Reading matters

'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 209 pages; 2008.

Visit any bookstore in London right now and it's hard to miss the displays of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- it seems to be everywhere. The careful positioning of it -- especially on the "3 for 2" tables -- obviously works, because against my better judgment I recently bought a copy and devoured it in one sitting. Easy enough to do, actually, because at just 209 pages and typeset in a relatively large font, this is more a novella than a novel, and hence it's a very quick read.

An international bestseller that has been translated into some 16 languages, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has also been shortlisted for a host of literary awards including the Man Booker Prize 2007, the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2007 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2008. But it has also attracted much flak centered around its alleged anti-American stance (it's no plot spoiler to say that the main character smiles when he sees the collapse of the World Trade Towers on TV, pleased because "someone had so visibly brought America to her knees").

In my opinion, this is shallow criticism, because the book's greatest failing is not its content, but the way in which the story is narrated. This is a fictional account of a young, intelligent and ambitious Pakistani who is educated at Princeton University and secures a highly desirable job in New York. When he falls in love with a troubled rich white girl he begins to realise that her material trappings cannot alleviate her pain. Then, following the attacks on the World Trade Centre, when the entire city is in mourning, he begins to question the purpose of his own life and the Western values that leave him feeling so cold, detached and unfulfilled. He returns to Lahore, and it is here that his story begins: a first-person narrative that is addressed to an unseen acquaintance (effectively you, the reader) in a little cafe as dusk descends.

It is this narrative device that I found particularly troublesome. The tone of the voice is cool, arrogant and slightly menacing, which is fine. But every now and then the narrative flow is interrupted by rather clunky direct addresses to the unseen acquaintance -- "But observe! A flower seller approaches. I will summon him to our table. You are not in the mood? Surely you cannot object to a single strand of jasmine buds." -- which act as unwanted reminders that you are reading a book which means you can never fully lose yourself in the story.

This is a great shame, because it's a good story about an issue not much discussed in popular literature, that of the foreign man who's turned his back on the American dream. If nothing else it's a thought-provoking read and would certainly make great fodder for a book group discussion, but on the whole I found The Reluctant Fundamentalist disappointing and nowhere near as exciting or as provocative as I had been lead to believe. And the conclusion, which is as predictable as they come, left me feeling like I'd been terribly short-changed.

'How the Light Gets In' by M.J. Hyland

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 320 pages; 2004.

A couple of years ago I read MJ Hyland's Booker Prize shortlisted novel, Carry Me Down, which I greatly admired. Her ability to get inside the head of a disturbed 11-year-old boy was nothing short of extraordinary.

Her debut novel, How the Light Gets In -- written two years before Carry Me Down -- covers similar terrority, but this time the protagonist is a 16-year-old troubled girl. But that's where the similarities end.

This time the narrator is not from Ireland, but Australia, and the setting is the suburbs of Chicago.

Louise Connor is an exchange student from an underpriviledged background who has high hopes of reinventing herself as a new person, free from her emotionally distant family -- her unemployed parents, two bullying older sisters and their no-hoper boyfriends -- where evenings are spent 

all in the boxy lounge-room, all smoking; so much smoke you can hardly see, the burning ends of their cigarettes glowing, moving from lap to mouth, somebody waving at the smoke to see the TV screen.

When she moves in with her clean-living morally upstanding host-family, Margaret and Henry Harding, and their two children, 14-year-old Bridget and 15-year-old James, she believes it won't take long to "unlearn the tricks of my own family". But despite the love and affection shown to her -- Margaret is especially touchy-feely and goes out of her way to make Louise feel at home -- it doesn't take long before Louise starts to crack under the pressure.

'The Ghost' by Robert Harris

Fiction - paperback; Hutchinson; 310 pages; 2007.

My very short relationship with British author Robert Harris has been a bit of a hit and miss affair: I absolutely loved the compulsively readable Fatherland (1993) but struggled to finish the dull and plodding Enigma (1996), and so I've not been inclined to read his other novels -- Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium -- for fear of wasting my time. But his latest book, The Ghost, has received so much press attention and been lavished with equal amounts of praise that I admit to being intrigued enough to give the man a second shot.

The Ghost was published last September among a flurry of reports that it was based on Harris's one-time friend, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie. This is a claim that Harris denies.

But reading this book it's difficult not to think of the the two main characters --  Adam Lang and his controlling wife Ruth -- as thinly veiled versions of Tony and Cherie. The difference is that in this novel the couple are immersed in an extremely wicked plot that even the conspiracy theorists would have a hard time dreaming up!

'Isn't It Romantic? An Entertainment' by Ron Hansen

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 208 pages; 2004.

Isn't It Romantic? An Entertainment is the literary equivalent of a light romantic comedy, probably with Jennifer Anniston and Ben Affleck in the lead roles.

I read it on the strength of Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, which I devoured -- and loved -- last month, but this book could not be more different in temperament, tone and subject matter.

It's a delightfully quick, frothy read. The Chicago Tribune describes it as "A literary bonbon as sweet and light as meringue" which is pretty much a pitch-perfect summary. Although Isn't It Romantic? An Entertainment feels contrived in places -- with a light dusting of barely-there schmaltz -- it's a fun romp, and I raced through it in just four 20-minute tube journeys.

It opens with French tourist Natalie Clairvaux taking a solo bus trip across America. When her playboy fiancé, Pierre Smith, tracks her down the pair inadvertently become stranded in small town Nebraska. Here, the locals invite them to be king and queen of an annual three-day festival in which the town's founder, a 19th-century trapper from Bordeaux, is honoured.

What ensues is a bit of a French farce in which Natalie is wooed by a 50-something rancher and Pierre is pursued by the attractive young waitress from the local diner. And when the town conspires to hold a wedding for the couple, no one is quite sure exactly which couple will walk down the aisle.

As silly as the plot sounds, there are quite a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in this book. And Hansen writes with such a deft hand, you can picture the scenes unravelling right before your very eyes. Indeed, the book would make a terrific film because it could so very easily be adapted into a screenplay. In fact, I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't optioned it already -- or maybe someone's just waiting for Jennifer Anniston and Ben Affleck to become available, in which case I'd suggest you just hang out for the DVD...

'Forever' by Pete Hamill

Fiction - paperback; Back Bay Books; 613 pages; 2004.

Sometimes you pick up a book and get totally swept away by the story that you forgot all sense of time or place. So it was with this critically acclaimed novel by the former editor in chief of the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

At 613 pages I expected this hefty tome to last me a couple of weeks but I was so caught up in the life of Cormac O'Connor, an Irish immigrant who lands in New York in 1740 and remains...forever, that I raced through it in less than a week -- and even then I tried to draw out the last hundred or so pages because I didn't want it to end.

I'm not sure how to describe Forever. It's part swashbuckling adventure, part romance, part historical drama, part fable. It spans more than three centuries and tells the story of a poor rural Irish lad who is granted immortality, as long as he never steps foot off the island of Manhattan. And because part of his deal is to ensure he lives a very full and active life, rather than sitting on the sidelines merely existing, he throws himself into all kinds of situations.

Over the course of some 300 years he witnesses (and sometimes partakes in) many great scenes in history, including the American Revolution and the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. During this time he also meets and falls in love with several women, learns many different trades, carries out various professions (printer, artist, journalist) and teaches himself a host of languages.

But this is no fairytale. Violence and mayhem follow Cormac throughout the ages, particularly as he is on a quest to avenge his father's brutal murder. According to Celtic code this means he must not only seek out and kill his father's murderer, he must also ensure that all of the murderer's heirs are slain. (I admit that I quietly struggled with this aspect of the storyline, because it seemed too brutal for my liking -- and I wanted Cormac, such a well-rounded and likeable character in so many respects, to learn that revenge does not solve anything. I won't spoil the plot by revealing whether or not he succeeds in achieving his goal.)

'Mariette in Ecstasy' by Ron Hansen

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 192 pages; 1992.

"One of the most acclaimed novels of 1991" screams the blurb of this book by acclaimed American writer Ron Hansen.

This doesn't seem much of a recommendation to me, but how else would you market a book about a bunch of nuns living in a convent in upstate New York in 1906? Doesn't sound like a particularly inspiring sort of story, does it? And yet this sparse, beautifully written novel, is an exquisite, mesmerising read. Open any page and the words are impeccably arranged to read like poetry.

Wide milk cows are tearing up green shocks of grass in the pasture. Each chews earnestly, like a slow machine, until the roots disappear in her mouth and she goes back to the grass again.

Mariette in Ecstasy is about a 17-year-old girl who joins the Sisters of the Crucifixion, where her much older blood sister is the Reverend Mother. Into this world of extreme religious devotion, Mariette offers a breath of much-needed fresh air. She is young, pretty and full of life. But she is also incredibly devout and believes that she can commune with Jesus to a much higher degree than the other nuns.

When Mariette begins to show signs of divine possession and begins bleeding from wounds in her hands, feet and side that resemble the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, the nuns close ranks. Is it a hoax or a miracle? Is Mariette duping them, or is she a saint?

'Little Face' by Sophie Hannah

Fiction - paperback; Hodder; 357 pages; 2006

Little Face was one of those books I added to my wishlist after I read several favourable reviews online. Last week I was lucky enough to obtain a free copy via Bookmooch and as soon as it arrived I ripped open the envelope and waded in.

The story is one of those rip-roaring woman-in-peril narratives that starts out at a ferocious pace but eventually loses steam and ends up making the reader want to throw the book across the room out of disappointment and frustration. If truth be told, that's actually what I did, and I do believe the words "what a crap ending" came out of my mouth!

Little Face capitalises on every mother's fear: the loss of a child. And Sophie Hannah does this with aplomb, making her main protagonist, first-time mum Alice Fancourt, nervous, jittery and anxious even before anything happens to her new bub. Then Alice's nervous disposition morphs into very real fear and paranoia when she becomes convinced her two-week-old daugher, Florence, has been "swapped" while in the care of her husband, David.

Of course, David thinks the claim is ridiculous, but Alice's mother-in-law, a control freak who is not all that she seems, isn't quite so sure. Over the course of the next few days Alice's world is turned upside down as her husband becomes more vindictive and nasty towards her. It is only later when the reader realises that David's first wife has been murdered that you begin to really fear for Alice's safety -- physically and psychologically.

'Carry Me Down' by M.J. Hyland

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 256  pages; 2006.

Carry Me Down is about a year in the troubled life of a boy trying to comprehend a confusing and painful adult world.

John Egan is unusually tall for an 11-year-old and his voice has already broken. He is obsessed by the Guinness Book of Records and has a 'gift' for detecting lies.

An only child, he lives with his mother, father and grandmother in a small village in rural Ireland in the early 1970s. But when he moves with his parents to a council estate in Dublin, the notorious seven towers of Ballymun (U2 fans will appreciate this reference), his relatively happy homelife takes a serious downward slide.

When John's obsession with truth telling goes a step too far, it has drastic -- and quite unexpected -- consequences for his parent's relationship and his own sanity.

'New York Vertical' by Horst Hamman (photographer)

Non-Fiction - hardcover; teNeues Publishing; 192 pages; 2004

"One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years." So wrote Thomas Wolfe.

And I agree.

I admit I have a soft spot for New York. Until last May I had never been. I loved it so much I returned again less than six months later.

There is no doubt that New York is special. But what makes it special is harder to define.

For me it is the buildings and the sheer vertical nature of the cityscape with its never-ending canyon-like avenues. How could an architecture-buff not be mesmerised by the size and shape and design of so many varied and interesting skyscrapers residing on one small urban island?

'Tokyo' by Mo Hayder

Fiction - paperback; Bantam; 480 pages; 2005

Having written just two previous novels, Mo Hayder already has a reputation for writing fast-paced, intelligent thrillers. Tokyo is no exception.

For the first time, Hayder sets her novel on foreign soil, although her main narrator, the weird "Grey" whose shadowy past is never detailed in full, is English.

Grey has an obsession with the infamous Nanking Massacre of 1937. She tracks down a Chinese professor working in Tokyo who may be able to help her find a piece of film that records the atrocities that happened at the hands of the Japanese. But when Shi Chongming meets her he denies all knowledge of the film, claiming that it does not exist. Grey, who is annoyingly childlike and frustratingly naive throughout this entire novel, is unconvinced.