Neverwhere (1996) Neil Gaiman

I do not like fantasy. I wrote it early on in the blog and I have never enjoyed wishy-washy stories about dragons, elves, pixies, ogres, hobbits, fairies, giants, demons, witches and wizards. However, I definitely do like Neil Gaiman. Prior to purchasing this, I read half of 'American Gods' and decided I needed to read more of his work as I found him to be witty, imaginative and an excellent storyteller. Until I read the Author's Note of this edition of 'Neverwhere', I had thought that the television series had been based on the book but it is, in fact, the other way round. However, Gaiman diplomatically says that the televised version of his story hadn't been 'necessarily bad' it had missed out large parts that he thought were essential and so he wrote the novel.

The novel focuses on Richard Mayhew, an unfortunate city worker in London who has a demanding and not-at-all understanding fiancée, who one night stumbles across a wounded girl on a London street and decides to help her. The next morning, he awakes to find that nobody recognises him, taxis don't notice him and his world has been turned upside down. He enters a new world, 'London Below' (as opposed to 'London Above') and begins a quest with Door, the wounded girl who he helped before.

London Below is a dingy, dirty and dangerous place which slightly mirrors and satirises life in the 'real' London. There is a floating market, where you can buy 'anything,' including "Rubbish!...Junk!...Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe and useless piles of shit! You know you want it." Sounds like an average trip to Primark to me. Gaiman also amusingly gives literal meanings to place names: there is an angel at Islington, there are a skulk of friars at Blackfriars (thanks Google for the collective noun there) and Knightsbridge has a terrifying bridge, encompassed by night.

Gaiman's prose is often humorous and quite blokey for a fantasy writer: "Can I help you?' asked the footman. Richard had been told to fuck off and die with more warmth and good humour." This is very occasionally juxtaposed with some uninteresting exchanges between the characters: "Now would be a very bad time to discover that one was claustrophobic, wouldn't it' 'Yes,' said Door. 'Then I won't.' said Richard. Despite that snooze-inducing exchange, this does not detract from a superb storyline.

It has taken me around two years to get round to reading 'Neverwhere.' I knew little about it other than Gaiman talking on a podcast about 'American Gods' discussing how he needed to add little bits of information about London for his American readership who may not understand the various parts of the city. Once you get reading the novel, you quickly get round to knowing and loving the characters of Richard, Door, the Marquis de Carabas and Hunter, whilst having a grim amusement and fascination of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar.  Whilst I 'don't like' fantasy, I think if you don't enjoy Neil Gaiman's writing ('American Gods,' 'Stardust' and this are all essential reading), you essentially are discounting novels of huge amounts of fun and imagination. These books contain them in abundance.

Key quotes

• "Metaphors failed him. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into a place of things that are, and it was changing him."
• "Richard wrote a diary entry in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job a fiancée, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancée, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly."
• "The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen."

Other thoughts

• I enjoyed Gaiman's description of how the BBC presented 'the Beast' as looking "more like a rather sad looking cow."
• Enjoying Potter, the recent BBC adaptation of Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange are rather troublesome in my long-held view that I don't like fantasy. I think what I might mean is I don't like 'Lord of the Rings' or fantasy that focuses on non-human beings. I can deal with 'realistic' fantasy if that makes sense. 
• The other day I spent a few minutes looking around Waterstones fruitlessly attempting to locate the animated version of this story as I was interested to see how the characters were presented. Penny found it in a second. Having flicked through it though, the characters were not at all how I imagined them to be. I don't imagine Door to look anything like that Marvel comic-like character below; I thought of her more as a grubby girl out of a Dickensian poorhouse.  
  

The Yellow Birds (2012) Kevin Powers

Back in 2006, I spent the last few months of my degree course writing about the presentation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the novels of Vietnam War veteran Tim O'Brien. I had previously enjoyed the poems of Wilfred Owen and still enjoy teaching them to pupils at school. I clearly enjoy reading about the torture that young men who go to war sense upon returning home, unable to clearly describe the sights that they have seen and the horrors they have endured. So, all that having been said, I was looking forward to this novel.
The novel focuses on Bart and Murph, two young soldiers who have come from humble backgrounds to join the army and fight in Iraq. The chapters flicker back and forth on his time before joining the army; fighting in Tal Afar; and his return home. There is some extremely good writing in this debut novel right from the opening lines: "The war tried to kill us in spring. As the grass greened the plans of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer." For a first novel there are often passages like this which are majestic, accomplished writing.
Powers' writing has been compared to many literary greats of the American canon: Hemingway, O'Brien, Melville, and his admirers are not of low calibre - Hilary Mantel, Colm Toibin and Ann Pratchett are all fans. However, Powers does occasionally slip into cliché, "I hated the way he excelled in death and brutality and domination. But more than that, I hated the way he was necessary, how I felt like a coward until he screamed into my ear 'Shoot these hajji fucks!' I hated the way I loved him when I inched up out of the terror and returned fire, seeing him shooting too, smiling the whole time." He might as well have brought Lieutenant Dan back from catching shrimps with Forrest and put him into Tal Afar. 

Powers says that the reason he wrote the novel was to try to explore the question: "What does it mean to try to be good and fail?" Something that struck me as I was reading this is that I am not sure that this question is explored fully: He made an unrealistic promise to a soldier's mum that he would look after him. He became desensitised to death whilst being a solider. He struggled to socialise and to find purpose in life upon his return. The novel is lauded as being a masterpiece, but I believe that it is 'only' good. Perhaps when more literature comes out of our very recent endeavours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 'masterpiece' tag that Kevin Powers now holds will be reassessed.

Key quotations

• "All pain is the same. Only the details are different."

• "Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability."

• “I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.” 

Other thoughts

• I really wanted to like this novel but found myself getting bogged down by it and feeling it didn't flow. Having just looked at my chosen quotations and had a good think about it, it's got some exceptional writing in it. Maybe I need to read it again in the future and see if my mind changes. We'll see.  

All Over Creation (2003) Ruth Ozeki

My parents gave me this book for Christmas having added it to my Amazon wish list after reading Ozeki's Booker Prize shortlisted 'A Tale for the Time Being.' I had also added her other book, 'My Year of Meats,' but that remains on the Amazon which I put down to my mother thinking that vegetarianism is akin to witchcraft and I might be converted. 

Yumi Fuller is a Japanese-American lady who was born into a family of potato farmers in Idaho. At the age of fourteen she has an affair with her history teacher, which leads to her having an abortion and leaving home. Twenty-five years later, she receives a call from her friend and next door neighbour Cass telling her that her parents can no longer cope with their age-related illnesses, so she returns to look after them. Throw some activists protesting against genetically-modified food and a hell of a lot of seeds into the mix and there's your story.

The novel is unquestionably an ambitious one. The multiple narrative; the array of characters of all different ages; the themes of life and death, family, friendship; the idea to write a novel about potato farming and make it interesting are all central to the success of 'All Over Creation.' Ozeki's personal life is also mirrored in the novel with the main protagonist's father being American and mother being Japanese and an Alzheimer's sufferer. I preferred this nod to the writer's personal life to her naming a character after herself in 'A Tale for the Time Being,' which I just found rather odd.

Through Yumi and Cass, the novel's two most central characters, Ozeki is most successful. Both characters are flawed but both evoke very strong emotions from the reader: the harrowing accounts of Yumi's trip to have an illegal abortion and Cass having yet another miscarriage - something that she is so used to that the description of it happening is reduced to a short paragraph, before she returns to bed without telling her husband of the pregnancy or the latest trauma, are painful to read. At other times I was left shaking my head at Yumi's absent approach to parenting or Cass's slight disappointment that her best friend wasn't dead.

Something that slightly bothers me about Ozeki's (and anybody who falls into this trap) writing is being rather contrived in the first place, and then explaining it to the author in the second. She has a big thing about character names: Yumi/yummy/You Me; a character in 'A Tale for the Time Being' called Nao... The novel had me groaning slightly with her rapist teacher and potato-botherer being called Elliot Rhodes and then one of the Seeds explaining that it is the same as erodes. I think most readers may have worked that out on their own.

The novel is about life and death. The author makes reference to the Buddhist belief that only two things are certain in life: You know that you will die and you don't know when it will be. Life, despite its difficulties, is celebrated in this novel and the continual reference to seeds are not accidental. Yumi's parents sell seeds from Asia in Idaho, Elliot Rhodes works as a PR officer for a GM seed company, the activists call themselves 'The Seeds of Resistance.' and so on. 

After struggling through 'H is for Hawk,' this was quite an easy read and an enjoyable one. Ozeki is by no means the perfect author, but she is an incredibly adept one of whom I'd happily read more from. Before starting this novel, I picked up Mark Haddon's 'A Spot of Bother' to read after 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime' came to Birmingham and left without me getting to see it. After a couple of pages, I gave up as I need to be in the right frame of mind for a novel. I'm glad I grabbed this one off the shelf.

Quotations

“As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.”  Hmmm.

"Secondly we believe anti-exoticisim to be explicitly racist, and having fought for Freedom and Democracy against Hitler, I do not intend to promote Third Reich eugenics in our family garden."

"It starts with the earth. How can it not?"

