Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (HarperCollins 2011)

Set in 1857 Jamrach's Menagerie tells the story of Jaffy, a poor but happy child who wanders the streets of the East End of London, through the mire and the open sewers bare footed without the least concern. When one day he encounters a tiger newly escaped from its captivity he brazenly walks up to pet its nose only to end up in the tiger's mouth. His rescue came in the form of the eponymous Jamrach, an exotic animal dealer who leaps atop the creature and forces its jaws apart. Jamrach's menagerie is a place of wonder filled with Tasmanian devils, all kinds of birds and primates and Jaffy takes a job there where he encounters Jamrach's assistant Tim Linver and Dan Rymer, the salty sea dog/animal tracker responsible for collecting some of Jamrach's more exotic products.

When one day a Mr Fledge comes in and asks that he be supplied a dragon (most likely a Komodo Dragon) Jaffy, Tim and Dan join the crew of one of Mr Fledge's whale boats and set out towards the South Seas in pursuit of their quarry. What follows is a somewhat harrowing tale of torture, starvation and whole lot of pain as things go from terrible to worse in a story partly inspired by the true tale of the Essex (a story which also partly inspired another infamous book of whaling ships, Moby Dick).

It is an intentionally difficult book to read as the author tries to put you into the mindset of the protagonists as they go through some pretty extreme torment and the result is that some chapters go by a great deal slower than the rest (reading a chapter about the doldrums is liable to send one into them oneself). It is a very evocative book and as Jaffy, Tim and Dan suffer, I could feel their pain.

The book is far from perfect. Some of the characters aren't developed well enough  such as Skip whose madness is just accepted but never questioned or explained, or Tim who becomes incredibly two-dimensioned once they set foot aboard the whaling ship. Also the ending is a little too rose-coloured as things at last come together in an ending Disney would be proud of. However, these are comparatively minor complaints and I wouldn't be surprised to see this making the Booker Prize shortlist.

4/5

Far to Go by Alison Pick

Far to Go by Alison Pick (House of Anansi Press 2010)

The Toronto based Alison Pick goes over somewhat familiar ground in her tale of a family of well-to-do Sudetenland jews and the events of their lives leading up to and following its annexation by Germany in 1948. At the heart of the story are the Bauers, Pavel who is a Jewish factory owner, his glamorous wife Annelies, their son Pepik and their maid Martha who narrates. Ultimately it is the story of the Kindertransport, for as the Bauers see that their options for escaping ever fiercer grip of Nazi rule diminish their only hope is to see Pepik out of the country safely.

The other aspect of the story is that of another Annelies, a holocaust researcher who is trying to track down Pavel in modern day Canada so that between them they can piece together the true story of what happened back in Czechoslovakia during the war.

This book suffers from the comparison to far greater books such as the immeasurably better Austerlitz by WG Sebald for all its haunting melancholic meta-fictional brilliance, or one can even look to last year's booker prize longlist for a more interesting holocaust novel in Simon Mawer's 'the Glass Room'. Alison Pick barely moves her narrative above the pedestrian and does nothing with her story that has not been done many times before.

Stylistically too the book has its flaws and one would never guess the author to be a poet because her symbolism and analogy are drab and obvious. Pick also hit against a pet peeve of mine by the pointless use of well-known foreign words to try and add an international flair, something usually the preserve of mediocre travel books.

Pick has clearly been inspired to tell the story of her own family history so I can understand why she has chosen to write it, but it's predictable conventionality means that it never lifts itself above the mediocre and I am at a loss as to explain how it made it into the Booker long list. I would be very disappointed to see it make the short list.

2/5

C by Tom McCarthy

C by Tom McCarthy (Knopf Canada 2010)

C is for Serge Carrefax who is, I guess, what passes for the hero in this tale of the son of a wealthy family whose patriarch runs a school that teaches deaf children how to speak. Set in the early 1900s the book is split into four sections that deal with his adolescence and his intense relationship with his sister, his teenage years at a spa in Central Europe to treat his unexplained build up of what historically would have been called black bile, his young adulthood as a spotter/navigator in the budding air force of the First World War and finally his life in Egypt as the representative of the murky Empire Wireless Chain scrambling to deal with an country in the throes of a struggle for independence.

