Reading Matters

'Invisible' by Paul Auster

 

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 320 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I think I may have developed a wee bit of a literary crush on Paul Auster, although our relationship took a little while to develop. Indeed, I was ready to dump him before it even began, because our first meeting in which I read Oracle Night, back in 2005, was not a particularly pleasant one: I simply didn't get what he was all about. But then I gave him a second chance and read the New York Trilogy and suddenly it all began to make sense. Auster is a novelist who plays with the format, concentrates on recurring themes (for example, coincidence, writing and story-telling, truth and memory) and often makes himself part of the action.

This novel, his 16th, is one of his more accessible, and would make the perfect introduction to anyone who has yet to try Auster for themselves.

It's told in four interlocking parts. The first introduces us to Adam Walker, a 20-year-old poet and literature student at Columbia University, who meets Frenchman Rudolf Born, a visiting professor, and his seductive young girlfriend, Margot, at a party. The chance introduction is to have a long-lasting impact on Adam's life. Initially it all seems rather positive, because Born is a rich man and he's keen to employ Adam as the editor of a new literary magazine he wants to launch. But then it all goes terribly wrong, for reasons I won't divulge, and Adam finds himself wishing he'd never met Born, who comes across as quite a creepy, violent, narcissist capable of the most hideous crime.

The second part is told from James (Jim) Freeman's perspective. He once attended classes at Columbia with Adam, although they were never close, and went on to become a very successful writer. The pair fell out of touch, but then 38 years later, Jim receives a part-written manuscript from Adam and asks for his honest opinion of it. The manuscript, entitled Summer, is included, and forms the bulk of this part of Invisible. It tells the story of what happened to Adam after his falling out with Born in the spring of 1967, and includes an eye-opening, somewhat racy, account of Adam's incestuous relationship with his sister.

The third part is again told from Jim's perspective, with the second part of Adam's manuscript, entitled Fall, included. This details Adam's move to Paris and his half-cooked ploy to extract revenge on Rudolph Born on home turf. It also recounts his friendship with Born's step-daughter.

The fourth and final part has Jim meet Adam's sister, Gwyn, a 61-year-old beauty, to discuss whether the manuscript should ever be published given it has quite damaging revelations about her in the text. Born's step-daughter also has her chance to tell her side of the story.

As you can tell, there's quite a lot of jumping around of perspectives, although it's all told in the first person. It's only Adam's manuscript that switches around. But this is fairly typical Aster fare, because he has a penchant for including a book within a book, so what you end up reading is a multi-layered narrative. It's a bit like sitting in front of a mirror with a mirror behind you reflecting a never-ending set of images of a person looking in the mirror looking at a person looking in a mirror and so on.

There's no denying I loved this book. I raced through it in just a matter of days and found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. There's something about Auster's work that unsettles the unconscious mind, so that certain scenes and characters will pop into your head unannounced. I have only read a very small selection of his extensive back catalogue but Invisible is one of the better ones I've had the joy of reading. Definitely recommended, regardless of whether you're an Auster virgin or not.

'After The Fire, A Still Small Voice' by Evie Wyld

 

Fiction - hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 304 pages; 2009.

Evie Wyld's debut novel After The Fire, A Still Small Voice hit the headlines last week when it won the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys literary prize, which is awarded to a UK or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under. I'd bought the book back in September, following a tip-off from @SineadGleeson, but I didn't pull it off the ever-growing TBR pile until after the award announcement.

The book, which is set in Australia, follows two men, a generation apart, who bottle up their grief and are forever tormented by it. Their stories are told in alternate chapters.

Frank, who's in his late 20s, lives in Canberra. When his relationship breaks down he moves north to start a new life as a recluse on the coast. He sets up home in the abandoned shack that once belonged to his grandparents and works part-time at the local marina. But he's troubled by his past which threatens to unravel his tentative hold on the world.

Leon is the only son of two Dutch immigrants who set up a bakery in suburban Sydney following the Second World War. Their new life in a strange land is forever shattered when Leon's dad volunteers to fight in the Korean War. Later, when Leon is a young man, he finds himself fighting an altogether different war: he's conscripted to Vietnam.

The book interleaves these two seemingly disparate stories together to build up a moving portrait of men on the fringes of society who become scarred by battles, figurative and literal. It portrays their sadness, their loneliness and their melancholy in such a touching way it's hard not to be emotionally affected by it. If nothing else, it superbly captures that space between people that prevents them from talking about the terrible things they've done and the secrets that they hold dear.

It's a terrifically mature piece of work, belying Wyld's age -- she's just 29. It's even more impressive when you consider that the male voices she uses throughout the book ring true. And, if that's not enough, she has all the descriptions of Australia, from the huntsman spiders that curl up inside your clothes to the smell of the eucalyptus wafting on the air, absolutely pitch perfect.

The prose style is effortless, the characterisation superb -- she really gets inside the heads of these people without over-explaining anything -- and the pacing is spot on. I'll admit to holding my breath in a few places, because there are certain revelations that I just never saw coming, and I'm glad that the cheap literary stunts that could have been used to ratchet up the tension are clearly avoided.

After The Fire, A Still Small Voice isn't a perfect novel, but it's a highly accomplished one and very deserving of its recent accolade. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't collect a whole swag more.

'The Maintenance of Headway' by Magnus Mills

 

 Fiction - hardcover; Bloomsbury; 152 pages; 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Books v. cigarettes' by George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Coming Up for Air' by George Orwell

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Fugitive Pieces' by Anne Michaels

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Truth or Fiction' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 160 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Jennifer Johnston does a nice line in slightly kooky characters, and her latest novel, to be published on November 16, is no exception. Desmond Fitzmaurice, one of two main characters in Truth or Fiction, is a doddery old writer who's fallen into obscurity. He lives a rather privileged existence in a house on the Dublin waterfront, where he is waited on hand and foot by his second wife, the dour-faced Anna. For all intents and purposes he seems to be a gentle old soul prone to sentimentality and a hankering for times gone by.

But then London-based journalist, Caroline Wallace, enters his rather mundane world and this version of a polite, well-mannered chap nearing the end of his life, gets turned, ever so slowly, on its head. Caroline, who's been dispatched to interview him on the eve of his 90th birthday, isn't entirely sure what to expect. When she arrives the first thing she does is tell Desmond that:

"My editor asked me to come and interview you. She would like to bring you back to life again. She feels your work is too important to be let fade away, as it has. She would like me to reassess your work and also to do a feature on your lifestyle. How you live, how you have lived, the interlocking of your life and work."

Desmond is not entirely enamoured with the intrusion:

"You wish to take the unimportant garbage of my life and stir it in with the important, with my work. You wish to make me intelligible to the masses. I never wrote for the masses to read."

And yet, there's something about this new-found attention that wins Desmond over. Before long he is introducing Caroline to the important people in his life and confessing a succession of sordid events. But how much of what he tells her is truth, and how much of it is fiction? 

The beauty of this novel, Johnston's 16th, is not so much her typical restrained and unpretentious prose style, nor the fast-moving narrative that largely comprises dialogue, but her very human characters with their flaws and foibles. That Caroline arrives in Dublin reeling from a marriage proposal made by her partner of 10 years adds an extra layer to the story, for how much of her anger is affecting her opinion of Desmond? And why is she so angry in the first place?

Once again Johnston has delivered an entertaining and effortless read, one that can quite comfortably be read in an hour or two. It's a welcome return to form after her slightly disappointing Foolish Mortals; I only wish I hadn't raced through it so quickly, because it could be a long wait for her next one.

'The Lonely Londoners' by Sam Selvon

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 160 pages; 2006.

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.

So begins Sam Selvon's bittersweet story about a group of West Indian immigrants living in 1950s London. It's a truly evocative look at a city through the jaded eyes of a black man, Moses Aloetta, a veteran Londoner who somewhat reluctantly welcomes newcomers from his homeland and shows them the ropes. ("I don't know these people at all," he tells one of his friends, "yet they coming to me as if I is some liaison officer, and I catching my arse as it is, how could I help them out?")

But having earned a reputation as a "good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do", Moses finds himself taking Henry "Sir Galahad" Oliver under his wing. Galahad is irrepressibly upbeat and optimistic; he's also thick-skinned, turning up in the dead of a London winter wearing nothing but "an old grey tropical suit and a pair of watchekong" (crepe-soled shoes). He doesn't even have any luggage with him.

