by ELG Gray

The Luminaries

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 4/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, gets off to a pretty strong start. It has quite a gripping middle. But I was massively underwhelmed by the ending.

The trouble I had, I suspect, is in it’s re-readability. In my ignorance, this wasn’t really a category I had considered before, but I have learned (courtesy of my friend, Dan – fount of all knowledge) how critical it is in an award-winning book. And all the moreso here. Let me explain:

I read The Luminaries once, and mostly, I read it for the plot. It is (seemingly) a murder-mystery set during the New Zealand gold rush. It features a whore and a missing person and at least one ghost. So pretty action packed, and full of twists and turns. All along the reader notes that the chapters open with signs of the zodiac, and there are some overtures to other astrological symbolism. But, frankly, I pretty much ignored it. A bit too airy fairy for me. Besides, there was just too much going on! There are well over a dozen ‘main’ characters in the book.

The trouble is, the ending really quite clearly ISN’T about the plot. It’s a pretty big anticlimax. It is MUCH more about the astrology, and the paths the characters lives take. So I was massively disappointed. But upon reflection, if I read the book again and had the time/patience/inclination to take more note of the star signs throughout, I think it would be a much subtler, cleverer book. And, returning to my original point, a book only wins an award after the people reading it have read it a good many times. I suppose it makes sense that the panels of people giving the prize have to read and re-read countless books in order to give them all a ‘fair’ comparison. I suppose.

Whilst I can understand that a Great book could/should have multiple layers, I think that only really being ABLE to access them through multiple reads feels a bit inappropriate. I mean, I loved watching the Sixth Sense, and watching it a second time was pretty awesome, but I didn’t NEED to do so in order to get a lot of out of it. Also, the Sixth Sense’s running time is 107 minutes and the Luminaries weighs in at an incredibly hefty 832 pages. The prospect of reading it again makes my shoulder hurt.

All that said, it is a good book. And shout out to the only-28-year-old Ms. Catton. What a hugely impressive accomplishment pre-30. The very nice thing is that if The Luminaries is any indication of future work, I look forward to reading more by her again in the future!

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.

02.22.14

by ELG Gray

Life of Pi

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 5/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 4 stars

The Life of Pi is a coming of age shipwreck story, about religion and zoology. What more can you ask for?

Yann Martel’s mind must work in such a different way. I suppose that is what creativity is. But the very fact that he managed to construct a story where an Indian boy can be Muslim, Hindu, and Christian (because he ‘just wants to love God’) grows up, literally, in a zoo and gets shipwrecked with a tiger (probably) tipped this book to a four from a 3 plus. That’s quite a lot to fit in. And he does so with aplomb.

What’s interesting to me about the Life of Pi is that I read it for the first time probably about 10 years ago and managed to remember so little of it. I usually can recall most of the major themes of a book, and with this one all I remembered was the shipwreck and the tiger. There’s Quite a lot more to it than that – so I do wonder why my brain didn’t retain them the first time ’round. Maybe I was too overwhelmed by the different themes? I have to say that I definitely enjoyed it more this time than my memory of it a decade ago. I *like* that a boy manages to be three religions. I choose to interpret that move in a way that pokes fun at the institution of religion (rather than the spirit behind it), which appeals to me. But there are enough religious overtures in the book that I also see there is room for different interpretation, and for controversy.

I liked the Life of Pi because I like the story. And the fact that really it is a story for the sake of a story, makes it all the more appealing. I’ll ruin then end if I explain that further, but if you’ve read it you will know what I mean. Which I quite appreciate. There are times when Martel pushes implausibility to become ridiculous, but I can still forgive it. There are a few needless points of view, and I found that I never got particularly upset at any of the more tragic turns of events – which is a bit surprising.

Still, I very much recommend Life of Pi as being something totally different, interesting, fun, and full of animal-life. It’s a grown-up bedtime story.

02.11.14

by ELG Gray

Brave New World

Page turner: 8/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 10/10
Overall: 5 stars

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is brilliant.

In my head, I thought it would be a sort-of precursor to 1984: author creates totalitarian regime for political point. Point made well and clear, and good story along the way an added bonus. (Not to diminish from 1984, which I will certainly get to and give proper consideration in due course!) A Brave New World is so much better than that. Huxley, in 1932, publishes a book that creates an entirely different planet- full of crazy rocket technology, syntethetic experiences, and sky scrapers- that hasn’t, really, aged. And this new planet isn’t really the result of an intentially extreme political party gaining world dominination. Instead, it is an entirely new culture. A new world. One that I had never even considered feasible.

The brave new world which Huxley writes about is a world of ‘decanting’ rather than ‘birth’; where happiness, consumption, and stability reign at the price of passion, liberty, and independence. Imagine a world where ‘pneumatic’ is the highest of compliments. It’s so very, very backwards from what we all take for granted. But it takes not-very-long before you get into it. Even as I read about the conditioning that people go through in order to create this society of solidarity (think Pavlov … on crack), I felt for them. You feel the pressures of thier invisible constraints. And you empathize.

The appropriately eerie cover from my edition of Brave New World

Really, I think this book should have been in the curiculum on one of my university anthropology courses. Talking about seeing things through different lenses. It’s nurture trumping nature – but playing by totally different rules.

Meanwhile, it’s still a good story. Lots of sex (not too explicit), drugs, love, death, and a bit of adventure. And the accessories of the world itself is more novel and fascinating than plenty of ‘modern’ science fiction books.

It’s also incredibly well written. Concise but descriptive. Clever but functional. And, not to be too blunt, a very readable length. Well edited.

Brave New World is really a commentary about what happens ‘for the sake of progress’. When technology gets us so far – then what? You can see why what happens happens. And simultaneously you can totally comprehend the perspective of ‘ancient’ Shakespeare (his works feature) and of the folks of a ‘Savage Reservation’ whose way of life resembles that of Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century. Sort of.

I will admit that by a somewhat surprising turn of events the two main locations of the book- London and Malpais, New Mexico – are places that I hold rather personal connections with. But that probably just makes it a cheeky 6 stars for me, and a 5 for everyone else. So, if you are looking to read a Great Book, getting many virtual brownie points for high school English teachers the world over, go with Brave New World.

02.05.14

by ELG Gray

True History of the Kelly Gang

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

The trouble with the True History of the Kelly Gang was that I got bored. I didn’t mean to get bored, but I did. I still Liked it, but I just felt like I sort-of-got-the-point-and-you-know-how-it-ends-anyway so, why bother? Perhaps I would have been more gripped if I knew the core elements of his real life in advance (I didn’t) and thus wasn’t spending so much energy trying to keep track of the characters comings-and-goings. There are a lot of them. But even then, I’m not sure.

As I have since discovered in my historical research – Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang were Australian outlaws primarily active in the 1870s outback. The book is about Ned, his childhood, and (surprisingly briefly) his gang and its exploits as an adult. The book actually really picks back up in the ending chapter where accounts of his gang’s daring dos really get told.

Ned Kelly in 1880

It’s a clever idea, and the structure of the book is quite nice. As a reader, chapters are bunched into manuscripts, that are clearly Ned’s own scribblings of his life on whatever paper he has to hand. In the end, it becomes clear how these documents have been gathered, grouped, and published for the sake of posterity. Neat. I liked it.

Peter Carey does a wonderful job of making Ned a consistent, likeable, pleasant Outback murderer/Robin Hood type character. I liked Ned.

And yet, somehow, after whizzing through the first half of the book or so, I really did get bored. I felt I ‘got’ Ned – what made him tick – and somehow that early revelation made me much less interested in following him and what happened next. The ‘traps’ (police) are all corrupt. You want your own land. You are oppressed. Pride and honor are of the utmost importance to you. As are horses. Check check check check check. Now get on to your exciting burglaries, get-aways, tell us about your suits of armour! Explain to me more about your ending! Tell me what I always wanted to know!

There is very much a good story in the ‘untold truths’ of the Kelly Gang as clearly the man, myth, legend has a great deal going for it. And I did like this attempt. I suppose the trouble is that I keep having to remind myself of that. It was something a bit different, and certainly worthwhile.

Maybe some Aussies can open my eyes, more, to questions that WERE answered in this book that had I been less ignorant of the principle stories of the Kelly Gang before I started I would have found more exciting and compelling?