Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

A couple of years ago, I was working as an editorial assistant for a fiction publisher. It was a good job - a shimmering-holy-grail sort of job, really, for a literature graduate like myself - the kind of career-starter that other literature graduates would fight to their last bloodied gasp to secure. I was pretty lucky to have landed this job, this shining golden job that allowed me to read and edit and generally indulge my love of books for a living. And yet, in the middle of the cold black tidal wave of the recession, I decided to leave my job. With no other job to go to.

Quite a lot of people thought I was mad. I didn't blame them. I was a bit mad, I think. The thing was, I'd pretty much fallen into the job, and so it felt quite natural to just fall right on out of it again. There are a whole long and convoluted list of reasons why I resigned, which I am not going to go into on a book review blog, but suffice to say that one of them - definitely one of them - was the slush pile.

The slush pile was the deluge of unsolicited manuscripts I had to sift through on a daily basis. For months, every manuscript I picked up had some kind of depressing premise. Death, drugs, nihilistic sex, abuse. I used to take this stuff to read and make notes on during my train commute home, and oh my goodness, it was just about all I could do not to hurl myself onto the tracks by the end of each journey. I used to come back into the office complaining about it. "Why does nobody ever send us in anything funny?" I lamented.

With this in mind, as a parting gift, one of my colleagues gave me this book, Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon. It's taken me until now to read it, and I'm not sure why - maybe because it is partially about the business of publishing fiction, and I needed to distance myself from that for a little while. Anyway, once I started reading it, I ate the damn thing up. It is funny. It's got wit, slapstick, self-deprecation . . . It's also got death, drugs, nihilistic sex, and abuse - but they're done funny.

It's about Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor and novelist, struggling to finish an absolute behemoth of a book entitled Wonder Boys which he has promised to deliver to his friend and editor, Terry Crabtree. Crabtree has come to visit, and Grady is desperate to hide from him the fact that the book is actually still unfinished. On top of this, Grady's wife is missing, his mistress is pregnant, and his fucked-up student has killed a dog that Grady feels responsible for.

One of my favourite bits, where Grady is trying to work out how he feels about the prospect of a baby:

'Do you have any babies in this hospital, by any chance?' I said when she looked up. 'You know, where you can look at them behind the glass?'

. . . So the tuba and I went to take a look at the babies. There were only two on display at the moment, lying in their glass crates like a couple of large squirming turnips. A man I presumed to be the father of one of them was leaning against the observation window, an old guy like me, sawdust on his trousers, hair Brylcreemed, his shop foreman's face beefy and half asleep. He kept looking from one to the other of the babies, biting his lip, as if trying to decide which one to spend his hard-earned dollars on. Neither of them, his face seemed to say, was exactly a bargain, head dented, skin purple and crazy with veins, spastic limbs struggling as if against some invisible medium or foe.

"Boy," I said, "would I like to have me one of those." 

The whole thing is irreverent. Irreverent and irresponsible. And I'm not sure how funny non-writers would find it - a lot of the humour hinges on the paranoia of writer's block, and the gap between how the writer perceives themself and how they actually are:

For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I'd fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before . . . I reread with scorn the confident, pompous annotations I'd made on that distant day: Take your time with this, and This has to be very very big, and worst of all, This scene should read as a single vast Interstate of Language, three thousand miles long. How I hated the asshole who had written that note!

Personally, I found it hilarious. I'd recommend it to aspiring, failed and successful writers everywhere, and oh, how I would have loved to have found it in the middle of my slush pile.

Room by Emma Donoghue

I had been avoiding this book. I don't, as a rule, go anywhere near sensationalist literature, and as this book is based on real-life cases such as those of Jaycee Lee Dugard and Natasha Kampusch - young women who were imprisoned by their kidnappers for years - I was concerned that reading this novel would make me feel as if I were being voyeuristic and indirectly exploitative.

Room is narrated by Jack, the five-year-old boy who the captive woman has borne by her kidnapper. Because his mother is so fiercely protective of him, consigning him to the wardrobe each night before the kidnapper makes his appearance, the boy witnesses very little of his mother's rapist, and so details of the abuse do not make it into the novel. This was a wise choice on the part of the novelist. Reading it, I felt as though Donoghue was protecting the dignity of the female character (who we know only as 'Ma') from our scrutiny of her trauma. Although Ma is obviously a fictional construct, her story is based on those of real-life victims, and I did feel that Donoghue was writing with a respectful sense of distance.

Jack is an unusual and tricky choice of narrator - brought up alone by his mother, in an 11-foot square room, he has no concept of other people (apart from his shadowy impressions of the kidnapper, who he views as a kind of devil figure), or of the outside world. All his knowledge has been acquired from his mother, who was 19 when she was abducted, and from the television he is allowed to watch twice a day. His vocabulary is advanced, due to the intense relationship he has with his mother, but his syntax and sense of grammar is often childish - 'You cutted the cord,' he tells his mother, recounting the story of his birth. These inconsistencies of language have drawn criticism from other reviewers, but I'm not sure that I mind them. I work with young children myself, and even those with sophisticated vocabulary will often make mistakes with tense. I think Donoghue has pulled off something extraordinarily difficult in telling a dark and adult tale from the perspective of a very innocent boy.

That's not to say I think it's without flaws. The first half of the novel, bound as it is in the consciousness of a small child and a soundproofed room, is limited in plot. The minutiae of the mother and son's daily routine becomes tedious - as of course it would do to the two prisoners - and I found myself flicking forward to see if the whole novel was set in the room. It wasn't, and that was what encouraged me to keep reading - to find out how the escape was engineered.

This brings me to what I believe is the second flaw of the novel. The escape, 'Plan B', as Ma and Jack refer to it, was a hugely risky undertaking, and one that I am not convinced a devoted mother such as Ma would have encouraged Jack to attempt, even in the depths of her desperation. That said, she was clearly frightened that the two of them might perish anyhow due to the chilling caprice of their neglectful captor, and perhaps she saw this escape attempt as the better option. I felt that, as a woman with an awful lot of time on her hands, she would have been more meticulous and measured in her planning, rather than the sudden, panicked, fallible plot she went ahead with. I also felt that the escape itself was under-described, although this could be put down to the fact that it was Jack's first foray into the outside world, and he would quite naturally have been utterly overwhelmed.

A much larger portion of the novel than I had expected was devoted to the pair's recuperation after their escape and rescue. The bewilderment of the inevitable media onslaught is deftly portrayed through Jack's eyes. I did feel that some of the media reportage was too insensitive to be credible - I'm thinking of the newspapers' christening Jack 'Bonsai Boy', of the coldly academic discussion of the victims on television, and of the incredibly unsympathetic chat-show interviewer - but then, I read the Guardian and not the tabloids, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Jack's story really came into its own at this point, as Ma struggles to negotiate the schism between the girl she was and the victim and mother she is now, and begins to succumb to depression, and Jack has to find his feet (literally: he cannot manage stairs, and he cannot walk in shoes) in the outside world without his mother's guidance. The relationships with Ma's family were portrayed with interesting complexity, although I did frequently lose patience with Grandma, who seemed to have no patience whatsoever herself with her very damaged grandchild, and who seemed to be exclaiming every five minutes that she 'couldn't cope' with his behaviour.

The ending, with Jack and his mother returning to the Room for him to say goodbye, felt appropriate and poignant. The difference of their reactions upon their return to their place of imprisonment - Jack's warm exploration of the place that was once so familiar, in comparison to his mother's physical nausea - is both striking and deeply unsettling. But Ma's  determination to allow Jack to say goodbye to what he sees as his former home, and her ability to put his needs above her own in this, is testament to her strength as a mother, and ends the novel on a real note of hope for their relationship.

I don't think I'd read this book again. The quality of the writing did not quite make the cut for me, and I am a little surprised that it made the Man Booker shortlist. However, I did sit up till nearly midnight reading the first half, and finished the rest of it the next morning, which says a lot for the page-turning quality of the story. Donoghue is sensitive in her treatment of the subject matter, so I would have no qualms in recommending it to someone who I thought might be interested in this kind of literary-light fiction.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I bought this book in December while travelling in Kerala. It cost me 299 rupees - about £3.83 - and I read the majority of it in the fragrantly hot airport at Cochin, curled up in a slippery waiting room chair, desperately trying to stay awake to board my 4am flight.

The White Tiger won the Booker in 2008, and I remember skim-reading the first few pages when one of my lecturers brought a copy to the pub that year. Ostensibly it is an epistolary novel, written as a series of unanswered letters from a young Indian entrepreneur to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China, and I think that when I first flicked through the book the set-up somehow struck me as an awkward conceit, and so I didn't bother chasing down a copy of my own.

Three years later, standing in a bookshop in the south of India, looking for a novel that would complement the experience of being outside of Europe for the first time in my life, my eyes alighted on the bold spine of Aravind Adiga's debut. I opened it at random, read a little. It was better than I remembered. Quite a lot better. Whether this was because I was reading it in a different mood, or because I had now spent some time in India and could better identify with the tone of the book, I'm not sure. Either way, I bought it (along with an authoritative-looking, pictureless Keralan recipe book, which has gone on to provide hours of amusement in my cold English kitchen, as I try to work out what I can substitute for ingredients that are unobtainable in my local Co-op).

The White Tiger is an uncomfortable read. Written from the perspective of Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw-puller, it shines an uncompromising light onto the 'India of Darkness', where a dip in the River Ganga will fill your mouth with 'faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.' As a small boy, Balram watches his mother's body burn in a pyre on the banks of the river, and is appalled to watch her become part of the 'black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here.' Thus begins Balram's quest to liberate himself from this desperately inevitable cycle, and to emerge into the second India, the 'India of Light'.

Balram goes to great pains to learn to drive, whereupon he wins himself a job as driver for Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam, the son and daughter-in-law of one of the three malefic landlords from his home village. Through his rear-view mirror, Balram is introduced to the seamier underpinnings of middle-class India: bribery, abuse and prostitution. A traditional fictional hero would rail against such practices. As an anti-hero, Balram becomes complicit in them. In modern India, he tells us, 'there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.'

Balram is not a character with whom it is easy to sympathise. Yes, like many a downtrodden protagonist, he is given a miserable start in life, and yes, he aspires to greater things. But he is cold-blooded in his attitudes and his actions: he wants sex, he pays a whore; he wants job security, he hounds his Muslim colleague out of town; he wants a new life, he slits the throat of his boss with a broken Johnny Walker bottle and steals his suitcase of bribe money. At times, his crude turn of phrase made my skin crawl -  'dip my beak into her' was, for me, the most repulsive of these. But then, this unlikeable crudeness is the whole point. Balram is a tea-wallah turned driver turned entrepreneur, a 'half-baked' semi-urchin from a lowly sweet-making caste, and all he has been exposed to in his short life is filth, corruption and greed. He is unshakeable in his belief that if he is to improve his lot in life, he must be ruthless. And ruthless he is, and improve his lot in life he does.

At the close of the book, Balram reflects on the decisions he has made and the damage he has wrought, and decides that even if he is caught and punished, 'I will never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master's throat. I'll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.' He is morally bankrupt, but he is exultant. To me and to the reader, it seems a hollow triumph, but Balram sees it as the pinnacle of all achievement: to have tasted life on the other side of India, the India of Light.

As a novel, The White Tiger is not a conventionally satisfying read. Balram's crimes are never resolved: the last page leaves him in Bangalore, hiding in plain sight as a successful businessman who also happens to be on India's 'Most Wanted' list. The brilliance of the book is in Adiga's acute observations of India's serving class - and, nested within that, the servants' own gimlet-eyed observations of the middle classes who employ them. Theirs is an India of air-conditioned cars and cut-throat ambition, where religion is played for advantage, and the accrual of rupees is the ultimate goal in life. It is not the India I saw in December, which was one of canalways festooned with water hyacinth, impeccably turned-out government workers, and cheeky-faced village children running along the river banks soliciting 'one pen, one pen' - but then, I was an affluent tourist, with pale skin and a return ticket to England. I am quite certain that there was plenty that that was hidden away in entirety from my foreign eyes.