The Lonely Londoners follows the ups and downs of Galahad, and others like him, who arrive in London, thinking the roads are paved with gold, but then find that life is tough, that everything is expensive and that the white population is wary of black faces (or "spades" as they are called throughout this book) despite the "open door" policy of letting citizens from the colonies settle in Britain.

There's no real plot to speak of, because this is essentially a collection of vignettes about various immigrants and the different ways in which they adapt and change to suit their new environment. It's quite dark and depressing in places, as you come to experience each character's slow dawning that London is not the place they thought it would be, that it's a bleak, alien town, far removed from the sunnier climes from which they came.

There's a wonderful scene near the beginning of the novel which captures this sudden sense of alienation perfectly. Galahad is braving the morning rush hour for the first time and when he sees so many people bustling about the tube station "a feeling of fright and loneliness come on him all of a sudden".

The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up the colour of the sky so chocolate it make him more frighten. It have a kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver. He have a feeling is about seven o'clock in the evening: when he look at clock on top of a building he see it only half-past ten in the morning.

Anyone who has experienced a London winter for the first time will know this feeling well; the nights stretch into 17-hour extravaganzas and you're lucky if you see any daylight at all if you work in an office. This feels alien enough without having to worry about where you're going to live and work and whether you've got enough money for the bus fare!

Selvon describes this netherworld existence, including the cramped bedsits, visits to the dole queue ("a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up") and the liming (a Caribbean expression for "hanging out"), so beautifully it's easy to get caught up in the lives depicted here. But the best part is seeing how the city eventually works it charms on them, so that, in the end, they find themselves feeling at home, or, as Galahad puts it, "when the sweetness of summer get in him he say he would never leave the old Brit'n as long as he live".

As you will have noticed from the quotations I've used, the book is written in a kind of Jamaican patois, or, as Shusheila Nasta writes in the introduction, "a creolized voice" which lends it a lovely, intimate, Calypso rhythm, and a sense that you really are in the heads of these Caribbean immigrants. 

The Lonely Londoners is part of a trilogy; I'm looking forward to reading the next two as soon as I am able.

'Winterland' by Alan Glynn

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 480 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I love Irish literary fiction and I'm quite partial to the odd crime novel, so when I first heard that Alan Glynn's Winterland was described as "Dublin noir" I knew I'd probably enjoy it. I was right. This is a cracking story, brilliantly told and incredibly entertaining, and I bet it won't take long before the film rights are sold and we see it on the big, or possibly little, screen some time soon.

The real strength of this story is its wholly contemporary feel. Anyone who knows anything about the Irish economy will love this book, because it so beautifully captures the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" earlier this year), planning policy and politics. Throw in a gangland murder, a dash of violence, a smidgen of retribution and you've got all the right ingredients for a dark and thrilling read.

The book opens with a young thug, Noel Rafferty, being gunned down in the beer garden of a local pub. Police figure it's a gangland murder, because the victim is a small-time drug dealer. But later that same night Noel's uncle, also called Noel Rafferty, is killed in a mysterious car accident. Why have two members of the same family, sharing the same name, died on the same night? Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

Enter Gina Rafferty, aunt of the first Noel, sister of the second, who doesn't believe the official explanation that the car accident was exactly that -- an accident.

She begins some detective work of her own, and before long she finds herself thrust into a world of dodgy dealings involving property and politics. She learns that her brother, an engineer, was working on a huge skyscraper, the tallest of its kind in Europe, known as Richmond Plaza. He had a close working relationship with the property's developer, Paddy Norton, a greedy man intent on turning the Dublin skyline into a mini-Manhattan. Norton, in turn, has connections with Larry Bolger, a power-hungry politician with an eye on the country's top job. There's obviously some shadowy goings on between these three men, but proving it takes Gina into dangerous and uncertain territory.

To complicate the story further, enter Mark Griffin, the sole survivor of a car accident that left him an orphan more than 20 years earlier. Is he connected to the Rafferty deaths and, if so, how?

All these characters, including the lone female heroine whom everyone in authority dismisses as an airhead, might sound slightly clichéd but in Glynn's capable hands they become very real people, with foibles and flaws. He really gets into the heads of each individual character and presents their motivations and desires so intricately it's easy to feel empathy for even the most loathsome of the bunch.

