Coe for Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse... Well, not quite, not yet, but the Silly Season is upon us and incurable readers like me need lots of lovely books to help us through the silliness.

At this time of the year we want our reading matter to be relatively pain-free, not necessarily 'easy', but not too complicated, dark or depressing. (It's dark enough outside if you're living in the Northern Hemisphere.) We want books that are well-written, that goes without saying, gripping and convincing, preferably with a decent dose of humour.

I got lucky and kicked off the Festive Season with a book that meets all the above requirements. Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle  is a sequel to his hilarious portrait of adolescence in the seventies in Britain, The Rotters' Club. You don't have to read the seventies novel before the sequel - set three decades later in Blair's New Labour Britain at the beginning of the 21st century - because Coe provides a synopsis of The Rotters' Club for those who have not read it, or have read it and (in the writer's own words) 'inexplicably forgotten it'. This tongue-in-cheek phrase from the Author's Note sets the tone for a satirical and entertaining novel, 'with a disturbing undertow of menace', according to the Literary Review.

I got aquainted with The Rotters' Club during a lazy summer week on a yacht off the Croatian coast last year and found it such perfect holiday reading that I promptly posted a blog about it (http://maritareadingspace.blogspot.com/2010/08/those-lazy-hazy-days-of-summer.html). Much to my delight I can now report  that the sequel is just as enjoyable and eminently suitable for the Silly Season. 'Intensely readable', is how Ian Rankin rates it - and he should know, having written some intensely readable books himself. I have to confess I still prefer the earlier novel, but then I'm a child of the seventies. I  could identify with everything depicted in The Rotters' Club, from the punk rock to the ugly brown wallpaper.

In The Closed Circle Benjamin Trotter and his old school friends are on the brink of middle-age: married, divorced, disillusioned and angst-ridden. Coe manages to achieve the same irresistable mix of politics and sensual pleasures, satire and seriousness, as in the earlier novel - and music once again plays a prominent role.  

The Rotters' Club, after all, is also the title of an album by the cult group Hatfield and the North. And one of the three sections of The Closed Circle is called High on the Chalk, inspired by a song with the same title from the album Beet, Maize and Corn by The High Llamas. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of these groups. Even my French partner, who's a walking encyclopedia of modern music and often listens to Hatfield and the North, had to admit he doesn't know The High Llamas.   

By the way, it's through my partner that I got to know Coe's work, only after I'd moved to France, where they adore him. He seems to be one of those English authors who are perhaps even more popular in France than in some Anglo-Saxon countries. So if you're still searching for something to read while you're digesting your Christmas turkey or trifle, I can assure you that most of his novels would make pretty good festive fare for the spirit: What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Dwarves of Death...

Season's Greetings to all readers out there - and may Santa bring you at least one great book this Christmas.



     

Travelling space

Novels often turn out to be better guides to the soul of a place than even the best official guide books. A first-rate fiction writer can grasp the essence of a country, a city, an era in a more creative way than most travelogues. 

I realised this once again during a recent short trip to the USA when I was fortunate enough to have Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as my fictional guide.

I'd been meaning to read Freedom ever since it was published last year. Like millions of readers worldwide I'd been enchanted by Franzen's The Corrections; I'd also read his earlier novel The Twenty-Seventh City (not quite as enchanting; the author was obviously still getting into his stride) and his thought-provoking nonfiction work How to Be Alone. But there were so many other books-to-be-read on my bedside table that I kept postponing the pleasure. 

Then I found myself on the east coast of the USA with a suitcase full of unsuitable books. Yes, I'm still old-fashioned enough to carry actual books instead of an electronic reading device when I travel. The extra weight isn't really a problem. I leave the books with friends along the way once I've read them - which usually leaves me with enough space in my suitcase to buy more books. This time, though, I'd packed in a hurry, and the books were all wrong, nothing even vaguely American.

Just the excuse I needed to walk into a New York airport bookshop, where I saw Freedom on a shelf waiting for me as if we had an appointment. An hour later I was reading it with the kind of slow-burning excitement that increases with each page. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the novel even if I'd never been to the USA, but reading it while I was over there was a real treat.

Freedom is a huge sprawling family story set over a few decades and in many different cities (which I couldn't all visit, obviously), but a substantial part of the narrative action happens in  the two cities where I spent most of my time: New York and Washington DC.  I also visited friends in Mclean, Virginia, just across the river from DC, where the young Joey Berglund sees 'a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where (he) wanted to live as soon as he got rich'. Previously I'd never even heard of Mclean, but now I could understand exactly what Joey meant with that 'sylvan cul-de-sac'. There is even a short scene between Joey and Jenna in a Florida airport, which I read just after I'd flown to Florida. Talk about the right book at the right time. This one was perfect.

