American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

American Gods was on my pile of books to read for a very long time, but when I went back to England for Christmas it was the one I was most keen to read, so it’s the one I picked for the plane trip back. I read the rest of it slowly, and overall very much enjoyed the striking imagery, strong characters and evocative settings of the book.

At the same time, though, I felt a certain disappointment similar to my feelings at the end of Murakami’s novels. A lot happened, and some of the plot strands were tied up so neatly as to almost be pat, but I still felt like my expectations weren’t fulfilled. I wanted more to happen. I think the problem was that the stakes never seemed genuinely very high.

Conceptually, American Gods is strong. It has a lot in common with Gaiman’s friend and collaborator Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, only of course set not on a fantasy world but in a rather gritty modern America. In Discworld, it was belief that made a god strong while superficial worship was irrelevant, while that seems somewhat inverted in American Gods but the basic outline of an everyman figure assisting a god whose glory days are in the past while a large conflict approaches is clearly echoed. That said, the books are of course very different beasts and Gaiman is in full adult-writer mode, not shying away from the profane, darkly violent, sexual or indeed hypersexual. Not advised as a Coraline follow-up.

The novel revolves around Shadow, a big guy of indeterminate brown-skinned race who is a very engaging main character, being big and quiet but also inquisitive, loyal, intelligent and unfailingly self-sacrificing. The novel opens with him being released from prison, where he is serving time for a somewhat self-sacrificial crime, expecting life to be much better once he’s released. However, he finds that the life he wanted to return to has crumbled, but has a chance at a new job with a strange old man with the air of a con artist who introduces himself as ‘Wednesday.’

One of my problems with American Gods was that many parts of it were too obvious. I liked Wednesday’s name, as I know not everyone knows the origin of the English names for days, but another character introduced very early but properly revealed much later had a name that was far too blatant. Shadow’s own background was signposted far off, too, as was the overarching plot and the tacked-on murder mystery was so obvious as to feel to me like it shouldn’t have been included at all. Part of my feeling of being unsatisfied, I suppose, derived from this feeling of the big reveals not being at all surprising.

I loved the first third of the book. I enjoyed the bleak vision of modern America Gaiman drew up, of ex-cons and small-town rumours and at the same time, the mysteries of an underworld of gods living amongst us. I loved that the lore of America was tied up in its kitschy roadside attractions, and that traveling around the country was obviously an important part of this story. And I enjoyed both Shadow’s and Wednesday’s characters and their relationship.

But then things meandered. Far too long was spent with Shadow fitting into the community of a small, quiet northern town where everybody knows everybody and yet every year some kid goes missing in the snow. This whole section of the book felt very weak for me, labouring the point that an ordinary everyday existence had appeal to Shadow but he was caught up in some bigger issues. This was also where the over-obvious murder mystery came in, with the added layer of bathos coming from the fact that nobody thought there was any murder.

This part felt like it was give Shadow a real moral dilemma, weighing up a fantastical world against a real, rooted one where people value him for what he is, but in the end that wasn’t the point, the point was simply stalling. And that left me feeling unsatisfied. I suppose that middle act wouldn’t have mattered if the last part had been really satisfying, but in the end even a climactic clash of epic proportions didn’t seem very satisfactory at all. The antagonists weren’t a well thought-out force to be reckoned with, and there were too few identifiable individuals to care for. At that stage there didn’t seem to be much real threat to Shadow, so there was very little sense of suspense or urgency at the end.

I don’t want to give the impression I thought this was in any way a bad book. It was enjoyable, full of strong images and excellent characterisation. I will certainly watch the adaptation when it comes out. But it was another case of me expecting more than I really got.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

I seem to mostly read Murakami’s books while I’m travelling. I started this book on the way to Japan and finished it when back home for a while. Murakami’s breakthrough book and seemingly his most widely-read, I thought this could be more exciting and engaging than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. However, I found it very similar – but lacking the charms or intriguing strangeness of that book. And I can’t say it was my favourite. So no, I wouldn’t say I recommend Norwegian Wood, either.

It seems that Norwegian Wood is actually Murakami’s plainest story. No passing through possibly-figurative walls at the bottoms of wells here, nor peculiar psychic powers. No odd gruesome war stories or mysterious dirty phone calls.

Norwegian Wood is a simple, melancholy love story. Watanabe’s best friend dies, and he has a brief romance with the dead friend’s former girlfriend. She ends up institutionalised, while Watanabe drifts – seemingly like all Murakami’s protagonists. He muses on how ordinary he is while enjoying the arts, and meets several intriguing girls. All the girls fall for him and talk to him in very quirky ways, often about sex. This, too, seems a staple of Murakami, and again strikes me as the very same sort of wish-fulfilment for lonely, horny young men that is seen so often in seinen manga.

If I thought that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was frustrating because it always seemed like exciting events were on the brink of happening but never really did, Norwegian Wood is worse. There isn’t really any drive to the story, none of Watanabe’s relationships seem to get beyond superficial games of intrigue and the climactic final action has been coming all along and unfolds with turgid inevitability, neither causing the reader any surprise nor sadness.

I must say, I don’t understand the fuss around Murakami. His characters constantly have to tell one another how interesting they are so that they actually seem that way. They always get told how odd their way of thinking is, how charming their speech is, how they have a special and intriguing outlook, but other than a few pleasingly poetic musings, I don’t see the evidence for it. I could understand if Murakami championed the ordinary, overlooked sorts in life and made the reader empathise with a dull character who in fact had great hidden strength, but he instead seems to just have these ordinary men suffering from sad pasts yet constantly surrounded by attractive women who find their plain speech, simple favours and occasional compliments terribly fascinating and interesting.

Occasionally Murakami does bring up interesting questions. I did have an emotional reaction to the utterly horrible friend of Watanabe’s who has great ambition but a callous mind and is constantly torturing his poor girlfriend, but his part in the book is very minor. Some musings about sex and loyalty also resonated with me, even if my conclusions were essentially opposite from Watanabe’s.

Otherwise, I must confess I was bored. Almost nothing happens in this book. It’s a collection of unrealistic conversations with unrealistic women. As a translation, like most readers I forgive stilted dialogue, awkward pacing and peculiar sentence structure, as condemning the style of a writer isn’t fair when it comes through the filter of another writer from another language altogether, but it’s the substance of this book that I found lacking.

My defining impression of Murakami novels, one that will likely prevent me reading another, is that he shows us an engaging everyman, clever but innocuous and always good with the girls, and puts them in a situation where it seems that something interesting is just about to happen to them. But at the end of the book, nothing very interesting ever does. Or if interesting things do happen, the character simply drifts on in the same manner. I don’t want melodrama or wailing and gnashing of teeth – but I do want some kind of impact on character and narrative. But once again I was left unsatisfied. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

I’ve been meaning to actually read one of Murakami’s novels for years, since I read his After the Quake short stories some time ago. But it never really felt like a priority until a few weeks ago, I felt like reading something more contemporary and he seemed ideal. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his breakthrough novel, was the one I found first. I found Norwegian Wood a little later and get the impression it may be a better place to start with him, but it was too late. And I will get to Norwegian Wood next anyway – for while I can’t say I think Murakami is the genius he’s often made out to be, nor that I truly loved this book, there’s something about his writing voice that is incredibly compelling and makes him eminently readable. That’s a rare and intersting thing.

That said, the thing that struck me most about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is that it’s really not worlds away from the kind of thing you find in light novels. The kind that get adapted into anime series and get lots of fanservice-heavy merchandise. In fact, early on in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was strongly reminded of Bakemonogatari. Sound far-fetched? I don’t think it is.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle centres on a very normal everyman character named Okada. When first his cat and then his wife go missing, he begins to meet a whole lot of girls, many of whom have special powers or hidden oddities about them. There’s the mysterious and standoffish clairvoyant. There’s the clairvoyant’s little sister, a beauty with an odd story about being born in extreme pain until she tried to kill herself, whereupon she could feel nothing. Then there’s the precocious loli, who at sixteen is too young for Okada but teasingly flirtatious. Then an older woman with a lot of money and the means to advance Okada’s needs. And of course, quite passively, Okada begins to develop strange powers of his own, powers that actually seem to transcend those of the women around him and make him necessary to them. Trust me when I say that this is all very typical stuff for light novels. There’s a lot of the same set-up in To Aru as well.

But of course much happens here that is not the territory of such light entertainment. There are long and detailed passages about Japanese military actions in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which include quite brutal violence. There is a lot of sexually explicit description and erotic writing, although invariably presented rather clinically. There is much musing about metaphysical matters, the meaning of life, how events in childhood deeply affect a person’s story, and discussion about people’s place in one another’s existences. And of course, Okada being in his thirties there is a different outlook from teenaged protagonists, a far greater sense of impotence and ennui.

I resent the book a little. As seems to be the trend for Murakami books, very little happens. The ending is contrived and could have happened at any point previously, meaning there’s not really any sense of true progression. Though I’m reading in translation, there’s also the fact that we get so many voices in this book, so many storytellers, yet except for the easy imitation of teenage speech given to Kasahara Mei, they all express themselves in the same, slightly off-kilter way, a prim and matter-of-fact style given to metaphysical tangents.

Yet the fact is that Murakami definitely has the quality a writer should prize most highly, which is readability. He can have his character meander and think trite philosophical thoughts at great length, and he can have next to nothing happen for chapters on end, yet I still wanted to go back to the story. Only in the old man’s stories about his army life did I get bored, and yet they might be the part that endures most clearly in my mind. Okada is not a blank slate, nor is he incredibly ordinary, but he is extremely easy to identify with and even like. That’s a rare gift, and I suspect what makes Murakami the success that he is. Okada is not like me, his interests are not like mine and nor is his life, and he does a whole lot of things that I would never do. Yet he never seems strange or hard to understand. He is always sympathetic, even when psychotically violent or completely irrational.

Very little happens in the book, and much of what does happen defies explanation. A lot is purposely vague, and the fact is that making something random seem significant by having something that parallels it popping up in a flashback is just smoke and mirrors. I dislike open-ended meanings and bizarre supernatural events that can be explained away by saying ‘oh, this is magical realism’. And yet I still liked the book, and its writer. I think that is Murakami’s trump card, his own magic power. I don’t think he needs to write a good story to write well.

So I will at the very least read another Murakami book. I don’t think I will call myself a fan, but I certainly don’t regret the time I gave to this book, or think I should be cautious with giving my time to another. Murakami has an undeniable gift, of making his reader feel they’re very like the character narrating the book even if he is thinking or doing the strangest things, and I find that undeniably fascinating. 

Joe the Barbarian, by Grant Morrison

Of the big names of comic writing, I always struggled to get into Grant Morrison's work. I remember when I was reading a lot of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, giving his best-known books a try. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum but felt the writing was a little haphazard and overly concerned with being edgy in an attempt to seem terribly grown-up. I read a fair chunk ofThe Invisibles but just couldn't engage with any of the characters. So while it was Morrison's name that made me pick up Joe the Barbarian in the comic book store, it also made me cautious. Opening it to a random page near the end, though, and seeing the intriguing image of Joe and his two companions standing in front of an army that included Robin sitting on top of a (ahem, very much non-DC) Transformer while Superman hovers above and some sort of battle-scarred Care Bear cowered in the background, I was intrigued. 

As it turns out, the presence of these sort of cameos is minimal, but the comic itself is quite brilliant, easily my favourite of Morrison's works and actually one of my favourite limited comics overall. It has been optioned for a film, and it would make quite a brilliant one. 

The set-up is a simple one that allows for the full flow of Morrison's imagination. Joe is a young teen with diabetes, and when some unfortunate events around him visiting his father's grave lead to severe hypoglycaemia, he begins to hallucinate - and getting down from his attic room to the refrigerator in order to get a soda and then find the fusebox to get the lights back on becomes an epic fantasy populated by his toys and the people in his life who seem to represent the difference civilisations he meets in the world that struggles against King Death. 

It's a classic multiple-levels-of-reality story, recalling Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with the various civilisations found in different parts of the house reminding me of Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, but that angle of low blood sugar leading to hallucinations and the constant interpolations of reality that remind us that this is a serious medical situation that could lead to Joe's death, as well as the obvious abandonment issues he has, give layers of urgency and grit that take it away from being twee and keep it thoroughly modern. 

