A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

One of the books shortlisted for 2015's Man Booker Prize, A Little Life appeared to be the favourite to win but ultimately lost out to Marlon James' History of Seven Killings. Hanya Yanagihara tells the story of a group of friends living in New York, starting out as college graduates beginning their careers, and seeing them through several decades. Charismatic but unpredictable artist J.B. and architect Malcolm, but really focuses on kind-hearted actor Willem and most of all Jude, who never speaks of his past, and is something of an enigma. The first section gave a very relatable depiction of people in their late twenties still trying to figure out what it means to be an adult.

Yanagihara uses an interesting mixture of narrative voices: first and third person, with a touch of second as well, to give a variety of perspectives of Jude's "little life." When shown from Jude's own point of view, he is not named - which can prove a little confusing when he is only identified with a shared pronoun "he," although for the most part it is kept fairly straightforward. This technique indicates his lack of self-regard, self-importance or even sense of a personal identity. Jude and his friends are a tight-knit circle but not an exclusive friendship. As the years go by, relationships between the quartet change, get strained and fixed, drift apart in adulthood but always share their bond. Yet J. B. Malcolm and Willem can't figure out what to make of Jude, no matter how much they love him, for he never speaks of his past. And it emerges he has a very good reason for not wanting to speak about it.

A Little Life is an emotional rollercoaster, between the heights of the love of the people in Jude's present, and the crashing lows, all the different kinds of self-destructiveness that comes as a souvenir from fifteen terrible years of his childhood. You come to really care about these people, feel their sorrows and their frustration when Jude just won't admit he needs or deserves help. At other times, you revel in the relief and joy that things are finally going well - but always, hanging over your head, is the threat of another relapse. And every so often, Jude reveals a hint of the trauma in his backstory, and it's harrowing stuff, but for the most part I think, tactfully handled.

However, near the end of the flashbacks, I found myself questioning how plausible that every adult in Jude's life for fifteen years was a complete monster. Of course I know there are some really evil people out there - but for one kid to encounter so many, everywhere he went, and no one else, brought me out of the novel to ponder if perhaps Yanagihara had gone a little over the top with Jude's tragic backstory. Then, with one shocking plot twist in the last hundred pages, I felt more and more fearful of the ending. The love and goodness of Jude's friends and adopted family wasn't enough to keep the book from leaving a bad aftertaste. The penultimate section of the book would have been a fine and satisfying note to end on, although as hard as I tried to resist the fact, the ending was always inevitable. But how I wished it wasn't. It's been nearly two months since I began writing this review, and over that time, the dismay and disbelief from the last hundred pages or so have been my lingering impression of the book, quite overshadowing all that impressed me through the majority of the book. A Little Life is a book that stays with you long after you put it down, which is a point in the favour of any book, surely. But it's a shame that what I remember after I finished the novel was not the same as what drew me back to its pages through the reading process.

The Accidental - Ali Smith

Ali Smith is one of those authors who, until now, I had repeatedly not read. How To Be Both has been on my radar for a while, highly acclaimed and alluring, but somehow a bit intimidating too. And, when I finally bought The Accidental from the Books for Syria table at Waterstone's last week, and read the blurbs for Smith's back list,I recognised the strangely-incomplete titled There But For The as another book I'd picked up many times but never quite brought home with me. Smith has a reputation for being very clever and lyrical, but somewhat experimental in style, which had slightly frightened me for a long time. But this was for a good cause - a charity donation that gets you a free book, right?

The Accidental focuses on the Smart family: two parents and two adolescents, all of whom have their own struggles and unhappinesses. Astrid, aged twelve, is a lonely teenager, trying to make sense of her world through her video camera. Magnus, who is about sixteen or seventeen, is eaten up with guilt after his involvement in an incident at school with tragic consequences. Their stepfather, Michael, is a creepy college professor with a midlife crisis and lots of affairs, while their mother, Eve, feels the weight of unhappiness of her family, her marriage, and her career as a writer.

Into their lives comes Amber, a strange woman who shows up at their house one day. Everyone thinks she's here with someone else, but who is she, really? Each member of the family perceives her differently, either finding what they long for or need in her, or perhaps projecting their wishes onto her. She is the narrator, probably, of the first-person passages interspersed with the Smart family point-of-view chapters, yet we don't really know much about her. She doesn't quite seem real. Some of the characters think she must be an angel, but if so, she is an unstable, maybe even dangerous one. At the end of part one, she starts to give you a few answers - surprisingly early on, I thought - until: "Well?" she said. "Do you believe me?" I didn't think to do otherwise until that point, but the question throws it all into doubt. But that's all the answer you get.

The Accidental is a story about story, structured tidily into three parts: beginning, middle and end. About how stories grow and change in the telling, mutating and shaping the perception of truth. We see this expressed in different ways throughout the novel, for example in Eve's book series called "Genuine Articles," in which she takes real stories from history, but rewrites them to give them happy endings and "what ifs."

The language is lyrical, poetic - one section being made up of actual poetry, in Michael's "middle," the changes in form showing his world and his mind unravelling somewhat as the style turns from conventional sonnets in the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, to a frantic, disjointed style, to words just apparently thrown at a page. For Michael, Amber represents an incorruptible purity, and is the woman immune to his attempts at seduction. And his sense of entitlement can not deal with rejection. He is a repulsive creature.

Ali Smith's narrative contains some stream-of-consciousness, luring you to read on, but also to take your time thinking about her word choices. I found The Accidental engrossing with lots of food for thought, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. She's not necessarily a new favourite author, but definitely someone I want to read lots more from in the future.

Book Review: Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee

Contains spoilers

A young woman takes the overnight train home to Maycomb, Alabama, for the first time in many years. Before she arrives, she makes sure to dress in slacks, in part to scandalise her aunt, in part because they are the clothes that make her feel most like herself when she returns home. The woman is Jean Louise Finch, once known as Scout, the narrator and heroine of To Kill a Mockingbird. In many ways, Maycomb is the same, but in other ways it has changed. It is the 1950s, and times are changing. Racial tensions are high, with talk of desegregation, which meets with resistance among the white members of the community. Jean Louise's homecoming is bittersweet. Maycomb is home, with all the memories of her childhood; her boyfriend is here, and her father, although  her brother Jem is dead now, and Atticus is older, more creaky, but still the wise, quietly witty, respectably subversive lawyer. And Jean Louise will never see eye-to-eye with her Aunt Alexandra, and she no longer quite feels that she fits in at her hometown. There are shocks in store for Jean Louise, and everything she has previously taken for granted comes crashing down around her.

Go Set a Watchman was written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and, although it works as a sequel, being a completely new story, the elements which later evolved into the classic are visible in another form. Harper Lee brings the humour and warmth that readers will instantly recognise from Mockingbird, the same wry observation and understated wit. Jean Louise is older, but the tomboy child is never far from the surface, and Atticus, though he may seem serious, has a dry wit of his own.

The prose is inconsistent in quality; less polished than in Mockingbird, a weird combination of dry exposition and presumption that the reader to has a little more contemporary political knowledge than I had half a century later. Go Set a Watchman is character-driven, without a big major plot event such as the trial at the heart of To Kill A Mockingbird. As such, I felt it a bit less engrossing, a series of events and flashbacks, and wondering what the actual story was going to be. But when it's good, it really shines. Some lines of dialogue or description had me laughing aloud. (People who grew up in a certain kind of church will know exactly which hymn is being described as "bloodthirsty.") The characters walk onto the page fully-formed, and it's easy to forget that it was their first appearance on paper. Scout is as lovable, passionate, outrageous and unconventional as a woman as she was as a girl, a person who transcends ink and paper. The flashbacks to Scout's childhood and teenage years were very funny, as was the scene at Jean Louise's "coffee," and the way snippets of conversation from one-time acquaintances came together to be faintly ridiculous.

It doesn't really feel fair to compare the novels, except to observe how Harper Lee took the good elements of Go Set a Watchman and made them great. The change in narration from third person (Watchman) to Scout's first person (Mockingbird) brings you closer into the world, and the way that events run together in the latter, with a mixture of childish imagination and adult reality, build a complete child's view of the world out of the fragments of memory presented in Watchman. 

