I wanted to read this again as soon as I finished it the first time. Though it’s a lot of work – a circuitous, fractured narrative that fills more than a thousand pages – there’s something addictive about it, which is appropriate, given that addiction is one of its key themes.

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace
Abacus 2007, Paperback, 1104 pages, £12.99

If you’re unfamiliar with IJ, start here. For this review I’ll assume a familiarity with the basic plot but I’ll try to avoid spoilers. Alongside my second reading of IJ I decided to read Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of Infinite Jest.Carlisle summarises each section of the novel and then offers analysis of the key themes and draws together the threads of the story so far. I highly recommend it; it’s like having a highly astute friend read along with you. As I completed each section of IJ, I read the relevant section of Carlisle. It definitely deepened and enriched my understanding of the book.

Elegant Complexity

Greg Carlisle
SSMG Press 2007, Paperback, 524 pages, £36.48

However, even without the guide, the structure of IJ is easier to perceive on a second reading. Reading for the first time, it’s hard to keep track of the characters and the various strands of the plot. Those things are much clearer the second time. Knowledge of where the characters will end up makes it easier to track their path through the book.

It’s also easy, with just one reading, to assume that Wallace has poured everything he can think of onto the page, that this is, as I thought after my first reading, “a collection of scenes, essays and anecdotes that DFW assembles into a vague story”. I was wrong. This is as tightly honed as a 200-page novel. Nothing here is wasted and everything is thematically relevant. It’s mind-boggling that Wallace managed to coordinate so much material and is one of the reasons why I think this is a masterpiece.

Wallace’s concerns are communication, entertainment and addiction. Our desire to be entertained, to be absorbed in something without being challenged or made to work, becomes addictive and eventually leads to our withdrawal from the world, killing our ability to communicate with others.

This behaviour is cyclical and repetitive and so is Wallace’s novel. The novel itself ends with the characters in stasis, their fates hinted at but not detailed. Denied release, the reader is left craving more, like an addict, and one can simply turn to page one and begin reading again; the cycle will continue.

Cycles and circles are everywhere in the book, from the addict’s repetitive behaviour to the “annular fusion” process that provides power for the Organisation of North American Nations, to the wheels of the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists.

But there are plenty of other recurrences: the colour blue, for example, and water and the idea of heads as somehow independent of bodies. Mastery over the body requires inhabiting the head – as the novel’s tennis players do – but trusting the head too much can withdraw you from the moment, which is a problem for addicts. Take Gately’s realisation, for example, as he struggles with pain and withdrawal:

“Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”

This is so blindingly true that it seems obvious and yet it really isn’t. It’s a lesson that some of us never learn. But Gately comes to realise it:

“No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it.”

The thing that makes John ‘No Relation’ Wayne a better tennis player than Hal Incandenza is that he can forget a point as soon as it has gone. Hal’s game is affected by what has happened. Wayne’s is not. Wayne is completely in the moment.

These glittering shards of intelligence, like slivers of broken glass – bright, piercing and clear – are scattered through the novel. But Wallace isn’t entirely in his head, he writes with genuine heart too. This is one of the most compassionate novels I’ve ever read, one that comforts you just as much as it challenges you. It’s a book that begs you to understand that a realisation worked for is one that will stay with you. It’s a book that wants to show you how hard communication can be but that will, if you work, communicate that message clearly.

It’s a work of genius. It’s perhaps my favourite novel. You should read it at least once.

Related posts:

1. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 17, 2010)
2. Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (Shane’s book 21, 2009)
3. White Noise by Don DeLillo (Shane’s book 11, 2010)

What he has actually written is a fairly conventional British historical novel, with the the customary bloat and boast of copious research, but lacking the formal invention and play that one would expect in anything described as modernist.

This dichotomy is tremendously interesting to me, and I want to spend a little bit of time thinking about why McCarthy has allowed his publishers to create this association.

C

Tom McCarthy
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 320 pages, £16.99

When I think of modernist novelists, I think first of all of formal innovation of the type that readers of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil will be familiar with. And certainly one thinks later of Beckett in this same mould.

Just taking the writers I listed above, we find innovations like interior monologue, intertextuality, novelistic essay, digression and shifting narrator without having to think about for very long at all. The nearest McCarthy gets to a formal innovation is the interpolation of the odd letter and the pervasive use of the present tense.

