J is for Jewell

I went for a very easy J – Lisa Jewell’s Vince & Joy. I object whole heartedly to labelling or pigeon holing anything from music to films to books, but very generally speaking so-called chick lit is far too successful. There are some authors I like who are smeared with the chick lit brush – Meg Cabot has written some fun stuff, Jodi Piccoult tends to be tarred with it and Marian Keyes is capable of writing interestingly. Unfortunately Lisa Jewell does not fall into the category of ‘worthy chick lit’, if you will.

Vince & Joy follows the love, losses and tribulations of Vince and Joy. They meet as teenagers in a caravan park in Hunstanton (yay, East Anglia reference) where they enjoy two weeks of intense connection, and both lose their virginities, to each other. One morning, in fact, the morning after, Vince wakes up to find a soggy note from Joy where all he can make out is ‘I’m so ashamed’. He assumes that this relates to their night of passion, but of course the reader knows that it’s something to do with Vince’s pretty mother and Joy’s pervert father. When this is finally revealed, five hundred pages later, it’s a bit of an anti climax.

I read the whole thing so I obviously didn’t detest it. The story begins with Vince at a friend’s house, while they cheer him up from the latest dumping. They begin to talk about their first loves, and from there Vince tells the story of Joy. I liked this way of getting into the story, as contrived as it was.

The whole thing rattles along pretty well, lots of near misses, disastrous relationships on both sides and lots of fate/destiny moments to keep romantics happy. The other thing I liked about it was that it was told in the majority from Vince’s perspective. His voice is slightly feminine, but then his character is a bit wet so it fits in quite well.

Vince and Joy were obviously the main characters, but there were hundreds of other people involved who flitted in and out. Most of them were pretty well drawn, but a couple were confusingly similar. Vince and Joy both end up with kooky, hippy housemates at one point. Later on in the book, the woman I thought was Joy’s housemate has a revelation when she spots joy in a magazine. Of course, it’s Vince’s ex housemate who’s never met Joy, just knows about her. Maybe that’s just me not paying proper attention, but I did find it confusing.

Although the flashbacks are interesting, the five hundred odd pages propel the reader through inevitable relationship failures towards the end, where you know that Vince & Joy are going to end up together because they’re meant to be together. Of course, when that finally happens, the book ends. I was a bit disappointed with this – I wanted to see them get married and have kids and grow old together. I think that’s probably a compliment for Jewell, that I wanted to see more of the characters and wasn’t thoroughly bored of them.

I’d recommend this book, or any of the other near identikit pastel covered novels, if you’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Or you find it in a train station. Nice, but not really satsifying. The literary equivalent of a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Good to have but you regret it when you’re starving later.

I is for Irving

The I and J authors have been surprisingly difficult to find, although it’s been easier with surnames than it was with first!

My I is John Irving and his book, The World According to Garp. For me it’s one of those books, like The Fountainhead, which is always mentioned but very few people have actually read. I’ve had it for a while but hilariously, haven’t read it. The interesting thing about it is that I couldn’t find out what it was about – the back of the book gives nothing away and I didn’t want to use Wikipedia because that tends to give a page by page plot rundown, with no spoiler alerts.

So, for those of you in the same situation as me (fearful of spoilers but interested in the plot, here goes. It’s about Garp. And the world according to him. Ta dah. The book begins with Jenny Fields, a war nurse who wants a child but not the hassle of a husband. In the early pages of the book she slashes a would be paramour with her scalpel, which she carries in her bag for just those situations. At this point I thought the story would follow her life. She gets pregnant by a dying gunner called Garp, whose brain was so damaged by his injuries that he can only repeat his name. She names the resultant son Garp. Just Garp, at the beginning, but eventually giving in and bestowing him with initials – T.S.

She and baby Garp move into an all boys school where Jenny is the nurse. At this point the focus changes from Jenny to Garp as he grows up with the rest of the live-in children. The rest of the book follows his loves, his children and his running, entangled with subjects such as what makes a successful book, feminism, monogamy and the overall responsibility we have for other humans.

Garp’s an author, but much to his dismay Jenny becomes an author first, when her highly feminist novel A Sexual Suspect, becomes an international bestseller and a bible for disillusioned ladies. After that, Garp lives in Jenny’s shadow and the more she becomes the figurehead for beaten and bruised women, the more resentful he gets.

The World According to Garp is well written and interesting. It’s made more interesting by the inclusion of some of Garp and Jenny’s) writing throughout, defined by different font. Normally this irritates me in a book, but this time it helped to move the pace along and show the reader that there’s a change in environment. These books within books serve to deepen the layers of the novel, without meaning to sound too pretentious. When reading it I had dreams of unicycling bears and starving French armies, which I always think is a good indication of how good a book is – when it gets to you on a subconscious level, and leaves you thinking about it for weeks afterward.

Aside from being a story about a man who’s also a writer, lover, father, son, runner and wrestler, it also has a couple of stand out tragic episodes, tinged with really dark comedy. I don’t want to give anything away but the story builds and builds to a complex climax interwoven with all of the previous markers in the book. It made me read an extra thirty pages before going to sleep just so I could find out what happened. Unputtdownable, I guess you’d call it.

I’d recommend this to anyone who fancies a memoir/life story that’s a bit different – more thoughtful, thought provoking and well-written. I’m looking forward to reading more John Irving, in fact I think The Cider House Rules will be the next one.

H is for Hornby

There must be some kind of zeigesty thing going on as my friend Owen wrote a blog this week on High Fidelity. Either that or he’s just nicking my ideas…

I’ve read this before, and obviously seen the film a few times, but I felt like reading something familiar. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the tale of Rob Gordon, a man recently dumped by his long term, live in girlfriend. It’s a single focus story which means, as with all first persons, that you can’t quite trust the protagonist. In this case, however, you feel that he’s more honest than most. Be warned, there might be spoilers ahead.

Rob’s not a very likeable person, but like any normal human being he has good and bad points in his character. He owns a record shop, Championship Vinyl. A quick google turns up about 60,000 hits for ‘Championship Vinyl shop’, and one site lists it as ‘the greatest record shop that never was’. Other than that, he’s in his mid thirties and still thinks he’s a student. He’s also obsessed with the past, and quite a large part of the book’s taken up with him tracking down all of his ex-girlfriends in an effort to prove that he’s blameless for his recent break up with Laura. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but that’s just the way I see it.

Despite this, though, I still like Rob Gordon. If I met him, I’d probably have a drink with him (not in that way) although he’d no doubt bore me to tears within about twenty minutes, talking about his top 5 songs not to drive to (Number One: Leader of The Pack) or quizzing me on my five first gigs, then cringing at choices I made more than a decade ago.

Music is a big part of the book, and it’s satisfying when you recognise the song being discussed, although it’s equally dissatisfying when you don’t. It’s the same with everything, I suppose – books, food, film… You’re part of a club when you know the reference, and when you’re not, you nod along and pretend you know what’s going on.

Another big part of the book is the location in London. Not the square mile, but the Zone 6 areas. It’s dingy and rundown but it grounds it in a reality that I felt the film lacked with an American setting. Don’t get me wrong – they did a good job transferring it, but everything was made a bit more shiny, glossy, hopeful. Marie LaSalle in the book is peaches and cream, slightly rounded, whereas in the film she’s Lisa Bonet – lithe, sexy and more coffee and cream. To be honest, these are minor gripes and I think both the book and the film stand up well to scrutiny. I have to wonder though, how happy Nick Hornby is at least two of his London based books being transferred across the Atlantic, the other one being Fever Pitch, which morphed from a football focussed book into The Perfect Catch, a baseball loving Jimmy Fallon wooing Drew Barrymore. I think the rights money probably eased that pain a little.

I’ve read a few of Nick Hornby’s books now, and High Fidelity is the most appealing one to me, probably down to the amount of music and the effect it has on Rob’s life, from teenager to middle-age. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s found themselves arranging their music in chronological order, or their films by director’s chronological order.

G is for Graham

The Unfortunates follows mustard heiress Poppy Minkel through life as she dodges family obstacles and tries to be everything she wants to be. It begins with the sinking of the Titanic, as young Poppy searches for her father and comes upon their ‘Irish’ instead – the maid who her father was evidently having an affair with.

Books which have child narrators tend to suffer from the same fate – there’s a knowing tone from the author where the child describes what they see without context, leaving the reader to figure out what’s really going on. Sometimes this can work quite well, as in The Time Traveler’s Wife, where the voices of Clare and Henry are distinct from their adult selves but equally recognisable. Luckily Poppy isn’t a child for very long, as the story skips through her teens and early twenties, including WWI in the process.

She gets married, has children, moves from Paris to England and back to America in a relatively short space of time and without a lot of hassle – although by the time she comes back it’s the middle of WWII, she’s only really affected because she can no longer fly her bi-plane. This is another section of the book where you read between the not very subtle lines - Poppy is Jewish and so she finances the escape of a number of Jews from Paris, with the help of her artist friend. It’s frustrating because Poppy is not stupid – she has a number of businesses throughout the book and knows what she wants in other places, and yet she seems to be wilfully ignorant of huge issues, such as the German occupation. In one scene she re-visits the hotel she stayed in in Paris in order to re-claim her furs, left twenty years before.

Perhaps I’m missing the point – just because Poppy seems to care only for her furs and hats, does not mean she doesn’t care. There’s a fine line in writing characters, a balancing act where you want your reader to get to know your cast, without having their peccadilloes forced down your throat at every opportunity or conversely, knowing only what they say and not what they feel. Personally, I feel that Poppy was not written sympathetically enough. Parts of her story were tragic and heart breaking, but as a reader I tend to follow the character’s lead and as she soldiered on with her candelabra and boots, so did I.

I’ve read a couple of Laurie Graham books (the other being Gone with the Windsors) and I find that there’s a knowing, slightly smug humour which revolves around political in jokes, which I don’t generally get as my knowledge of early 20^th century royalty/American presidents isn’t great. Maybe that’s my fault for knowing more about Katie Price’s family than our Queen’s, but either way I’m not keen on feeling like I’m missing out on a book because I don’t get the references.

I understand why people like this and other Laurie Graham’s but for me she’s not a favourite author.

F is for Funke

Three things you should know about Cornelia Funke and Inkheart:

1. This was translated from German
2. She is the second bestselling children’s author in Germany, behind she-who-shall-not-be-named
3. Inkheart is the first in a trilogy

So there you go. Number one is important because sometimes, I felt that some of the prose was a bit strange. I put number two in because I was surprised she was number two (because I didn’t think it was amazing) and I was surprised she was behind what’s her name (because Funke deserves better than that). Number three because, I found it interesting and it tells you a lot about a book before you even begin.

There is a huge tradition of fantasy novels which come in long, drawn out series. HP fans may well believe that it started with their mistress, but it started long before then. You could argue that Doyle’s The Lost World is the first in a series of fantasy books with Professor Challenger in (it has dinosaurs, it counts as fantasy) and that was written nearly one hundred years ago. Besides that, there are the more obvious choices of Lord of the Rings, Lemony Snicket, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Garth Nix’s Sabriel/Old Kingdom. I wish sometimes that fantasy writers could write a story in one book, from beginning to end. Diana Wynne Jones does that pretty well, but most of them (let’s face it, most writers, no matter what genre it is) can’t resist a little overhang, a snippet of plot to hang onto and pull the reader into the next story. For those who like fantasy trilogies – any of the aforementioned come highly recommended, along with Marianne Curley’s Guardians of Time. As far as the little wizard and the precocious dragon riders go, I don’t recommend them.

Anyway, back to the plot. Meggie Folchart’s twelve year long life is turned upside down when a mysterious stranger turns up at her home, which she shares with her father, Mo. An adventure ensues where people and books get kidnapped and rescued, villains are met, stories unravel and so on.

Number one on the list features quite heavily in the next couple of points I have to make. I got very confused about the geography of Inkheart as quite early on in the book Meggie and Mo set out for Italy, which they claim will take about a day. Obviously my British arrogance was quickly uncovered because they don’t live in the UK, being German. Silly me.

The addition of relevant quotes from (mainly children’s) classics at the beginning of each chapter was a lovely idea, and I really enjoyed reading them and trying to guess where they were from before I read the bottom line. I also added a couple of books to my ever-increasing ‘I want to read that’ pile – TH White’s The Once and Future King being one of them. Ooh, I might read that for W.

I know it sounds daft, but I got the character names muddled in my head so I called Meggie ‘Maggie’ for 90% of the book, and Farid ‘Fraid’. I even managed to arrange Resa’s name to spell… well, you get the idea.

I realise I haven’t spoken about the story at all. Basically, Mo can read characters and objects into existence from the pages of books. The rules appear to be simple – it has to be aloud, it has to be meaningful and if a real live person appears, someone from our world disappears. A sort of less witchy The Craft type energy balance deal. Mo once read a real villain into existence, along with the mysterious stranger who first appears at the window at the beginning, and a couple of others.

One thing that bothered me was that when Mo read from Inkheart and made the fantasy characters into flesh, only one person vanished – his wife, Meggie’s mother. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see a solution apart from ‘the two cats’ which don’t count later on in the book and don’t even match the total of three men and a marten.

I loved that books in Inkheart weren’t just things to do, but places to go. I know when I read a book I’m really enjoying, I actually go with the characters. I can see the Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie and Susie Salmon’s ‘heaven’ and the whole assortment of characters in Pippi Longstocking. This was literally true in Inkheart, where small boys spring to life and tin soldiers drop from the sky.

The idea is a good one, but I remembered that it’s not wholly original. Influences and influencers have always been around, which is fine, but it seemed like that was the one magickal part about the story. Characters come to life in Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom trilogy and in the film of Young Sherlock Holmes (“Young Sherlock Holmes”, I believe) the stained glass window comes to life and tries to run the children through with his big sword. Remember that bit? Brilliant.

Still, I would have been more eager to read the other two books (Inkspell and Inkheart) if there was more to the story. I also felt that some of the phrases were a bit stumbly, which may be down to the translation from German. In some bits, especially the quotes at the beginning of chapters, words were even missed out which made it… interesting to read.

At the end of the book there’s an interview with Cornelia Funke, which is pretty cool as there’s quite a big section in Inkheart about how most people think that authors are dead and buried, rather than living. I reckon that was aimed at kids, in a not so subtle attempt to get them to read more and make celebrities out of the authors. I can’t remember the exact question or her answer, but Funke says that it was her daughter’s idea to put in the romance between Meggie and Farid. I had to double check on the romance, which had a couple of mentions where they look at each other. I reckon it’ll develop into something more over the next couple of books but really, could she not have fitted it in to one book?

It’s quite hefty, at nearly six hundred pages long, but I believe that Cornelia could’ve stripped about two hundred pages out of that at least. There’s a lot of repetition, and while I appreciate that you don’t want to read the same name hundreds of times, when she’s still called ‘Silvertongue’s daughter’ at page five hundred, it just looks a bit strange.

In conclusion, I probably won’t read the rest. Some parts of the book were lovely, especially the tin soldier section and the evident love of books. If I was twelve, I’d probably have loved all of them AND the film.

E is for Ellis

I feel like I miss the point with Bret Easton Ellis. I’ve read half of American Psycho, all of Rules of Attraction and now all of Less than Zero, and it feels like a joke I don’t get. I couldn’t read American Psycho as all of the identikit businessmen were getting me down. We get it, everyone’s the same, we’re not individual etc etc. I enjoyed Rules of Attraction because it had more actual plot and better characters. Less Than Zero unfortunately falls into the first bracket of Ellis books.

Clay is a thin, blond, tan college student who’s come home for the holidays. All of his friends are thin, blond and tan. Most of them are college students, some of them are drug dealers but the majority of them combine the two lifestyles, while remaining thin, blond and tan. You get the idea – Clay’s rich parents don’t pay him enough attention, but neither do the parents of his thin, blond, tan friends, so it’s all okay.

There really isn’t a lot more to tell about story. I like the verbal motifs that crop up throughout the novel – Clay picks up on a phrase his friend says about driving (people are afraid to merge) which he builds on until it becomes a chorus of mis-matched, out of context and meaningful words on how shit life is.

Ellis reminds me of Douglas Coupland, but he lacks any of the wry humour and downright humanity present in JPod, for example.

Some things I learned from Wikipedia and imdb: Less Than Zero was Ellis’ first book. There’s a film of it too, released in 1987 and starring John Hughes muse Andrew McCarthy as the aforementioned Clay. Robert Downey Jr and James Spader also appear in the cast list, as fairly prominent characters. Interestingly, none of them are blond, thin and tan.

Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why I should like Ellis’ writing, please do. I don’t dislike it, and I can appreciate that his style may be loved by many, but for me he just doesn’t press the right buttons. There are only so many business cards, lines of coke or blond, tan people I can stomach without reading something else.

D is for Doyle

For my D I read “The Lost World” by Arthur Conan Doyle. According to my trusty tool, Wikipedia, it was first released in 1912, which is pretty cool when you think about it, as it’s quite a long time ago and people can still read it! Unlike this new-fangled internet thing, where people skim read/look at pictures once and then forget about it. However, I shouldn’t bite the hand that’s feeding me, so to speak, so I’ll move on.

The Lost World tells the tale of Edward Malone, a journalist roped into meeting the awesome Professor Challenger by his gruff Scottish boss. Challenger challenges (arf) accepted scientific theories about evolution by maintaining that dinosaurs are alive and well in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. He’s also a bit of a livewire, which is a bit like saying that Mother Theresa was quite nice. Challenger is described almost exactly like Brian Blessed, except that he’s quite short. On Malone’s first meeting, Challenger rassles around his study and eventually out of the front door, where he is admonished by a passing policeman.

In a relatively short space of time, Malone finds himself agreeing to be a neutral party on the expedition to (dis)prove Challenger’s theories once and for all. Unsurprisingly, he volunteers for this mission to win the heart of a lady. When you think about it, there are lots of books and films where the driving force is love. James Bond’s raison d’etre is arguably to avenge the death of his wife. It also explains his rather offhand way with women in subsequent stories. Gladys tells Malone that she wants a man who’s adventured, experienced and can basically sweep her off her feet with a pinky.

I couldn’t help equating Challenger to Doyle himself while reading the book, mashed in with Brian Blessed. This was even harder to do when you add in what’s on Doyle’s epitaph:

STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
KNIGHT
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN & MAN OF LETTERS

…which is basically what I want, along with Oscar Wilde’s “Wit”. Maybe a ‘Woman of letters’ instead. It is interesting that he has patriot on his tombstone but is buried in England. Perhaps he’s a British patriot. Either way, I reckon Doyle was a bit of a ‘character’.

Once the intrepid explorers actually arrive at the location, they pick up some guides to help them on their way. Aside from the phoenetic Scots accent, this is the bit that made me a bit uncomfortable, as my PC conscience started shrieking at me. The ‘natives’ are jolly nice red fellows, while the nonedescript cowboy types are villains, caught up in a blood battle which endanngers all of the nice white men. I suppose the book was written nearly one hundred years ago, and perception has changed a lot since then. It does beg the question though: Should I turn a blind eye to that part because Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and was a pretty decent writer, or should I shun all of his work because he didn’t think as equally as the majority of people do in this century? Rather like Fleming’s work (Mr Charming should be happy, lots of Bond references) , I don’t believe that you should ignore a body of work because you don’t agree. It represents a snapshot in time and society which can be kept forever, if we’re careful.

Aside from that, reading The Lost World’s a bit like reading a Famous Five novel where they are all tipsy from lashings of ginger beer. Proper beer, not that wimpy fizzy stuff. There’re lots of “jolly odd” and “fine chap, that one” as well as an Awfully Big Adventure in the form of a long journey, betrayal and obviously – dinosaurs.

Two things impressed me about this book. The first thing is that there was what appeared to me to be a plausible explanation for a previously undiscovered land where dinosaurs roam. In a nutshell, it’s that earthquakes moved the tectonic plates at some point, so that a section shot skywards. The animals stranded on the high clifftop went happily about their business for hundreds of years, rubbing shoulders with two sorts of humans and lots of creepy crawlies. That may not seem likely now, but there are still sections of the Amazon we do not know about, along with Australia, Russia and indeed, the sea. I like that idea more than the amber theory, anyway.

The other thing that impressed me was the sheer eloquence of the written words. Doyle manages to pack a lot into a relatively short novel – around three hundred pages. The characters begin in London, travel all the way to The Lost World, spend months there and travel all of the way back to London. Added to that, they also relate their tale to sceptical Londoners and there’s even room at the end to set up a sequel! Not a word was wasted, and I never felt like I was reading the same things over and over.

It’s not really my cup of tea, but I did enjoy it and would recommend it to people looking like a good old-fashioned adventure story, akin to Verne.