Translated from the Arabic, Imarat Ya’qubyan, by Humphrey Davies

Harper Perennial, 2007. 253p.

The Yacoubian Building was first published in 2002 but has probably lost none of its relevance even given recent events in Egypt. The book is about the inhabitants of said building in Cairo and their various (mis)fortunes. Whether all Egyptian life is there I’m not in a position to judge; there certainly is a wide cross-section of society within its pages, though. The characters are memorable enough; some verge, as in magic realism, on larger than life, but their motivations are always clear. The viewpoint characters engage sympathy and are used to point each other up effectively.

In part the book deals with the daily grind of living under a dictatorship and the petty corruptions involved in survival but also slyly illustrates how those abused by power can be used by unscrupulous religious manipulators to further their own ends.

The wider culture Aswany portrays may not be as saturated with sex as in the West – though there is a mention of semi-naked girls on television adverts – but everyday life as depicted here most certainly is. Then again, love, sex and death are the novelistic big themes, possibly the more so in a society where lack of sexual expression is expected. Or, given that it was also a salient feature of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, does sex become more important when it perhaps represents the only means of personal expression in repressive societies?

The translation is effective (if into American English) and mostly flows easily – the book is very straightforward to read yet doesn’t lack complexity – but had a couple of infelicities. A footballer does not “shoot” the ball to another player and the ugly word “governorate” is employed to describe what appears to be an administrative district. (Governorate has a Wikipedia entry but “does not exist” in either dictionary.com or thesaurus.com.) The term bailiwick might have been better but is perhaps too old English. Would district or jurisdiction not have been clear enough?

To sum up, The Yacoubian Building is a very readable and interesting illustration of the differences and similarities between cultures and of what it means to be human.

I’ve just caught up with the news that Joanna Russ has died.

She was one of the first women to break into the male dominated world of 1960s Science Fiction and used feminism as her main theme, explicitly critiquing sexism and women’s perceived role in society. In this respect SF was, of course, a perfect vehicle with its ability to take a fresh look at how things are and how perhaps they ought to be.

I do not recall reading The Female Man, perhaps her most famous novel, but may have done so in my teens when most of my reading came from the local Library. I do have Picnic On Paradise (1968) on my shelves and certainly read that but must admit I don’t remember much of it from this distance in time.

What is undeniable is the impact Russ had in promoting women and feminism in SF.

Russ also took a great interest in slash fiction and seems to have been a force in it beginning to be taken more seriously than when it first appeared.

Joanna Russ 22/2/1937-29/4/2011. So it goes.

Millenium, 1998. 292p.

The book contains two novellas and five shorter stories taking in SF, fantasy, thriller and mainstream. The title novella has quite the most unsympathetic narrator I think I’ve ever read. He is supposed to be British and Shepard gets the idioms correct but we use “at night” rather than “nights” and (mostly) don’t call the game “soccer.” Full marks for the effort though. It’s a strange tale set on a space station beyond the orbit of Mars, where the usual human venalities and appetites abound.

A Little Night Music’s SF gloss features reanimated musicians but is really about a failed marriage.

Human History is set in a post-apocalyptic world where strange creatures known as Captains exert control over the remnants of humanity. Things do not turn out well.

Sports In America is a straightforward tale about a gangland hit that doesn’t quite come off. The characters rattle on unnecessarily about baseball and American Football.

The Sun Spider is a fantasy/SF cross where a theoretical physicist has discovered life in the Sun.

All The Perfumes Of Araby, a story published in 1992 but set in 1992 and which has been somewhat overtaken by events in the real world – the Middle East has not evolved in quite the way depicted, there are as yet no inoculations against AIDS – has a female Desert Storm veteran wishing to recapture some of that experience by taking up with a smuggler based in Cairo. The smuggling goes wrong.

Beast Of The Heartland is about a declining boxer who has a chance of one last big payday. Shepard manages to find a new angle on this hoary old scenario.

Apart from the two non-speculative ones the stories as a whole show a tendency to start in the real, solid world and part way through shift into a more fantastic milieu. Their narrators are also keen to tell rather than show and to philosophise. Betrayals are common. The collection as a whole is really just what you’d want in fiction.

Picador, 2008. 553 p.