We’re fond of labelling things, of course, because it gives us a sense that we know what we’re dealing with. Aha, we say, a modernist novel. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. But we’re also tremendously fond of applying labels as a mark of aspiration, sometimes not in a wholly dishonest way, in order to bask in the satisfying bloom of a connection with the work of those we admire. And of course critics love to assign labels, both pejorative and otherwise, because it prevents them from having to do the hard work of actual analysis. You’ll note that I did that very thing when I described C as a “very conventional British historical novel” a little earlier. I hope to give weight to my choice of labels in a little while.

What sort of author would allow their publisher to claim an artistic kinship with Beckett? The sort who had no say in the matter, perhaps? The sort who was happy enough to receive a highly flattering comparison but too timid to ask that it be suppressed in the interests of modesty? Or perhaps the sort whose estimation of their work far exceeded its actual quality. Or, finally, the sort who is actually producing work worthy of comparison to such a great forebear.

It’s impossible to be certain which one of these categories McCarthy fits in. Well, except the last; he definitely doesn’t fit there. A more modest, hell a more honest, author would have asked his publisher to tone it down a considerable amount.

Alright, so much for it being modernist. Is it good?

I say yes. It’s better than almost any Booker longlisted novel I’ve read in the last few years, with only J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime being significantly better. (It’s instructive to note the formal innovation that really is present in Summertime, incidentally.)

The basic theme is communication and what happens when it breaks down. Our hero is Serge Carrefax, whose mother is deaf and who was taught to speak by his father, an inventor who is particularly fascinated with radio. Serge develops a similar fascination.

In a crucial episode he witnesses his sister, Sophie, having sex, although he seems unaware of what is actually happening, despite the fact that, as we shall see, it leaves an indelible mark on his sexuality. There’s a very subtle suggestion that it was his father who was her sexual partner. It’s possible that I’ve imagined this entirely, largely prompted by the sudden appearance of the word “incest” in the last few pages of the novel. Whoever her partner was, she soon loses her grip on reality – this is another major theme – and takes cyanide. Perhaps importantly, Serge twice gives false accounts of her death, although in both cases there is a poetic truth to his explanation.

She was pregnant at the time of her suicide, and her foetus appears to have passed to Serge in the form of chronic constipation, for which he seeks treatment in a Czech spa town. Here McCarthy establishes a pattern that will be followed in each subsequent section of the book: Serge arrives, meets and screws a girl, builds towards some kind of crisis, is hit by the crisis, he moves on.

Every time he screws a girl, he does it from behind. This is the position that he observed his sister having sex in. I suppose that this is meant to remind us how important an event in Serge’s life this was but I think, for reasons I’ll come to, that this doesn’t really work. It also suggests that Serge is unwilling to open himself to a richer form of communication in his love making, which would be made possible with eye contact.

The entire book is quite frequently very funny, especially in its wordplay on misheard words – another instance of the communication theme – and a couple of wonderful set pieces, and the tone is consistently beautifully ironic. The comic highlight is Serge’s disruption of a seance with a piece of radio equipment which enables him to tell the audience that the medium is a fraud by communicating it through her tipping table. It’s a superb piece of comic writing which is also germane to the theme: the seance is fake communication, and Serge’s disruption of it is truthful communication.

The description of Serge’s sister having sex is also tremendously funny, as we gradually piece together what is happening based on McCarthy’s use of free indirect style to show it to us through Serge’s young eyes. Much as I enjoyed that, though, I wondered how much the comic nature of the description detracted from the obviously vital importance of the act to Sophie and to Serge.

From the spa town – in which he witnesses an argument between nationals of the countries soon to be setting their differences from the discomfort of trenches – he heads to the Air Force. Here his responsibility is to communicate – the theme, again – with his artillery to instruct them where to shell. The authenticity theme is here again, in the form of a carefully staged simulacrum of a German gun emplacement. Later, he goes to the rear and finds a group of technicians experimenting with various means of detecting the Germans’ positions with sound waves. Communication again.

In this section, the text is littered with encoded messages that he sends to base, and we are forced to recognise the research that a contemporary realistic novelist is expected to have done. I’m not sure why making things up should be something a novelist would try to disclaim; perhaps it’s a comfort blanket they huddle in to protect themselves from the claim that their plot isn’t credible. I suppose if you set out to be a realist then you might as well do it properly, but there’s a logical extreme to this which ends in a place that can’t be good for the novel. Unfortunately, the obviously researched pieces of the novel are easily the worst passages.

It is while with the Air Force that Serge becomes addicted to drugs. As a result of these drugs – another aspect of the authenticity theme – he fails to react appropriately when his plane comes under attack, can’t communicate with his pilot, causing them to crash, killing the pilot. He’s captured and imprisoned. This is the easily the weakest section of the novel, concluding with a rather clichéed section in which he faces a firing squad which is called off at the very last minute thanks to the armistice. There’s also the rather troubling fact that he shows absolutely no remorse for the pilot’s death.

From the war, Serge heads back to London where his drug-taking starts to assume an even more dominant part in this life. By now there’s a Gumpish feel to the way that Serge is present at important events, in this case the drug-enhanced roaring ’20s. From there, he heads to Egypt to work on the British Empire’s communications networks. This occurs in 1922, a key year in modernism as several reviewers have reminded us, although any connection with the publication of Ulysses or The Waste Land is undetectable to me.

Again, this section deals with authenticity, this time through the ancient Egyptians’ practice of creating a fake burial chamber in order to fool looters into thinking they had found the real thing. Perhaps understandably, McCarthy is unable to resist the temptation to mention that avatar of communication, the Rosetta Stone. By this stage, the communication theme is well and truly banged in.

While having sex with a woman he has just met – from behind of course – Serge is stung by something (a scorpion?) which eventually induces delirium, and with it the authenticity theme is back. It’s during this delirium that the incest suggestion flashes by. It’s easy to see how incest could be considered fake, or at least illegitimate, communication. But I might equally be doing a little bit too much decoding here.

C – which one rather lumpish bit of dialogue suggests stands for carbon, the basic building block of all life – is a very well written and enjoyable novel. But it is not in any sense experimental or modernist. Perhaps it’s just people trying to sell books, and nothing sells books like a bit of a literary todo – Gabriel Josipovici has recently published a stinging critique of the big beasts of British letters called Whatever Happened to Modernism? and it fits nicely in with that kerfuffle.

The problem with that approach is that it causes one to lose respect for the author, whose hubris is frankly pretty repugnant, and it overshadows one’s experience of the book, because there’s a frustration at its conventionality which wouldn’t otherwise be there absent these claims to difficulty and formal innovation. If you want a modernist-inflected novel written by a British author, may I recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Unconsoled, perhaps the best British novel of the last 20 years. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an amusing, well written, conventional literary historical novel, C is an excellent choice.

Related posts:

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Elegant Complexity by Greg Carlisle (Shane’s books 19 & 20, 2010)
2. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction by Martin Priestman (Ed.) (Shane’s book 7, 2010)
3. ‘48 by James Herbert (Ian’s book 8, 2009)

The Moving Toyshop

Edmund Crispin
Vintage 2007, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

Cadogan is caught up in a mystery when he arrives in Oxford for a holiday. Walking into town in the early hours of the morning, Cadogan’s suspicions are raised by a toyshop. Finding the door unlocked, he makes his way inside and discovers a dead body. Before he can raise the alarm he is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, the toyshop has gone – replaced by a greengrocer’s – and there is no sign of the corpse. Baffled, he turns to Fen for help.

What follows is reminiscent of an Ealing comedy as Fen and Cadogan chase around Oxford in search of the truth.

Crispin enjoys himself throughout, throwing in all kinds of literary gags and satirical lines. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the sort of book in which characters don’t go to the police when they’ve no earthly reason for not doing so,” says Cadogan at one point after Fen has refused to go to the authorities.

In quiet moments the pair play a range of literary games, listing “unreadable books”, for example, and “detestable characters” (”everyone in Dostoevsky”, Fen offers). Later they get a lift from a lorry driver who has become depressed by urban life after reading too much D.H. Lawrence.

Fen’s awareness that he is a character in a mystery novel – at one point he thinks up titles for Crispin’s subsequent books – is reminiscent of John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that Carr’s hero, Gideon Fell, has the same initials as Fen.

The solution to the puzzle is convoluted and slightly confusing but still fairly satisfying. However, the solution isn’t the point. This is an entertaining romp that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable speedy read.

Related posts:

1. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)
2. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)
3. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (Shane’s book 30, 2009)

Runaway (Vintage)

Alice Munro
Vintage Books USA 2005, Paperback, 352 pages, £9.69

Runaway is heavy with accolades: it won The Giller Prize, was a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, and made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Award. For so long a Canadian treasure, it seems that Alice Munro is at last getting the international recognition she so deserves.

Munro’s spare, undecorated writing has always resonated with me: stories of girls becoming women and women breaking free and buckling under, unfinished human beings finding a way to nurture their own private hopes — how similar we all are! — whilst conforming to expectation and regulation, as so many of us must. Her prose is meticulous, her characters unsettlingly real and achingly flawed.

