Reading matters

'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 365 pages; 2008.

Rose Tremain is one of those British authors who has been on the periphery of my reading existence for about 10 years. She's been hard at work crafting novels -- 11 at last count -- and the odd short story collection, but I have only ever read Music and Silence, which won best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards. In fact, I adored that book so much, it may partially explain why I've shied away from reading anything else by Tremain: I've been scared that nothing else could live up to the beauty of my first experience reading her work.

I have had her 1992 novel Sacred Country in my reading queue for a year or so, but then she won this year's Orange Prize with The Road Home and I wondered whether it was time to give her another shot. A half-price promotion at Waterstone's was the final push I needed, and so, that was how I found myself last weekend opening this book and falling in love with it.

The story is essentially about an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country (I imagine it is Poland and wondered why Tremain had refused to just come out and say this), who arrives in London determined to make enough money to support his elderly mother and young daughter back home.

Lev is in his early 40s and still grieving over the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukemia, so there's a sense of melancholia about him. But he is also prepared to work hard and knows to get anywhere in life he must put aside his personal troubles and just get on with it.

Naively believing that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, he initially struggles to get settled, sleeping rough and making a measly fiver here and there by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. But his luck turns when he scores a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef (the fictional GK Ashe who has a  touch of the Gordon Ramsay's about him).

With a little help from Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the long bus journey to London, he finds himself a room to rent in a house owned by the genial Christy Slane, a recently separated Irish plumber. Together Lev and Christy strike up a wonderful friendship, based partly on shared grief and the fact they both have young daughters of around the same age.

When Lev finds himself falling in love with Sophie, a colleague, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete, but it's really just the beginning of a complex, often bumpy, occasionally funny and constantly challenging journey...

'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.

'The River' by Tricia Wastvedt

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 346 pages; 2004.

The River was one of those spontaneous purchases made on the back of an Amazon recommendation. Previously I knew nothing about the book and had never heard of the author, but the storyline sounded intriguing.

It's set in an idyllic English village that is haunted by a terrible tragedy in which two children drowned in the local river. This was in 1958.

Fast forward almost 40 years and Anna, a young pregnant woman from London, arrives in the village, hoping to start a new life for herself. She meets Isabel and Robert, the couple whose children died all those years ago, and finds them living a strange existence: emotionally separated (but not divorced), with Isabel residing in the house and Robert acting as if he is her head gardener.

Weird as it might sound, Isabel invites Anna to live with her permanently. But when the baby is born, Isabel starts acting oddly. She becomes especially protective of the newborn and before long Anna realises that Isabel's intentions may not be without malice...

'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 336 pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors. He has a distinctive, often experimental, style that mixes black humour with scathing satire. The result is often a very funny, completely surreal, rollicking good read. But his new novel -- subtitled The Oral History of Buster Casey -- fails to deliver the usual offbeat and inspired narrative I have come to expect.

Rant is essentially a story about a now-dead wayward weirdo -- Buster L "Rant" Casey -- who is responsible for an urban plague of rabies and other "pranks" across America. It is set in a technologically advanced dystopian future in which people are separated into two distinct groups -- daytimers and nighttimers.  The nighttimers, who come out when it is dark, spend a large proportion of their time Party Crashing. This is a sport in which participants deliberately cause car accidents in a rather destructive and surreal version of a demolition derby.

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy

Fiction - hardcover; Picador; 256  pages; 2006.

The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Two travellers, a man and his young son -- both unnamed -- follow the road south in search of a warmer climate.

Their journey is a treacherous one. They trudge through snow, pushing a shopping cart loaded with their worldly goods, and are constantly on the look out for the predatory "bad guys" out to steal their belongings. They have a gun for protection, but the bullets have long run out.

In this rather chilly, desolate and oppressive landscape, the man and his son devote most of their time to walking and looking for food. They spend their evenings huddled under a plastic tarp, frightened that the cold will kill them.

'Race to Dakar' by Charley Boorman

Non-fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown Book Group; 320 pages; 2006.

As I write, the 2007 Dakar Rally is in full swing. It is the world's most gruelling and challenging off-road endurance race for motorised vehicles. One motorcyclist, South African Elmer Symons, has already died in this year's race and last year's claimed the life of Australian Andy Caldecott.