In the first part of the novel a shy boy called Robbie Coyle is growing up in a village called Kenzie in 1960s Scotland with the ambition of going into space. Since his father is an ardent socialist and anti-American Robbie therefore wants to be a cosmonaut. A frequent attender at his local library, he devours knowledge about the Soviet Union and discovers that “Russian is a language where some letters are written back to front and others are completely made up.” Quotes such as this display Crumey’s excellent ability to inhabit the world of a pre-adolescent. As he matures he starts to hear a voice in his head. The section ends with that voice saying, “I guess we’re not in Kenzie any more.”

The story then flips into a scenario of a Soviet-style Britain where a young adult Robert Coyle has been recruited into a space project to reach, before the wicked capitalists do so, what is possibly a black hole travelling through the solar system. The secret “Installation” where Robert is in training is suitably grim, the illustrations of the many compromises people have to make in such a society convincing, though whether dissidents could flourish there is another question. Perhaps this exists in the same British Democratic Republic which featured in the author’s Mobius Dick.

This central section could be considered an Altered History novel where the Jonbar Hinge lies in whether or not a man named Deuchar died while trying to rescue twins from drowning many years before the time the action is set. Yet its juxtaposition with the preceding and following parts, set in the “real” world, argues against this. And Crumey’s treatment of his subject matter does not have the feel of SF. The Soviet section can be read to be implicitly a figment of Robbie’s imagination. The subtlety of the point of divergence also marks this out from SF treatments of Altered Worlds. While Crumey pushes credibility a little by having characters in the central section behave and speak, or have the same names as, those in the book-end segments he does certainly avoid the trap into which Philip Roth fell in The Plot Against America of restoring the altered world to normal by the end.

The coda, a (present day?) exploration of the situation of Robbie’s ageing parents and a young boy who meets a mysterious stranger on a mission (which he is unwilling to explain) provides counterpoint and a resolution of sorts.

Sputnik Caledonia is excellently written and engaging, with convincing characters, but not quite as full of verve as Mobius Dick. I will look out for more Crumey, though.

In Saturday’s Guardian Margaret Drabble made a comment that she gave up first person narration after three novels because she came to think it a lazy form.

This is (or was) apparently a general view among the literati, that third person narration was more literary, more legitimate, that first person was less worthy, but it’s not one I ever shared.

I declare an interest here. Most (if not all) of my published works have been in the first person.

I do make one claim to distinction, though. I am one of the very few people to have written a piece of fiction in the first person plural. That story was This Is The Road, in the anthology New Worlds 3, Gollancz, 1993 – nominated for the BSFA award 1994 – which was also published in translation as “Le Chemin D’Eternité,” in Cyberdreams 7. The only other instance I recall of the use of “we” in a narrative sense was in one of Primo Levi‘s books (for shame, I forget which) about his experiences in the concentration camps.

Granted, third person gives insight into the inner life of all the characters and enables us to know them in the round but all we are told is vouchsafed to us by the author, who by definition knows everything about the character. That can present a problem, for it means that the author has to choose not so much what to tell us but instead what to leave out, or else overburden us with information.

Consider now the first person narrative. Except for the viewpoint character, everything we as readers know about all the other characters in the book is not what is known to the author – who is still omniscient I need hardly add – but merely what is known to the narrator. Everything the reader needs to learn has to be revealed by the narrator’s interactions with, or observations of, the other characters and cannot be told to us directly. To my mind, far from being lazy, that is a much harder act to bring off successfully than merely entering a character’s head whenever convenient. This difficulty is perhaps heightened when the chosen first person narrator is unreliable.

In this regard, I would submit that the use of multiple viewpoints each of whom is a first person narrator, while providing a more complex narrative, is a form of cheating.

From her last sentence (see above link) Drabble seems to have altered her view. “It’s the straight true line that’s hard.”

Welcome (back) to the club.

Faber, 2000. 282p.

When he was young, to escape his alcoholic father, Jamie Bawn ran away from his home in Berwick to live with his grandparents in Ayrshire. His grandfather, Hugh, “Mr Housing,” was the major driving force behind the building of tower blocks in Scotland and encouraged the taking of short cuts in the construction process to get as many as possible built for the money in order to remove people from slums. The generation before, Hugh’s mother Effie was a turn of the century socialist famous for leading a rent strike. Now (in 1995) Jamie has returned to Ayrshire to be with his dying grandfather.

The ramifications of family relationships, how each succeeding generation reacts to – or against – the previous, are the theme of the book – though at one point it does seem that O’Hagan’s title may be more of a reference to the Lord’s Prayer. (Catholicism is a given in the two O’Hagan books I have read.)