Runaway succeeds both as a collection of individual stories and as a whole, coherent unit — something I think very few short story collections manage to do. The first, titular, story begins square in Munro territory as the cautious relationship between two women, one a farmhand, the other the owner of the farm, evolves into something more significant when the younger enlists the older’s help to run away. Yet the inclusion of mysticism transforms the story into something bigger, and it left me wondering whether the author was exploring new creative ground (and if so would she please continue doing so).

The collection also contains a literary triptych, a novella in three parts, again on the themes of escape, loss and acceptance of what is. ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’ chart Juliet’s transition from girlhood to womanhood, donning and then losing the comfortably self-effacing mantles of wife and mother, unable to the end to lose herself. The take-home, as a reader, is a musing on what it means to really know yourself, the only companion you’re sure to have the whole way through.

‘Passion’, the heartbreaking ‘Tricks’ and ‘Powers’ round out the collection, each a quiet revelation on different phases of the journey from girl to woman. Wrong decisions and their unending aftermath, the weight of hope, the sting of jealousy, the dark realness of experience after a lifetime of anticipation — these are the connected moments that make us who we are:

She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.

Sentimentality tends to take away from short fiction — I think the form is best suited to observation, glance-type snippets of other lives, told in a way that invites the reader to form his or her own attachments. As much as she embraces weighty subject matter, Munro never tells her reader how to feel. Her characters are as they are, not as she wants us to see them. Rather than influencing how her reader should relate to her work, Munro offers her observations as just that — unpolished glimpses into the lives and thoughts and wants of people like you and me.

Related posts:

1. Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (Shane’s book 14, 2010)
2. The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore (James’s book 30, 2009)
3. Dubliners by James Joyce (James’s book 6, 2010)

Captain Blood (Vintage Classics)

Kate Mosse (Introduction)
Vintage Classics 2009, Paperback, 224 pages, £7.99

I wouldn’t bother if I were you. It’s only a couple of hundred pages but feels like far more. The story meanders along, one episode not really flowing into another in a way that decent editing hid very effectively in the film, but makes the book feel as though it should have ended but there’s another fifty dreary pages to get through before you can go to bed.

The action sequences are flabby, the characterisation of anyone other than Blood paper thin and his motivation is sketchy at best. There’s a love interest that’s supposed to carry the events along but, as the woman in question appears only very briefly in a chapter when you’re mostly concerned with an escape that’s one of the better passages, so it’s difficult to find a reason to care.

There’s no real sense of place (he might as well have stayed in Somerset for all the flavour of Tortuga you might have been hoping for), no suspense or conflict that isn’t solved with some predictable flash of insight on Blood’s part and a terrible lack of humour.

Worst of all it’s terribly racist. I found out about half-way through that it had been published in 1922. I had assumed it was much earlier. The terrible crime committed upon Blood at the beginning of his story is his unwarranted enslavement. He feels the weight of it on his shoulders for page after boring page, but has no problem with keeping black slaves of his own on his escape. He doesn’t bother trying to help them escape, doesn’t even seem to notice their condition. There’s no hint of this contradiction in the narration, no sign that the author is aware of it.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the effects of imprisonment on the human spirit here, but none of the black characters are even named.

Avoid this book.

Related posts:

1. Your Face Tomorrow. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías (James’s book 1, 2010)
2. Sunnyside by Glen David Gold (Shane’s book 9, 2010)
3. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)

Crime and Punishment (Penguin Popular Classics)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Penguin Classics 2007, Paperback, 448 pages, £2.00

I have always thought of Crime and Punishment with a little wince of guilt, as I based part of the dissertation for my degree on the Raskolnikov character without actually having read the original text, so I’d avoided it until now as I was worried that I might have been completely mistaken in my borrowed analysis, so it was with an increasing sense of relief that I turned the pages and discovered a tight, stifling portrait of a man struggling with depression and guilt at having failed to live up to his own opinion of himself.

Morality is a malleable thing for the great figures of history, so it’s fine for some people to have murdered and stolen in the story of their lives, as they fit into the story of the world. Raskolnikov studies those figures but finds himself wanting as we meet him in his squalid little room, his studies abandoned and rotting in the corner, and his crime, the murder and burglary of a money-lender and her grand-daughter, can’t be excused.

As we go on his mental illness becomes the sharp focus of the book and I’d come to think of it purely in terms of this picture of a mind in trouble, so I was completely thrown when it spins on its heel and becomes a murder mystery a few hundred pages in. It’s still far from being a 19th century Rebus of St Petersburg but the crime and its detection, investigation and punishment all come into the centre of the narrative for the last section of the book, saving it from being a fascinating but rather too single-minded book about the madness of one man and turning it into a horrible vision of a society full of poverty, class struggle, the class system, misogyny, manners and the morality that might or might not apply to people and their deeds.

The claustrophobia felt by the characters and the sudden lurch from squinting vision of one miserable life to gaping view of a miserable city left me feeling a bit sick. Excellent book, I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

A note on the book itself as a physical object: I bought this in a Penguin edition printed on recycled paper with a bright green cover. Although it seemed like a great idea at the time the pages wrinkled and warped as I read and the text didn’t stand out as sharply as it could have against the dull beige background. For a shorter book that would only be read once, and quickly, it could work, but for something of this stature that I’d like to return to, pay the extra pound and get a better quality version.

Related posts:

1. War of the Worlds by HG Wells (Ian’s book 12, 2009)
2. Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley (Shane’s book 8, 2010)
3. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction by Martin Priestman (Ed.) (Shane’s book 7, 2010)

The power of fiction, the need to create and, most of all, to believe something are all key themes in Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco’s second novel. It’s a kind of intellectual Da Vinci Code, one that piles conspiracy theory upon conspiracy theory but always with tongue in cheek.

Foucault’s Pendulum

Umberto Eco
Vintage 2001, Paperback, 652 pages, £8.99

The book opens with Casaubon, an Italian intellectual and publisher, hiding in a Paris museum at night waiting for a mysterious group who, he thinks, have kidnapped his colleague, Belbo. While he waits he considers the events leading to this point and we drift into flashback. Eco layers the flashbacks, creating a labyrinthine narrative with frequent digressions into the history of assorted medieval sects, the occult and extracts from Belbo’s aborted attempts to write fiction.

Casaubon, Belbo and their colleague Diotallevi work for a small publishing house that deals with a lot of manuscripts from conspiracy theorists. They term these authors “the Diabolicals” and at first mock them. Later they have the idea of coming up with their own conspiracy theory, one that combines all of the crazy theories that cross their desks. What starts as an amusement eventually becomes something that they take more seriously and becomes dangerous once they realise that there are groups out there who believe that the trio really have uncovered a secret.

“Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel,” Eco told the New York Times in 2007. Life is too short to read books by Dan Brown so I can’t speak from experience here but I’d guess that the difference between the two books is that Eco seeks to satirise and deconstruct conspiracy theories while Brown seeks to titillate. Eco fills pages with arcane references and history and after a while I stopped wonder what was true, what was legend and what he had invented. It doesn’t matter – the content of the conspiracies is not the point of the book.

There is genuine tension in places and quite a lot of comedy but mostly this is an intellectual adventure concerned with the love of books and the pleasure of knowledge. It’s also a pleasingly ironic exploration of worlds within worlds, reminiscent of Borges. It’s a lengthy read but nowhere near as inaccessible as it might appear at the outset.

No related posts.

Hangover Square

J.B. Priestley (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, £9.99

Hangover Square is typically considered part of the crime genre – indeed, that’s how I heard of it – but it’s a broader book than that. Though it’s clearly a thriller – in large part a study of a murderous mind – it’s also a moving story of unrequited love, a black comedy and a portrait of Britain on the edge of war.

The book opens at Christmas 1938 and ends just days after Britain declares war on Germany. The main character, George Harvey Bone, is a borderline alcoholic who is obsessively in love with Netta Longdon, a sometime actress and member of his Earls Court drinking set. Most of the time Bone pines for Netta but when one of his ‘dead moods’ kicks in, all he can think of is killing her.

The dead moods – apparently some kind of schizophrenia – are a blank to Bone once they end so though we know what he is planning, he is unaware. The plot is complicated by the fact that Netta is such a horrible person. She uses Bone just for his money and otherwise prefers the attentions of Peter, a former convict with an interest in fascism. In some ways, the murderous Bone understands his situation better than his mild, love-smitten alter ego, even if his chosen solution is beyond the pale.

Hamilton’s description of life in London in the late 1930s is vivid and detailed but it’s his characters, particularly Bone and Netta who really give the book its life. Though Hamilton’s portrayal of mental illness is, to say the least, simplistic, the rest of Bone’s character is drawn with sophistication. We see the other characters only through Bone’s eyes but Hamilton skilfully controls when we see their real motives and when they remain hidden.

