book review – Page 63 – Fiendfully Reading

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

June 5, 2017 fiendfullyreading

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the eagerly-awaited follow up to The God of Small Things, a moving novel that spans decades and goes across the Indian subcontinent to show a cast of interconnected characters and how their lives are shaped by conflict, joy, and circumstance. Depicting the stories of a variety of characters, it does not have a main narrative as much as it puts pieces of different individuals together to form a woven novel showing a modern world and its battles.

The storytelling is expectedly vivid and gives detail to different episodes such as the experiences of a transgender woman, Anjum, who finds community and makes her home in a graveyard, and the complex relationships and life of Tilo, who has been loved by fighters and intelligence officers. These female characters in particular are difficult to forget, with stories that combine family, religious and ideological conflict, and love. Roy’s style suits this storytelling, leading the reader between different narratives easily and making the novel easy to follow and join up the pieces of. From the bustle of Delhi to the countryside of Kashmir, Roy’s descriptions are intricate and show a conflicted and modern world, a world with ancient conflicts in close proximity to branches of Nando’s.

The novel is unlikely to disappoint Roy’s fans who’ve been waiting for her next book. It is a fantastic story full of vivid characters whose struggles are varied and real.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

May 31, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Life in a sentence: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

Solar Bones is a distinctive novel that tells the highs and lows of a man’s life through his immediate thoughts and memories. Marcus Conway is an engineer with a wife and two grown up children, with his thoughts clouded with current work projects and interfering projects, his wife’s sudden illness from a tainted water supply, and the lives of his children, one a local artist trying out a new medium and the other across the globe in Australia. The novel follows him musing over all of these and more, considering the structures of civil features, marriage, and stable life in one single sentence.

McCormack’s stylistic touches—a single sentence novel, broken up by commas and line breaks—makes the book feel strangely natural, giving Marcus’ thoughts a flowing quality that might be expected from stream of consciousness writing, but also some of the feel of poetry. The detail, especially depictions of specific moments like when his wife is very ill, is vivid and real, with the ability to make the reader feel a little queasy, for example. The nature of the novel means it is focused upon the character, his thoughts, and his life rather than a particular main narrative, though the book does have a decisive ending.

Solar Bones is far more readable than the ‘single sentence novel’ selling point makes it sound, but also it is this selling point that gives it a distinctive style, a return to the modernist stream of consciousness and a way of making prose and poetry less separate. It makes for a tender look at a life, unmissable for literary fiction fans.

A History of Running Away by Paula McGrath

May 28, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Running away and finding home: A History of Running Away by Paula McGrath

A History of Running Away is a striking and unforgettable novel with three different narratives that weave their way to show how running away can help you find homes you never knew you had. The most substantial of these is Jasmine’s attempts in the 1980s to escape her small town Irish home for a big city, which does not go as planned. The other two are set in 2012 and follow a gynaecologist dealing with the pressures of working in an Irish hospital and worrying about her ill mother and a girl in Maryland running away after the death of her mother. These stories unfold in a gripping and honest way, showing how finding out who you are can be a difficult process.

McGrath’s writing makes for a tense read. The book’s structure, cutting between the narratives but allowing for a large amount of Jasmine’s to run through the centre of the book, draws comparisons between the acts of running away whilst allowing the characters’ other connections to come through. The novel’s backdrop is the political and social events of the worlds in which the characters live, from Irish abortion laws in the present day to racism and gender restrictions in 1980s Dublin. It is a book that doesn’t shy away from the issues that the characters face, but also doesn’t define them by those issues.

Jasmine’s narrative is the most engaging, as her story is followed through her repeated running away and attempts to work out what she wants to do and whether it is even possible to achieve those goals. Her friendship with Nigerian medical student George as he teaches her to box is a particular highlight, showing how an unlikely acquaintance can have a huge influence.

A History of Running Away is a fantastic read for anybody who enjoys well-written, character-centred books, particularly those which span time periods to show common themes and social issues, and those which focus upon a variety of women.

Party Girls Die In Pearls by Plum Sykes

May 24, 2017 fiendfullyreading

80s culture, Oxford undergrad high society, and murder: Party Girls Die in Pearls by Plum Sykes

Party Girls Die in Pearls is a fun murder mystery set amongst the parties, scandals, and scrapes of Oxford students in the 1980s. Ursula Flowerbutton is a middle-class girl from the countryside, brought up by her two grannies and looking forward to studying History and eating cucumber sandwiches when she goes to Oxford. However, her desire to get involved with the Cherwell, an Oxford student newspaper, becomes a reality when after an unexpected party invite, she comes across a dead body on her way to a tutorial. Suddenly, Ursula must spend her first week in Oxford on the trail of a murderer, assisted by her new American friend, and try to unravel all the love affairs, college jealousies, and high society secrets that she finds in her way.

