Modern Classics

Can I recommend yesterday's Observer supplement: Reading With Kids Ages 8+?
The reason I know that the book list is good is that I have four non-reading kids - physical kids not cerebral - yet they've picked up and voluntarily read for themselves most of the books that are showcased.
Including Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events which they read with such relish I became alarmed! Why did my kids want to read gothic horror - with mutilated parents and a grotesquely evil uncle - are their lives too secure? uninspiring?
Then I realised that my favourite novel from childhood - A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is almost the very same story - a cherished child whose comfortable lifestyle is cruelly removed by the death of a beloved parent - thrusting her into a brutal world - where despite her much reduced circumstances she manages to retain her integrity and kindness ...

The Bookseller of Kabul

And I thought the culture I grew up in was awful... Rural Ulster in the Seventies was a male dominated society - it overflowed with misogynist bullies - swanking around in dark suits, holier than thou - one of our warlords was once quoted as saying, with a pious expression on his fat, well fed face: "the problem with women is that they don't know to stop talking when a man starts."
Thanks God then for my own lovely father - the most gentle of men - who has never once raised his voice to me, or told me how to behave. Or what to wear. Or who to marry.
Even now, he lends me his car when I need it, he babysits when I want to go out, he compliments my cooking and when I make mistakes he always blames everyone else.

The Painted Veil

The book should come with a Health Warning attached - BEWARE IT'S NOT LIKE THE FILM -if you thought the film was sad...
Silly vain Kitty marries stiff, formal Walter because he asked her and she was desperate. Walter takes her back to Hong Kong where he works and within three months she's committing adultery with slimy Charles Townsend, the assistant colonial governor. When Walter discovers their affair he gives Kitty two choices - he will divorce her quietly if Charles Townsend agrees to marry her, or she can come upcountry with him, into a cholera epidemic with the very good chance it will kill her.
Of course slimy Charles will not marry her - it would ruin his career and his reputation - so Kitty, with no other choice travels upcountry with Walter. Into the jaws of death.
And here's where the book and the film diverge.
In the film Kitty and Walter are reconciled; Walter even accepts that she's probably pregnant with Charles Townsend's baby. And when he dies with cholera, she's distraught and by his side.
In the book they are not reconciled - Walter dies, face to the wall, quoting the last line of Goldsmith's An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog - 'the dog it was that died.'

Diplomatic Baggage

I absolutely loved this book. Not only was it the perfect antidote to the post modern whingeing of The Slap but I utterly identified with plucky Brit Brigid who married a man with itchy feet and spent decades trailing the world in his wake. So there's two of us - that's good to know...
What's particularly good is that Brigid pulls no punches about what is naively perceived by non-ex-pats to be a glamorous lifestyle for apart from the sunshine and staff a trailing spouse's lifestyle is very much the same as it would be back home - except she's a foreigner in an often hostile land, with absolutely no backup - no family members to help her out, no Welfare State to support her, and Hubby's at work at least six days a week.
It's the trailing spouse who finds a house she can bear to live in. And places in schools for the children. And a bottled water supplier. And a car. And staff she trusts and likes. And a few like minded friends.
And by the time she's managed all that it's time to move on to the next place.

The Slap

Please don't tell me this is an accurate representation of contemporary Australian society - really - are all Australian men aggressive, boorish and unfaithful with a Madonna / Whore complex? Are all Australian women submissively tolerant of their aggressive, boorish, unfaithful husbands? Are all Australian teenagers taking drugs and sleeping around? Does everyone swear all the time? I have faithfully read through the 500 pages and been unable to find one person I could identify with - not even one I could sympathise with -
So, what's it all about?
Obnoxious aggressive small boy gets a slap at a party from an aggressive wife- beating man. Passive aggressive earth mother of the small boy refuses to accept his apology - she reports him to the police and those at the party who witnessed the slap are forced to take sides on the issue - which they cheerfully do because everyone at this particular party is tediously opinionated with one- dimensional opinions...

Your Royal Hostage

May I suggest Your Royal Hostage as a literary antidote to the upcoming royal wedding - since they seem to have so little story of their own...
English rose Princess Amy is engaged to marry - it's the wedding of the year - and Jemima Shore, a reporter, has been asked to anchor the American television coverage. But it's not just nostalgic Americans who are interested in the royal wedding - an animal rights activist group is conspiring to make an extravagant gesture during the televised coverage...

