This is my review of The Warden (Penguin Classics) by Anthony Trollope.

The first story in the “Chronicles of Barchester” is a slim novel with such an apparently slight plot that it may seem all too easy to slip into the category of “classics I never got round to reading”, but that would be a mistake.

The Rev Septimus Harding enjoys a pleasant life in his role as warden at Hiram’s Hospital, with the welfare of twelve aged men in his care. His peace is shattered when John Bold, a local reformer bent on “stopping injustice” begins to question the financial arrangements that give the warden too high a salary and the old men too small a pension. Is Bold’s action foolhardy or noble, since he is jeopardising his prospects of marrying Harding’s daughter Eleanor?

In a climate of attacks on the religious establishment, the issue escalates. The machinations of Harding’s outraged control freak son-in-law, Dr Grantly are of little avail outside the cosy world of Barchester, and the matter even gets reported in “The Jupiter”, the highly influential organ of the national press. A decent and kindly man, Harding is mortified to find himself personally vilified. A further problem is his growing sense that he is not really entitled to his salary. Normally keen to avoid arguments and supine in the face of Grantly’s domination, is this to be the one occasion when Harding takes a stand and, if so, what form will it take?

In all this, the characters are so real, both in their conversations and the shifting inner thoughts that Trollope describes so acutely that, if one could meet them now, direct communication would be possible – as might not be the case for some of Dickens’ caricatures or Jane Austen’s mannered heroines (both writers whom I appreciate and respect in other ways).

The book is full of sly humour, as Trollope shows Abel Handy, the old men’s self-appointed spokesman, using all the manipulative arts of a modern union leader to induce his colleagues to “make their marks” (since they can’t write) on a petition. Likewise, we see how Mrs Grantly plays the accepted game of the dutiful wife in public, but controls her husband behind the scenes as he does others in public. Then there is the description of Harding, playing the “air violoncello” in moments of deep concentration or stress, to the bemusement of people who do not know him well. We can also identify with Trollope’s tongue-in-cheek musing on the power of the Jupiter, a kind of Victorian forerunner of Murdoch’s power to make and break people, at least until recently.

The only parts to which I cannot relate are when Trollope gives way to the fashion of his times to launch into a flowery essay on, say, the behaviour of people at social gatherings. When the language becomes arch and peppered with classic allusions I do not know, I lose patience. These passages are mercifully quite few, except towards the end when the plot moves to London.

What I like most is the way that, in his focus on the small, quiet lives of very ordinary people, Trollope has the gift of summoning a sense of grief and loss as moving as in any great tragedy, but also of maintaining a sense of proportion and showing people’s capacity to adjust and survive, as is part of the human condition.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock.

Set on Guernsey, this debut novel interweaves the lives of two characters: bright but unpopular and emotionally disturbed teenager Cathy, revealed through the black comedy of her diary , and her deceased Uncle Charlie, whose suffering under the German occupation is recorded in interviews with his brother Emile, also Cathy's father. Before his recent death, Emile was a local historian, obsessed with exposing the truth, but he may have been unable to cope with facts that proved unexpected, or impossible to prove beyond doubt.

In the first few pages Cathy confesses to the murder of her former best friend, but we know she is an unreliable witness. Other reviewers have been repelled by her coldness, but I see it as a kind of defence against a lack of parental affection and bewilderment over the loss of a father whom she clearly admires, but who died before she could "get to know him".

I found the genre hard to place – psychological drama, perhaps? Some scenes are very amusing. At times, it reads like a teenage cartoon strip, yet there is always an underlying sense of the grim legacy of the Nazi occupation. Guernsey is presented in a negative light – somewhat leavened by humour – as claustrophobically small, overrun by tax-dodging foreigners, with a local population concealing their guilty secrets over collaboration with the Germans. The web of lies makes it hard to know the truth, and triggers a chain of misunderstandings and long-term wrongs.

The story held my attention, despite the distracting footnotes, intended to show Cathy's precocious attempts to write like an academic historian, but many of the comments could easily have been included in the main body of the two parallel story lines.

Although I expected to be disappointed by the denouement, it is potentially better than I had feared. I like the ideas of an ambiguous ending, but some of the final revelations seem unnecessarily rushed and I was left too unclear as to exactly what role Cathy's mother has played. I also dislike the note of moral blackmail on which the book ends – it is neat, but overly cynical. I want the book to be more than just a clever construction.

Perhaps the portrayal of the malevolent Nic could have been more nuanced, although she is of course seen from Cathy's distorted viewpoint. Also, you may feel that sometimes the author steps in and inserts a little too much mature self-knowledge into Cathy's adolescent diatribes.

Overall, the novel is like a Chinese meal, giving short-term gratification but leaving you a little unsatisfied and wanting something more substantial.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed.

This novel exposes the plight of muslims living in the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir, doomed to suffer whether or not they are militant. It has the ingredients for a powerful and moving tale, narrated by the anonymous son of a village headman in the wild, beautiful mountains close to the disputed border. One by one, members of his close-knit group of teenage friends disappear, leaving him haunted with questions. Why did they not include him in their plans to leave? Have they really crossed the border to join Pakistani training camps? How many have been killed in attempts to infiltrate back as terrorists? When, sickened by military reprisals, all the villagers have decamped apart from his stubborn father and long-suffering mother, the narrator is forced to become a "collaborator", searching the mutilated corpses of infiltrators to collect ID cards and weapons. Is his main motivation just to earn money for his family, or does he seek to find the bodies of his friends?

Although I wanted to be gripped and impressed, I found this book very hard to read. The plot is too slight to sustain a full-length novel, without very skilful writing. In the lengthy first part, the author rambles through the chapters like a traveller without a compass. Despite the vivid descriptions of the striking landscape and the villagers' simple lives, when it comes to the relations between characters, the style becomes stilted and wooden. I found it hard to distinguish individual characters or to care about them. The narrator's endless speculation over his friends' fates becomes repetitious and tedious.