Sykes’ narrative is a classic murder mystery, but the insight into the upper-class world of a certain subsection of Oxford students is what adds to the enjoyment, with witty and sometimes biting comments and descriptions giving a vivid picture of the world in which Ursula finds herself. Explanations of elements of slang amongst the rich and of Oxford traditions may seem a little odd to some, but it draws attention to the period nature of the setting whilst also holding up elements to ridicule. The characters are quite memorable, either in their poshness or eccentricity, and the style is light and straightforward, making it an easy read to devour in an afternoon.

The novel is full of references to both works involving Oxford (a footnote calls the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited the Downton Abbey of the 1980s except everyone was secretly gay) and 80s pop culture, with films and famous songs mentioned amongst the elite world. Like Starter For 10 and Stranger Things, Party Girls Die in Pearls mixes a genre story with a distinctive 1980s setting that will appeal to those who lived it and those who wish they could recreate the aesthetic of the time. Anyone who went to Oxford will also recognise details in the novel, many unchanged since the 80s.

The Songs by Charles Elton

May 22, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Protest music and show tune rhymes: The Songs by Charles Elton

The Songs is a strangely enchanting novel about the children of an ageing protest singer and how their unusual lives converge. Rose is sixteen and cares for her dying younger brother Huddie whilst living with their eighty-year-old father Iz Herzl amidst the presence—both real and imagined—of his current and past wives. Rose and Huddie’s mother died falling out of the same window twice. Meanwhile, Iz’s much older son Joseph writes songs very much unlike his father’s political work: rhyming tunes for musicals. As things go wrong and the siblings who have never met end up with their lives coming together, it becomes clear fame, family, and truth are not always simple.

Elton’s novel is made up of a bright and distinctive cast of characters, from Rose’s first-person narration, in which her view on her beloved brother, her maths ability, and her family’s unusual history become clear, to Maurice, a schoolboy from the late 1940s fascinated by revolution who meets a Jewish outsider. The book may seem initially to be focused on music and the life of a musician’s family, but a lot of the novel is also about religion, history, and loss, as well as the darkly comic truth of estranged family and secrets. At the start of the novel, the discussion of fame, rumour, and retelling history make interesting points about celebrity life, and throughout these recur in different ways to show connectedness and also how things aren’t always as they seem.

The tone is light yet distinctive, making it an easy and enjoyable read, and the narrative does have one or two surprises. It will appeal to fans of books that contain distinctive characters with both light and deep subject matter, for example novels by Matt Haig. The real standout is the perspective of Rose and how her and her brother exist as the eccentric and often forgotten children of a famed singer and activist.

Judas by Amos Oz

May 21, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Judas by Amos Oz (trans. Nicholas de Lange)

Judas is a thoughtful and complex coming-of-age novel set in Jerusalem in 1959-60. Shmuel is an idealistic student whose life seems to be at a dead end. When he sees a mysterious handwritten note on a campus noticeboard, he takes a job as the companion to an elderly invalid in a different part of the city. As well as arguing with and listening to the old man, he must share the house with a strange older woman who soon fascinates him, though she appears less intrigued by Shmuel. What follows is a narrative about conflict, conversation, religion, treason, and love, as Shmuel tries to find his way forward in life and processes the thoughts and lives of his two new companions.

Amos Oz combines youthful uncertainty and idealism with big questions of political and religious divide and debate. Shmuel’s curiosity about Gershom Wald, the old man, and Atalia, the mysterious woman, seems to battle with his abandoned intellectual curiosity in the figure of Judas and of Jewish views of Jesus, with information about these areas taking up different chapters. He is an interesting central character, the kind of protagonist who falls into a situation through being lost and melancholy and then leaves it somehow transformed. Conflict in Israel is central to the novel, but so is unrequited love and desire, and attempts to understand different viewpoints and how this may change ideas about treason for example. The narrative follows a classic plot of lost student obsessing over various things and battling desire and mystery, but it is the insightful musings, conversation, and detail that give the novel its spark.

Phone by Will Self

May 19, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Darkly comic spy satire: Phone by Will Self

Phone is the witty and fast paced new novel from Will Self, a side-eyed look at the modern worlds of intelligence, warfare, and technology. The main focus is on Jonathan De’Ath, a spy known as ‘The Butcher’ to all who and know him, and his secret longterm lover, tank commander Gawain Thomas. The other thread of the narrative follows recurring Will Self character Zach Busner, an aging psychiatrist, and his family, particularly his daughter-in-law Camilla and autistic grandson Ben. Self creates a riot of a ride, darkly comic and reference-heavy, in this novel about technology and life in the twenty first century.

The narrative hurtles full throttle in one direction, narrated by one character without room for pause, then screeches suddenly into a new point of view. This style – not unexpected to anyone aware of Self’s work – is unlikely to be to everyone’s taste, but it creates an obsessively-echoing and detailed novel full of parroting phrases and cultural references. Acronyms are written phonetically, making the proliferation of them in the modern day very apparent. The Butcher is a fantastic creation, a meticulous and twisted spook who ends up with a glaringly obvious Achilles’ heel, and his sections make for the most exciting reading. How his story has any connection to Busner, Camilla, and Ben is not apparent for much of the novel, but becomes apparent by the end in a satisfyingly fitting yet somewhat ambiguous way.

Phone will not appeal to everybody. However, its blend of exposing military and intelligence cover-ups, political and societal satire, dark comedy, and strangely intriguing characters is a success, leaving a novel that is an intense and unrelenting read, one that pulls the reader into its style and idiosyncrasies. Despite being a spook adept at hiding, Jonathan De’Ath is not easy to forget.

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

May 17, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Friendship, anarchy, and being invited to stay in someone’s French house: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Conversations With Friends is a funny, exciting, and sometimes darkly relatable novel about being in your early twenties and about how to live your life. The story is told by Frances, a twenty-one year old student living in Dublin who writes poetry that she performs with her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi. When they meet the older journalist Melissa who wants to profile them, they are drawn into the world of Melissa and her actor husband Nick, a world of tension, money, and wine. Frances begins an affair with Nick and soon everything is complicatedly entwined as they all consider what they want and what they believe.

The prose is fresh and somehow distinctive, giving Frances’ observational view of the world whilst accurately describing minuscule feelings and emotions. The descriptions of the sensations of being a student and in your early twenties are particularly astute, for example Rooney’s accurate depiction of the feeling of writing an essay, isolating yourself from the world and then emerging to find everything feeling strangely novel. Frances’ disorientation with the world and with the way she is living comes through, particularly when she tries to deal with feeling down and discovering she has a chronic pain issue. Bobbi is another great character, someone whose truth is clouded by the way that Frances sees and describes her, but who shines through as lively and opinionated. The main characters are complex and messed up, arguing about love and ideology and hurting each other a lot.

Engaging and gripping, it is not as much the narrative as the character relationships and the prose that keep you reading. It is filled with dark humour and literary references alongside relatable emotions, tangled-up relationships, and some background discussion of sexuality, class, and mental health. Rooney has created an exciting and enjoyable read about friendship, love, and the imperfection of being twentysomething.

Juniper Lemon’s Happiness Index

May 15, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Juniper Lemon’s Happiness Index by Julie Israel

Juniper Lemon’s Happiness Index is a moving YA novel about loss and friendship, about having secrets and knowing what to do with other people’s. Juniper Lemon is lost without her older sister Camilla. She writes a daily Happiness Index in her sister’s memory and doesn’t know how to get through to her grieving parents. When she discovers a mysterious letter written by her sister to “You” on the day of her death, Juniper starts on a path to try and solve this mystery, protect her own secrets, and find a way of keeping Camilla close as the days keep going on.

The novel has a vibrant cast of characters, following Juniper as she makes new friends and deals with old relationships in the light of recent tragedy. The way in which Juniper realises she has brought people together around her is particularly powerful and leaves a lasting message about the importance of connecting with other people even—and especially—when terrible things have occurred. The mysteries and secrets unfold in a satisfying way whilst all being relatable issues and ideas to a teenage audience and there is a wealth of understated detail, but it is the characters who really shine through and their emotions are what makes the book important. In particular, the highlighting of different points of view—how thinking you’re helping somebody might not actually be the help they need, for example—is significant, showing how Juniper’s actions are well-meaning but can have negative consequences too.

Uplifting yet not cloying, Juniper Lemon’s Happiness Index will appeal to anyone who enjoys YA books that balance friendship, love, and serious issues, with a tinge of mystery and ambiguity.

None of the Above

May 9, 2017 fiendfullyreading

None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio

None of the Above is a powerful and compelling YA novel about a girl who discovers she is intersex aged eighteen. Kristin is a hurdler with a college scholarship and a popular boyfriend who finds out that her chromosomes aren’t what she assumed. She has to deal with her identity in the wake of this discovery and then when the whole school finds out she is intersex. The novel is an uplifting story about identity, learning who you and others are, and finding out who is really there for you.

Gregorio has written a novel that will make many people think, with many characters taking similar journeys of learning to understand different people and how some things—like gender—are far more complex than some people may imagine. Most of this is through the experiences of Kristin and through her and other people learning about being intersex, but there are also moments of discussion about things like homophobia and transphobia which focus on characters learning to be better towards others and to set aside assumptions and prejudices. Kristin herself is likable and interesting, somebody who isn’t even sure how to begin dealing with her own identity and her existence in relation to other people. The teenage characters are pretty typical of a YA novel, with various interests and dreams relating to school and college, which is important in a novel that tries to show how crucial acceptance is in a normal, everyday context.

None of the Above is an important book, taking an identity issue and makes it part of a YA narrative that is similar to many teenagers—dealing with who you are alongside possible mental health issues and life drama. It is similar to books like If I Was Your Girl, particularly in showing both the great and terrible sides to high schoolers and their ability to accept or ostracize.