by ELG Gray

The Sea, The Sea

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 3/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 2 stars

The strongest single word I can think of to describe Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea is:

Insufferable.

I realize that normally the word is applied to a single character, rather than an entire book (of them), but it still fits.

At first I found The Sea to be a bit quaint … sweet. A retired theatre-man by the name of Charles Arrowby turns out to have some hidden depths! He likes a more ‘basic’ life by the ocean, he starts to write his own memoirs/diary/autobiography. He has a way with words, and not too bad a means of doing ‘character sketches’ of the many people that have passed through his life. Sure, he’s a bit arrogant and self centred, but, so what?

But then the book keeps going, and not only does his own self-absorption become more apparent, so too does that of ALL the other characters. They all seem to be caricatures of themselves. Those whom Charles loves, we (the readers) quickly cannot stand. Don’t even get me STARTED on Hartley. Yes, he finds his ‘one lost love’. I don’t even feel bad telling you that. She’s … gross. Get over it.

Now, much of the point of the book is to really dig deep into the motivation of people – how love affects (and disaffects) us all, in so many ways. But do at the main characters need to be so insufferable to tell such a story? And did Murdoch need to throw in a few gratuitous hallucinations of dragon/Loch Ness style monsters and ‘Orientalism’ in the form of super-natural rescues? I really don’t think so. Maybe it was meant to be a nod to magical realism or some such. I just found it a bit peculiar, particularly in the context of this narrative.

So, clearly, not a winner for me. I read it. I’m OK with having read it. I liked BITS of it – there are moments of drama and of quiet smiles. But overall? Nah.

Nifty cover, though.

The Sea, The Sea

06.08.14

by ELG Gray

The Orphan Master’s Son

Pager turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought-provoker: 9/10
Overall: 4 stars

The Orphan Master’s Son is about North Korea. And it is brilliant.

What is so powerful about it is that it brings to mind other dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984, only The Orphan Master’s Son is (essentially) real. Or based in a real place, where unspeakable things happen. Perhaps I should caveat that to say that of course unspeakable things happen everywhere in the world, but the particular ones that Adam Johnson narrates in TOMS were beyond anything that my little Western mind had ever even considered within the bounds of modern reality. Shows what I know.

The book is in two parts – the first tells the story of the protagonist Pak Jun Do’s young-young adult life and the second is the story of Commander Ga. It is difficult to explain how the two relate without giving the essential narrative ploy of the book away (have you seen ‘The Sixth Sense’?) but Johnson’s story-telling technique in breaking up the book this way is elegant, simple and very effective.

Pak Jun Do grew up in an orphanage, and being an orphan is apparently the worst thing to be in North Korea. Though never overtly explained, the implication is that if you have no parents to protect you, you are at the whim of the State to make use of you as it sees fit. So the first half of the book is really a series of horrible, entertaining, mind-boggling misadventures. Tunnelling, pain training, starvation, kidnapping, sailing, shark attacks and (of course) American Sneak Attacks! are all present. It starts a bit slowly but, given all that action, it is safe to say that it builds and becomes engrossing.

The best way to summarise the second half of the book is to say that Commader Ga’s world is a world-turned-upside-down. Imagine putting your whole reality under a microscope and questioning every-single-tiny assumption. It’s like that. It’s scary (but not hide in the corner scary – it’s blow-your-mind scary).

Throughout the book Johnson tells the story of the Orphan Master’s Son through a few different voices, including that of the omnipresent loudspeakers blasting ‘news’ to North Korean citizens. The technique works to force you to consider the different perspectives in the book, but there are a few chapters/characters that I think have more limited success simply when juxtaposed with the Greatness of the others. Similarly, I couldn’t wait to find out what happens and to explore the other-worldliness of North Korea, but the book is 575 pages long. I noticed.

For such an undertaking, I can totally see why Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer for The Orphan Master’s Son. It’s astonishing – both in the setting/story and the way he manages to tell it. I heartily recommend.

05.15.14

by ELG Gray

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Pager turner: 8/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars
Readability: 5 stars

A Visit from the Goon Squad is fab. It’s a good read. An award-winning book that I read that I would periodically would forget was award winning. Which (perversely?) is a good thing. I think.

Jennifer Egan’s writing style for Goon is just so solid. And unpretentious. The book doesn’t have any of that slightly nose-in-the-air *worthy* feeling that so many others on this list seem to. It was refreshing, as well as just awesome.

I could describe this book a being ‘about’ sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Or I could describe it (somewhat more loftily) as about time. Either would be accurate, and you can read the book on either level and enjoy it.

A Visit from the Good Squad is sort-of like Love Actually meets Sliding Doors meets six degrees of separation … in the fourth dimension. One chapter kicks off with a character from the last, but you don’t know which character and you don’t know at what point in his/her life. It bounces around. And it is interesting if you read each chapter on its own, but it Makes Sense if you read them together, and are paying a bit of attention. Of course the lives of the characters interweave in mundane and meaningful ways. And of course the characters themselves are flawed, human, loveable, and frustrating.

Did I mention there is a whole chapter told from the point of view of a 12-year-old who keeps a powerpoint diary? Amazing. Resonant. Fun.

Read it.

05.05.14

by ELG Gray

The God of Small Things

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 9/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars

I savored The God of Small Things. And savoring a book is a hard thing to do for a person not Reknowned for her patience. Someone whose personal tastes, normally, probably weight the page turner category a bit more than she should in the overall liking of a book. But not this time.

Cover of my copy of The God of Small Things. Check out the quote.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a masterpiece. I admit that I’ve nicked the word from the cover of my copy of the book which has a quote from a review that calls it ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’. But still.

The book is about the childhood lives (or really, a week in their life) of twins Esta and Rahel, their immediate family, and the not-so-immediate consequences of tragedy and loss. It is heartbreaking – but you know it will be from the start – so you have time to prepare. And time to be swept along with the current of the book.

When I first started thinking about what I would write about this book, the analogy that popped into my head was a lazy river. Where you sit back, close your eyes, and when you open them again you’ve got a heck of a lot further than you thought you had. You moved and didn’t realize, as you were so set focusing on the here-and-now. The Small Things. And yet there you are. At the end.

The imagery and the language of this book carry you along. I (obviously) like the use of the occasional capital letter for Emphasis. So does Roy. Who also mixes sentence length, type, and rhythm enough to give variety, but consistently enough to give unity. The book is lyrical.

The plot itself at first doesn’t seem to have that much to it, but it deepens and thickens (remember that river? the depths? murky waters?). Rahel has Returned ‘home’ after years and years away, at precisely the same age as her mother was when she died (a vi-able dieable age). And the story is told in flashbacks, only they are so seamlessly interwoven around Rahel’s interactions with the main characters that ‘flashback’ is far too jolting a word. The story unfolds as Rahel remembers and rediscovers. Again, you almost don’t notice.

The God of Small things is beautiful and profound. You know those people who unwrap presents tortuously slowly, not tearing a single bit of paper? It’s painful, but you can’t tear away your eyes. This book is sort-of-like that. It’s a gift.

04.06.14

by ELG Gray

Schindler’s Ark

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 10/10
Thought provoker: 8/10
Overall: 4 stars

Schindler’s Ark is an absolutely phenomenal book. This story of the holocaust is really only believable because it is true. It is fact that the work only barely qualifies as one of fiction that I have struggled hugely with rating it ‘fairly’.

The story of Oskar Schindler and how he saved the lives of over 1,200 Jews during WWII is outrageous. It is a tale of bravado, of love, of ridiculousness, and of cunning. And it is true. The reason that Thomas Keneally chose to write it as fiction seems to be because a) that was the fashionable thing to do in the early 80s and b) to allow him to guess at a few conversations of which there are no records.

But the story reads like non-fiction. It reads like a biography of Schindler – and regularly quotes the many people who were interviewed as part of the book. His Jewish advisers and beneficiaries, his stoic wife, some Polish/German observers and Nazi participants all contribute. As such, how do I compare it with the ‘actual’ novels on this list? Keneally gets credit, of course, for choosing the topic and the breadth of time covered. He crafts the swathes of anecdotes, formal interviews, and historical documents into a incredibly readable, tragic, brilliant work. But it isn’t ‘his’ story. Not in the way that Hilary Mantel inserts her imagination into Crowmwell’s Wolf Hall. Or at least, it doesn’t *seem* to be.

I gave it a four because I feel like I should be rewarding a novelist’s originality. Otherwise, this book deserves a 5. Keneally brings the characters and personalities off the page. Schindler is very much a flawed man; but one who became larger than life as circumstance and coincidence presented himself with an almost-godlike opportunity that he uniquely is able to seize.

The haunting image of Genia, in red, taken from the film Schindler’s List based on Schinder’s Ark.

I have read a lot about the Holocaust, and Schindler’s Ark stands above all the other books I’ve read. It does a brilliant job of balancing the vastness of the loss of life in that era with the reality of the pain and horror of individual losses. How the loss of many millions of lives is in fact the loss of one life, then another, many millions of times.

And, especially for those people who have seen the film adaptation Schindler’s List, who can forget little innocent 4-year-old Genia, dressed head-to-toe in her favorite color red as she toddles towards death? Keneally must have somehow managed to connect Schindler’s memories of the girl in red with the thousands of anecdotes of Cracow ghetto survivors to determine who the girl really was.

Schindler’s Ark is haunting. Triumphant. Read it.