Those 2,500 years of history are wrapped up in Afghanistan: A military history from Alexander the Great to the war against the Taliban. Tanner’s book was one of my summer reads, and while it’s not exactly typical beach fare, it was as engrossing as anything else I’ve read this year.

Afghanistan

Stephen Tanner
Da Capo Press Inc 2009, Paperback, 392 pages, £10.99

Tanner has an appetite for details, be they curious medical facts about long-dead generals or drawn-out explanations of groundbreaking military techniques. These details add a human element to his narrative and balance out the great swathes of rather weighty historical data. All in, he’s a sound, if slightly biased guide through some intimidating facts, figures and battles. But when Tanner is truly captivated by his subject… oh my word, he is a veritable Scheherazad.

The steel and sinew of Alexander’s fighting men; Chingis Khan’s bloodsoaked raids, hooves pounding and heads rolling; feisty Lady Sale’s rooftop stakeouts during the British retreat from Kabul to Jallalabad – all of these come alive in a wonderfully, rich, envious way. You get the sense that on some level, Tanner feels like he knows these characters and has kind of tricked himself into believing he was there. Here’s the first paragraph of chapter two – Alexander the Great:

In 329 B.C., observers overlooking a valley among the barren foothills of the Hindu Kush stared down at a remarkable procession. Horsemen rode ahead of the invading army, frequently dashing back in ones and twos to report to the head of the column. Agile javelin men on foot warily probed the heights on either flank. On the road along the valley floor, the thick column of cavalry and foot soldiers stretched as far as they eye could see, bristling with weapons. Their faces were sunburned and their armor glistened like an endless ribbon of fire. Unlike the Persians, these newcomers brought little baggage and few servants; they all seemed like fighting men.

… And just like that, you’re crouched behind a boulder on the dusty hillside wondering who these men are and what they’ll do next. It’s hard not to enjoy stories like these.

I do have one quibble though, and that’s with Tanner’s determinedly linear approach to history: first there were the Macedonians, then the Persians, then the Parthians, the Mongols, the warrior tribes, the Russians, the British, more tribes, the Soviets, the Mujahideen, the Taliban and the Americans. It’s all a little too neat and tidy, and in some places, this oversimplified reformatting of history affects the artifice of cause and effect where there is none. I’m not calling him a revisionist; I’m just saying that it’s a little too on brief.

Tanner comes back again and again to the view that Afghanistan is unconquerable by foreign powers. History has proven this to be so. The price all parties pay – and are still paying – is just too high. But along with this, and less explicitly, Tanner seems to be saying that Afghanistan is fundamentally ungovernable, and I think this is incorrect. At the very least, it is oversimplified: Afghanistan hasn’t been successfully conquered and held by any of the aforementioned foreign parties, but neither has it always been a cauldron of bloody chaos.

I mentioned Baker’s article at the outset of this review, and I’m going to close on it. This isn’t a comparative review, but I read her piece this morning and her central point, the omission of which is this book’s primary shortcoming, is important. Baker has lived in Afghanistan and is married to an Afghan-American man. She has had one foot in the culture – something that doesn’t come across in Tanner’s writing. The point she is able to make, and the point Tanner just doesn’t, is that the old ‘the damned place is just ungovernable’ argument doesn’t actually wash:

The easy narrative is to blame Afghanistan, a country that managed to repel both the British and Soviet armies in their primes and frustrate all manner of occupiers. But to throw hands up in exasperation and say Afghanistan, with its tribes and conservative traditions, is an ungovernable place impervious to change is to cower behind a convenient historical falsehood. Before the 1979 Soviet invasion, my mother-in-law wore Chanel suits and held a senior position with the national airline. My father-in-law worked for a functioning government that was slowly yielding development and progress.

Baker’s full article is on TIME.com

Sooner or later, Stephen Tanner will sit down to write the third edition of this book. All quibbles aside, I look forward to reading it.

Related posts:

1. An Unexpected Light by Jason Elliot (Sara’s book 3, 2011)
2. Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington (Shane’s book 9, 2011)

An Unexpected Light

Jason Elliot
Picador 2007, Paperback, 496 pages, £8.99

Elliot writes of feeling a tug of curiosity towards Afghanistan as a boy, and then feeding it with travel stories, maps and a fantasy realm of turquoise skies, verdant hills, watchful shepherds and enigmatic, rambling oxen (a scene-setting mishear for his father’s reference to ‘the oxus’). At nineteen he slipped into the country on the night train from Lahore and spent the summer dodging Soviet mortars with the mujaheddin. Ten years later he went back, and found that while both he and his beloved had changed – Elliot now a father and the incoming fire Taliban – what was between them had remained unexpectedly steadfast:

It was the strangest thing, but as soon as we’d stepped out of that little plane onto Afghan soil, I felt as though some inner clock of mine, which had stopped since I had last been there, began to tick again.