The War of the Worlds -- H.G. Wells

I started reading this little slice of sci-fi iconoclasticism the moment I finished Carhullan Army. At a mere 180 pages I had assumed I would whistle through it . . . so how is it that, almost a full month later, I have only just laid the beast to rest?

It's not that I've cheated on it: these fingertips have touched no other fiction in the meantime. It's not that I've ignored it, either: despite my exponentially escalating workload as a student teacher, I have read a little bit of it almost every night. No, the trouble (and the reason why I've eked the damn thing out in such tortuously tiny increments) is that I didn't like it.

I am a bit embarrassed to admit this.

The War of the Worlds is a seminal novel. Published 113 years ago, it was the first modern tale of alien invasion. Think of all those that have come after, novels and films alike: It Came From Outer Space, The Day of the Triffids, The Thing, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Independence Day, Men in Black . . . The list could go on, and on, and on, and on.  The War of the Worlds popularised invasion fiction, paving the way for endless reimaginings of our planet's interactions with alien lifeforms.

It starts off promisingly enough. We follow the story of a man who, in his amateur astronomical observations, notices a strange jet of flame emitted from the planet Mars. Days later, a shooting star is observed falling towards earth - and lands in Horsell Common, near our narrator, who ambles along to see what gives. There he finds a cylinder in the middle of a vast crater, the top of which is unscrewed from within to reveal a slimy, tentacled Martian. Spectators gather round the lip of the crater, only to be vanquished at the first green flash of the aliens' Heat Ray.

Cue mass exodus, jumbled up with death and destruction and foolish sceptics who don't believe there is anything to run from. The Martians, severely hampered in their movements by the Earth's superior gravitational pull, haul themselves into their 'handling machines' - lithe, three-legged constructions of gleaming metal - and go on a bit of a rampage. Our narrator takes his wife to safety in Leatherhead, and leaves her to return a borrowed dogcart to his local innkeeper. The Martians, however, get in the way, and so begins a mad dash through London and north, scavenging for food, and picking up waifs and strays along the way.

This was the point at which I began to lose interest - mainly, I think, because of Wells' insistence on geographical precision. The avalanche of place names in this book is frankly stifling, and if you don't know London and its many suburbs in intimate detail (and I don't) then it frustrates the reading experience. It didn't help that the narration of the book holds the reader continually at arm's length. From very early on in the novel, it becomes clear that the narrator is telling his story from some point in the future at which the Martians have been vanquished. As you might imagine, this does defuse the tension rather. There is also a heavy reliance on exposition; a tendency to report rather than dramatise. For example, at one point in the novel our narrator is hiding out in a farmhouse with a curate, when a Martian rocket lands right outside the house. The narrator and the curate aren't getting on very well anyway, and now they are trapped together indefinitely. The narrator tells us of the curate:

"As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves."


Somehow I would rather have seen those days play out on the page, to have observed the fights and to have drawn my own conclusions about the character of the curate. This is a big fat instance of Telling not Showing, and while I do believe that there is a place for Telling in all writing, I got a bit cheesed off with being Told all the way through the course of this book.

Ultimately, I found I didn't care too much about my narrator's personal journey. He'd already told me that the Martians were going to come to a sticky end, I knew that he would survive, and I was fairly confident that he would end up reunited with his wife as well. Yawn yawn.

What did pique my interest, however, was the way in which news of the invasion spread. In late nineteenth century London, there are no telephones, no text messages, no radio. When something momentous happens, it spreads by word of mouth, by telegram, and by newspapers still wet with printing ink hawked on the street. Mass communication is a process of diffusion; news can only permeate through a population person by person. The slowness of it, the fallibility of it, is something that is almost unimaginable in the current Western world, with our iPhones and our broadband connections and our plethora of national and international information networks.

Communication has progressed beyond recognition since my own childhood, let alone since Wells' time. As for how it may develop over the next 113 years . . . that, surely, is for the writers of science fiction to speculate.

The Carhullan Army -- Sarah Hall

Post-apocalyptic narratives have always exerted an ineluctable pull on me. From happening upon Jean Ure's harrowing Plague 99 trilogy (now, scandalously, out of print) as a child, through a period of downright obsession with the dodgy New Zealand television series The Tribe in my mid-teens, to more grown-up explorations of the genre in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood, I have been captivated by depictions of societies shattered, of the old world order wiped out in one fell swoop, and of what happens to those left struggling to survive.

The Carhullan Army (Faber, 2007) opens with a nameless woman preparing to make her escape from a Cumbrian town which is under the auspices of an oppressive regime. The woman, who we know only as 'Sister', abandons a husband she no longer loves, and sets off in search of Carhullan, a farm-commune consisting solely of women, where she hopes to find sanctuary. She is met, however, by a gun barrel and a punch that fractures her shoulder, and is promptly incarcerated in a tiny metal tank for three days while the women of Carhullan wait for her to crack.

So far, so different from the happy-clappy agrarian utopias of the kind that feature in Year of the Flood or Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Carhullan's women are taut and unsentimental, prepared to do whatever it takes to protect their lifestyle. Their leader is Jackie, whose language is blunt and crass, but whose actions shimmer with intellect and idealism. 'Sister' passes the initiation test, and is subsumed into the world of the commune.

And that is pretty much that for the next hundred pages. We learn a lot more about the day-to-day functionality of the commune, which has been intricately and admirably imagined by Hall. Her descriptions of the commune's fare are wonderful - bowls of porridge with butter forming 'an oily yellow pool in a crater in the centre', and the 'puckered strip' of raw deer tongue that Sister is pressured into eating. I have a soft spot for writers who can render mundanities beautiful in this way. We learn about the work that keeps the commune ticking over, the peat-cutting with which Sister assists, and also about the handful of undernourished men who live in a kind of satellite commune.

However, engaged though I was by this depiction of a "cosy catastrophe" lifestyle, I was unable to discern any real driving plot until page 151, when Jackie, the leader, starts to assert her own agenda and forces the women to either support her plans for revolution or leave Carhullan. Sister commits herself to Jackie's brutal training, which we experience in wincing detail . . . but all the while as I was reading, I was conscious of the pages-to-go thinning between my right thumb and the back cover, and all I could think was: how on earth is Hall going to squash the actual rebellion into the space she has left?

The answer, of course, is that she doesn't. We cut from the training up at Carhullan directly into the dying moments of the last battle scene, and within two bloody, bullet-riddled pages the novel is extinguished. It's unexpected, and my gut reaction was to deem it a bit of a cop-out on the author's part - all that slow tip-toeing build-up, and then - wooosh! - one giant leap over most of the action. Upon reflection, though, I'm inclined to think that this omission was a conscious decision to place all the emphasis on the women's path to war: the act of battle itself was not as important as the philosophy behind it. And indeed, preservation of this philosophy is the reason why Jackie commands Sister to surrender at the end - to 'make them understand what we did and who we were'.

Ultimately, Hall's exploration of feminism in a post-apocalyptic environment makes for a fascinating and worthwhile read. Do the women truly succeed in empowering themselves, or do they - with their army fatigues, their cropped hair, their guns and their bombs -  merely ape a patriarchal template of power? I'm not entirely sure. All I know is, the scene I found the most powerful was the one where Jackie asks Sister why she allowed the regime to fit her with a contraceptive coil that she emphatically did not want. Sister tries to explain that she didn't feel she had a choice in the matter, and Jackie says: "Suppose you had that old gun I've fixed up. Suppose you had it in your hand and the doctor asked you to lie back and open your legs wide. Suppose if you said no, he was going to make you. Would it make any difference, that gun?"  "Yes," Sister says. "It would." 

As someone who has never thought about guns much before, the realisation that in such a situation, such a weapon would make a difference to me, too, really chilled my blood. Food for thought.

The Seeds of Time -- John Wyndham

Being a sucker for all things dystopian and apocalpytic, and having vastly enjoyed The Day of the Triffids earlier this year, I couldn't resist this 1956 collection of science-fiction short stories by John Wyndham when I spotted it on my boyfriend's parents' bookshelf last weekend.

Time-travel, if done well, is one of my favourite fictional devices, and it forms the basis of the first story in Wyndham's collection: Chronoclasm. How satisfying a word is that? I bloody love it. I haven't yet determined whether it's Wyndham's own neologism, but it comes from the Ancient Greek khronos (time) and klastes (a person who breaks something). A chronoclasm is, according to the story's scatty and romantic heroine, Tavia, 'when a thing goes and happens at the wrong time because somebody was careless' - i.e., when a time traveller somehow fractures the course history should have taken. (Doctor Who, I think, is a bit of a classic chronoclast...)

Wyndham called this story a romantic comedy, and indeed it is light-hearted, shading towards silly in places. Tavia Lattery, a student from the Twenty-Second Century, receives a love-letter on her birthday, penned by her long-dead great-great-great-uncle, Gerald Lattery. Driven by curiosity, she sneaks into her university laboratory's 'history-machine', and searches Gerald out in the early Twentieth Century, much to the consternation of her fellow academics. I loved the examples of chronoclasms given in the story: of Hero demonstrating a steam-turbine at Alexandria, and Archimedes using napalm at the siege of Syrcuse. I did find myself wishing that Gerald and Tavia were a little less saccharine, but enjoyed the denoument of their romance nonetheless.

Martians cropped up in a couple of stories in the collection: Dumb Martian was my favourite of these, pitting a callous Earthman, Duncan, against a Martian woman, Lellie, whom he has purchased from her parents for the purpose of keeping him company during a five-year contract on a sub-moon of Jupiter. An allegory for racism and domestic abuse, the story explores Duncan's determination to ignore his wife's intellectual capacity, his escalating cruelty, and the revenge Lellie finally wreaks. I loved this story for its cold, silent battle of wits in its closing scenes - the breathless intensity of their hatred for one another, played out against a backdrop of the whole dark universe.

Parallel universes are another of my favourite sci-fi tropes, and in Wyndham's Opposite Number, academic Peter Ruddle is visited by an alternate version of himself and his ex-girlfriend Jean, who are most appalled to discover that they are not married in Peter's reality. It's a clever little riff about paths not taken; thought-provoking, and ultimately, I found, rather comforting.

Other stories include Pawley's Peepholes, a satirical take on time-travel as a kind of bawdy seaside attraction, and the fabulously grim Survival, in which a meek young woman politely dispatches the entire crew of a marooned spaceship. There were a couple of clangers in the collection, too - I wasn't a mad fan of Compassion Circuit, where an ailing woman is turned into a robot to preserve her mind, nor of the somewhat insipid closing story, Wild Flower, where a schoolmistress disturbed by the encroach of technology finds solace in a bunch of unusual flowers. I think the problem with both of these stories for me was that they felt underdeveloped; I didn't believe in the characters, and I didn't feel as though Wyndham believed in them either.

That said, I think that overall, this is a brilliant collection. Wyndham explains in his introduction that he wrote the stories over fifteen years as a kind of experiment, moulding the sci-fi motif to a variety of short story genres. The result is something that you don't find often with single-author collections: a clutch of stories which are consistent in voice and theme, but which are so assorted in their tone, in their handling and in their purpose, that they fly from the page in all different directions: never predictable, never tedious.

The whole experience has sent me off on a bit of a sci-fi jag: I've just received a rather stout package through the post containing H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, none of which I've read before, and all of which I've heard glittering and marvellous things about. Watch this space.