Schindler’s Ark, by Thomas Kenneally, 1982

Keneally was inspired to write the remarkable story of Thomas Schindler after a chance meeting with Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. In some ways this novel is as much Pfefferberg’s as it is Kenneally’s – his persistence is trying to ensure Schindler’s story had a wider audience was remarkable. He was an advisor to Kenneally during the novel’s development and accompanied him to Poland during his research. Keneally dedicated Schindler’s Ark to Pfefferberg: “who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written.” He was then also involved in persuading Steven Spielberg make the film of the novel.

Schindler’s Ark is in many ways more a history text than a novel. Kenneally has justified the designation of the text as a non-fiction novel (which I know is a recognised literary genre but still feels like a contradiction in terms) due to the inclusion of reconstructed conversations between participants. I take his point, but these are clearly an imaginative way of presenting some aspects of the narrative, and in no way undermine the exhaustive and detailed research that underpins the text. Further there is always a risk that presenting the text as fiction allows sceptical readers to distance themselves from the appalling brutality the novel exposes.

As I am sure almost all readers of this blog will know, Schindler’s Ark is the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman and entrepreneur who during the Second World War helped save the lives of thousands of Polish Jewish men, women and children. They worked in his factories, and he protected them by insisting that their labour was essential in keeping his factories open, and that in turn the factories were vital to the German war effort.

As the war progressed that was a fiction that was increasingly hard to maintain. His workers were moved first into the Krakow ghetto, and subsequently into brutal labour camps. Those were the ‘lucky’ ones of course – many others were taken directly to the concentration camps. Schindler’s factories produced goods that had a very marginal impact on the war – usually just domestic goods – and any weaponry was very low grade. In any event the Nazi’s blood-lust was such that they were prepared to destroy any Jewish people they could find, irrespective of whether they worked in industries critical to the war. So how was Schindler able to protect his workers when millions of others were being taken to the death-camps? His approach was simple – bribery. He spent lavishly on all sorts of expensive and hard-to-find goods to buy influence and favours, and keep the local Nazis pre-occupied and distracted while all around millions of Jewish people were being slaughtered.

Schindler was clearly a flawed human being – a member of the Nazi party, a drinker, womaniser and a war profiteer – and Kenneally’s portrait is unsparing about Schindler’s weaknesses; he makes no attempt to disguise these aspects of Schindler’s personality. It is possible that it was his very unsaintliness that allowed him to make the difficult decisions he had to make every day to preserve the people under his protection.

Unlike any other novel, film or programme I have seen or read, Schindler’s Ark chillingly portrays the brutality of the Holocaust. You think you know what happened, and perhaps want to avoid some of the details. While Schindler’s Ark is unsparing in its descriptions of Nazi brutality it is the mundane aspect of the regime, its businesslike approach to the industrialisation of murder that is so terrifying. The novel also brought me closer than ever before to an understanding of why Jewish people felt and feel the need for an Independent Jewish state, where all aspects of society – the Government, the police, the media and so on – are under the control of Jewish people. Because during the Holocaust Jewish people felt and were powerless in the face of the German state and were unable to look to anyone – other than the rare exceptions such as Schindler himself – for help or protection. I know I am in deep water here and I in no way want to provide blanket justification for the actions of the Israeli state and its sometimes brutal treatment of Palestinian people, but understanding the mindset which leads to condoning that behaviour is for me a new way of looking at the Palestinian conflict.

Kenneally’s determination to do justice to Schindler’s story makes Schindler’s Ark a dense, and at times distressing read. There is a vast amount of detail to be absorbed, dozens of characters who appear briefly and move on, and minute analysis of minor details of the operation of the factory. These details are probably important when weighing the negative aspects of Schindler’s life against the more obvious positives, but a more ruthless editor might have made this an easier read. Not all novels need to be easy to read, of course, but I wonder how many readers will have given up at some point and watched the film instead? The novel’s retitling for its American publication and the subsequent film, List instead of Ark, is interesting. It’s reductive – it’s so much easier to write a list than build and protect an ark. Escaping the Holocaust wasn’t only a matter of whether you were on a list or not. The film’s title, if not the film itself, reduces Schindler’s heroism to a single act rather than the arduous and lengthy process of fighting every day to preserve the lives of the Jewish people under his protection.

Schindler’s Ark deservedly won the 1982 Booker Prize against a varied and interesting shortlist. The chair of the 1982 judging panel John Carey said “This book has behind it a powerful organising and speculative mind, exercising great tact and restraint in the presentation of its terrible story“. This quite in itself restrained compliment is interesting – the powerful organising mind of the author was an important factor in doing justice to the story, even if it does sacrifice some of the narrative drama for a more exhaustive detailed account of events. But the restraint and tact are equally important – it would have been easy to have presented this as an adventure/escape story, which would have been tasteless and disrespectful to those who didn’t survive. In the end it is a portrait of an almost unimaginable horror and a brief glimmer of hope.

The Promise by Damon Galgut 2021

Any novel set in modern South Africa is going to be about apartheid. There’s obviously no way of avoiding the subject, but the author needs to find a way of addressing it that is original, to find a new way of telling the same story. The Promise is an interesting addition to the collection of novels that try to talk about the experience of the end of apartheid. It might say more about my reading choices than anything else, but most of these stories tend to be told from the white/Afrikaans perspective.

The Promise is told predominantly from the perspective of the Swart family, landowners and farmers just outside Pretoria. I say predominantly but one of the distinguishing features of this novel is the extraordinarily fluid narrative voice. It moves from character to character and scene to scene remarkably quickly, and there is often a beat where the reader re-orientates themselves to the new point of view. While it is usually made clear quickly who’s eyes we are now seeing the world from, that moment of uncertainty is disorientating. As a technique this is really effective in keeping the reader focussed on the word on the page – this is not a novel you can coast through, not without getting thoroughly confused anyway! It is broken into four sections, each set around ten years apart and focussed on the death of a family member.

Amor is the youngest daughter of the Swart family, and the closest the novel comes to a central figure. She is the still centre of the novel around which the other characters revolve. She witnesses her mother, on her death-bed, ask her father to promise to give the family servant, Salome, ownership of the run-down house she occupies on the family farm. The promise is given but insignificant to him and he quickly forgets it. When reminded by Amor he can barely recall having done so (although he never denies it) but it is clear he has no intention of doing keeping his promise. The worth of his promises is underlined when he assures Amor she will not have to return to the hostel she has been living in during her mother’s sickness, another promise that is quickly broken.

As successive family members die, Amor returns to the family farm to remind the surviving members of her father’s promise. Each time the issue is raised it is waved away as a nuisance. It’s hard not to translate this situation to the wider political context, with the farm representing the country and the promise being a political commitment to restore ownership of the land to the black community. During the course of the novel the apartheid regime comes to an end, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee completes its work, and Nelson Mandela is freed and becomes President. But the white community as represented in the novel retains its privileges and its prejudices, and the changes going on in the outside world seem to leave the Swart’s unaffected.

Of course the word ‘promise’ can also mean potential, and this novel is also about the wasted potential of the younger generation of the family. As a young woman, Amor promises to be beautiful, but that promise is (it is suggested) wasted, as she rejects her family, breaks contact with them other than to attend periodic funerals, and refuses to accept any income from the farm under the terms of a family will. This money collects in a trust account and she intends it to eventually go to Salome.

Anton, Amor’s older brother, undergoes a steady mental breakdown through the course of the novel. This breakdown is precipitated when, during his army service, he shoots and kills a woman protestor on the same day his mother dies. He believes he is in some way responsible for his mother’s death. It is that which troubles him, not the death of the black woman herself. He slowly descends into alcoholism, and while doing so tries to write a novel, which eventually Amor comes to read. She describes it like this:

“There are interjections from the author in the margins too. Is this a family saga or a farm novel? one says. And another. Weather is indifferent to history! And also, Is this comedy or tragedy? ..The phases of the man’s life, separated by intervals of roughly ten years, will map out his development into full maturity, from promise through defeat to return and ripening, in tandem with the seasons.” (277/278)

It is quite common for authors to anticipate and address critics comments within the novel itself, but I am not sure if I can remember someone doing it quite so openly. The Promise is both a family saga and a farm novel (another genre that is new to me!), and while the rest of this description parallels without quite matching the novel in which it appears, it seemed to me a very unsubtle way of reminding the reader that this is just a novel not a record of a real family’s lives. This breaking of the fourth wall happens at several points throughout the novel. At one point the narrator’s restless focus switches to a homeless man, almost as if by accident. After he is arrested for vagrancy, fined and discharged, the narrator observes:

He has a long walk ahead of him, back to the church that he regards as home, but there’s no reason to accompany him and, come to think of it, there never was. Why is he obscuring our view, this unwashed, raggedy man, demanding sympathy, using a name that doesn’t belong to him, how did he waste our time with his stories? He’s very insistent on being noticed, how self-centred of him, what an egotist he is. Pay him no further mind. (203/204)

The Promise reminded me of the 2007 Booker winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Both are constructed around families returning to the family home for a funeral, both of course won the Booker, and both front covers feature photographs of young girls staring directly down the camera. The Promise is the stronger, more interesting of the two, and I can see why it won last year’s Booker (from what seems quite a weak shortlist). Eventually it fizzles out, stopping rather than ending, and I was left wishing for a novel about apartheid that for once isn’t written from the white people’s perspective. Galgut could have given the black characters in this novel more than just a handful of lines, and portrayed them as more than victims or walk-on characters. Perhaps it’s not his place to write about the black South African experience of apartheid, (it’s not like he portrays apartheid as a good thing! or his racist characters in a positive way) just that the attempts at redemption by Amor (she goes to work as a nurse in ward for Aids victims) seem pathetic by comparison with the scale of the crime that was apartheid.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey 1988

Peter Carey’s 1988 Booker-prize winning Oscar and Lucinda tells the parallel stories of its eponymous characters: Oscar Hopkins, a disgraced clergyman, and Lucinda Leplastrier, owner of a glass factory. The novel is narrated by one of the Oscar’s descendants several generations later, who is always keen to point out the role random chance seems to have in determining their fate. Although they eventually meet on board a ship headed to Australia, for a large part of the novel their stories are separate.

Oscar is raised in remote Cornwall by his father who is a preacher in the Plymouth Brethren, a harshly non-conformist group which believes in the literal truth of the bible.

He (Oscar) comes to believe that God wants him to convert to Anglicanism, despite his father’s conviction that this means he is going to hell. But his conversion is also, incidentally, a means for him escape from rural Cornwall and achieve an education. At Oxford while training to become a priest Oscar discovers gambling, a sin he is never subsequently able to escape from. Whilst at university Oscar is a social outcast. His poverty marks him out, as does his other-worldly appearance and his complete lack of social skills. By chance he meets a fellow student, Wardley-Fish (a larger than life character I wish we had seen more of) who introduces him to the joys of gambling. At first his horse-racing winnings provide him with the funds to stay at Oxford, but his gambling – even on the Sabbath – eventually gets him into trouble, to the extent that the church authorities decide to exile him to Australia.

Lucinda’s story is also dominated by her fascination (or perhaps it is an addiction?) with gambling. She is orphaned when she is a young woman. She inherits the large farm in Australia her parents bought following a move from the UK. Not really knowing what to do with either her inheritance nor the rest of her life she spontaneously decides to buy a glassworks. Making a success of the business isn’t easy – the fiercely misogynistic glassblowers don’t even allow her to enter her own factory. At a loose end, Lucinda falls into the wrong crowd, and begins gambling on cards. A trip to London isn’t the way of rebooting her life she is looking for, but on the way back she meets Oscar.

Oscar’s terror of the sea – and large bodies of water more generally – means he is unable to socialise or move freely around the liner taking them to Australia. Nevertheless they bond over their mutual hobby, and Lucinda eventually invites Oscar to stay with her in Sydney. Their friendship develops and society is scandalised when they live together seemingly as man and wife, although in fact entirely innocently. Their relationship falters as Oscar is convinced Lucinda is in love with Reverend Hassett, a glass expert she consulted on the acquisition of her factory.

The finale of the novel involves a dangerous and improbable bet – Lucinda challenges Oscar to deliver a glass church to Reverend Hassett in his new living in Boat Harbour. Yes, a glass church. If that were not improbable enough, instead of taking the church by sea, Oscar’s fear of water means he has to travel overland, through largely uncharted territory. This fanciful expedition inevitably extracts a high price from them all.

Oscar and Lucinda could have been the great Australian novel. Carey is recorded as having said of his writing “My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country“. The colonisation of the continent by the British and others, and the impact this had on the indigenous peoples, is a theme which ripples through this novel, but always as the background to the lives of the central characters rather than ever being foregrounded as an issue. In the novel’s opening introductory chapter the narrator tells the reader a little about the area where he grew up, including the following:

“I learned long ago to distrust local history. Darkwood, for instance, they will tell you at the Historical Society, is called Darkwood because of the darkness of the foliage, but it was not so long ago you could hear people call it Darkies’ Point, and not so long before that when Horace Clark’s grandfather went up there with his mates – all the old families should record this when they are arguing about who controls the shire – and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women and children off the edge.”

This shocking massacre is part of settler history, and no worthy of further exploration. While other writers might think this story worth telling, in this novel it is just window-dressing, local ‘colour’. Oscar and Lucinda are both European settlers, as is almost everyone else they meet or mix with, while the indigenous Australians are virtually voiceless. Towards the end of the novel there are some brief exceptions to this rule – Kumbaingiri Billy, for example, a friend of the narrator’s father, is introduced as the source of the story of the glass church – but overwhelmingly this novel is about the experience of colonial Australia, in which European settlers struggle to come to terms with the challenges of the new world. That settler experience is only part of the story of Australia. Australia wasn’t invented or discovered by Europeans – I am pretty sure it was there all along and had been inhabited by people for thousands of years. While Carey doesn’t ignore that fact he really doesn’t address it at any length either. It is only recently, in A Long Way from Home for example, that Carey has finally started to address face-on what he has called “the fundamental, bloody circumstance of my country”. In the promotional interviews for that novel Carey said that “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.” The fact is he managed to do just that in this novel. I know it might seem strange to critique the novel Carey hasn’t written, and I understand his reasons for not feeling qualified to write about the aboriginal experience, but I can’t help feeling it was a huge missed opportunity.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 1997

There are plenty of websites that claim to be able to teach you how to write a novel. I haven’t investigated them in any detail, but I know that they offer guidance on how to structure the plot of one’s novel – of course they do. I have a strong hunch that one of the plot structures they suggest (if they don’t, they really should) would consist of parallel timelines following the novel’s characters in the present,

alternating with chapters set much earlier, before a significant event which marks a turning point in their lives. In the present they look back on said formative event with regret, perhaps not having been able to move on with their lives, still haunted by the past etc; in the past they approach the event with no idea what is coming, blithely unaware of how their lives are to be changed forever. We the reader will know and can see the innocent steps they take towards disaster through the prism of that knowledge, perhaps guided by a wistful ‘little did I know’ narrator. Better still, keep the detail of the ‘event’ vague – tease the reader with the idea that something terrible or disastrous is about to happen, but leave the details to the novel’s climax.

Does that sound familiar? Would you want to read a novel with that structure? Or does it sounds a little like writing by numbers, following a formula that you have read a thousand times before. It’s a little more interesting that a simple chronological series of events, but it has its flaws. For a start there is really not that much suspense – we know something is going to happen which will change our characters’ lives, even if we don’t know what precisely that event is, and we know more importantly that they come through it alive if not unscathed. Reading the novel becomes a matter of waiting for the ‘event’ to be revealed. That, in a nutshell, was my experience of reading The God of Small Things. It felt too mannered, too much like an exercise in creative writing, too artificial. It prevented me from becoming immersed in the text and in believing in the characters. Which was obviously a pity, because the author clearly has immense potential.

The God of Small Things is a classically fragmented narrative. It is constructed around two periods in the lives of twins Estha and Rahel: in 1969 when they are seven, and then in 1993 when they finally reunite after the traumatic incident that forms the heart of the novel. The twins come from a wealthy, Syrian-Christian family living in India and in the 1969 storyline live in an extended family with their mother Ammu, grandmother Mammachi, uncle Chacko, and great-aunt ‘Baby’ Kochamma. The narrative uses multiple perspectives and voices, but principally is shown through the naïve eyes of the children. The tragic events are set in motion when Margaret Kochamma, uncle Chacko’s ex-wife, comes to visit the family from England with her daughter, Sophie Mol. We learn as early as page 4 that Sophie dies in the course of the visit, but how she comes to die, and who is held responsible for her death, is not explained until towards the end of the novel.

In the present, the trauma of Sophie’s death, and the twins’ subsequent separation, still echoes. They both return to the family home, now much run-down, and resume an adult version of their childhood existence.

Roy’s prose is dense and at times wonderful. It is not unusual for her to use three images in one sentence. They can when this happens become crowded and lose their impact. Take this example from the novel’s first page for instance:

“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire.”

Can ropes be like gunfire? Technically no, but of course the mind is agile enough to move from the initial metaphor (slanting silver ropes) to the simile (like gunfire) without being concerned with the apparent contradiction, in the same way we have no problem with Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. Notice also the dead metaphor (ploughing) lurking there in between the two more obvious images. Out of context like this the writing stands out – we can see the monsoon rain slanting down and hitting the dry earth, pitting it with holes, but the cumulative effect of the imagery can be a bit wearying. When Roy avoids trying to assure the reader than everything is like something else, and just allows things to be what they are, the prose is far more effective:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.”

Compare this to when the imagery takes over:

“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.”

The novel’s Romeo and Juliet storyline, in which the taboo against relationships between Touchables and Untouchables is broken, is intertwined with the children’s excited memories of going to the cinema to see the Sound of Music, driving in the family car, and playing in the grounds of the family home. Here the river at the end of the garden represents a border between order and chaos, the known and the unknown, civilisation and barbarism. Once the reader acclimatises to the novel’s splintered structure it becomes as absorbing read – we know tragedy is about to strike but need to understand how and why. I have to say I found the novel’s ending its weakest element. It was gratuitous, a way of abruptly bringing the novel to a close when the story had run its course. But although the relationship between the twins is ostensibly the heart of the novel, there are many other themes, characters and relationships that were of greater interest and which outweigh the disappointing conclusion.

The God of Small Things (I should confess now that I still don’t properly understand what or who the titular God of Small Things was) is a wonderfully rich and rewarding novel. Perhaps it is too easy to mock some of the more obvious elements of ‘creative writing’ as I have done in the opening paragraphs of this review (John Crace does an excellent job of parodying the novel’s excesses in this review in the Guardian). And it is fair to say that it won the Booker in an exceptionally weak year (you are unlikely to have heard of any of the other short-listed novels). But don’t let that mislead you: it would have been a contender in any year. It joins and deserves its place among the many other Booker winning novels set in India, such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Paul Scott’s Staying On, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and of course the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

PS I am not a massive fan of trigger warnings, but there is a scene of child sex abuse in this novel that you probably ought to be aware of. It’s written from the child’s perspective (frightened and confused) and while admittedly it adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the novel in the run up to the tragedy, I am not convinced it was needed.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, 2010

The Finkler Question was Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel. He has continued to publish a new work every other year (or thereabouts) since his first book Coming from Behind came out in 1983. The choice of The Finkler Question as winner of the 2010 Booker Prize was not particularly controversial (compared to many previous awards) – the field was strong, including works by Peter Carey, Damon Galgut and Andrea Levy, but it had been well reviewed and strongly tipped to win. Reviewers compared it favourably to Philip Roth and even Lewis Carroll! It was however unusual amongst Booker winners in that it was – ostensibly – a comic novel, the first of its kind to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.

I appreciate ‘comic novel’ is a fairly loose category. In a 2015 lecture Jacobson himself gave to the Royal Society of Literature he offered these tips on how to write (and therefore what constitutes) a comic novel:

“Don’t try to be funny. The best comedy arises out of an embarrassment of seriousness.

Don’t give characters funny names. (Dickens used them all up)

Underwear isn’t funny. Neither are exclamation marks.

Writing about sex altogether is tricky. But inexplicitness is best, except when it isn’t. Do remember, though, that it takes refinement to be gross. (Was Jacobson following his own advice in his book The Act of Love which preceded The Finkler Question? Publishers Weekly described it as a “naughtily erudite” novel in which he “explores the nature of the erotic” in which a character is found “letching after two underage girls while attending the funeral of a man whose wife he had seduced” and in which the main characters wife ’embraces the infidelity foisted on her with gusto, relishing her thrice-weekly assignations and, after much persuasion, titillating her curious husband with details of their intimacies.’? Doesn’t look like it.)

Don’t be upbeat or feel-good, and don’t invite your readers to find you or your characters incorrigible.

Assume you are writing a tragedy. If your novel is any good that’s precisely what it will turn out to be.

Don’t consent to be called a comic novelist. It’s a tautology.”

A lot of these pointers are things to avoid rather than to do, and Jacobson was almost certainly trying to be witty rather than offering a serious guide to writing a comic novel, but at the same time the tragic element of The Finkler Question is central to the narrative and one that I will return to.

The connection between Jacobson and Kingsley Amis is deeper than their both having won the Booker. In my view many of Jacobson’s works bear a strong resemblance to those of Amis senior. His leading male characters are generally irritable and world weary, with an internal monologue revealing someone kicking against the pricks. These characters frequently seem an avatar for the novelist themselves, revealing their frustrations with the modern world and women in particular, especially those who prove resistance to their late middle-aged charms. Amis was notoriously misogynistic, but there are similar traits in Jacobson’s work. In No More Mr Nice Guy for example, the wife of his central character writes “feministical-erotic novels” and in Redback, Jacobson’s third novel, misogyny is front and central. Both men also experimented with writing dystopian novels – The Alteration (Amis) and J (Jacobson).

What does it mean to be Jewish? More specifically what does it mean to be Jewish in the UK in this century? That is The Finkler Question.

Jacobson’s central character, Julian Treslove is mugged one night. He is convinced his attacker calls him a Jew during the attack. Though some of his friends are Jewish, Treslove is not. Following the attack he becomes increasingly obsessed with what being Jewish means, in this time and place. For Treslove this isn’t a religious quest but rather a cultural one. He wants to understand the intricacies and precise nature of British Jewish life.

One of Treslove’s friends Libor Sevcik, is an elderly widower who was once a teacher specializing in Czech history. Treslove and Sam Finkler, the third member of the group, were two of his students. All of the book’s characters have complex identities – Sevcik had a second improbable career as a Hollywood gossip columnist. Finkler is a successful television personality and author. Treslove is a casual anti-Semite – despite having Jewish friends he really has no understanding of Jewish culture and thinks ““Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.”

Treslove turns the word “Finkler” into a private synonym for “Jew” and begins to anatomise what he thinks as ‘Finkler’ behaviours, traits and customs, wondering to what extent he shares these characteristics.

Jacobson writes passionately about the Middle East through his complex characters. The New York Times’s review of the novel claims that the novel “does a painful, bravura job of presenting a full spectrum of Jewish attitudes about the Middle East”. Perhaps, although I don’t think Jacobson makes any serious attempt to underplay his own views:

“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries…”

This is that difficult beast, a deadly serious comic novel. Wry smiles are probably the most you will get in the way of comedy or amusement and the main characters are hard to love, but the insights into Jewish life in 21st Century Britain are important and make the novel worth reading in themselves. I doubt if any minds will have been changed by the analysis of the ‘Finkler’ question but that obviously was never really the point. In trying to be both amusing and serious the novel runs the risk, like all others of the genre, of being neither. I think it will be obvious by now that I am still not sure whether it succeeds or not – but that indecision is OK, I don’t pretend these reviews are final judgments on what I read. The 2.8 (out of 5) score on Goodreads from the 2,000+ reviews suggest I’m not the only one with mixed or indecisive feelings about it!

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, 1992

The English Patient has given me doubts about my whole approach to reading. How can a novel so widely, almost universally praised, leave me so cold? What am I missing? Am I reading just for the sake of meeting some arbitrary blog-related target (bad) or for pleasure (good). Do I need to rethink how I read these novels? Sometimes it is interesting to spend time working out precisely why the novel in question missed the mark, but it would be nice from time to time to be able to write about what it did well. Perhaps I am just on a bad streak, missing the Terry Pratchett novels which were such a release from ‘literature’.

The novel is set in Italy at the end of the Second World War. The novel has a complex narrative structure in which events are told out of sequence. A severely burned “English” patient in the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo an Italian monastery, is being cared for by Hana, a Canadian nurse. He is the only patient left after the rest of the hospital has been evacuated at the end of the war in Europe. His only possession is a battered copy of Herodotus’s The Histories. Also in the villa/hospital is an Italian/Canadian/British thief and spy, Caravaggio. Of all the novel’s characters Caravaggio is the least well realised. The descriptions of him burgling various properties in the nude were bizarre, and when he has his thumbs cut off as a punishment for his thieving it seems a fairly light sentence in the circumstances. Eventually these disparate and troubled characters are joined by Kip, an Indian bomb disposal engineer working with the British Army in the area. 

The English patient is horrendously burnt and will almost certainly die, but is lucid and able to recall some of his experiences leading up to his accident. His memory comes back to him intermittently, although he can never remember his name nor confirm his nationality. (We eventually discover he is not English at all – one of the many instances in the novel where things are not what they seem). He seems to have been slowly dying for several years, although the little I know about severe burns cases suggests that would be highly unlikely if not impossible. Previously he was part of a group of explorers mapping the North African desert. His adventures and those of the other inhabitants of the villa are the focus of the novel – little happens in the villa itself until the very end of the war.

In The English Patient Ondaatje has constructed a complex, elusive novel. It has some finely drawn characters, plenty of incident, and a mystery which is slowly revealed. It was quickly translated into an award winning film. The director made some striking choices about the way the narrative is presented, which highlighted some of the weaknesses in the novel’s construction. Incidents which are central to the film and prove heart rending and dramatic are almost thrown away in the novel. The most obvious example of this is the scene which forms the climax of the movie. The English patient is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert. His lover is seriously injured and her husband who was piloting the plane, dies. It is suggested that the crash may have been a deliberate attempt by the husband to kill his wife, and possibly her lover, in revenge for her infidelity. The patient rescues the wife and carries her into a nearby cave. She is seriously wounded but might survive, although the nearest town is three day’s journey away, and without the plane the patient has no way of getting help any faster. He walks to the town where he is immediately taken into custody on suspicion of being a spy. No-one will listen to his pleas, that he has left an Englishwoman out in the desert without food or drink, and she will surely die if he doesn’t go back to her.

In the novel, instead of this scene being a heart-breaking climax to the patient and his lover’s affair, it is simply one of many fragmented recollections that surfaces during his morphine injections used to control his pain. It is not given any particular emphasis within the narrative structure. Of course I appreciate this was a deliberate choice by the author – war is full of tragedy – but the different choice made by the film director was clearly more impactful. The film also evens the novel’s timeline out to an extent, making the structure more straightforward while retaining the multiple flashbacks that are at its core.

Just to be clear, I appreciate that Ondaatje’s decisions to structure the novel in the way he did, to foreground some events and leave others in shadow, were obviously carefully thought through. They all add to the elusive nature of the novel in which the reader has to invest thoroughly in the narrative in order to construct the whole. Hence my feelings of guilt that I didn’t come to the novel prepared to do this work, put this effort in, and as a result didn’t benefit from the reward that would have brought. Putting it simply, I didn’t pay sufficient attention. And that’s entirely down to me.

Having offered that mea culpa, the novel is weakened, in my opinion, from the uneasy combination of different narratives. As well as the present day events in the villa, described in the present tense, there are the patient’s memories of time spent exploring the desert, Caraveggio and Hana’s personal reminiscences, and Kip’s training as an unexploded bomb disposal engineer in England. These last scenes in particular, full of technical bomb-making detail, for which Ondaatje obviously did a lot of research, seemed lifted from an entirely different novel and grafted onto this narrative. 

And finally there is the prose. Much praised for its lushness, its vibrancy, its – well, pick the adjective of choice. But I found much of it just pretentious. I know it is unfair to quote the novel and make fun of the empty sentences, having emptied them myself of context and meaning, but how else can I demonstrate the point? You will either enjoy this style of writing or not – and I found it vacuous and empty. Worse at times it descends into meaninglessness.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.”

“I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?”

In most cases these are the author’s characters speaking rather than the narrator, so it is the characters who are being over the top, pompous, or plain ridiculous. But when everyone speaks like this, more or less (Kip is the primary exception) then I can be forgiven for finding it wearying. It certainly didn’t leave me wanting to read more of this author.

Staying On, by Paul Scott, 1977

Staying On is effectively a post-script to The Raj Quartet , Scott’s earlier sequence of novels about the end of the British occupation of India. Set in 1972, shortly after the India/Pakistan war that led directly to the creation of Bangladesh, it tells the story of a British couple, Tusker and Lucy Smalley (briefly mentioned in the latter two books of the Quartet) who are the last British couple living in the small hill town of Pankot. Tusker, formerly a colonel in the British Army, chose to stay on in India after independence, when most British people returned to the UK, initially opting for a post in business and then finally retirement. One of the reasons for staying on was that the couple’s meagre savings would go much further in India than in the UK. But inevitably they slowly become more and more isolated as others leave.

The Smalley’s live in The Lodge, an annexe to Smith’s Hotel. Their status as slightly unwelcome lodgers is obviously symbolic of the role of the British in India after the end of the Raj and reminiscent of J G Farrell’s use of the hotel as a symbol of Imperialism in his wonderful 1970 novel Troubles.

