Reading Matters

'On a Chinese Screen' by W. Somerset Maugham

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; Vintage Classics; 137 pages; 2010.

This is one of those books I probably would never have bothered reading had it not been for two important facts: it was a free download from manybooks.net and it was about China.

What I hadn't clocked when I first began reading it was this: there is no narrative thread holding this book together. It is merely a collection of pen-portraits of various people, mainly expat officials, that Somerset Maugham met on his travels through China in the early 1920s.

There are 58 short sketches in total, and while each one is expertly and vividly drawn, it does not make for an effortless read because it is simply too disjointed. It's almost like reading someone's notebook rather than a published book.

Its importance, I guess, is more as an historical "document", because Maugham's "reportage" offers a glimpse of Europeans living in China during the interwar years. What he depicts is far from pleasant. These are people who don't give a damn about the culture or the people. They simply cling onto the vestiges of home. No one bothers to learn the language or befriend the natives. Assuming that Maugham's descriptions of British diplomats, Catholic missionaries and the like are accurate, this is a rather damning portrayal of the English abroad.

This is a good example:

China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they looked with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese language. Why should he unless he were a missionary or a Chinese Secretary at the Legation? You could hire an interpreter for twenty-five dollars a month and it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew queer in the head.

Funnily enough, I get the impression that many of his sketches are tongue-in-cheek and that Maugham knows full well that these people are truly hideous in outlook and attitude.

Indeed, the book works best when Maugham offers up his own opinion of the Chinese natives (mainly "coolies") and the places he visits (mainly villages along the Yangtze) -- he seems far more accepting, interested and intrigued by his travel adventures than his British counterparts.

There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down in the depth of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and foursquare, at due intervals stood at their posts.

The book, however, is probably best read by genuine W. Somerset Maugham fans, those with a deep interest in China or budding authors wishing to learn the art of descriptive writing.

It was first published in 1922.

'Red Dust' by Ma Jian

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; CCV Digital; 336 pages; 2010. Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

I'm not a huge fan of travelogues, but I decided to read Red Dust based on the strength of Ma Jian's superb novel Beijing Coma and Max Cairnduff's excellent review.

I read it on my Kindle while in China last month, and found much of Jian's descriptions, particularly of places I had been such as the ancient city of Xi'an and the Ghost City of Fengdu, very authentic.

The book chronicles Jian's travels throughout China during the 1980s, a time in which travel for the average Chinese citizen was banned without the necessary paperwork.

He claims to go travelling because: "I want to see my country, every river, every mountain. I want to see different people, different lives. [...] I just want to know it, see it with my own eyes." But that is the sanitised version.

Before he hit the road, Jian was an official photographer for the propaganda department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. He spent most of his free time as an artist. His house, a "crumbling old shack", in Beijing was used by fellow creatives -- writers, painters, poets and dissidents -- as a secret meeting point.

He was labelled as a "questionable youth" by his bosses, who believed his "spare time activities" indicated he had been poisoned by "bourgeois Spiritual Pollution". He escaped the clutches of Party Officials waging their Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution by forging his own travel documents and heading for the desert. (Just as well, because within a matter of years more than a million people were arrested and nearly 200,000 executed as part of the Campaign.)

It was 1983 and he was 30 years old. He had hoped to find spiritual enlightenment along the way, but as most travellers are wont to discover, Jian ended up learning a great deal about his country -- good, bad and ugly -- and the people who lived in it.

He was on the move for three years before he decided to return to Beijing.

Initially he revels in the freedom that travel provided:

Men are like swallows, when autumn arrives they long to fly away. Life moves with the same rhythm as the sky and the earth. It changes as sun changes into moon and day into night. If they told me to return to Beijing now, I would charge straight into those ramparts.  I would rather crack my skull and die than go back to moulder in that dank city.

But later, after some close encounters and a constant struggle to earn enough cash to get by, he realises that freedom is not the be all and end all. "Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fears, but this is not real freedom," he wrote. "You need money to be free."

While I found Red Dust an easy read and enjoyed discovering more about China through Jian's eyes, I did have some problems with the book.

The first -- which can be dismissed as my own fault, rather than the author's -- was Jian's narrative voice. I simply did not like it, because it often came across as arrogant and sexist (not dissimilar, in fact, to his fictional Dai Wei in Beijing Coma).

The second is simply the repetition of Jian arriving in a new place (usually broke and worried that the authorities will discover his papers are illegal), befriending someone, finding out about the local culture and then leaving. Once or twice is interesting, but when the bulk of the narrative is just relating a succession of these encounters, as different as each may be, it does become wearing. (Max Cairnduff's review also finds this a major failing.)

Of course, that's not enough to dismiss the book completely. There's a lot in Red Dust which provides food for thought, particularly as it is set just as China's economy was beginning to open up thanks to Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Jian thought that this would help his people, until he meets many rural folk who tell him otherwise. One chap says:

"A free economy won't make bicycles or sewing machines grow from the earth. [...] All the young men have left to find work in the cities. They come back at Spring Festival with new watches and big bags of clothes."

I'd love to know how opinions and attitudes have changed in the 25 years since Jian went on his travels, but sadly Jian will never be able to retrace his steps to find out. He's no longer welcome in his homeland and has been resident in London since 1999. His books are banned in China.

'The Getting of Wisdom' by Henry Handel Richardson

Fiction - Kindle edition; Project Gutenberg; 209 pages; 1910.

Henry Handel Richardson was the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, an Australian author who was born in 1870. The Getting of Wisdom, her second novel, is probably her most famous book, and a century later it remains in print.

Its enduring popularity is probably due to the universal story it recounts: an unworldly young girl from the country goes to boarding school in the city and tries desperately to fit in -- with mixed results.

The story is supposedly semi-autobiographical -- aren't they all? -- and is based on Richardson's own experiences at the prestigious Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne, where The Getting of Wisdom is set.

The protagonist, Laura Tweedle Rambotham, is a likable character but she is completely hapless and, at times, annoyingly unable to learn from her mistakes. She is 12 years old when she is sent to school from her rural backwater home.

She's an outsider as soon as she arrives, because most of her fellow students come from well-off backgrounds. Laura, by comparison, comes from a one-parent family (her father, a barrister, has died) and her mother makes ends meet by taking in embroidery and other sewing-related jobs.

Much of the story revolves around Laura's painful attempts to fit in. Although she is accepted socially by her peers, it is a constant balancing act to keep it going without anyone detecting the flaws in her background.

When, in "a moment of weakness, she gratuitously gave away the secret that Mother supported her family by the work of her hands", her standing within the school community begins to slide.

Work in itself was bad enough -- how greatly to be envied were those whose fathers did nothing more active than live on their money! But the additional circumstance of Mother being a woman made things ten times worse: ladies did not work; someone always left them enough to live on, and if he didn't, well, then he, too, shared the ignominy. So Laura went in fear and trembling lest the truth should come to light.

As much as I enjoyed this novel, I did begin to wonder what the point of it was. In most coming of age stories the protagonist goes through some kind of "test" and emerges all the stronger for it, but in The Getting of Wisdom Laura merely gets sucked into the cruel games of her peers. Instead of standing up to them -- defying them -- she lowers herself to their standards and offers them what they want, even if that means she has to lie or carry on a charade to do so.

And by the end of the story, as Laura gets ready to leave school for good, she feels that she still doesn't fit in:

She went out from school with the uncomfortable sense of being a square peg, which fitted into none of the round holes of her world; the wisdom she had got, the experience she was richer by, had, in the process of equipping her for life, merely seemed to disclose her unfitness.

Despite this failing, the book is an evocative read, particularly of another time and place. It has a distinctive Australian feel -- I loved the descriptions of Laura's holidays on the beach and her excursions into the city -- which ensures its place in the Australian literary canon.

And I rather suspect girls in their early teens would enjoy it, seeing as it is filled with callous, often bitchy, characters with which every girl has to contend when she is growing up. There's also plenty about what it is like to negotiate the unfamiliar world of boys when you don't quite know what is expected of you...

 

A list of Australian classic reads

The Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor, Susan Wyndham, has put together a list of Australian classics "that every Australian can enjoy if they want to understand our literature, our country and ourselves''.

I've broken the list into two sections, fiction and non-fiction, and put the books in alphabetical order by author's surname.

FICTION

• Eucalyptus by Murray Bail (1998)
• True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)
• For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke (1874)
• Our Sunshine by Robert Drewe (1991)
• Night Letters by Robert Dessaix (1996)
• Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan (2001)
• My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin (1901)
• The Children's Bach by Helen Garner (1984)
• Monkey Grip by Helen Garner (1977)
• The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910)
• The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson (1930)
• Capricornia by Xavier Herbert (1937)
• Johnno by David Malouf (1975)
• The Harp in the South by Ruth Park (1948)
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)
• The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (2008)
• Voss by Patrick White (1957)
• The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White (1979)
• The Tree of Man by Patrick White (1955)
• Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (1991)
• The Riders by Tim Winton (1995)
• Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (2006)

NON-FICTION

• The Tyranny of Distance by Geoffrey Blainey (1966)
• The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd (1960)
• A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey (1981)
• The First Stone by Helen Garner (1995)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Lucky Country by Donald Horne (1964)
• The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (1987)
• Damned Whores and God's Police by Anne Summers (1975)

I think it's a fairly standard but representative list with no real surprises. I've read 10 of them and there's a further five already sitting on my TBR pile. How about you?

'The Grass Arena' by John Healy

Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 272 pages; 2008.

The Grass Arena, a memoir by John Healy who spent 15 years living on the streets of London, will alter the way you view homeless people.

The book is written in what can only be described as schoolboy English, with sparse prose and an affinity for exclamation points. But this naive, un-educated voice, rings true and becomes rather endearing once you get into the rhythm of it.

It begins by detailing John's rather impoverished, ultra-religious and violent upbringing in which he sometimes lives with his parents in London and sometimes lives with his extended family in Ireland.

It then turns to the horror of his adult life lived on the margins of society. Here, in the "grass arena" he hangs out with all forms of low-life -- petty criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts -- and survives by his wits.

Much of his time is devoted to avoiding violence on the streets (nasty punch-ups fuelled by alcohol) and finding enough money -- either through begging or petty thievery -- to secure the next drink, whether it be beer, red wine or methylated spirits, he's not fussy (although he does confess that meths is "bastard stuff" which is "hard to get down first thing in the day -- any time for that matter".) 

Life is a blur of abject, hopeless drunkenness, broken by stints in prison, but underneath it all you get the very real sense that Healy desperately wants to escape this way of life. And, eventually, he does, by a rather surreal saviour: the game of chess, for which he has a particular talent.

This memoir isn't exactly a fun read, although it does have moments of high humour of the blackest variety, but it's an illuminating account of what it is like to be a member of an underclass spurned by society. And it details, almost lovingly, the camaraderie and sense of community which exists between those people who have no homes to go to.

The autobiography, first published in 1988, was made into an award-winning film by the BBC in 1991.

As an aside, I read this book back to back with MJ Hyland's This is How and was surprised at some of the similarities between the fictional Patrick Oxtoby and the very real John Healy: both suffer from severe tension in the upper back and neck that can only be alleviated through drink; both become alcoholics; and both eventually end up in prison.

To hammer the point home further, Oxtoby reads an unnamed book borrowed from the prison library which I believe can only be Healy's Grass Arena. I'm convinced MJ Hyland must have read it as part of her research for her novel.

Top 10s: The best reads of 2010

It's that time of year again when everyone shares their best reads of 2010.

I've read so many wonderful books this year that I've narrowed it down by only including novels, as opposed to novellas or non-fiction titles.

Here's my list (in alphabetical order by book title):

 

'Beijing Coma' by Ma Jian (2009)

"At more than 600-pages long, it requires a major commitment from the reader, but it is worth the effort. It is a deeply moving account of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement, culminating in the massacre in which thousands of Chinese citizens were killed. Unusually, it is told from the point of view of one of the students, Dai Wei, who is in a coma. As a concept, this shouldn't work. But in Ma Jian's hands this wholly original approach is devastatingly effective."

 

'The Canal' by Lee Rourke (2010)

"The Canal might be a book about boredom, but there's little or no risk of evoking that emotional state in the reader. This is a novel pulsing with ideas and theories (and lots of facts about London, if you're that way inclined), and one that's likely to tell you more about the human condition than any textbook possibly could."

 

'Of A Boy' by Sonya Hartnett (2003)

"The real strength of this story, which is written in plain, languid prose, is Hartnett's uncanny ability to get inside the head of a lonely school boy. She underplays everything, so it is you the reader who comes to understand the pain of his existence."

 

'Room' by Emma Donoghue (2010)

"The novel, which is Donoghue's seventh, is an extraordinarily atmospheric read. I use the term 'atmospheric' to describe the feelings it evokes in the reader and the ways in which those feelings linger for days afterwards. I found myself not so much reeling in its wake but feeling as if something had shifted inside of me, so that I could no longer perceive the world in the same way."

'A Short Gentleman' by Jon Canter (2009)

"I think the funniest thing about the book (and admittedly the first half is more hilarious than the second half) is the way in which it pokes fun at Britain's upper-classes. Their eccentricities, the ways in which they run their households and conduct their lives all come in for more than their fair share of ribbing."

 

'Skin Lane' by Neil Bartlett (2008)

"I have not read anything quite as haunting as this strangely beautiful book. It's a novel that is full of contradictions: it brims with sexual tension, and yet contains no sex; it is filled with death, and yet no one is murdered; it's repetitious to the point of being dull, and yet features some of the most exciting and heart-hammering scenes you will ever read."

'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas (2009)

"The Slap is by no means a perfect novel -- sometimes the writing feels forced, especially when sketching in the back story for individual characters, and I suspect the numerous music references are going to date it quickly -- but its ambition, its scope and the sheer force of the story-telling more than makes up for this. It's a very bold book, full of sex, drugs, middle-aged angst and a lot of crude language."

 

'So Much For That' by Lionel Shriver (2010)

"I can't exaggerate how much I enjoyed this book. I lived with these characters for an entire weekend (the book arrived on a Saturday morning and by the Sunday night I had finished it) and felt like I'd gone on a huge, emotional roller-coaster that lasted almost 48 hours. It made me laugh, it made me cry and it made me angry."

 

'This Human Season' by Louise Dean (2006)

"What I admire most about this book is Dean's clear-eyed ability to reveal the human angle of The Troubles rather than concentrate on the politics of the situation. She never glorifies the violence or takes sides. Perhaps her own background -- she is English, middle-class and lives in France -- has helped her look at events with an outsider's cool objectivity."

 

'This is How' by MJ Hyland (2010)

"This Is How is far from a cheery read. Despite the loathsome character at its heart, it's strangely compelling. It's dark, disturbing and filled with pathos, but it is exactly this kind of exploration of a fragile mind that everyone should read, not because it offers condemnation, but because it does the opposite: illuminates and educates."

 

Have you read any from this list? Care to share your own top 10?

'Beijing Coma' by Ma Jian

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 666 pages; 2009. Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

It's been a very long time since I read a novel that I know will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is by no means a perfect book -- it's far too lengthy for a start and the lead character is arrogant and annoying by turns -- but it is a powerful, compelling read, a story that bears witness to a shocking event that the Chinese authorities would rather you did not know about: the Tianamen Square massacre of 1989.

Although the book is fictional, it is based on first-hand experience and, from what I can gather having now read this wikipedia entry, is historically accurate. Only the names have been changed.

Beijing Coma remains banned in China, along with everything else that Ma Jian has written. (He now lives in London with his translator wife, Flora Drew.)

At more than 600-pages long, it requires a major commitment from the reader, but it is worth the effort. It is a deeply moving account of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement, culminating in the massacre in which thousands of Chinese citizens were killed. Unusually, it is told from the point of view of one of the students, Dai Wei, who is in a coma. As a concept, this shouldn't work. But in Ma Jian's hands this wholly original approach is devastatingly effective.

As Dai Wei lays in a bed in his mother's apartment waiting to die -- he was felled by a bullet during the military crackdown -- he takes in everything happening around him. Much of the time he reminisces about his past, and through this we learn of his childhood growing up in 1980s Communist China, where his father was labelled a "rightist" and sentenced to 20 years in a prison farm, and his mother was a fine, upstanding citizen who toed the Party line.

Later, he escapes the claustrophobia of the family home to attend university, where he spends more time chasing girls than studying. He eventually gets swept up in the idealism of the pro-democracy movement and finds himself head of security during the protests which begin in April 1989.

He recalls the student movement's slow disintegration, as boisterous enthusiasm and idealism makes way for in-fighting, internal power struggles and corruption all because it lacked a truly united front.

But Dai Wei's memories of the past are constantly interrupted by events happening around him in his mother's cramped and shabby apartment. Because he was injured during a massacre that the Government denies ever happened, he is not allowed medical treatment. It is up to his mother, as sole carer, to do what she can to help him: she gets drugs and IV equipment on the black market, and occasionally has documents forged to allow him to be treated in hospital. It is a perilous, on-the-edge and inhumane existence for both parties.

His mother is anxious for her son to die to relieve her of this terrible burden -- and she makes no bones about telling him this, not knowing that despite Dai Wei's vegetative state he can hear everything she says.

At times the narrative feels like a dark comedy (there's one instance when Dai Wei's urine is seen as a miracle cure and people come from far and wide to buy it from his mother's apartment), but for the most part it is a damning indictment of China's human rights record.

It is also a fascinating insight into the massive economic and physical changes that Beijing underwent between 1989 and the 2008 Olympic Games, as old buildings were torn down to make way for modern ones, and local residents took advantage of new investment.

But for Dai Wei's mother this change is not welcome. As she juggles her son's medical needs with her own struggle to survive, she is ordered by the Government to leave her apartment so that it can be demolished to make way for new buildings as part of the Beijing Olympic bid. Her refusal to move, to succumb to the Government's demands, not only shows how much her attitude to the Government has changed (she was once a model Communist citizen), it provides a glimpse of a country thundering ahead so fast that only the fittest, strongest and most adaptable can survive.

These dual narratives are interleaved in a seamless fashion, so that only the tense -- past for Dei Wei's memories, present for events happening around his sick bed -- orientates the reader.

A word of caution, however: the level of detail in this novel may be off-putting to some, because Ma Jian records the minutiae of student life and every tiny step of the protest movement. I admit that I did, at times, wonder if it was worth me ploughing ahead. I'm pleased that I persisted, because the sheer weight of the information presented builds momentum. By the time you reach the horrifying climax -- the tanks rolling in and the soldiers mowing down innocent bystanders -- it's like being hit over the head by a tonne of bricks, as the full force of all that detail rains down on you. It is, without a doubt, one of the most dramatic endings to a novel I've ever read.

Beijing Coma held my attention for an entire month. It is a brave and audacious book, brimming with idealism, chaos and horror. If you like your fiction rooted in fact, with a choppy, fast-paced narrative, and a conclusion that leaves you reeling, then do add this one to the list.

 

Merry Christmas!

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's visted this blog, left comments, sent me books or written me an email over the past year. Your support and enthusiasm is much appreciated.

No matter how you celebrate this time of year, and even if you don't, please accept my best wishes.

And if you believe in Santa, I hope he brings you loads of books!

'Factory Girls' by Leslie T. Chang

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; Picador; 320 pages; 2010.

Since the 1990s China has undergone rapid economic development. It's no exaggeration to say that practically every useful item that we buy in the West -- for example, shoes, t-shirts, laptops and mobile phones -- was made in a factory somewhere in China. But what of the people who work in those factories? What sort of lives do they lead? How is China's rise to power affecting them?

Leslie T. Chang, a Chinese American, wrote Factory Girls as a means of exploring these very questions. She says she didn't want to write about the harsh conditions in the factories, because that had already been done. Instead, she wanted to concentrate on the workers and tell their stories.

Over the course of two years she follows two young women, Min and Chungming, who leave their rural villages -- what is known as "going out" -- in pursuit of a better life earning a regular wage in a factory. In China, these young women (and men) are "rural migrants". There are 130 million of them (one-third of which are female), representing "the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century".

Chang says she specifically wanted the book to focus on women, because they "seemed to have the most to gain in leaving the village but also maybe the most to lose".

Dongguan, in the south-west, was the logical place to start. It is one of the largest factory cities in China, with a population of almost 7 million people, 2 million of them rural migrants. Some 70 per cent of the workforce is female.

What Chang discovered was surprising. While I won't go into specific details about Min and Chungming -- you need to read the book to discover their ups, downs, successes, failures, and the corruption and dangers to which they are exposed, all of which is gripping stuff -- in general the women did not see factory work as we in the West might view it. They saw it as an opportunity to better themselves, to escape their rural lives and to achieve some measure of career success.

They also enjoyed a more fluid job situation than their male counterparts, and were often promoted more quickly. They were more flexible, in terms of fitting in, because they "quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles and accents of the city".

But if you are female, rural migration is a double-edged sword:

If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man's land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. [...] Social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn.

Despite Chang's insistence that she didn't want to write a book looking at factory conditions, she does provide some interesting pen-portraits of what it is like to work in these places. I found it eye-opening: the factory, no matter what it produces, is pretty much a way of life. Employees sleep in factory dorms, eat in factory cafeterias, are treated in factory hospitals. One factory that Chang visits employees 70,000 people!

Typically, the pay is usually low and the working hours extreme. Privacy is non-existent, as this excerpt describing one of Chang's visits, explains:

Girls stand in doorways combing their shampooed hair in hand mirrors; girls in shorts and flip-flops lug buckets of water to mop the dormitory floors. Residents of the upper floors lean on bare arms over balcony railings, checking out the goings-on at ground level and calling out to friends many stories below. A pop ballad blasts from a tape deck into the muggy morning. I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice. The air smells of laundry hanging out to dry; bleach, detergent, and damp are the perpetual scents of the Yue Yuen factory.

Interestingly, migration, once a last resort, has now become an acceptable, indeed desirable, route to a better life. Chang says today's migrants are "younger and better educated than their predecessors" and that "they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city".

One of the girls she follows, Min, is able to support herself and her family in the countryside, buying them new things -- a TV, furniture and so on -- and upgrading their lifestyle in the process. It's not uncommon for young rural migrants who work hard to buy their parents a bigger, better, more modern house or apartment.

But Factory Girls isn't just a book about modern China. Chang includes a dual narrative that gives a nod to the past. This narrative focuses on her own Chinese roots, in which she returns to her ancestral village and learns about her family, particularly her grandfather who was assassinated after World War Two. This adds an extra dimension to what is already a superb journalistic endeavour.

This is a book that puts a human face to China's ongoing economic development, but ultimately the book works because these are human stories that transcend time and place. And you don't even have to be remotely interested in China to appreciate Chang's effortless and engaging writing style. Highly recommended.

Top 10s: My favourite bookish moments of 2010

This year has been a rather unpredictable and unsettled year for me personally and professionally. But the one constant has been my love of books and the strengthening of friendships, both online and in person, with others who share my love of literature.

Here's 10 bookish highlights for 2010 in the order in which they happened.

• Joining a mobile library

• Setting up the Not the TV Book Group with three other bloggers

• Enjoying a day with Harvill Secker and an international contingent of writers

• Hearing Alaskan-born writer David Vann read at a literary evening at To Hell With Books in Woburn Walk, Bloomsbury. (I also met author Evie Wyld and had a bit of a "fan moment". More here, but you need to scrawl down.)

• Being named on Cision's Top 10 UK Literature Blogs

• Hearing Joseph O'Connor speak at the London Literary Festival

• Chairing my first literary gig: a conversation between me, German author Friedrich Christian Delius, and his translator, Jamie Bulloch, at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, North London. (Hat tip to Meike of Peirene Press for asking me to do it.)

• Meeting Lisa from ANZ LitLovers

• Buying a Kindle and then using it on my travels

• Shopping for books in Beijing, China: Wangfujing Bookstore and Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore

What have been your bookish highlights this year?

New Elliot Perlman novel due next year

From a discussion on Twitter earlier today, it looks like Australian author Elliot Perlman is going to have a new novel published in 2011. (I have reviewed his previous two novels here.)

It's been a long time between drinks, as they say, so this is one book his fans have been waiting quite a while for.

Other Australian releases to look forward to next year are nicely rounded up in this piece by James Bradley published on the Wheeler Centre website.

'The Gates Between' by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Fiction - Kindle edition; Project Gutenberg; 220 pages; 1887.

Do you ever wonder what on earth possessed you to buy or borrow a particular book? I have absolutely no memory of even downloading this one -- a freebie from manybooks.net -- before I left London in mid-November.

So when I started reading it earlier in the week in the hope it might cure my fictional reading slump, I hadn't a clue what it was about (one of the most annoying things about eBooks is the lack of blurbs), but I liked the sound of the title and the author's double-barrelled surname.

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) was an American author best known for her three Spiritualist novels, The Gates Ajar, Between the Gates and Beyond the Gates.

Alas, I could not find any information about Between the Gates apart from a small description on Encyclopedia.com which described it as "the afterlife adventures of an agnostic doctor". I rather suspect that if I'd known that at the outset I would not have read this book. But however unappealing a story with Christian overtones might sound to me, I admit that once I'd begun reading the opening chapters I was hooked.

The story is told from the point-of-view of a 45-year-old doctor, Esmerald Thorne, who is the bastion of the small-town medical community in which he resides. His patients love him and he loves his patients. But if you read between the lines you also get to see that he might have a bit of a "god complex", because he is a man of science who thinks himself slightly superior to the mere mortals he treats.

Of course, with hindsight, and knowing that the book has a strong religious message to impart, it's clear that Stuart Phelps wants to cut her doctor character down a peg or two.

She gives him a more human side by having him fall desperately in love with Helen, a woman 12 years his junior. ("My accident held me a prisoner for six weeks. But my love put me in chains in six minutes.") And after a short courtship the pair marry and later become parents to a son. Dr Thorne describes himself as being "chloroformed with joy".

Then the cracks in their marriage begin to appear. Dr Thorne is an irritable man and he begins to find Helen irritating. He cannot understand why she frets so much about their poorly son. He dismisses the baby's constant crying as nothing more than teething problems.

SPOILER ALERT

And then one day, after a tiff with his wife, he storms out and is involved in a fatal horse and carriage accident.

I had been dead twelve hours before I found out.

The rest of the book revolves around Dr Thorne coming to terms with his new life in the "afterlife". He begins to realise that he might have been a good human doing good things in the human world, but his lack of faith has left him slightly diminished in the world of the dead. He doesn't quite fit in and struggles to comprehend that all his success counts for nothing in this new place.

Good luck, good looks, good nerves, a good income, an enviable reputation for professional skill, personal popularity, and private happiness -- these things had struck me as so wholesome that they must be admirable. [...] Now it was as if, in the act or fact of dying, I had moved a step or two, and looked over the edge of the bright shield.

Further on Dr Thorne meets a young boy in the afterlife and is devastated to discover that it is, in fact, the son he insisted was healthy. Now he begins to learn about humility -- and fatherhood, and what it is like to live a woman's life in which child-rearing and domesticity is the central focus.

I have to admit that the moral and religious lessons do wear thin very quickly -- and that they are so bleeding obvious as to be cringe-worthy. However, I suspect the ideas presented here were new and exciting at the time of publication, and maybe even 21st century Christians and theologians will find much more to appreciate in The Gates Between than this somewhat cynical, atheist reviewer!

But the book is easy to read -- provided you can forgive Stuart Phelps' tendency towards breathless gushing and composing entire paragraphs out of questions -- and it provided a decidedly different flavour to my usual reading material. Whether it got me out of my reading slump remains to be seen.

When fiction just won't do

Now that my China travels are over and I'm holed up in Australia for the next month, I've never had more time to read. But, unusually, I don't seem to be in the mood for fiction.

While I was on the road I found plenty of time to read -- mainly in airport lounges, train stations and in bed at night. Over the past three weeks I've devoured several non-fiction titles, including Ting-Xing De's My Name is Number 4.

I've also read Somerset Maugham's On A Chinese Screen (about his travels through China in the 1920s), Ma Jian's Red Dust (about his travels through China in the 1980s), Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls (about what it is like to be a woman in modern China trying to make a decent living) and Mark Leonard's What Does China Think? (about China's rise to power in the 21st century). (Can you detect a theme in my reading?? Reviews will appear in due course.)

I don't think I've ever read so many non-fiction titles one after the other since leaving university more than a decade ago!

I've tried to get my nose stuck into some fiction but with not much luck. I seem to have abandoned Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (too many cliched characters) after trying to read it on and off over the past month. And ditto for Zhang Wei's The Ancient Ship.

Perhaps an old classic might help get me in the fiction mood? Suggestions welcome, particularly as my Kindle is proving a very easy way to acquire books when I'm hooked up to a wifi service!

Author Ruth Park dies, aged 93

New Zealand born, Australian-based author Ruth Park has died, aged 93.

She was known largely as a children's author -- she wrote the Muddle-Headed Wombat series, which I grew up with as a child -- but also penned some truly classic adult novels, including The Harp in the South trilogy (recently republished in the UK in the Penguin Modern Classics imprint) and Swords and Crowns And Rings, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1977.

There are some lovely tributes published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Herald-Sun, and The Courier Mail.

'My Name is Number 4' by Ting-Xing Ye

Non-fiction - Kindle Edition; Doubleday Canada; 240 pages; 2010.

Ting-Xing Ye is a Chinese-Canadian author, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. My Name is Number 4, first published in 1997, is her heart-rending account of what it was like living in that country during that time.

In China, number 4 is regarded as an unlucky number (similar to the way we in the West regard 13), and for Ting-Xing Ye it could not be more true. Born in Shanghai in 1952, she was the fourth child (out of 5) and by the time she was in her early teens both her parents had died. She and her siblings -- two elder brothers, and an older and younger sister -- were then raised by her Great Aunt.

Unfortunately, because her father was a factory owner, all the children were branded as "capitalists" when the Red Guards took over. This meant much humiliation at school, where she was subject to verbal and physical abuse.

But what terrified me most was a new government policy, supposedly designed to relieve the pressure of overpopulation in the cities. One child from each family must move to the countryside and remain there for the rest of his or her life.

Ting-Xing does the honourable thing and volunteers to move to the country, even though her elder sister was technically the sibling who should have gone. Ting-Xing was given two choices: a rubber plantation on Hainan Island in the South China Sea, or to a prison farm, far north of Shanghai in Jiangsu Province. After her brother did some investigating and discovered that the rubber plantation was plagued by a "devastating outbreak of hepatitis", she chose the prison farm.

For the next six years, Ting-Xing lived and worked on the farm, which "had been set up in the early 1950s to put away political prisoners" but now housed other criminals, all male, whom had been charged with living "dissolute lifestyles". This presented Ting-Xing and her female companions with another threat -- sexual predation -- while trying to cope with a new life of hard work, humiliation and separation from friends and family.

Ting-Xing's account never wallows in self-pity, but she makes it clear that her deprivations were harsh and that she was, at times, subject to what we today know better as "sleep-deprivation torture used by many countries in espionage and war".

She makes few friends and spends what little free time she has teaching herself English, which pays off in the end, when, aged 22, she passed the entrance exam to Beijing University.

Sadly, the Kindle edition of this book seems to be missing the section I was most interested in: Xing-Ting's life post-prison. I wanted to learn of her life as a translator, her feudal-style marriage and later of her defection to Canada, where she married a Canadian and lives to this day. It was only upon reading the fine print, on the second-to-last page, that I realised this is an abridged edition designed for young adult readers -- which may partly explain the over-emphasis on menstruation throughout the book (teenage girls love that sort of thing) and the patronising glossary at the back explaining about the PLA, Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four.

Despite this, My Name is Number 4 is a good read in the sense that you really get a feel for what it must have been like to live a life of fear, deprivation and exile all in the name of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Xing-Ting Ye has an important story to tell, and she tells it well. It's just a pity that this edition wasn't the one I expected, but that's more the fault of the marketing than the author. I reckon teenage girls would love it.

A visit to Beijing Foreign Languages Bookstore

If I lived in Beijing, this store would be my little piece of heaven.

I only discovered it by accident. I had a couple of hours to fill in before my flight to Australia, so I braved the cold and went window shopping along Wangfujing. Just as I was about to turn around and head back to my hotel, I spied this across the street and I just had to go in and take a peek.

I didn't take any snaps inside (far too many sales assistants patrolling the floor) but imagine a wide room filled with chest-high dark wood shelves filled to the brim with mainly English-language novels and non-fiction titles. (The shop also stocks Japanese books, CDs, travel books and Chinese learning material.)

I headed straight to the "Chinese culture" section, which stocked fiction set in China and plumped for Shan Sa's Empress, a fictionalised account of China's first and only female emperor, Empress Wu of the Tang Dynasty.

I bought some souvenir bookmarks too, so was delighted when the cashier wrapped them up and tied the parcel with brown string!

I couldn't think of a better way to finish up my stay in Beijing and my 23-day sojourn around China than visiting this shop and splurging on a book!

A visit to Wangfujing Bookstore, Beijing

One of the best things about travelling is being able to browse in bookshops to hunt out local gems not available back home. In the past I've spent many enjoyable hours buying books in New York, Dublin and Melbourne. But in China things have been a little less straightforward.

I discovered an amazing bookshop in Hangzhou last week: a massive four-storey building crammed to the rafters with books and an equal number of shoppers. But it did not sell one single English language title, so while it was interesting to peruse the shelves and wander around the store, it was frustrating in the sense that I really didn't know what I was looking at because I simply don't understand the Chinese language.

But today, here in Beijing, I found a terrific shop on the main shopping street. And tucked away on the third floor was a small section specialising in English-language books.

As well as contemporary fiction and row upon row of badly warped Wordsworth Classics, there was a small selection of novels about China, which would have come in handy when I was looking for suggestions back in early October!

The prices were generally quite high -- around £10 per paperback -- but that may be due to the fact they were all editions imported from either the UK or the US.

I ended up buying Yu Hoa's Brothers, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, for the equivalent of £11.50. It's more than 600 pages long, so I'm hoping to get my money's worth out of it!

I love how the shop assistant wrapped it up for me: she simply stuck a bit of pink paper around the middle and handed it over.

I saw others buying piles of books that were wrapped in the same way, then tied together with a big loop of brown raffia. Later, when I had a coffee in a nearby cafe, I saw shoppers wandering past toting their book purchases by the raffia "handle". I suspect if you want to protect your new books from rainy weather you simply bring your own bag...

What is the purpose of fiction? Is it simply entertainment or does it have a moral dimension too?

I think good fiction expands our sympathies, asks us to consider people and places and circumstances very remote from our own, and asks us to consider how we would act and what we would feel if we were in their shoes. Much wickedness stems from our failure to imagine other people as fully human, and as our equals. So, yes - I think fiction does have a moral dimension. But, of course, if it is not also entertaining no one will read it and it will have no effect at all.

-- Hilary Mantel, as quoted in the PS guide to Vacant Possession

Do you agree?

Travels with my Kindle

As you may recall, I invested in a Kindle prior to my travels. Now that I've been on the road for three weeks, I thought I'd share my thoughts on using the device.

 

The benefits

I have to be completely up front and say I love using it. It is so lightweight and thin, that it takes up hardly any room in my bag.

I have used it in all kinds of conditions: on boats, planes and trains (I can't read on buses or in cars); in waiting rooms (for boats, planes and trains); in parks and gardens in strong sunlight; and lying in bed. Occasionally I have had to slightly alter the angle of the screen to avoid the glare of light bulbs, but for the most part I have not had a problem reading the screen in a variety of light conditions.

The device is easy to hold, and I've become accustomed to only needing one hand. I've even used it propped up on a table and just pressed the button whenever I've wanted to get to the next page. Perfect, especially if you are eating breakfast or having a coffee!

I've loved being able to have a smallish library at my fingertips, because I've juggled various books at once depending on my mood.

The big plus? Having the 1,032-page Lonely Planet Guide to China loaded onto my Kindle. It saved about a kilo in my luggage!

I've also been able to read a selection of brief city guides I downloaded in PDF form from the Travelex website. These have provided excellent overviews of various destinations.

In terms of battery life, I've been using the device constantly for three weeks and have not yet had to charge it.

 

The negatives

I've found it awkward to find things in the Lonely Planet guide using the search facility, because it just throws up so many results. For example, search for "Hangzhou" and it will list every single time the word is mentioned in the book, when, ideally, I just want to know what chapter focuses on this particular city. With a traditional book, I'd just flick through until I found what I wanted.

I've also found it problematic not knowing when I'm nearing the end of a chapter. Personally, I like being able to use chapter breaks as natural breaks to stop reading, but if you don't know where the next chapter lies you can't really do this.

The device does let you know what percentage of the book you have read, but, as I found when reading a non-fiction book, this can be slightly deceptive. For instance, when I read a non-fiction book about China, the actual text only comprised 60% of the book, the rest was made up of the index and appendices. It wasn't a huge problem, but I felt slightly ripped off that the book finished much sooner than I expected!

Because the Kindle is regarded as an electronic device, you can't use it on planes during take-off and landing. Fortunately, I'd been tipped off about this beforehand, so I've been carting around a traditional book (Emile Zola's Ladies Delight) just for these moments, although I've tended to just read the in-flight magazines or duty-free brochures at these times.

Finally, having all my reading material in eBook format means I have been unable to swap books with fellow travellers. This has been slightly frustrating, especially as one of the girls in my tour group is a bit of a book fiend.

The Kindle is no substitute for my love of traditional books, but it is proving itself an invaluable device for life on the road.

'Dead Lovely' by Helen FitzGerald

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 298 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

Last year I read Helen FitzGerald's second novel, My Last Confession, and enjoyed it enough to request her debut novel from the publisher. It was only while holed up at my sister's place at Abu Dhabi last month that I got around to reading it. It turned out to be perfect holiday reading fodder, the type of book that's not earth-shatteringly intelligent but one that's entertaining and a lot of fun, albeit with a dark noirish feel to it.

The story introduces us to Glasgow-based Krissie, a social worker, who is also the star of the show in My Last Confession. That means it would have made more sense to read Dead Lovely first, but never mind, the book still made total sense, even if it had a touch of the déjà vus about it. (It took me awhile to clock that I had already "met" Krissie in the FitzGerald's second offering, but I digress...)

Krissie is a rather plucky young woman, a kind of good-time-girl, who likes to work hard and play hard. Her best friend, Sarah, is more settled. She's married to Kyle, a GP, and together the pair of them are trying to have a baby -- with no luck.

Krissie's friendship with Sarah begins to become strained when Krissie accidentally falls pregnant, thanks to a one-night stand during a wild holiday in the sun, and decides to keep the baby.

To patch things up between them, the trio go on a camping holiday to the Scottish Highlands, and this is where things begin to get even messier: Krissie falls in love with Kyle, whom she happened to share a house with back in her university days.

If this sounds a bit too far fetched, you'd be right. But the story goes completely over the top when one of the trio is killed during the trip. Now, I'm not going to spoil it and reveal who the victim is, but it's what happens after the death that makes this book such a page-turner. The effect on Krissie is paramount -- she becomes wracked by guilt and when the paranoia takes hold there's no knowing what might happen next.

I went to the bathroom to wash my face. In the mirror was a woman with red eyes, bruises, bag-lady hair and very odd clothes. Who was I? And what was I thinking? Hoping for the best? Escaping? I couldn't get away from this, away from my guilt, ever, I had to tell.

Dead Lovely is not exactly realistic -- in fact, I'd go so far as to say that the storyline in completely preposterous -- but it's a fun romp, and perfect fodder for when you are on holiday or in the mood for something that won't tax the brain matter.

I liked its mix of dark humour, murder and mayhem. The publisher sums it up as "intelligent chick-lit", but I reckon it's more accurate to describe it as a crime comedy. Either way, it's an edgy and entertaining read. And if you like this one, then you can follow Krissie's story, three years down the line, in the follow-up My Last Confession.