Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson
Ecco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24

Shortly before his death Teddy lost his virginity to Eliza, who was visiting for the night from New York, where her mother is dating Jude’s father. Eliza also gave Teddy cocaine, which may have been the key ingredient in the mixture of substances that killed him. All of this happens in the opening of Henderson’s novel, which deals with the fall-out from Teddy’s death.

Jude travels to New York to tell Teddy’s brother, Johnny, the news. He moves in with his estranged father and gradually becomes involved in the ’straight edge’ punk scene, which rejects stimulants of any kind. Meanwhile Johnny, who is exploring Buddhism, decides that the right thing to do would be to marry Eliza and raise his brother’s child.

It is this chaotic situation that Henderson gradually brings to order. The punks form a kind of family, their own families having disintegrated at the hands of their hippy parents. Jude’s father deals drugs and his mother makes a living blowing glass bongs. Johnny’s mother skipped town shortly before Teddy’s death, fearing that her lies about Teddy’s father’s identity were about to be exposed. Nobody in the book seems grown up but at least the children have an excuse.

Without parental guidance, all kinds of values take their place. Buddhism, straight edge punk ideals and the camaraderie of life in a touring band are all explored as potential codes for living. In the end, the kids will grow into their identities, regardless of what they choose.

Henderson has an eye for detail and creates an authentic mid-1980s New York that is grubby and crime ridden but also filled with an unusual sense of community. A key scene in the novel takes place at the Tompkins Square Park riot in August 1988, in which heavy-handed policing turned a rally into a battle.

She’s equally able to draw the contrast between New York and sleepy Lintonberg, Vermont. The characters shuttle between the two – usually from one of Jude’s parents to the other – seeking to escape one and find refuge in the other. The city represents hope for excitement but also danger; the small town means boredom but sometimes safety. Conversely, the city means anonymity, while the small town can be a place where mistakes are hard to live down.

These aren’t pleasant characters – at least I didn’t find them that way – and that can make this book a difficult read. Like real people, the cast of this book are rough-edged and can be inconsistent, selfish, confused and irrational. Spending a lot of time inside their heads can be an uncomfortable experience.

That’s not a criticism. If anything, it’s to Henderson’s credit that she has resisted sentiment and stuck to the story. Ten Thousand Saints is a very good novel but not necessarily an enjoyable one.

No related posts.

Memoirs of a Master Forger

William Heaney
Gollancz 2009, Paperback, 320 pages, £7.99

Some time ago I stumbled across a blog post by Joyce in which he explained that the success of the novel had been somewhat galling. It had better reviews than Joyce’s previous work and went into reprint in its second week – a feat that none of his other books had managed. Joyce wrote: “It confirms some rather worrying trends in publishing.”

Would this book have been just as successful if it had been released under Joyce’s name? He thinks it is unlikely. Without any preconceptions about the author, critics and booksellers had to take William Heaney’s ‘debut’ at face value. A new Graham Joyce novel has critics digging through the old reviews and booksellers reaching for the previous sales data.

It is a fascinating experiment but I found the book itself to be unremarkable. William Heaney, the central character and supposed author, is a borderline alcoholic who works for a youth organisation and, in his spare time, sells forged books and donates the proceeds to charity. He also either sees demons or has a mental illness that leads him to believe that he does.

The demons have been around since a distressing incident at college, which is recounted in flashback. The donations to charity are, in some ways, an act of penance for what happened when he was younger. They are also partly driven by the fact that Heaney is, despite the criminal activity, a kind and decent person.

William’s wife has left him and the separation has caused tension between him and his children. He falls into a relationship with a younger woman, Yasmin, though he feels uncomfortable at the age gap and her pursuit of him. For things to work out, William will have to confront his demons.

Do you see what Joyce has done there? He’ll have to confront his demons. His demons. Yes, the metaphor is a little heavy-handed.

Joyce says that the book contains a critique of the publishing industry. There is a satire of British Council-supported poetry and, obviously, the novel is filled with fake books as well as – apparently – a demon that lives in a manuscript. It doesn’t really amount to a critique, though.

The problem is that this is part thriller, part romance and part satire but doesn’t fully convince as any of those things. The threads about demons and forgeries seem to be building towards a tense conclusion that never arrives. Instead, everything is tied up with very little trouble. So much for the thriller.

The romance, too, is pretty simple. Two likeable people want to get together and there are no significant obstacles to that. Jolly good. And the satire just isn’t sharp enough.

Nevertheless, Joyce writes very well and Heaney is an amusing, interesting character whose observations are often enjoyable.

Related posts:

1. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Shane’s book 7, 2011)
2. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (Shane’e book 5, 2011)
3. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape 2011, Hardcover, 160 pages, £12.99

Sadly that is very much the case here. In many ways The Sense of an Ending reminds me of Graham Swift’s horrendously smug and pointless Tomorrow. While it’s not as bad as that, I certainly didn’t enjoy it very much.

Like Tomorrow, The Sense of an Ending revolves around a secret that is supposed to be so terrible that we are meant to be outraged and shocked when it is revealed, whereas in both cases my reaction was “is that it?”. (At least, it seems that way. If not, why be so coy about the secret as to leave it to the final pages before it is revealed?)

The book is written in the first person, and the narrator’s voice is very pooterish. The idea, I think, is that we’re supposed to think of him as someone who’s a bit naive, which I did, but also someone for whom we have a degree of sympathy. On the contrary, I found him boring, unremarkable and rather prim, and those feelings got in the way of having much sympathy for him.

While I’m certain it’s possible to write a brilliant novel about someone so boring, this one isn’t it. I’d recommend giving it a miss.

A brief note on the physical form of this book. I bought the first edition, which is, as is customary with Julian Barnes’ books, beautifully made. The cut edges are black and, although contributing to the expectation that something more remarkable is going to be found in its pages, this and the all-too-rare sown binding make this a lovely object.

Why aren’t all first editions made with this kind of attention to detail? Now that e-books are gaining such ground, is it too much to hope that physical books will be produced with more care?

No related posts.

There isn’t much of a story here. Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’, is disconnected from life. Having spent time as a poet, a soldier and, more recently, a mathematician, he has come adrift. His father suggests that he take a job as secretary to a count, which leads to his involvement in a committee charged with organising a celebration to mark the Austrian emperor’s 70th anniversary.

The book is considered a 20th century classic, a modernist landmark to rank alongside Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses. If you read James’s 26 Books review, you’ll find that this is his favourite novel. I’m afraid I cannot find the appeal at all.

This is a novel of ideas, a book about nationalism, morality, crime, justice, family, art, intellectualism, commerce, philosophy, militarism, sexual deviance, pacifism, mental health, society, the media and love. Had Musil lived, he would probably have gone on to cover umbrellas, chagrin and sausages too, for all I know. It’s a book about everything and that’s pretty much my problem with it.

The Man Without Qualities is like a map of the world in 1:1 scale or a gigantic photograph in which everything is in focus. It feels like there is no discernment. A work of art is more about what you leave out than what you put in and Musil seems unable to leave anything out. By attempting to say everything, he ends up not saying anything.

For 700 pages or so the book meanders. The long deliberations of the committee, which is led by Ulrich’s cousin, are satirised mercilessly. Having established that the committee is foolish and peopled by fools, Musil then goes on to repeat the point in various ways for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I found it hard to care. There is no emotion to connect to, just a series of abstract intellectual ideas that are ultimately meaningless.

After about 800 pages the book becomes more compelling. Ulrich’s father dies and he travels back home to settle affairs. There he meets his sister, Agathe, from whom he has been estranged for some time. They find a deep connection that draws them together and, since they are siblings, also makes them uncomfortable. Suddenly Ulrich seems to have found the meaning that he was looking for but it is forbidden to him. He and his sister are two halves that can never be properly whole.

The pair alter their father’s will so that Agathe’s husband is disinherited. Her marriage had been an unhappy one and she planned to leave him anyway. Ulrich becomes consumed with the question of whether their action was justifiable.

It’s here that Musil’s obsessive attention to the tiniest detail of intellectual process finally finds a worthy target. There is emotional weight to this dilemma. What Ulrich and Agathe have done is illegal but is it also immoral? That question finds a parallel in their relationship.

This is compelling in a way that a satire about a committee can never be, at least for me. About three hundred of the final four hundred pages in this book could be edited into a wonderful novel.

And what of the rest? I’ve tried to understand what people see in this book but I remain puzzled. The blurb on the back of my copy says: “There is scarcely a page that does not provide new thoughts or offer new insights.”

It’s certainly true that there are plenty of insightful passages and thought-provoking sections here but they are diluted amid the pages of detailed examination of nothing of consequence. Worse, Musil devotes equal time and energy to expounding ideas that are just nonsense.

Here’s Arnheim, a wealthy German industrialist who worms his way onto the committee, considering money:

“And the same is true of morality: if our acts were unrepeatable then there would be nothing to be expected of us, and a morality that could not tell people what was expected of them would be no fun at all. This quality of repetitiveness that inheres in the workings of the mind and morality inheres also, and to the highest degree, in money. Money positively consists of this quality. As long as it keeps its value, it carves up all the world’s pleasures into those little blocks of purchasing power that can then be combined into whatever one pleases. Money is accordingly both moral and rational; and since we all know that the converse is not the case, i.e., not every moral and reasonable person has money, we may conclude that money is the original source of these qualities, or at least that money is the crowning reward of a moral and rational life.”

That “no fun at all” is wonderfully placed and is indicative of the frequent brilliance of Musil’s writing. However, the argument itself is obviously nonsense. Of course money isn’t a moral and rational force, any more than trousers or bassoons are. We can see the flaw in Arnheim’s argument immediately. He’s a fool – and given that he’s supposedly a respected author, Musil is implying that Arnheim’s readers are fools too. But why spend so long unfolding a worthless argument?

Every single character has these obsessive, laborious thought processes. In Ulrich’s case, the ideas are most often interesting and illuminating, though by no means always. Other characters are almost always talking – or thinking – nonsense. At great length. It becomes tiresome very quickly.

There is no shortage of critics far more learned and well-read than me who will tell you that this book is a masterpiece. If you are curious then you should probably make up your own mind. I can’t recommend it.

Related posts:

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (James’s book 4, 2011)
2. The Canal by Lee Rourke (Shane’s book 2, 2011)
3. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies (Shane’s books 29-31, 2011)

Diamonds are Forever

Ian Fleming
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London to be cut, and they’re sent off to America to be sold.

The plot is quite straightforward, more of a yarn than a crime drama, with events unfolding one after the other with little action required on Bond’s part beyond turning up shooting whoever needs to be shot. He meets and falls in love with his contact, Tiffany Case, continues his friendship with Felix Leiter, goes from the east coast to Las Vegas and the villain’s hideout. In this case, it’s an abandoned western town, complete with saloons, boardwalks, stetson hats, chaps and a handsome old steam train.

He is tortured, the girl helps his to escape and he does his secret agent bit, killing the bad guys in a spectacular set piece.

It’s easy to see the origins of contemporary action films and thrillers in these early Bond books. The 1960s Pan edition I bought at a jumble sale when I was 7 is now yellowed and cracked, but the promotional blurb on the back describes it perfectly: ‘Supersonic John Buchan’.

Buchan’s heroes tend to drive around having things happen to them, just as Bond turns up with a gun and a girl. Where Richard Hannay might get the train to Newton Stuart and eat sandwiches in country pubs, however, Bond flies first class to New York, dines on steak and clams and drinks meticulously-described cocktails.

The modern furniture in hotel rooms is detailed (‘well designed and made of a silvery wood that could have been birch’) along with the air conditioning and the television (‘with a seventeen inch screen’). Bond and Leiter have conversations about salad dressing and cuts of beef while they’re not dodging bullets or whooshing around in exotic cars. There’s an exciting world away from dreary old Britain, Fleming is saying, and the keys to it are these brands, these locations, this lifestyle.

Gambling is also much discussed and portrayed as something with very little chance element. The old women at the slot machines are to be pitied for their monotonous quest to pour as much money as possible onto the casino’s balance sheet, the dealers are well-drilled sharps whose main skill is to facilitate the money laundering that goes on at the 21 tables and horse racing is pure theatre. Despite everyone being aware of the crookedness Bond still goes on with the gambler’s superstitions and excitement. The chance element might be a fiction, but it’s one that it appears is worth maintaining.

The longing for domesticity can’t be suppressed indefinitely though and after a while the old desires for children, a settled home life and, above all, toast and sauce bearnaise make themselves felt and Bond installs Case in his flat and covers up his intentions – a permanent relationship – from M in his report. The character develops a little and From Russia With Love looks enticing on the bookshelf.

Related posts:

1. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
2. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)
3. The White Lioness by Henning Mankell (Ian’s book 5, 2011)

The White Lioness (Inspector Wallander Mysteries)

Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

The crime story here is more ambitious and international in scope, involving an assassination plot of famous real-life South African political figures, fictional contract killers and the landcapes of two radically different countries.

As with Inspector Montalbano, the detective is a route into the private lives of a country’s citizens and their most passionately held beliefs. In this case, a deeply depressed and troubled Swede finds his little regional patch invaded by the preparatory processes of a plan that should take place half a world away. He’s brought into international affairs only by accident, when a local woman is murdered carelessly by Konovalenko, a Russian who had been hired to train the killer.

The rather small personal effect of this collateral damage – the motherless family, the church that loses a devout member of its congregation – spur him on to delve into the affairs of the giants. Despite the world stage setting, each player has their own individual motive and Wallander is on the same level as the ex-KGB sociopath, the township professional murderer, the murdered woman’s husband, the bigoted boere, the keen young inestigator and the president of South Africa.

Parallels between Wallander’s family and that of Kleyn, the chief conspirator, are prominent in the latter half of the book but horrifying. Wallander’s distant father and grown-up daughter are spiky in each other’s company but share a bond of love, while Kleyn keeps a house with the mother of his daughter in it, both of whom loathe him deeply but have to hide their feelings to make sure they’re safe from his violence. The danger that the Wallanders face is the converse of that faced by Kleyn’s.

As the story progresses we see the opposite ends of the emotional scale in response to killing. Konovalenko kills at will with no remorse, Wallander is driven to the point of madness. Sweden, we see, is a deeply civilised place that can hold itself apart from the desperate animalism of other countries.

This is a surprisingly subtle book, disguised as a police thriller. Nice.

Related posts:

1. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)
2. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
3. A Venetian Reckoning by Donna Leon (Ian’s book 3, 2011)

The Shape of Water (Montalbano 1)

Andrea Camilleri
Picador 2005, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

The story concerns a man found dead in a car in a wasteground well known as a trading place for prostitutes and drug dealers. He’s Silvio Luparello, an engineer and uncorrupted politician. He’s wealthy and aristocratic, so the well-worn crime trope – this case must be finished quickly to avoid publicity for the powerful friends of those in charge of the police – comes into play and Montalbano feels under pressure.

Clues land in his lap and a clear scenario unfolds, implicating Luparello’s wife and associating the dead man’s name with a particular kind of shame and sexual fantasy. As Montalbano makes his tour of the characters associated with the Luparello family he becomes sure that he’s being fed this scenario, and plugs away at it until he establishes the truth of the matter, exonerating the wife and uncovering a completely different sexual motive altogether.

The police procedural aspects of the book are well done but rather unremarkable. Imagine an episode of Morse with rural southern Italy in the background instead of Oxford and you probably have it. Like Morse, there’s very little moving about and a lot of thinking and passing around of possibilities, but it’s well-paced and sufficiently surprising to make it stand on its merits as a piece of genre crime drama.

But the appeal lies in the culture and personal politics. The two men who find the body first call the dead man’s lawyer, not the police, in order to attract his good favour. The supposedly clean victim had another side to his character that was covered up for a set of reasons that are tightly woven together but beautifully specific to each person who kept quiet. Further information is suppressed and only comes out due to some expertly-played patronage by Montalbano himself and organised crime, surely unavoidable in any Sicilian story, is treated as though it were a messy local records office, an unremarkable part of life to be avoided if possible but engaged with as cleanly as possible if necessary.

Familism and clientelism, the Italian politics books that I’m slowly getting through tell me, are the two dominating modes of engagement in Italian business and public life. People find opportunities for their families, and draw trusted acolytes around themselves, holding out the prospect of a better position when someone else moves on in exchange for menial and unrewarding work now. Society is made up of these more or less connected cells, the bonds of which are mystifyingly complicated until you can work your way inside. Montalbano’s job is to painstakingly and methodically work his way in and takes the reader with him. It’s a wonderful illustration of the anti-meritocratic nature of this culture, with some mouth-watering descriptions of food thrown in.

Inspector Montalbano books have also been turned into a series of television films by Rai, also in Italian, which are very good but not as vivid as this book manages to be. Video tape can look a bit washed out.

Related posts:

1. A Venetian Reckoning by Donna Leon (Ian’s book 3, 2011)
2. Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia (Shane’s book 6, 2011)
3. The Information by James Gleick (Shane’s book 11, 2011)

A Venetian Reckoning

Donna Leon
Pan Books 1996, Mass Market Paperback, 240 pages, £6.99

Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, a sort of Venetian Maigret with a lower clear-up rate.

The story is a gruesome one. It starts with a lorry smuggling prostitutes across the border from eastern Europe, crashing and scattering bodies across a snowy landscape, and ends with abductions and executions.Brunetti rarely knows what’s going on and is powerless to stop anything. Even his final leap of logic and judgment ends badly.

Throughout, he’s an intelligent man with excellent instincts and policing skills, but there’s something huge going on that he isn’t able to get his arms around. The case does come in to his family home in a quite horrific way but the horror isn’t the only reason his wife and children are shown. They’re a big part of his life and character, as much as his work, and we couldn’t see him without them.

The story itself, gory as it is, contrasts with Brunetti’s happy home life and idyllic Venetian setting, but Italy is a malevolent character full of corruption, violence and venality. Leon lives in Italy but hasn’t wanted her work translated into Italian. Considering the current state of Italian detective drama, which has begun to function as a carpet-unsweeping exercise for the country’s organised crime failings, that’s a little surprising. Perhaps she has hoity-toity venetian friends who don’t want to be told.

A Venetian Reckoning is unsettling and beautiful at the same time. I liked it very much.

Related posts:

1. Naples ‘44 by Norman Lewis (James’s book 5, 2011)
2. Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia (Shane’s book 6, 2011)
3. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carré
Sceptre 2009, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

When Issa Karpov, a young Chechen with links to Islamist terrorists, arrives in Hamburg, he immediately draws the interest of the intelligence services. The Germans are keen to erase memories their failure to detect the Hamburg-based group that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US. They want better intelligence sources to help spot future plots.

The British, meanwhile, are interested because of Karpov’s father, who was a Russian officer. Lurking in the background are the Americans, who want to use extraordinary rendition to remove Karpov to their own facilities to find out what he knows.

