A Common Reader . . .

Review: The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds

From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest.  Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions.  In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare's years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history.  

The book is sparsely written.  Foulds does not write lengthy descriptive or scene-setting passages, but each small vignette contributes to a rich picture of the cloistered life of a 19th century private asylum. 

This is no mad-house.  The asylum is run on orderly lines by Dr Matthew Allen, a thoughtful man who likes to get to know his patients.  However, the finances of the asylum are precarious and Foulds describes Allen's attempts to mix the cure of souls with mechanical invention and patents.  Poor Allen finds his time increasingly spent trying to "diversify his business", but without success. 

In the meantime, the patients are allowed a relative freedom, and for a while John Clare is allowed a day-pass from his confinement, a privilege he abuses by staying overnight with gypsies and returning much the worse for wear.  I found the section where Clare is with his gypsy friends particularly well-written, showing the considerable research Foulds has put into this book.  The detailed description of how to prepare a hedgehog for the pot is particularly enlightening! -

The body he gave to Judith to pack in still clay and went on to the next one.  Judith made a smooth ball around the animal and placed it in the fire.  An hour later, the baked spheres were rolled out of the fire with a stick, cracked open, and the cooked hedgehogs were lifted out naked and steaming.  Their prickles remained stuck in the clay and pulled easily from the flesh . . and the fine smelling meat was passed around.  John ate.  It tasted as well as he'd remembered: a sweet, earthen, secret flavour.  The meat was tender.  Warm grease coated his lips. 

Review: Burial - Neil Cross

I read my first Neil Cross book about a year ago, and since then have been seeking out other books by this remarkable writer.  Neil Cross specialises in complex psychological novels in which ordinary people get involved in highly disturbing crimes.  His ability to capture the horror of suburban man as he is sucked into unresolvable conflicts is second to none.  I can only think of writers like Ruth Rendell or Frances Fyfield who also twist the knife into the psyche of middle-England, leading to late nights as their readers plough on through these literary nightmares to find out what happened next.

In Burial, a young man called Nathan goes to a party, where drink and drugs flow freely.  Nathan is about to break up with his girl-friend and hooks up with Elise, an appealing and friendly young woman who seems to be happy take over where his previous girl-friend left off.  Nathan also meets Bob, an old acquaintance who offers to drive Nathan and Elise out in his car to a remote spot where they can take more drugs and have what seems (mistakenly) to be a good time. 

I have no intention of spoiling this book for other readers and must stop my description there.  But it will do no harm to say that Nathan ends up years later with a horrendous situation to deal with involving the exhumation of an ancient corpse, the concealment of appalling secrets from his wife, and an attempt to sort out Bob, who now has a terrifying hold over him but has also degenerated into a shambling and confused wreck.  Half-way through the book, the reader suddenly sees that the whole situation is so impossible for Nathan to deal with that there seems to be absolutely no resolution other than some sort of nuclear option.  It is at this stage that the reader's late nights begin. 

Review: Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

Although I've heard of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly in the context of his highly successful novel Fight Club, I'd never read anything by him before until being sent  Pygmy through the post.  At first I was not sure that this was going be my sort of thing, but within a few pages I was hooked. 

Imagine a country containing an amalgamation of all the worst attributes of North Korea, Communist China and Nazi Germany.  Children are tested for their future educational and career needs at the age of four, and those who show high potential are whisked away from their parents into state institutions.  There they are brainwashed into complete subservience to the state, using a curriculum involving extreme martial arts, political indoctrination, chemical warfare and urban terrorism.

Now move forward to a mid-Western church in America where a female missionary feels such concern for these children that she arranges an exchange visit for a number of them to stay with American host-families.  The children arrive in America to have six months of respite from their harsh existence, and as the host-father puts it, to "to sing our songs and share the fellowship of our homes and church".  However, unbeknown to these generous-hearted families, these children have been given a plan:  their educators have shown them how to wreak "Operation Havoc", a terrible act of destruction on the evil American town in which they have come to stay.

This book is one of the funniest books I have read in a long time, but also immensely clever.  The whole book is written in the first person by one of the children, Operative 67, using a sort of pidgin American which takes some getting used to but provides considerable insight into the regime they have been brought up in. 

Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival mid-western American airport greater _______ area. Flight ____. Date ______. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name. Operation Havoc.

Fellow operatives already pass immigrant control, through secure doors and to embrace own other host family people. Operative Tibor, agent 23; operative Magda, agent 36; operative Ling, agent 19. All violate United States secure port of entry having success. Each now embedded among middle-income corrupt American family, all other homes, other schools, and neighbours of same city. By not after next today, strategy of web of operatives to be established.

Review: Chess - Stefan Zweig

Ever since reading Stefan Zweig's longest novel, Beware of Pity, I tend to pounce on any book I find by this early 20th century  Austrian author.  Chess is what may be called a "slim volume", being only 73 pages long, but readers of Zweig will be used to slim volumes - for with such a small oeuvre, publishers seem unable to resist issuing Zweig's novellas and short stories in small portions.