In his hallucinated world, Joe's pet rat seems like a huge warrior and becomes one of the best companion characters in this style of story I've ever seen, brave despite his reputation as a coward and a fine guardian. Together, they travel via the bathroom - populated by toilet dwarfs - down the vast mountains of the staircase, battle a monstrous dog that has wandered through the open door, receive aid from cowardly scientists, become tempted by the comfortable warmth of the hearth that is of course only a distraction, to the waters of life, but then before they are drunk, down into the basement where King Death dwells - in the clothes Joe's father left behind. 

It's consciously an archetypal hero's fantasy, and driven in part by the laziness of the ancient prophecy (of the 'Dying Boy'), but that is a large part of its charm. The presence of toys and various real-world interpolations are fun, and Joe himself is very likeable - he is bewildered by the world around him, trying to impress on these fantasy figures that there is a greater reality in which they don't really exist, with his square-jawed, wide-eyed design keeping him feeling grounded and ordinary rather than romanticised. 

This is perhaps something that a lot of other writers have done before. But it's done so well and with such exuberance - something I don't really associate with Morrison - that it's hard to resist. Highly recommended - and I certainly hope a film adaptation will eventually come. 

Avengers vs X-men

Drawn in by the Messiah War and the surrounding events, I wanted to see what became of young Hope after all the difficulties of getting her into the world – and besides, this event was part of the reason I read that one in the first place. They feel like they followed hot on the heels of one another to me, but in fact there were a couple of years to build up to this. Hope helped with the powers of other newly-awakened mutants, and then in a schism involving Cyclops sending his youngest out to battle against a powerful sentinel made by the new kiddy Hellfire club (who are thoroughly lame and unbelievable), Wolverine left to found his own institute to keep them safe and out of battle. Of course, that couldn’t last too long, and when it becomes apparent that Hope is attracting the powerful and destructive Phoenix Force, Cyclops’ desire to protect her and Wolverine preferring to let his fellow Avengers take charge of the situation bring things to a head.

Yes, once again it goes back to the Phoenix. Too many major events in the X-Men’s canon go back to it, as do adaptations like the cartoon series, when in all honesty it wasn’t that interesting a plot in the first place. That said, my distaste for the idea didn’t last all that long when it soon became clear that going back to themes prodded at a few decades ago through the cynical, gritty, trying-to-show-maturity filter of present-day comics allowed for some interesting new angles. And honestly, if the underlying concept is Avengers vs X-Men, there isn’t really that much of a contest unless the mutants get a bit of a power-up. Several of the most powerful X-Men (and former X-Men villains) are Avengers anyways, and the X-Men are after all not made up largely of characters powerful enough to each carry a title since the silver age and compete alone against major cosmic forces. On the other hand, the phoenix power-up was if anything too far the other way, making the X-Men far too powerful to be opposed until inevitably it’s the corrupting influence of the bird that makes them lose their way. If anything, this was my major complaint with the event – the most interesting questions it raised, like what the Avengers could do if the X-Men genuinely were making Earth perfect and forcing them to stand down, or whether power must be earned (as if most of the Marvel roster earned their power when it first appeared) – get left by the wayside for the easy ending offered by absolute power corrupting absolutely.

But still, everyone loves heroes turning against their fellow heroes – just look at Civil War – and this is Marvel’s most broad attempt at that yet. The decimated X-Men stayed out of the War, but now pretty much everyone who fought in it – as well as several of their former friends – are against them. And I have to say, I found it very compelling reading, and yet again asked myself why the big Hollywood adaptations couldn’t take on this sort of plot, based on betrayal and comradeship.

Not everything works. The clash between the Avengers Academy and the mutant captives was rushed and unconvincing. The Hellfire kiddies I definitely could have done without – as I said, they are very unconvincing, like when the kid promises money for prestige in prison, as if that wouldn’t just get him assaulted. Xavier deserved a greater presence, only shining in a brilliant chapter where a secret council meets, and most of the miniseries of one-on-one fights were terrible, either ending with one person getting distracted or just leaving, with one of the last ones, a series of gag comics, just the sheer laziness of a studio throwing things at a comic to see what stuck. The Iron Fist side-story was boring and Iron Man was a bit irritatingly too capable of doing anything with some nonsense built into his suit.

Still, overall I got very carried away with this and very much enjoyed the moments where the world-destroying firey force was forgotten and two people dug into one another’s pasts and the differences in their approaches. Luke Cage in particular got very much humanised and I like how modern Marvel doesn’t shy from sex, drugs, infidelity or decadence. Though having Namor as some sort of sex-pest only made me snort in derision. 

X-men – Messiah War

I’m not entirely sure why I decided to read the Messiah War storyline – I think perhaps it was because I saw Hope in a glimpse at the Avengers Vs X-men comics (a gimmick no fan can quite resist, no matter how much they might roll their eyes), and thought I needed more context. There are a lot of mutants, even with the much-reduced post-decimation roster, that I don’t recognize here either, though – Pixie, Elixir and Vanisher sent me back to Wikipedia, and (the cameo from) Peepers made me remember a long-forgotten silly character, may he rest in peace.

Messiah War covers a major event in the wake of The Scarlet Witch very nearly depowering every mutant in her Marvel universe. Only a handful remained – though predictably just about all the established favourites either stayed mutants or regained their powers through twisted plot contrivances. Anyway, after a long period of searching, the X-men finally see what they had hoped for on Cerebro – the light of a new mutant life. Indeed, Hope’s birth causes the whole machine to shut down. Unfortunately, other factions also knew of her birth, and from the start Hope is both a symbol and a threat. After much carnage, it is Cable who saves her, and eventually he feels forced to take her into the future to keep her safe. However, she is anything but safe as Bishop chases him, determined to kill her, and besides, the future is full of numerous other threats, from cockroach people to a Stryfe risen to dominance. Marvel’s rather confusing view of timelines involves a definite confirmation of multiple possible futures, with time travellers coming from them, but one master timeline, so that when a character goes back and changes something, his future then no longer exists. Thus Bishop is determined to prevent his from coming to pass.

