Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan

This is my sixth McEwan novel. Two I thought were magnificent (The Cement Garden and The Child in Time), one was great but had a misleading title (in Atonement Briony doesn’t atone!), and three (Saturday, Amsterdam, and now Sweet Tooth) were just very mediocre.

And why is Sweet Tooth mediocre? Because McEwan has too much sympathy for an awful character (Serena is very much like Briony in Atonement), because it takes for freaking ever to get to the actual core of the plot, because the actual lives of interesting Cambridge spies (just ask Alan Bennett) unlike Serena’s are actually, well, interesting, and most of all because – unsurprisingly – everyone is again so posh that it gets to be really rather unnerving.

Like Briony, Serena is completely self-centred, and even in this case McEwan seems to defend her (the comments the narrator makes about the University of Sussex – where McEwan himself studied – are absolutely awful and yet appear to be justified even when they are unjustifiable). And the plot twist at the very end is just not that ground-breaking or mind-blowing (plus, the letter that constitutes the final chapter is simply way too long). 

The Russia House – John le Carré

On my very first trip to Books for Free I faced a dilemma: with Group Portrait with Lady and What a Carve Up! already in my bag I had to pick my third (and last) free book for the day. On the one hand I had The Russia House, on the other Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Much like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I chose poorly, picking up le Carré’s novel and leaving behind Greene’s (never to be seen again, at least not for free!).

The Russia House is actually ok, but that’s about it. I was expecting something as exciting as Gorky Park, but instead found a fairly slow book in which, ultimately, very little happens. It probably was thrilling back in the time of Glasnost and Perestroika, but for someone who has to teach about those times (and who has grown to take a number of the comments made by Goethe as rather obvious in the late stages of the Cold War) it just wasn’t that interesting.

The love-story behind the old washed-up anti-hero and the beautiful Russian is just a bit too cliché. And the most interesting character in the novel (Landau) just disappears after two chapters.

Also, can somebody explain to me how a spy (like the narrator) who has access to tapes but not to video recordings of the meetings described can know how the characters he is spying upon are sitting and how the light reflects in their eyes?!?

Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky

Bad historian (yet again) I had never read anything by Irène Némirovsky until my mother decided to invest a cheeky pound at Oxfam and buy me a copy of this novel.

Which, in my view, is actually two novels of extremely uneven quality. On the one hand, Tempête en Juin is an unusual portrayal of a defeated nation and its weaknesses, but on the other hand Dolce is a fairly boring and uneventful description of life in the countryside in occupied France with romantic overtones (seriously, ask Fenoglio how to write a novel about Nazi occupation and its impact on the countryside).

Of all the parallel plots that interlink in Tempête en Juin, the story of Philippe Péricands and “his” kids is breathtakingly beautiful in a way that only French stories about children of the 40s and 50s can be (Les Choristes, Au revoir les enfants), and is a reminder of how unstable the lives of troubled youth at the time could be, very much like in Les Quatre Cents Coups.

The one thing I struggle to understand though, is how Némirovsky managed to have an early draft of the two pieces of the Suite that was already so polished – had I been fighting against time like she was, I think I would have desperately tried to finish a very messy first draft of the whole book before allowing myself to re-read it even once. But then again, I’m not a great writer…

Master Georgie – Beryl Bainbridge

It’s always reassuring to know that, if I’m looking for a quick quality read, I can always find a book by Beryl Bainbridge (and all my key second-hand shops, Fopp, Books for Free etc. seem to have copies of them somehow). This one in particular was probably coming from Books for Free.

While I didn’t like it as much as An Awfully Big Adventure or Harriet Said… (which I’ve only just realized I never wrote about in this blog – silly me! As it’s an outstanding, thought-provoking and disturbing read) I still enjoyed Master Georgie. More than anything, I think Bainbridge deserves to be praised for looking at the Crimean War (a war about which I know next to nothing – in case anyone needed further proof that I’m a bad historian).

The one issue I had with this book, however, was that I found it rather “uneven”: of the six chapters narrated by three characters (but never by Georgie himself), Myrtle’s two are absolutely beautiful and touching (after all, Bainbridge has always been an absolute master at describing the lives of troubled girls with their hopes, fantasies, and realities), Pompey’s ones are cute and endearing in an Oliver Twistesque kind of way, but Potter’s ones are just a bit too plain (I do realize Bainbridge needed to have a more mature – although not necessarily reliable – narrator, in particular in Crimea, but I just didn’t find his chapters to be at the same level as the others’). 

The Casual Vacancy – J.K. Rowling

I’ve only read one Harry Potter. That makes me an awful human being in the eyes of many, but that also means that I’m not disappointed at the lack of magic in this book by J.K. Rowling.

The Casual Vacancy is daring but enjoyable. Its characters for one reason or another are mostly unlikable (maybe with the exception of the Walls and of Andrew?) but remain interesting. The plot is not something that leaves the reader on the edge of the seat – I mean, these are local elections after all… – but the novel is quite an acute portrayal of contemporary Britain.

So in all fairness I think J.K. Rowling should be given credit for writing this book (and for making a number of points that are surprisingly and commendably political). It was really quite good. Had it had a bit more irony or humour in it (nothing really brought a smile to my face, except maybe for old and drunken Samantha snogging teenage Andrew) perhaps it would have even been “really” good…

What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe

One of the many books I snatched from Books for Free in Stratford before it closed (the reserves, unfortunately, are starting to slowly run out…). A few months ago I read – and really enjoyed – The Rotters’ Club, but found this novel to be on another level.

What a Carve Up is a cross between epic family novels (Solomon Gursky Was Here is the first one that comes to mind, because of the nature of the Winshaw family and the mischievousness of some of its older members – often more interesting than their kids), cheesy mysteries (Ten Little Indians) and the most enjoyable and ironic Alan Bennett works.

The constant alternation of styles, narrators and registers is obviously yet again a display of Coe’s considerable talent. And the fact that so much of the novel is set in Northern England is again a welcome departure from London-centred British literature.

Much like in The Rotters’ Club with Malcolm, even in What a Carve Up Coe kills off one of my favourite characters (Fiona) relatively early (I mean, not super-early, but the writing is on the wall from the start, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling too much). Yet I don’t hate him for that. Although I really wish I knew what happened to Phoebe and Graham…

Cartongesso – Francesco Maino

A book that I’ve read over the weekend as I found myself in the Italian north-east (where the novel is set) for a wedding.

Maino’s first novel has been fairly widely acclaimed (I mean, as widely acclaimed as an Italian novel can be…) and with this the author won the Italo Calvino Award. To me, that’s definite proof of the desperate scarcity of young Italian literary talent.

The novel is interesting for about 30 pages, then the stream of consciousness grows predictably stagnant (seriously, isn’t it outdated as a literary device/style at this point?!?) and the reader realizes that the book doesn’t even have a hint of a storyline (and as a rant against the system it gets to be fairly boring fairly quickly).

That said, I have to give credit where credit is due, and I have to admit that I really enjoyed Maino’s cultural references (Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, Thelonious Monk, Giorgio Morandi – an artist who has to be “respected” if not necessarily “loved” – and, most of all, Drazen Petrovic). Yet, this is not enough to make me say that I liked the book.

Plenty of Italian readers will disagree and tell me that I don’t understand the subtlety and the actuality of this novel. Maybe that’s true, but I also think that most of them read about 3 books a year.