Reading Diary: Eleanor Catton, more Trollope, and Bates in the woods

Eleanor Catton is not only longlisted for the Booker, she's apparently odds-on favourite -- and for a book, The Luminaries, that hadn't bloody well been released when the list was actually announced. Like AM Homes (see previous post), Catton is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is published in the UK by Granta, but she's ACRES better, with natural style and wit and a great sense of pace. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, was mind-blowingly self-assured, and my god does the fact that she's only about 28 make me depressed.

The Luminaries wasn't due out until September, though I suddenly received an email from Amazon suggesting I buy it and realised they had brought the publication forward. I have now obtained it and lugged it two miles in my backpack on a hot day -- man, it's a chunky beast. But hey, if even a bit of the £14.99 in Blackwells goes to Eleanor Catton, it'll make up for the piss-poor customer service Heffers offered, not to mention the inevitable carpal tunnel syndrome I will have after reading it.

Whilst on Mull this year, I read another by Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, a chunky semi-panoramic drama dealing with the rise of the City and the exciting possibility of spinning money from almost nothing, simply by investing in the right places. Trollope clearly sees Cityboys as a threat to his homely standards of decency and tradition, although, interestingly, the one exception to the 'new money = bad' rule is also the only Jewish character, which at least reminds us that Trollope was in some respects remarkably liberal. 

I say 'semi-panoramic' because the book lacks the social sweep of Bleak House or Middlemarch, which are rather more substantial as a result. Nor did I find it as moving as The Warden. But The Way We Live Now has one great advantage, which is that it's also, pretty much, the way we live now, where the very rich are almost untouchable unless those in power decide to allow them to fall (Murdoch, anyone?). I have a feeling that, were Trollope alive today, some things wouldn't look so very strange to him.

HE Bates's short meditation on the joys of woodlands, Through the Woods, attracted me instantly because I've recently expanded my nature interests to include trees, wildflowers and butterflies (I've liked birds for some years already). Bates draws out a languid, vivid narrative of how several of his favourite woodlands develop with the seasons, complete with a rant about gamekeepers and pheasants: "The pheasant is the lord of life, the almost divine sovereign of the woods. You must not ... do anything to upset his chances of ordained death." Bates is sarcastic and profoundly emotional by turns, and the book is beautifully presented with an elegant, well-spaced font and a gorgeous cover. It's part of a Little Toller series of nature writing -- Frank Fraser Darling's Island Years, Island Farm is going onto my list.

May She Be Forgiven: AM Homes's prize-winning disappointment

I was thrilled when AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction. I have to admit, it's not a prize that has always filled me with joy: back when it was the Orange Prize, it was won by Madeline Miller, for The Song of Achilles (2011), a sacharine romance whose only saving grace was that it was based on The Iliad, and by Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), a self-justifying piece of narcissism if ever there was one.

However, I still cheered for AM Homes, because I read The End of Alice (1996) about five years ago, and remembered it as adventurous, beautifully-written and rather seductive. This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), her best-known since, didn't appeal to me, but I bought May We Be Forgiven (2012) shortly after her victory in the Women's Prize was announced, thinking it would be a safe bet for a great summer read. And hence I learned (as I learn regularly with the Booker) that there is no such thing as a "safe bet" in literary prizes.

The book is plastered with gushing gobbets and is marketed as a Franzen-esque "great American novel" (Jeanette Winterson's words). It certainly has some of the classic tics of one: an obsessive focus on Jewishness, race, presidential history and American branding, not to mention adultery, the failure of the nuclear family, substance abuse and gruesome scatalogical black humour -- to name but a few.

**SPOILERS ALERT** 

(Even Mark Kermode gets told off for this now, and I'm going way further than he does, so I feel bound to issue these warnings.)

The narrator, Harold "Harry" Silver, is kissed by his brother's wife Jane at a Thanksgiving Day dinner. His brother George, a just-slightly-stereotyped American big business type with penchants for sexual harassment, incest roleplay and violent tantrums, crashes his car and kills a couple (possibly deliberately). He is taken to a psychiatric unit, from which he escapes, comes home, and finds Harry in bed with Jane. He smashes his wife over the head with a lamp. Their two children are fetched home from boarding school just in time to see their mother's life support turned off.

