Fiction And Poetry Reviews

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Few contemporary novelists receive more polarised book reviews than Ian McEwan. Like Marmite, his fiction seems hated and loved in equal measure precisely because it is so distinctive. His novella Amsterdam is a case in point, winning the 1998 Booker Prize, but with reviews that seemed evenly divided between praise and damnation.

Literary fiction is often disliked because not much seems to ‘happen’, but this accusation could never be levelled at Amsterdam, which is a masterclass in plotting. True, the limits of plausibility are stretched at times, but McEwan has an uncanny ability to make unlikely events seem likely through the sheer persuasiveness of his writing.

The book centres on the psychological interplay between two lifelong friends, Clive Linley, a renowned classical music composer, who regards himself as 'Vaughan Williams' heir' and Vernon Halliday, the editor of a national newspaper. Both are former lovers of Molly Lane, a famous restaurant critic who has also bedded the Foreign Secretary.

Despite the privileged position of the two protagonists, McEwan manages to ground them in a reality we can all understand. Through brilliant characterisation, he imbues Clive and Vernon with the same flaws that most of us encounter from time to time – the hubris that sprouts from success, the resentment that kindness is sometimes mistaken for weakness, and those occasional rivalries between friends that cannot be resisted.

The theme of the book is how our moral compass, best intentions and sense of judgement can all be undermined by the obsessions we have in our everyday lives. What Amsterdam achieves brilliantly is to fuse the grand ethical themes of modern life with the prosaic and incidental details of how we live it day to day.

In little more than an afternoon's read, Amsterdam manages to slip all this past us, through clever timeshifts and telling detail in a tight narrative.

Marmite perhaps, but bland it is not.

A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey

Published in 2017, Peter Carey's fourteenth novel A Long Way from Home is not only very entertaining, but also of great literary interest.

Reading the first part of the blurb on the back cover, one might be forgiven for thinking the story is about the 1954 Redex Trial — a gruelling 10,000 mile car rally around Australia. Ostensibly, the novel is precisely that – full of derring-do tales about driving along dirt tracks and perilous clifftops. However, the story is cleverly interwoven with themes that are far more momentous, exploring the continent's disturbing colonial legacy and the way we all try to come to terms with our mistakes.

In this way the story of the Redex Trial is heightened to the level of an allegory, with the prodigious map-reading skills required to circumnavigate Australia's wild frontiers echoing the life stories of the main characters. They too are navigating, but for them the path they are trying to find is a way through life itself – how to reconcile oneself with a difficult past, struggling with current circumstances, and yearning for a better future. Effortlessly, Peter Carey manages to dovetail these grander themes of our existence with amusing descriptions of everyday life. Sometimes these sudden shifts can cause important narrative details to be smuggled past us, so as ever with Carey, the reader must be vigilant.

A Long Way from Home is also a masterclass in first person narration, with the book’s chapters alternating between two first person POV characters. This is challenging at the best of times because of the need to differentiate the voices of the characters convincingly. In Peter Carey's case it is even more challenging, because of his own uniquely distinctive writer’s voice, yet the viewpoints of Irene Bobs and Willie Bachhuber, the story's two main characters, remain poignantly contrasted throughout.

Elizabeth Alone by William Trevor

William Trevor’s Elizabeth Alone is a novel about Elizabeth Aidallbery’s visit to hospital for an operation. Put like that, it doesn’t sound particularly promising, but in the hands of one of the finest writers in the English language, the story lights up an entire world of characters with their joys and disappointments.

There are many aspects of the novel to interest those that want to improve their own writing, such as the seamless shifts in point-of-view, the sparkling dialogue, the precise word choices and the sheer economy of the writing.

One of the highlights is the way Trevor handles minor characters. Often these are needed in a narrative to provide backstory, or to move a story along, but frequently they end up as cardboard cut-out creations that detract from the reader’s enjoyment. There is a panoply of minor characters in Elizabeth Alone, but they are skilfully deployed to reveal more about the lives of the main characters. Often a minor character will appear for just a paragraph or two, never to appear again in the book, but each time the pen-picture is convincing and unobtrusive.

There are several moments in the novel when the very difficult feat is achieved of fusing pathos and comedy together, causing laughter, certainly, but also deep sympathy at the same time.