These forces largely play out in the background as Le Carre focuses his attention on Tommy Brue, who runs a British family bank in Hamburg, and Annabel Richter, the human rights lawyer who represents Karpov.

Karpov’s father was a customer of Brue’s bank and Richter hopes that the money the bank owe’s to Issa can be used to keep him out of the hands of the intelligence services and give him legal status in Germany.

Le Carre’s central trio, Brue, Richter and Karpov, are all well drawn. Brue, cuckolded, estranged from his daughter and laden with guilt over the customers his father brought to the bank, sees Issa as a chance for redemption. Richter seeks to make amends for a previous case in which she believes that she failed.

Issa, meanwhile, is harder to read. Angry and vulnerable, determined to be a devout Muslim but unsure what that means. He ricochets between those who seek to help him and those who would harm him.

The supporting cast are a little more cliched, particularly Gunther Bachmann, the German intelligence man who leads the operation to find Karpov. He’s a tough, charming workaholic who doesn’t respect authority or play by the book. The kind of character you’ve seen in dozens of spy novels, in other words.

Le Carre moves the pieces of his plot into place slowly, before the whole thing snaps shut abruptly. The ending is so abrupt, in fact, that it feels a little unsatisfying. A chapter expounding on the conclusion would have been welcome but it would also, perhaps, have undermined Le Carre’s point. It’s hard to say more without giving away the ending but the way that Le Carre closes the book puts the reader in a similar position to the characters.

Like a lot of Le Carre’s work, this is a very moral book. Once again, he shows how individuals can be helpless victims in the face of an espionage complex that ruthlessly pursues its larger objectives.

This isn’t in the same class as the other Le Carre novels that I’ve read but it is an engaging book that tells a powerful story.

Related posts:

1. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis (Shane’e book 5, 2011)
2. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
3. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins (Shane’s book 35, 2011)

“Hey Foss,” the prosecutor said, taking Clark by the arm, “of course it changes. Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes everyday.”

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

George V. Higgins
Picador USA 2010, Paperback, 192 pages, £8.99

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is another classic of the hardboiled crime genre but while The Hunter is the equivalent of the Hollywood action thriller, this is the precursor to something more realistic, such as The Wire. The characters here, whether crooks, cops or lawyers, are just doing their jobs as best they can.

In his introduction Dennis Lehane – a novelist and one of the writers for The Wire – describes the book as “the game-changing crime novel of the last 50 years”. He notes that the book is almost all dialogue and praises Higgins’ ear for real speech.

The plot concerns Eddie Coyle, a smalltime crook in Boston, who is facing jail time for his part in a robbery. In an attempt to avoid prison, Coyle begins feeding information to the police. He doesn’t think he’s giving them anything important but, unknown to him, someone else is feeding better information and Coyle could end up taking the blame.

It’s fairly clear early on how the book is going to end but that isn’t the point. What makes this book so good is Higgins’s evocation of character and place. He wrote this while working as an attorney in Boston and his knowledge of the system comes through in the tangible authenticity of the dialogue and the setting.

Higgins does so much of his storytelling through speech that the story takes on a hazy, vague quality at times. It adds to the unsettling feel of scenes such as the bank robberies carried out by the gang that Coyle is supplying with weapons. The cold precision of the robbers and the business-like capitulation of the bank staff is brilliantly rendered.

As with The Hunter, it’s clear to see how influential this book has been. However, while that book has been so thoroughly imitated that it feels like an imitation itself, there is a quality in The Friends of Eddie Coyle that is very hard to imitate. Indeed, Lehane’s introduction says that even Higgins could not manage to imitate this book with any success.

It still feels fresh and it’s a thoroughly engaging read.

Related posts:

1. The Hunter (aka Point Blank) by Richard Stark (Shane’s book 34, 2011)
2. The Information by James Gleick (Shane’s book 11, 2011)
3. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (Shane’s book 21, 2011)