Recommended.

Related posts:

1. Runaway by Alice Munro (Sara’s book 4, 2010)
2. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Shane’s book 13, 2010)
3. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner
Vintage 1996, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

While there is much to admire in the novel – the strong evocation of place, for example, and the ear for country vernacular – it’s the unusual narrative technique that makes the greatest impression. Faulkner makes the reader work hard; his characters do not provide helpful recaps of prior events or of their relationships with one another, which is exactly how real people think. The result is a story that emerges slowly, with questions often remaining unanswered for long periods and the reader forced to fill in the blanks with guesswork.

On the one hand, as I’ve said, this narratorial approach is more authentic. On the other, not having all the information you need to make sense of the story serves as a constant reminder that this is a novel. It constantly draws one’s attention back to the narrative device – or at least that’s the effect that it had on me. It distanced me from the characters, making me feel that I never really understood them. But, paradoxically, that is what it’s like in real life – we can’t ever truly know what it’s like inside somebody else’s head. Then again, isn’t the point of fiction to take us inside others, where we can’t ever go in reality? Faulkner’s technique reminds us that we’re reading fiction and in doing so offers a more realistic view of a character than a traditional first-person narrative would, which perhaps defeats the point of writing a novel in the first place. To me, it is both a more authentic and a more artificial narrative voice.

Of course, 80 years later, this technique no longer feels innovative. However, Faulkner carries it off so much better than most authors that its power is undiminished. It is the conviction with which he draws his characters and the strictness with which he controls his narratorial eye that allow him to succeed where lesser authors would fail.

The strictly subjective approach means that it’s often unclear whether things are really happening, and even when it’s clear what’s happened Faulkner often shows us two contrasting perspectives on events without offering a judgement about which we should believe. For example, is Anse’s determination to travel so far to bury his wife an act of devotion, an ill-advised piece of bloody-mindedness or simply selfishness? The answer is unclear until the very last page of the book.

The conflicting motives of the characters may not always be clear but their voices are – each character’s inner monologue is distinct and recognisable without being being caricature. It is clear, without anyone saying so, that Vardaman is a small boy, for example, and that Jewel is a doer, not a thinker.

There’s a sadness about the book that grows as it becomes clear that the family’s quest will not be worth price that they have paid along the way. It is the reverse of Homer’s quest in The Odyssey – from where the title is drawn – instead of returning to home and order, the Bundren’s are leaving home for a place of chaos and uncertainty. The family should have stayed at home, the reader, however, will benefit from having taken the journey.

Related posts:

1. Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis (James’s book 7, 2010)
2. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Elegant Complexity by Greg Carlisle (Shane’s books 19 & 20, 2010)
3. The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin (Shane’s book 18, 2010)

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

Still, the tension with his wife has Billy pondering their relationship as his 12-hour shift unfolds and the body he is guarding leads him inevitably to wondering about the nature of evil. He begins to consider the misdeeds from his own past and the times he was tempted to do worse. Are some people simply evil or are we all the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, Brady’s psychiatrist and professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a “concatenation of circumstances”?

It’s not the most profound question, admittedly, but it’s one that Thomson has Billy approach honestly and thoughtfully, without trying to turn his character into a philosopher or an intellectual. Billy, as a policeman, has seen more of life’s ugliness than most of us ever will – and been involved in a little himself – and it is this insight that he brings to bear on the subject. When Hindley appears, perhaps as a ghost or perhaps in Billy’s imagination, Thomson draws her with the same kind of restraint. Her presence on the page is chilling but underplayed. Thomson is not setting out to chill, he knows that the subject will do much of that for him.

There is some consideration, too, for the demonisation of Hindley. Thomson pays little attention to Brady but shows some interest in how a figure such as Hindley becomes so large in the public mind. Mostly, though, he seems to be interested in fathers and daughters. I think I’m right in saying that every woman in the novel has a father who is to some extent dysfunctional. In a sense, Billy’s 12-hour shift is an examination of his fitness as a father for his own daughter. It’s perhaps coincidental but worth noting that Thomson has a daughter too.

When Billy’s shift ends so does the novel. There is no big twist and no enormous dramatic peak, just a release of tension. Sometimes it’s only when you breathe out that you realise you’ve been holding your breath. That’s how the end of this book feels.

Thomson’s writing is spare, restrained and, barring the odd slip, pitched perfectly throughout. This is a thoughtful little book and one that’s well worth your time.

Related posts:

1. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Shane’s book 10, 2010)