Young Hope gets to spend a fairly pleasant early childhood with a surrogate mother (from whom she gets her name) in a community hidden from the world, then learns survival and combat skills as a child frequently in a lot of danger, spends two years fending for herself in a dystopian city (and finding a taste of love), comes very close to death in an X-Force side-story that I have to say I enjoyed mostly for Apocalyse, then grows to young adulthood in a capsule, Lion-O stylee. As soon as she is back in the present, it’s very clear that the modern X-Men writers want to be gritty and hard-hitting, though if anything, their constant bloodiness, killing-off of fan favourite characters and - rather awkwardly given a long history of undoing deaths and heroes and villains alike surviving the most unlikely things - trying to make moral tensions between killing and not killing.

Ultimately, the Messiah War and Second Coming arcs feel rather more inconsequential than many such major events. But I certainly like Cable much more now, and find the new X-Force compelling – especially interacting with Deadpool, who for once was written in a very enjoyable way as a kind of long-suffering clown and extreme punching bag. Also nice knowing Doug and Warlock are still around, and that the stupid Predator X has finally died. Now it remains to be seen if Hope can be a likeable and important character beyond being a vulnerable child who needs protecting.

Every time I read a decent event like this one, though, even if it’s not a brilliant one, I wonder why the makers of the Hollywood adaptations never try to adapt one of these larger-scale stories, especially with the modern comic book mixture of sincerity, grit and ironic self-awareness (without being smug about it).  

Dunk and Egg (novellas 1-3)

After the last couple of Song of Ice and Fire books, the question that’s been mostly occupying me regarding George RR Martin is whether or not he can tell a story with a good ending. Because for all this world-building is compelling, his main novels have become a great sprawl with no end in sight – and when that end comes, will it satisfy? There are so many characters to root for who will ultimately be enemies…‘Is it all going to end with a whimper?’ I ask, trying to avoid directly quoting TS Eliot. And so I came to the (currently) three Dunk and Egg novellas, short stories from the same world, a little under a hundred years before Game of Thrones. The first made me think that yes, Martin knows how to craft a good, solid ending. The others made me wonder. After all, The Hedge Knight was kept so exaggeratedly simple it was almost cartoonish – and the others were more ambitious, but soon began to sprawl themselves, and now the larger tale feels very much unfinished.

What is remarkable about the stories is just how intricate Martin’s world-building is. These characters are mentioned in the main series, especially by Maester Aemon, who knew them, but what’s impressive is more subtle – characters talk of the entire era, of the political situation and the power struggles, of how men compared one king with the next, and the quirks of the men around the royalty.

Focusing on just one point-of-view character makes for neat, compelling storytelling – as long as there is a decent setting, which the two stories with tournaments have – and I very much liked Sir Duncan and his relationship with the cocky but still childlike squire with a secret. I care about them. I’m interested in Bloodraven and how he becomes what he is in the main series. Though we already know the ultimate end for Dunk and Egg, I quite possibly want to know what happens to them next more than any of the characters in the man series. These novellas had their flaws, but they still very much engaged me. 

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire book 5, by George RR Martin

A Dance with Dragons is essentially part two of the half-book that was A Feast for Crows, although long enough that it has been split in two for its paperback release, confusingly enough. With a few little exceptions like chapters for Jaime and Cersei, it fills in the story of all the characters conspicuously absent from the previous book – Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Jon Snow, Bran, Davos and a certain Ironborn thought dead. As the first two tended to have the chapters I found most interesting in the first three books, I looked forward to this, and while it was indeed a rather more interesting book than its predecessor, I have to say that it chiefly featured more treading water and unnecessary padding. It began in an interesting fashion – Reek is the most iconic development in a long while, and it was good to see what happened to Tyrion – but then the book went as flat as its predecessor. Daenerys’ story really stalled when she decided her dragons had to be locked away underground, and until the last few chapters I was worried that her story would not get out of that rut at all. Even when it did, the aftermath slowed back to a crawl again. Tyrion remains an interesting character but apart from the little irony of Dany saving him without knowing it and the clever way Mormont enters his story, the way he drifts about meeting uninteresting new characters is frustrating. Arya’s story arc has her just having to train very hard at this juncture, so little of much interest happened there, and Bran was in a similar position: they in particular were noticeably given chapters that were noticeably just stalling any interesting action.

Essentially, I’m finding these books frustrating. This isn’t what I hoped for when I eagerly got the second book to continue the story. I thought that four books later, characters would be very far from where they began. I didn’t expect Bran to have only just met his three-eyed crow, or for Jon to be interminably trying to please different factions while nothing of any interest at all happens at the Wall. I didn’t expect the Lannisters to just be lingering and for any possibility of the Starks’ return to power to still be years and years off. I didn’t expect Dany to just be sitting around thinking about who to marry or shitting and bleeding all over the place in the wilderness with her return to her country potentially years off. And to be honest, I can’t see how almost the entirety of Westeros except perhaps The Vale will manage to escape mass death in the winter that is to come. As I said with the last book, it’s not actually in any way proven that Martin is any good at all at ending a story – it’s all taken on trust. Even this one didn’t end with a bang – just with the incipit return of a character I’d expected to remerge for the entire book (though admittedly for most of it I thought he was hidden amongst the Dany’s flatterers having changed his face enough that Ser Barristan didn’t recognise it). Well, we’ll have to see.

And I’ll likely be waiting a long while. It’s been taking Martin long and longer to write his books, and this is the first time I’ve been there for one of the looooong gaps.

The Fry Chronicles, by Stephen Fry

It’s been quite a few years now since Stephen Fry’s first volume of autobiography, the excellently-titled Moab is my Washpot - though apparently in light of the fact nobody got it, this new release has a simpler name. It was released to great fanfare about being the first book to be released in so many ways – in bookshops, as ebook download, as an iOS app etc – and shot to the top of the non-fiction charts. And I was well-pleased, because Stephen Fry is amongst my favourite public figures, being educated, eloquent, and also very funny, a non-threatening example of what much of modern England seems to have grown to fear and resent, yet also remains venerated by thousands who are perhaps less vocal about it. I thought him superb in Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, better in Wilde and read most of his novels. I love QI despite occasionally being annoyed by it, and his is one of only three Twitter accounts I follow. I like that he represents the old world but is so tech-savvy. I like that he is vulnerable and happy to talk about his flaws and that he is also very much an aspirational figure, and have read most of his novels, which while really no classics were well-written and highly memorable.

