2010s

David Mitchell

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

You know by now, I’m sure, how keen I am to coerce my friends and family into writing reviews to appear on my blog. Well, Sceptre kindly gave me a copy of David Mitchell’s latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. My aversion to long books, coupled with quite a graphic opening chapter, led me to seek outside assistance… step forward Clare. A David Mitchell fan AND an ex-employee of the Bodleian, there could be no better person for the task. And of course, her rather fab review has put me to shame. As always when I’ve got someone guesting here, I’d love you to make them feel very welcome… over to you, Clare!

I very nearly never read David Mitchell at all. If it had not been that I received a free (damaged) copy of his 2004 novel Cloud Atlas from the Waterstone’s branch in which I worked as a teenager, chances are I would never have paid him much attention. My reading tastes are mostly confined to novels published before the middle of the last century, and, I suppose, could be described as rather parochial in scope. So quite why I count as one of my all-time favourite writers a man whose novels are so absolutely unlike anything I would ever usually read is really rather beyond me.

His novels are, in fact, not at all my kind of thing. Spanning countries, eras, characters, voices, tenses and, sometimes, even dimensions of reality within a single volume, they are anything but parochial. Cloud Atlas, for example, my first Mitchell experience (and what an initiation!) has been described by the Guardian’s William Skidelsky as ‘a giant Russian doll of a novel’. Containing in its pages six vastly differing yet somehow interlinked narratives (from a boat in the Pacific Ocean in the mid-nineteenth century, to a holographic narration of an executed clone in futuristic, dystopian Korea, to letters from a penniless British composer in Belgium to his gay lover…and that is only the half of it), it leapfrogs from historical fiction to science fiction, from magic realism to something even more post than postmodern. Such towering ambition and chameleonic literariness should be intimidating, or at least, should simply not work. And yet this unassuming 41-year old from Worcestershire manages to not only get away with it, but also to create worlds, voices and characters that thrill, move and enrapture. His first three novels, Ghostwritten (1999), Number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), all share these ‘Russian doll’ tendencies, from which Mitchell moved away with 2006’s Black Swan Green, a more linear, autobiographical ‘coming of age’ novel.

Thus it was with some degree of interest that I approached his latest offering, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, published this month. It, too, marks a departure from his first three novels, but it is no less staggering in ambition and scope. Opening in the year 1799, the novel is set in Edo-era Japan; more specifically, the artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki, at that point a trading post with the Dutch East India Company. The trade with the Dutch is the only contact Japan, a country where traditions and culture are strictly guarded and Christianity banned, has with the outside world. In this restrictive atmosphere we find Jacob de Zoet, an earnestly Christian and conscientious Dutch bookkeeper whose task it is to attempt to clear up the corrupt practices of the Company’s former officials. However, the more the ‘corrective’ work continues, the more corruption continues to breed both within the Dutch Company and the Japanese officials, until Jacob finds himself inextricably and dangerously entangled with Dejima’s fate, as the Napoleonic Wars gain momentum throughout Europe and the British attempt to capture Dejima for their own uses. However, as we would expect from Mitchell, this expertly researched narrative is only one thread within the novel. Throughout the book there runs the undercurrent of Jacob’s forbidden love for the disfigured Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, whose kidnapping by a demonic ‘religious’ order dealing in sexual slavery, infanticide and cannibalism is one of the more bizarre but thrilling parts of the book. Finally, Jacob climbs in station as political events unfold, and there is a sense of an epic of Tolstoyan magnitude, a personal story set against a huge backdrop of events.
Mitchell utilises Dejima expertly as a symbol of threatened insularity, and the tensions between the ever-encroaching European world are a recurring theme throughout the novel, whether it be the forbidden family Bible which Jacob carries with him, or the access to European medical knowledge which enables Orito to save lives, or the recurring problems (and political dangers) of translation and interpretation between the Japanese and Dutch languages. The story is intricate, and peopled with characters as vivid, extreme and expertly realised as those in Dickens, yet Mitchell’s greatest skills are his ability to tell and manipulate a story, to grasp a reader’s attention, and to draw one fully into whichever and whatever world he is creating. He may be one of the few young modern writers who has had a two-day conference dedicated to his work, but David Mitchell’s main talent is the reality of his writing rather than the hyperreality of his plots. His descriptions cover frequently the gritty, grimy, physically degraded elements of human existence (the opening chapter is certainly not for the faint-hearted), but also ascends to painting moments of exquisite beauty. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is possibly not the best way to begin reading Mitchell (for that, I would recommend my own ‘way in’, Cloud Atlas), but for his existing followers it marks an exciting and mature move. I simply cannot wait to see what the man will do next.

I will leave you, I think, with a fragment of one of my favourite passages from The Thousand Autumns; a rather Under Milk Wood-esque description of Dejima and its inhabitants towards the close of the novel, which begins with describing gulls wheeling above the port and accelerates into dizzying rhyme: tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year old whores; the once-were beautiful gnawed by sores…where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself. Arguably, with his fifth book, Mitchell has created both a world and a masterpiece. I am very, very glad that David Mitchell is not at all my kind of thing. I hope he may not be yours either.

The Art of Gardening

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

No, I haven’t come over all horticultural (my current back garden is entirely laid to concrete, although I did once grow a few nice flowers in pots – cue unnecessary picture of them, taken a year ago).


So, where was I – not horticultural, but almost equally unusual for Stuck-in-a-Book, because today I’m talking about poetry. I’ll confess, I don’t know much about poetry – but every now and then it just hits the spot. And today the poetry is The Art of Gardening by Mary Robinson. The collection is inspired by a whole spectrum of things – nature, memories, other writers such as George Orwell and Karel Capek – and even a series inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, chunks of which I read last year.

The Art of Gardening was sent to me by the publisher (Flambard Press) but I have to be completely open about this and say that Mary Robinson is a family friend I’ve known all my life. The Robinson family lived near us in Merseyside – and, while we’ve moved further and further southwards, they went northwards, and we’re now at the extremes of the country. As a family with an arty Mum, a vicar Dad, and twin sons, they’re not dissimilar from the Thomas family…

Anyway – that’s the picture set, and it would feel far too weird for me to write a review of the collection, so instead I’m just going to type out my favourite poem in the collection and encourage you to go and get yourself a copy!


Apple Blossom

Don’t go my mother said
standing under the apple blossom
wearing that long baggy cardigan
snagged and pilled like a neglected paddock.

How could we not go?
I was doing a last round of the house
checking for something forgotten
but in reality saying farewell.

The removal men had gone.
I looked out of the wash-house window
and there she was, unchanged
after twenty years.

The spring before I started school
she had shown me the alphabet
under the apple tree – pale petals fell on the paper
as she traced the shapes with her self-taught hand.

Years later I was reading my own books.
In the evenings she banged out campaigning letters,
the old manual typewriter resounding to the clack
of rage and the rasping roller of frustration.

Now my last sight of her will always be
under the apple tree –
Don’t go she said.

How many Hectors make an acre?

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

I mentioned a while ago that I was dabbling in various translated novels, and when better than after a trip to Paris to finish off two novels translated from the French? Well, yes, perhaps *on* a trip to Paris would be better, but there’s a 782 page reason that I didn’t, which will be revealed in a week or two.

Instead, it was my train journey home where I finished a couple of novels (I think I surprised the girl I sat next to, as my bag seemed to have an inexhaustible number of books emerging from it) – and, first up, Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord, courtesy of Gallic Books (thanks!)

Apparently Hector has sold over a million copies worldwide, and Gallic have just brought his words of wisdom to the English speaking world. Having just read books translated from the French by Lelord, Kundera, and Veronique Olmi, I can only conclude that there is no ‘French style’ which is universally carried across – because the style of this novel is quite unlike anything else I’ve read. It tells of Hector, a psychiatrist, wandering around the world trying to find out what makes people happy. Or, perhaps more importantly, what makes people unhappy – especially when there seems to be no external reason for their unhappiness.

Lelord is himself a psychiatrist, and so he knows what he’s talking about, but as I said – the style is very unusual. Every now and then it’s in the second person – the second person, you know… oh wait, that’s an example – and it’s all written (how shall I put it?) quite childishly. As though it were aimed at children, I mean, rather than telling immature jokes and so forth. Here’s an example, which also amused me because I live with one:A psychologist is somebody who studies how people think or why they go a bit crazy or what makes children learn at school and why some don’t, or why they hit their schoolmates. Psychologists, unlike psychiatrists, don’t have the right to prescribe pills, but they can make people take tests or choose the right picture in a box or calculate things using dominoes, or tell them what an ink stain makes them think of. And after that they know something about the way your mind works (but they don’t understand everything, it has to be said.)Of course, sometimes writers use a faux-naive voice so as to subtly work on two levels, a sort of knowing wink to the reader – but I don’t really get that impression with Hector. Lelord just seems to have chosen quite a guileless, ingenuous narrator – and it works quite well, so that we get a character exploring happiness without an ounce of cynicism. Which just wouldn’t happen in the pen of a British writer – we do ooze cynicism with every ink drop.

As Hector travels to far flung places, getting himself into situations which are awkward, dangerous, serendipitous and fun, he compiles a list of lessons about happiness. These are the crux of the novel, so I shan’t spoil them now, but to give you an example – the first two are ‘Making comparisons can spoil your happiness’, and ‘Happiness often comes when least expected.’

