'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt

 

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

It's all there in the opening line, really: Bunny is going to be killed, the killers (among them our narrator) may or may not get caught, the killers are still only concerned about themselves.

I read this book on the strength of some glowing recommendations and some ecstatic reviews on the back pag, so it was almost inevitably going to disappoint. It did, but only slightly. It starts promisingly, laying out over several hundred pages how it comes to pass that Richard Papen and his friends kill their college classmate, Bunny. This, for me, is where the true brilliance of the story lies, as Tartt paints Bunny as such an odious, parasitic creature that I found myself urging the other characters to kill him as soon as possible. Such feelings, growing as they do over several hours, are far more discomforting to an immersed reader than they are while watching a film, where "Kill that fucker!" is a much more transitory, forgettable reaction. Also notable was how familiar the pretensions and arrogance of the scholarly friends felt. I read the book using my old student card as a bookmark to remind me of how jumped up and obnoxious third-level education can make you.

It's after the death of Bunny that things start to lag a little. I believe Donna Tartt spent several years writing this book, and it shows - in both good and bad ways. The prose is of a lovely standard, and the characters mostly well-drawn, but the pacing of the drama is all over the place, zipping along at one moment and leaden and flabby the next. As such, some key events feel hurried, while some more peripheral moments feel hugely over-emphasised.

Still, it's hard to imagine that there's a novelist out there who didn't overthink their debut novel to some degree, and far be it from me to denigrate what is a well-loved work, one that a lot of people feel is destined to enter the modern canon. Tartt shows a stunning coldness at times, and I find myself hoping that her third book, rumoured to be due next year, won't suffer the same consequences of an equally-lengthy gestation period.

'There Are Little Kingdoms' by Kevin Barry

Were I a more prolific reader and book-blogger I would no doubt be inclined at this time of year to wax lyrical about my favourite book of the year. But I'm not, so I can't. Paul Murray's Skippy Dies, the very first book I reviewed here, would most likely take the crown if I thought about it. Though had Kevin Barry's debut short story collection There Are Little Kingdoms been released this year I would have had an awful lot to think about.

 It was, in fact, released in 2007 - leaving me mystified as to how it took until early this year for me to get wind of it. It appears to have had slow-burning success, garnering rave reviews and high profile admirers such as Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright on the way. It's a kick in the bollocks of a book, giving a stunningly accurate depiction of an Ireland that is so rarely portrayed well in culture, be it high or low brow. The Ireland of midlands ennui and petty personal victories. As soon as Barry launches into his first story, Atlantic City, you feel a surge of familiarity with the protagonist, Jamesie, king of the pool table and the pinball machine, a proud, bored fish in a slightly-too-small pond.
And so it continues from story to story. If you don't already know countless examples of these characters in real life then you certainly know they're out there, just a stroke of poor luck away from sitting beside you on a bus, or hitting on you painfully in a provincial nightclub. Donna and Dee, the restless and irritating twins of Ideal Homes provide a perfect example, somehow perfectly encapsulating the new mentality and morality that took hold just as the Celtic Tiger first stirred.
But if it sounds as though Kevin Barry has taken a harsh view of the people of these nondescript towns that dot the country then you'd be mistaken. His pages lack a sense of judgement, simply letting the characters be who they are, letting them reside in their own little kingdoms.
Read this to enjoy some side-splitting, heart-splitting prose, and to learn something you almost already knew about Ireland today.

'The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ' by Philip Pullman

Before getting down to the nitty-gritty, a small qualm I have with this book: the 245 pages of the paperback edition contain some of the widest margins I have ever encountered, with a full inch to either side of the text, and about an inch and a half at the top and the bottom. This, coupled with the fact that each short chapter tends to conclude halfway down a page and is followed by a blank page (included in the page numbering) mean that the book is presented as a full-blown novel, though a more environmentally-concerned publisher could probably print the content on 60 or less pages without reducing its legibility. I have read longer short stories than this entire book, which leads me to believe that Canongate were being more than a little cynical by finding a way of duping people into spending around twelve euros on what is really a very slender novella. Clever.


What's left of this book when you cut out the excess paper is intriguing. Pullman retells New Testament stories by imagining the figure of Jesus as twins: the wholesome, well-intentioned preacher 'Jesus', and the sickly, shady 'Christ' - who recognises the potential for power that his brother's charisma represents, and reports on his actions to a mysterious stranger. Events, unsurprisingly, lead towards the crucifixion of Jesus, and it is only here that the story deviates significantly from the gospel stories as we know them and the sinister undertones of Christ's meetings with the stranger are brought starkly into the light. Most powerful of all is Jesus' lengthy soliloquy in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which Pullman's own atheistic viewpoint is shown both in a manner both strident and measured:

‘And slander’s what it is; you made this world, and it’s lovely, every inch if it. When I think of these things I’ve loved I find myself choking with happiness, or maybe sorrow, I don’t know; and every one of them has been something in this world that you made. If anyone can smell frying fish on an evening by the lake, or feel a cool breeze on a hot day, or see a little animal trying to run around and tumbling over and getting up again, or kiss a pair of soft and willing lips, if anyone can feel those things and still maintain they’re nothing but crude imperfect copies of something much better in another world, they are slandering you, Lord, as surely as words mean anything at all.’

The last line of the above quote also shows Pullman's awareness of the historical context of the story, with a clear reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He shows himself to be generally well-informed when it comes to biblical scholarship and is largely respectful of it. He does, however, pick and choose when to go with the facts as they are generally accepted, and when to twist things slightly to fit his own narrative purposes. This is probably fair enough, as this book is ultimately one about storytelling, but it makes for a confusing blend of myth and history at times (the book is sold as part of Canongate's Myth series). Much like the New Testament, many would claim. The compelling question for me is whether Pullman is aware of Albert Schweitzer's findings in his book 'The Quest of the Historical Jesus' that anyone who postulates too much on the precise character and ideology of the historical Jesus ends up projecting their own personality onto him. I would warrant that Pullman is aware of this, and has taken the opportunity to quite openly use the figure of Jesus as a mouthpiece for his own philosophy and thoughts about organised religion.


Fortunately, it's a lucid and compelling one, well worth the money despite its brevity.

'Disgrace' by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace was the first novel I read by JM Coetzee and, at the age of nineteen, was probably one of the first really "grown-up" novels I bothered finishing. It's a fine piece of work, notable throughout for Coetzee's complete control of the story and his utter lack of bombast, even when describing dramatic and traumatic events.The novel deals with the fallout of the early post-apartheid years in South Africa and shows how attempts to even the score in terms of land-rights and crime may well have gone too far in the other direction. Coetzee is sometimes criticised for having a certain cold clinicalness to his writing, but it is precisely these qualities that make Disgrace such a memorable book, deserved winner of the Booker Prize in its year of publishing, and one that is likely to stand the test of time.

'The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts' by Louis de Bernieres

Every now and then you read a book that has little bits of magic in it, be they in the style or the story of it. The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts is a book coated in big, dirty swathes of magic. Whilst being grandiose and intimate at the same time, this tale of love, corruption and cruelty in an unnamed South American state contains both belly-laughs and enough viciousness to make you weep for the world on virtually every page.

When you stop to consider that this was de Bernieres' debut effort you will start to weep for all the writers who never manage to demonstrate an ounce of this man's vision or ambition within their entire careers. If I'd ever gotten around to reading more than one short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I have a feeling that I'd be drawing most favourable comparisons right now.
Minor quibbles (if only because no-one enjoys relentless positivity) are that there are an awful lot of Spanish slang words to get your head around, and an awful lot of characters to follow. But really, these things matter not a whit, as this is one bad-ass muchacho of a book.

'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson

"The new Dan Brown!" claim excited fans, who love Stieg Larsson's brand of page-turning, investigative excitement, and who relish the sight of the same book being read by so many people.

"The new Dan Brown," sigh the less easily impressed, who recognise something horribly familiar in the sloppily-written, even-more-sloppily-edited prose with a manipulative cliff-hanger shoehorned into the end of every chapter, and who despair of the sight of every single fucker on the bus making this their quarterly read.

Larsson is, to my mind, a couple of notches above Dan Brown. Make of that what you will.

'Let The Great World Spin' by Colum McCann

"A poet with every living breath" proclaims Peter Carey of Colum McCann, with the kind of effusiveness that is now entirely typical from big authors providing a cover quote to help a lesser-known author flog their book. For once, however, this appears to be more than mere hyperbole.

McCann's book, set around Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, is told from the multiple perspectives of people in New York at the time, and shimmers with pretty words and turns-of-phrase from start to finish. My reading of it suffered from lack of time due to work and wedding preparations, meaning some of the intensity of the book was lost through my spending over a month on it. Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel that it featured one or two fairly superfluous narrators - particularly the teenaged photographer Fernando, whose function within the centre of the novel I couldn't really understand.
More impressive were the middle-aged Claire - grieving for her son killed in Vietnam, and the loud-mouthed prostitute Tillie - an intriguing blend of arrogance and contrition.
Ultimately, I found the narration of the story a mixed bag: largely compelling but occasionally flagging. However, it is the constant beauty of McCann's prose that makes this book essential reading for those who are as concerned with style, perspective and profoundness as they are with out and out storytelling. Nowhere is this better seen than in the sections of the book that deal with Petit's (though he is unnamed in the book) daring walk:

"Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other. On the lookout for the moment when he wasn't even aware of his breath.

The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.

     He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake."