The Book Tower

I had high hopes for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. But whilst much of the book is very well written, I found the overall reading experience dull. For a relatively short novel, I struggled at times and was pleased to get it over with. I found the novel’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, unlikeable and consequently cared little for him. His wife, Rachel, was too sketchy, equally unlikeable. The third main character, Chuck, was equally sketchy, equally unlikeable. This is an incredibly, and annoyingly, overrated and pretentious novel.

I guess you’ve guessed that I didn’t like it very much, so I’d like to move on to The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. This novel was nominated for last year’s Booker prize. It’s a very well written book, and the sort of book that at times suggests that it is going to turn into something rather special indeed.

The Secret Scripture is set in an institution in Ireland, the sort of place that was once called an asylum, and this way of thinking is at the heart of the novel. Long term inmate Roseanne, nearing one hundred years of age, looks back on her life in what has become a jumbled view of personal history. By her own admission, memory plays tricks and is deceitful, or can she not face the pain of the past? Why is she incarcerated and what, however misjudged, is the reason for it? Dr Grene, an apparently benign psychiatrist, attempts to piece her life together of the eve of the hospital’s closure. But are his motives really so kindly?

As I’ve said, at times I thought this novel was on the brink of brilliance. I liked the way that it played with memory and the reader’s trust in the narrator. The point of view switches betweeen that of Roseanne and Dr Grene, from her own take on events to Grene’s attempt at research into the cloudy past. For a moment I thought that The Secret Scripture was going to rival and possibly surpass Atonement in its examination of memory and how foolish choices can so affect the future with terrible consequences. And how it isn’t all as it seems, not all as it really happens.

But The Secret Scripture has a twist. And it’s a terrible twist, but alas not in the satisfactory sense. It’s a twist I saw coming but one I hoped I had wrong. It’s not a twist I’ll share to spoil the book, although it’s one that ultimately does ruin the novel. Another damn shame.

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Many contemporary directors would probably turn down the offer to make a short film intended to promote Eurostar. Luckily Shane Meadows continues to shine in his own league, and he turns this rather odd concept into another of his string of original and charming films. Working on the Eurostar project, Meadows realised he had a proper feature in the making, and Somers Town is the result. It’s a beautifully shot black and white movie set in the Kings Cross area of London, featuring the usual mix of Meadows humour and poignancy.

In the Shane Meadows canon, Somers Town sits somewhere between A Room for Romeo Brass and his early feature Smalltime. He proves again that he directs youngsters brilliantly and there’s also the bleak observation of people wasting their days away with hopeless, harmless petty crime. This film will draw comparisons with his most celebrated work This is England because it again stars Thomas Turgoose in the lead and features Perry Benson in a supporting role. Both are excellent but play characters far removed from the darker and more dangerous predecessor. Somers Town is funny and light, often at odds with the grim sights of London it depicts.

Turgoose plays Tommo, a lad from the Midlands who finds himself instantly homeless in London. He befriends Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish teenager holed up in a flat all day as his father works on a building site. The two of them while away their days attempting to court a young waitress, earning petty cash from an eccentric neighbour (Benson) and desperately trying to find Tommo a new set of clothes. Marek also hides his friend in the flat while his father is out at work, and although he inevitibly finds him the outburst thankfully doesn’t spill into usual Meadows territory. As I’ve said, this film is fairly lightweight and easily the most accessible of Meadows’ films.

Fans of the director, like me, will love this. Anyone new to him may leave the experience baffled, finding him no more than a grittier Mike Leigh. I loved the film for its simplicity in exploring innocence, early friendship and first love, and there’s a fabulous soundtrack. And mostly I liked it because Shane Meadows just appears to go on following his own instinct, delivering film after memorable film.

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For quite a while, I’d reserved a five star rating for A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. How better to start the new year than with a top notch recommendation? But now I’ve finally reached the end of the novel the number of stars has slipped to four, possibly three. The reason for this was the book’s immense length at just over 700 pages, and whilst I found Toltz a gifted and extremely amusing writer I also found the closing few chapters a struggle to get through.

The novel follows the Australian Dean family and is delivered largely from the viewpoint of Jasper Dean, looking in particular at his relationship with his father Martin. Plagued by eccentricity and occasional mental illness, Martin is prone to acts of delusion (whether it’s building a series of complex mazes around his house or devising schemes to create lottery millionaires, Martin is up for the challenge). Equally oddball is Martin’s late brother Terry, a promising sporting hero in his youth who descends into criminal activity and eventually becomes an infamous celebrity. The novel is primarily a comic one although it is peppered with bizarre scenes of death; the suicide of a teacher and his son at a cliffside school, the suicide of Jasper’s mother amidst rival smuggler warfare, Terry Dean’s own apparent end in a prison fire and Martin’s death as a seabound fugitive smuggled back into Australia. Indeed, the only character who survives without physical harm is Jasper, although events leave an understandably indelible scar on his mind.

Jasper’s narration is often interrupted by the voice of Martin in the forms of a long monologue describing his early experiences of Terry, extracts from a secret journal found at the back of a wardrobe and the opening of an unpublished autobiography. It’s an interesting device to keep the story fresh, although like many novels with alternating narrators this one failed slightly because all voices sounded the same; ultimately the voice of Steve Toltz. It’s a good voice, although at times I forgot whether it was father or son I was listening to, and ultimately (and unfortunately) I realised I didn’t care enough for the Deans as much as I was supposed to.

There’s also an oddness to The Fraction of the Whole in its depiction of love and sex, and whilst it deals very well with the lost love of a father, it deals very strangely with love and relationships with women. Prostitutes, strip bars and indifference to sex are placed liberally throughout the book, and if the male characters in the story are unusual, the female players are stranger still and I found Toltz painting them with rather cavalier brushstrokes. This is a shame, although the author can always argue that he’s mostly looking at the world through the eyes of the slightly unhinged.

A Fraction of the Whole is a gargantuan work of fiction and Toltz almost gets away with delivering such a long piece. At its best there are some wonderful set pieces and hilarious episodes. But for a first novel it’s just way too ambitious, and the last few chapters gave a sense of laziness, as if the author was tiring of the book as well. That’s a shame too, but I’ll no doubt look out for his next effort, especially if it’s delivered at a more reasonable length.

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