It's fair to say the novel starts with a bang. The rest of the narrative piles up subplot after subplot in a rather rambling fashion: Harry starts finding women to sleep with on the internet and becomes temporarily convinced one of them has been murdered (she later disappears, leaving him to look after her demented parents); he goes with another woman to an erotic party in a Laser Quest; loses his job as a Nixon scholar. George's children, Nate (12) and Ashley (11), suddenly awaken to an awareness of the world around them and convince Harry to adopt the dead couple's son, Ricardo; Ashley is sexually abused by a teacher at her boarding school; George, now in a wilderness-survival prison unit, uses the iPad Harry sent him to get into arms dealing with an Israeli prisoner friend, necessitating an utterly unnecessary sequence where Harry has to be cruel to be kind and help the FBI recapture his own brother.

The novel climaxes with a trip to a tribal village in South Africa for Nate's bar mitzvah (he has done work with the village), during which the local medicine man effortlessly points out some profound and noble truths about Harry and his family (my racism radar definitely started twitching in this scene), and gives him some mysterious tea which help him to expel the vile and putrid mess he has made of his life so far (as well as rather a lot of faecal matter).

Some of the facial expressions I
perfected while reading this book

There are some highlights. The glimpse of academic thriller (thing Byatt's Possession and Frayn's Headlong), when Harry is allowed access to some boxes of Richard Nixon's previously-unseen papers, is good fun. Homes uses a first-person present-tense voice, which I generally find incredibly annoying, but which she manages to keep light with a lot of dialogue and a fairly unreflective style. It's a pacy read, with no official 'chapters', only short breaks. And Ricardo, Nate and Ashley (if not Harry) are generally sympathetic characters, though all of them seem at least five years older than they're meant to be, and I started to feel some affection for them well before the end.

I can feel what Homes is trying to do -- it's a narrative about trying to live with guilt, and the impulsiveness and soullessness of modern life. But the book never stays in one place long enough to do any of this properly. None of the subplots are developed or add anything to the story other than a sense of how random and transient most things are; none of them, in fact, really qualify as subplots at all. And I was never emotionally drawn in, even during the inevitable breakdowns and outbursts of both Nate and Harry, which should be the climax of the book; instead they are dealt with in half a page, and "told" rather than "shown". The book is stubbornly non-visceral.

Not only this, the writing is uneven and even lazy. Homes has a weird habit of ending a sentence with a dash followed by a single word. "It's a denuded glass booth -- powerless." "... pieces of the lamp -- shards." "... to suck the hot mustard directly from the plastic packets -- self-punishment." WHERE DID SHE GET THIS FROM? It's such a self-conscious piece of stylistics that I was sick of it after literally one example -- saturated. There was never a place where I thought, ah, yes, this extra word adds a whole new dimension to this sentence -- clever. Either it repeated something already expressed, or it smacked us across the face with the subtext any intelligent reader would have been able to infer -- superfluous.

I actually started marking things that
pissed me off. She repeats the same
phrase twice in two lines, for
no obvious reason. ARGH.

And that pretty much sums up my twin problems with this book -- that Homes appears to trust the reader too much in the big emotional moments and plotlines she really ought to have taken a bit more time over, but can't manage to trust us to understand the simplest of things. "I can't help but notice," Harry muses, "that I've become close to Cheryl, that I share things with her, that I'm starting to think of her as a friend, a confidante." Oh my god, I thought, that's how we should be reading the intimate conversation you've just been having. My head was starting to bleed from all that puzzled scratching, but now I understand -- enlightened.

Basically, the skeleton plot of this book has already been covered by Nick Hornby's About a Boy: empty, materialistic man suddenly encounters crisis and learns what is really important in life, i.e. engaging with the people around you. It's a decent length at 480 pages, and yet the message of the whole novel has to be sledge-hammered home by what Theo Tait termed the "keynote speech" of the book. This is fine for a dick-lit-hit-cum-Hugh-Grant-film, but for serious, prize-winning literature, it did not live up to my expectations -- disappointing.