These sorts of lists could be saccharine and irritating – ‘happiness is like a butterfly of joy, flapping its wings of laughter’, that sort of thing – but luckily Lelord never wanders into that territory. Each lesson comes from an event in the novel, not just phrased in overly abstract terms. And, since Lelord is a psychiatrist, you realise that the lessons – seemingly off the cuff – actually come together to mirror psychiatric and psychological research, in the least off-putting way imaginable.

All in all, this is an unusual and fun novel, but one which might just have something worthwhile and interesting to say as well – for something else worthwhile and interesting, check out Cornflower’s review here!

Croc Attack – Assaf Gavron

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A name you might well recognise from the blog comments here, and across the blogosphere, is ‘Dark Puss’ or ‘Peter the Flautist’ – well, Peter took me up on a challenge a while ago to write a review of Croc Attack by Assaf Gavron. I’m always delighted to post regular readers’ views on books, and since I thought there’d be people better qualified than me to comment on this novel, I was very pleased when Peter offered to review it for Stuck-in-a-Book. Without further ado…

Croc Attack by Assaf Gavron
Simon very kindly sent this book to me to review and I will try my best to write something that won’t let down too much the high standards he has set with his reviews.

The internal battles of the near Middle East, particularly between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, are so horrible, Byzantine and yet sadly so much part of our culture that I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have not read any novels that relate to them. Croc Attack changes all this. The story is straightforward, perhaps even a little cartoonish. The protagonist of the title, Eitan Enoch, narrowly misses being killed in a suicide bomb attack on one of the little buses in Tel Aviv. Further bloody bombings and their inevitable reprisals follow and Croc begins, against his wishes, to become something of a celebrity as the man who cannot be killed. Ultimately this exposure makes him the explicit target of a suicide bomber, Fahmi, who co-narrates the story while lying badly injured and in a coma in hospital. The two stories are neatly entwined with both musing on the inevitability of conflict, the lack of any possible resolution and indeed the almost familial need to go on killing and being killed.

So far so bleak but, despite the gravity of its subject matter, this book isn’t. Indeed it has several moments of, admittedly dark, humour. It also fails to take any obvious sides, empathy and sympathy being shown for all who are caught up in this ghastly conflict. The alternating story telling mostly works, though Fahmi’s is the weaker and there are some implausible coincidences at work in the plot but overall I think the structure works pretty well. There is some interesting commentary on high-tech commerce, Croc works for a company dedicated to the reduction of time wasting in call centres, directory enquiries etc., and on the bear baiting of low grade chat shows. Perhaps the female characters are a little weaker but the thing that did strike me as well described is the strange feeling you get when travelling on public transport in the aftermath of an attack. I live in Central London and travel daily by tube. I can remember vividly the feeling in my mind the day after the 7th of July attacks, the suspicious looks of fellow passengers, and the alarm at sitting next to someone with a rucksack and the complete futility of those concerns since I really had no sane alternatives. Gavron captures this very well and the long term after effect is of course the terrorists’ primary weapon in destabilising society. I haven’t, thankfully, been on the other end of a military reprisal but I am sure that living with the threat that you and your family might be wiped out with no warning by a laser-guided missile must be a very similar experience.

It’s not all death and despair, there are some episodes in which characters are allowed, for a few hours, to escape from their daily fear and profess love and/or lust. Simon usually puts at least one quotation into his reviews and I’ll end with one too.

‘What was the message you wanted to give me?’

A second passed before I realised what she was talking about.

‘I don’t know’ I said. ‘He didn’t get to say it. He was thinking. But I’m pretty sure that he wanted to let you know that he loved you. Something like that.’

She looked at me.

‘His look had that kind of meaning. It wasn’t a “tell her to feed the cats” kind of look.’ I said, staring at the gearstick. ‘And I can understand him.’

‘He didn’t have any cats. He couldn’t stand them.’

‘I can understand him on that one too.’

She smiled. So I wiped her smile with a kiss. Her lips were soft as feathers, as deep and salty as the sea.
I found it a great read, essentially it is a thriller with some genuine political and human insights into the Middle East conflict, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Unspoken Truth

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You know that disclaimer often put at the beginning of films or novels, ‘The plot and characters in this work are fictional, and any relation to actual people alive or dead is coincidental’? (I saw it the other day at the beginning of a Bollywood film about a camera which can see the future, where I thought it was perhaps superfluous… but if you are at a loose end, check out Aa Dekhen Zara, it’s good fun). Well, perhaps wisely, Chatto & Windus haven’t used that at the beginning of Angelica Garnett’s new book The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories. You might recognise her name from her autobiography Deceived with Kindness, over there on my 50 Books You Must Read – as Vanessa Bell’s daughter (and consequently Virginia Woolf’s niece) she has a unique and invaluable viewpoint on the Bloomsbury group – one which sees them all as people as well as icons. 26 years after publishing that autobiography, and over ninety years old, Garnett is back with a book marketed as fiction, but just as clearly based in her experiences growing up.

Which, of course, is no bad thing – Garnett had such a fascinating childhood. We get unexpected glances on the legacy of her parents, throughout all the stories – ‘It may seem strange that, brought up in an eminently intellectual atmosphere, I learned only how to feel and not to think.’ These stories are roughly chronological, covering different sections of Garnett’s life. The first is called ‘When All The Leaves Were Green…’ has Bettina as the heroine, and looks at growing up in a bohemian, artistic household, without any companion of Bettina’s own age. It’s a great depiction of Charleston, through the lens of fiction. I love this first excerpt, which brings across the vivid quality of living amongst those who sought beauty so avidly, and lived so vibrantly. It also shows how this feeling for beauty has found its way into Garnett’s writing style. The second excerpt shows more the confusion and isolation which a young child can feel amongst bohemian adults.

In those years the house and the whole of life was bathed in colour: it mottled or streaked the walls and furniture and sang silent but powerful songs from room to room, space to space. In the morning, the pink and yellow curtains drawn across the window mendaciously promising a fine day even when the sky was water-filled, blowing inwards as the breeze explored the room, momentarily filling it with air, and the colours she knew so well answered each other like a game of ping-pong – they glowed and sizzled and almost shrieked with the pleasure – the black, the Indian red, the peacock blue or yellow ochre. She could never think of the house without them: it was as though they had grown there and when, later, she returned year after year, though imperceptibly faded, they rose again and struck their strange chords like a forgotten musical instrument.

When Nan said something, Bettina knew she meant what she said, and nothing else. It was dull, but there was at least no need to worry that she hadn’t understood. In the world of the drawing room or the studio, however, every word meant at least two things, and the uppermost meaning was the least important. Most things were said as jokes, but there was always a lick at the end like a cat’s tongue, which ruffled the petals inside her, and sometimes jerked something out of her which she wished she hadn’t said.The second story, and easily my favourite, is really a novella, at around 150pp. It is the only one where the story never feels dutifully paced, but flows – again, surely autobiographical, but feels more free than the others. It tells of a shy girl who goes to stay with friends of her parents in France, Gilles and Juliana, in order to perfect her French. We feel her discomfort at joining a family and society she does not know, but also the first flourishes of independence, and a portrait if an outsider’s view of a marriage: Gilles returned from London and our life resumed its previous pattern. I began to note the difference between Gilles and Juliana, his rapier-like decisiveness, her slow deliberation. Both witty and cultured, it was Juliana who occupied the centre of the scene, Gilles the wings. When Juliana was talking seriously she disliked interruption, but Gilles always broke in, fired into disagreement or wishing to qualify her statements. His manner was the opposite of hers – quick and concentrated, intense but rather as though, with each sentence completed, he had finished with it. Juliana, on the contrary, talked as though she were building a tangible structure, and when she paused, you could almost see it sitting on the table. I was going to talk about all four stories, but I’m going on a bit… the third is very short, and the fourth is about a friendship that went a bit sour. That will have to do! I think that ‘Aurore’ is the best reason to buy The Unspoken Truth, to be honest, and the other stories – good though they be – are bonuses to me. The long short-story is perhaps the most difficult length to do well, and the most difficult to find the right concentration for, but ‘Aurore’ is successful. It doesn’t feel like an abridged novel or an extended story, but rather the right content for its length.

As I said at the beginning, The Unspoken Truth is clearly heavily autobiographical – but it isn’t clear where the line is drawn. Anybody reading this book, even if they hadn’t heard of the Bloomsbury Group, would realise it is autobiographical, because the structure so clearly cries it out. So linear, and chronological, with arbitrary incidents introduced and never mentioned again; characters who come in for a paragraph or two, and fade away – all the sort of anecdotes which make sense in an autobiography, but not really in fiction. But somehow this isn’t just another autobiography – given the label ‘fiction’, Garnett flies in a different direction from Deceived with Kindness. Not compelled to give an overview of the famous names she mentions, The Unspoken Truth has richer writing, more introspection, a greater use of imagery. It’s not always wholly successful, and where it lags it doesn’t have the excuse that an autobiography does, its chronicling responsibility – but for the most part, these stories are quietly beautiful, and add another new dimension to an understanding of Garnett’s extraordinary family.