Other thoughts

• At first I thought the way that Ozeki presented the hippie community was a bit...naff. I stand corrected though as they turned out to be excellent smaller roles in the novel leading to the catastrophic climax.
• I don't think Yumi will be winning mother of the year.
• Ozeki said that Yumi was named after 'You...Me.' I got that part, but she also said it's a tribute to one of the best songs of the seventies. Which song is that? Answers on a postcard please.
• I got three books in the post yesterday: 'The Yellow Birds' by Kevin Powers, 'The Leopard' by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and 'Axeman's Jazz' by Ray Celestin. What next? 

'H is for Hawk' (2014) Helen Macdonald

Before I started writing this blog, my aim was simple: one book a week. Third book in and I have failed miserably. There are reasons for this, of course, but failing this early is not something I had on my list of  things I wanted to happen in May. It was a simple list of three:

1/. To watch my beloved Aston Villa win the FA Cup.

I suppose it could be argued that this was out of my control. I had queued outside Villa Park From 3.55am for tickets for the final and I knew it'd be worth it because it was Villa's year. The week building up to the final was consumed by excitement and feverish nerves about how it would be the first time since 1957 that we won the cup.

We didn't win the cup and I am still licking my wounds and wondering why bad things happen to good people. 

2/. Do something to the house. 

This is possibly more what Penny wanted to get done in May more than what I wanted to do. It was half term and I wanted to put all of my efforts into preparing for a trip to London. However, the conservatory in the new(ish) house was sadly lacking anything that could be described as a floor and we needed to get it done. 

We got it done - finishing at 12-something am, woke up and realised we had to do it all over again. Several coffees, a couple of arguments and lots of painful limbs later and it's done. Woohoo.

3/. Read the bloody book.

For some reason, this was a struggle. It wasn't that I didn't like the book - there's a lot of things that I loved about the book: I think that it's simply that my mind was in a few different places whilst reading it. I'd had a torrid time at work over the last few months which were probably enough to make a monk swear and I was exhausted. Half term, a gruelling cup final and a newly finished floor gave me fresh vigour though, and I finally finished it.

The book won the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize and it is very easy to see why. It intertwines Macdonald's very personal account of the struggle to come to terms with her father's death, a biographical account of T.H. White (writer of The Sword in the Stone and goshawker) and, of course, account of Macdonald's purchase and training of a goshawk called Mabel. 

I watched an interview with Macdonald where she talked about the personal nature of her account and she said that she had tried avoiding writing about the her grief in such detail when she first started writing it, but it simply did not work. She eloquently describes her feeling of desolation several times through the book, even down to the etymology of 'bereavement': “Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.” 

This isn't to say that H is for Hawk is a purely a cathartic experience. There are parts which make me laugh; there are parts that stir a fascination in the goshawk and there are others that conjure vivid images. I quite enjoyed imagining a lady walking round Cambridge with a hawk on her wrist swearing at joggers. 

Macdonald's account is not an easy read. It is dense and thorough with descriptions and requires a degree of patience. If that sounds like a negative review, it is not. It is ultimately a rewarding read exploring a woman's struggle and addiction. I can associate and empathise with her on the addiction front. She  reminisces about her childhood where she collects any literature she possibly can on goshawks and falcons and talks about the birds with her parents to the point of tedium. I did the same by banging on about football to my parents, friends, sisters. Macdonald writes:

"What I had just done (hunting with Mabel) was nothing like birdwatching. It was more like gambling, though the stakes were infintely bloodier. At its heart was a willed loss of control. You pour your heart, your skill, your very soul into a thing - into training a hawk, learning the form in racing or the numbers in cards - then relinquish control over it. This is the hook. Once the dice rolls, the horse runs, the hawk leaves the fist, you open yourself to luck and you cannot control the outcome. Yet everything you have done until that moment persuades you that you might be lucky... That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world''s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I'd taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn't want to ever return."

There is, one key difference between my addiction and Helen Macdonald's. Walking down those steps at Wembley at 7.45pm on Saturday, I felt as if I didn't ever want to return to watching Villa: I was drained. Maybe I should get myself a hawk. 

Other thoughts

• There were a couple of passages about gender and sexuality and their relation to nature. Is hawking a 'man' sport? Are books written about nature primarily written by homosexual authors? What is clear is that animal companionship is often a cure for loneliness and a metaphorical bandage for a number of wounds.
• Very few pages went without the leitmotif of birds. Robins, rooks, owls, sparrows, robins. You name it. The book practically flutters as you read it.
• The cover of this book is a thing of beauty. Definitely one of my favourites.
• I like Helen Macdonald: she favourited a Tweet of mine.