Go Set A Watchman covers similar themes to those at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird, of race, and justice, family, an end of innocence and Right and Wrong with capital letters. But Right and Wrong are more complex here; it is a more adult novel and leaves you, the reader, conflicted. Because here, Atticus Finch, Defender of Good and Right, a man with a sense of justice beyond his time, is wary of the changing of the times, and stands against the desegregation of the races in the South, attending meetings alongside hateful, bigoted people and condoning them with his silence.

The confrontation and conversation at the end of the book would be powerful and upsetting enough were these characters we'd met for the first time a couple of hundred pages back. With the weight of half a century behind it, however, and with literature bearing Atticus' reputation for more than twice as long as Jean Louise's twenty six years, I too felt that sense of betrayal and hurt, all the worse because Atticus remains in character throughout. His arguments against desegregation are calm, reasoned and thoughtful - and awful and wrong. It's hard to reconcile some of the terrible things he says with the man who has been long considered a hero, and I'll be posting a whole separate essay about that issue in the next day or two. There is a time when the bitterness of the rift between Jean Louise and Atticus seem impossible to get past.

Yet Go Set a Watchman ends on a note of hope and reconciliation. It has become necessary for Jean Louise to smash the idol she'd made of her father, in order to live by her own conscience, to fight battles because she knows them to be right, not to accept that everything Atticus says or does is good and right. Without wishing in any way to downplay or defend his beliefs and words, he is, for the most part, a good man, with strong morals, and a good father. The lessons she learned from him as a child and young woman set her up well for life. But he is still a man, and he is still flawed. It's as true for the reader as it is for Jean Louise; we come of age alongside her. Heroes will only lead us so far. Ultimately, we must become our own heroes.

Go Set A Watchman is not as wonderful a novel as To Kill A Mockingbird, but it was never going to be. It's a patchy, but pretty good, literary novel of its time; darker and more nuanced than its sister novel. It's interesting to compare the complex adult morality to the simple black and white of a child's understanding. Is it essential reading? Not in the same way that To Kill a Mockingbird is, but Go Set a Watchman is an interesting piece of literature, more than a first draft, but not quite a sequel, to be read thoughtfully with a critical mind.

Bout of Books 8.0: Thursday

Today has been another quiet, fairly unremarkable day at work, but I was pleased to unpack the new editions of American Gods and Neverwhere. Of course, it's great when we sell out of my favourite books, because it means I'm getting to share the love, but the shelves feel incomplete without them. And they have new, colourful covers! (If I'm totally honest, I think I prefer the old black paperbacks, but the new ones are also very nice and exciting in their novelty.)

I've been working my way through In One Person by John Irving, which is the first book I've read by this author. It's an enjoyable, character-based novel, which hops around the protagonist's timeline, from his teenage years at school, to travelling Europe as an adult, various lovers, male and female, and back to his childhood spent around the amateur theatre company his family were part of. The narrative seems to be arranged by theme rather than chronology, and gives an idea of how a person's character is formed by people and events throughout one's lifetime. I had planned to read a lot more this evening, but phoned my sister and ended up chatting for nearly an hour. I'd like to get to about page 400 before bedtime, though.

Bout of Books: Thursday

Today was another slow day at work, with not enough jobs to keep me occupied all day, and for the second day in a row, the weather meant customers were few and far between. Yesterday, because it was pouring with rain and today because the sun was out and no doubt people were all on the beach, in the park or in their gardens. The upside of this was that today, I got to escape the dingy staff room and take my lunch and book out to the nearby park, stopping off at the local bakery, Grace's, for a take-away coffee and a tasty doughnut. I was incredibly lucky: there was a heavy-looking grey cloud hovering ominously over the town, but the sky over the park was blue and sunny. Even when the cloud started to creep towards me, there remained a friendly blue patch right over my bench. Needless to say, it was very difficult to head back to work afterwards.

I'm about three quarters of the way through Alex Woods, and for all its apparent simplicity, it is an extremely profound book. Picking up from yesterday, we've followed Alex through his early teens, his friendship with the curmudgeonly Mr Peterson, his struggles with school bullies, morality and family. Alex Woods is a very cleverly crafted story. Every incident is there for a purpose, though not apparent at first, coming together to shape Alex's character and build up to the main event of the plot. For a long time, I felt that Alex read quite young for his age: he has a lot of book-knowledge, but there was a kind of innocence in his earnestness which, though very endearing, made me think of a twelve-year-old when he was approaching fifteen. Then something happens to make him grow up subtly but quickly. All the little events in preceding chapter that have taught him about himself and the world, come together to show that he is a young man with a strength of will beyond his years.

Tomorrow will be a very welcome day off, and I've made few plans other than reading plenty. I intend to finish Alex Woods either tonight or tomorrow, and make the most of the day to make a start on Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen. I've had this out of the library for a while, but needed the time to really get stuck into reading it. Tomorrow is the perfect opportunity.

Books read today: The Universe Versus Alex Woods - Gavin Extence

Number of pages read today: 120

Number of books read in total: 2
Books finished: 1
Today #insixwords: light, easy read but surprisingly deep

Books added to mental shopping list: 5

Top Ten Tuesdays: Unreviewed books

I've kept this blog for three years now, but only in the last year have I been updating it regularly, posting reviews of most of my reading material - but not all. If I don't review a book, it doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't like it; on the contrary, there are several books I've loved so much that I just haven't been able to do them justice. In other cases, I feel that a review would be just an inferior rehash of the book's synopsis and a "This is great! Read it!"

Top Ten Tuesdays are a weekly blog feature held at The Broke and the Bookish, and this week the challenge is to list ten of the books we'd love to share with other bibliophiles, but which for one reason or another we haven't reviewed.



1. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak. The story of a little girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Narrated by Death. Beautiful, eye-opening and heartbreaking.

2. The Help - Kathryn Stockett. This novel has recently been turned into a film which is now (USA) or soon (UK) showing in cinemas. Three women in 1960s Mississippi unite to challenge people not just to accept "the way things are" but to really think about their attitudes towards race, primarily, as well as class and gender.

3. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. A Cult classic, written by two great names in modern fantasy, before they were really famous, Good Omens shows the bumbling efforts of Aziraphale (angel) and Crowley (an angel who did not fall so much as saunter vaguely downwards) to prevent Armageddon. Hilarious and quotable, with a brilliant cast of characters, Good Omens is fun to play "guess-who-wrote-which-bit" with. (Apparently even they aren't quite sure.)

4. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters. With deliberate parallels to Oliver Twist, this page-turner keeps you guessing and brings to life the murky underworld of Victorian England.

5. The Earth Hums in B Flat - Mari Strachan. A quirky family story set in 1950s Wales, told by an imaginative 12-year-old who takes it upon herself to investigate the disappearance of a local man, opening up more cans of worms than anyone could have foreseen.

6. Crow Lake - Mary Lawson. Another family story, this time Canadian. Not a lot really happens, to be honest, but it's a story with characterisation strong enough for that not to matter. A short read, maybe 200 pages or so, but one which really draws you into the family's world.

7. The Tales of Beedle the Bard - J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter fans will know of at least one of the fairy tales, as it is a critical part of the final novel. There are five fairy tales in all, simple but flawless - and one rather gruesome one! The book is enhanced by explanatory notes on each tale from Professor Albus Dumbledore himself, and his musings are typically whimsical yet philosophical.

8. The Company of Liars - Karen Maitland. The year is 1348, and a band of misfits travel across England, trying to avoid the Black Plague. Many are on the run, all have strange tales to tell, but can they trust each other? This book ended on a twist which led me to want to read it all over again, to see if the new knowledge would change the way I read it.

9. The Distant Hours - Kate Morton. Ms Morton has written three novels now, and has pretty well established a recogniseable pattern of family tales, linked through the generations. This doesn't mean her stories are formulaic, though. Far from it! The Distant Hours is a modern gothic tale with all the best parts of such a story: an old house, mysterious sisters bound together by their past, and at the heart of it all, another story.

10. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series - Alexander McCall Smith. This is a lovely, cosy series of books set in Botswana. Mma Ramotswe's cases may not be dramatic compared to a New York detective, but every one is taken seriously, because every case is important to the person who is asking for help. McCall Smith writes which such a love for the country and characters, and the series has a gentle, innocent feel to it that is hard to find in adult fiction nowadays. This is a series I go to for a light, feel-good read, and can easily get through one book in an afternoon or evening.