pace that threatens to derail it all. Whether you want to get on the ride depends on your constitution, because the only fluffy thing about this book is the bunny on the cover. Don't say you haven't been warned.

The great D'Arcy Niland book grab

Isn't the internet wonderful? On Sunday morning, still thinking about D'Arcy Niland's The Shiralee, I decided to hunt out all his previous novels. He had five in total, all sadly out of print, but thanks to AbeBooks.co.uk I managed to track down four of them (the only one I didn't find was The Apprentices).

And so, trying not to think too much about the cost (£32 in total), I clicked and clicked and clicked and clicked. And within half-an-hour I had ordered the lot from four different booksellers, here in England and Northern Ireland.

Three of them arrived yesterday, the fourth today. Their conditions vary, but they're all clean, readable copies.

• Call Me When the Cross Turns Over (1957); first edition hardcover
• Gold in the Streets (1959); a paperback from 1966
• The Big Smoke (1959); a paperback from 1978
• Dead Men Running (1969); a first edition hardcover

They're all a bit musty smelling, and the pages look ready to fall out of a couple of them, but I love the old-fashioned covers, especially The Big Smoke with its young Aboriginal couple on the front and the hustle and bustle of Sydney behind them.

I'm now toying with the idea of having a D'Arcy Niland reading binge, where I work my way through them in chronological order in the space of a month, or would that be overkill? I'll keep you posted...

'A Drinking Life' by Pete Hamill

Non-fiction - paperback; 1st Back Bay Ed; 280 pages; 1995.

I am a sucker for memoirs, especially if they're written by "proper writers", whether authors or journalists. It's not so much that these particular people lead more interesting lives than others, but they can write about them so much better than anyone else. Essentially, they use the skills of novelists and reporters to turn their life stories into highly readable and entertaining narratives.

I was particularly keen to read journalist and novelist Pete Hamill's memoir A Drinking Life because I knew so little about the man. I suspect Americans have a better handle on him given he's been the editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, but I only discovered him when I read his 2002 novel Forever last year. I thought that book was excellent and on an excursion to New York last November I went on a mission to track down his memoir, expecting that I'd probably have to order it online at some point. But, alas, the first store I went into -- Barnes & Noble in the Time Warner Centre -- had it in stock. I felt like I'd found gold at the end of the rainbow!

Needless to say, it took me almost a year to dig it out of the ever-growing To Be Read pile, but the wait was worth it.

Given the title I had expected A Drinking Life to be a story about Hamill's battle with booze, but that's not really what this memoir is about. While he discusses his relationship with alcohol very frankly throughout the book, from his first taste of beer as a child to his teenage discovery that drink could let him "get rid of something", this is not solely an alcoholic's confessional. It's actually a memoir of a lifetime New Yorker, and, more crucially, reveals how a poor working-class kid from Brooklyn managed to carve out a successful writing career despite several setbacks, poor decisions and a fondness for women and drink.

At times it reminded me very much of Betty Smith's much-loved American classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly Hamill's account of growing up in Brooklyn the oldest of seven children (his parents were Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland), but it's also a firsthand account of what it was like to experience everything from the Great Depression (Hamill was born in 1935) to the Korean War, McCarthyism to the assassination of President Kennedy.

What makes this particular memoir so vivid and interesting to read, however, is Hamill's brutal frankness and the candid nature of his writing. He never shies away from being totally honest, even if it portrays him in a bad light. His relationship with his father is often painful to read, because he makes it clear that he loved his father, a one-legged drunk, but did not feel that his father loved him in return -- he was constantly seeking approval that never came. It was only when he left school at 16, moved out of the family home and took a job as sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that he gained some measure of paternal respect. This was helped, in part, by working alongside men that knew his father and who told him tales about Billy Hamill's strength, determination and brains.

Pity allowed me to see him as man, instead of a father who could not play the role that my childish imagination and need had assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands from his own father. [...] In a new way Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination, and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all his black silences.

But despite Hamill's vow that "I didn't want to be like my father. I didn't want to be a drunk", he discovers that drinking gives him "strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true". It is the drink that sustains him through a myriad number of changes in life direction: he studies art, has an affair with a much older nude model while dating a "nice girl" his own age, flees to Mexico City with a male friend to study painting and writing, and later returns to New York, as a fugitive, to work as a graphic designer. In 1960 he makes the dramatic switch from pictures to words, and becomes a reporter for the New York Post.

He later marries, has two children, and travels the world in pursuit of stories and good times. When his marriage breaks down, mainly because of his drinking, he decides to quit the bottle for good. It was a move that produced another dramatic turn in his life, because he met and later moved in with actress Shirley MacLaine, and developed a career writing fiction, including novels and TV scripts.

According to Hamill's own website, A Drinking Life was on the New York Times list for 13 weeks when it was published in 1995. I'm not surprised. It's a terrific account of a life well-lived, even if much of that life was marred by drink. You certainly don't need to have read any of his novels to appreciate the wonderful story recounted here, but it will no doubt encourage you to seek out his other work. It's emotional, forthright, funny and informative: what more could you ask for in a memoir?

New Sony Readers to go on sale next month

I've just received an email from Waterstone's alerting me to Sony's new Readers, which can be pre-ordered online and in store.

According to the email, the "Readers come in two different sizes, in a choice of colours, with more easy-to-use features and the capacity to hold up to 350 books."

The one on the left is the pocket edition retailing for £179.99, although there's no sizing info on the Waterstone's website, so I'm not sure of its dimensions. But I do like the pink colour. (They come in black and silver too.)

Sadly, I'm not an eBook fan, so I won't be pre-ordering one. I was lucky enough to try out the original Sony Reader last year but it didn't blow me away. Call me old-fashioned or a luddite, but I actually prefer books as proper objects, with paper and binding and stuff. Sure, they might clutter up the house, but they look good -- and they smell even better. Oh, and the batteries never go flat, either.

Not The Booker shortlist unveiled

Remember that post I wrote about the Not The Booker Prize? Well, the shortlist has now been announced. It looks like this:

Solo by Rana Dasgupta 
Tomas by James Palumbo
The Tin Kin by Eleanor Thom
Neverland by Simon Crump
This Is How by MJ Hyland
Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth

You can find out more via The Guardian Books Blog.

'The Pages' by Murray Bail

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 208 pages; 2009.

It's been 10 years since Murray Bail's last novel, the oh-so wonderful Eucalyptus, which is one of my all-time favourite books. I was anxiously awaiting this new one and had it on pre-order from Amazon for what seemed like forever. When it thudded through the mail box late last week, I devoured it hungrily. Unfortunately, I was slightly disappointed by it.

I'm not sure why. The writing is exquisite, with touches of modernism (Patrick White came to mind on more than one occasion), and the characters are wonderful: well drawn, believable and quirky. The narrative, however, is vague, and there were times when I wondered, where is Bail going with this?

The story is told from two intertwining perspectives. The first is largely from the point of view of Erica, a 45-year-old unmarried philosopher from Sydney, who is sent to a sheep station in the NSW outback to appraise the work of another philosopher, Wesley Anthill, who has died and left all his papers in his writing shed. The second is told from Wesley's point of view, first as a young man, who leaves the farm and moves to Sydney in search of "experience", before wandering through the UK and Europe, and then returning home to toil away on his life's work.

It's made clear from the start that Erica is a fish out of water. She's city born and bred, and the prospect of going over the Blue Mountains into the outback fills her with dread. To alleviate the boredom, she takes along her good friend, Sophie, a psychoanalyst. The dynamic, and the unspoken tension, between this pair certainly enlivens the narrative, particularly when they arrive at the sheep station and find their hosts, Wesley's siblings, Roger and Lindsey, are reclusive country bumpkins not used to talking, much less entertaining two "sophisticated" guests.

There are some funny moments throughout, a kind of laconic humour that brings a smile to the dial, along with some lovely homesick-inducing descriptions of the landscape and interesting turns of phrase, such as this gem:

Also on the table was a bottle of tomato sauce, almost finished, the leftovers clinging to the insides, like the remnants of the British Empire.

And this:

Men in the square were happily playing boule in the face of their fast-approaching deaths.

Much of the book is a kind of treatise to philosophy -- and posits that the Australian climate and landscape do not generate the kinds of conditions necessary to develop philosophical thought.

Hot barren countries -- alive with natural hazards -- discourage the formation of long sentences, and encourage instead the laconic manner. The heat and the distances between objects seems to drain the will to add words to what is already there. What exactly can be added? 'Seeds falling on barren ground' -- where do you think that well-polished saying came from?

And he juxtaposes this with the idea that Sydney may not be a philosopher's city but it is "the most psychological city in the world" where people go into therapy to talk about themselves.

What is going on here? The skies are blue, forever cloudless -- is that it? A great emptiness sending people back to themselves. Now that the city is up and running, no longer a country town, there's been a transference from the landscape and its old hardships to the self?

There are some big ideas here, and I suspect anyone who's studied philosophy (I haven't) will love it. But I was left wondering whether I had missed anything. Was Wesley's philosophy anything more than the average Australian youngster who backpacks through Europe and returns home feeling as if they've discovered themselves and the world?

The Pages is one of those books that asks more questions than it answers, and I suspect it's one of those novels that requires a second reading to fully appreciate. I think this quote by the Independent, on the back of my paperback, sums it up perfectly: "This book is as hard and sparse as that landscape, but no less beautiful for that."

The Pages was shortlisted for this year's Miles Franklin Award but lost out to Tim Winton's Breath.

'The Shiralee' by D'Arcy Niland

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 257 pages; 2009.

D'Arcy Niland was an Australian author who wrote six novels, several short story collections, some poetry, radio and television plays, and an autobiography between 1955 and his untimely death in 1969. He was married to New Zealand writer Ruth Park of The Harp in the South trilogy fame.

He was best known for his first novel, The Shiralee, first published in 1955, which went on to become an international bestseller. It was turned into a film, starring Peter Finch, in 1957. But I largely knew it as a TV mini-series, produced in 1987, starring Bryan Brown. I didn't watch the series, because I remember the promotional adverts made it look like mawkish sentimental claptrap, and sadly that put me off ever wanting to read the book.