Formerly the town’s principal hotel, Smith’s is now overshadowed by neighbouring The Shiraz, a much larger and more modern hotel built by a consortium of Indian businessmen. This is obviously the shape of things to come for Smith’s, now as anachronistic (and unprofitable) as the Smalley’s themselves. The novel focusses on the relationship between the brash, monosyllabic Tusker and his thoughtful, considerate wife, and in turn their relationships with the community around them. This is a detailed portrait rather than the sweeping descriptions majesties of post-Imperial India that the reader (well, this one) might have expected. Little happens in Pankot – no tiger hunting from the back of an elephant, no tribal communal riots or violence. Life as an expat in Pankot, relayed to the reader through Lucy’s lively inner monologue, is a restrained affair in which a letter from England is a cause for excitement.

In an imagined conversation to a prospective British visitor, Lucy reminisces about her childless marriage to Tusker and the decisions he made along the way that caused her such pain, most of all the decision to stay on when they had an opportunity to return to the UK. She has endured his buffoonery and occasional infidelity (the suggestion being that it is the former that was more painful) with a traditional stiff upper lip, but is coming close to breaking point. She knows Tusker is unwell, and is worried about her financial position should he die. Having borne multiplies slights from other army wives, she was looking forward to being shown respect as a ex-patriate, but finds that life has not turned out as she expected. Having lived with the fine racial and social distinctions that were so important to life as an Army wife, Mrs Smalley is unable to make any close friends among her Indian neighbours, and is obviously lonely and isolated.

In parallel to the Smalley’s relationship, Mrs Lila Bhoolabhoy, owner of Smith’s Hotel bullies her hen-pecked husband, the hotel manager. Mrs Bhoolabhoy, without consulting her husband, makes plans to sell the hotel for redevelopment. This will lead to the Smalley’s eviction, the news of which precipitates Tusker’s fatal heart attack. Scott sketches in a number of other characters that complete the Smalley’s small circle of acquaintances – their loyal servant, Ibrahim, their new gardener, Mrs Bhoolabhoy’s maid Minnie, the local vicar, and Susy, Mrs Smalley’s mixed-race hairdresser.

This is not a novel driven by events. The one major turning point – Tusker’s death – is announced in the opening sentence and the remainder of the novel is an explanation of how his heart attack is triggered by the eviction notice. There is no mystery about the cause of death – Tusker’s health issued are mentioned throughout, as is his tendency to flare-up in response to any perceived slight from his landlord. Instead the focus is on the minutiae of the Smalley’s lives in the days leading up to his death.

This was an enjoyable if slight novel that is in some ways more interested in the Smalley’s relationship than the setting. I suspect that the return to the UK that Mrs Smalley yearned for would have still left her marriage under strain, and her friendships limited by social constraints of class, religion or race. Ideally I would have read The Raj Quartet first before Staying On, which would have made it a very different read, more an epilogue than a stand-alone novel. These are some of the difficulties of working one’s way through the Booker prize winners in such a haphazard way. I doubt The Raj Quartet will now ever make its way onto my hypothetical to be read list, but you never know.

The Famished Road, by Ben Okri, 1991

Ben Okri’s The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. I found it a difficult, challenging book. I am not the only one – many reviewers (good example here) have found the novel so hard to read to the extent they reported giving up in frustration at the bewildering narrative style. Which is a pity, because underneath all the badly written magical realism is an interesting, even uplifting story about life in a rapidly changing African village.

The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro, an abiku, a child spirit who repeats over and over again the cycle of life and death. For reasons that never become clear Azaro finally decides to stay on earth and live a full life. But his family have a hard existence – they live in one, damp-sodden room, haunted by rats in the walls. Work is brutally exhausting. The family is always crippled by debt and any time they do have any money it is quickly frittered away. Political parties promise change but are obviously, openly corrupt. They have no real friends – their neighbours are hostile and unwelcoming. Meanwhile all around the forest is being cut down to make space for more roads and housing.

Early in the novel Azaro is kidnapped and about to be sacrificed by a police officer and his wife before being saved by his mother. But he is a resilient child, bouncing back after being beaten or thrown out of the local bar. His father has the same irrepressible spirit. He is an amateur boxer who seems to win every fight against all the odds. His mother sells small household goods from the street, scratching out a living in pennies.

As an abiku, Azaro often sees spirits and enters the spirit world. These dreamlike scenes were the most difficult to read – intensely episodic and devoid of any logic or structure. This is not the magical realism found in authors such as Garcia Marquez; magic is not integrated into the everyday work, experienced by everyone and accepted as normal. Here it happens to Azaro alone – no-one else can see the spirits that appear to him. These scenes have a drug-induced quality and go on for many long pages. I could quote them at length but here are a few shorter examples:

“The trees were running away from human habitation. My eyes became charged too and I saw people with serene bronze masks emerging from trees. I saw a bird with a man’s hairy legs flying clumsily over the branches of the rain-tree. An antelope with the face of a chaste woman stopped and stared at me…An old man emerged from the anthill that had been following me”.

“I heard the cry of a cat. A dog’s eyes stared into mine…An eagle flew in from the door and landed on the old one’s head. He touched the eagle with his good hand and a black light shot into my eyes. When I opened them I saw I was in a field. Around me snaked a green river. I looked up and saw a blue mountain…A cat jumped right through me…The beggar laughed. “

“Inside a cat there are many histories” (572). (Indeed there are).

I like to think I am a bit of a connoisseur of the meaningless sentence, and The Famished Road added quite a few to the collection. For example: “I stayed outside for while, planting my secrets in the silence of my beginnings”. (288) That sounds meaningful, but it could mean so many different things it ends up meaning nothing. Perhaps it is intended to mean something different to each reader. I recognise that in quoting it I have had to strip the sentence from its context, but there are times when you just have to abandon attempts at understanding and listen to the poetry.

“Her snoring altered the geography of our destinies” (568)

And so on. I am sure it is these exhausting sequences which will have put off so many readers. The story of Azaro and his family’s struggles struggled to escape from the burden of this dominant element of the narrative. Okri has some important points to make about the reasons for the family’s impoverishment:

“He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence.”

The novel ends with this message of hope:

“There will be changes. Coups. Soldiers everywhere. Ugliness. Blindness. And then when people least expect it a great transformation is going to take place in the world. Suffering people will know justice and beauty. A wonderful change is coming from far away and people will realise the great meaning of struggle and hope. There will be peace.”

The unnamed African country Okri describes is very undeveloped even though it is rapidly modernising. Witchcraft and primitive medicine – juju – is a dominant theme throughout the novel. Herbalism is the term used to describe traditional medicine but it appears as a little more than a rebranded and sanitised version of witchcraft. These scenes and characters have a troubling subtext, and it concerned me that Okri appeared to give serious credence to the concept of child-spirits and witchcraft. This concept of the spirit child may have been society’s way of rationalising high rates of infant mortality. Children die because they are spirits fated to be reborn, rather than because of preventable disease or deprivation. But Okri doesn’t introduce this idea. Instead spirit children are presented as a fat of life. No-one questions there existence in the novel.

Even in the twenty-first century, African witchcraft beliefs are widespread, and have been incorporated by some into a local brand of Christianity. This has led to much violence against young Nigerians in particular. Children and babies branded as ‘evil’ are being abused, abandoned and even murdered. Preachers provide expensive exorcism services, profiting from childhood illnesses. Human rights activists opposing this practice are threatened and harassed. One source quoted in Wikipedia estimates 15,000 children in the Niger Delta alone have been forced onto the streets by witchcraft accusations. “Children are taken to churches where they are subjected to inhumane and degrading torture in the name of ‘exorcism’. They are chained, starved, hacked with machetes, lynched or murdered in cold blood. In Akwa Ibom State and Cross River State of Nigeria, about 15,000 children were branded as witches and most of them end up abandoned and abused on the streets.”

It is easy for me to preach but I think an author has a responsibility when writing about these topics to not passively endorse the wide-scale harm that occurs due to these ideas. Okri may have wanted to reflect a genuine part of African culture, without passing judgement and allowing the reader to make their own conclusions. However, there is a difference between reflecting people’s lived experiences and presenting their superstitions in a vivid and confirmatory manner, especially in a novel that is otherwise realistic. Okri needs to show recognition of the negative impacts of the perception of spirit children, they need to do more than just reflect the existence of these beliefs.

I would love to hear what you thought of the novel, and specifically this particular issue.

Rites of Passage, by William Golding, 1980

Rites of Passage is an account of a voyage by sea to Australia. Set in 1812, at the end of the Napoleonic war, the voyage is undertaken by a group of Britons in search of a new life in Australia. The ship is a converted man-of-war, an aging battleship. The story is told in the form of a journal written by Edmund Fitzhenry Talbot, a young aristocrat. We are told this journal is being written to entertain Talbot’s godfather, who is apparently a very influential man, and who has arranged for Edmund to work for the Governor of New South Wales in the colony. Talbot describes the ship’s layout, its crew and passengers, and the mainly weather-related incidents that comprise the voyage. He loses track of the days at sea when he falls ill, but as the ship approaches the equator the narrative slowly focusses on the fate of one other passenger, Reverend Colley, and something that happens to Colley when the ship crosses the equator – the rite of passage in the novel’s title.

Colley’s role in the novel is largely one of scapegoat. He accidentally offends the ship’s captain by intruding on the quarterdeck without permission, something forbidden in ship’s orders. Colley makes clumsy efforts to repair his relationship with the captain, but is rebuffed. He becomes a focus for the crew’s attention, and is hazed during the crossing the equator rituals. These central events happen ‘off-screen’ – Talbot the novel’s principal narrator isn’t present when they happen, and is only vaguely aware of them (his focus is on chasing a young woman of negotiable affection around the ship) and in the subsequent journal pages written by Colley they are only alluded to tangentially and ambiguously. Whatever happens, Colley then gets blind drunk and there is a further incident with the crew in which sexual activity with one or more of the ship’s crew is hinted at. Struck by shame Colley retreats to his cabin, refuses all food and drink, and eventually dies. In the nineteenth century shame could be fatal, apparently.

Golding seems to have based this incident on the well-documented practice of humiliating crew members when they cross the equator for the first time. If the Wikipedia entry is to be believed this practice continues in navies around the world to this day. It seems likely in the nineteenth century these ceremonies would have been less restrained than they are now. A record of the second survey voyage of HMS Beagle describes the crossing thus:

As they approached the equator on the evening of 16 February 1832, a pseudo-Neptune hailed the ship. Those credulous enough to run forward to see Neptune “were received with the watery honours which it is customary to bestow”.[2] The officer on watch reported a boat ahead, and Captain FitzRoy ordered “hands up, shorten sail”. Using a speaking trumpet he questioned Neptune, who would visit them the next morning. About 9am the next day, the novices or “griffins” were assembled in the darkness and heat of the lower deck, then one at a time were blindfolded and led up on deck by “four of Neptune’s constables”, as “buckets of water were thundered all around”. The first “griffin” was Charles Darwin, who noted in his diary how he “was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. — They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. —a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. —at last, glad enough, I escaped. — most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. — The whole ship was a shower bath: & water was flying about in every direction: of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.” 

All good fun but the element of humiliation is never far off.

For a novel about a sea voyage there is surprisingly little about sea-voyaging in Rites of Passage. Yes, there’s plenty of description of the ship and its working, and Talbot devotes a lot of time to learning ‘tarpaulin’, which he claims is the sailors name for their slang and technical terms about the working of the ship. But for a voyage half-way round the world, the novel is in many ways claustrophobic, confided within the narrow constraints of the ship. There’s no mention of the ship ever docking for supplies for example. At the end of his journal Talbot describes it as: “some kind of a sea-story but a sea-story with never a tempest, no shipwreck, no sinking, no rescue at sea, no sight nor sound of an enemy, no thundering broadsides, heroism, prizes, gallant defences and heroic attacks. Only one gun fired, and that a blunderbuss!” which is about right.

This is largely because the novel isn’t really about the voyage at all. It ends long before Australia is reached for one thing – the destination and the new world it represents is unimportant. This novel is really much more interested in the social structures which govern life on board. The ship as a metaphor for society is an image that goes back as far as Plato. In case the reader has missed the point, Golding names his ship Britannia. The passengers and crew are carefully stratified into a class system distributed through the ship’s decks, with strict codes of conduct and conventions (which of course Colley is punished for breaking).

Ostensibly Rites of Passage is a straightforward story of a sea-voyage. But as you might expect from a Nobel-winning novelist there’s plenty more going on than you are initially led to believe from the flawed narrative voices. But the novel also felt very old-fashioned. It could easily have been written by Conrad in the first decade of the twentieth century, o, earlier. People dying of shame tends not to happen in novels written towards the end of the twentieth century! The narrative structure, based around Talbot’s journal, felt forced to me, harking back to the early epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. For all his status and education Talbot is an unobservant narrator, never able to get to the bottom of what causes Colley’s death. The text within a text, Colley’s fragmentary notes which Talbot discovers in his cabin and pastes into his journal, are written in a more authentic, accessible voice, and came as a bit of a relief.

I can’t honestly say this was an enjoyable read, with the archaic language and the claustrophobic setting combining to give the novel a constricted, stifled atmosphere. It is is the first in a series in which Golding continued the voyage towards Australia, and we find out more about the characters he introduces here. Once again I find myself hesitant about investing more time in a trilogy, although this time for very different reasons than when I finished The Ghost Road!

The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker, 1995

I think it would be fair to say that my experience of reading Booker prize winning novels has so far been patchy, to say the least, certainly recently having focussed on some of the earlier winners. Along the way there have been some incredible novels, but also a fair share of stinkers. I am delighted to say that The Ghost Road was very much in the first category. It was outstanding – original, touching, and very well written.

The Ghost Road is the third novel in the Regeneration trilogy. I found this out after buying the novel, which put me in a bit of a quandary – do I read the previous two novels or just push ahead with this one on its own? In the end I decided to read this novel first – which I now regret. If it had been a stinker then I could just tick it off the Booker list and move on, but it was such a well-written book that I really think I ought to read the first two in the trilogy. But of course that’s a daft way to read any series of books! So I just have to live with my decision.

Ghost Road follows the continuing adventures of Billie Prior, who in the earlier books had served in the trenches in World War One and been hospitalised suffering from shell-shock. This novel sees his recovery and return to the front. It opens with a scene in which Prior leers at women sun-bathing on the beach (a reference to the Nausicaa chapter in Ulysses?). He is keen to return to France despite being offered the opportunity to serve out the rest of the war in a desk job in the Ministry of Munitions, while at the same time accepting fatalistically that his chances of being killed are high. Prior is a sexually adventurous and ambivalent young man – Barker recounts his numerous encounters graphically without ever being salacious.

The battle scenes in the last days of the Great War are reserved for the final chapters of the book and arrive with huge impact. A futile war becomes even more pointless as the armistice is just days away; readers will be aware of that ticking clock and the imminent death of Prior’s fellow officer, Wilfred Owen. These powerful scenes are hard to read but incredibly well written.

The other main thread of the novel interwoven with the story of Prior’s return to France is told by his former doctor, Rivers. While continuing to care for his patients as the Spanish flu begins to take grip, Rivers recalls his time on an anthropological expedition to the Solomon Islands to study the local culture. This section is based on the work of the real-life character of Dr Rivers. Throughout the novel Barker draws on factual accounts and experiences, but integrates them seamlessly into the narrative to the extent that it is impossible to tell which is fiction and which fact, nor that it really matters. This is one of those novels that sends the reader down a series of internet rabbit-holes as passing references to the executor of Oscar Wilde’s estate for example, or the gay sub-culture of the Edwardian era appear in the narrative. The Solomon islanders culture, dying out due to the imposition of European ‘law and order’, is focused on the capturing of prisoners from local tribes and beheading them. This death cult is implicitly contrasted with the industrialisation of death on the Somme and Passchendaele, and seems almost civilised by comparison.

The First World War is very familiar ground for novelists, but Barker has used this setting with a highly original approach to create a powerful novel. I caught some echoes of Catch 22 in the descriptions of the struggles to capture an insignificant piece of land days before the Armistice. I could have done with more Prior and less Rivers in the overall balance of the novel – I found Billie the more interesting character – a working class officer recovering from shell-shock with an out of control libido and friends with some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, what’s not to like?

This is a brave and interesting novel and a worthy winner of the 1995 Booker, a self-conscious and stunningly successful attempt to break away from the northern, working class, feminist stereotypes Barker previously found herself constrained by. The novel addresses the profound contradiction of the heart of the Great War – that it was at once terrible and, for some, exciting and worthwhile or rewarding. Barker explained in an interview:

“I think the whole British psyche is suffering from the contradiction you see in Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, where the war is both terrible and never to be repeated and at the same time experiences derived from it are given enormous value”.

Prior thinks he is mad to have come back to France, but would equally have been mad not to. The novel’s ending is hard to read after all that has come before, as the attempt to cross the canal is beaten back:

“Prior was about to start across the water with ammunition when he was himself hit, though it didn’t feel like a bullet, more like a blow from something big and hard, a truncheon or a cricket bat, only it knocked him off his feet and he fell, one arm trailing over the canal.

He tried to turn to crawl back beyond the drainage ditches, knowing it was only a matter of time before he was hit again, but the gas was thick here and he couldn’t reach his mask. Banal, simple, repetitive thoughts ran round and round his mind. Balls up. Bloody mad. Oh Christ. There was no pain, more a spreading numbness that left his brain clear. He saw Kirk die. He saw Owen die, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arc in the air as it fell. It seemed to take forever to fall, and Prior’s consciousness fluttered down with it. He gazed at his reflection in the water, which broke and reformed and broke again as bullets hit the surface, and then, gradually, as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.”

Is this not wonderful, under-stated writing?