'Swamplandia!' by Karen Russell

Karen Russell first attracted attention a couple of years ago for her debut short story collection St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves. Needless to say, I haven't read it. But there was something beguiling about the cover and plot synopsis of her maiden novel, Swamplandia! , a tale of an odd family who live on an island in the Florida Everglades, where they run their own (eponymous) alligator park, replete with live alligator wrestling shows.

It's a singularly strange book, largely in a positive way. It opens with the death of Hilola Bigtree - alligator wrestler extraordinaire and beloved mother of Osceola, Kiwi and Ava. The book is largely built around the efforts of the three to deal with their mother's death, though only the perspectives of Kiwi (in the third person) and Ava (a more gripping, less amusing first person perspective) are seen. Kiwi's is really a coming of age story, as he travels to the mainland and works a shitty job for a rival theme park in a misguided attempt to raise enough money to keep Swamplandia! afloat without Hilola, its star attraction. Ava is a charming, unreliable narrator who struggles to keep her sanity whilst looking for her older (but still teenaged) sister, Osceola, who has become unhinged enough to run off with a ghost called Louis Thanksgiving, who she intends to marry.

Such a bizarre story, you would imagine, requires strong, vibrant writing to work. And Russell manages that in spades, with memorable descriptions and inventive adjectives in almost every paragraph, without sounding too loose and jazzy. A sampling of any page of the book would throw up vivid sentences, but one particularly striking metaphor is used to explain a character's reaction to a rape, where she feels drawn to her rapist:

 "Once, at Argyle Murphy's fish camp, I watched a little scottie dog get a Gulch bottle broken across its back and then go loping, tongue lolling, towards its owner with the man's beer and its own blood stiffening on its fur - not to attack him, as I'd originally thought, but to lick and lick at the emerald bits lodged in his hand."

Interestingly, in an interview Karen Russell speaks of how her writing process involves a lot of time carefully composing sentences, and how the editing of the book required her to cut a lot of these sentences out. It is arguable that a few more sentences could have been chopped to facilitate a zippier, tidier narrative; though it would take a hard-hearted bastard of an editor to decide which ones. Swamplandia! falls a fair way short of perfection, but the loveliness of its prose means any reader will be glad to have encountered it.

'The Thing Around Your Neck' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A few years back Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came to a secondary school I was teaching in at the time to do a reading and Q&A session for the senior students there. I hadn't read anything of hers at that stage but was aware of the high acclaim there had been for her novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibsicus, so I went along out of curiosity. After she'd finished reading some extracts questions were opened to the floor and a girl put up her hand and asked Adichie where she gets her ideas for characters. The author was a few words into her answer before she stopped and asked the girl if she had read any of her books, as she was going to use a particular character to illustrate her answer. When the girl rather shamefacedly admitted that she hadn't Adichie just laughed before continuing her answer, which was to the effect that her characters are nearly always based on people she's met. Then she said "Maybe one day I'll write a story about a girl who asks questions about books she hasn't read."

Ouch.

Adichie's fierce intelligence, along with her biting (and sometimes petulant) wit are what come through in The Thing Around Your Neck - her first collection of short stories. She is a traditionalist in the sense that there is absolutely no gimmickry to her prose, though she rips into certain conventional values mercilessly. 'Cell One', which I have seen singled out as one of the weaker stories in the collection in other reviews, is an excellent opener to my mind, with an elegance of style that matches the grace under pressure of the narrator, save for one outburst.

High standards are maintained throughout, as Adichie plays through her strengths by sticking to the subject matter she knows, that being conflicts of various sorts in her native Nigeria and the difficult experiences of Nigerian immigrants in the USA. You firmly feel that she is basing these stories on personal experiences, some of which are clearly still very raw. Perhaps a little too raw, in some instances, such as 'Monkey Hill' - a tale of frustrations and condescension at an African writers' conference, where Adichie's obvious desire to lampoon someone leads to a mildly cartoonish depiction of a villain, thus threatening the integrity of what is otherwise a very clever story. Although, as Adichie would be at pains to point out, I wasn't there.

The only other criticism I could make of this collection is that on the one occasion when Adichie chooses to narrate a story from a male perspective I felt my immersion in the book waning considerably, as the story didn't have a fraction of the heart of the others. But that is only really a minor glitch, and you can appreciate the fact that Adichie is trying to spread her wings a little. I read much of this book out loud (it helps my wife get to sleep) and the immaculately composed sentences tripped off the tongue, and brought out just the amount of emotion that they were looking too. I look forward to delving further into Adichie's work, along with reading this one again sometime. And I'm glad I'll never have to ask her an uninformed question.

'In a Strange Room' by Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut achieved a new level of fame last year when In a Strange Room made it onto the Man Booker Prize shortlist. But he had been there before, a few years back, with a very fine book called The Good Doctor. Neither of these books won the prize, which seems a shame, as they are two of the most fascinating, readable literary novels I've encountered. Both possess that quality that only the most special novels have where the reader feels enriched and, in some intangible way, changed by what they have read.

In a Strange Room is, at face value, three pieces of travel writing with only a shared narrator as a common thread. Galgut himself appears to be that narrator, though he makes it clear that this is really a work of fictionalised autobiography fairly early on:

"He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past.  Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was.  But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching."

Throughout the book Galgut moves between referring to the protagonist in the third person (for the most part) and the first person. Surprisingly, this is never confusing to the reader. It simply reads as a way of distinguishing the polished narrative of his experience from the sketchier parts of the story. Thus, when the narrator is at his most confused and emotional vulnerable we are more likely to see 'I'. Whilst the three pieces are ostensibly unconnected, there is an increase in intensity throughout each, which then carries through to the next, culminating in some emotionally coruscating scenes in the final part, where the narrator cares for a manipulative, suicidal friend. Such devastating drama owes much to Galgut's precise, controlled prose. there are no pyrotechnics here,  for he shares a talent with Cormac McCarthy and countryman JM Coetzee for employing a deliberately limited vocabulary to powerful effect.


Galgut has said that this book is about power, love, and guardianship, and how our relationships are defined by one or more of these elements. It is, and more. But for me his true triumph is capturing the disconnectedness of the traveller and the frustrations of thwarted love. Highly recommended.

'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.