Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

January 7, 2014January 7, 201423 Comments

I think I need to start this post with an apology to George Orwell because like many people, I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager and assumed I’d read everything by Orwell that was worth reading. I was obviously wrong because Coming Up for Air is a great book, though very different from his two most famous novels. In a way, though, I’m glad I’ve waited until now to read it because I’m not sure I would have appreciated it as much when I was younger.

Coming Up for Air was published in 1939 and tells the story of George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance salesman who is bored with his dreary, middle-class existence. Married with two children, George’s biggest worries are his mortgage, his weight and the risk of losing his job, but with Europe on the brink of war he knows that the monotony of his life could be about to change. On the day that he receives a new set of false teeth, George takes a trip into London where he sees a poster that triggers memories of his childhood and Lower Binfield, the small, peaceful town where he grew up. George is tempted to return to Lower Binfield for the first time in years, but if he goes back now, what will he find?

Based on the other two books I’ve read, this is not really the type of book I would have expected from George Orwell. However, there are some similarities with Nineteen Eighty-Four in Orwell’s surprisingly accurate predictions of the future. Reading this book gave me an eerie feeling, knowing that it was being written just before the beginning of the Second World War, when the author could have had no real knowledge of what was to come, yet anticipating the changes that would soon be upon the nation.

“I can feel it happening. I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think. And I’m not even exceptional in this. There are millions of others like me.”

My favourite part of the book was the long section in the middle where George looks back on his childhood in Lower Binfield at the turn of the century. This whole section is a lovely nostalgic portrait of an England that is now gone forever…that had already gone by 1939, destroyed by the First World War.

“1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the chance to learn.”

The novel doesn’t have a lot of plot, but that wasn’t a problem; I didn’t find it slow at all. There’s not much dialogue either, as we spend the whole book inside George’s head with his thoughts and memories. Despite this, I found the book completely engrossing. The only time I got bored was with George’s long and enthusiastic description of fishing, his favourite hobby until the age of fifteen. But even this was steeped in nostalgia:

“The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool — and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.”

George’s actions and opinions are not always very admirable and his views on the women in his life leave a lot to be desired, but despite his flaws, I couldn’t actually dislike him. He’s so ordinary; not a hero, but a real human being with good points and bad points. He has a wryly funny, self-deprecating narrative style which saves the book from becoming too depressing, though overall I found this a sad and poignant story rather than a humorous one. I don’t know much about Orwell’s own life, but I’m sure this book must have been autobiographical to some extent.

I loved Coming Up for Air and will certainly consider trying another of Orwell’s books.

Sleeping Patterns by J.R. Crook

November 8, 2013November 8, 20136 Comments

I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book in a giveaway hosted by Charlie of The Worm Hole earlier this year. It’s probably not a book I would have chosen for myself but Charlie’s review (and others) made it sound very intriguing.

To begin with, the book is dedicated to the memory of the author, J.R. Crook, who we are told in the introduction (written by his friend, a fictional character called Annelie Strandli) is dead*. Before he died, Annelie says, he sent her fifteen envelopes each containing one piece of an untitled story and she has put them together to form a book. Annelie received these fifteen story fragments out of order and has presented them in that same order in the book so that Chapter 5 appears first, followed by Chapter 1, then 11.

Annelie herself is a main character in the story. A Finnish student living in London, the story tells of her relationship with Berry Walker, an aspiring writer. Annelie, Berry and Jamie (J.R.) Crook all live in the same student accommodation. Intrigued by the mysterious Berry, who is an insomniac, Annelie begins sneaking into his room and reading his writings, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Hoping for some insights into Berry’s character, Annelie becomes absorbed in the story he is writing – the story of Boy One, who has the habit of falling asleep at the most inappropriate times and entering the world of dreams.

There are so many clever ideas to be found in this book and it has such an unusual, innovative structure! I was impressed by its originality, though a bit disappointed that the actual plot wasn’t more compelling. Due to the fragmented nature of the story, possibly reflecting Berry’s disturbed sleeping patterns and Boy One’s dreams, I found it difficult to follow what was really happening (a story-within-a-story-within-a-story doesn’t even begin to describe it!) However, if you see the book as a sort of puzzle or jigsaw to be solved, then it definitely works in that respect.

When presented with chapters numbered incorrectly, the natural reaction is to want to read them in the correct numerical order, starting with Chapter 1. I managed to resist the temptation and just read the book straight through from cover to cover the way it was presented, but I did wonder whether the story would have made more sense if read in the right order or whether that would have just left me more confused. After spending most of the book feeling lost I was pleased to find that things did start to become clearer towards the end! At just over 100 pages, it would have been short enough to read again if I had wanted to and I’m sure a lot of things would have been clarified on a second read.

