Paul Beatty: The Sell Out (2015)

Edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)
Review number: 1510

The Sell Out is a novel which divides opinion. If you look at online reviews, ones which give it very high ratings are common, but so are ones which give it very low ratings. The style and the content of Beatty's novel are responsible for both these extreme reactions, and I can really understand why people think of it in both ways.

I started out as a fan. The first part of the book is a tour de force of satirical humour: this is I think the only Booker Prize winner I have ever laughed out loud when reading. Basically the book starts with the ending. The narrator ends up before the US Supreme Court, basically for actions which call the comfortable assumption of white people that there is no longer any racial divide in the United States, which is the first chapter, with the rest of the book leading up to this appearance. The early parts of the book are an extended, vitriolic, riff on what it means to be black in twenty-first century America, full of references both literary and otherwise, and also full of language which may well shock.  It's kind of like the illegitimate child of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. Strong stuff, and although I was enjoying it, I didn't want to read more than a few pages at a time.

As the book goes on, the tone settles down somewhat, and this is actually a problem. The actually story is less interesting than the set pieces and jokes - things like a parody of The Charge of the Light Brigade, or a stand-up comedian making jokes in the format of academic reports on psychological experiments. Without the energy present at the start, The Sell Out reading experience becomes an impatient wait for the next extended joke.

If you don't get many of the references (and I'm sure I missed some, not being into gangsta rap), the jokes won't be as funny. If the language offends, you will find The Sell Out unreadable. It made a difference to me that the book was written by a black writer; I think I would have been offended if it had been written by anyone else. The first part is really love or hate; the second half is so much less successful that it was just mainly average. Overall, my rating for the book is 7/10.

Toby Litt: Journey Into Space (2009)

Edition: Penguin, 2009
Review number: 1499

Warning: this review is going to contain lots of spoilers, without which it would be hard to say what I want to say about it. Please don't read if you don't want to know the plot of the novel.

Toby Litt is, incidentally, someone I used to vaguely know (I had rooms on the floor below him for a year when we were students). Some of his novels I like a lot, and others not at all. Journey Into Space is the first of his books which I have read which comes between the two extremes. Or, rather, it moves from one to the other, as the story progresses.

Journey Into Space is divided into five sections, each shorter than the previous one, which gives an overall impression spiralling into a central point because of the way the plot develops across them, as well as because of influence the decreasing length has on the reading experience. The whole thing is set on that standard science fiction location, the generation ship on its way to colonise another world, inhabited by a very small community. (In-breeding, something which concerns some of the other writers of this type of stories, is simply handled by gene technology.) The plot covers four generations of life on the ship, not starting at the launch but several generations into the journey.

The first section is the most unusual in science fiction terms. It concerns the meetings between two teen-aged cousins, who share their ideas about Earth, a world they have never seen except in the records carried by the ship and messages received by it. The main way they do this is through "describing", where each tries to make the other feel what it would be like to experience something - rain, grass, the presence of animals - they have never known themselves. The theme here is nostalgia, and how we look at a past we can never actually see fully. This might feel like an extended creative writing exercise ("Produce 500 words describing grass from the point of view of someone who has never seen it in reality"), but it is effective at generating a mood which is shattered at the end of the section - Celeste gives birth a child (in a strange passage using a series of images derived from the describes, while the pair are shunned for their incestuous relationship.

In the second section, the child, named Orphan, takes over as the centre of the narrative. He charms his way into becoming the captain of the ship, despite not being terribly bright, and becomes regarded as something of a king and god. He institutes a perpetual, hedonistic party, where everything is done on his slightest whim (though he is manipulated into making decisions by others who have more interest in running the ship). This section seems to be a commentary on a different aspect of today's world, where we are living in the moment without a care for the traditions of the past or for the effects our way of life will have on generations to come. The main problem with this section is that Orphan, as depicted, does not convince the reader hat he has the charm he is credited with

The third section follows the life of Orphan's third child, imaginatively named Three, from spoilt child to ascetic obsessed with being able to write on paper in the old fashioned way, and centre of a new religion, proselytised by her nephew.  It is in this section that news reaches the ship that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself. In the final two sections, the nephew takes over the ship after Orphan and Three die; the ship then returns to earth, receiving a signal to indicate that there have been some survivors, before being deliberately crashed into the earth to obliterate defective humanity (leaving just two survivors, in an escape pod, who know that there is no way they can properly survive). This nihilistic section is much less clearly linked to commentary on twenty first century humanity. It seems perfunctory, and poses a fairly common conundrum - how does the narrative survive and who adds the final words describing the death of the last two humans orbiting earth? It may be that this ending is meant to provide some positive message of hope: somehow, some remnant of human civilisation has continued - but it isn't effective in this way for me, being swamped by the nihilistic theme of the book, which seems to be that the human race is better destroyed than allowed to continue.

The message of Journey Into Space (assuming I haven't just completely misinterpreted the novel, and there is one) is made so much the centre of the novel that other aspects of fiction writing suffer, especially characterisation - Celeste and Three are the only individuals given much in the way development. Apart from the descriptions which form part of the game between Celeste and August, there isn't much filling in of the background; like a lot of modern science fiction, Journey Into Space assumes that the reader will be familiar with the basic idea of a generation ship, for instance.

While there are some interesting ideas in Journey Into Space, parts of it simply don't work, and it generally feels under-developed. My rating: 5/10.

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks (2014)

Edition: Sceptre, 2014
Review number: 1497

The Bone Clocks tells the story of the life of Holly Sykes, from her teenage years in Gravesend in the 1980s through to the mid twenty first century. This immediately makes it unusual: most novels are either fairly firmly set in a recognisable past (or more or less present) or in the future. Mitchell also combines, as in several of his other novels, fantasy elements with naturalistic and real world events, such as the war in Iraq.

This is a novel in which it is quite hard to work out what is going on, at least at first reading. Some things are clear: Holly has the second sight (though that term isn't used by Mitchell) and has visions of the future. There are characters who have access to something they call "the script", but their role in the story is not properly explained until near the end. These characters appear mysteriously at moments in the story when an important choice is to be made by one of the more reality bound characters.

The Bone Clocks is episodic in nature. There are lengthy gaps between the dates at which each is set, sometimes decades, and they are not all told from the same point of view. They do make the story a little bit harder to grasp, though the arrangement is not as complex as the structures of some of Mitchell's other novels (the episodes are presented in chronological order). Paradoxically, though, I found The Bone Clocks much harder to read than these earlier books. Each episode was individually interesting, but there is not really a sense of where things are leading to. A character is shared with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but that does not help make things clearer.

The resolution of the mystery of the script does make everything a lot clearer, but it is a very long time coming (I think this is Mitchell's longest novel by quite some way). Even though I am usually a big fan of the author, I felt that it didn't really prove worth the wait. If I had been new to Mitchell's work, I probably would never have gone on to read his other novels, and this would have been a pity. So I would suggest starting elsewhere and come to The Bone Clocks later, if you like Ghostwritten or number9dream. Even then, I feel that the books of Nick Harkaway or Haruki Murakimi are a better follow-up to Mitchell's early work than The Bone Clocks.

The "bone clocks" of the title are human bodies, referring to the ageing process. Ageing and time are the main themes of the novel, though it is also about how something magical can touch the most banal of lives - even someone growing up in Gravesend in the eighties.

Not Mitchell at his dazzling best - but still reasonably enjoyable and intersting. My rating: 7/10.

Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013)

Edition: Penguin, 2014
Review number: 1496

This is Mohsin Hamid's third novel, after The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I still think is the best novel to portray the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings, and his debut Moth Smoke, which I didn't like so much and now barely remember. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is, like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an attempt to bring attention to issues from a world that westerners tend not to think about much - this time the poverty stricken Asian communities where very rich and very poor often live almost side by side. It is much more similar, however, to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which has an almost identical theme.

Adiga's book, while noteworthy for the vigour of its protagonist, is a novel which is traditional in form. Hamid tries something different: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is told in the second person, as a self help manual, with a certain amount of amusing ironic deconstruction of what a self help book actually is (pointing out that if there is one self it is meant to help, it's the author who pockets the royalties, for instance). Each chapter follows the same format - a succinct title ("Move to the City", "Get an Education"), a short introductory paragraph about the nature of the help offered, and an instalment from the "your" story. I usually find second person narratives extremely irritating, but the self help conceit and the thought that has gone into the writing and its balance between the stark reality of life in "rising Asia" and humorous touches means that it actually works quite well.

There is very little in the novel to date the start and finish, though it covers sixty or more years, from young childhood to death, slightly unsettling in the second person. Hamid's nationality suggests that the location could be Pakistan, though he is careful not to be too specific (omitting mention of religion, for instance, or any politics beyond that of the city in which it is set) - it could be any number of places in Asia. A Pakistani background would also suggest that the novel describes a life from colonial independence to almost the present.

Returning to the comparison of Hamid's novel with Adiga's, I would say that The White Tiger is more profound, while How to Get Filthy Rich is more accessible. The same statement would still be true if The Reluctant Fundamentalist is substituted for The White Tiger. I enjoyed How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Hamid has something important to say (if not anything new), but I don't think it will stay with me in the same way as the other two novels have. My rating: 8/10.

Philippe Claudel: The Investigation (2010)

Translation: Daniel Hahn (2013)
Edition: MacLehose (2013)
Review number:1491

Even the very shortest summary of The Investigation makes the main feature of the novel immediately apparent. The Investigator is sent to look into a series of suicides at the Firm, and has a series of strange experiences in the Town. This immediately shows that virtually nothing in the book is named directly, everything being given a role in a way which makes the novel seem to be full of symbols (these substitutes where names are normally used are always capitalised). The symbolic side of the novel is so apparent that it is noticed by the characters (in a none-too-original ironic touch); the Investigator and the Policeman discuss whether they might be in a novel about three quarters of the way through.

The important exception to the lack of proper names is the hotel in which the Investigator stays, Hope Hotel, and this actually makes the symbolic nature of the book seem even clearer: it is a bizarre place, and every time the Investigator's hopes rise that he might actually have a decent room and breakfast, they are doomed to strange disappointments: bathrooms where all the taps dispense boiling water, breakfasts where everyone else is served lavishly while he is given just two rusks. If The Investigation has any message it is this: that life is confusing, surreal, and doomed to disappointment.

What the reader thinks of the novel will almost certainly be determined by what they think of this defining foible. For me, it was interesting to begin with, but quickly became irritating. Although a short novel by modern standards, The Investigation felt over long and extended; perhaps the natural length for literature which is so dependent on a quirky structural idea is the short story.

Most reviews I have seen of The Investigation  emphasise how much it is like Kafka. This is true, in its portrayal of an innocent individual caught up in amysterious, bureaucratic nightmare. Claudel also brings in absurd and humorous elements, and the overall tone is much lighter. It's a black comedy, not a nightmare at all. Much of the humour is about the mishaps of the Investigator, and that has a cruel side to it which I personally don't find amusing.

My rating: 4/10.

Iain Banks: The Quarry (2013)

Edition: Abacus, 2014
Review number: 1489

It felt like a significant, sad, occasion when I started to read The Quarry. This is the last time I will be able to read a book by one of my favourite authors for the first time, and it is a book which is infused with the news of his final illness and death in 2013, even though the similarities between the terminal cancer of the major character of Guy and the sudden final illness of his creator are apparently accidental, the book being written before Banks' own diagnosis. The awareness of this makes it tempting to either write about how it feels when a cultural figure of importance in your life dies, or to give the book a good review whether or not it deserves it, more a tribute to the person than an honest look at the quality of this particular work (as happened with Double Fantasy, the album which was released almost coinciding with John Lennon's murder, leading to the retraction of at least one prominent poor notice). I might give in to the first temptation a little (you may notice that in fact I already have), but I will definitely try to avoid the second: I hope that this will be an honest account of what I thought of The Quarry.

The first thing which strikes a reader of The Quarry is the narrative voice. The story is told by Kit, who is Guy's son. That there is something unusual about Kit is immediately obvious - he is autistic, basically, and thus his world view is pervaded by the way his mind works (for instance, the importance of the number of steps taken on the journeys he regularly makes on foot). It immediately reminded me, for obvious reasons, of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which is narrated in a similar fashion. Another, perhaps more apposite, comparison would be with William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, because the use of a narrator with an unusual way of looking at the world becomes of importance. How the reader feels about Kit's narration will effectively colour their response to the book as a whole.

The plot revolves about the resolution of three questions of importance to Kit and the group of Guy's friends who make up most of the rest of the characters. First, who was Kit's mother? Second, what will happen to him when Guy dies? And third, what has happened to the missing video - one of a series of parodies made by Guy's friends while reading film studies, this particular one has content which is potentially very embarrassing to some of the participants, and they are reluctant to explain why. The story is about these questions to the extent that the answers will pretty much determine the level of satisfaction that a reader feels at the end.

While making the reader wait to find out the answer to these questions (unless they skip to the end), Guy and his friends reminisce, take drugs, argue and rant about the state of the world. I found the rants in particular a little wearing on the patience - Guy's in particular being more similar to those of Ken Nott in Dead Air than perhaps is good for the individuality of the character. Some readers may find the pretty constant bad language hard to take, though Banks is probably not a writer you will read for very long if you are offended by swearing.

The static nature of the setting - almost all of The Quarry is set in a couple of rooms in a single house in a small town - and the nature of the plot - lots of lengthy discussions which go nowhere - makes for a less than engaging read in comparison to some of the more accessible Banks novels which precede it  (for instance, Espedair Street, The Crow Road or The Business). Neither does the use of Kit as a narrator match up to the more extreme experimentation of Banks' early career (Walking on Glass, The Bridge, etc). It's still enjoyable, just not great by Banks' standards. My rating: 7/10.

Nick Harkaway: Angelmaker (2012)

Edition: William Heinemann, 2012
Review number: 1476

Harkaway's first book, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favourite new novels of the last few years, so I have been eagerly waiting to read his second, Angelmaker.

The central character, Joe Spork,  is a craftsman who works on clockwork mechanisms, deliberately following in the footsteps of his grandfather rather than his father, an East End gangster. But when he is asked to repair an enigmatic device, he draws the attention of a shady government agency as he races to prevent the use of a doomsday weapon.

There are, unsurprisingly, many similarities between Angelmaker and The Gone-Away World. The style is the same, the frenetic pop culture tropes are used as effectively. Here, the references include such things as Kim, sixties London gangsterism, a hidden London which most inhabitants never see (Neverwhere without the fantasy elements - including a market held near HMS Belfast), and so on. Like Angelmaker, it reminded me strongly of Thomas Pynchon, though perhaps in this case Vineland is a closer fit than Gravity's Rainbow. It's lighter, with more concentration on the humour, but is certainly no less enjoyable.

This type of wildly whimsical storytelling always appeals to me, but if it isn't your cup of tea, you are unlikely to enjoy Angelmakeras much as I did. And since the cleverness of the silly side to the book is such an important part of it, it's probably not worth picking up if that is so. But to those of us who do like this, Nick Harkaway's second novel is as much a treat as his first. My rating: 9/10.