October Reading
The Last Hundred Days, by Patrick McGuinness
All that brouhaha about 'readability' is a way into this Booker-longlisted volume: it quite clearly failed to make the shortlist because it reads like a John Burnside novel. This similarity is not surprising, given that McGuinness is also a poet first and a prose stylist second, but is perhaps an odd choice for those approaching the book for its subject matter rather than its treatment. Like Snowdrops, AD Miller's dangerously light novel of Moscow, this is a book about a slightly degenerate young Western man who finds himself in an odd Eastern European half-world. Unlike that shortlisted work, it is never explicit and rarely clumsy. McGuinness's evocation of the last days of Ceausescu is eerily surreal, all empty streets and speeding motorcades, and black market jamborees in the basements of national museums; very little actually happens - there is a pseudo-romance, and a prominent sub-plot about the illicit activities of one of the narrator's academic colleagues, as well as a convoluted strand featuring the simultaneous composition by a former political figure of an official and an unofficial memoir. Its a novel about suppression and co-option, but also about doubling and the destruction of the past. It's circumlocutory approach can drag, but it is carefully and elliptically structured to emphasise the uncertainty of (semi-)autobiography, and as such has no place zipping along. This isn't a warm book, but it is a wise one.
The Universe of Things, by Gwyneth Jones
For a review in Foundation.
Bound for Glory, by Woody Guthrie
A bit of a scandal I hadn't read this one. And what a curious book it is - it is full of incident and amusement, of the moral humour at work in Guthrie's songs, and yet at the same time it doesn't quite cohere. Perhaps this is a result of its authorial modesty: Guthrie is reluctant, it seems, to make his memoir a book about him, in the sense that he follows the course of his own life and yet repeatedly casts the light of his narrative to one side or another of it: to his mother's depression, or to the plight of an Oklahoma oil boom town. His music appears late and quietly, and Cisco Houston gets but a walk-on - the hobos on the train seem to have more rounded characterisation than the moments one would assume might be of most interest to Guthrie's readers. What more would one expect from a folksinger, though, than autobiography as social document?
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
A bit of a scandal I hadn't read this one, too - though almost accidentally read at last, after years of feeling that I knew so much about it that picking it up would be in effect a re-read. What's interesting about Wuthering Heights is that it seems entirely to lack a structure, and that in the popular imagination this significant impediment has been ironed away by a focus on the doomed loved affair between the first of the novel's two Catherines and the first of its two Heathcliffs - this despite the fact that the love affair itself lasts far less time than the angst-ridden gnashing of teeth about its cessation, and that the affair is brought to an end not by the malicious machinations of others but by Cathy's apparently unshakeable faith in the class system. Famously, Brontë doesn't attempt to make any of her characters remotely likeable or even trustworthy, and the nested style of the narrative, with its shades of a sort of country bumpkin Frankenstein, does its best to distance us from the truth of the story. Its principle effect is evocative, of course, though its picture of Yorkshire is so far from the chocolate box tourist board image of it today as positively to dissuade you from visiting. Both more and less than its reputation suggests.
All that brouhaha about 'readability' is a way into this Booker-longlisted volume: it quite clearly failed to make the shortlist because it reads like a John Burnside novel. This similarity is not surprising, given that McGuinness is also a poet first and a prose stylist second, but is perhaps an odd choice for those approaching the book for its subject matter rather than its treatment. Like Snowdrops, AD Miller's dangerously light novel of Moscow, this is a book about a slightly degenerate young Western man who finds himself in an odd Eastern European half-world. Unlike that shortlisted work, it is never explicit and rarely clumsy. McGuinness's evocation of the last days of Ceausescu is eerily surreal, all empty streets and speeding motorcades, and black market jamborees in the basements of national museums; very little actually happens - there is a pseudo-romance, and a prominent sub-plot about the illicit activities of one of the narrator's academic colleagues, as well as a convoluted strand featuring the simultaneous composition by a former political figure of an official and an unofficial memoir. Its a novel about suppression and co-option, but also about doubling and the destruction of the past. It's circumlocutory approach can drag, but it is carefully and elliptically structured to emphasise the uncertainty of (semi-)autobiography, and as such has no place zipping along. This isn't a warm book, but it is a wise one.
The Universe of Things, by Gwyneth Jones
For a review in Foundation.
Bound for Glory, by Woody Guthrie
A bit of a scandal I hadn't read this one. And what a curious book it is - it is full of incident and amusement, of the moral humour at work in Guthrie's songs, and yet at the same time it doesn't quite cohere. Perhaps this is a result of its authorial modesty: Guthrie is reluctant, it seems, to make his memoir a book about him, in the sense that he follows the course of his own life and yet repeatedly casts the light of his narrative to one side or another of it: to his mother's depression, or to the plight of an Oklahoma oil boom town. His music appears late and quietly, and Cisco Houston gets but a walk-on - the hobos on the train seem to have more rounded characterisation than the moments one would assume might be of most interest to Guthrie's readers. What more would one expect from a folksinger, though, than autobiography as social document?
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
A bit of a scandal I hadn't read this one, too - though almost accidentally read at last, after years of feeling that I knew so much about it that picking it up would be in effect a re-read. What's interesting about Wuthering Heights is that it seems entirely to lack a structure, and that in the popular imagination this significant impediment has been ironed away by a focus on the doomed loved affair between the first of the novel's two Catherines and the first of its two Heathcliffs - this despite the fact that the love affair itself lasts far less time than the angst-ridden gnashing of teeth about its cessation, and that the affair is brought to an end not by the malicious machinations of others but by Cathy's apparently unshakeable faith in the class system. Famously, Brontë doesn't attempt to make any of her characters remotely likeable or even trustworthy, and the nested style of the narrative, with its shades of a sort of country bumpkin Frankenstein, does its best to distance us from the truth of the story. Its principle effect is evocative, of course, though its picture of Yorkshire is so far from the chocolate box tourist board image of it today as positively to dissuade you from visiting. Both more and less than its reputation suggests.