This book won the Luke Bitmead Bursary for previously unpublished authors and, having now read it, I can see why, because I can honestly say I’ve never read a book quite like Sleeping Patterns before. My personal preference is for more traditional novels – stories with a beginning, middle and end – but I’m always happy to try something a bit different. And this was certainly different!

* Don’t worry – J.R. Crook is not really dead. He even signed my copy of the book!

The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter

August 13, 201316 Comments

The Sea Change is a novel about many things: love and grief, friendship and betrayal, the devastation caused by war and natural disasters, but perhaps most importantly, the relationships between mothers and daughters.

Violet Fielding lives with her parents and her sister, Freda, in a small Wiltshire village called Imber. In the middle of the Second World War the residents of Imber are forced to evacuate, leaving the village to be requisitioned by army troops and used for military training exercises. As Violet tries to settle into a new life in a new home, she is unable to forget Imber, her childhood friends and Pete, the boy she fell in love with.

Many years later in 1971, Violet’s daughter, Alice, is travelling to India with her boyfriend, James. Alice was not on good terms with Violet when they parted; her mother disapproves of James and isn’t very happy about Alice going so far away. When they reach India, Alice and James get married, but the day after their wedding the coast of India is hit by a tsunami and Alice is separated from her new husband, who had gone out to get breakfast. As she begins to search for him – an almost impossible task, given the scale of the disaster and the number of people who are missing – Alice reflects on her life with James and thinks about what went wrong in her relationship with her mother.

The Sea Change is one of those dual time period novels I’ve complained about so much in the past, but I thought the structure worked quite well in this case. Although the two stories are set in different times and places, I could see parallels between them – in both there is a sense of loss and grief for things and people that are gone forever. I never managed to become as interested in Alice’s story as I was in Violet’s, but I did love the way the two storylines began to merge together towards the end.

I’ve read a lot of books about the war but none that have dealt with this particular aspect: the idea of an entire village that has been abandoned and the effects of this on the people who once lived there. It was so sad to read about a whole community being broken up and forced into a different way of life. The fact that Imber is a real place, still uninhabited today, makes the story even more moving. Alice’s story was also something new for me; I’ve seen images on the news, of course, showing the destruction a tidal wave can cause, but it’s not something I’ve ever read about in fiction.

There are some books that grab me from the first page and don’t let go until the end; other books are gentler and draw me in more slowly. This was one of the second type but that doesn’t mean I liked it any less. The Sea Change is a beautifully written book, filled with emotion and poignancy and a real understanding of complex relationships. There are some beautiful descriptions too, of both England and India. I would never have guessed this was Joanna Rossiter’s first novel as it feels like the work of a much more experienced author! I’m looking forward to seeing what she writes next.

Thanks to Penguin for providing a review copy of this book.

Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

June 7, 201327 Comments

I’ve never read anything by Barbara Pym until now, despite feeling sure that I would enjoy her books, so Barbara Pym Reading Week seemed a good time to start. Less than Angels is not a book that I’ve heard much about so I was worried that it might not be a good one to begin with, but it’s the only one I actually own so it made sense to read it first. Luckily I did enjoy it and it has left me wanting to read more of Pym’s books as soon as I can!

Less than Angels revolves around a group of anthropology students, their professors, families and neighbours. Catherine Oliphant is a writer of romantic fiction and articles for women’s magazines. Her boyfriend, Tom Mallow, is an anthropology student who has recently returned home from being ‘in the field’ in Africa and is now working on finishing his thesis. Despite having very different personalities and not really understanding each other’s work, Tom and Catherine seem to have settled into life together – until Tom meets Deirdre Swan, a younger student who is just beginning to study anthropology.

While the relationships between Tom, Catherine and Deirdre form the central thread of the novel, another storyline centres around money for research grants which the rich widow Minnie Foresight has promised to give to Professor Mainwaring’s department. Among the students hoping to receive these grants are Deirdre’s friends, Mark and Digby, who provide a lot of the book’s humour. We meet lots of other great characters too, including Deirdre’s mother, Mabel, and her unmarried Aunt Rhoda. And there’s also Alaric Lydgate, an eccentric anthropologist who lives next door and can often be seen wearing an African mask around the house (and secretly wishes he could wear it all the time).