So when actor Charley Boorman finished the 20,000 mile road trip from London to New York (the long way round via Russia) with his best mate Ewan McGregor in 2004, the Dakar Rally seemed like the next logical challenge. But, as Charley was soon to realise, there's a big difference between riding a route you've organised yourself to racing along one that has been designed to test your off-road navigational skills, your physical capabilities and your mental strength to their absolute limits. It has often been compared to climbing Everest or sailing around the world it is such a difficult feat to achieve.

'A Redbird Christmas' by Fannie Flagg

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 207 pages; 2005.

As much as I hate the term "heart-warming" I can't help but use it to describe this delightfully charming tale set in rural Alabama.

Peppered with plenty of kooky characters -- four widows, a couple of bachelors, a crippled girl and a tame bird -- and a simple plot -- 52-year-old city man with only a few months to live moves to warmer climes and gains a second chance at life, while a young girl abandoned by her trailer-trash family falls in love with a red cardinal and is "adopted" by a local woman -- A Redbird Christmas is a gentle read that won't tax your brain matter.

Sure, it's a little on the sweet side -- the epilogue is particularly heavy-handed in the saccharine department -- but overall it's the perfect antidote for the busy yuletide season. Mind you, this novel isn't overly Christmassy, so would make an ideal light read for any time of year.

'The Rainforest' by Alicia Steimberg

Fiction - paperback; University of Nebraska Press; 160  pages; 2006. (Translated from the Spanish  by Andrea G Labinger.) REVIEW COPY.

Cecilia, a 50-something widow from Buenos Aires, is an independent and highly educated woman, a writer with a strong network of friends to support her. Why, then, has she allowed herself to be physically and mentally abused by her teenage son?

The Rainforest, by award-winning Latin American writer Alicia Steimberg, explores this conundrum with grace and sensitivity in fluid, almost languid prose that is divided into short, crisp chapters.

In the opening chapter we find Cecilia in an expensive convalescent spa in the Brazilian rainforest. Her stay, funded by a handful of unnamed generous friends, is designed to help her find solace and to come to terms with her familial problems.

Leaves and flowers brush my arms and my tears mingle with the raindrops that have begun to fall. I cry and feel better. I can’t see the sky, just the tops of the tall trees and a monkey swinging from a branch. What I wouldn’t give right now to be alone on a sultry afternoon, with a storm threatening, at the Buenos Aires Zoo, breathing in the scent of the animals by an algae-covered lake. I lie down on a bed of leaves at the foot of a colossal tree and fall asleep. When I awaken, I see that it’s grown dark enough to start back. When a little light filters through the branches, I realize I’m close to the clearing. Before leaving my solitude behind, I let out a scream that is like a howl.

Despite her obvious distress, Cecilia unexpectedly falls in love with a North American man, who is also staying at the spa and grappling with emotional issues similar to her own.

'The Restraint of Beasts' by Magnus Mills

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 215  pages; 1999.

This is the type of book that will make you look at high tensile agricultural fencing in an entirely new way. I'm not joking. And it might make you think twice about refusing a third helping of sausages at breakfast, too.

A highly unusual tale written in a highly unusual style, The Restraint of Beasts (the title refers to what a fence does) is a black comedy like no other.

It tells the story of two itinerant Scots fencers, the pub-obsessed, cash-strapped Tam and Richie, who are dispatched to England to build a fence. With them goes the narrator, their foreman, who dreads spending the next six weeks or so living on a farm in a squalid caravan with his often silent and moody charges.

'The Republic of Trees' by Sam Taylor

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 240  pages; 2006.

Four adolescents -- expat Brits who live in France -- run away from their family homes to spend the summer in the forest free from adult control. Here they set up a new society called The Republic of Trees based on the principles in philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract.

At first things are carefree, even joyous. Louis, the intellectual leader devotes his time to drawing a map of the region; Alex, the hunter ensures there's a ready supply of food; Isobel does the cooking; and Michael, the youngest of the quartet, climbs trees and swims in Elbow Pool.