The Wilding

Reeling from my last literary encounter with Eimear McBride's lacerating stream of consciousness novel, I am relieved to move into more conventional Summer reading territory with Maria McCann's The Wilding.

This novel was long-listed for The Orange Prize for Fiction, and is McCann's second novel. It is endorsed as a riveting read by no less than Lionel Shriver herself who states that:"McCann has in buckets whatever mysterious quality keeps a reader wide-eyed well after he'd planned to turn out the light."

The front cover looks like it might be a Cider with Rosie, bodice-ripper type of novel, but I was won over by The Times' reassurance that it is in fact:"An absorbing drama of revenge, inheritance and danger." This is the point at which tonight's dinner scheduled to be a rather adventurous pork with Persian spices, might itself be in danger of never materialising! Should I batch-fry the marinaded meat, or should I turn over the first page? Mmmmmm..................... I turned over the first page.

Indeed, it was a very enjoyable, easy-reading, page-turning novel, and went down as satisfyingly as the Persian pork did, once I had wrenched myself away from the story to make it.

The narrator, Jon Dymond, is a young, itinerant cider-maker from a well-respected family, whose world is turned upside down when his uncle dies.  He discovers dark secrets, which have been buried deep, but which threaten to drag him down when he attempts to bring them into the light.

The rhythms of the countryside seasons and customs in the post Civil War era are skilfully evoked, and the process of cider making is covered in great detail. McCann sets the scene well, tells a great story, and fills it with intrigue, danger, superstition and a twist. What more can one ask of a good Summer read?

This is the Pork with Persian spices, which eventually got made, and fed to the family, despite Maria McCann's attempts to distract me!

Amazonian Battle

The Times this weekend  (Amazon loses plot in battle with authors, Alexandra Frean, Sat August 16 2014), writes that Amazon, the online retailing giant may have misjudged the strength of feeling out there in its bid to underprice its competitors in the book market.

It has been engaged in a stand-off with Hachette, who have authors such as Donna Tartt and Stephen King in their stable, refusing to let customers pre-order many of their books online, and imposing artificial delivery delays. This apparently stems from a disagreement on how prices for e books should be set. Amazon has a similar dispute with Disney over the pricing of its DVDs.

Frean writes that if we were dealing in everyday commodities here, no-one would bat an eyelid. We are all used to the big supermarkets undercutting the smaller players. However, "Books are not regarded by their consumers as just any other commodity. They are things of beauty to be cherished."

So, we need to ask, what price convenience? One unnamed New York Literary agent told the newspaper:"As a business partner it's like dealing with the mob, but as a consumer, it's hard not to love Amazon."

Everyone loathes a bully, but we all love a bargain, especially when we can have it delivered to our front door.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

So, after Lionel Shriver's wonderful dissection of sibling relationships, let's continue with the whole brother-sister vibe with Eimear McBride's debut novel,  A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.

I jumped straight into the first chapter, carried along on a torrent of ingenious prose, tossed this way and that by the fierce current, arms flailing, tumbling over and over, trying to get my bearings. Every now and then catching a glimpse of the sky and the river bank, or an overhanging branch to grasp hold of and pull myself up.

This is the only way I can describe what it is like to be immersed in the wild rapids of Eimear McBride's writing, constantly looking for points of reference, then recognising where I am, only to be swept away again. This book is like nothing I've ever read before, and for her to conceive it and dare to write it this way is a virtuoso feat.

My first sense was one of panic, followed shortly by consternation: "Oh no, a novel with fractured syntax, surely not all the way through?" I feared I'd never be able to stick with her anguished stream of consciousness, but reader, I persisted; for it is compelling, and has far too many resonances with my own background, steeped in Irish Catholic guilt.

I can't say that it was an enjoyable experience, and if you are looking for a light holiday read, or are of a nervous, sensitive or depressive disposition, this isn't for you. The stripped down prose somehow enables her to say more than if she had put all the flesh on the literary bones, but I couldn't empathise with her girl at all, except in her childhood flashbacks of playing with her brother. Eventually, I was confused and disgusted by her inner dialogue, and her actions, feeling tainted by my acquaintance with her. Maybe this is the reaction McBride is looking for? It's a good job this girl and this novel are half-formed, because if the gaps were filled in, it would verge on pornographic voyeurism! I found myself worrying about the novelist's own mental state, like one worries about the well-being of actors who inhabit their characters' dark personalities on the stage every night. Just where did she get the inspiration for such a damaged soul?

I cannot recommend this book. I did not enjoy this book. However, I can recognise  and applaud her creative genius. McBride's prose has raw power, laying bare her characters' souls, eliciting the kind of connection I feel with truth and reality and being alive as when I read poetry. She is utterly fearless.

It is an amazing debut novel, full of literary chutzpah, expressing the best and the worst that the human spirit is capable of. I just found it too uncomfortable staring into the abyss, spectating as a poor, damaged, lost soul spirals into anguish and despair. By the end I had RSI from watching her press the self-destruct button once too often.

So, a novel novel, and one that has already garnered The Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2014, against some very stiff competition. It's not The Emperor's New Clothes. It is the real deal, but a deal that lost its appeal quite quickly for this particular reader.

Big Brother

Back to the amazing writing of Lionel Shriver, and her latest offering Big Brother. This will be only the second of her novels that I have read, and having enjoyed Kevin so much, I am expecting a lot of her talents.

Have you ever met a close relative at the airport after an absence of several years, and wondered if you would be able to recognise them? Thankfully, through the auspices of Facebook, this didn't happen to us when we met our niece recently, who had flown over from New Zealand to travel round Europe. Recognition was instant. Sadly for Pandora Halfdanarson, this wasn't her experience when she went to collect her big brother Edison from the airport at Cedar Rapids, who hasn't changed his Facebook profile picture in four years. He's the older brother she had always looked up to: a minor celeb on the New York jazz scene, slim, good-looking, talented, and oozing confidence. When all the passengers have passed through the baggage claim, she doesn't  recognise the grossly overweight man being pushed towards her in a wheelchair by two flight attendants. Whilst Edison's girth has changed considerably in the intervening years, underneath the folds of blubber, he appears to be the same person. So what can possibly have gone wrong in Edison's life to bring about such momentous physical change?

Down on his luck, and having slept on too many of his friends' couches, (and possibly broken them), Pandora is persuaded to invite him to Iowa for an extended visit before he takes off on a scheduled jazz tour of Europe. She is so shocked by this man-mountain, who had "never sounded fat over the phone!" that she is almost lost for words, and as Edison settles into life in the home she shares with her husband Fletcher, and two step-children Tanner and Cody, this strained silence is prolonged. Nobody is prepared to ask him how or why he got so big, or why a talented jazz pianist has no inclination to play the piano. He literally becomes the elephant in the room, who leaves a trail of havoc wherever he goes:  kitchen stove and work tops covered in mess from his food prep binges, and coffee cup rings on Fletcher's hand-made tables. Something's gotta give, and that something turns out to be the Boomerang, one of  Fletcher's earliest pieces of furniture, much beloved by the family, which cracks under Edison's immense bulk.

By this stage, cracks also begin to appear in the strained relationships between spouses, and between brothers-in-law, and the veneer of patient endurance and restraint as the interloper's visit drags on, lifts completely, until Fletcher lets rip at his unwelcome house guest with a diatribe that could strip the French polish off a coffee table at twenty paces. This kind of exchange, where characters externalise exactly what they think of each other is where Shriver excels. She nails the internal   monologue of her narrator Pandora, and every other voice of every other character in the book. She is pitch perfect. It is, at one and the same time, horrifically real and excoriating, yet deeply, darkly funny.

Obviously, if no-one intervenes and tries to prevent Edison from gorging himself to death, he will probably explode like Mr. Creosote! Fletcher doesn't think his brother-in-law has the self-discipline to get his weight down. "Put you alone in a room with a plate of French fries, and the spuds win every time. The will is a muscle. Yours is flabby as the rest of you, bro."

As Pandora takes up the gauntlet of fighting for her brother's life, we wonder just how much she is prepared to sacrifice to save him from himself, whether she can help him find a reason for living, other than his own deluded ego, and just how much the ties of blood can bind.

Cocktails

One of the great extras with Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project is the list of cocktails in the back based on characters in the novel (all served with a twist!)

The one below is more conventional, but a little different to Don's version, which came out of The Bartender's Companion: -

"Dr. Miranda Ball raised her hand."Same again, please."
I called to Rosie, loudly, as the bar area was now very noisy. "Miranda Ball. Alabama Slammer. One part each sloe gin, whisky, Galliano, triple sec, orange juice, orange slice and a cherry."
"We're out of triple sec," yelled Rosie.
"Substitute Cointreau. Reduce the quantity by twenty per cent."

By the end of the evening at the golf club, Don, Rosie and the boss of the operation had made and served one hundred and forty-three cocktails!

The Rosie Project

Bill Gates was right about this book. He read it overnight, and I took just over a day to complete it, in stark contrast to my previous struggle with the magic realism of Mr. Fox. It is a fabulous read that is hard to put down, with a thoroughly engaging protagonist.

Everyone is going to love Graeme Simsion's Don Tillman,  a Professor of Genetics, pushing forty, who has everything scheduled and spreadsheeted in his life, but who is still in want of a wife. Don knows he is different, (his behaviour is typical of someone with Asperger's Syndrome), and that it is always going to be difficult for someone like him to find a life-partner, so he decides to initiate "The Wife Project". He devises a questionnaire to sift out time-wasters, and find his ideal woman, helped by his closest friend and colleague Gene, and Gene's long-suffering wife Claudia.

Things take a comic turn when Rosie fills in his questionnaire, and eliminates herself immediately from the running by virtue of being both a smoker AND a vegetarian. This is when the real fun begins! Although Don knows that Rosie doesn't fit the bill, nevertheless he just can't stop seeing her, ostensibly to help her in the search for her real father.

There are several laugh-out-loud moments in this novel, and some simply brilliant one-liners from Don, who is unable to pick up on the social cues that most of us process straightforwardly. Although he may be socially inept and gaffe-prone, being ASD has given him amazing gifts of organisation, focus and memory, which he is able to use to his advantage. His star turn as a cocktail waiter was one of the most hilarious episodes in the book. As he expertly took orders and served up Alabama Slammers, Rob Roys and Martinis, (whilst surreptiously swabbing empties for DNA), I wanted to punch the air and celebrate the triumph of a nerdy Geneticist over the smug, successful, professional customers he was serving.

Love is, of course, not an exact science, with precise ingredients like a cocktail, and the joy of this novel is watching Don's rigid schedule bend to accommodate another person, without him really realising why. He deserves to find love, but can a man who can recognise a DNA match, find the love of his life through a questionnaire, or will life be a little more inventive and romantic?

Summer reads

How many of those Summer novels that we look forward to reading on the beach, do we actually read all the way through to the end? Somebody with too much time on their hands has researched this very question and discovered that not many of us persevere to the last page.


http://www.channel4.com/news/books-summer-reads-how-much-actually-hawking-index


Let's hope my Summer is not full of "non-reads!"

Mr. Fox

So, I'm back to Magic Realism, it would appear, with Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox.

"It's ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction. It's not real. I mean, come on. It's all just a lot of games." says the fictional author, St. John Fox to his fictional heroine, Mary Foxe. She takes umbrage at her creator's villainy in constantly doing away with his female leads, and accuses him of being a serial killer.

Unfortunately, I AM sensitive about the content of fiction, and so while I know it's a lot of games, and am aware that Oyeyemi is playing them, (in what one reviewer has described as an almost "trippy" way), I just prefer my fiction to be more straightforward story-telling.

I do not deny that she is a very talented author, able to create tension and suspense, and to handle her protagonists with wit and humour, but I was left dissatisfied and bewildered by this novel.

I'm going back to meat and two veg, I think, and leaving the literary Sushi alone!