The Stranger in the Mirror

I'd leave the house convinced that I looked tremendous: elegant, original, with a fascinating vintage twist. But.... by the time I reached the office full of busy efficient young women all looking indefinably right in their clothes it would be clear to me that what I had on was, equally indefinably, wrong. Not risibly unfashionable or disastrous mutton dressed as lamb, just very dowdy and a bit eccentric: an opinionated old bird in flat boots, trailing peculiar bits of vintage finery.

The End of the Affair

Driven potty with jealousy Bendrix walks away from his married lover and decides to pay for some casual sex to hurt both himself and Sarah... (As you do)
He finds a pretty professional girl and offers her drink...
Except:
Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

A Christmas Carol

I'm reading the children A Christmas Carol. They've been listening patiently enough but I've been wondering if perhaps it's too difficult for them to understand, what with the old fashioned language and adult themes.
So today we watched A christmas Carol The Musical with Kelsey Grammer as Scrooge...
And in the midst of all the singing they told me: "This is exactly the same as the book, Mum. Everything Mr. Scrooge says in the movie, he has already said in the book..."

PC

Can it really be true that these three gollliwogs were originally called Golly, Wolly and Ni**er? Thanks to political correctness they've been rechristened Wiggie, Waggie and Woggie. It's just a pity political correctness stopped at the renaming of our heros and didn't censor their dirty habits. Allow me to quote a sentence on p.140:
'Now that afternoon Wiggie went out to buy some cigarettes.'

On Chesil Beach

Poor Florence Ponting, disgusted by sexual intimacy, quite obviously she's been fiddled with, probably by the overbearing father, the hints are heavy throughout the book. I mean to say, what man takes his teenage daughter on sailing trips and hikes without chaperoning - and they never talk about it afterwards....
And yet all the reviews of this book focus on the decade - it wasn't Florence's fault her new husband's premature ejaculation caused such irrevocable disgust - this was the early Sixties, when young ladies did not lust.
Rot.
Here's an extract from Love In A Cold Climate (one of my favourite novels) first published in 1949.
Beautiful Polly Hampton is causing consternation - she doesn't seem interested in love or marriage, her mother is at the end of her tether. Sweet, normal Fanny, her friend, is asked:
"Have you ever fancied somebody ever since you can remember?"
I was obliged to admit this was the case. From a tiny child, ever since I could remember in fact, some delicious image had been enshrined in my heart, last thought at night, first thought in the morning. Fred Terry as Sir Percy Blakeney, Lord Byron, Rudolf Valentino, Henry V, Gerald du Maurier, blissful Mrs Ashton at my school, Steerforth, Napoleon, the guard on the 4.45, image had succeeded image...
Fast Mrs Chaddesley Corbett agrees. "From kiddie car to hearse, I couldn't know it better. After all what would there be to think about when one's alone otherwise?"
Florence Ponting was revolted by intimacy - just as Polly Hampton was and Fanny's cousin Linda - because they'd been fiddled with when they were young teenagers.

Shopping

Years ago, when I was student, I shopped in a second hand bookshop in Rathmines Dublin 6. The stuff I bought there was legendary - my literary education. (I was reading Agricultural Science not English at university).
Today feels like deja vu. A trip to the BSPCA thrift shop, and this is what I bought, and everyone one of them cost less than a pound:
On Cesil Beach - Ian McEwan
Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Which shall I read first?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress

So this is affluent Ireland, wealthy South-sider Dublin with private school education and rich kids wearing rich clothes? Oh dear.
Allow me to introduce Ross our narrator. He claims to be 'West Brit' elite - that's middle class Irish to you and me. But in Ross's wee world this simply means he's got more cash than the CHV he so scathingly ridicules (CHV: Council House Vermin)
Except it's Ross who is the vermin. Somehow he has managed to miss the private school polish - he has no manners, no charm and no social skills. He doesn't even have a job - he's 23 and shamelessly lives on handouts from his parents. His friends are one dimensional; the girls he meets shallow and sluttish...
Of course Ross is only a caricature. A work of dark comic genius. A distillation of arrogance and ignorance; he's grotesque and shocking and terrifically funny....
And I shall continue to disbelieve the hair raising (real life) stories that occasionally filter through from affluent South sider friends - about 'blow job' parties amongst private school teenagers who don't wear knickers at rugby club discos...

The Last September

They talk funny in The Last September. It's almost a different language. Just about English. Here's an interchange between Marda and Lois, who barely know each other: (Marda is writing to Leslie Lawe, her fiance, Lois is looking on):
Marda: "What was the name of the man at lunch - surname?"
Lois: "Lesworth. Gerald. Is very social. He smiles all the time like a dog. Do you think that is good in a man?"
Marda: "I am telling Leslie he wants to marry you. May I?"
Lois: "Will it give Mr Lawe a good impression?"
Marda: "Well it furnishes you rather."
'Furnish' - isn't that marvellous - as if empty headed introspective Lois needed wallpaper, a rug and a couple of armchairs to give her a bit of personality. Poor lost little Lois. She utterly lacks passion for smiling Gerald Lesworth yet she seems determined to marry him. Probably just as well Gerald is murdered before they make each other miserable.

We Are All Made Of Glue

Do not read this book if you suffer from squeamishness or a delicate stomach for We Are All Made Of Glue is full of grotesque descriptions of hygienically challenged Mrs Shapiro.
Mrs Shapiro's 'smell was ripe and farty like old cheese, with a faint hint of Chanel No.5.'
Mrs Shapiro's house smells of 'damp and cat pee and shit and rot and food mould and house filth and sink gunge and cutting through all that a rank, nauseating fishy stink.'
In the pocket of Mrs Shapiro's coat is a 'disgusting snot-caked handkerchief with traces of dried blood'.
On the floor of Mrs Shapiro's bedroom lie 'a pair of peach camiknickers trimmed with cream lace a faint stain yellowing the silk.'
I have always considered myself to be fairly tolerant of filth; my mother used to lament: "Anne wouldn't see dirt if it hit her between the eyes..."
Yet I'm not sure I can read on without retching...

The Twin

The Twin of this novel is Helmer. He's a middle aged bachelor farmer; he lives with a bullying father. Father is finally dying; Helmer's been half-dead most of his life - we're persuaded by Helmer this is because Henk, his twin, drowned as a teenager. I, however, am inclined to believe it's Helmer's repressed homosexuality which causes him to suffer a life of such awful emptiness and masochism every tiny action and interaction is recorded as though it has painstaking significance:
For example:
The donkeys are waiting for me even though I don't go out to them every evening. I've left the light on and it casts a broad track into the yard. My very own crib. They snort when I enter the shed. I give them a couple of winter carrots and a scoop of oats. Their breath billows up out of the trough as a cold cloud. I sit on a bale of hay and wait for them to finish feeding.
I, I, I. Poor bloke. Father sent away the farmhand with whom Helmer was falling in love; now he doesn't even have a dog to cuddle up with in bed.
Although The Twin is a Dutch novel, set on a farm in the waterlands of Holland, the story of gay repressed Helmer has universal appeal: twenty years ago when I was a student our Faculty of Agricultural Science produced a magazine: Ceres was full of wise chat and in jokes; photographs and fun. And a touching and memorable poem about falling in love, written by 'A gay Ag'....

with my lazy eye

Lucy Bastonme had a privileged 'West Brit' Dublin 4 upbringing. There was a holiday cottage in Connemara, tennis lessons and Mum baking profiteroles when friends came over for dinner... Lucy's dad was a VIP - so respected the family were given seats right at the front when Pope John Paul came to Ireland in 1979.
Yet this is misery memoir - it's angry, directionless; fatalistic. Lucy hates her life. And judging by the way she behaves I'm guessing she hates herself too.
Here she is, not yet twenty:
Abandoned one morning, I balanced in the listing bed - hung-over, make-up smeared, smelling of sex - and felt around for the remote control. I dully flicked through the channels, nothing on: cartoons, Mass, football, Mass. The layout of the church looked familiar. I sat up, tickled when I recognised Alison Hampton and her family sitting in a tidy row and Father Perry preaching from the altar. The cameras panned to the next reader approaching the podium: a woman in a tweed suit and scarf making self-consciously slow progression. Shoulders back, chin slightly raised, she adjusted her microphone, and in an accent more Anglo-Saxon than ever, my mother began reading. I got up and ran myself a bath. What was I doing with my life?

In Cold Blood

Before reading In Cold Blood may I suggest you watch the 2006 movie Infamous? They work so well together, for the movie stops where the book begins - the final scenes in the movie are of Truman Capote at a cramped desk writing...
In the movie: "What starts out as the irreverent journey of the openly gay writer Truman Capote to the middle-class world of 1950's Kansas, where he goes--with his childhood friend Harper Lee--to research the murder of the Clutter family, turns to something altogether darker when Capote forms an intense and complex relationship with one of the murderers...."
Well, I'd never have guessed from the book alone that Capote was a gay man, or that he fell in love with Perry Smith. There's no trace of the author's private life in it. Or his personal feelings. Until I watched the movie I assumed In Cold Blood was kind to the killers because Capote had spent time with them, and got to know them as people; and that the dead Clutter family were harder to write because he never met them...
Now I realise the book is not a disinterested reconstruction of heinous mass murder and 'how the bad boys were caught'; instead it is a love letter and an apology to Perry Smith - for though Capote may have been in love with him, it didn't stop him bleeding Smith dry to get what he wanted for his book.

Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex

Since the children quit school for the summer I've been dashing into Bahrain's one bookshop to seek out light-weight, escapist reading. I desire short sentences with no introspection as I cannot settle while the children are bickering and bouncing on beds; they can't go outside to play since it's 45 degrees in the shade. The solution, of course, is to get them reading, too, so I dragged them down to the bookshop and in the children's books section I discovered a curious thing; many internationally successful children's books are written by Irish men - John Boyne, Darren Shan, Derek Landy... and this week splashed all over the shop is Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex.
I'd never read an Artemis Fowl and this is the ninth book about him but I didn't allow that to put me off. I plunged straight in and I'm delighted to tell you The Atlantis Complex is so cleverly written there's no need for back story or explanations..
So, who is Artemis Fowl? He is, to quote himself, 'a child prodigy from Ireland who has dedicated his brilliant mind to criminal activities. His mother says: 'People are afraid of you, Arty. Girls are terrified of you. You're a fifteen year old in bespoke suit and nobody died."
Not a regular boy then? Well, no for 'Arty' is away with the fairies.
In The Atlantis Complex he has summoned the fairies to Iceland to demonstrate his latest invention to save the world from global warming. The Ice Cube shoots out nano wafers -each one 'smart enough to know which way is up when it hits the surface and configures itself to insulate the ice and reflect the sun.'
Sounds great except the fairies find it hard to believe Artemis might care for the environment; the Artemis they know is notorious for extortion and kidnapping. Also he's not himself - he's got galloping paranoia and is obsessed with the number five. Could he be suffering from Atlantis Complex - a mental illness caused by too much magic and a guilty conscience?
Meanwhile, imprisoned deep in Atlantis (second city of Fairyland) disgraced Captain Turnbull Root has been patiently working on a escape plan. Thanks to a gullible prison warden and a brainwashed personal guard his cell is full of sophisticated computer equipment. Root hacks into the command centre of a fairy space shuttle on its way to Mars and the shuttle changes course. It lands in Iceland to kill the fairies who are meeting with Artemis Fowl then dives into the ocean, heading fast and hard to Atlantis.
Captain Holly Short and Foaly a centaur survive the attack, as does Artemis. Under normal circumstances Artemis would now hatch a cunning and ruthless plan to recapture the hijacked shuttle but unfortunately Artemis is not himself - he's suffering phase 2 of Atlantis Complex; an alter ego, Orion, has taken over his consciousness. Orion is a lovely boy, not a bit cunning or ruthless and when appealed to for help he suggests they build a bivouac and wait to be rescued.
I have heard the Artemis Fowl books described as 'Die Hard with Fairies'
but such a description does not do them justice. I have never before been so seduced and convinced by the imaginary world Eoin Colfer creates.
VERDICT: There is nothing lightweight about Artemis Fowl. Prepare to be mesmerised.

What Katy Did

I have a bone to pick with Aunt Izzie for I hold her partly responsible for Katie's horrific fall from the swing which left her unable to walk for two years. Aunt Izzie knew the swing was unsafe - but instead of explaining to 12 year old Katie: "The swing is unsafe, a support has been damaged, it will be fixed by tomorrow," she exercised her ridiculous theory that a child must obey unquestioningly, as if she were a soldier or an automaton... Is it hardly any surprise that intelligent, high spirited Katie defied her spoil-sport aunt and ran off down the garden without a backward glance, to swing on the forbidden swing?