William Trevor rarely resorts to long descriptions of what people and places look like; instead he locates the reader inside the heads of his characters, so that we know exactly what they are thinking and feeling about the world around them. The story probably won’t appeal to readers who prefer plot-driven stories to character-driven ones. There isn’t much in the way of mechanical plot in Elizabeth Alone, but we are immersed and left to reflect on some very captivating portrayals of the way life is lived. Not bad for a trip to the hospital!

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient is set in 1940s Italy, where four people come together in a bombed out villa: a traumatised army nurse, a Canadian thief without thumbs, a Sikh bomb disposal expert and a man bearing the title of the novel, who is unrecognisable following his rescue by Bedouin nomads from a burning plane.

The narrative thrives not just from the passionate exchanges that develop within this eclectic group, but also from their backstories, which connect their claustrophobic circumstances to the vastness of the world outside, lending the novel a sense of universality, particularly through themes of love and war.

The writing is often sublime lyrical prose. Tuscany at night is 'the noise of the trees, the breaking of moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of asters outside.' If a poet can take weeks to craft a couple of stanzas, it is easy to see why Ondaatje took four years to write the book and then another two to cut, prune and polish.

The brilliant interweaving of the backstories with the action in the villa is achieved by breaking many "rules" of fiction writing. There are frequent shifts in point of view and rapid changes between present and past tense in a series of non-linear twists and turns, but these devices work seamlessly; there is even a four line paragraph containing three similes, but it works perfectly in context!

The book is heaped with intertextuality, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but the historical and literary references throughout the novel are never gratuitous and invariably amplify the storytelling.

It seems churlish to pigeonhole The English Patient into a genre. Yes, it has 'romance', but not of the kind that genre name usually signifies. The boffins classify the novel as 'historiographic metafiction', which is not entirely helpful.

Let's settle for 'literary fiction', because it's a beautifully written story.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

In the annals of literary history, 1922 stands apart as a particularly feted year, what with the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Jacob's Room and Eliot's The Waste Land. Although justly revered as beacons of modernism, these works have tended to eclipse other works from the same time. One such is Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), which manages to echo many of the experiments in fiction served up by Lewis's more famous modernist contemporaries. This is illustrated in the passage below where the business elite from the fictitious American city of Zenith are conversing freely in the washroom of their exclusive social club.

They grinned and went into the Neronian washroom, where a line of men bent over the bowls inset along a prodigious slab of marble as in religious prostration before their own images in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied, authoritative, hurtled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling of lavender-bordered milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the barons of insurance and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down the law for Zenith; announced that the day was warm—indeed, indisputably of spring; that wages were too high and the interest on mortgages too low;

The terms 'Neronian washroom' and 'massy mirror' seem worthy of Eliot and Joyce respectively, whilst Virginia would have been tickled pink by the rhythmic use of punctuation.

There are many defining features of modernism throughout Babbitt, including experiments with interior monologue, a largely plotless narrative, and a satirical take on the generally accepted status quo, which is manifested throughout the novel by a withering exposé of vacuous materialism during the Roaring Twenties.

It's a marvellous book that is beautifully conversational and remarkably undated. Indeed, when reading John Updike, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe it is hard to believe their own wonderful writing does not owe at least something to Lewis's pioneering spirit.

A. E. Housman: More Poems

What is poetry? Ask a poet this question and you will often receive the same quizzical response that jazz musicians give you when you ask them to define jazz – if you have to ask the question, they seem to say, you’ll never know the answer.

Ask literary buffs the question and they’ll often disappear up their own iambic pentameter, although you might get into a fascinating conversation about the technical distinctions between prose poems and poetic prose.

Perhaps slam poets, as the cutting-edge keepers of the oral tradition, can help us with the question? But no, too often it's all about the performer and a shouty stream of consciousness.

Unfortunately poems often use line-breaks and stanzas to create the illusion of poetry without much in the way of emotion, rhythm, condensed thought, startling imagery and words that sound with a sigh.

All these elements are present in the two poems below by A. E. Housman. Both are from the posthumous collection More Poems published in 1936 and feature roman numerals for titles, as befits someone who thought the words should do the talking.

XXX

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;
I only vex you the more I try.
All's wrong that ever I've done or said,
And nought to help it in this dull head:
Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye.

But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,
Be good to the lad that loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you,
And whistle and I'll be there.

 

XXXI

Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.'
'I will, no fear,' said I.

If here, where clover whitens
The dead man's knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.