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.