An Unexpected Light doesn’t unfold in a linear way: Elliot patches together two separate experiences into one very dreamlike memoir. This is a story that wants to cast a spell rather than unfold a strand of events: just as, in a dream, things happen and all of a sudden you’re in a new place and not sure how you got there, so did I feel surprised to find that I was back on that original late-seventies journey, or had somehow returned to the first act of the second journey. Readers who require dates and order, be warned… this may grate.

Like anyone fallen head over heels in love, Elliot has a tendency towards lapsing into overly poetic reveries about his beloved. Call me petty, but I thought the term ‘lapis lazuli’ was overused by about two hundred times. Sometimes, a sky is just a sky. Multi-paragraphic descriptions of the same that left me picking up adjectives and searching for story underneath indicate this book could have done with a slightly more aggressive edit.

Yet this is a love a story, and Elliot’s rose-tinted ramblings are the stuff of lovers everywhere. So too is his un-retouched description of his own involvement: his exhaustion, his fear, his selfishness in the face of incredible poverty and generosity, and his lasting shame afterwards. Elliot recognises his own role as a bit part in a much larger drama and he humbles himself accordingly. An Unexpected Light is his story to tell, but the story is not about him.

Elliot’s memoir so swept me away into dreamy envy and obsessive detail mode because I, too, have a crush on Afghanistan. Since National Geographic’s iconic 1985 cover; since a well-travelled auntie bequeathed me a butter-soft cotton top bought in Kabul during her 1976 Afghan odyssey and suggested I make the trip myself, one day; since that first teenage reading of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I still haven’t been, so for me this book was a wistful sort of read: a deliberate indulgence in something I can’t have just yet, so immersion in someone else’s romance will have to do.

And it did, for now.

Related posts:

1. Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein (Sara’s book 2, 2011)
2. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)

Tokyo Vice

Jake Adelstein
Scribe 2010, Paperback, £35.00

Adelstein’s account of his twelve-year career as a journalist on the police beat in Tokyo is an accessible, pleasing read.  That’s no back-handed way of saying the storytelling in Tokyo Vice is simplistic (it is clearly told but not dumbed down) or set out in a primitive parade of monosyllabic grunt-words (Adelstein is a skilled writer with a perfectly ample vocabulary – and in two languages at that). Rather, it’s a memoir that just unfolds itself from the outset, and for this reader, as for the half-dozen people I have recommended it to, it was difficult not to get carried along in the momentum of Adelstein’s crazy life.

One of the joys of the memoir form is in witnessing the author mature. This memoir spans a good fifteen years and the shadings of Adelstein’s self-portrait develop considerably during that time.

He starts out as the journalistic equivalent of a Wild West gunslinger, all balls and bravado, bedding a source in the name of the story and throwing a punch at a senior journalist on a night out. But as the stories he chases grow heavier and their shadows darker, and as Adelstein himself becomes a husband and father, he evolves beyond boisterous, act-first-apologise-later japery into a more thoughtful person and writer. His involvement with the Lucie Blackman case and his support for her family is sobering. His off-the-clock investigation into sex trafficking in hostess clubs is heartbreaking. And his ongoing efforts to be “an honourable man” in a neverending mudslide of dishonour are wonderfully human and hopeful.

Adelstein can speak, read and write Japanese. But far over and above this, he can also practice the business of investigative journalism in his second language. This is no menial thing: while he may forever be a gaijin to the Japanese, he has managed to learn and play back the rituals and shared memories that make up a culture. He’ll never be a native – and maybe nor would he want to be – but Adelstein is culturally bilingual, and this makes the reader’s journey an easy pleasure.

He regularly performs a dual role in Tokyo Vice, one moment running into the fray and shaking clues out of a dodgy hostess club, the next leaping smoothly to the reader’s side to explain the myriad subtleties of his greeting ritual with a Yakuza boss known as The Cat. Documentarian, fact-checker and leading man, Adelstein gives this book his all.

Toky Vice is, as my father would say, “a real yarn” – and trust me, folks, that ain’t no bad thing.

Related posts:

1. Going Ashore by Mavis Gallant (Sara’s book 1, 2011)

Going Ashore

Alberto Manguel (Introduction)
Mcclelland & Stewart Ltd 2009, Hardcover, 357 pages, £21.07

James recommended Mavis Gallant’s work to me last year knowing I love short stories and clean, concise writing – and I do appreciate her for that – but it’s her own story, not those she has written, that so warms me to Ms. Gallant. Born in Montréal in 1922, she moved to Paris in 1950 to write short stories for a living. Can you imagine? A 28 year-old divorcée skipping continent on a solo mission when the rest of the world was coupling up and settling down behind picket fences. And the most inspiring bit? She succeeded. In 1978 she referred to her “life project” and said, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It’s what I like doing.” (Source: Wikipedia)

The self-awareness and autonomy I find so admirable in Ms. Gallant’s character surface in her writing as a sharpness of vision. Writing is what she does, and she turns her whole focus to it. There’s no sentimentality here, no reason to soften rough edges or manufacture closure. Characters are almost uniformly flawed, and stories just end where they end. Some, like the title story Going Ashore, wrap round and sort of close off that chapter in anticipation of a new one, but the majority end where the pieces fall. I liked that about this collection.

Ms. Gallant has an exceptional eye for detail, and though some of her stories now feel too dated, their subtleties too subtle for a modern reader – what was risqué then reads a little less so now – the best stories in this collection still feel real and relevant. Human dramas – unwanted pregnancies, mental illness, loneliness, cultural isolation – don’t change that much from one generation to the next.

The Rejection, a short piece about an inept father’s attempt to reach his daughter even as she casts him aside for another guardian reveals much about the intellectual and practical challenges of being a parent. Changing oneself into an adult isn’t easy:

“He was dealing with a child, he suddenly recalled; it was not a father’s business to please for justice but to dispense it. Pride, yes, pride was important, but he was not to give up his role.”

As much as a I found it difficult to read, The Cost of Living was another of my favourite pieces in the collection. An examination of loneliness and unbelonging, it had me wringing my hands as spinster Louise, moral compass spinning after a doomed affair, spends and spends her limited inheritance on a lost cause. Ms. Gallant isn’t the first writer to tell of people who try to salve guilt and hurt with spending and reinvention, but she does it exceptionally well.

One thing that struck me about this collection is that it focuses mainly on suburban and rural life, while the author is very much urban, having lived in Paris most of her working life. I suppose, though, that our storytelling tools are gathered early, as we are still taking the world in, and Ms. Gallant’s were gathered on the suburban streets of Montréal. She built on them in later life, but they were shaped early, as most of ours are.

Final comment: if you’re looking for an introduction to Ms. Gallant’s work, start here and be sure to read the Editor’s Note by Douglas Gibson, the author’s longtime friend and colleague. Gibson tracked down each of the stories in this collection and brought them together before the author when ill health prevented her from doing so herself – a touching backstory to a very impressive selection of work.

No related posts.

Home

Marilynne Robinson
Virago 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Well, I didn’t. Instead, I read the thing wondering what the hell I was missing, and whether I as a reader had somehow regressed in my ability to appreciate (or even identify!) a good book.

Home is the story of the family Boughton, and the return of prodigal son Jack during the last months of his father’s life. It is a story of regret over the past, fear of the present and future, faith in God and family, and the blindness of parental love.

Home takes place around the middle of the last century and unfolds at a thoughtful pace – slow enough that, were it really speaking to me, I would have gratefully allowed it to slow everything down so I could meander along with it. But it was too slow for me, and I found the three central characters – Reverend, Jack and sister Glory – irritating and unbelievable in their unwillingness to speak of the many elephants in the room. For me, this was a story of avoidance, of talking about other things and pretending there’s nothing wrong as the last moments of life slide by and mistakes become unfixable. I found it upsetting, but not (I imagine) in the way the author intended. I didn’t identify with Glory or Jack – I wanted to grab each by the shirt front and give them a shake.

It has occurred to me that, as with most of life, reading is a timing thing. Maybe the question of whether a person will love a book has as much to do with that person and what’s going on for them, as it does with the book. Or maybe I just built it up too much: reviews like Ms. Shilling’s tend to foster significant expectations. Either way, I have to declare this reading of Home a fail. But with all the awards and love that have been heaped on the author and her body of work, I fear the failure was mine.

No related posts.

Kilter

John Gould
Ravenstone 2003, Paperback, 205 pages, £9.55

With a few notable exceptions – Annie Proulx being the most notable – when I read a volume of short fiction, I expect a couple bites of chaff to be mixed in there with the wheat (see my review of Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman). But Kilter surprised me in that the wheat:chaff ratio was unexpectedly low. Each fiction is an unannounced glimpse into someone else’s world, and just about every one of those world’s caught my imagination. I wanted to stay there and spy for a while.

I remember, as a young’un, reading tweeny and teeny fiction series like The Babysitters’ Club and the various VC Andrews series, and constantly being annoyed at the clunky, multi-page intro (usually found on about pages eight through fourteen) that kicked off each volume. This was the part when the author filled in the backstory, fleshed out the characters and set up the action: a serious case of telling versus showing. Poor form for literature, but I wouldn’t be quick to hold up Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls or Petals on the Wind as examples of literary achievement.

The reason I digress along these lines is this: short fiction challenges writers to show, not tell. The form simply doesn’t accommodate a lengthy set-up. With Kilter, John Gould has hacked away at the form, cutting off all the fat (and, perhaps, some of the meat) to the point that each fiction is an uber-truncated, peek-in-and-peek-out view of someone else’s life…. and they work. The whole book works.

Each of these fictions, the shortest of short stories, speaks of a highly skilled writer. Gould’s storytelling is spare but deliberate, and with a paragraph or two of action and dialogue, a whole world history looms into view: grudges, alliances, anxieties, digressions, hopes. No intro or outro required. The form isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like short fiction or more experimental writing, I recommend Kilter.

My favourites fictions in the collection: Civilized, Takeout, Zeroes Someone Painted, The Point of Dreaming.

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The Discomfort Zone

Jonathan Franzen
Harper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 256 pages, £8.99

I read The Discomfort Zone in 2006, when it was first published, and was struck by the similarities between the author’s own life and the fictitious lives he conjures up in The Corrections (which I had read several years earlier). The reviews that nudged me towards The Discomfort Zone had focused on the self-deprecating humour Franzen uses to the lever his personal history to a mass-market-appeal level of funniness and universality. On first reading, several years ago, I was disappointed: not so funny. What humour there was was muffled by details; the anecdotes themselves were too few and far between. Yet four years later, it’s a different book – or more accurately, I am a different reader.

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom.

I suspect that on my first reading of The Discomfort Zone, mid-twenties and still wholly unsure of who I was and how to be whomever I should be, that I was too self-conscious to appreciate the absurdity and wastefulness of the condition, a theme Franzen riffs on from start to finish. He does this sincerely, too: you get the feeling the man isn’t yet fully at home in his own skin and still feels bad about it.

Franzen anchors his memoir on the idea of two selves, that as a child he had an external self, which he projected for his parents and which curiously resembled a 50-year-old man more than an eight-year-old, and a secret internal self: messy, desirous, unbridled, curious but afraid of asking and exploring for fear of standing out from the crowd. This motif resonated with me: weren’t we all that way, and didn’t it take us forever to realise it! His realisation of another, less punitive way of being – a realisation brought on by reading Kafka and analysing a quirky teacher – is another marker on the path to adulthood, so obvious once you see it but bloody invisible until you’re ready to do so:

A man could be a sweet, sympathetic comically needy victim and a laviscious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

The Discomfort Zone is funny at points, but it is consistently more thoughtful than funny: a series of ruminations on how we become who we end up being, and how we crawl out from under the crippling self-consciousness that begins to pinch right around the time we begin to grow up.

On the other side of what I hope will be the toughest acts of my shift from child to adult, The Discomfort Zone said a lot more to me – or perhaps I was more able to listen. Worth a read.

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It’s the very definition of a one-way trip to Regretsville, where even the highest highs (more money than they knew what to do with… the entire extended family living in a luxurious pleasure-dome… food and health care for the poor of Medellin) feel hollow, so low are the lows we know are to come.

Escobar

Roberto Escobar
Hodder & Stoughton 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £11.99

I chose this book because I find true crime fascinating, and organised crime especially so (after reading Mario Puzo’s The Sicilian at 12, I decided I wanted to marry into the mafia and then pressed my parents for tips as to how I might meet a mobster). But I chose this particular account of Escobar’s story because I felt that, coming from an Escobar, the narrative would be less likely to edge into War on Drugs, God Bless America propaganda territory. I wanted to know what actually happened… or at least, as close as I could get to it.

People fragment themselves: Pablo Escobar ordered thousands of murders and carried out many by his own hands; he also lavished money on Medellin’s poor and was a tender father to his children. Stitching these two halves into a whole is a difficult task, both for the writer and for the reader. Roberto Escobar does his level best, but the result is a story that feels shallow and the precise points where this reader wanted depth and detail.

Pablo didn’t kill people as often as people “were murdered” (by some unseeable force, perhaps?); violence tends to be something the police commit against the brothers Escobar, et al, versus the other way ‘round; upon his arrest at last, Roberto’s only crime, in his own eyes, was “Rh: that I have the same blood as my brother Pablo”. Well, that, money laundering, harbouring a fugitive, aiding and abetting various crimes, etc etc. Sorry Roberto, your crime of Rh comes up a little short. More than once, I felt a sense of frustration with Roberto’s approach. It reminded me of the time I took a tour through a famous prison and the tour guide spent forever promenading us through the manicured hedges, only to scamper past the really gruesome bits, dismissing it as “Oh, death row, not all that interesting”. But Roberto, this is why I read the book. I *want* details. The dishes your mum cooked you and Pablo aren’t as interesting to me as the ins and outs of the drug trade.

Still, Escobar is a good read, and its author’s curious focus is perhaps evidence of a coping strategy for anyone who has been through what he has been though. It’s easier to white-wash.

Final, technical note: Escobar is billed as being ‘as told by his brother Robert Escobar’. The person to whom it has been told is the book’s co-author, David Fisher. Fisher has a light touch: the book reads like the narrative of someone whose grasp of English isn’t entirely there. I took this as intentional, and although it works with Roberto’s gloss-over-the-nasty-bits style, it did distract me a little – I kept wondering what juicy bits I was missing.

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I read The Road last year and found it harrowing: McCarthy writes sparingly but brutally and some of the book’s bleakest scenes almost too much to bear. I approached No Country for Old Men with some caution, or at least, I paced myself lest things become too dark once more.

No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy
Picador 2006, Paperback, 340 pages, £7.99

I was right to slow it down, but for the wrong reasons. This is a story that unravels at its own speed, and is best enjoyed slowly, better yet the second time round.

It’s a sinister tale of a drugs, death, money and desperation, of poor decisions, cheap hotels and a seriously unexpected weapon. The central characters form a sort of triumvirate of masculinity: wet-behind-the-ears Llewelyn Moss who lives to regret the first chance he’s ever taken; sociopathic antagonist Anton Chigurgh (and his air gun); slow-talking, sharp-eyed Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, as wise as he is world-sick. It’s a book about men, and each character riffs on and eventually dismantles a different stereotype. I read this as a question: how does one be a man? Violence, authority, greed, familial responsibility, power – these are [some of] the components of masculinity, but how should they come together?

The story follows a path of violence and the people swept up – and tossed aside – in its wake. The voice is unmistakably McCarthy: devoid of quotation marks, pared-back and always in the vernacular. It nudged me to slow down and take it word by word, scene by scene. As someone who normally binges on books, cramming the words down as fast as I can, skipping whole sentences just to get to the next, No Country for Old Men provided a welcome change of pace. A reminder that books are better, savoured.

The book’s setting, the characters’ names and McCarthy’s clean, tight writing style are evocative of one of my favourite writers, Annie Proulx. Both tell their stories in a tight-jawed drawl, deliberately and surely. They won’t be rushed, and neither would you want them to.

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The Myth of Supply and Demand

Michelle Keill
Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd 2010, Paperback, 380 pages, £8.99

This one was a stinker. Stale dialogue, haphazard narrative, a predictable plotline, overuse of adverbs and – O sin of writerly sins! – a protagonist I didn’t so much dislike as want to mow down with the nearest high-end sport-utility vehicle (pretentious, see, just like him), The Myth of Supply & Demand seriously failed to impress.

“Knobhead dumps girlfriend, wins her back”

There it is in six words. Fair enough summary for a love story, only The Myth of Supply and Demand has very little to do with love.

John, our protagonist, is a selfish, narcissistic economics editor. When his supply of girlfriend Lola exceeds his demand, he panics and dumps the girl… and then spends the rest of the book trying to get her back. That he eventually does comes as no surprise, but the journey there is a cop-out: John hasn’t changed so much as worn himself – and me – down.

Reviews on Amazon indicate some people have enjoyed this book. I’m afraid I am not one of them. In fact, I struggle to come up with anything good to say about it, which feels cruel given my six-degrees -type tangental connection to the author. But fair is fair – if I’d written something like this, I’d deserve my comeuppance, too.

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