My first impression after reading Chapter One was that I liked Barbara Pym’s writing but was completely overwhelmed by the number of characters we were introduced to in that first chapter and the way the viewpoints changed from one to another so rapidly. Fortunately, after a couple of chapters things settled down and we could concentrate on getting to know one character at a time.

I thought Catherine was a lovely person and although she and Deirdre could be seen as rivals, Catherine’s mature attitude to the whole situation made it easy for me to like Deirdre too. It was interesting to read the contrasting descriptions of Catherine’s solitary but independent life in London, and Deirdre’s life in a middle-class suburban household, living with her mother, brother and aunt. I thought it was funny when one of Deirdre’s fellow students, a Frenchman called Jean-Pierre, visits the family to study a typical English Sunday! I liked the idea that there’s as much for an anthropologist to study in English habits and traditions as there is in the customs of African tribes, and I was also interested in the comparison of the insights writers have into human life as opposed to the views anthropologists have.

I loved Mark and Digby too. One of my favourite scenes was the one where they take Miss Clovis and Miss Lydgate to a restaurant and spend the whole time worrying about the cost and trying to choose the cheapest things on the menu. I also liked the part where Professor Mainwaring invites four of the competing research grant applicants to his house in the countryside for the weekend. Near the end of the book, the story takes a more dramatic turn which I thought felt a bit out of place with the rest of the novel. Apart from this, I enjoyed Less than Angels and am excited about reading more of her books.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

May 22, 201314 Comments

Having read both of Khaled Hosseini’s previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, I was excited when I discovered that he had written a new book. It’s been a long time since A Thousand Splendid Suns but his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, was worth waiting for. It’s a gentler book than the previous two and much less harrowing. I didn’t learn as much about life in Afghanistan as I did from the other two books and this one doesn’t go into much depth on the Soviet invasion or the horrifying events of the Taliban years, but it’s still a very powerful and emotional novel. It’s a story about families, about the relationships between brothers and sisters, parents and children, and husbands and wives.

In 1952, Saboor and his young children, Abdullah and Pari, set out on a journey from their small village in rural Afghanistan to the capital city of Kabul. The two children have a very close and loving relationship; Abdullah has taken on the role of a parent to his little sister since their mother died when Pari was a baby. They are happy to have the chance to spend some time together on the journey, but what they don’t know is that when they reach Kabul something is going to happen that will change both of their lives forever.

As the story moves through the generations and across continents, we also get to know a variety of other characters, all of whom are connected in one way or another to the family we met at the beginning of the book. These include Uncle Nabi, who leaves home to work for a rich family in Kabul, and his employer’s wife, Nila Wahdati, a poet. Then there’s Markos, a plastic surgeon from Greece who is working for a charity in Kabul, and Adel, son of a famous Afghan warlord who slowly discovers that his father may not be as heroic as he seems. A whole chapter is devoted to each character’s story, which made the novel feel almost like a collection of short stories. Some of them are more interesting than others, but they all share the same themes: the effects of years of conflict on a country and its people, and the suffering of families torn apart by war or poverty.

I found this book to be much wider in scope than either The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns; it begins with one family in Afghanistan but over the course of the novel we are taken to America, Paris and the Greek Islands and meet a huge number of characters. This was not necessarily a good thing, though; sometimes I felt that the focus had moved too far away from the storylines I was most interested in and the novel started to lose some of its magic and become less compelling. One of my favourite chapters was actually the first one, in which Saboor tells Abdullah and Pari a fairytale about Baba Ayub, whose son is stolen away by a div (a type of monster). Ideas and metaphors introduced in this opening chapter run through the entire novel, which I thought was very clever.

Early in the book someone mentions that a story can be like a train – you can jump onboard anywhere but will get to the same destination eventually. That’s a good description of And the Mountains Echoed, as the story is not told in strict chronological order – as well as moving from one character to another, we also jumps backwards and forwards in time within each chapter – but when we do finally reach the end, everything comes together to bring the novel to a beautiful and moving conclusion.

Pictures at an Exhibition by Camilla Macpherson

March 28, 201318 Comments

In 1942 the National Gallery in London launched its ‘Picture of the Month’ scheme. Each month one of the masterpieces that had been hidden away to protect them from bombing raids during the war would be brought out of storage and put on display. Daisy Milton, who is working in London as a typist, decides to go along every month to look at the paintings in the hope that it will give her something to look forward to and help her get through the days until the war is over. After each visit to the gallery she writes a letter to her friend Elizabeth in Canada, describing the painting and how it made her feel.

