It’s both exciting and depressing to read an excellent debut novel by some twenty-one year old punk. It is outright distressing, though, that someone so young should demonstrate such an insider’s acquaintance with the seamy world the book depicts.
On the cover of my edition, Irvine Welsh compares the book to Less than Zero, and that’s apt–perhaps if you splice it with Welsh’s own Trainspotting and the controversial movie Kids. The novel is written from the perspective of a handful of kids in low-middle class Britain where the same old decisions and insecurities that have always plagued adolescence have to occur in a violent and drug infused sprawl. Our hero is somewhat pathetic obsessive/compulsive Adam, who has an irresistable fancy–stoked at a distance–for the pill-popping hottie, Eve. His attraction to Eve teases him out of his abusive home and into her chaotic world for which he is singularly unprepared. Though she fakes it well, Eve, of course–being only fifteen–isn’t ready for it either. In fact, if there is an underlying theme of the book, it might be that no one–including the snake Gaz–is ready for this garden. (Oh yeah: the “apples” are drugs. Just to complete the symbolism. In actuality, this symbolism is not overplayed. In fact, densely, it was a while before I got it.)
Though Apples is a blast to read–not least because of Milward’s ability to drop into slang driven voices and disordered adolescent minds–it is pretty painful. You’ve got overdoses, broken faces, rapes and infanticides, and the first-person narrative doesn’t allow any distance from any of it. The narrative approach also doesn’t let the reader hate any of the characters–except perhaps the snake. You can regret their decisions or lament their innocence, you can cringe at the way their naivete permits a flood of heartbreak and pain, but their sins are understandable for all that. Despite its rough edges, the book brims with heart.
We’ll be hearing a lot more for Richard Milward, assuming he doesn’t live anything like the life of his characters. He’s convinced me that a 21 year old can write a splendid novel with wisdom and perspective, and that’s no small feat.
John Banville, whose Booker Prize winning novel The Sea had critics speaking of an Irish Nabokov, has started churning out noirish mysteries under the name of Benjamin Black. Christine Falls is his first foray into genre fiction, and its success has been undeniable: it has probably gathered him more readers than all of his more literary books combined. It is far from his best book, however, and I suspect his pen name reminds us that it is not to be judged in the same class. The quality of its language is, to be sure, several orders above that of most genre fiction, and its characters are, for the most part, quite compelling. Nevertheless, the true literary writer’s coyness and unwillingness to cater to the reader shows in a lack of snap and suspense that ultimately keeps Christine Falls from comparing to the best of the genre.
The plot starts rolling when Quirke, a pathologist with a fondness for the bottle, discovers that the records of a young woman’s death have been falsified and that someone has apparently absconded with her newborn child. His curiousity leads him to discover that the circumstances of her death were far from regular, and that his own adopted family might be deeply involved. In the end, Quirke feels his way through the tangles of two mysteries–the one of the dead girl and her child, and the other the complicated thicket of secrets that constitutes his own family life.
Quirke is a satisfying protagonist who will no doubt serve Banville/Black well in the future. (He has already made a reappearance in Black’s The Silver Swan, and more will surely come.) If the plot is ultimately a little weak (and less than mysterious–I felt the most interesting parts of the solution were guessable at a very early stage), the characters are not. My suspicion is that Banville will only get better at this game, and that now that the foundations are laid we can start getting to work with some real mysteries. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll also keep preferring Banville to Black.
At some point I learned to repeat to my teachers that Greek tragedy is cathartic. It probably would have been better to have us read something that actually was cathartic, but I seriously doubt Sophocles would have fit the bill for a bunch of fourteen year olds. Sophocles doesn’t do it for me today either, and it’s the rare piece of literature that does. But every once in a while I become so enthralled with a book that it threatens to become transformative; I emerge from the reading as if baptised. This was my e experience with Yu Hua’s To Live.
As To Live begins, we hear from a narrator telling us of a time he was traveling across China in search of popular folk songs. During this trip, he encounters an old man badgering his tired ox while plowing his fields. The rest of the book is essentially narrated by the old man, Fugui, as he recounts his harrowing life story.
Fugui’s tale begins at his youth as an undisciplined aristocrat, literally riding the backs of prostitutes through his village, and then through much harder times, most of which can be traced back to his disgraceful behavior. This is, however, not a simple morality tale, for it is not as if Fugui is ever really born again–though he learns from his past, he has the human habit of forever discovering new mistakes to make. In addition, his life’s tortuous path is intertwined with the massive changes taking place in twentieth century china:the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, the Chinese Land Reform Movement, The Great Leap Forward and finally the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. So on the one hand you get an inspiring study of a character who is committed to life despite its difficulties, and a personal reflection of the impact of national level events filtered down to the “simple” lives of Chinese peasants.
Though the book was banned in China on its release in 1993, it has been named one of the ten most influential Chinese books of its decade, and was the source for a movie by the same name. (I haven’t seen the movie, but I certainly will.) Hua is one of China’s pre-eminent authors, and I plan to read every word the man writes. He’s that good.
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone has been widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. The author has been compared to Foer, Vollman, David Foster Wallace, Ondaatje, and no doubt many, many others. Me, I’m dropping it at page 66 as part of my new policy not to chase sunk costs. (See earlier post on that topic.) Those comparisons are absurd. No doubt something of the book triggered something in the minds of some reviewers, but that doesn’t establish similarity of any sort and pasting such comparisons on the cover seems tantamount to false advertising.
I won’t pretend to speak to the whole novel, since I didn’t read it, but pages 1-66 read like a bad translation–or rather a good translation of bad english. It was written in German by a Bosnian and then translated by Anthea Bell, so there is more than one explanation for the choppy style. The prose, which speaks in a voice of wide-eyed innocence, never really rises above that naïve style, which is no doubt an attraction for some, but I found it rather labored. The story follows a boy, whose mother is a Bosnian and whose father is a Serb, as he is exiled by war and sees the plum eating days of his youth become swallowed by war. Needless to say, this is the story of Stanišić as well.
Call me a cynic, but could it be that the sensation following this novel is fueled in part by politics? Tell me I’m wrong, but my copy is going back to Amazon.