Turns out that was my loss, because The Shiralee, recently re-issued as a Penguin Modern Classic, is an absolute gem, one of those delicious reads that transports you to another time and place, and makes you hungry to read more of the same thing.

The story is set during the Great Depression (I think -- it's hard to be 100 per cent sure). Macauley is a swagman, an Australian term for an itinerant labourer who travels between jobs largely on foot, carrying a traditional swag (a bed that you roll up) and a tuckerbag (a bag to store food). He even stores his money in "a travelling branch of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company -- an empty golden syrup tin".

As he crosses the byways and highways of rural NSW, Macauley is accompanied by his four-year-old daughter, Buster, whom he initially regards as his "shiralee", a slang word for burden. Six months earlier he "kidnapped" Buster from her city-based mother, when Macauley discovered his wife in bed with another man. Taking Buster was supposed to be a form of punishment, but it seems to have backfired, and his quiet, frugal lifestyle has now become tempered by a little girl who talks too much and slows him down.

And yet, while it's slowly dawning on him that Buster's mother doesn't want her daughter back, Macauley is getting used to the company -- even if he may not want to admit it.

They had walked for two hours, and Macauley couldn't help but observe, as he had been observing, the growing endurance of the little girl. It dragged from him some slight sense of gratification. He wasn't paying out tribute to the child: he was merely feeling the small but positive diminution of responsibility. But it wouldn't be long now. At the end of the third hour and a steadily maintained pace, Buster's feet were scuffling, and she was whinging to be carried.
'Don't kid me,' Macauley said. 'You can go on a bit yet.'
'I can't. I can't,' the kid whimpered desperately.
'Come on.'
Macauley took her hand, and kept going. He felt the tugging weight. It got heavier and heavier. It was not brutality, but purposeful tactics. He stopped them short of the verge of exhaustion. When the child was swaying, leaning back from the mooring of his hand, the legs wobbling, the voice dreeing mournfully while the tears flowed unattended down the crumpled face -- that was when Macauley picked her up.
She was asleep in five minutes, her head on his shoulder.
Pity crept like a little flame into the smoulder of his resentment, but the resentment was too strong for it and it was smothered. Macauley told himself this could not go on. He was vehement.
Yet when he saw emus he had a wish that she could see them; when he saw the wild pigs had been rooting up ground he had an inclination to point it out; and when he came upon a goanna disgorging at his approach a kitten rabbit he had an instinct to wake her up and show her the sight.

The story covers Macauley's and Buster's adventures on the road. To write much more would spoil the enjoyment for others, but it's safe to say there's a few brawls, a run-in with the police and a lot of miserable weather. In fact, you're never quite sure what's going to happen next, and I was surprised, on more than one occasion, at the turn of events. (Note, there are no chapter breaks, so it's almost impossible to put this book down, because there never seems to be a natural point to stop reading.)

It's interesting to get a glimpse of a bygone way of life, particularly given that allowing a child to live such a rough and ready lifestyle today would be tantamount to child abuse. 

There's a wonderful sense of friendship and camaraderie in this book, too, not only between father and daughter, but between the many old friends Macauley meets along the way, as well as the new people he bumps into who think nothing of sharing their food and their shelter. It's certainly a less suspicious era, where people are trusted at face value, and no one thinks twice about picking up strangers wandering along the roadside.

Obviously, The Shiralee is a product of its time, and there's a very light smattering of racist terminology throughout.

But the book has a big heart. It's funny in places and sad in others. It's occasionally tender, occasionally brutal. It's humble, knowing and wise. Sometimes it makes you feel ashamed to be human, at other times it makes you feel proud. And, above all, it makes you wish every book was written like this: forthright, absorbing and genuinely moving. It is never mawkish, never sentimental.

I wanted the book to go on forever because I so enjoyed being in the company of these wonderfully smart and good-hearted people, but when it didn't, I felt like having a good, long howl: it's got a cracker of an emotional ending.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography says the book is about the "responsibility of fatherhood" but I like this description best, because it sums it up perfectly: "Niland's writing reveals a man who was profoundly aware of the paradoxical burdens and vitality of the shiralees which all human beings must carry."

I can't praise The Shiralee enough and look forward to hunting out Niland's back catalogue, sadly all out of print, in the weeks to come.

'Scoop-Wallah' by Justine Hardy

Non fiction - paperback; Summersdale; 320 pages; 2009.

Justine Hardy's Scoop-Wallah has just been republished after a 10-year break. I discovered it via a journalists' electronic newsletter I receive a couple of times a week, one of those "alerts" that tells you about moves and job opportunities within the British and Irish news media, which I normally bin after a quick skim. But lately the alerts have begun promoting books about the media (well, with no journalism jobs about at present, I guess the newsletter has to be filled with something) and Hardy's book caught my eye. In fact, it sounded so intriguing I ordered it immediately.

The book recounts Hardy's year-long experience as a journalist on The Indian Express, an English-language newspaper based in New Delhi. She had gone there after a chance conversation with her local greengrocer, an expat from the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir which straddles the India-Pakistan border. Hardy wanted to buy half a cabbage; he wanted her to go to India because he felt she'd do a better job of reporting on the state of his former home than the world's press.

Hardy, up for a challenge, went for it. She leaves London and winds up living in one of the more fashionable areas of New Delhi. Through family connections -- her cousin married an Indian and one of their great friends had become her best friend in India -- she finds a room in an apartment block overseen by a former Rajput prince. While her accommodation is far from luxurious -- "two beds, a suffering sofa, a view over a dusty garden, the roar of an old air cooler" -- she settles in well, travels to work courtesy of her own rickshaw driver and gets assigned quite a lot of "fluffy" articles. Her life seems very far removed from the slums and the grim poverty one might expect.

But she's desperate to cover the serious stories, instead of the society weddings and polo matches, and through sheer tenacity and badgering of her editor, does, eventually get to see some of the more seedier and dangerous aspects of India. Her journey to Assam, in the country's north-east, is particularly telling. The main tea-growing state has an endemic terrorism problem caused by separatists who seek to rid the area of "foreigners". Here she learns that every garden pays protection money, that the separatists get large sums under the guise of a land tax on every kilo of tea produced, and that if the company does not pay, people go missing. She also sees the terrible working conditions of the largely female employees, while the estate manager lives a very comfortable existence in a lovely house, thank-you-very-much. 

Later she gets to cover other "important" stories, such as the former high-flying journalist who's swapped reporting for teaching children in the slums, and the middle-class belief that "education and a good salary buy immunity from AIDS". She even goes on a side-trip to meet the Dalia Lama.

At all times, Hardy generates an infectious enthusiasm and passion, not only for the immediate topic at hand, but for India as a whole. Her book is a refreshing take on what it is like to live and work in a country that is constantly striving to reconcile its wish to modernise without losing its rich traditions so deeply rooted in the past. She peoples it with a cast of entertaining and quirky characters -- her gay, alcoholic, spoilt rich-man prince is a hoot, and her jolly editor, who's had his own hard-hitting journalistic career thwarted but never lets on, livens up the page whenever he's mentioned. Indeed, the dialogue throughout is often hilarious.

I found Scoop-Wallah a quick, enjoyable read, one that provided an inside glimpse of the "real" India that you'd never gain from the normal run-of-the-mill travelogue. But, for personal reasons, I particularly enjoyed reading about the newspaper industry and the ways in which it differs from the British press.

Please note that the book also features some of Hardy's wonderful black and white photographs. These are scattered throughout the text rather than being sandwiched in the middle, lending the book a more personal quality.

A 'Mad Men' reading list

I'm a shameless fan of the American television series Mad Men and have just been presented with a three-disc set of Series 2, which I'm greatly looking forward to watching. (I didn't watch it when it was screened on BBC4.)

In the meantime, I was quite excited to see a post entitled The Mad Men Book Club on the Daily Beast, which lists the types of books Dan Draper would be happily seen reading.

I love that it includes Sloan Wilson's oh-so wonderful The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which I read last year, and Slyvia Plath's The Bell Jar, because both books are so indicative of the time in which Mad Men is set. Similarly, the former could be written with Don Draper in mind; the latter with his wife, Betty, in mind.

The full list is here.

'Netherland' by Joseph O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 248 pages; 2009.

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was famously long-listed for last year's Man Booker Prize, attracting a flurry of support from mainly North American critics who loved the cricket element of the book. (The Vulture section of the New York Times has quite a good summary of the acclaim it garnered upon release. And President Obama also turned out to be a fan. )

But on the other side of the pond the response was more mixed. And if you dare check the Amazon.co.uk reviews you'll see the broad spectrum of views it's attracted which range from glowing five-star accounts to less-than-complimentary one-star assessments.

Thinking that the novel was about cricket, I picked it up at the start of the Ashes series last month hoping to get myself in the mood for a summer of competitive sport between two old rivals, Australia (my homeland) and England (where I now reside). Six weeks on, the five-match series is now at level pegging and the deciding final match will be played this coming Thursday, so what better time to review the book?

While Netherland could be regarded as a paean to cricket, this is not a novel about cricket. This is a novel about what it is like to be an outsider and living in the fringes, or as O'Neill's apt title suggests, in a state of being neither here nor there -- the netherland.

For while the protagonist, Hans van den Broek, chooses cricket as his refuge, there's a lot more going on here than the "gentleman of sport". Hans is an immigrant -- Dutch-born but educated in Britain and now residing in Manhattan, with his wife and young son. He's desperate to fit in and goes through the whole rigmarole of gaining his US drivers' license, if only to become that little bit more embedded in the culture. Connecting with people who play cricket in New York is yet another way he can "connect", albeit with an immigrant underclass. And, tellingly, the one man with whom he forges a tentative friendship, Chuck Ramkissoon, winds up being pulled out of a New York canal with his hands tied behind his back. (Note, this isn't a plot spoiler: O'Neill reveals this fact up front and much of the novel is about Hans recalling his relationship with Chuck, trying to pinpoint what it is about that man that could have resulted in someone wanting to murder him.)

Netherland has also been described as a post-9/11 novel, but again, this label has been slightly misconstrued. While the book reflects the kind of "netherland" residents in Manhattan might have felt in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, a kind of eerie state of no longer feeling comfortable in their homes, this isn't the sole premise of the book. O'Neill uses it as a vehicle to explain the disintegration of Hans' marriage, for while Hans is content to be "carried along by the dark flow of those times" his wife is not. She no longer feels safe in the city and decides to return to her native England, taking their infant son with her. Hans, unable to commit to such a move, finds himself living a kind of transatlantic lifestyle, dividing his time between New York and London. Again, it's a netherland existence, neither a New Yorker, nor a Londoner; neither a married man, nor a bachelor.

Ironically, having read this book, I, too, felt kind of ambivalent about it, not quite sure if I loved or loathed it. I finished it maybe a month ago but simply haven't had the time to review it, but strangely, with the passing of time, the story has coalesced in my brain and I've found myself thinking about certain elements. I wonder now what was holding Hans back, why he was passive on so many different fronts -- his friendship with Chuck, who clearly had a lot of dodgy things happening in his life; and his foundering marriage -- and let events wash over him without really taking any action himself. Was it a psychological netherland that constrained him, or would that be taking the netherland theme a step too far?

One of things that has stuck in my head is the sense of belonging Hans achieved by playing cricket in New York, even though some of his fellow sportsmen could not speak English and he refused to adapt his batting style to the "American way" which meant "the baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting". I loved that each weekend was spent in a van, travelling around the five boroughs, to play a "friendly".

We sat mostly silent in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives -- jobs, children, wives, worries -- peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit.

As an aside, I was watching BBC Newsnight a week or two back which featured a story about the NYPD running a cricket competition to help improve relations with the city's ethnic minorities.  "That sounds just like Joseph O'Neill's Netherland," I told my Other Half, who was watching it with me. Then, lo and behold, the presenter Gavin Esler interviewed, via satellite, O'Neill, who came across as one of the most articulate, gentlemanly and genuine author interviews I've ever seen. You can watch it here. It was enough to make me want to read more of his work, so if you've read any of this other titles, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

'Explorers of the New Century' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 186 pages; 2006.

Magnus Mills is a cheeky little scamp. With a big black beating heart. He lulls you into a false sense of security before dealing you a killer blow. And you can't help but love him for it.

Explorers of the New Century, his fifth novel, starts out as a rather fun, light-hearted story about two groups of explorers competing to reach the "furtherest point from civilisation". One group -- Scandinavian, small and efficient -- follows a dry riverbed; the second -- British, large and disorganised -- takes a different route across an endless landscape of scree.

The narrative plods along (pun fully intended) for what seems like forever. Not much seems to happen. (Admittedly, I considered abandoning the book, because it was so slow and dull.) The Scandinavians make good progress but are constantly worried they'll get pipped at the post, while the Brits get mired in bickering and make poor leadership decisions.

And then, somewhere around the half-way mark, Mills throws a curve ball that makes you rub your eyes and re-read the sentence to make sure you didn't misunderstand it. Suddenly the book takes a rather kooky and surreal turn, and you begin to realise Mills must have had a great time writing this book. Either that, or he was hallucinating when he cooked up the plot.

Then, just as you're coming to grips with this new turn of events, he delivers another surprise twist that turns everything, and I mean everything, on its head. The story, which began as a rather pedestrian (there I go with the puns again, sorry about that) narrative now becomes rather dark and sinister. It makes you see everything that's already happened before in a new and disturbing light. It's brilliant.

Now, for obvious reasons, I can't reveal the exact nature of these two "twists", but I can say that Explorers of the New Century is one of those deceptively simple novels that is part allegory, part fable and stays with you long after you've finished reading it.

Crucially, there's a lot of deadpan humour in it too, which breaks up the monotony of the anorexic text. Most of it is quite subtle, but there was one exchange they caused me to laugh out loud. The British group has just set up camp and are fantasising about scones with "lashings of jam and butter".

The tent had four occupants. Sargent was in his normal position by the door. Next to him was Summerfield, already fast asleep. Then came Seddon, and at the far end was Plover. The latter had adopted his usual pose. He was lying on his side, outstretched with his legs crossed and his head popped on one hand, facing the doorway.
He waited a moment and then said, "I think you'll find that the  correct pronunciation is 'scones'."
"'Scones'?" repeated Sargent.
"'Scones,'" repeated Plover.
"Well, I've never heard that before. We've always said 'scones' where I come from."
"Same here," agreed Seddon.
"I assure you the word is 'scones'," said Plover. "You should look it up when you get the opportunity."

Trust Mills to capture the absurdity of English people arguing about the English language!

For what it's worth, this is a hugely enjoyable book which can be easily read in just a couple of hours, perfect if you're looking for a quick palette cleanser between novels. It's typical Mills fare, if a little darker than usual, so if you like this you're sure to enjoy his back catalogue, most of which is reviewed here.

An alternative to the Booker Prize

I'm feeling rather ambivalent about the Booker Prize this year. I felt the same last year. Perhaps it's a product of getting older and more cynical, but I'm beginning to think it's just one giant marketing exercise. While it's wonderful to promote those books lucky enough to make the longlist, there's a part of me that worries about all the other wholly deserving titles that don't get the same attention.

Which is why I've really enjoyed following The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. Yesterday, they published their own alternative longlist as judged by Guardian readers.

The list, in full, looks like this:

Ghosts and Lightening by Trevor Byrne
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Map Of The Invisible World by Tash Aw
Summertime by JM Coetzee
The City and The City by China Miéville
John The Revelator by Peter Murphy
Solo by Rana Dasgupta
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Jerusalem by Patrick Neate
Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
This Is How by MJ Hyland
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
The White Woman On The Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
The Harrowing by Robert Dinsdale
Hodd by Adam Thorpe
The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom
The Winter Vault by Anne Michael
White Is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
The Father Of Locks by Andrew Killeen
The Children's Book by AS Byatt
Stone's Fall by Iain Pears
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
Down On Out On Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill
Rose by Gillian Green
Cockroach by Rawi Hage
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Grace, Lamar and Laszlo The Beautiful by Deborah Kay Davies
Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward
Tender by Mark Illis
Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
Little Gods by Anne Richards
A Kind Of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
Great Waters by Kit Whitfield
Black Rock by Amanda Smyth
Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane
Harare North by Brian Chickwava
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
Tomas by James Palumbo
Neverland by Simon Crump
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
All The Colours Of The Town by Liam McIvanney
Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
How To Paint A Dead Man by Sarah Hall

You can vote for the book you want to win up until August 23. A shortlist of six will then be drawn up.

In the meantime, what do you make of the list? Read anything on it?

A visit to the Long Room

How's this for a library? It's the magnificent Long Room at the Old Library of Trinity College, Dublin. It's one of Ireland's biggest tourist attractions and, being a tourist a few weeks back, I paid a visit. (And when I say paid, I mean paid: it cost a staggering €9 to take a peek. Mind you, this included a glimpse of the Book of Kells, encased in glass, which I'd long wanted to see, so it was worth it.)

Sadly, photography is banned in the Long Room, so I had to refrain from taking any snaps. Instead, I bought a postcard and scanned it in, which breaches copyright, but honestly, if you can't take a snap, how on earth can you share the love with fellow bibliophiles? Trying to describe the room is pointless. How can you convey the sense of wonder, the rich aroma of musty books, the golden light, awash with dust motes, filtering through the windows? How can you describe how very small you feel standing underneath that enormous vaulted ceiling?

According to the brochure I picked up, the room is 65 metres long and houses around 200,000 of the library's oldest books. I honestly have to say that seeing all those volumes lined up in such a precise order looked too beautiful to be true. I half-wondered, quite foolishly I might add, whether it was all just a set piece, designed to woo visitors, because surely you couldn't have this many books in the one place without hiring an interior designer to ensure they looked just so.

You'll also note the succession of marble busts lining both sides of the central aisle. The collection began in 1743 and comprises a very regal-looking one of the Dublin-born writer Jonathan Swift.

There's an old harp on display, too, believed to be the oldest in Ireland. It dates from the 15th century. Sadly, I failed to notice this when I visited, but turn over any Irish euro coin and you'll see it depicted, so I didn't miss out entirely -- hehehe.

You can find out more about the Old Library and Book of Kells via the official website.

'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' by Paolo Giordano

Fiction - hardcover; Doubleday; 352 pages; 2009. Translated from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

A novel written by a particle physicist that features mathematics and numbers may not be all that surprising. But what is surprising about Paulo Giordano's debut, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, is the age of the author -- he's just 26 -- and the outstanding success, both critically and commercially, that the book has garnered.

According to the publisher, the book has sold more than 1.2 million copies across 34 countries since its publication in Italy last year. It has topped the Dutch and Spanish bestseller lists and scooped five literary awards, including Italy's premier literary award, the Premio Stega.

Earlier this year, I heard the author interviewed on BBC Radio 5's Book Reviews with Simon Mayo show, and everyone on the panel raved about it. I decided then that I really ought to read it, because surely it couldn't be that good? Or could it?

Well, I'm afraid to say that you'll get no dissident voice from these quarters. The book is a delight. It's literary without being pretentious, which probably explains its extraordinary success. But it also tells a wonderful story about two intriguing characters, Alice and Mattia, and their intertwined destinies.

Both Alice and Mattia are loners, who have been scarred by childhood tragedies. Alice suffered a terrible skiing accident which has left her with a pronounced and permanent limp, while Mattia abandoned his mentally disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned she was gone, never to be found. These two irreversible episodes have manifested themselves in psychological conditions: Alice is anorexic, Mattia is a self-harmer.

Interestingly, Giordano doesn't sensationalise or glorify their conditions, they're merely character traits and never explored in any great depth. Indeed, Alice is so successful at hiding her illness that no one, not even the closest of family members, ever seems to notice it. (This, I admit, annoyed me a little: how could you not notice someone shoving food in napkins or fainting, because they're so undernourished?)

The story, which spans 24 years, follows these two characters from childhood to adulthood, as they grapple with their lives and make decisions about their futures. The third-person narrative keeps the momentum going by toying with the idea that Alice and Mattia are destined to be together.

Mathematicians call them twin primes: they are pairs of prime numbers that are close to one another, almost neighbours, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from really touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. [...] Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, two twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough really to touch one another.

I won't spoil it by revealing whether they do, in fact, get their acts together, because most of the fun of reading The Solitude of Prime Numbers is discovering whether they will ever become truly romantically involved. What I will say is this: the ending is not the predictable one that seems to loom at around the 290-page mark, which only made my love for this book all the stronger.

This is by no means a perfect novel, but it's an extraordinarily human one, melancholy and inspiring by turns. It also comes across as being very wise, particularly in terms of familial relationships, friendship, marriage and parenthood, as if Giordano is much, much older than his years. He also has an uncanny ability to get inside the head of a teenage girl who is desperate to be liked by her peers, and the scenes in which Alice is bullied at high school are incredibly authentic.

Assuming Giordano continues to pursue a writing career, rather than a scientific one, then he will definitely be one to watch in the future. But in the meantime, I suspect his debut will continue to sell like hot cakes, as indeed it should.

'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 240 pages; 2009. Free copy for our Book Group courtesy of the publisher.

I first read Sylvia Plath's one and only novel, The Bell Jar, as a young 20-something, when I was hugely unsure of my place in the world. Indeed, I'd graduated but my career prospects were thwarted by a massive recession (it was 1991) and I was making ends meet by working part-time in a book shop. Reading The Bell Jar was a rewarding experience, because the main character, Esther Greenwood, was also coming to terms with her place in the world -- or not coming to terms with it, as it turned out. As I read about Esther sliding further and further into depression, I realised my life wasn't so bad after all. But I did find The Bell Jar very dark and bleak.

Reading the book for the second time round, almost 18 years later, I was struck by how little of it I remembered. And it also seemed far less depressing. Indeed, there were many moments when I laughed out loud. Here's a case in point: Esther and a colleague catch a yellow cab back to their hotel after a party, and this is what ensues:

The cab driver took the corners with such momentum that we were thrown together first on one side of the back seat and then on the other. Each time one of us felt sick, she would lean over quietly as if she had dropped something and was picking it up off the floor, and the other one would hum a little and pretend to be looking out the window.

But I digress... For those of you who are unaware of the storyline, it goes something like this: It is 1953. Esther Greenwood is a first-rate student from rural America who wins a college scholarship along with the opportunity to spend a month in New York city as an intern on a fashion magazine. But during her time in Manhattan with 11 other young female interns, Esther slowly realises that she can no longer define herself by her academic accomplishments. The world, as she knows it, is coming to an end and she doesn't quite know how to handle it. Or, as she describes it, she "felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks".

When she returns home, she discovers that her application to join a writing course over the summer has been rejected, and depression sets in.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story [that she had read].
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The phrase that comes to mind here is "paralysed by choice". Indeed, as the summer drags on, Esther becomes more dejected, lost and depressed, not helped by the absence of her medical student boyfriend who has been sent to a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis. Not that she thinks much of him anyway...

Before long, Esther is seeing a psychiatrist and admitted to an asylum. A string of failed, one might say half-hearted, suicide attempts follow, as does a course of electro-shock treatment. It all feels very bleak and depressing...although the ending is relatively upbeat.

I'll admit that I loved the first third of the book, set in New York, much more than the sections covering her psychiatric experiences. Perhaps it's the beautiful writing and the pitch-perfect descriptions of Manhattan where "the city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking" or maybe I just identified with Esther's cynicism, her refusal to get caught-up in the shallowness of the fashion industry, the endless parties, the free gifts. She wants something more meaningful even if she hasn't quite figured out what that might comprise...

The latter two-thirds of the book comes across a bit like one long whinge-fest. There was part of me that wanted to grab Esther by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Sure, her aspirations aren't being taken seriously, but why not prove what you can achieve before giving up because you don't see the point of it all? But then, it's hard to fully comprehend what it must have been like to be a woman in the 1950s, when society simply expected you to get married, stay at home and raise a family. How would an intellectual, creative woman, deal with making such compromises?

The Bell Jar was Plath's only novel, because she killed herself a few weeks after it was published in 1963. Obviously, one can't help wondering how much autobiographical detail fills its pages. Sadly, we will never know.

----

This book was chosen by Simon as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. It was a great choice. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members, which I'll update as they are published:

• Simon's thoughts

• Claire's thoughts

• Novel Insights' review

'Once & Then' by Morris Gleitzman

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 249 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian-based writer with more than 20 childrens' books to his name. This book, packaged as an "adult edition" brings together his two Holocaust novels -- Once, first published in 2005, and Then, first published in 2008 -- for the first time. Fittingly, it's released today (August 6) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

I'll have to admit that when this one arrived on my doorstep a month or so back I was a little skeptical: surely it was just jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon already set in place by John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (both of which I loved)? What could yet another childrens' novel tell us about the Jewish experience during the Second World War? Hadn't it all been said before? And why wasn't Penguin re-issuing Esther Hautzig's true life story The Endless Steppe instead, a book I adored when I was a pre-teen and still remember with an aching fondness?

Casting my cynicism aside and holed up in my sick bed bed, I decided to give this one a go because it probably wouldn't tax the brain matter too much. I figured I'd probably read the first 50 pages and then make a judgement call. I got so swept up in the story about a 10-year-old Jewish orphan, Felix, and his gutsy little non-Jewish friend, Zelda, that I read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours. And then wished I hadn't ploughed through it so furiously because I wanted to spend more time in the company of these wonderful, inspiring characters.

The beauty of Once & Then is its ability to present the Holocaust in a fresh way -- that is, from the perspective of a young boy who fails to comprehend the violence and brutality around him. Of course Boyne does this in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but Gleitzman tackles it from a slightly different angle: a Jewish boy who doesn't even remotely understand that it is his very religion that puts him in danger. Indeed, when the book opens Felix's naivety is crystal clear: he truly believes he is only residing in a Catholic orphanage, not because his parents are dead, but because they are trying to sort out their problems as Jewish booksellers before coming back to rescue him.

There were two reasons Mum and Dad chose this orphanage, because it was the closest and because of Mother Minka's goodness. When they were bringing me here, they told me how in all the years Mother Minka was a customer of their bookshop, back before things got difficult for Jewish booksellers, she never once criticised a single book.

His innocence is all the more apparent when you realise he's being carrying this false hope with him for three years and eight months, and yet it remains undiminished. His only fear is that when his parents return they won't recognise him because he's changed so much in that time.

But the tables are turned when a group of Nazis arrive one day to burn all the Jewish books in the orphanage's library. Felix suddenly realises that he needs to rescue his parents, not the other way around.

There's a gang of thugs going round the country burning Jewish books. Mum and Dad, wherever in Europe they are, probably don't even know their books are in danger.
I have to try and find Mum and Dad and tell them what's going on.
But first I must get to the shop and hide the books.

This sets Felix off on an amazing voyage of discovery in which he escapes the orphanage and begins a new life on the run. Along the way, he collects a sidekick, a six-year-old girl, whom he rescues from a burning farm. Together Felix and Zelda form a formidable duo, a kind of brother-sister act that endures all kinds of highs and lows as they try to survive everything the Nazi regime has to throw at them.

To supply any more detail would spoil the plot, because the enjoyment of reading Once & Then is letting the adventure unfurl page by page, and experiencing the adrenalin rushes, the shocks and the tears that this brings. There's plenty of laughs in the book, too, a delightfully naive child-like humour that softens the blows of what would otherwise be a terribly dark and depressing story.

But the best part, especially for book lovers, is the infectious enthusiasm for storytelling that exists within Felix and his undying love for British writer Richmal Crompton and her humorous Just William stories.

I clamber over the beds and squeeze onto the floor and take a book from the shelf. Just William by Richmal Crompton. It's still one of my favourite books in the whole world. As I open it I try not to remember Mum and Dad reading it to me.
Instead, I read a bit to myself. About William's dog. He's called Jumble and he's a mixture of about a hundred different dogs and William loves him even when he pees in William's new boots.
Mum and Dad said I can have a dog like Jumble one day.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about them.
William is training Jumble to be a pirate. That's what I love about William. He always stays hopeful, and no matter how bad things get, no matter how much the world turns upside down, his mum and dad never die.
Not ever.
I know I should be getting back, but I can't get up at the moment. All I can do is stay here on the floor, with Just William and Zelda's carrot, thinking about Mum and Dad and crying.

Once & Then is a powerful story about the strength and resilience of the human spirit. It's about courage and hope, and surviving against the odds. And while it tackles one of the darkest times in 20th century history, Gleitzman does it sensitively without losing any of the important detail. There's plenty of death here, and cruelty, but it's not sensationalist or gratuitous. "This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable," he writes in his afterward. I think he's achieved it.

Today's links

I'm home in bed, suffering from some kind of dreaded lurgy. It's either a bad dose of tonsilitis or the early stages of swine flu. I'm riding out the aches and pains, fever and sore throat by taking paracetamol every four hours and drinking lots of water. Sadly, I don't seem able to muster the energy to read my latest book, Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, but scooting around the internet for a bit of a look-see is manageable. Here's a few great links I've discovered today:

Jackie at Farm Lane Books Blog has a thoughtful post about contact with authors.

Anne Brooke has a cracking review of Chris Cleave's The Other Hand on the always wonderful Vulpes Libris blog. [Via Lisa, who left a comment on my review of Cleave's book.]

The Times has published a list of the best 60 books of the past 60 years. It's an interesting list with a load of popular titles. I've read 22 of them.

John Self of Asylum has a great review of Magnus Mills' latest offering, The Maintenance of Headway. I've added it to my wishlist, having read most of Mills' previous novels.

The Guardian has published an intriguing piece about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall going from Booker outsider to favourite in 48 hours. I'm itching to read it: I saw the glowing reviews on  Newsnight Review on Friday, which are mentioned in the piece, and promptly added it to my wishlist. It's also got 20 five-star reviews on Amazon, if that's anything to go by...

The Irish Times looks at whether getting nominated for a literary prize guarantees a longer shelf life for your novel.

The same newspaper also has a great interview with Patrick McCabe, who has just finished a new, yet-to-be-published novel.