The dialogue, smart and snappy (and riddled with Dublinese and obligatory swearing), moves things along at a crisp pace. There's plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way, but apart from one over-the-top scene towards the end of the book, the whole of Winterland feels authentic and prescient. Highly recommended.

Winterland is published on November 5.

'The Space Between Us' by John MacKenna

Fiction - paperback; New Island Books; 282 pages; 2009.

At what point do you decide to abandon a book? I ask, because I came very close to abandoning this one. I struggled with the first 54 pages, not quite believing the dialogue (too verbose, too artificial) nor the characters (too one-dimensional, too false). But something convinced me to keep reading on, because who knows, maybe it would get better. And, thankfully, it did.

Reviewing this book proves somewhat problematic, however, because the plot has several key revelations which are best discovered by simply reading the book rather than reading this review. (And, whatever you do, don't read the review or "product description" on Amazon, because they're riddled with spoilers. I found this out the hard way, but even though I discovered what was going to happen, The Space Between Us still left me reeling at the end, part in shock, part in awe.)

The basic premise of the novel goes something like this.

A young architect opens the door to two police officers (or guards, as they are known in Ireland) who inform him that his wife, a solicitor, has been killed in a car crash. His reaction is not what one would expect. Instead of being overwhelmed with grief he's overwhelmed by relief -- their marriage had been floundering for a long time but neither party had had the courage to end it. Now, left alone to raise his two-year-old daughter, our unnamed narrator has been given a second chance to start afresh. When a married friend, Kate, confesses she's in love with him, there seems only one road to take...

The book then jumps ahead 17 years and we discover the narrator living in the same house, but alone. His daughter, Jane, is studying classical music at university, but comes home to spend her weekends with him and their dog, the impossibly named Rostropovich. The story then follows our narrator for a year, and in that year, we find him being tested on very many levels.

"You need to stop letting things happen to you and make them happen for you," his neighbour berates him one day.

"You need to be more passionate about life. And I'm not talking about shagging me. I'm talking about you and this way you have of sitting back and letting life wash over you. I've known you for twenty years and you've allowed yourself to just exist, you've lived without passion."

This seems to mirror something Beth, his late wife, once told him when they were on holiday in Amsterdam almost 20 years earlier. She thought a permanent move to the Netherlands would be the impetus needed to kick-start his career to the next level, "the move that gives you the grand design". But he's content designing houses in small-town Ireland and the idea doesn't interest him.

"I think you're afraid of the world," Beth said. I knew by her eyes she was serious. "I think you feel safe being the medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. But what happens if another fish appears in that pond?"

In essence this is a novel about the choices we make in life and the consequences of those choices. It's also very much about unrequited love, death, grief and the relationships between fathers and daughters. And I defy anyone not to read this and be incredibly moved by the gentle prose and the emotional story that unfolds but most of all by the powerhouse ending that turns everything else on its head. This book isn't what I expected, it's far more shocking and disturbing than I could have possibly envisaged, and I rather suspect anyone who decides to give it a try will concur.

Oh, and if anyone does read this book, please come back and let me know: I'm dying to have a proper discussion about it, as it throws up so many interesting topics and issues.

'Legend of a Suicide' by David Vann

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is a deceptive book. I started it, thinking it was a novel, and was mid-way through it before I clocked that it was no such thing. This is actually a series of stories, albeit about the same character, Roy Venn, dealing with the suicide of his father, Jim.

The first, Ichthyology, is told through the eyes of a young Roy, who is obsessed with his aquarium and sneaks out of the house in his pajamas whenever he hears his parent's fighting. We learn that his father, a dentist, is a troubled man beset by marital woes. The ending, when it comes, via a .44 Magnum handgun on the deck of a fishing boat, feels like a relief.

The next story, Rhoda, is a black comedy about Jim's second wife, "who had dark, dark hair, pale skin, and a dropped eyelid that, on closer view, made her terribly beautiful". At only 13 pages long, it's enough for the reader to glean that Jim's unable to relate to women very well: within days of their marriage the pair are rowing and Jim's telling Roy, "She wasn't like this before. This isn't the woman I married." We also discover Jim's penchant for guns.