Regular visitors to A Common Reader will know that I don't hesitate to comment on the physical attributes of a book - binding, cover art, price and anything else that strikes me about the production before me. In this case, while the production is excellent the price is silly - I am only grateful to ebay which enabled me to pick up Chess for £0.99 rather than the £5.99 cover price allocated by Penguin. 

Quibble over, the novella is as well-nigh perfect as might be expected.  A wealthy passenger on a Buenos Aires bound ship, discovers that a famous chess-master Czentovic is also on board.   Czentovic, the chess-master was an infant-prodigy peasant with no education or talent in other fields, but has risen to prominence in the world of chess with this single talent which has failed to civilize him in other ways, leaving him brutish and insensitive.  

The narrator decides to challenge Czentovic to a game, but the chess-master replies that he is unable to play any game for a smaller fee than $250.  The narrator clubs together with a group of aquaintances and take on Czentovic as a team, only to be roundly beaten and in very few moves.  During the next game, a mysterious stranger approaches the group and offers advice, leading to a draw, much to the surprise of Czentovic. 

Review: Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart

Ever since Jerome K Jerome had such a phenomenal and long-lasting success with Three Men In A Boat, other travellers have written humorous accounts of their exploits, increasingly so in recent years.  There seems to be a vast market for these books, and I enjoy reading them from time to time, usually as light relief from my heavy schedule of more serious books.  The range available is vast: there are accounts of going to live in foreign countries (e.g. Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde), taking on ridiculous challenges (e.g. Tony Hawkes, Round Ireland With A Fridge) or just humorous travel journals (e.g. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice).

Chris Stewart's books are firmly in this category, and I can say they are among the best.  Ever since his hugely successful Driving Over Lemons, Chris has charmed us with his light-hearted approach to seemingly impossible challenges.  I remember reading "Lemons" during a period of commuting to London in a cold winter and turning away from views across Battersea to Chris's descriptions of Andalucia, which helped me forget that I was about to join the "I did not know death had undone so many" hoards scurrying over Waterloo Bridge. 

Chris Stewart is a little like Michael Palin, in that he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, an ideal travel companion, even on the printed page. John McCarthy interviewed him on Radio 4's Excess Baggage last week about his new book Three Ways to Capsize a Boat and clearly Chris is a generous-minded man, given to self-deprecation and complete lack of boasting.  I had this book on my "to be read pile" at the time, and as I injured my knee last Sunday and was pretty much bed-ridden from Monday to Wednesday, I decided to promote "Three Ways" to the top of the pile and see if Chris could lighten my mood as he did those years ago while on the commuter train.  

Review: Turbulence - Giles Foden

In Turbulence, Giles Foden has broken new ground by writing a literary novel about meteorology while at the same time providing a fascinating description of the importance of weather forecasting to the preparations for D-Day. 

With thousands of ships and aircraft gathering along the South Coast of England, it was essential that military planners received the best possible weather forecast so they could decide what day to launch the invasion of France.  Unfortunately, meterology in 1945 was an uncertain science which provided reliability over short periods only, at best not much over 24 hours. 

In Turbulence, Giles Foden presents the story of Wallace Ryman, a meteorologist of some genius, who has devised a complex mathematical formula which can calculate the "Ryman Number" a key factor in predicting the effect of turbulence on weather systems, thereby raising the game of meteorology to a new level.  Unfortunately Ryman is a pacifist who has withdrawn from the world of meteorology to a remote house in Scotland and has devoted himself to peace studies, using his theories to predict turbulence among nations rather than weather systems. 

Henry Meadows, a rising star at the Met Office is sent to Scotland to try to befriend Ryman and gain access to his weather-forecasting methods so that the vital D-Day weather predictions can be made more robust.

I enjoyed so much about this book its hard to know where to start.  I was reminded of other writers like Sebastian Faulks, Ian McEwan and Robert Harris, who have all developed complex human stories in a last-century historical setting, with equal amounts of complex plotting and dramatic surprises.  At one point I couldn't help but remember the scene in McEwan's Enduring Love where a balloon causes a death:  In Turbulence we actually encounter death by weather balloon, which is surely unique!    

Review: Paradise Lost - Giles Milton

There was so much "history" in the 20th century that it is easy to forget highly significant but more local events which have been lost among the big picture issues of world wars, evil dictatorships and million-strong massacres.  The destruction of Smyrna (now modern-day Izmir) in 1922 is one such, and Giles Milton has done us a great favour in writing such a lucid and interesting book, Paradise Lost, about the destruction of this great city.

In outline, after the First World War, Greece, with the support of western governments, invaded Turkey in the hope of establishing a Christian Empire in Asia Minor.  By 1922, the Turks had driven the Greeks back and their victory was imminent.  The citizens of Smyrna, who inhabited perhaps the most cosmopolitan and multi-cultural city in the region, believed that as was shown many times before in their history, all parties had an interest in maintaining the peace and prosperity of their great city.  In particular, they mistakenly believed that the Allied war-ships off their coast would protect them from Turkish retribution.  Alas, how mistaken they were, for over the course of two weeks their city was almost totally destroyed, with almost 2 million people falling victim to the catastrophe.