books
C by Tom McCarthy. Follows the short life of Serge Carrefax, born just before the turn of the twentieth century, as he makes his way through various period settings the author wants to visit. The tone is distant and factual, particularly at the beginning, which reads weirdly like stage directions. The central theme is communications technology, and connection not so much between people as between pieces of information, references and allusions and hidden forces. I think it needed a richer, more lively approach to bring that out, though. Conversely, I think it was the slightly unnerving flatness of the atmosphere that kept me reading more than the content, though some things amused me. McCarthy likes to bring up Serge's inability to master perspective in drawing to remind you that this flatness was intentional, but I don't know what he thought he was saying with it. Serge was not a character you'd take to: cynicism and uselessness are his most discernible traits. He didn't seem at all someone you'd want on your side in a war: off in a world of his own, usually high on drugs, usually with an erection. In fact, generally he could have served as an illustration of how hopeless a character from a literary novel would be in real life. He dies from an infected ankle because he hasn't got the nous to do anything except stare at it and think literary thoughts. McCarthy seemed determined to contract any words that could be contracted, which was noticeable and irritating. Three stars: I liked it more than it deserved.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Follows the career of Thomas Cromwell. I'd always wondered what exactly it was about (who was Cromwell again and what did he do?) and why people thought it was so great. Basically it kind of is the same old story of Henry VIII and his wives and the break with Rome, but it's surprising how new and different this perspective and approach made it. Somehow it took away a lot of that "of course it happened that way, it did happen that way, it was always going to happen that way" quality of history. I always find it kind of frustrating that you can never know how the past felt when it wasn't the past but today, and little of historical fiction really gives any of that "the past today" feel. Mantel is trying to push the idea that it's the people behind the scenes who do all the pushing, trying to portray a kind of dynamism in the smaller people, more business-y end of history. The great virtue of her Cromwell is his competence, he gets things done, he plays the game well enough to outwit his opponents (at this stage). It's always weird when you read books about the first couple of wives and remember how many of the schemers who got other people killed got killed themselves a few years down the line, and I guess the title suggests how the adrenaline and skill of that dog-eat-dog game is what Mantel's paying tribute to. There's a kind of pity for Cromwell, at having to be the one who does the dirty work, and thought of only as that person, and he gets shown with children and small dogs as if to make up for it. A lot of people like the Boleyn sisters seem a little more idiosyncratic than they're often portrayed, which helps to keep up the illusion that Mantel's version is the unique version. There was a place where it dragged, but on the whole it was interesting.
The Charioteer by Mary Renault. Laurie is recovering at a hospital during WWII when he first becomes attracted to Andrew, a conscientious objector orderly, then remeets Ralph, a boy he looked up to at school and had a weird Significant Encounter with. I read one of Renault's historical novels, and I remember liking it more than this. It's so vague, like, even when I'm pretty sure there's nothing taboo under discussion no one can say anything straightforwardly so you actually know what it is. Everyone has terribly complex feelings and neither I nor they could work out what they wanted. I felt like Renault had created psychological profiles for them all with diagrams linking their childhoods to their current personalities and neuroses, and felt rather pleased with herself for doing so. The ending brings in the charioteer motif, and it really felt like Renault was bringing in all the grand classical stuff she was used to dealing with and trying to shove it into a story that didn't support it. You expect a certain datedness, but combined with Renault's style and aims, I just didn't think it was very satisfying.
Feed by Mira Grant. Set a few decades into the future, Georgia and her (adoptive) brother Shaun are bloggers after a zombie virus took over the world. One of those books not quite so bad you stop, but constantly irritating. The end was a bit touching (in a bad way, btw), which brought the overall level up a bit, but for the most part Georgia didn't seem to have much characterisation apart from being dour and self-satisfied, and Shaun was suicidally stupid. There was a weird quasi-incestuous vibe between them, lots of pointed reference to how they didn't mind sharing a room and neither of them wanted to date anyone else, which, fine, but it seemed a bit pointless just hanging there without any acknowledgement even. There were constant reminders about how irritating it was to have blood tests so often, and apart from the repetitive aspect, you'd think they'd be used to it seeing as it had always been part of their lives. The blogging was just weird. If it's become something really formalised and categorised you have to be qualified to do, surely it just lost any particular zeitgeisty internet quality Grant wanted to tap into. It sounded so boring. And there was a big conspiracy, and I wasn't at all clear what they were actually conspiring for.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Five sisters, obsessed over by the neighbourhood boys, kill themselves. People seem to think Eugenides is an amazing literary stylist, but I thought the prose was rarely above average. It's narrated by a generic "we" who stands in for all the male youth in the town at the time, apparently now grown to middle age and still poring over the artefacts the girls left behind them. Obviously, this isn't really plausible, and I think the male "we" was meant to match the female "we" used in one of the girls' journals, like the novel's less about specific characters (certainly we don't get much quality time with specific characters) than the generic meeting between the sexes, separate camps mythologising each other from behind the lines. While there's a couple of moments where "we" seem to have the realisation that the girls are just people, living unglamorous lives of their own, I didn't think that promise was realised. They never came into full focus. It's like, I will demonstrate the fruitlessness of feverish speculation about other people's lives! Which is always surely going to end in an empty-feeling end product. The novel's basically a black joke. Once the first sister kills herself, you're hanging around waiting for the punchline, which you think is the discovery of the other four's bodies. Then it seemed to be more the weirdness of "we" which, to my mind, can no longer be passed of as generic or showing the nostalgia of lost innocence etc.
The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God ... It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling.
I wasn't sure how to take the ...insensitive attitude to suicide or the sickly air of entitlement. The overwhelming impression was trivial but clammy.
Paper Towns by John Green. YA about a boy who longs from afar for a girl who takes him on a whirlwind of adventure one night then runs away. Uneven. I felt like Green was well-intentioned and trying not to fall into pitfalls, but the basic structure and premise was flawed. The middle dragged a lot, while Quentin was trying to track down Margo. If I didn't really see why he was doing it, I understood even less why characters were afraid she'd killed herself. The end was too twee, and contradictory. Green was trying to say at the same time that Quentin was projecting a lot onto Margo and actually hardly knew her, and that he was having an amazingly profound lifechanging encounter with her and that theirs was a tragic but beautiful love that could not be. And they used poetry to explain their feelings in dialogue I couldn't imagine anyone saying. Margo's angst was too stereotypical and unexplained; I couldn't feel her pain at being consigned to a role as I never got a sense of what that role was, why she was the mythical Margo Roth Spiegelman. Mystery girls are just a mystery, not an actual presence or character, and here an uninteresting mystery. Quite a lot of it was enjoyable enough at the time, but the actual substance was pretty dubious.