A Legend of Good Men is set after Jim's death and focuses on Jim's first wife (Roy's mother) and the succession of men that she dates. Or, as Roy so aptly puts it:

The men she dated were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They'd move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they had come to stay. They'd tempt us with brightly colored objects -- flowers, balloons, remote controlled race cars -- perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they'd vanish, and we'd find no sign left, no mention  even, as if we'd simply imagined them.

By now, we've built up a pretty good picture of Jim, his first wife, his second wife and his son, and how his death has altered their lives forever. And then David Vann pulls a brilliant literary trick out of the magic hat and presents us with a two-part novella, Sukkwan Island, that is some of the finest story-telling you're ever likely to come across in modern fiction. I loved this section of the book, which is told in the third-person (as opposed to the first-person in the preceding stories), and read it with a mixture of awe, fascination and fear.

Again, this story looks at Jim's suicide from another angle: what if a bereaved son could extract his revenge on his dad before such a cowardly act is even carried out? I won't spoil the plot, but if you think Stephen King meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road you'll get a fair idea of the horror and bleakness of what unfolds. Mind you, it's quite hilarious in places, if you don't mind laughing at gruesome things. Basically, Jim decides to spend a year living on a remote Alaskan island, taking his now 15-year-old son with him. He is woefully ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, for the task and when winter sets in things begin going a little awry, with devastating consequences...

The fifth and final story, Ketchikan, is told through Roy's eyes as an adult revisiting the town his father once lived in, hoping to confront the mistress that destroyed his parent's first marriage. But instead of putting ghosts to rest, Roy realises that perhaps there were very real reasons for what happened and that he's failed to properly grasp them, let alone understand them. It feels like an emotional low-point, and the reader's left wondering how much of the father's patterns of behaviour will be carried on by the son.

Interestingly, David Vann has dedicated this book to his own father, James Edward Vann, who killed himself when David was a child. In his acknowledgments David thanks his family "because it was an uncomfortable topic I was writing about -- my father's suicide -- and there's exposure in these stories." He adds: "They're fictional but based on a lot that's true."

Legend of a Suicide was published in the US to critical acclaim last year; it will be published in the UK for the first time at the end of this month.

'Quartet' by Jean Rhys

 Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 144 pages; 2000.

It seems ironic or pre-determined (or something), because no sooner than I write a post about bleak books and ask you to submit your suggestions, than I pick up Jean Rhys' debut novel, Quartet. Ms Rhys doesn't necessarily have a monopoly on bleakness, but boy, she does an exquisite line in melancholy and hopelessness.

This book, first published in 1928, brings bohemian Paris in the 1920s to life. It's set in the neighborhood of Montparnasse, where people lived in hotels and passed their time in smoke-filled cafes and ate out every night because they simply didn't have the facilities to cook at home. Women were generally seen and not heard, and relied on men to support them.

Living in this dark, seedy world is Marya, who left England four years earlier to marry a Pole called Stephan. Despite the fact Stephan, an art dealer, "disliked being questioned and, when closely pressed, he lied", she feels safe and "strangely peaceful" when she is with him. But then he is imprisoned, and she's left penniless and alone.

An older sophisticated couple, Mr and Mrs Heidler, come to her rescue, offering her the spare room in their apartment. Although the idea of living with them fills her with "extraordinary dismay", she is left with little choice and moves in. 

It works out well in the beginning, but Marya, a deep thinker, soon finds herself being manipulated and it all goes down hill from there.

I can't say much more than that, because I don't want to ruin the story for those yet to read it. But it's melancholy and rather glum and poor Marya seems unable to get herself out of the hole she's created. She comes across as being rather young and naive, but also slightly weak, as if she feels that because she is trapped there's no use fighting and that it would be simply easier to succumb to other's desires and needs. Even when her husband is finally released from jail, she seems unable to stand up to his devious ways and just lets him get on with it.

This is a beautifully written book, and I love that Rhys doesn't explain everything, so it's up to you, the reader, to fill in the gaps. It's only 145 pages long, but I did have to re-read certain sections because I felt that I'd missed a subtlety that was crucial to the plot. I think there's so much going on here, between characters, even within certain character's heads, that it's the type of book that would benefit from two or more readings and you'd come away from it with a whole new perspective and appreciation of Rhys' talent. (Remember this is her first novel.)

Quartet is incredibly evocative of another time and place, and as I read it I kept thinking it would make a wonderful film. So I was delighted to discover that Merchant Ivory have beaten me to it. It was made into a movie in 1981 and that it can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.

'Trauma' by Patrick McGrath

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 224 pages; 2009.

I read Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now last year and enjoyed it so much I made a note to read more of his work. Trauma, his most recent novel, was the ideal follow-up, mainly because it felt remarkably familiar to the final story, Ground Zero, in the previous collection.

Trauma is about a Manhattan-based psychiatrist, Charlie Weir, who is still coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage seven years earlier. Even though he treats patients who have gone through traumatic events, he seems largely unable to confront his own demons.

The opening line makes it clear that Charlie has a guilt complex about his mother:

My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it.

Having spent most of his childhood worried about her constant rages, depression and alcoholism, and forever trying to protect her from her suffering, he's self-aware enough to realise that he chose his profession because of his mother.

It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them.

But the psychological effect of his love for her, and her indifference to him, has been further complicated, or worsened, by the absence of his father, Fred Weir, who deserted the family when Charlie was eight years old. A tense, resentful and problematic relationship with an older brother -- Walt, a successful artist -- who never cared much for his mother but was clearly her favourite child, means Charlie's got a few family hang-ups.

All this, by the way, is merely a backdrop to Charlie's real story, which begins with a tentative reunion with his ex-wife, Agnes, and their young daughter, after a seven-year silence. (The reason for their marriage breaking down and Charlie's subsequent solitude is a plot spoiler, so I won't elaborate further.) As the pair begin the long, drawn-out process of mending their relationship, Charlie acquires a new lover, Nora Chiara, and his life, finally, seems to be falling into place.

But, there are complications. He begins sleeping with his ex-wife, who is now married to another man, and then Nora begins freaking him out by behaving in irrational and unexpected ways.

As the tale unfolds it doesn't take long to see that the psychiatrist is becoming just as unstable as his patients.

What I liked most about this book was the fast and furious pace of the story-telling. Even though the narrative jumps all over the place, from past to present and back again, often within a matter of pages, it's easy to follow, and allows the reader to build up a picture of a man quite clearly troubled by past experiences and unable to deal with the consequences of his actions. He's morally dubious throughout, but at what point does the reader even trust his version of events? And who's to say Agnes, Walter or any of his family members are any better?

There's something dark and disturbing about the subject matter, but McGrath has an uncanny ability to really get to the heart of what makes people behave in the often strange and absurd ways that they do. This is the type of novel you race through then wish you'd lingered over the deliciously simple prose that little bit longer. I felt bereft when I came to the end of this book -- read in one sitting, I might add -- and I rather suspect it would make a great choice for a book group, as there's clearly so much to discuss, including psychiatry, family relationships, marriage, sex and jealousy.

'Brooklyn' by Colm Tóibín

Fiction - hardcover; Viking; 256 pages; 2009.

Reviews of Booker long-listed novels on this site are a bit like London buses. You don't get any for ages, then two come along in quick succession.

Following on from yesterday's review of Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, is Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, another from this year's longlist.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I have a soft spot for Irish fiction, so it was no great surprise that this would be my type of book. But what I did find surprising was just how much I liked it. I devoured it in just two sittings this past weekend.

The book opens in poor, provincial 1950s Ireland -- Enniscorthy, County Wexford to be precise. Eilis Lacey, a part-time shop girl, leaves behind her mother and devoted older sister, Rose, to immigrate to Brooklyn, USA, in search of a better life. She lives in an all-girl boarding house, presided over by the matron-like Mrs Kehoe, and spends her days working in a local department store and her evenings studying for a book-keeping qualification at Brooklyn College. Along the way she makes several friends, meets a boy and finds herself living a relatively contented life, despite the fact that she still misses her family back home.

I'm not sure I can really say anything else without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I shall keep schutm, suffice to say this is a quietly devastating read, one in which it is completely possible to lose all track of time as you get lost in the world presented here.

Brooklyn is a gentle read, but its gentleness should not be mistaken for shallowness, because this is a story that's profoundly moving and tickles the grey matter in ways you might not quite expect. It might be set in the 1950s but it touches on universal themes that resonate today, and I've yet to read anything that so perfectly captures the profound sense of dislocation you feel when you swap one country for another and then return to your homeland for the first time.

In short, Brooklyn is a superb paean to homesickness and the émigré experience. I think I identified with it so strongly because it shows, in an understated but powerful manner, how all emigrants have to make that god-awful decision about whether to stay or go, a decision that paralysed me for years. When Eilis is confronted with this very kind of choice she is tormented because there is no one right answer: whatever she chooses will have both negative and positive repercussions for herself and her loved ones.

And while I've tried to avoid reading reviews of this book, fearful that it will put me off reading it, I'm conscious Brooklyn has drawn criticism from some quarters over Eilis's passive nature, yet I did not see her that way at all. Sure, her move to Brooklyn is organised by others, namely Father Flood and Rose, but she recognises this as an opportunity for which she should be grateful, even if she finds the prospect of leaving all she knows behind a daunting one. She's proactive enough to get herself educated while in Brooklyn, because she recognises this as another opportunity to better herself in ways which would not be possible "back home". The truly lovely thing about Eilis is that she is a good person, and she thereby attracts good people and many acts of kindness come her way, but her good manners and her unwillingness to rock the boat should not be mistaken for passivity.

Whether Brooklyn makes tomorrow's Booker cut, I cannot say, but it deserves a wide readership regardless: it's a powerful story about culture shock and the life-changing decisions we all must make as we grow up and forge our own paths. I rather suspect it's going to be one of those books that will stay with me a long time...

'Voice Over' by Celine Curiol

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by Sam Richard.

Celine Curiol's debut novel, Voice Over, is one of those books that can best be described as "dense" -- it's closely packed with ideas and is written in a complex style. And despite my initial reservations that the narrative was too slow, too meandering, I grew to very much like this story and the slightly kooky, incredibly naive young woman at the heart of it.

It is set in Paris at an unspecified time, although the lack of mobile telephones suggests it could be any time prior to, say, the late 1990s. The unnamed narrator is the "voice over" woman at Gare du Nord train station, which is sort of ironic given that she is struggling to find a voice of her own.

We don't know how old she is, nor anything of her family or educational background, but we learn that she has a crush on a friend, who is already attached to a woman called Ange. As the story develops the crush turns into an obsession and because we are only ever presented with her side of the story we never truly learn how the chap feels about her: does he consider her a hapless friend or someone he would consider leaving his current lover for?

Similarly, while we learn that her work colleagues don't much like her (she hears them talking about her in the staff toilets), we're never quite sure why she attracts so much unwanted attention from men (except, of course, for the one she really wants): is she strikingly beautiful, or does she simply send out the wrong signals? Much of the book documents her endless string of weird and occasionally disturbing encounters -- with men in nightclubs, bars, cafes and parks. Occasionally she finds herself in dangerous situations -- locked in a drug dealer's flat; mistaken for a prostitute by a high-ranking diplomat; running from strangers who want to mug her.

She seems astonishingly passive, unable to say "no" to anyone. This description of her walking through a busy street market seems to sum up her life:

Buying nothing, present in this atmosphere of harangue and transaction, engulfed, borne along by two opposing currents. She allows herself to be pushed along by the movement of the crowd, the sudden eddies, the halts, the momentary gaps. To be there like everyone else, but without a reason, without resisting.

And she's completely disconnected from the real world in the sense that she works in the travel industry, announcing train arrivals and departures, but has no clue about what lies outside of Paris: she's never travelled and doesn't even know what Big Ben is.

How did she get to be like this? Strangely enough there are clues: she refers to a "rite of passage" which, on candid admission to a friend, results in them falling out. Curiol very cleverly scatters these little hints, like breadcrumbs, at semi-regular intervals throughout the narrative, so that there's a reason to keep turning the pages: what was this incident and when did it occur?

In terms of prose style, Voice Over is complex. As James Urquhart writes in this very perceptive review in The Independent "Curiol deliberately blurs speech and thought in dense slabs of intricate prose to engender the same confusion in the reader as in her cripplingly unconfident protagonist". This makes it a disorienting read, but once you get your head around it (I found it helped to read the book in large chunks) it's actually rather mesmirising and hypnotic.

Voice Over was first published in France in 2005. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Independent Foreign Ficton prize.

----

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

• Simon's review
  

• Claire's review

• Novel Insights' review

• Jackie's review

'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.

'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.

'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.

'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.

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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