Category: Fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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I’m not sure how to begin describing Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad to you, but I’ll do my best! I’ll start by saying that it’s an original and imaginative novel which revolves around a large number of different characters, most of whom are involved in the music industry in some way (be it as musicians, producers, record label owners, publicists, or music lovers). The main theme of the book is time and Egan uses her characters to explore what happens to us as we age and how life doesn’t always turn out the way we hoped it would.

I don’t know exactly how many characters there were in this book, but it felt like hundreds! Two of the most important are Bennie Salazar, a record executive, and his assistant, Sasha. Most of the other characters are somehow connected to either Sasha or Bennie, whether directly or indirectly. We meet new people in almost every chapter and I found I needed to pay attention to every new name as even someone who seemed completely insignificant could reappear later in the book.

Each chapter is written in a distinct style and has its own unique feel. One chapter takes the form of a celebrity interview; another is presented as a PowerPoint slideshow. Some chapters have a first person narrator; others are told in the second or third person; we move from past tense to present tense, from one country to another and backwards and forwards in time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an author incorporate so many different styles and ideas into one novel – which could be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your personal preferences. If you like books that are adventurous, innovative and different, then you’re probably going to love A Visit from the Goon Squad. If not, you might find it all a little bit confusing and overwhelming like I did.

Many of the chapters seemed more like self-contained short stories than part of a novel and although each one is linked to the others in some way, I thought the book felt too disjointed. For me this made the experience of reading it quite uneven – there were some parts that I really enjoyed and some that just didn’t interest me at all. The air of experimentation, along with the PowerPoint presentation and the futuristic world portrayed in the final section, made the whole book feel very ‘modern’ and this is maybe another reason why it didn’t really work for me. I suppose I just prefer novels which have a more conventional structure, less jumping around in time and place, and a stronger plot.

A Visit from the Goon Squad sounded fascinating and I can see why a lot of people would love it – it’s a very unusual book which sparkles with originality and creativity – but it turned out not to be my type of book at all.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

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I picked up Great House after it was named on the Orange Prize longlist in April and probably wouldn’t have thought about reading it otherwise. Based on what I had heard about the book before I started reading it I suspected I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. I liked the central concept of a number of different people being linked by an item of furniture (a desk) and was curious to see how this would work. Having read the book, though, it would be inaccurate to describe it as ‘a book about a desk’ – in fact, in several of the book’s eight sections the desk is barely mentioned at all.

The novel is made up of four separate stories, with two chapters devoted to each one. The first story is narrated by Nadia, an author living in New York, who receives a writing desk from a Chilean poet, Daniel Varsky. At the end of the first chapter we leave Nadia behind for a while and move to Israel, where we meet Aaron and learn about the difficult relationship he has with his son, Dov. Next the action switches to England and our third narrator, Arthur, who tells us about his wife, Lotte. Lotte, another writer, has a secret which is only revealed as she grows older and begins to suffer from Alzheimer’s. The fourth storyline involves Izzy and her relationship with Yoav and Leah Weisz, the son and daughter of a collector of antique furniture.

There are some themes that recur throughout most or all of these four narratives: authors, relationships between parents and children, loss and memories. All four storylines interested me but the one that I found the most engaging was Aaron’s. I thought his voice was the strongest of all the narrators; the others were not as easy to distinguish between.

Great House is a novel that requires a lot of patience and concentration. The ways in which the four stories are linked are not immediately obvious and you need to read the entire book to be able to fit the various pieces of the puzzle together. Although I didn’t enjoy it enough to want to read it again, it’s a book that would almost certainly benefit from a re-read. Even reading slowly and making a few notes as I went along there were still things that didn’t quite make sense to me, but I think if I started the book again with my knowledge of the later sections I should be able to pick up on little details in the earlier chapters that I’d missed the first time.

The quality of the writing is excellent; there were sentences that were so beautifully constructed that I had to go back and read them twice. It’s a clever book and definitely not an easy read, but one that leaves the reader with a lot to think about, and although the book wasn’t really to my taste it’s undeniably a very impressive novel.

Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson

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Every morning Christine Lucas wakes up to find a strange man lying beside her in bed. Every morning she listens while he tells her that his name is Ben and he’s her husband. Every morning she discovers that she is suffering from amnesia and that she has no memory at all of most of her adult life.

Christine’s doctor advises her to keep a journal. If she records everything she learns each day, he says, perhaps it will help to bring her memories back and allow her to make sense of what has happened. Then one day Christine picks up her journal and sees that she has written the words DON’T TRUST BEN. But why shouldn’t she trust him? What is going on?

SJ Watson’s psychological thriller, Before I Go to Sleep, is one of the most gripping books I’ve read this year. My only regret is that I didn’t save it to read at the weekend when I would have fewer interruptions. Reading during the week I had to tear myself away from it to go to work or to bed. What makes the book so suspenseful is the uncertainty about what exactly is happening. With the entire story told from Christine’s perspective we don’t know any more than she does. It’s possible that Ben could be genuine – it’s also possible that everything he says is a lie. And what about Dr Nash? Could he also be lying to her? Christine doesn’t know and neither do we.

It’s hard to imagine anything worse than waking up each day, not knowing where you are (or even who you are), not able to recognise the man who says he’s your husband, having to learn everything about your life all over again. By losing her memory Christine has lost her whole identity. As she says to herself at one point in the novel, “What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?” She was in such a horribly vulnerable situation and I felt afraid for her. The atmosphere throughout the book is very unsettling and although I had a few guesses, the ending still managed to shock me.

Without spoiling the story for you there’s nothing more to say other than to echo all the other glowing reviews out there and to tell you that in my opinion all the hype surrounding this book is justified!

I received a copy of this book from Transworld for review

Daphne by Justine Picardie

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Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne features one of my favourite authors, Daphne du Maurier, as the main character. We first meet Daphne in 1957, an eventful time in her life. Having discovered that her husband has been having an affair, she throws herself into her current project: a biography of Branwell Brontë. Daphne is convinced that Branwell has been unfairly treated by literary historians. She believes that he may have been capable of writing a novel to rival Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre and that he may even have been the author of some of the works attributed to his more famous sisters. As part of the research for her new biography Daphne begins corresponding with Alex Symington, a Brontë scholar who shares her views on Branwell. But Symington has some secrets in his past. Can he be trusted?

Another thread of the novel takes place in the present day and is narrated by a student who is busy writing her PhD thesis on Daphne and the Brontes. The story of the shy, naïve student and her difficult relationship with her older husband, Paul, is clearly supposed to mirror the story of Maxim de Winter and his young wife in du Maurier’s Rebecca. Paul even has a glamorous ex-wife, reminiscent of Rebecca herself.

Whenever I read a novel with multiple time frames I usually find that I’m more interested in the historical parts than in the modern day sections, but with Daphne I thought all three strands of the story were equally interesting. The chapters which deal with the characters of Daphne and Symington seemed to be well-researched and were very informative. We learn a lot about Daphne’s relationship with her father, the actor Gerald du Maurier. We are also shown how Daphne was feeling the pressures of being a famous author, how she felt haunted by the ghost of Rebecca and could only truly relax when she was at Menabilly, her Cornwall home. And Picardie explores the link between Daphne and the Llewelyn Davies brothers, particularly Peter, who was the inspiration for J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

I should warn you that if you haven’t read any of Daphne du Maurier’s novels yet you may come across some spoilers, particularly for Rebecca, so you might want to read that one first. I would highly recommend reading Rebecca anyway – it’s a fantastic novel and one that I’ve read and loved several times. I thought Daphne lacked the magic of du Maurier’s own novels and I don’t feel the desire to read it again and again as I have with Rebecca, but it was still an enjoyable book. If you’re interested in du Maurier, the Brontes or literary mysteries with a gothic feel, I’d suggest giving Daphne a try.

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

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Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist working in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. For ten years the country has been torn apart by civil war and a large percentage of the population have been left suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Adrian’s job is to help people cope in the aftermath of the war. One man, who set fire to people’s houses during the war is now haunted by the smell of burning meat. Another woman is showing symptoms of fugue – a rare condition which occasionally causes her to disappear from her everyday life and turn up in another place miles away from her home. But Elias Cole is the patient Adrian spends the longest with and who intrigues him more than any of the others.

Elias Cole is an elderly retired professor who is dying of lung disease and he relates to Adrian his memories of the woman he once loved: her name was Saffia and she was married to a fellow academic, Julius Kamara. As Adrian learns more about Elias and his relationships with both Saffia and Julius during the period of political unrest in the late 1960s, it becomes clear that Elias’s story may have an effect on Adrian’s own life. We also meet Kai Mansaray, a young surgeon at the hospital where Adrian works, who has been left traumatised by the war and is suffering from insomnia and recurrent nightmares. He and Adrian become friends but their friendship comes with its own set of obstacles that need to be overcome.

The Memory of Love is the first book I’ve read set in Sierra Leone. One of the great things about fiction is that it gives us the opportunity to learn about countries that we may otherwise have gone through our whole lives knowing very little about. The descriptions of life in Sierra Leone are beautifully written: the sights and sounds, the trees and flowers, the colours of the sky. I didn’t know anything about the history and politics behind the civil war but it wasn’t really necessary to have any prior knowledge – and even after finishing the book I didn’t feel I’d really learned much about the war itself. But what the book does do, and does very well, is show the effects the war had on the personal lives of the population, particularly the fear and uncertainty people felt, not knowing who they could and couldn’t trust.

I wish I could say I had loved this book, but I didn’t. It was extremely well written but after about 100 pages I was bored. I put the book aside for a few days and then picked it up again. This time I managed to finish it, but it still seemed to take forever to read. And towards the end, when the various threads of the story began to come together it all seemed a bit too convenient – too predictable, too many coincidences. But the fact that I didn’t enjoy this book probably says more about me as a reader than it does about The Memory of Love as a novel. It was too detailed and descriptive for me and I found it very, very slow. I do seem to be in the minority though, so maybe you’ll have better luck with it than I did!

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

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I always feel a bit apprehensive when reading a book like Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi which has been read by so many people and seems to divide opinion so much. Would I love it or would I hate it? I was actually expecting to hate it, since I did try to read it a few years ago and gave up after a couple of chapters. After deciding to give the book a second chance and making it to the end this time, I was surprised to find that I had the exact opposite reaction – I loved it and was completely captivated by it from start to finish. Now I’m annoyed with myself for waiting so long before giving it another try!

Pi Patel’s father runs the Pondicherry Zoo, so Pi has grown up surrounded by animals. However, this still doesn’t prepare him for what happens when he and his family decide to emigrate to Canada, taking several of their animals with them to be traded to other zoos. When they are shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Pi finds himself trapped in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan – and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.

I remember that when I first tried to read Life of Pi I struggled to get through the opening chapters, but this time I found them much more interesting. Not much actually happens in this early section of the book, but the scene is set for the rest of the story. We learn a lot about animals and how they are treated in zoos. We also see how Pi explores various religions and the benefits of each, before deciding to be a Christian, Muslim and Hindu all at the same time. But it wasn’t until the shipwreck scene and Pi’s subsequent discovery of the tiger sharing his lifeboat that I really became absorbed in the story. The account of Pi’s battle for survival and his relationship with Richard Parker makes for fascinating and compelling reading. It’s hard to believe that a story which takes place mainly within the confined space of a small lifeboat can be so enthralling!

Which brings me to the final section of the book. At first I hated the way the book ended and I did feel cheated – I expect a lot of readers have felt the same way, which will be one reason for the love/hate divide – but then I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it and how clever it was. I have rarely come across a book with such a thought-provoking and ambiguous ending. I’m so glad I decided to give Life of Pi a second chance, as after my first attempt at reading it I had thought it just wasn’t for me.

Have you ever been surprised by a book after giving it another chance?

Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier

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I love Daphne du Maurier; whenever I pick up one of her books I know I’m guaranteed a good read. Although this one was not as good as some and I can certainly understand why it’s one of her less popular books, it still kept me gripped for all 300+ pages. I’m pleased I can say that because, having read other opinions on this book, I was concerned that it might be the first du Maurier novel that I wouldn’t like.

Published in 1972 her final novel, Rule Britannia, imagines that the UK has broken away from Europe to form an alliance with the US. This new nation will be known as USUK. The first twenty-year-old Emma knows about this is when she wakes up one morning to find that the tranquil corner of Cornwall where she lives is now under American occupation – there’s an American warship in the harbour, American marines stationed in the area and roadblocks on the routes leading in and out of the town. Already the Queen is visiting the White House and the President is preparing to come to Buckingham Palace. Despite reassurances from the government that the formation of USUK is essential for Britain’s economic and military stability, Emma’s family, friends and neighbours begin to grow increasingly concerned about the exact nature of the alliance and the effect it will have on their previously peaceful lives.

It can’t happen here, thought Emma, it can’t happen here, that’s what people in England have always said, even in wartime when they were bombed, because they were all together on their own ground. Not any more.

Although the story unfolds from Emma’s perspective, the real heroine of the story is her seventy-nine-year-old grandmother, Mad (short for Madam – unless I missed it, we aren’t told her real name), who is a retired actress. Mad and Emma live together with Mad’s six adopted boys whose ages range from three to nineteen, all of whom have suffered some form of tragedy in their early lives. Mad, even in her old age, is a strong-minded, independent woman who is determined to defend her home and family no matter what, and she plays an important part in Cornwall’s resistance to the occupying forces. But although Mad and her family believe they have been invaded, I should point out that we’re told the majority of British people are very happy with the alliance and that it’s only a small percentage of the population who are rebelling against it.

As with most Daphne du Maurier novels, this one does have some suspenseful and unsettling moments. I know from my past experience of her work that nothing is ever quite as it seems and I was wondering what surprises and twists she might have in store for the reader – but unfortunately I found the way the book ended slightly disappointing because I felt there was a lot more she could have done with the story. Another thing I didn’t like was the fact that one of Mad’s adopted sons, three-year-old Ben who happens to be black, appeared to have been included simply as an excuse to make racist jokes. The book was a product of the 1970s I suppose, but these comments are offensive rather than funny. These negative points, along with the overall strangeness of the book, stopped me from enjoying it as much as I’ve enjoyed her other books. It doesn’t compare to her best work and if you’re new to Daphne du Maurier I would suggest starting somewhere else.