What I’ve been reading

I’ve never kept any kind of diary. However, at Christmas a few years ago my granddaughter gave me a book journal, and I’ve enjoyed making short comments on the books I’ve read. As I’m often asked: “What do you read when you’re not writing?” I thought I might share these comments with my readers. So here are some selections from the past two years. Let me know what you think.

Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel

A considerable talent, sadly wasted. HM creates vivid scenes and intriguing dialogue, but scorns any attempt to help the reader understand what characters are actually doing. Nothing is made plain, all is indirection and allusion.

For example, she has a pathological reluctance to call the central character by name—he is always “he”. Since the pronoun refers, by a general grammatical rule, to the last male person named, this leads the reader into error. I know why she does it: she wants the reader to feel always in the character’s mind. But a writer’s first duty is to make the meaning clear, and nothing is worth the sacrifice of that.

The story is told out of chronological sequence. What is the reader’s reward for struggling with the resultant confusion? There should be some higher logic dictating that events are related in a more satisfying or more revealing order. But there is none that I could detect.

Oh, and it’s told in the present tense, a sure-fire way of discouraging the casual browser in the bookstore.
The result is like a movie without its soundtrack: occasionally dramatic and exciting, but mostly bewildering and ultimately boring.

The challenge for the modern literary novel is to present the interior life of a character, that river of random and dislocated thoughts and feelings, while at the same time sustaining an intelligible and rational account of external events. This book does not even try.
(2 October 2009)

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout

I find it hard to say why this book is so utterly captivating. It consists of thirteen short stories set in a small town in New England, most of them featuring or at least mentioning the title character, an ornery schoolteacher with a patient husband and a disaffected son. The tone is low-key, although dramatic things happen—sudden medical emergencies, outbreaks of lunacy, and one gory murder.

Perhaps the appeal is the wisely realistic view the author has of people as vulnerable and sad even when they are being thoroughly nasty. You feel EJ must be very old to have acquired such wisdom. In fact she’s 53.
(24 September 2009)

The Lost Symbol
by Dan Brown

This is DB’s first book since The Da Vinci Code, and it brings a similar thrill: astonishing edge-of-the-seat suspense almost all way through. It has the same faults, too. You have to suspend your critical faculties in order to temporarily accept a lot of hokum about symbols, ancient texts, pyramids, and yadda yadda yadda.

But the story is so exciting and moves so fast that you don’t care (just as, when watching Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar a few days ago, I didn’t care that people talked about guilds, chimney tops, book pages, and other things that did not exist in Ancient Rome).

As in The Da Vinci Code, there’s a problem with the ending: anything short of an apocalypse is bound to seem anticlimactic. But by that time you’re breathless, exhausted and happy.
(22 September 2009)

The Year that Changed the World
by Michael Meyer

A really exciting history book. It tells of the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Revolt was stirring in most Iron Curtain countries, but everyone feared that the buds of reform would be crushed under the Soviet boot—as had always happened before. The suspense is high as people wait to see whether the tanks will roll in again. I lived through these events but I now realise I had no conception of the full drama. Highly recommended.