If C is for Carrefax then it is also for communication as a strong theme that runs through the novel. As a child Serge is fascinated by CB radio, tracking the beeps and background noises he picks up on the waves. His father is also interested in communications and as he experiments with an ammeter he believes that the world reverberates to the echoes of past conversations and thoughts, what he believes makes up white noise and that if it was possible to isolate the individual strands of thought and expression then one might be able to listen to the words Jesus said on the cross.

Tom McCarthy is an unusual author whose own pretensions to avant-gardism and involvement in the semi-fictional (whatever that might mean) group the International Necronautical Society makes me think he is either an interesting and boundary pushing author or someone whose head has been sucked in by the vortex created in the general area of his backside. This is certainly not a book without flaws as the plotting is patchy and the last quarter is disappointing, ending on more of a whimper than a bang. However there are some interesting scenes such as one early on where Serge and his sister start playing an early version of Monopoly then take to making it a physical game played around their estate and finally one of the imagination directed from their bird's eye view of their grounds up in the attic of the house.

McCarthy has previously written about Tintin and aspects of C hearken back to Herge's creation but given the post-modern treatment. Serge's character whilst at school studying architecture has troubles drawing buildings with any perspective and so creates a portfolio made entirely of top-down plans and that is very reflective of a character who has little depth. As booker prize prospects go I would be tempted to put my money on this one to win (although my previous selection didn't even make it into the shortlist) as the strongest of the picks I've read so far despite the problems I've found with the book but there is the chance that the judges might think it too inaccessible generally to be a suitable pick.

Interesting if not flawed:
4/5

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (Random House 2010)

Parrot is the son of a journeyman printer and apprentice engraver whose master, Mr Watkins, appears to die in a fire set by the owner of a publishing house on the discovery by local officials that the particular skills of Watkins have been used in producing forged currency, a crime punishable by death. On the run he meets a one-armed Frenchman, the enigmatic and mysterious Tilbot, in whose services he travels first to Australia, then to France and finally to America to provide assistance to Olivier.

Olivier is essentially a re-imagining of the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, the son of a noble family who managed to avoid the guillotine during the reign of terror. On finding himself snubbed as the Bourbons return to the throne following the July Revolution, Olivier's father fears for his son's safety and so with Tilbot's help Olivier's mother arranges for him to travel to America ostensibly on behalf of the French government to undertake a survey of the American Penal system but what he writes is a book on the people and institutions of the budding democracy.

If any of this sounds complicated then I can assure you that this is very much a simplification of what is a sometimes irritatingly convoluted book. The narrative goes back and forwards between the two main protagonist  as the old world invades the new and there are some very telling judgements made on the culture, political institutions and the nature and social etiquette of the people of the new democracy and as an Englishman living in Canada it has made think a lot about the differences of living in a nation that still has some notions of aristocratic entitlement as compared with a nation when essentially anyone can reach the heights that come with public office, especially when one has money to grease the wheels.

Peter Carey I think had a great theme for his novel and there is in evidence some first rate research and one can almost see the 18th century America through de Tocqueville's ever widening eyes however he didn't really seem to have thought up a story to match his vision and as the story meanders its way with little or no conclusion at the end one can't help but feel that the plot was made up on the fly, so to speak. There are some great set-pieces but they don't do enough to rescue the book from its faults. I don't think Parrot and Olivier in America deserves to be short-listed for the Booker and it is definitely not strong enough to win.

Great idea but the plot let it down

3/5

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (John C Winston Company 1925)

First published in 1886 in the magazine Young Folks, Kidnapped is essentially historical fiction loosely telling the story of James Annesley, the presumptive heir to titles in both England and Scotland who, tricked by a wicked uncle and kidnapped into being an indentured servant who somehow escapes many years later and fights his way back to lay claim to his lost fortune.

