→ March 27, 2024
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Prophet Song.

Taking his cues from the devastating civil war in Syria, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist authoritarian movements in the West, Paul Lynch has crafted a terrifyingly personal dystopian vision in his newest novel, Prophet Song. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, the book follows the decline into tyranny and civil war of the Republic of Ireland through the eyes of Eilish, a mother of four who tries desperately to hold her family and herself together even as the world around her crumbles.

The story begins in the not-too-distant future, where an unidentified party has taken control in Ireland and turned the national police (the gardai) into state security, choosing labor unions – especially the teachers’ union – as their first targets. Larry, Eilish’s husband, is a leader in the teacher’s union himself and after one interrogation finds himself arrested by the national government, disappearing into the state’s growing apparatus for political prisoners and leaving Eilish alone with four kids, ranging from the teenager Mark to the still-nursing Ben. The state gradually increases its authority and rounds up more and more dissidents, even firing on protestors, leading to a near-total breakdown in the social order, food and water shortages along with bread lines, neighbors denouncing neighbors, and the inevitable rise of a ragtag rebel army. All the while, Eilish is trying to keep her family safe, including her father, who is in the early stages of dementia and only half understands what’s happening. Eilish can access some foreign news sources, such as the BBC, to get an outside view of the conflict, and the ubiquity of cell phones changes some of the dynamics of survival, but none of this changes the more fundamental needs to get food, shelter, and medical care, all of which become critical as Eilish has to decide whether to stay or make a dangerous bid to cross the border with Great Britain and join her sister Aine in Canada.

There’s something very It Can’t Happen Here about Prophet Song; this is the kind of collapse we associate with countries where the populace is mostly non-white – Syria, Somalia, Yemen, the D.R. Congo, and now Haiti. Lynch’s Ireland goes from an affluent, stable democracy to a police state that resembles the early U.S.S.R. but with the weaponry and technology of modern conflicts. A staid middle-class life sits on a shaky foundation of civil society that, as we’ve seen in the U.S., depends in large part on people not losing their minds and voting for would-be fascists. (Lynch never identifies the party in power by name or ideology, but they are at the least anti-labor; their specific policies aren’t relevant to Eilish’s story and he doesn’t waste time on them.) Hungary had a functioning democracy for a short while, but its people voted in an irredentist autocrat who has gone after two of the most common targets for authoritarian regimes – Jews and LGBTQ+ people. Venezuela and El Salvador have slid from democracy to dictatorship, with the former’s economy collapsing after its first strongman died. It can happen, but we never dream that it will until it’s too late, often by our own hand.

The real power of Lynch’s work is that he focuses exclusively on one family, and one person, rather than telling the story of the collapse of a country. In that way it’s more in the vein of survivalist or post-apocalyptic fiction, like Testament, In a Perfect World, and The Road than the standard dystopian novel. The leaders of the country are never named; in fact, no one in any position of authority, not even a police officer, gets a name in Prophet Song. Names are reserved for the ordinary people – Eilish, her family, a few neighbors. This choice makes the book more intensely personal, and becomes its own form of psychological horror – will Eilish’s family survive another day, and what calamity might lurk around the corner? You can experience the terrors of the police state from the most granular level, where the lights don’t stay on and food is scarce, where you can’t get across town to see your ailing father and you have to worry one of your kids will be arrested or shot for being out past curfew.

Lynch doesn’t shy away from the inevitable tragedies of his setting; Eilish is fighting a losing battle but refuses to admit it. Even the ending leaves some questions unanswered, and Eilish still isn’t certain if she’s made the right choices for her family, because in that situation you will never have that certainty. Instead, Lynch makes the smart choice to lean into the crises, but move us quickly in and out of them, so the story is never lurid, never ogling Eilish’s misery for the reader’s pleasure. It’s a masterful blending of the dystopian novel, the political thriller, and an exaltation of the power of one person – of one mother – to carry the weight of two different generations and somehow make it through.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

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→ December 16, 2022
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The Bone Clocks.

I love David Mitchell’s prose, and I love his characters, but now that I’ve read all of his novels, I think I don’t really love his books as much as I should. The last one on my list was The Bone Clocks, which I tore through, as I have with every novel he’s written, but which once again left me kind of cold when it came to the story. Of his eight published novels, I think I’d say I truly liked only four, and even Cloud Atlas was probably more a respect and appreciation sort of ‘like.’

The Bone Clocks is a two-layered novel that brings back the body-snatching spirits who appear at least in passing in every one of Mitchell’s novels except for Black Swan Green. It turns out that there are two sorts, the Horologists and the Anchorites, and they’re waging a war across all of time because they differ in how they view humans – as hosts, or as food, to put it in the simplest terms. Rather than just follow these disembodied entities, however, The Bone Clocks instead follows a number of characters, notably Holly Sykes, across decades and around the world as they live their own complicated lives while often serving as unknowing vessels for Horologists. Holly is the closest thing to a central character here, as she appears at the start of the book as a rebellious teenager who finds out her boyfriend of a few weeks is actually sleeping with her best friend, which leads to a series of unfortunate events that put her on the path of the spirits, coincide with the disappearance of her younger brother (who appears to be autistic), and give her what she thinks are visions for much of the rest of her life. We also meet a group of obnoxious upper-class twits at a college that’s supposed to be like Cambridge and a bad-boy author named Crispin Hershey who’s on the downswing of his career, before eventually getting to the heart of the book, the battle for all things between the two disembodied groups, before concluding in a grim post-apocalyptic section that recalls the middle section of Cloud Atlas in setting and tone.

I just can’t get into the Horologists stuff, and Mitchell is fully invested in it, bringing them into almost every book of his, often shoehorning them in somewhere they don’t belong (Utopia Avenue). I enjoy the way he reuses characters and places, or inserts other references to his previous works into new ones, but for someone who writes such lovely, evocative prose about reality, he spends too much time in this unreal milieu. Mitchell captures much of the human experience as well as any contemporary writer, especially grief and sadness, so jerking the reader out of whatever emotions he’s created to go spend time with Marinus or Esther Little or the Mongolian or whoever does the work no favors. There’s a good novel here in The Bone Clocks that just follows Holly Sykes through her highly eventful life, but he’s written her a story that’s inextricable from the Horologists’ narrative.

Slade House is the ultimate Horologists/Anchorites novel for me – it’s a horror story and a thriller and at its heart it is just about those beings. There’s one focus there, so you’re not divided between a very real world and Mitchell’s fantasy environment. And Black Swan Green works the other way; with no mystical mumbo-jumbo, you just get a beautiful coming-of-age story, rendered in fine detail by Mitchell’s eye and pen. Even Utopia Avenue got most of the way there, as the spirits appear just once, in a brief section that you could probably skip and not miss at all. Since that’s his most recent novel, I’d like to think that it’s a sign that he’s getting away from the Horologists & Anchorites and might just continue to write straightforward novels – with lots of callbacks and other references, sure, but perhaps grounded in a single plane of existence instead.

Next up: John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, winner of the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction. O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is one of my favorite novels of all time.

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→ April 13, 2022
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Black Swan Green.

My reading of the entire David Mitchell catalogue continued during the offseason, as I read but never reviewed The Thousand Autumns of Jasper de Zoet (which I loved – brilliant prose and a compelling story), and now brings me to Black Swan Green, an autobiographical memoir set in Ireland in 1982. It’s the most straightforward of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read, with relatively few references to people and events in his other novels, and a lovely, bittersweet coming-of-age story that reads like a way better Belfast.

Jason Taylor is Mitchell’s stand-in, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents and his older sister Julia, attending a boys-only school where he’s one of the less popular kids, due in part to his stammer. He’s friends with Dean Moran, one of the few kids less popular than he is; gets bullied by a few of the street toughs from the town; and harbors a quiet crush on Dawn Madden, who ends up dating one of the worst bullies in Black Swan Green, Ross Wilcox. Jason’s misadventures nearly always start in mundane ways – he’s at school, on the bus, at a carnival, at home, or just playing in the woods – but end up touching on one or more of the major themes: his parents’ fractious marriage, his difficulty in almost every social situation due to his stammer, and the difficulty of fitting in that teenage boys everywhere face. So much of Jason’s inner monologue revolves around trying to be cool enough that he’ll be accepted – or at least not bothered – by the town’s bullies, but not to attract undue attention and thus becomes a target for them for an entirely new reason.

Jason is a fantastic character, one I wish we’d see come back again in another novel – although I suppose he’d be a successful writer as an adult. I certainly saw enough of myself in him, despite the outward dissimilarities between us (I never had a stammer, and Jason is more comfortable fighting & playing sports than I was), to feel like both he and his story were realistic. Mitchell gives him everything a protagonist should have, building out Jason’s moral compass and personality through a series of normal events that many kids would face, from finding a lost wallet to standing up to bullies to coping with the conflict between loving your parents and recognizing that it’s not cool to be seen with them. It’s a more modern interpretation, but you can interpret Black Swan Green as the protagonist’s struggle against a world where toxic masculinity is the norm, a world into which he does not fit.

That does mean that the other characters are less fleshed-out, especially Jason’s dad, who is just kind of a dud as a person – although I would guess most of us know a Michael Taylor who talks a good game but doesn’t post when it’s his turn to be a good father or husband, and it’s hardly surprising when he eventually fails at all of his roles. Julia doesn’t get enough time on the pages, as she heads off to college partway through the book, but she’s the most interesting secondary character, as she softens towards her younger brother as both her time at home comes to a close and she better foresees the storm brewing in their parents’ marriage.

Black Swan Green – which has put the Charlatans’ “Sproston Green” in my head for the last week – doesn’t have the mystical elements that appear in most of Mitchell’s books, and other than a mention of Robert Frobisher, none of the major names who pop up in the Mitchell Literary Universe appear here. (Some characters here show up in minor roles in other books, especially Cloud Atlas, but none rang a bell for me so long after I read that work.) That’s for the better, as it would have been jarring to have that stuff show up in a roman à clef, unless the Horologists really did show up in Mitchell’s childhood. One warning: There’s a fair bit of homophobic language here, although I’m sure this is accurate to the time period and setting – I was 9 in 1982, in New York rather than Ireland, but this was the vernacular of teenaged boys in the 1980s – and it’s hardly glorified. It’s unsurprising to see Mitchell do straight fiction this well, and as much as I enjoy his broader and more inventive plots, this is among the best coming-of-age novels I’ve ever read.

Next up: Ellen Hendriksen’s How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Snow.

John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea and was shortlisted for the noirish The Book of Evidence, but he also writes mysteries featuring a pathologist named Quirke under the pen name Benjamin Black. He published a new mystery in 2021, titled Snow, under his own name, with references to Quirke but a new lead in detective St. John Strafford, whose first name is pronounced “Sinjin” and last name is mispronounced by everyone he meets. Banville can’t help but write beautifully, and he has crafted a narrative that zips right along, in a setup that could easily have come from an Agatha Christie novel … but my god, the ending is so predictable you could probably guess it from this setup: In the prologue, a priest is murdered, stabbed in the neck and then castrated. If a possible motive for someone to kill a priest in this way came to your mind, you probably got it right.

I’m a fan of classic English mysteries, especially those of Christie – I’m a Poirot guy, but I’ll read anything she wrote, and have read more books by her than by any other author. There´s something about the simple setup and intricate plotting that will always appeal to me; it’s similar to my taste in board games, where most of my favorites have simple rules that lead to complex strategies. There’s an elegance to it that I appreciate.

Banville follows the template to a tee, other than, perhaps, the detail of the gelding of the priest’s corpse. But is he subverting the genre, or playing it straight and just adding too little to the form to make it interesting? Banville’s prose evokes the setting, the place, and the cultural conflicts that lie beneath the surface of the story, including the Catholic/Protestant split in 1950s Ireland. The Osborne family, owners of the house where the priest died and where he was often a visitor, are Protestants, as is Strafford, which the Osbornes seem to think should make them allies, especially against the power of a Church that will eventually show up to lean on Strafford to let the truth lie. Yet the motive for the murder is mundane, and figuring out who did it won’t be difficult.

The novel also suffers from Strafford’s blandness: he’s neither likeable nor unlikeable, lacking the conceited air of Poirot or the wit of Archie Goodwin or the debonair of Lord Peter Wimsey. Strafford enters the book early enough to establish some sort of defining qualities for himself, even an eccentricity or two, but beyond his name and the running gag that everyone loses the ‘r’ in his surname when he introduces himself, there’s nothing.

Banville does seem to be making a bigger point here with this story, about Ireland, the Church, the aftereffects of trauma, and doing that in a murder mystery feels a bit off. I doubt Banville wanted to trivialize his subject, but that’s how it comes off in the end, especially with the last-minute twist to the resolution (which is also reasonably easy to see coming). There’s a follow-up novel coming this year called April in Spain that unites Strafford with Quirke, to be published under Banville’s own name rather than the pseudonym, and perhaps that will answer some of these questions. As much as I enjoyed reading Snow while I was in the middle of it, the ending revealed it to be just empty calories.

Next up: I’m reading Mike Schur’s upcoming book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which, so far, is just as good as you’d expect.

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→ March 12, 2021
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number9dream.

David Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, is beautifully written but the most derivative of the five novels of his that I’ve read so far. Mitchell is an unabashed fan of the works of Haruki Murakami, but here he picks all of the wrong parts of Murakami’s works to mimic, with a story that never comes together and ends on a note that would make even less sense if you haven’t read his first novel, Ghostwritten.

number9dream is ostensibly the story of Eiji Miyake, a 20-year-old student who was raised by his mother and later his grandparents, and who sets out from his rural island home to Tokyo to try to track down his father’s identity. Along the way, he has a series of improbable encounters with yakuza, hackers, detectives, and, of course, a beautiful woman in whom he takes an interest. Mitchell divides the book into eight chapters – the ninth is the ending – each of which roughly comprises one of those adventures in Eiji’s quest to figure out who his father is and force some sort of meeting with him.

I enjoyed Murakami’s two big novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, tremendously, even acknowledging some of Murakami’s flaws as a writer (such as his inability or unwillingness to write compelling female characters). His use of magical realism and creation of immersive dreamscapes make for incredibly compelling reads that I find I can’t put down – but when he hasn’t been able to cast that spell, as in Killing Commendatore, it becomes tedious, like you’ve seen behind the magician’s curtain and realized how every trick is done.

number9dream feels more like the latter kind of Murakami novel, probably because Mitchell is trying too hard to emulate another writer, when, as would be clear in some of his later novels, he’s best when he’s just being David Mitchell. The series of events that befall Eiji are so improbable, often with over-the-top violence that borrows from Murakami’s worst instincts in that department – even those two Murakami novels I most enjoyed have one scene of horrifying violence apiece – that I couldn’t get caught up in any parts of the story or, most importantly, the major mystery of who Eiji’s father is or whether he’ll find him.

Mitchell’s use of dream/fantasy sequences early in the novel is also offputting, and he just drops that gimmick well before the halfway point. Eiji’s crush on Ai, a server at the coffee shop he visits at the start of the novel while following a lead on his father through the lawyer who has coordinated payments from his father for his care and upbringing, is fine, but the way she reciprocates doesn’t feel realistic at all to the character or women in general, falling into white-knight fantasy territory as well. There isn’t a well-written woman in this book, in fact, which I don’t think is typical of Mitchell – but it is typical of Murakami and the latter’s worst trait as an author.

I’ve read five of Mitchell’s eight novels so far, and this is easily his worst. It’s derivative, but worse, Eiji and his quest are just not compelling storylines – more so once it becomes clear early in the novel that if he finds his father at all, it’s not likely to be a satisfying resolution for him or for the reader. Eiji looking for his father is a good start on narrative greed, but Mitchell doesn’t keep it going, because ultimately Eiji’s reason for trying to find his father’s identity appears to be nothing more than curiosity – it’s not money, it’s not a strong emotional need, it’s just a mystery this goofy kid wants to solve. Maybe that’s uncharitable to Eiji or Mitchell, but I know the author can craft more gripping plots than this one, yet the most interesting parts here are the non sequiturs that hint at his other books (such as the Voorman Problem). I’ve got three Mitchell novels left to read and I imagine this will end up at the bottom of my rankings once I’m through.

Next up: I’m many books behind in reviews, but right now I’m reading both Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Tim Grierson’s This is How You Make a Movie.

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→ December 16, 2020
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Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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→ April 16, 2019
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The Sea.

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, a slim, introspective novel on death and grief, written from the perspective of a middle-aged thesaurus. It’s a demanding read that brims with ideas and contains many sparkling turns of phrase while simultaneously maddening with the narrator-protagonist’s bloviating style and endless desire to show off his vocabulary.

Max Harden is a retired art historian who has recently lost his wife, Anna, to some sort of aggressive cancer, after which he revisits the seaside cottage where he’d spent time one summer and had first encountered death and loss, although exactly how that occurred is saved until the very end of the novel. (The reveal is similar in tone to that of another Booker winner, the marvelous The Sense of an Ending, but the latter book does it far more effectively.) He splits his meandering narrative across three separate timelines – the end of Anna’s life; the summer he spent with another family, the Graces, at their cottage; and the present day as he’s returned to the sea and found connections to the past.

There’s a profound sense throughout Max’s story that he’s still struggling to process his own grief in the face of several shocking losses, something he seems to cover up through his own dissembling, almost in parody of the British stiff-upper-lip stereotype, the man who can look at and even identify his feelings but refuses to engage with them. The reader never gets to know Max at all; he’s the astute observer, in the style of Nick Jenkins, but lacks any discernable personality traits of his own, other than, perhaps, his ability to keep his own grief off the pages. The only real indication we get that these deaths have affected him comes near the end, when a bout of drinking leaves him with a head injury and eventually brings his adult daughter around to try to coax him to come live with her, especially as she’s afraid he may have tried to take his own life. Even then, he can barely conjure up the emotions any father should feel for his daughter, not least the reversal of roles that comes when your children have grown and begin to wish to take care of you.

I mentioned the novel’s vocabulary above; Banville may have all of these words at his immediate disposal, but just because you know a word doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice for that situation. Here’s a sampler of esoteric words I encountered in the book, most of which I didn’t know previously: rufous, immanence, minatory, eructations, aperçu, anabasis, expatiation, putative, vulgate, refulgent, vavasour, plangent. I looked up all of the words on that list (and more) that I didn’t know, or of which I was unsure, and yet have forgotten most of them in the book’s wake. Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book stilted, claustrophobic, and pretentious, while referring to Max as a gloomy narcissist, and even though I clearly liked the book more than she did (low bar, I know), I can’t argue with her criticisms. The occasional use of a twenty-dollar word in lieu of a ten-cent one can be fun for writer and reader, illuminating the page, signaling a shift in tone or sparking a thought in the reader’s mind, but when you’re regularly reaching for the OED, using minatory when menacing would have sufficed, you’re trying too hard.

Banville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize once prior to this win, for the superior The Book of Evidence, a twisted novel in both senses of the term, one that also has a narrator writing at some remove from his emotions but does so in a way that heightens the tension rather than suffocating it. His win in 2005 was not well-received, as The Sea beat Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous Never Let Me Go and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, both of which would have been better choices, as well as highly-regarded novels by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. It does, however, illustrate one of the criticisms of major literary awards – their tendency to reward their own, to be slow to recognize cultural and stylistic shifts, and to excessively honor works that draw heavily on or even mimic the classics of the western canon. I could live with a little pretension if the book took me on an emotional journey, but The Sea seemed to prefer to send me to the dictionary instead.

Next up: I’m just about finished with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, another Booker winner, after which I’ll turn to this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

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→ September 5, 2018
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From a Low and Quiet Sea.

Irish writer Donal Ryan has received significant acclaim in his home country and Great Britain for his works to date, but relatively little attention here so far, although that might change with his latest book, From a Low and Quiet Sea, which was just long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and weaves together three narratives of men adrift in their worlds that is by turns harrowing, wry, and empathetic.

The novel, a scant 180 pages with a lot of white space within, unfurls in four parts, one for each protagonist and then a short final section that brings the three plot threads together. The first of the stories is the most powerful and feels the most timely: we meet Farouk, a Syrian doctor who senses that country’s civil war approaching the city where he lives with his wife and daughter and arranges with a smuggler to take them out of Syria to Europe, only to find that the smuggler has lied and put the three of them and dozens of others on a ramshackle boat that isn’t seaworthy and ultimately ends in tragedy. Farouk is then left to try to assimilate into a new country while bearing the weight of the tragedy that befell him and many of his countrymen, without a home to which he can return.

The next two stories are less gripping, although they will eventually connect with Farouk’s in powerful fashion in the final section. Lampy is a ne’er-do-well of sorts, a college-aged man with a job as a bus driver for local assisted living facilities, living with his mother and her father, with Lampy’s father unknown to him and seldom even discussed. John is nearing the end of his life and expressing remorse for so many of the actions of his younger years, including how many lives he ruined as a “lobbyist” (a fixer, really) and one man he killed by accident. Eventually these characters and a few adjacent ones intersect in part four, with deep consequences for most of them.

Ryan’s prose style is challenging, with meandering sentences that run on for half the page, reminiscent of Faulkner or Ryan’s contemporary Eimear McBride, but his scene-setting skills are remarkable if you can process all the information he’s throwing at you in these endless phrases. He’s at his best as a pure writer in Lampy’s section, explaining the chaos of Lampy’s home life and communicating his disorientation within his own life. Ryan often gives you the sense that you’re observing the action from a remote distance, or perhaps from some altitude, so while the action is clear, the images might be blurred around the edges, which establishes the inner confusion of the three primary characters – Farouk ripped from his normal life into a new country; Lampy uncertain of fundamental aspects of his identity; John grappling with his own mortality, unsure if any repentance will suffice for things he’s done.

That sense of distance and of the reader’s difficulty in fully observing the action before him is strongest in the final section, where Ryan connects the three stories in oblique fashion, enough so that I had to re-read several parts to be sure I had caught the intended connections Ryan had made between characters. You might piece one or two of them together earlier in the book, but I did not, and Ryan’s unannounced shifts in how he identifies certain characters was jarring.

However, Ryan has infused so much of the empathy he has for his creations into this book that even my momentary confusion at how he assembled the pieces in the fourth part couldn’t reduce my investment in the resolution – and that is From a Low and Quiet Sea‘s great strength. This is a literary work, aimed high in prose and complexity, but is still fundamentally an accessible and human work, a novel that is simultaneously timeless and very much a document of our time today.

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→ June 24, 2015
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The Third Policeman.

I have two Insider posts up this week, one on the Touki Toussaint trade and one on scouting Yoan Moncada, Rafael Devers, and Javier Guerra.

I’ll admit right now that I only partly understood Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, almost as much as I enjoyed his most famous work, the metafictional masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. He wrote The Third Policeman next, but couldn’t find a publisher at the time and eventually shelved the work and reused a portion of it in his final book, The Dalkey Archive, but the original work came out shortly after his death and has quietly obtained a cult following, one that rose when one of the co-creators of the show LOST mentioned that the book might give viewers a clue to the show’s underlying mythology.

I can’t discuss the book in full without spoiling the ending, but I’ll do my best to cover my thoughts on the book’s meaning without ruining it. The narrator is the ne’er-do-well son of an estate owner in Ireland who inherits the land and farm when his father dies, letting the tenant Divney take over stewardship so he can continue his reading of the incompetent philosopher de Selby, whose work shows up repeatedly in the text and in various footnotes discussing de Selby’s life and some of his most bizarre ideas. Divney somehow establishes some kind of primacy in the relationship and even possible ownership of the estate, which leads in typically nonlinear fashion to the two committing a murder to rob a wealthy neighbor. After several years of an uneasy alliance, Divney finally tells the narrator where the proceeds are, but just when the narrator is about to grab the missing box, things get really weird, with reality turning upside down on the narrator, introducing him to the supposedly-dead victim, the narrator’s own soul (which he helpfully dubs “Joe”), and two policemen who are totally obsessed with bicycles. The third policeman … well, he’s there, but never there, and you’ll have to read to find out how and why.

The novel itself is deeply philosophical, with the destruction of the line between reality and fiction a completion of the blurring that O’Brien began in At Swim-Two-Birds (#52 on my most recent top 100 novels ranking). It’s decidedly postmodern but not metafictional. O’Brien delves into the nature of matter, reverting in a way to ancient beliefs about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, and how we perceive the world around us. He also seems to argue that time is, indeed, a flat circle, although the exact meaning of that statement won’t be clear until you’ve read the book. The fictional writings of de Selby, with whom the narrator is obsessed, are utter nonsense – de Selby tries to dilute water because it’s too strong and argues that night is merely a collection of “black air” particles – lending to the unreality of the narrative while also exposing the narrator’s own tenuous grip on what is real. When the two policeman show him the road to eternity and introduce him to a machine that runs on “omnium” and can create anything you desire, he just tries to grab as much stuff as he can, without any thought to the potential consequences (which you’ll also have to read to learn).

Drawing as much from Sartre and Camus as from Descartes and Einstein, The Third Policeman is delightfully weird yet profoundly disturbing once you’ve finished the book and reconsider what you’ve read. Rather than make a specific metaphysical argument, O’Brien experiments with reality within fiction, moving targets and obliterating lines to create a foundation for humor while simultaneously knocking the reader off balance. It’s an uncomfortably funny read, and one I couldn’t stop pondering for days after I finished.
Next up: I just finished Joel Dicker’s global bestseller The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

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