Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett

I was thrilled to find a Guardian newspaper summer reading list from all kinds of well known writers. This book was on it and I can imagine some cashed up writers prone on a sun lounge in Malaga reading this book from cover to cover. It is a page turner indeed. I am hypercritical of historical fiction and shy away from bodice rippers. However this one is really very compelling. I loved the historical period in which is was set: 1945 to 1989. It follows the lives of a loosely connected family whose various branches live in the Washington, East Berlin and Russia. It charts all those recently fascinating political events including the presidency of JFK, the lives and deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the civil rights movement in the US; in Russia we live through Kruschev and the succession of other leaders whose names I still can’t spell, right though to Gorbachev; in East Berlin of course we live with the Wall, the Stasi and the relentless dehumanization of the population. It is quite fascinating. What is not so fascinating is Follett’s really irritating prose style and interest in trivial detail. We could have cut at least twenty pages out of this 1004 page book if he’d reined in superfluous descriptions of what people ate for ‘snacks’ (for some reason every time I saw that word I wanted to throw the book at him!) and his tedious blow by blow descriptions of tawdry sexual encounters. I do not want to go with the hero as he slips his hand up under her skirt to find the soft triangular mound of her womanhood, for god’s sake. Follett is playing out his own sexual fantasies here and it doesn’t do service to what is otherwise a good story. And finally a bit of a whinge about the characters. There were too many good news stories here, too many easy paths to rock and film stardom, hell even potential Nobel prizes. We skimmed over whole lives, went in and out of marriages, babies grew up and left school, all in a superfluous and quite unsatisfying manner. I guess I found the premise so interesting that I thought someone could have written an entirely different type of book that explored some of these people’s situations in depth. But then, this is historical fiction, and that’s all part of the genre I guess. If you’re going to read it, warts and all, then this a good one.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Never Mind I was shocked by this book. It is supposedly about a little boy, Patrick, but he hovers around the edge of the story like a little ghost, barely making an appearance and on the run from his vicious violent father (who demeans the mother and rapes the child) and from his completely uninterested mother. Two other couples make an appearance: Victor Eisen, a Jewish philosopher and his American journalist girlfriend Anne, and Nicholas Pratt, wealthy something or other and his very young and very self centred glittering girlfriend Bridget (who is as sure she will have to end up marrying him as he is that he will have to get rid of her!). These people bring insight into the situation. But it is a black and horrible story about the acceptance of the father’s sadism and brutality. Friends had told me this was a funny book and indeed its scathing satire of the upper classes is at times; however the violence of the father overshadows all. And then I discovered that the book is autobiographical. St Aubyn was either going to write it or kill himself. There are more books in the series and I will go on to read them but not expecting the witticisms and light heartedness of the Mitfords this time!

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracey Chevalier

Tracey Chevalier seems to like these stories about painters and their muses. This one was about the tapestries of the lady and the unicorn that I’ve seen in the Musee du Moyen Age in Paris, set apart in their own room for considered viewing. They are beautiful and unusual, showing a lady seducing a unicorn until it is prepared to lay its head in her lap. They also refer to the five senses and have the most beautiful background of tiny flowers. The story is really chick-lit dressed up as historical fiction but it is a great light read and perfect for holidays. The central character is Nicolas, the painter who conceives the idea. He’s a randy young fellow and his affairs help to define what goes on both in the tapestries and in the lives of the people involved: the noble women in the family who have commissioned the tapestries, the weavers and even the servants. The story is told in a series of episodes narrated by different characters such as the young noblewoman Claude, her mother Genevieve, the weaver’s wife Christine, his daughter Alienor, the painter himself and so forth. In fact you could say the story is weaving in itself – and I wonder whether Chevalier hasn’t intended that.

The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell

The third in the Corfu Trilogy, this is another collection of anecdotes from the four years the Durrell family spent in Corfu. It’s full of delightful yarns, including the time they had a party for their Indian friend Jeejee. These second books in the triology are like appendices though, having no narrative or structure to hold them together. They’re only for people that want more of My Family and Other Animals.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

I found this book quite difficult to sustain. It’s about a young and rather gutsy woman from Nevada who rides motorbikes and does downhill ski racing, who decides to go to New York to pursue her conceptual art practice. She is described as a ‘landscape’ artist, and her interest is in taking photos of speed – tracks in the snow that sort of thing. She meets an older Italian artist, on the run from his family who own a rubber and tyre making empire. He makes polished metal boxes for the art world and is very successful. A lot of the next part of the novel deals with the world of conceptual art and artists in New York in the 1970s and with the run down neighbourhoods of Little Italy, where Reno lives, and SoHo where the artists are just moving in. Conversation, in my view pretentious and lengthy, absorbs the writer through all this, and I found it hard to wade through the meaningless rants of the artists. The book comes to life when Reno and Sandro go back to Italy and she stays with his dreadful family in Bellagio. We’re thrown into the political turmoil, kidnappings and murders that were taking place then. The characters are intensely drawn, the conversation riveting and the action fascinating. I was not pleased with the end of this book, where I didn’t feel that Reno had moved on or learned much. It was almost as if she had been a quiet observer, when in fact she hadn’t been that at all. She’d been intimately involved in the art scene, in a love affair, and in extreme political action, and for a girl who had taken the risks of high speed racing and a solo move to New York to try her hand in the art world, her lack of response, the fact that she just goes on as if nothing has happened, just doesn’t ring true.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I really love Ishiguro’s other books, especially The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He seems unafraid of trying different genres, and this one is indeed a very different genre. It is a fantasy/fable. It is set in the time after the death of the Briton King Arthur when there is relative peace between the Britons and the Saxons, who had arrived in England more as settlers than invaders. But this peace is held in place by the mists of forgetfulness and change is coming. The characters are the old Britons Axl and Beatrice, the last of Arthur’s knights Sir Gawain, and the two Saxons, the warrior Wistan and the boy Edwin. They are created like characters from fables, performing a function, their conversation like poetry. They are all on their own quests: the old couple to find reclaim their memories and find their son, Gawain and Wistan to battle the dragon, Edwin to find his mother. Of course all these quests are symbolic and their true purposes are only gradually revealed. The entire story reads like a mix of Arthurian legend, Tolkein (who based his stories on the same) and even Beowulf. It is populated by ogres and dragons and pixies. There are weird women in black flowing robes and monster creatures in lairs. A spell lies over the kingdom. These are the characters of mythology and they move through the novel in an elegant sort of dance. But this is not a fast moving adventure. It is as slow-paced and thoughtful as the gradual recovery of memories that occurs throughout their journey, true literary fiction, and something to be savoured rather than read greedily.

Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch

My goodness this man is a chilling writer. I loved the last book of his I read, The Dinner, but this one is possibly even better. It is another psychological thriller, about a doctor, Marc, his family – wife Caroline and daughters Julia and Lisa – who go on holidays with an actor, Ralph, and his wife Judith. They meet up with a film director Stanley and his girlfriend Emanuelle. In case anyone other than me reads this, I’m not going to describe the pivotal event that occurs. But you feel it coming with a sense of horror, through the technique of a first person narrative with Marc is telling the story in retrospect. There’s a chilling sense of impending trouble that makes you read this book in great greedy gulps. The characters are marvellously drawn; the men in particular are truly awful people. Their characters are mean spirited and unpleasant and they have particularly dubious moral compasses. But they too are compelling, like watching a snake. There’s a lot to think about in this book – parallels between characters, morality, the relationships between males and females – so it would be a fantastic choice for a book club discussion.

Maggie and Me by Damian Barr

I bought this book because I heard Damian Barr reading at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. If I had realised it was going to be a misery memoir, I wouldn’t have bought it but I am so glad I did. It is not only a memoir of an unbelievably rotten child’s up bringing but also one of his coming to terms with his sexuality in a place where ‘jessies’ are likely not only to be ostracised but also to be physically harmed. Barr grew up in Motherwell, a mining town an hour out of Glasgow. It’s rough and the people in it are violent, uneducated, hard drinking and mean spirited. His mother is damaged in so many ways – by her own upbringing, by alcohol by a rain haemorrhage, by a series of violent husbands and boyfriends. Yet there is a strain of love that persists, something I found very comforting – she always gets the kids up for school, she opens tins of soup and packets of fish fingers for their tea, she loves him. He finds friends and teachers, who although they stand solidly in the background offering respite and opportunities where they can, still cannot rescue him from his situation. Only he can do that. And he does, lurching through life, grasping educational chances and making it out. The link with Maggie Thatcher, who is quoted throughout the book, I find tenuous. I think what Barr is saying is that the harshness and unfairness of her government, and her exhortations to tough it out and do better for yourself, were actually some kind of challenge to him, in a sense making him angry and determined enough to escape Motherwell and build a life for himself. There are some very endearing moments in this book, a lot of black humour, and some horrifying ones, especially as they are autobiographical. I came out of it liking and admiring this very brave man and glad that he fought his way out to a better life.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

On the all-time favourites list of a couple of people I know, this book is an absolute treat. It’s modern historical fiction, the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s long term affair with Mamah Cheney, a client, and of how both she and Wright left their families to ‘elope’ to Italy. They returned to the house he built for them in Wisconsin. Mamah is a complex character and of course the writer had to pull together what information she could to develop her character. But I believed wholeheartedly in her. As an intellectual, feminist and translator, who put her principles above the learned conventions of the traditional mother role, she reminded me of many of the firebrand revolutionary women of the time who were prepared to sacrifice anything for their belief in self. I also liked too Horan’s take on Frank Lloyd Wright. I found him utterly believable, indeed many aspects of him recognizable from the several truly creative people I have known closely. This is a wonderful read: well written, passionate and a fascinating story to boot. Just don’t look up the story or anything about it before you finish the book because if you don’t already know this story, the ending is a complete surprise.

Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Looking for something of an easy read on holidays I found this on my Kindle and thought I’d give it a re-run. I found myself looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to read it, so painless and lightly entertaining was it. It’s a series of anecdotes about Durrell’s life on Corfu, where he lived from the age of 10 to 14 with his family. The previous novel My Family and Other Animals charted the whole story but this book is just additional stories, like the encounter with a gypsy man and his dancing bear, a trip to go night fishing and so forth. They are not the best of his stories – he’d already used those – but they were gently entertaining and a good respite from the more serious literature I’ve been reading for the past month.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This is a compelling book, chronicling the lives of four generations of the Whitshank family in Baltimore. By and large the story centres around their family home, the building of it, the living in it and the departure. The people are fascinating because they are so flawed and so real. Tyler jumps back and forth as the stories of each of the characters are revealed and they are indeed touching, often sad but surprising in their revelation of the grit and resilience that people find within themselves. So we begin with Linnie and Junior, who come together from poverty and an almost backwoods existence to build their future together; their children Red and his sister; Red’s wife Abby and their kids Amanda, Jeannie, Denny and Stem and their families as well. It is satisfying to see how Tyler works family characteristics through the generations. Although her novels could easily become soap operas, they never do. She’s a master of low-level miserable relationships.

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

This is a weirdly collated set of five short story type chapters that I have trouble connecting. They are set in various periods of time and occasionally there is a reference to a place or event that happened in another of them, for instance in the last story Freddy the protagonist is thinking about buying an apartment in an old workhouse that appeared in an earlier story. But minimal references like this can’t be the point of this novel can they? Well yes, they possibly can: at one point there is a reference to after death when our atoms mingle with other atoms to reappear as flowers or trees or the hand of a baby somewhere. So these ‘memories’ or reappearances of things and times and places are part of that. I think a lot of it is about isolation. Each of the characters wanders through the story seeking connections and intimacy and once they find it, they lose it again. In the first story the British schoolteacher come secret service agent is betrayed by the French girl he is in love with; in the second the entrepreneurial Billy loses his wife; in the third Elena the researcher loves a man she can’t have; in the fourth Jeanne falls in love with a priest and in the final story Freddy is abandoned by the love of his life. I found this a pretty unsatisfying book despite Faulks trying to be clever. It took me quite a while to understand what he was trying to get at and I still think I’ve missed most of it; in the meantime, with the exception perhaps of the last one, the stories lacked animation and hope.