So though I was far from a day-one reader, I was very interested in this release once I was reminded it existed, and even put other books on hold for it, which (Anna Karenina – which I have read on and off for years now – aside) I rarely do. I had been very eager for this book after finding Moab is my Washpot so compelling yet stopping short of the most interesting parts of Fry’s life. Maybe it is because I had been so eager that I was so disappointed.

I wanted to read about Fry’s realisation that he was bipolar and his infamous disappearance. I wanted to hear about how his first love made him feel and the fear and the desire of beginning a first serious relationship. I wanted to know how his public school sexual experiences affected him later. I wanted to know about his creative process and his struggles to write books. I wanted him to talk about why almost all his books have pretty boys in their early teens in pseudo-innocent sexual situations. I wanted to hear about the rebellious side of his life at Cambridge. Instead…where the first book seemed to have Fry bear his soul about his difficult adolescence, this one seemed very much to be keeping up a screen, despite the times he consciously says that he is revealing more than, perhaps, he would like to. Oh, and it said ‘autres maeurs’ instead of ‘autres moeurs’.

It’s a short book, and there are some very pleasant anecdotes about Emma Thompson, about Alan Bennett and about Douglas Adams, all drawn in the shorthand needed for such public figures. There’s some interesting little paragraphs about Blackadder and I derived some personal satisfaction from seeing how similar Fry’s attitude to his Cambridge education was to my own, except when it came to writing exams: he apparently developed a winning essay that he could bend to answer any question, largely based on an Anne Barton essay (my own wonderful old skeleton of a supervisor as an undergrad).

But by and large, this book was dull and totally lacking in insight. Some anecdotes had been told on QI. Others were covered in documentaries about Blackadder. All were the sort of thing suitable for those platforms – light, entertaining and at arm’s length from the actual man and his actual beliefs. His endless hand-wringing and emphasising the fact that he knows he’s very lucky and doesn’t want to come over as a prick but inevitably will gets very tiresome, too.

Perhaps it’s time to expect the safe and sanitary from Fry. But I wanted so much more than a book full of the padding of funny little stories and the repetition of the fact he really just got very lucky writing a play for Edinburgh, being in Footlights at the right time and getting an agent out of it, with everything else just tumbling out of that. This felt like an inflated encyclopaedia entry written by the subject. I wanted to know not just what happened, but how it felt.

Well, there’s still another volume to come – or even, perhaps, two. I will still read them, but my keenness has faded.

A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire book 4)

The fourth of the Ice and Fire books was the first one I didn’t read excitedly, or with any great desire to pick up again once I’d put it down. By this point the series was selling enough to top the New York Times bestsellers list, even without help of the excellent HBO series, but it would be a further six years before book 5 would come out.

And, as I found out at the end of this book, A Dance with Dragons is really this book, part 2. Even though the last one was big enough to need splitting into two for these shores, apparently that idea did not agree with Martin’s plans at all, so he wrote this book to focus on events in King’s Landing – with a few other strands thrown in – while the next will deal with Dany, Stannis, Bran and the rest.

I’m not sure whether it was because once the split happened this book needed padding or because Martin just has plans that require a lot of set-up here, but it really felt as though he decided to just tread water with this book. Far too much is given over to dull new (or previously peripheral) characters like the Krakens and the Dornish, without whom the central story would thus far be no different at all. Neither Jaime nor Cersei interest me all that much, and Samwell’s chapters are always very, very slow. This left only Brienne and a few chapters with the Stark daughters to spice up an otherwise turgid volume. The prose remains slightly painful, and there was one horrible attempt to make Cersei use some British vernacular that Martin got totally wrong – which I don’t believe was a printing error. I don’t mind there being Americanisms in a medieval England-style fantasy world – after all, it is a fantasy world – and the likes of ‘I wrote him’ I can happily let slide, but trying to have an English tone and getting it wrong ('He had bloody well think again') is in the realm of terrible fanfic. At least Martin has moved beyond using ‘merlon’ and ‘whicker’ every few pages, though.

After the fascinating cliffhangers of the last book, this was a real let-down. The hideous figure from the end of A Storm of Swords doesn’t even show up again until near the end of this one, the most interesting characters Tyrion, Bran and Dany are barely mentioned, and to add injury to it all, looking now at the Wikipedia, I see this is where Martin had intended there to be the time-skip I’ve been hoping for since the end of the first book, but he’s put it off because otherwise the next one would be all flashbacks.

It struck me at the end of the book, where Martin all but apologises to his readers for this, that while I’ve seen he can write great characters, great twists and great bits of political machination, I have no evidence at all that he can write a good, solid story with a powerful ending. Now I fear what the rest of the books will give us. Time to read something else for a bit.

The Subtle Knife

If I were to be unkind, I could summarise The Subtle Knife really quite adequately by simply saying, ‘Some people go some places – and this boy finds a knife’. Because that is basically all that happens. No wonder I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I’d read it! Yes, Lyra was very sweet, even if she seemed to be regressing rather than growing up, and yes, it’s good to see a wound that actually bothers someone properly in a children’s book, but it really wasn’t especially interesting.

And to be honest, the links to Paradise Lost and the story of the Fall, as well as almost all the cod-philosophical musings on Dark Matter and puberty are inelegant and really rather arbitrary.

Still, it’s better than almost any children’s literature out there, and I had a pretty enjoyable read. I’m not going to complain.

Lolita

It took far longer than it should have done, but I’ve come to the end of Lolita, truly amongst the best books of all time. Nabokov’s prose is a tour de force throughout, and consistently beautiful – while in many places opaque. The story itself is functional and well-crafted, with only enough actual events for a short story so firmly fixed by foreshadowing, by allusions, by the intricate detail in which such events are unfolded, that the prose and the study of Humbert Humbert’s psychological state take centre-stage – and enchant and mesmerise the audience.

Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.

Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.

Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.

When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.

Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.

Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.

An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.

Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.

Pnin

Nabokov’s Pnin is only a very short book – ideal reading for a rainy, cheerless day…and I would recommend it to anyone, because bringing about smiles of both laughter and wistfulness is a sure sign of success.

Yes, Pnin has greatly impressed me – and because it was such a success, it’s buoyed up my estimation of all the rest of Nabokov’s work, too. To be silly and florid, all I had seen was a flat landscape, with beautiful flora but no undulation, but now I perceive in his talent great hills and valleys, and I am greatly relieved – my faith restored!

Because Pnin is very funny. Nabokov has made me laugh before, of course – I laughed when I read Lolita at 15 or 16 at Humbert’s wicked abuse of sleeping pills on Charlotte (before his far more wicked and chilling planned abuse of them later). It made me giggle to read how Humbert ‘had put the radio at full blast […] had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight […] had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her’ and still she would not wake, until he kisses her, whereupon she ‘awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped).’ It makes me giggle now. But Pnin’s humour is very different. It is sweet, and endearing, and his character is almost bereft of darkness. As Nabokov himself wrote, writing Pnin was a ‘brief sunny escape from [Lolita’s] intolerable spell’. Indeed, Pnin is strangely interwoven with that work, written at the same time, and both helping to promote its deliciously sensual sister (when Pnin was serialised) and being bourn along in her contrails (after Lolita finally became a great success). They are so different that finally I unreservedly admire Nabokov and his art. This is the chameleonic quality I hoped for, and there is much to admire – and envy – in these two works, especially when side-by-side.

A collection of short stories or sketches more than a novel, Pnin is entirely character-driven. I expected Timofey Pnin (himself) to be a stereotyped, flat character like so many of Nabokov’s comic creations – but he is not. Nabokov puts himself in the story as a narrator (which I don’t think causes any great problems – the narrator-Nabokov is just a character, no different from any other historical figure placed in fiction; he just happens to be being written by himself), but it is clear that however much Pnin is created from observation, he is also created from deep familiarity – and he is by no means stupid; he simply has little English, which makes him seem less intelligent than he is.

Indeed, I saw a lot of myself in Pnin. I found him a far more sympathetic character than I had expected. His awkward affection towards his ‘son’ (and that awful moment where he thinks he has broken his beautiful gift from him), the way he goes on being utterly devoted to Liza despite knowing that she is only manipulating him, hurting him – that I understand, and for it, and for his countless other hapless, endearing traits, I really warmed to Tim Pnin, and the little world briefly built about him.

The Da Vinci Code

(P528): Please tell me the Teacher isn’t going to be Teabing…
(P532): Oh god…
(P533): Yes…yes, he is.

Those are the notes I scrawled to myself as I read some of the latter chapters of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Now that I’ve had a little time to look up some of the references I wasn’t sure about and find out some of the true history behind the organisations described, I think it’s high time to put down some of my thoughts on this minor publishing phenomenon, since I finished it a little while back, now.

It was an entertaining little page-turner, no better or worse written than the average children’s book, and if it inspires some interest in art and religious history (both areas of great fascination for me since I was a small boy – a much smaller boy than I am now, I mean!), then that is surely something positive. However, the book is also an extremely frustrating one.

Firstly, we have to fully accept that the characters are all incredibly stupid. Harvard Professors, Police Chiefs and professional cryptographers alike are idiots. Not only are they incapable of detecting a blindingly obvious anagram like ‘O Draconian Devil’ beside a mimicry of the Vitruvian Man, but they quite fail to notice what is blatantly mirror-writing for several pages. Even worse, a man who keeps the most important secret in the world encodes his ‘cryptex’ with the name of his own granddaughter! That’s not good encryption practice, now, is it? This would all be much more forgivable if Dan Brown did not insist on having his idiotic characters marvelling at how terribly clever all this is at every new revelation.

As you can tell from my little notes, I figured out who the ‘bad guy’ was going to be a few pages before he was revealed. I hoped it wouldn’t be him, and the French accent threw me off the scent for a while, but his pulling rank, and his blatant ‘last-person-you’d-suspect’ status made it inevitable – and rather underwhelming. Not only this, but I wish Brown had bothered to do some research into English speech. Sure, he throws in some todgers, some crisps, but really – no Brit refers to university as ‘school’, and these Anglophile French would be very unlikely to say anyone has got ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’. Add to this a tea obsession and some very melodramatic bad-guy ‘monologuing’ (as they put it in ‘The Incredibles’) and we have a very British bad guy. Seems very old-fashioned in such an à la mode piece, full of exophoric references to Smart Cars and suchlike. Perfect for the zeitgeist; I doubt it will endure.

What kind of name is ‘Teabing’, anyway? That’s NOT a good anagram for ‘Baigent’!

The countless inaccuracies in the background to the story are barely worth mentioning. It’s a work of fiction, after all. But when Brown begins the novel with a big heading, ‘FACTS’, and then brings up the Priory of Sion, his taking ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ as apparently his only source makes him look like a fool. It’s not hard to find out who Pierre Plantard really was, or what an easily-dismissed piece of esoteric fluff his Priory really is. Worse than that, though, is his treatment of Da Vinci and the story of Christ.

I was surprised, in a book called ‘The Da Vinci Code’, to see so few mentions of Da Vinci himself, and so little reflection on his paintings. And to say that Paul in The Last Supper must be Magdelene because he’s got no beard is nonsense. After all, Paul was often painted as quite feminine and beardless by contemporary artists – as in The Last Supper of Ghirlandaio.

Brown also seems to neglect to mention that Gnosticism, while supporting his ideas on Christ as an ordinary human in many texts, also contain far more evidence for Christ being seen as a super-powered deity than the canonical Gospels do – as in The Acts of Thomas, which I remember reading in part in year 10 at school. His claims that the Counsel of Nicene heavy-handedly censored everything that they disliked in writings about Jesus, on values that were totally new, are also easily dismissed when we see how similar the Muratorian Fragment’s list of gospels is to the one established at Nicene, which it predates by a century or more, if I remember correctly.

Still, the book is a fun one, a good momentary distraction. I would just hate to think that some gullible people might believe what they read there. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s fanciful The Portrait of Mr. W.H., where fabricated evidence is playfully used to identify Shakespeare’s male lover, only not so charming and having rather more ideas above its station. Brown’s work is entertaining, but a frustration.

Persians

Aeschylus’ Persians is not a famous play, with no great, memorable archetypes, and is unusual in having subject matter concerning recent events rather than mythology, but it’s one of the best Greek plays I’ve yet read. Around two and a half thousand years ago (astonishing to think of texts surviving so very long), Aeschylus fought in a battle against the Persians at Salamis (no, AT Salamis, not with salamis!), where according to popular legend, young Sophocles was in the chorus for the victory song, and Euripides was being born.

The play concerns not the victorious Greeks but the defeated Persians. A messenger brings news of King Xerxes’ crushing defeat, his mother weeps and summons the spirit of her husband, who warns against going against Greece, for it is protected by gods, and also cautions mortals not to be vain or proud. Xerxes appears in tatters, and with the chorus, weeps for his dead countrymen.

For a soldier who fought against these people, writing for an audience who must have lost family and friends in the battle, the sympathy and respect for the enemy is astonishing. In an age where we are so used to propaganda and the dehumanising of enemies, such respect and empathy for enemies seems remarkably noble and admirable.

Wilfred Owen’s sympathy for his foe in ‘Strange Meeting’ is powerful for it seeming to be a great exception. But for such an attitude to be the norm, and for a popular play to be written expressing the sadness of the enemy’s situation, with no possible way that the writing could be interpreted as mocking, or designed to make the audience jeer at the defeated mourners, really appeals to me. There is much to learn from ancient attitudes.

Prometheus Unbound

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is a very exciting and fast-paced play, for one within the confines of Greek theatrical tradition. Hephaestus, with Zeus’ pushy mouthpiece Might, chain Prometheus to a rock in the mountains of Scythia at the edge of the world. When they leave, Prometheus rages about the injustice of his situation. The first of many visitors in this barren land arrives – in fact, a whole group of them (the chorus): the Daughters of Ocean. Prometheus tells them about his situation – a powerful Titan who helped Zeus gain power by telling him to topple Kronos by guile and not strength, he (like Eve) has been punished for disobeying orders and giving knowledge to mankind. He is proud and defiant, and it is later hinted that this has been exacerbated by his belligerence, and that submitting to Zeus would mean an end to his suffering. However, he will not hear of it, no matter how Ocean reasons with him. Zeus is a selfish tyrant and Prometheus will never acquiesce – and besides, he can see what will happen, and knows the secret of Zeus’ downfall.

After Ocean leaves, Io wanders on, still in the form of a cow, tortured by a Gadfly. She is another victim of cruel Zeus – he tried to seduce her, she refused, Hera was jealous anyway and transformed her. She and psychic Prometheus tell her story, Prometheus foretelling her journey to the Nile, where Zeus will swoop on her and she will bear his child. One of this child’s descendents will be Heracles, who of course is the one to finally free Prometheus. Io exits with a brilliantly unhinged final expression of the woe of the toil ahead of her. Prometheus’ next guest is Hermes, who comes with an ultimatum from Zeus – tell him the secret of his downfall or have his eagle peck at his innards every day.

Proud Prometheus patronises the sarcastic Hermes and sends him back to Olympus. The chorus, despite knowing that if they stay, they will get caught up in the splitting of the mountain that will signal the beginning of Prometheus’ punishment, stand by Prometheus’ side, supporting his decision and signalling their agreement that Zeus is a tyrant, his downfall much to be wished for.

Coo, try rearranging THAT sentence so that it doesn’t end with a preposition!

I believe that in mythology, Io WAS the lover of Zeus, and bore his child willingly when she was turned back into a human in Egypt. I believe that it was Zeus who turned her into a cow, trying to hide her from Hera, who wasn’t fooled. Hermes was the one who killed her guardian, many-eyed giant Argus (Nabokov’s favourite). Although of course all myths are malleable, I expect Aeschylus skimmed over the first details of Io’s story in order to make Zeus more culpable, and Io purer, therefore more of a victim.

Women of Trachis

Sophocles’ Women of Trachis shows Heracles’ wife, Deianira, waiting for her husband’s triumphant return. However, she learns that he is bringing back a mistress, so sends Heracles a coat soaked in what she believes is love potion to keep him loyal. However, she was tricked by a centaur Heracles killed, and the potion is actually poison from the Hydra.

Hyllus (different from Hylas), Heracles’ son, comes and curses his mother, for the poison is causing Heracles great pain. Distraught, Deianira kills herself. Heracles is brought on and in agony, charges his son to burn him alive on a mountaintop, and marry the mistress who caused all this strife. Fearing his father’s curses, he agrees.

It’s certainly a tragic play, and evokes pity both for misled Deianira, for suffering Heracles, despite all his philandering, and for Hyllus, who loses both his parents on one day.

Philoctetes

Sophocles’ Philoctetes was a good play. The titular character was the man who burned Heracles when he was in great agony, for which he was given the great hero’s legendary bow. However, he was later bitten by a snake in a temple and cursed to suffer great agony but never die. Because the wound wept noisome pus and Philoctetes was crying out in such pain, the Greeks abandoned him, only to discover a decade later that they needed Heracles’ bow in order to win the war against Troy.

The great machintator Odysseus goes to find him, bringing along young Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son, to help with his plot. Neoptolemos is to win Philoctetes’ trust by saying he hates Odysseus (one on the ones who abandoned Philoctetes) and will take the stranded cripple home. Hugely grateful, Philoctetes trusts Neoptolemos and lets him hold the bow.

However, Achilles’ son is an honourable and honest young man, and hates having to lie, so finally admits his part in the deception. Odysseus storms on to intervene, but when Philoctetes gets his bow back, he runs off with his tail between his legs. The new companions decide to set off home, but then Heracles (now a god) appears ex machina to tell them to go to Troy and fight after all. Pure, virtuous Neoptolemos, whose conscience prevents him from following disseminating Odysseus’ advice, is a great character, and seeing him struggle with the dilemma obedience set against morality is both satisfying in its outcome and impressively modern.

Cloud Atlas

a great read, and highly recommended. It was by no means perfect, but for something I picked up on a whim because it was a bestseller, it was excellently written, literary and good fun. Its only real problem is that it really is just six stories with only incidental connection. I think that David Mitchell could very well write a chameleonic masterpiece, but not until he has a great unifying idea, so this is not it. What I said before about it putting me in mind of a schoolboy doing all his best funny voices for his friends stands, but to be entertaining, those voices have to ring true. Mitchell’s impersonations are damn good, if not quite perfect (but impressionists are only fun when you can recognise the face behind the voice).

Metatextual playfulness and pastiche always give the rather irritating shield of putting the work above criticism (What is an intended flaw and what is a genuine one? Is a man who has never heard of Poker using an expression from that game a slip or a statement about how elements survive while the whole is lost? Is the Britishness of the invented manners of speaking in the sci-fi segments intentional? What does this mean?), but the different genres are all taken seriously enough to be entertaining in their own right. None of these stories would be particularly good alone, but the contrast between them gives the pleasure of showmanship to the display of versatility. A trick has limited satisfaction, though; what was missing was unity.

‘Six interlocking lives – one amazing adventure’ boasts the blurb. But the connections are extremely tenuous, and the appearances of each work in the next are contrived and could be allusions to anything, real or fictional, without the effect being changed one bit. Adam Ewing is a 19th-c diarist who describes his stay on the Chatham Islands and the plight of the Moriori natives while a conman doctor makes him sicker so that he pays for the cure.

This diary is read by the superbly arrogant and snobbish Frobisher, who goes to study under an august musician and soon lets his loins lead him into various inconveniences.

Frobisher’s letters are addressed to Sixsmith, who in his old age is a murder victim in the well-observed aping of pulpy thriller ‘Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’, in which the eponymous journalist investigates corruption in a nuclear power plant in the 70s.

This thriller is sent to present-day publisher Timothy Cavendish, whose adventures are meant to be comedic but I found chilling (though rewarding in the end). I thought I’d imagined the similarity between this section and Nabokov’s writings, with its aloof, cantankerous narrator, literary allusions and instructions to cinematic directors, presuming I simply had Nabokov on the brain after my dissertation – but when Tim commands, ‘Speak, Memory!’, the allusion couldn’t be more direct (though Nabokov is not the only influence here). This homage, like the rest of Mitchell’s voices, is excellent, though of course not quite as inspired as its inspiration, as sparkling as that which sparked it, and I’m not sure Nabokov would have referred to such writers as Stevie Smith or J.D. Salinger, though Paddington Bear may well have held some appeal for him, too.

Cavendish’s life is made into a film, which is viewed by Sonmi~451, a mass-produced drone called a Fabricant from the not-so-distant future, where sinister consumerism holds the world in its corrupt grip.

This fabricant is then regarded as a god by the near-savage population of the final segment, where the civilised world has collapsed and a storyteller called Zachry tells his story about how he was host and guide for a visitor from a ship whose population had retained some of the old ‘Smart’ from before the ‘Fall’.

In other words, the connections don’t amount to a hill of beans and any crazy world you care to pick (‘Casablanca, Lars!’ I gleefully misquote).

There are other connections, frivolous and insignificant – a recurring birthmark, the ‘Cloud Atlas’ phrase, references to Nietzsche and especially the Will to Power – but really, drawing any connection between these would be as specious as saying there is great significance in the fact that the first and last tales both feature the buggery of little boys.

So with no message except perhaps that consumerism is bad in excess, and that racial equality is good (though some Scots beating up some English baddies can be a joyful thing), there is little to draw from this book. But that is not why it was written. It was written to be enjoyed, a playful and experimental piece of showmanship: art for art’s sake. In that, it is excellent, and is only very rarely dull or too self-indulgent. I loved it, though I sincerely hope that one day Mitchell will far out-do this and write something stylistically exemplary, playful AND significant.

The biggest lesson to learn is: every division for division’s sake can only push the onlooker one step further away.

Midnight's Children

I finished re-reading Midnight’s Children. I really should have spend the time reading something else. It’s not the monumental work of literature so many profess it to be. It’s rather good, with a sophisticated but simple and playful narrative tone, some amusing circumstances and lashings of India, but I’m not sure it will endure. It’s just too specific, too limited, too personal. And I find magical realism quite tiresome, being neither one thing nor the other, and lacking the freedom of either. And to be honest, it all gets rather tiresome.

One thing I didn’t expect it to be is dated. But it is. Literature needs to move on, I feel, and I think the first step is cultural acceptance – which doesn’t mean writing lots of Eastern-influenced pseudo-esotericism (though admittedly I’m using that bandwagon as a hook in my attempts to get a literary agent – but it never influenced my writing, and my influences are the nicely mashed-up, non-specific works I’m propounding). It means not thinking that because something is influenced by another culture, it is mystical, superior and above editing. A good story is a good story, wherever and whenever it is set, by whomever it is told. Similarly, some books, like Midnight’s Children, are bloated and ponderous and in need of major cutting, even if they’re intertwined with the identity of a specific country.

Cultural acceptance is when we recognise the influences beneath the themes of a novel, absorb them, recognise them but do not dwell on them. If anything, pigeonholing Rushdie and any other writers from other cultures (including émigré Russian literature) is reductive, counterproductive and destructive: a twee rhyme that encapsulates how risible I find notions such as, ‘This must be good because this is ancient’, ‘It’s Chinese so it must have deep spiritual value’ or indeed, ‘It’s Japanese: it’s cool’. Each writer must be assessed on their merits. I for one am tired of hearing that because a writer is black, Indian, feminist, working-class, young or indeed a struggling single mother, their work must be above all criticism.

This has strayed a long way from Rushdie’s book, and I’m not criticising writers. It’s the zeitgeist, not some nefarious plot. Rushdie has talent, but his book did nothing for me emotionally, except occasionally raise a smile. I didn’t dislike it – nor is it the great masterpiece it’s supposed to be. I think that it hit a nerve, but then, so did dozens of forgotten Booker winners. Time will tell what endures. If Rushdie’s book does, I will be surprised.