The narrator's "voice" is inconsistent: sometimes, he is a confused teenager, at other times he sounds more like the author, describing the village as "settling down to stasis". The writer's penchant for flowery writing works quite well for passages on spiritual matters, the burning of corpses to save them from desecration, and so on. However, when describing incidents, the style often becomes quite clumsy, with prose inadequate to the task and a frequent jarring misuse of words – I had to resist the urge to seize a red pen and correct it.

To give just one example of how the clotted prose undermines the dramatic effect:

"…Ramazan Choudhury's elder son – the same man who had worked on the mosque and whose two children I had seen at Noor's shop buying éclairs and whose full name, Ishaq Jan Choudhary, I only got to know now when we were paired together in the hunt for X's body – and I were scouring the area around the dirt track that goes away from the village and tails off into the footpath to the valley, when we saw X's ..body lying near a narrow stream running down from the mountain."

What were the editors fulsomely cited at the end, not to mention the author himself who is a BBC editor, thinking of?

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Half Blood Blues: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011 by Esi Edugyan.

Since I don’t care for jazz and have little in common with hard-drinking Black American male musicians, why was I so quickly hooked on “Half Blood Blues”? At first, it was the dry, wisecracking wit, and the rhythm of the Black American speech patterns which didn’t grate as I would have expected – “he stood..leaning like a brisk wind done come up” or “Man, Sid, ain’t you ever going to clean up? You live in plain disrepair” and so on.

Then, I was struck by the spate of vivid, original similes. “He got oddly thin lips, and with the drink still glistening on them they looked like oysters”.

I realised too that there is scope for a compelling drama in a situation where a group of jazz musicians, some black, realise that the world of swing in 1930s Berlin has suddenly turned dark as the Nazis brand it “degenerate art” and begin to beat up black artists.

The author knows how to create tension. From the opening sentence, “Chip told us not to go out”, the first chapter builds up a sense of impending calamity, as the narrator Sid reluctantly accompanies Hiero, a youthful prodigy on the trumpet, in his unwise quest for a drink of milk in occupied Paris, where his high visibility as a Black German combined with a lack of the right papers place him at risk of deportation to a death camp.

Esi Edugyan takes risks in introducing the real-life Louis Armstrong to the plot, but carries it off convincingly. She also succeeds in helping me to understand the appeal of jazz music. She finds apt words to describe in detail how Hiero’s playing sounds to Sid.

“Hiero thrown out note after shimmering note, like sunshine sliding over the surface of a lake, and Armstrong was the water, all depth and thought, not one wasted note. Hiero, he just reaching out, seeking the shore; Armstrong stood there calling across to him. Their horns sounded so naked, so blunt, you felt almost guilty listening to it, like you eavesdropping.”

This is not just a tale of a jazz group under pressure, surviving violent fist fights with the brutal “boots” (Nazi soldiers) but also a subtle psychological study of the interplay between the members of a group, providing a keen insight into personal and professional jealousy. Almost until the end, we are unsure whether Sid betrayed Hiero long ago, exactly how, and if he is a reliable narrator.

Some of the minor scenes drag a little and I found a few points implausible e.g. would it really take so many weeks to make a single record, without actually completing it, would/could the seductive singer Delilah make a headscarf out of a stiff, dusty theatre curtain? Despite this, overall “Half Blood Blues” is an original, well-plotted and beautifully written work. I shall certainly look out for Edugyan’s future novels.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

 

This is my review of The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht.

It is easy to see why this book won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. It has an unusual theme and approach, weaving together a grandfather's tall stories based on Balkan-style folktales and the experience of Natalia, a young doctor trying to cope with the aftermath of the grim war which caused the recent fracture of the former Yugoslavia, and with the death of her much-loved grandfather. Still only in her mid-twenties, the author is a gifted storyteller with an impressive command of English learned as a second language. I am not sure whether she sometimes misuses words by mistake, or is just trying to be original and poetical, but you cannot deny Tea Obreht's striking and unusual use of language.

Although I am no lover of magic realism, I was most impressed by the storytelling, in particular the tale of the "deathless man" who cannot be killed, even if shot through the head or drowned – a sceptical scientist, Natalia's grandfather is tantalised by the mounting evidence for this which flies in the face of reason. Obreht clearly loves animals, of which there are some wonderful descriptions – the tiger leaving footprints in the snow, round as dinner plates, or the elephant recaptured after its escape from the war-damaged zoo.

At first I was irritated by the lack of clarity as to exactly which country we are in – Montenegro, Croatia. Bosnia ? – which border we are close to, and so on. Then I realised that this is not the point. Obreht simply wants to create a sense of the superstition and prejudice, the deep-seated and irrational hatred between Christians and Moslems, the brutality and unthinking futility of war, and the residue of damage for the survivors. Then there is of course the simple expression of grief over the death of a close relative, regardless of whether there is peace or war.

I found the descriptions of Natalia's work the least satisfying, too many minor scenes of little interest, and in need of editing. Some of the later tales told to Natalia by her grandfather become rather tedious and rambling, getting bogged down in excessive back story about the early lives of Luka the sadistic butcher, Darisa the bear hunter and the village apothecary.

From the outset, Obreht skilfully manages to arouse the reader's interest by covering events through a series of separate scenes which move back and forth in time. Natalia's attempt to find out more about her grandfather's death and to obtain his belongings has a touch of the detective novel. Towards the end, the plot loses structure and pace. Again perhaps deliberately, it becomes even more fragmented and further parts company with reality, proving a little too fey and nebulous for my taste, although there is a persistent rather odd attempt to provide rational explanations for implausible events.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars