February 14 - no love for Salman Rushdie

Lesser known than St Valentine's Day, February 14 this year is also the 20th anniversary of the issuing of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book The Statanic Verses.

I've read The Satanic Verses, and frankly don't see what the fuss was about. I suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini hadn't read the book, but I'm far from an expert on the workings of the religious mind so maybe there's something I didn't see. Either way, I'm glad that nobody was foolish enough to try to act on the Fatwa, and that Rushdie is still alive and well (I saw his cameo role in Bridget Jones's Diary again recently). It's a pity, though, that he had to live his life in fear for a decade because of the inability of an aged cleric to understand the modern world.

I recently read Rushdie's earlier book, Midnight's Children, for which he not only won the 1981 Booker Prize but also won a unique 'Best of Bookers' in 2008. Both well deserved prizes - it is a much better book than The Satanic Verses and presents a convincing picture of an India (and Pakistan) that few westerners know. Written in a disarmingly simple style, its message is powerful and moving. At times you feel that the true central character is Mumbai itself, Rushdie's birthplace and obviously a place that exerts a strong influence on its natives. But the story goes well beyond Mumbai and brings the reader with it brilliantly.

By coincidence Slumdog Millionaire, also a film with Mumbai as its unforgettable backdrop, came out not long after I read Midnight's Children. It presents another, but not inconsistent, view of that great city. I think we'll be hearing more and more from Mumbai as India moves more decisively towards the global mainstream.

The Beach, by Alex Garland

I got (gently) criticised for piggy-backing on Amazon.com reviews when I blogged a few of the books I have read recently, so this time I'll ignore Amazon, and try to use only my own words.

My first thoughts on The Beach, before I started it, were slightly negative. My copy (shown above) has Leonardo di Caprio on the cover, as he starred in the film version of the book. I haven't seen the film, so I don't know what it is like, but when publishers use a film to retro-sell the book, it worries me. In addition, the group of figures on the cover (on Leonardo's chest!) look like an ad for Lost.

The book was not what I had expected, though.

Richard, the main character and narrator, is a credible example of the kind of rich western youngster that is seeking ever more extreme excitement in south-east Asia. His characterisation is fairly moderate - Garland resists the temptation to make him either heroic or anti-heroic. He just is what he is, warts and all. The cover blurb refers to Generation X, and in some senses Richard is a classic example of the stereotype - well-versed in TV and film culture, but largely uninterested in the actual cultures of the countries he is travelling in.

The plot is a strange mixture of utopian fantasy and The Lord of the Flies. Again, the cover blurb refers to The Lord of the Flies, but I had had that feeling even before I succumbed to the temptation of reading the cover reviews. The similarity, though was clear to several of the reviewers. Initially, though, I was more interested in the sense that Garland was trying to describe a type of Generation X utopia - an isolated beautiful spot inhabited by young people from all over the (western) world, where food and dope are free and plentiful, modern problems like illness and boredom are absent, and everyone is cool. Curiously absent is any mention of Generation X's other recreation, sex.

The utopia gets strained, though, and the modern world intrudes, ultimately destroying paradise. Perhaps Garland was trying to make some deep point, but it gets lost in the plot. Ultimately the book is simply a good read, retaining all the reader's attention right up to the end, which in typical Generation X style is a bit of a blur. Richard, the narrator, tends to take both the life and death of paradise fairly stoically, as if such things are expected by the jaded 'traveller'.

Garland's style is fairly sparse but effective. You are drawn into the book slowly - there are no clever literary hooks to grab you - but before long you want to continue reading simply because the book is interesting and readable. You don't really identify with Richard - he's too shallow for that - but you follow him nonetheless.

All in all, a good book, and Garland is a writer with talent. I have also read The Coma, his second book, and I would really ecomment that too.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

This morning I finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It is a lovely book and should probably have won the Booker Prize, instead of only being shortlisted (though, since I haven't read the 2001 winner, I cannot be certain). I entirely agree with the newspaper reviews quoted on Amazon which say:

'Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome confidence and eloquence', Independent .
'Subtle as well as powerful, adeptly encompassing comedy as well as atrocity, Atonement is a richly intricate book - A superb achievement which combines a magnificent display of the powers of the imagination with a probing exploration of them', Sunday Times .
'... a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping novel', Independent on Sunday

And Amazon's own review, which says:

'Atonement, McEwan's first novel since the Booker-winning Amsterdam, is an extraordinary achievement and possibly the finest work he has yet published. It is a engrossing book, full of narrative suspense and wonderfully defined characters. It is also a consciously literary novel, with allusions to Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and Henry James, but with none of the ponderous self-importance that label often suggests. Atonement confirms McEwan's great talents and well deserves its place on the Booker shortlist.'

Atonement is a classic Booker novel, in that it deals with powerful events and their effects on a small group of people, in a style more commonly associated with a number of Irish writers - Elizabeth Bowen, Ann Enright, John Banville and Willian Trevor.

It is hard to believe that Atonement was by the same author as Amsterdam. The latter was a weak book, I felt, and not a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi

I recently read The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel. For the first half of the book I was pleasantly expecting it to be like Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani, a book I really enjoyed. (Incidentally, when you put "Londonstani" into Amazon.com as a search word, the second item on the list of 18 hits is The Buddha of Suburbia - by a different author, and with no obvious connexction. Obviously I'm not the only person who saw the similarity!).

The Buddha of Suburbia is not, unfortunately, anything like as good as Londonstani. It starts with promise, but the characters fail to develop, the plot never really comes together, and the story quickly becomes unbelievable and, frankly, silly. Although Kureishi may be drawing on his own experiences (though I doubt this), it certainly doesn't resemble what I know of the lives of Indians in England in the 1970s (and I was there during that time, and knew Indians).

The book's publisher, Faber and Faber, on their website say that "The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain".

Oh dear ... they haven't even read their own book. One of the recurring threads in the book is Karim's annoyance at being called a "Paki" - he is, of course, Indian (the frequent references to Bombay may also give this away). Like this little fact, the rest of their self-serving review is also wrong - it is not a tour de force - more of a forced first novel. Read it if you want, but it isn't worth the price of a new book (I bought mine second-hand, of course).

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan

This book won the 1998 Booker Prize, so I expected great things of it. I had recently read, and greatly enjoyed, the 1997 Booker Prize winner - The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy - and I usually find Booker Prize winners and shortlisted books to be excellent.


I was surprised, then, to find that it read more like a short story than an important novel. I kept waiting for its genius to shine out, but then it just went and ended. Without any genius. Or any shining. In fact, it was so forgettable that I've already almost forgotten it.

Admittedly, the 1998 Booker Shortlist was not a particularly strong one, though it did have Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto on it - a much stronger book which, with the benefit of my recent hindsight, probably should have won.

Ian McEwan was short-listed again, in 2001 with Atonement, which I have yet to read (its on my shelf at home, though). I hope that turns out to be better. The film of Atonement is currently in the cinema but I am reluctant to go and see it before I read the book. By the time I do read it, though, the film will have disappeared from the cinema, and I'll have to wait for the DVD. Such a dilemma!

Another World, by Pat Barker

Almost by chance, I read a few of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy books last year and found them unexpectedly good. So when I found Another World in the Oxfam Bookshop in Uccle recently I bought it.

It was a disappointment. She returned to her First World War theme, but indirectly through the memories of an old man who is, himself, only one of the charachters of the book. But all the characters are shallow and undeveloped, and the book ends up being an uncoordinated clutter of clichés without a convincing central plot. Even the dénouement, when it finally comes, is a damp squib, because by then the reader (well, this one anyway) has long since stopped caring.

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

While I was in Pecs I also read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. What a disappointment! What a load of rubbish, frankly. I had been led to believe that he was a brilliant writer, and the cover blurb tells you that this book "is a transforming novel", and that Coelho has "the power to inspire nations and to change people's lives". What a load of tripe! The book was shallow, predictable, and frankly silly. However, what it seems to do (and maybe his other books too?) is to push a kind of silly spiritualism that borders on pseudo-religion. And maybe that is why some people think he is brilliant - maybe they are believers in the silly modern pseudo-religion of 'spiritualism'. Well, I'm not, and this is my blog, so my message is clear - don't bother with this short, shallow, and uninteresting pseudo-religious load of rubbish.

And will I look for more books by Coelho? No, I won't.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

I finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy while I was in Pecs. It is a brilliant book, and well worth its (1997) Booker Prize. When I started it I was afraid that it would be heavy going, but it wasn't. Despite the unfamiliarity of the names (in, I presume, Malayalam) they quickly became familiar, and the prose was beautiful and fluent. She captured and portrayed the mind of the children, who are the central characters, brilliantly.

Although ultimately a sad book, it didn't leave me with a bitter taste, because of the simplicity of the narration, and the depth of the story. If the measure of a book's worth is whether you would recommend it to a friend, then this book scores highly. For me, another measure is whether I will look for other books by the author. I will.

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis

One of the reviews of this book on Amazon sums up exactly what I thought, after having just finished it:

"Interesting, but did I actually LIKE it???,

Brett Easton Ellis doing what he does best: social commentary with a plot which twists and turns, and rants and raves, and gets bloody and gory and disgusting in parts... it definitely made me dizzy but did I like it? Still not sure. This one is more intellectually challenging than his previous novels and I couldn't put it down while I was reading it, but I doubt I'd ever want to read it again."

I've been a Bret Easton Ellis fan since I read American Psycho, which I thought was a brilliant book. Lunar Park, on the other hand, I found confusing. It started as a straight autobiographic narrative, which I found too self-referential and self-congratulatory. It gradually morphed into something that still seemed autobiographical but clearly wasn't. Where the book started veering off into supernatural territory I started to have doubts, but towards the end I think it started to all make sense, in a weird way. Like American Psycho, you are left at the end wondering how much of it actually happened and how much was the product of a tortured mind. Since Bret Easton Ellis is not that tortured, I think he has done a great job of writing from the perspective of drug-induced madness. The autobiographic start of the book leaves you with no clear dividing line between what you know to be true and what you wonder about.

Almost up to the last few pages I was convinced that I would give this book a poor review, but now I'm not so sure. One thing is certain, though; the reviewer (on the cover of my copy) who found the book 'funny' had clearly not read it. It is a tale of Generation X all grown up, and living in suburbia with money, children, and responsibilities, but none of the coping skills that are needed. The story is filtered through a haze of drugs and drink, which clouds the distinction between fact and fiction in a clever and seamless way.

Redemption Falls, by Joseph O'Connor

I have just finished Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor (brother of Sinéad O'Connor, a frequently controversial, and frequently brilliant, Irish singer). The book is a historical novel following, in time, the events covered in his earlier novel Star of the Sea. Some see Redemption Falls as a sequel to Star of the Sea, but I don't agree - the characters are different, and there is no real connection between the two except that they both deal with Irish immigrants to mid-nineteenth century America.

If a measure of a book's worth is how much you want to get home from work in order to get back to it, then this book is worthy.

The novel centres around an Irish revolutionary, latterly Acting Governor of the Mountain Territory in 1860s America, called Con O'Keeffe. The novel comprises legal documents, ballads, poems, interviews, narratives and a host of other paraphernalia associated with O'Keeffe. Some reviews see this as too complicated, but for me it worked.

An excellent book - get it and read it.

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

I've just finished reading If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, by Irvine Welsh. It’s a collection of short-ish stories, the last one being actually quite long (a 'novella', some reviewers call it).




The first few stories I thought were quite poor, to be honest. My opinion is shared by some of the reviews on amazon.co.uk: "The short stories are all rather flat and dry and without soul", "this just didn't hit the mark for me …", "this is his worst work yet- a waste of time …", and so on. Ouch!


The glowing reviews on the cover of the book: "Vigorous, stunningly funny, whimsical, warm, surreal, grotesque and brilliant" (The Guardian), seem a bit wide of the mark. A real example of why you should not judge a book by its cover!

A few of the stories are based in the US, but Welsh just isn't convincing as an American. He only becomes convincing when he returns to his roots in the last story, Kingdom of Fife. It is Welsh at his gruesome best – a fest of drink, drugs, sex and violence, narrated largely in the Scots dialect of the main character. Not for the faint-hearted.

By pure coincidence, an hour after finishing the book, I came upon an article in the property pages of the Irish Times – Irvine Welsh is selling his house in Dublin, in order to buy another one nearer to the airport.

"A house with a history always has cachet but for "Generation Xers" the ultimate trip is to lay claim to a house that was once a hero's home. Number 41 Grove Park, a quiet residential street just over Rathmines bridge, is the place novelist Irvine Welsh calls home and should spawn many dinner party conversations for house hunters.

The creator of Trainspotting lives in Dublin 6 but travels weekly to the US and UK, and the round trips are taking their toll. The writer wants a base closer to Dublin Airport than his present address."

"The writer's office is on the second floor with views of the Dublin mountains. It's a great space for creative thinking. "When I need to take a break from pounding at that intensity, I kick back my chair, which is on wheels and look out the window," he says".


The article notes that If You Liked School, You'll Love Work was written in this room.

Welsh has picked a bad time to move house, as the Irish housing market is crashing at present. However, since he intends to stay in Dublin, he'll be able to buy a new place cheaper too.

Island, by Aldous Huxley

I've just finished reading Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island, which he published in 1962, shortly before his death. There are books you cannot put down because they are so good, and then there are books you just want to get finished because you started them. This was the latter. I found it stilted, predictable and shallow, with no real story or plot. It is basically just a vehicle for Huxley to promote his weird ideas on societal organisation, drug-taking, and spiritualism.

The plot is a simple one ­– a western journalist gets stranded on a 'closed' island in the Indian Ocean, which he finds to have evolved into a utopian society as a result of the use of drugs, meditation and free love. So far, so good. But the book is thoroughly unrealistic – for example, in this 'closed' society the people are all bilingual in their native language and public-school English! They are familiar to the point of obsession with Western society, Western Philosophy and Christianity. In fact, everything about the 'closed' society is remarkably similar to the 1930's ideal of the English middle class, and entirely dissimilar to any known Asian society. The book continues with a series of artificial situations in which the protagonist is shown how the society arranges its education, health system, agriculture, child-rearing, and so on. It reads like a catalogue of utopian naivety, lightened only by the sheer silliness of Huxley's attempts to impose the Home Counties on south-east Asia, with added Hindu mysticism and narcotics.

Thank heavens I've finished this book, because now I can move on and read something better.

Stonemanor second-hand book sale

One of the regular events in my annual calendar are the second-hand book sales that are organised at the Stonemanor shop in Everberg, to the east of Brussels. Twice a year, in June and September, the shop car park is taken over by volunteers from ActionAid, who collect and sell English-language books in aid of their charity.

The books on sale range from pulp fiction up to unread copies of recent prize-winning novels, as well as all sorts of non-fiction. The prices are extremely low; the books are priced by the centimeter, so that a brilliant find costs the same as a dog-eared trashy novel - the price is around 1 Euro per 1,5 cm. Over the years I have bought hundreds of books, many of them in perfect condition, many in hardback, and many of them otherwise unavailable except through Amazon.

This June's book sale was yesterday, and as usual I came away with a box of books, including;

• Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
• Louis de Bernieres, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord
• Louis de Bernieres, The War of Don Emmanuels Nether Parts
• Pat Barker, Another World
• Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm
• William Trevor, Felicia's Journey
• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
• Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls
• Alex Garland, The Beach
• Alex Garland, Coma
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
• Barry Unsworth, After Hannibal

In addition I picked up a few non-fiction books, such as;

• Richard Taylor, How to Read a Church
• Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History
• Thomas de Waal, Black Garden - Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War
• One Hundred Years in Egypt - Paths of Italian Archaeology

My partner picked up about the same number of books, all equally interesting, and we also bought a handfull of books (mostly Douglas Adams) for our son who wasn't there. All in all, a very profitable trip out to the suburbs, and one that I'll repeat in September. In the meantime, I have enough books to keep me happy over the summer!

The Island of the Day Before

I have just finished reading The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco, and although I should be able to write some sort of a review, I feel that it would be better to wait until it sinks in a bit. Some books are like that - you don't know what you really think of them untill some time affter you have finished them, and after they have swirled around in your sub-conscious for a while.

Suffice it to say that the reviews the book gets on Amazon are far from complimentary: 'Eco becomes Narcissus' says one, and 21 out of 24 readers agreed; 'Eco needs a stricter editor' says another, and all four readers who responded agreed with that; 'Self-indulgent intellectualism' said a third, to which remark 11 out of 15 people agreed. Basically the readers found that the book failed to provide enough of a story, and wallowed in self-indulgent intellectualism. Hmm ... maybe they are right, but I'll let it settle in my head first. The comments on the US amazon site were slightly less critical, but still not good: 'Less Than I Expected', 'Weakest of Eco's fiction -- not that that's a bad thing', and so on.

The book is the tale of an Italian nobleman shipwrecked in the South Pacific in 1643. As part of a cabal instigated by French Cardinal Mazarin and his protege Colbert, Robert della Griva has been traveling in disguise on an English ship whose mission is to discover the Punto Fijo, the means by which navigators can plumb "the mystery of longitude." The rest I won't give away, in case the bad reviews don't put you off!

The Steep Approach to Garbadale

I've just finished reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks. Although it is fairly readable, I just did not think that it was up to his usual standards. The cover blurb, of course, would have you think that it was a masterpiece, but I don't think I will remember it in six months.

Out of interest, I looked at the readers comments on Amazon, and was reassured to see that I was not alone. The following comments pretty much agreed with me:

"... we know that Banks is capable of a lot more, and this book seems 'light' in comparison to some of his meatier work."

" the resolution feels somewhat rushed and in many ways too neat for the complicated network of familial relationships that Banks spends the book depicting."

All in all, I'd say it is worth the read, but it isn't in my Top 10 (or Top 100). Out of Banks' books, I'd score several much higher, with The Bridge being my favourite of his novels.