In the present day we meet Claire and her husband, Rob. When Rob’s grandmother, Elizabeth, dies she leaves him a box containing the letters she received from Daisy throughout the war. A recent tragedy has almost destroyed Claire and Rob’s marriage and Claire finds some comfort in reading Daisy’s letters and going to look at the paintings once a month just as Daisy did. As the months go by and Claire finds herself drawn into Daisy’s world she starts to see some parallels between Daisy’s life in the past and her own life in the present.

I enjoyed Pictures at an Exhibition, but although I was interested in both the wartime and modern day storylines I did prefer the wartime one because I found Daisy a much more appealing character than Claire. For a long time Claire annoyed me because she seemed so self-absorbed and unwilling to move on with her life. I had more sympathy for Rob, who came across as a kind, considerate husband who was doing his best to make their marriage work and starting to run out of patience. As Claire’s story unfolded I started to warm to her a bit more, but I would still rather have spent more time with Daisy.

My favourite thing about this novel was having the opportunity to learn about the paintings that were displayed in the National Gallery during the war. Each chapter of the book begins with a QR code that you can scan with your phone (if you have the right sort of phone) and it will take you directly to the painting, or you can look them up online yourself later if you prefer – they are all easy to find on the National Gallery website. Some were very famous paintings that I was already familiar with, such as The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck and The Hay Wain by John Constable, but there were others I knew nothing about. It was a fascinating experience to view each of these paintings first through Daisy’s eyes and Claire’s, then to be able to look at them myself and see things in them that I might not have thought of otherwise.

Thanks to the author for sending me a review copy of this book.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

March 2, 201316 Comments

When I started reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry it occurred to me how few contemporary novels I read these days. Most of the books I’ve read so far this year have been historical fiction, classics or ‘older’ books, so it was actually a refreshing change to read something written and set in the 21st century for once!

As the title suggests, this is the story of a man who embarks on an unlikely journey from one end of England to the other. His name is Harold Fry and his pilgrimage begins when he receives a letter from an old friend, Queenie Hennessey, who is writing to say goodbye because she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Harold writes a letter in reply but on his way to post it he becomes aware of the complete inadequacy of his words. And so Harold just keeps on walking…all the way to the hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, over five hundred miles away from his home in Devon.

Because it was such a spur of the moment decision, Harold is badly prepared for the walk. He’s wearing the wrong clothes and shoes, he doesn’t have a map and he has left his phone at home. With blistered feet and only a vague idea of the route he needs to take, Harold’s progress is slow but still he continues to put one foot in front of the other, convinced that his pilgrimage will help keep Queenie alive.

As Harold walks, he reflects on the things that have happened in his life, the choices – both good and bad – that he has made, and his relationships with his friends and family. In particular he thinks about what has gone wrong in his marriage to his wife, Maureen, and why he has always found it so difficult to connect with their son, David.

The plot may seem simple but there’s so much emotion and poignancy packed into every page. There’s a sense of mystery too, with lots of questions to be answered. We don’t know at first what exactly happened between Harold and Queenie. What did she do to help him all those years ago? Did they have a romantic relationship or were they just friends? We also don’t know what the problem is with David and why Harold has hardly spoken to him for years. And what was it that caused the rift in Harold and Maureen’s marriage? There are clues to all of these mysteries scattered throughout the story and we learn a little bit more in each chapter, with the truth slowly unfolding as Harold progresses on his journey.

As well as learning about Harold we also spend some time with Maureen, left at home on her own, and it was good to have some of the story told from a different perspective. It was interesting to see how Maureen reacted to her husband’s decision to walk to Berwick and how she tried to come to terms with it, torn between worry, frustration and an understanding that this was something Harold felt he had to do.

During his journey, Harold meets and talks to a variety of people from all walks of life – including a girl who makes him a burger, a Slovakian woman who gives him a room for the night, an American oncologist who explains cancer to him – and most of these are very supportive when they hear about Harold’s mission. Not all of them really understand what he is trying to do, but there’s always the feeling that their lives have been altered in some way by their encounter with Harold. Later his walk starts to attract publicity and Harold finds that he has become a celebrity. He is joined en route by a number of other people, some who have good intentions but others who are walking for the wrong reasons. When the other walkers began to join Harold it felt as if the original purpose of the pilgrimage had been lost, along with the simply beauty of Harold’s walk, and around this point in the book I started to lose interest. But I kept reading because I cared about Harold and Maureen and wanted to know how things would resolve for each of them. And I was rewarded with some wonderful chapters at the end of the book, filled with revelations about Harold, Maureen, Queenie and David.

I didn’t love this book as much as so many other people seem to have done, but I did still enjoy getting to know Harold Fry!

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley