This is my review of Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage Classics) by William Faulkner.

The self-made Thomas Sutpen achieves his ambition of carving out a plantation for himself in the Mississippi wilderness and acquiring a wife and heir, only to lose it all, partly owing to the calamity of the American Civil War of the 1860s, but also through past events coming back to haunt him. His life is a metaphor for the inward-looking, class divided, prejudiced, proud, stubborn, slave-owning South driven to its knees by defeat in the Civil War, the aftermath still evident when a young neighbour Quentin Compson tries to piece the story together, abetted by his friend Shreve, a Canadian "outsider" who is both fascinated by the South and able to assess it with an objective eye.

Faulkner's stream of consciousness style which must have been groundbreaking in the 1930s carries the reader into the characters' minds, using vivid visual impressions and memories to trigger a chain of fleeting thoughts. I like the way he tells the same story from different at times contradictory viewpoints, often repeating details with a hypnotic persistence, only to advance the tale without warning as another important fact is almost casually thrown in. It is also intriguing to grasp that key characters like Rosa Coldfield may only ever hold some of the pieces of the jigsaw – Faulkner is fascinated with the way people's perceptions vary, memory is distorted and complex motives may remain ambiguous, with actors themselves remaining unsure what they are going to do and why.

Despite some poetic passages of extraordinary brilliance and beauty, some sharp dialogue in the compelling southern idiom and a potentially powerful plot, I feel the work is flawed by a tendency to let experiment tip over into self-indulgent ranting and a descent into melodrama. The unrelenting focus on human degradation, the doom and gloom of the work prove unbearable at times, "the turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs". Also, the reliance on characters recounting past events tends to defuse the drama of what should be striking events, although I admit that some moments of high tension remain, even when I "knew" what was going to happen.

I can accept the perhaps at times unintentional racism of the piece as being a feature of the period. Faulkner's misogynic tone is hard to excuse.

This book needs to read twice, even several times to be fully appreciated. I wanted to read it the first time without benefit of notes, to get the raw impact, although it probably helps to consult a "study guide" for a second opinion on some of the obscurer passages. I like best the descriptions of the South stripped bare of overblown emotion, "he looked up the slope…where the wet yellow sedge died upward into the rain like melting gold and saw the grove, the clump of cedars on the crest of the hill dissolving into the rain as if the trees had been drawn in ink on a wet blotter." Yet even here is evidence of his verbosity.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Our Man in Havana (Vintage Classics) by Graham Greene.

To read this is to be reminded of the spate of "true classics" written in the mid-C20 when novelists still retained the fluency and eloquence stemming from a classical education which they were free for the first time to apply to the expression of real emotions, and the questioning of conventional values, morality and religion. There was so much to write about this that they felt no need for self-conscious experiments with structure or style.

Written with great prescience only a few months before the Cuban Revolution swept Castro to power in 1959, this black comedy introduces us to the anti-hero Wormold who at first seems pathetic, unable to demonstrate effectively the vacuum cleaners he is attempting to earn a living from selling, allowing himself to be twisted round the finger of his lovely but manipulative daughter Millie. Then we begin to see his unexpected resourcefulness when, bullied into acting as a secret agent for Britain, "our man in Havana", he begins to dream up a false trail of imaginary agents, all requiring payment of course, and even submits drawings of threatening installations, bearing an uncanny resemblance to hoover parts. He astonishes himself with the fertility of his imagination, "how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters".

Initially, all this subterfuge is simply to indulge Millie's whim for a horse, with the string of extra expenses this entails, yet he gains a simple joy from supplying her wants: he admires in her the spirit which he lacks, and treasures the few remaining years in which he will be able to share her life.

Of course, his colourful reports to London will have unforeseen, perhaps grim or violent ramifications. Yet, ultimately Wormold may be protected by the fear of those in authority of losing face.

Beneath the vivid evocation of a crumbling but picturesque Havana, there are continual hints of a darker and growing violence, such as occasional harassment by the police who back off at the reference to a certain Captain Segura, reputed to carry with him a cigarette case made from the skin of one of his torture victims.

In all the humour and entertaining plot twists there are the usual "grahamgreeneish" insights into morality, faith, the meaning of life, the nature of love and honour. He likens Wormold's growing sense of guilt to a small mouse, to which he may soon become so accustomed that he will let it feed out of his hand. In the end "Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?" Greene clearly thought so, although perhaps confined this belief to his novels rather than practise it in his own life.

P.S. Does anyone know the full lyrics and tune for the song quoted, which begins "Sane men surround /You, old family friendss/They say the earth is round-/My madness offends./An orange has pips, they say,/An apple has rind./I say that night is day/And I've no axe to grind."?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng.

A Chinese Malayan by birth, Judge Teoh Yun Ling retires to the house at Yugiri in the Cameron Highlands and the "Garden of Evening Mists" developed by the enigmatic Nakamura Aritomo, sometime gardener to the Emperor of Japan. Since she has suffered brutal treatment and lost her sister in a Japanese camp during World War 2, one is curious to learn how she managed to form a bond with Aritomo before his death. Shifting back and forth in time, the story is an account of her recollections, revealing some kind of truth layer by layer, as she follows a friend's advice and attempts to capture her memories before the aphasia with which she has been diagnosed destroys her mind, making her a stranger even to herself.

At first, I was put off by the cumbersome opening chapter, the dwelling on small details, the slow pace and the writer's preoccupation with metaphors which, although sometimes striking, too often seem clunky and distracting, even unintentionally comical – "the waterwheel dialled ceaselessly" and so on.

Then I became hooked by Tan Twan Eng's exquisite poetical descriptions of the garden, his enlightening explanations of the principles of Japanese garden design related to a Buddhist/Taoist philosophy of the meaning of life, linked in turn to woodcuts and the art of tattooing, and by his evocation of life in 1950s Malaya with the interaction of different cultural groups, including an introduction to a neglected aspect of colonial history in the rise of communist terrorism in Malaya in the 1950s. The main characters are well-developed, complex and flawed so that you want to know why they behave as they do, what secrets they may be hiding, how a known fate came to befall them.

I began to think that perhaps this should have won "The Man Booker", or that it may be "above prizes" but in the later chapters, where Yun Ling recalls her experiences in the prison camp or recounts Professor Tatsuji's period as a kamikaze pilot, the book loses some of its originality as the pace quickens and the prose becomes more commonplace – a pale imitation of say, "Empire of the Sun".

The final revelations prove a little contrived yet would have satisfied me if the final twist had not seemed a little too implausible – there is an over-reliance on coincidence in this book. Tan Twan Eng seems to have introduced a denouement only to leave it half-knotted, although I suppose this is a point for discussion in book groups.

After a rocky start, I found this novel absorbing, often a page turner, moving blend of unflinching and sentimental, thought-provoking and very informative as regards Malayan culture understood from the inside. It was useful but disruptive to look up various terms, often employed several times before they are explained in the text, if at all, so brief footnotes would have been helpful. I am also left wondering if some of the (to me) overwritten prose may be due to Tan Twan Eng's fluency in a language other than English, in which this style is highly regarded. His style may also reflect a continued focus in Malaysian study of English literature on the work of poets like Shelley (such as "The Cloud" quoted in the novel).

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars