Diverse book reviews

The Quickening Maze – Adam Foulds
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize this is a docu-story told with Fould’s poetic inner eye about John Clare’s incarceration in the High Beach Asylum.

It is also a book about dreams and schemes and revolves as much around the asylum owner, Dr Matthew Allen, a man most ignorant in what he is most assur’d, and whose knowledge of science and so-called rationalism imprisons rather than liberates his patients – and ultimately himself. Clare’s descent into madness, meanwhile, is mirrored by Allen’s own fall as everything he has worked for in his life is destroyed by improvident investments. Various other characters are drawn into the tragedy in a book that explores the commonality of social, physical and psychological isolation and alienation.

The book is shot throughout with glimmering observations about nature which we experience through Clare’s dissolving mind. There is humour, passion, melancholy and a strong sense of claustrophobia; the novel is like a dream of tonally-shifting moods. The forest and the asylum are two opposing dreamlike worlds that merge and fracture in the character of John Clare. They function as a metaphor for the novel itself which combines lucid observations with a poetic sensibility.

The casual cruelty of the asylum is contrasted to the rough friendship of the Romany people who accept Clare for what he is, rather than what he should be.

A beautiful, lyrical book that takes you inside its characters and makes you experience their discomfort and anguish.

Ines of My Soul – Isabel Allende

Another compelling historical reimagining bringing to life Ines Suarez, seamstress, adventuress, lover, female conquistador, a witness to a memorable and turbulent period in Chilean history.

Isabel Allende has found the perfect subject in Ines and makes her into a strong heroine. Her journey is unimaginably daunting to say the least and she never once gives up; she embodies the spirit of the conquistador and also the driven lover engaged with her destiny. Allende’s language is physical, sensuous, almost voluptuous – Ines embodies for her the female sensibility and appetite to succeed. There are many magical (and horrifying) set-pieces such as when Ines decapitates the hostages and looking like a “tangle-haired demon” throws their heads into the midst of the besieging Indian army.

She is also the voice of reason and compassion in an age of savagery and aggression and is thus a modern woman in a world of boiling, acquisitive men. She has extraordinary self-belief and a generous nature (although she understands the nature of politics); she is born survivor.

History is not just about war and the generals that commanded the armies. It is about the people who helped to create civilisations, it is about women like Ines who, in the culture of male hierarchy, are supposed to serve behind the scenes even though they effectively led from the front.

Beatrice & Virgil – Yann Martel

This is a book about the impossibility of writing a brilliant follow up book to a brilliant book.  And it shows.

Martel is riding off in all directions simultaneously, hedging his bets, but making his book neither (stuffed) fish or fowl.

As Sarah Churchwell writes in the Observer:

“Attempting to manage the problems he has created in trying to mix allegory, psychology, metafiction, mystery and a parable about the Holocaust (not to mention our inhumanity to animals) in under 200 pages, Martel also makes Henry explain the book’s flaws: “There seemed to be essentially no action and no plot in it. Just two characters by a tree talking. It had worked with Beckett and Diderot. Mind you, those two were crafty and they packed a lot of action into the apparent inaction. But inaction wasn’t working for the author of A 20th-Century Shirt.” No kidding.”

At the beginning of Beatrice and Virgil Henry, having painfully and intellectually constructed his holocaust flip book, has his chef d’oeuvre eviscerated by a group of people over lunch. So far, so funny. He mopes around a bit and then has an epiphany in which he acknowledges his writer’s block whereupon he goes forth with his wife to some unspecified cosmopolitan city and gets stuck into a real life, learning new skills and rediscovering old ones. One day Henry receives a package in the post, with a letter and Flaubert’s tale “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator”, a fable about a boy whose greatest pleasure is killing animals.

The package also includes part of a play about two characters named Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey, standing in a road, by a tree, trading cryptic epigrams. Later they offer sophomoric philosophising about something they call the Horrors: “How can there be anything beautiful after what we’ve lived through? It’s incomprehensible.”

At this point a vague dread seizes the reader because the symbolism is clanging cymbal-ism clanging and crashing in the distance. Yes, it is a holocaust novel or play within a story about the impossibility of doing justice to the holocaust couched in sub-Beckettian absurdist meta-drama cloyed with clunking allegory and clunkier dialogue. The author knows it’s bad, the protagonist seems to knows it’s bad, but they are complicit in the faux high seriousness of it all. After all the holocaust is no laughing matter. Should you doubt the author’s literary qualifications he also lobs in a connection to the Divine Comedy. Like his protagonist, Yann Martel wears his learning like a heavy overcoat.

The coda to the novel has Henry proposing twelve moral conundrums which almost serve to highlight how devoid of dramatic and moral impetus the previous 200 pages have been. The whole thing feels like an elaborate exercise in evasion, a literary babble of prinks and prabbles (to coin a phrase). In the end I threw the book aside with extreme prejudice.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlo Ruiz Zafon

Normally a book which proclaims proudly on its cover that it is The Number One Bestseller is likely to devoid of literary pretension, but one can see why this gothic melodrama meets rites-of-passage story meets historical thriller has captured such a wide audience. Serpentine plot twists, linguistic puzzles, chills and thrills and enduring love – this mystery has them all – and there is literary merit in the sophisticated narrative style that ramps up the dramatic tension. The characters are masterfully drawn – Fermin Romero de Torres might have sprung freshly minted from the imagination of Charles Dickens, whilst the evil torturing policeman Fumero is horribly believable.

Most of all this is a story about the love of stories, and why we love to read. Reading engages and stimulates our imagination on many levels; it is also a kind of catharsis where we live through the trials of the characters. We grow with the protagonist, Daniel, from callow, inquisitive boy to proto private detective and young lover; like him we are constantly seeking answers and to piece together meaning in events as they present themselves to us. The more we find out almost the less we know; the plot is tortuous, some of the stories within the story are told by unreliable narrators whilst the search for Julian Carax and his legacy is a journey that takes us all around the houses as well as into the murky past of Barcelona.

One of the conceits of the Shadow of the Wind is that all the copies of The Shadow of the Wind are being burned by its author – to deny anyone who would seek after the truth.  Even the name of the book suggests something fugitive, impossible to grapple with. Perhaps once a novel is finished and published it belongs to the reader; there must be a temptation for writers to repudiate books which other people have taken a kind of ownership of.

The image of the author frantically spinning webs, devising puzzles, creating literary cul-de-sacs to lure the reader into a strange darkness coincides with the notion of trying to transcend the limitations of the novel. We are all dragged back by the need for a congruent ending, a just resolution, an assertion of structure and narrative drive.