I don't mean that it's a perfect book - such ambitious novels seldom are. There are a few pages full of rather boring background information on Walter Berglund's complicated career moves which I would have gladly skipped. But the novel has nearly 600 pages, most of them gripping, satirical and serious, extremely well-written with totally convincing characters.

Walter Berglund's wife, the sporty and pretty Patty, is so vividly drawn that I was still thinking of her days after I'd finished the book. Their egotistical son, Joey, started out as the character I would have loved to hate and ended up learning to like somewhat reluctantly. And their eternally cool, eternally selfish rock-and-roll friend, Richard Katz, well, let's just say it's easy to understand why Patty found him so irresistible.

Freedom is a big novel about big ideas - politics and ecology, the state of the planet and overpopulation, capitalism and corruption, friendship and faithfulness - but the ideas are never abstract, always carried forward in a very concrete way by the characters. And there are moments of heart-stoppingly pure and beautiful writing. Let me leave you with one of my favourite paragraphs:

She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of a workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consist of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.


Bon voyage, if you're travelling soon. Here's hoping you find the perfect fictional guide. 

Out of the shadows of 'children's books'

'You must write for children in the same way as you write for adults, only better.'

I couldn't help thinking of this famous quote by Maxim Gorky while reading Jason Wallace's Out of Shadows, winner of the 2010 Costa Children's Book Award and shortlisted for the prestigous Carnegie Medal 2011. Especially in the light of Martin Amis's arrogant remark in a recent interview that if he had 'a serious brain injury' he might well consider writing a children's book (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/martin-amis-brain-injury-write-children).

Of course Amis was duly taken on by some well-known authors of children's fiction. But unfortunately his words confirmed the lingering suspicion among many readers that you have to write 'down' when you write for children. That it's somehow 'easier' to write for children or teenagers - and that these authors therefore deserve less respect than their colleagues who write for grown-ups.

From my personal experience of writing for adults and for children, I know just how wrong these assumptions can be. Yes, there is a difference between writing for children and for adults, just as there is a difference between writing poems and novels, or plays and short stories. But this does not mean that writing poems is easier than writing novels, does it?

As far as I know the Nobel Prize has never been awarded to someone who writes exclusively for children or teenagers - and we'll probably have to wait for that happy day before children's fiction finally gets the respect it deserves - but many a worthy Nobel Prize winner has also written for children. The French laureate JMG le Clezio  is a good example - and I wouldn't dare call him brain damaged.    

The test of a good children's book has always been that it could be read and enjoyed by all ages. In fact, a really good children's book should be read by all ages. Think Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird and many, many more.

Jason Wallace's intriguing debut novel definitely passes this test - which is why I'm almost sorry that the cover mentions the Costa Children's Book Award so boldly. Some potential adult readers might be put off by the knowledge that it was actually written for teenagers. And that would be a real pity. Out of Shadows is an initiation novel about a British boy's adolescent years in an expensive private boarding school in 1980's Zimbabwe - but it is much more than just another boarding school story.  The events begin shortly after Robert Mugabe has become the first black leader of the former Rhodesia, a Prime Minister deeply detested by most of the mainly white boys at Haven School. Their privileged families - and quite a few of their teachers, almost all of them still white - share their mistrust. The 15-year-long 'bush war' has left deep scars on both sides, black and white.

But Robert Jacklin's father is an optimistic believer in liberty and equality, a dreamer who has brought his unwilling wife and son from England to start a new life in a new non-racist country. Very soon Robert, desperate to be accepted by the other boys, learns to hide and betray his father's beliefs. He is especially keen to befriend  the leader of the group, Ivan Hascott, a cunning boy willing to go to any extreme to 'save' his country from the blacks.

The book reads like a thriller, short chapters full of action and horror, as you watch Robert fall under Ivan's spell, being drawn deeper and deeper into an abyss of bigotry and senseless cruelty. The malicious pecking order of 'good' traditional boys' boarding schools is brilliantly depicted, the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest. By the time Robert reaches his last school year, he has become 'one of the boys', consciously losing his British accent, using the same slang and racist terms as his chums, even joining in the sadistic 'games' they play with children from the black village.

But then Robert Mugabe visits Haven School for the official opening of a new building named after him, and Robert Jacklin realises that Ivan has been hatching a deadly serious plan all along, a fanatic final attempt to change the course of history...

Of course the reader knows that Mugabe wasn't assassinated in 1987 - that he is still in power more than thirty years later, a stubborn dictator seemingly hellbent on destroying his country - but this is not where the real tension of the story lies. Wallace concentrates on the internal tension of a teenager being torn apart by conflicting feelings of loyalty and morality and the need to belong. Out of Shadows is a story about black people and white people, but it is never told in a simplified black and white way.

On the contrary, it leaves readers - of all ages - with the distinct feeling that life remains full of grey areas. Sorry, Martin Amis, but this is certainly not the kind of story a brain injured person would write.