As in his later novel Be Near Me O’Hagan has a priest making sexual advances on minors and makes light of it. This is a very small incident in Our Fathers, mentioned in passing, treated as a matter of fact, and as a result it reads oddly after the scandals revealed in recent years.

The meat of the novel is in Hugh Bawn’s unshakeable belief that what he did was for the best. This is something that is perhaps characteristic of those of a religious bent.

The prose can be opaque at times, as if O’Hagan was trying too hard. It was his first novel after all.

Not a lot happens in Our Fathers and the text does not quite live up to the claims made for it on the back cover. But O’Hagan can turn a sentence.

The subjects of other O’Hagan novels, one about a young woman clearly modelled on Lena Zavaroni and another narrated by Marilyn Monroe’s dog, do not appeal to me, however.

Span count:- 1. (We also had swang – as the past tense of swing – which I confess I’d never heard of before but a few online dictionaries give as archaic or now chiefly dialect.)

Picador, 2005. 264 p.

The last two Banvilles I read – see here and here – had both been on my shelves for years and while never less than elegantly written were a touch distanced and unengaging but this one won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 so I thought that maybe he’d become a little more accessible.

The Sea can be summed up in one sentence. A man whose wife has died of cancer reminisces about his childhood and first loves and goes back to visit his old holiday haunts. There is of course more to it than this but that is the essence.

Banville has his narrative mouthpiece, Max Morden, adopt a meandering style, not quite stream of consciousness but with some sudden jumps in time and place. This all looks natural on the page, as if written effortlessly, but must have taken a high degree of crafting.

The typical Banville traits are all present, the literariness, the elegance, the beautifully constructed sentences flowing with sub-clauses, the use of unusual or high flown vocabulary (velutinous for velvety, for example) the revelation, very late, of a useful piece of information which helps to make the connection between the novel’s various strands. This last is something of a tease, however, (if not a cheat) and could be taken to exemplify a failure to provide sufficient foreshadowing.

The characters are all well rounded (and they can be irritating) but sometimes it seems as if they are being lined up one after another to have their little foibles exposed before the narrative flows elsewhere.

There is no plot as such but Banville’s prose carries the reader through. I do like him as a stylist. Overall, however, the effect is curiously flat and enervating. There can’t have been much competition for the Booker in 2005. Or was it just Banville’s turn?

Surprisingly for a writer who normally seems very meticulous there was one “lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song – see lay 10a ) and a “liquified.”

Translated from the Czech, Nesmesitná lehkost byti, by Michael Henry Heim.
Faber, 1995. 305 p.

This is a book to bring home how parochial and inward looking most fiction written in the English language is. There is no possible way that The Unbearable Lightness Of Being could have been written by a British or US author, or indeed any other anglophile. The mind set, the life experiences and especially the history it is written from are all too different. While the thrust of this book is by no means the same, I was reminded by its sensibility of the work of Bohumil Hrabal – not surprisingly also a Czech author.

The book is unusual in another sense – it breaks most of the rules that aspiring writers are advised to adhere to. A lot of the action is told to us rather than shown, Kundera addresses the reader directly, inserts his opinions into the narrative, tells us his interpretations of the characters. He also messes with chronology (admittedly not a major drawback, if one at all) and parenthetically gives us important information about some characters in sections which ostensibly deal with others. In parts, especially in the author’s musings on kitsch as the denial of the existence of crap – in all its senses – in the world, it reads as a treatise rather than an exploration of the human condition. That is, at times it is not fiction at all.

Kundera is highly regarded, so is this the essence of high art in fiction? That, as well as dealing with “important” subjects – or perhaps being considered to be circumscribed yet still endeavouring to tell truth to power (whatever truth may be) – the author should step beyond the bounds of narrative; of story?

The problem with such an approach is that it tends to undermine suspension of disbelief. The characters become too obviously constructs; the reader is in danger of losing sympathy, or empathy, with them; or indeed to care. It is a fine line to tread.

Where The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is not unusual is in its treatment of those novelistic eternals love, sex and death. Indeed at times it seems to be fixated on sex.

While the exigencies of living in a totalitarian state do colour the narrative, the treatment is matter of fact, oblique, almost incidental. The choices the characters make merely fall within the constraints of such a system. It is true, however, that something similar could be said for characters in any milieu. There are constraints on us all.

What I did find disappointing was that rather than finish, the book just seemed to stop. While the fates of the characters Kundera leaves us with are already known, this hardly seemed fair. “Leave them wanting more” may be an old showbiz adage but in the context of a one-off novel might be thought to be a failing.

Little, Brown, 2006. 344p

This starts with a blizzard of expletives as a pair of former classmates attempt, comically unsuccessfully, to get rid of two bodies. One of them is soon picked up by the police but the other is gravely ill in hospital after being stabbed in the eye. The first suspect asks for another former classmate, Martin Jackson, now a successful media lawyer in London, to help clear him.

The female Detective Superintendent in charge of investigating the case is also a former classmate.

While I did not require it I can understand why Brookmyre (or his publishers) thought it necessary to include a glossary at the back. Anyone not brought up in Scotland – probably the west of Scotland at that – might otherwise barely decipher a fair bit of the dialogue and prose. Said glossary is a mine of delightful usages, Brookmyre’s predilections (diddies is defined not only as mammary glands but also as, “See Greenock Morton FC,” plus there are repeated references to St Mirren wins over the Old Firm and sore points about refereeing decisions against them about which Brookmyre is clearly not bitter, not at all, and various derogatory terms are said to apply to Scottish broadsheet literary critics, about whom ditto) and is also extremely funny to those in the know, especially about the seat of the intelligences of Old Firm supporters.

The portrayal by Brookmyre of a West of Scotland (Paisley) Catholic schooling is bleak, not so much because of the adults in authority – though they get their fair share of disapprobation – but for the apparently unremitting viciousness and one-upmanship of the children one to another.

As to the novel’s flaws, jump cuts are frequent and sudden, there are too many characters, the murder plot which is used to draw us in to the action is perfunctory at best and some of the clues necessary to unravelling the mystery are given far too late but Brookmyre’s focus is more on the children’s school lives.

The glossary at the end is alone worth the admission, though.

One quibble. North of the Clyde the word skoosh is very definitely reserved for a carbonated drink – scoosh is what it does when you open the bottle after all – and never, as Brookmyre has it, for the uncarbonated variety.

Sceptre, 2004. 529p

Cloud Atlas has an unusual structure consisting of six separate narratives all in different styles – journal, epistolary, thriller, realist (for want of a better term,) interrogation transcript and memoir, wrapped round each other in a way which the author compares at one point to a matrioshka (what in my youth was called a Russian) doll and another as a successive series of interrupted musical phrases which are recapitulated and developed – in order – later. The second is a more accurate comparison as the tales are not truly enveloped one within the other. I would rather say they are ensleeved. (Or even enleaved: as in a book.)

While each section is perfectly fine on its own the connections Mitchell makes between them can be a touch tenuous; even a little forced. The breaks between the sections sometimes, disconcertingly at first, occur in mid-sentence; which admittedly is a brave move.

In order the stories concern a nineteenth century American heading back across the Pacific to the Californian gold rush; a post-Great War English musician acting as an amanuensis to a better known ex-patriate composer; a 1970s female reporter getting herself in too deep in a conspiracy involving a nuclear power company; a small time (contemporary?) English publisher, who is fleeing from gangster-like creditors, being trapped in a care home for the elderly; a fabricant (cloned) slave in a Future Korea who is “transcended” for revolutionary purposes; and an apologia pro vita sua from a man in an even further future post-lapsarian Hawaii.

The latter two segments employ distorted language. The Korean set one has “x” where we have “ex” (for example “xample” and” inxistent”) and stripped down spelling (“brite”) while the Hawaiian section is written in a more extremely evolved language – reminiscent of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker – which is strange to read at first but soon becomes familiar. The inclusion of these two narratives allows the novel as a whole to be considered Science Fiction, and categorised by me as such, though Mitchell may disclaim the description.

Each of the six sections is totally self-consistent and does not depend on any of the others for its individual resolution and each is as engaging as the next. Mitchell’s ability to portray character and deliver plot is unquestionable.

The over-arching structure could be viewed as an excuse to cobble together six novellas which might have been unremarkable if kept separate; but that would be a little harsh. While it certainly demonstrates Mitchell’s mastery of various writing styles, whether it constitutes a coherent whole is another matter.

Cloud Atlas is an impressive enterprise, though, whichever way you consider it. A true novel if you will, worth anyone’s reading time.