Set in Scotland and to the background of the Jacobite Rebellion (the attempt to put a Stuart back on the throne following the Glorious Revolution, that pit clan against clan in Scotland) Stevenson's story follows David (Davie) Balfour who, on his father's death is sent on a mysterious errand to his wicked uncle Ebeneezer who, with an eye on the titles of his brother arranges Davie's kidnapping aboard the Brig, the vessel of the malevolent Captain Hoseason.

Violence breaks out aboard the ship when Alan Breck Stewart is brought aboard and he teams up with Davie against the treacherous crew of the Brig. Thereon there is a shipwreck, a murder (the Appin murder, an actual historical event in which the real Alan Breck Stewart was supposedly complicit in) run ins with the British Red Coats and a return to seek just claims to his property.

I chose this book because I was going to the beach and if Treasure Island was anything to go by, kidnapped should have been a good adventure story for some semi-mindless reading however I found myself somewhat bored by the novel. For adventure stories there seems to be an ideal ratio in which events are drip fed to you at such a rate that you have just enough to get a sense of what's going on but little enough to keep you reading further (people like Grisham do this very well, it doesn't make for good books necessarily but it does help build a tempo which is how people read thousands of them a year and still devour more). Kidnapped doesn't seem to achieve this because nothing enough really happens. Where there is action it is exciting and the chapters around how Davie and Alan Breck meet and take on the crew of the Brig had me glued to the pages. Without the tempo you are left to dwell on the clumsy sentences and the painful dialogue and the somewhat indecipherable Scots dialect used intermittently.

Partly why I also read Kidnapped was because it was referenced in the biography I had just read of Gladstone in which he is said to have been so absorbed by the novel that he finished it in one day and was none to pleased with any interference to that reading. Gladstone's praise isn't without prestigious company as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and even Margaret Atwood list the book amongst their favourites which makes me feel as if I've missed something.

The story is interesting, the backdrop even more so I just wish a bit more action happened. Sadly I think you need to look to more renown Stevenson books if you want a good beach holiday book.

2/5

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago 2009).

Set in 1948, Dr Faraday is the son of working class stock who one evening is called out to the Hundreds Hall, the seat of the Ayres family, the estate where his mother worked when he was young as a nursemaid. This is just the beginning of his entanglement with the house and its family; Mrs Ayres the widowed matriarch and hangover from Edwardian society, her son Roddie, an injured and limping veteran of the war now master of the estate though not coping with the responsibility and Caroline, the intelligent but plain daughter who is often to be found wandering around the estate with her dog.

Things take a sinister turn as Roddie becomes convinced that he is being visited by a phantom with malicious intent who is leaving dark marks around his room and when the Ayres's dog attacks the young daughter of a nouveau riche family only new to area it begins his descent into what Faraday believes to be a severe nervous disorder.

The book is essentially a story of the end of the Edwardian dynasties and the break up of the estates of the landed gentry that followed the second world war and the election of Clement Atlee's Labour government. It is also a gothic-esque ghost story in the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe however I draw that similarity very loosely as it is at best a pastiche of that story telling. The book reminds me of peristalsis with its slow and steady pace building up a tension that releases itself not with a bang but with a wimper as any dramatic tension is dissolved with a disappointing last 100 pages. Dr Faraday proves an extremely boring narrator and as his affairs become increasingly entangled with those of the Ayres' it's hard to muster the requisite sympathy.

I have now read five of the six shortlisted books of the 2009 Booker Prize and I cannot say that I have been overly impressed by the quality. Hilary Mantel's' Wolf Hall' with its nauseating prose and unbelievable revisionist history, Adam Fould's rather insubstantial 'The Quickening Maze', Simon Mawer's screenplay of a novel in 'The Glass Room' and probably the best of the lot in AS Byatt's charming Middlemarch-esque tale of two Edwardian families in 'The Children's Book', none of these are books one can imagine recalling in ten years time, from this roster of historical fiction I do not see anything approaching classic status.

I am now fully aware that I have now reviewed three books and so far they have all been 3/5 and I'm afraid this shows the forgettable nature of them, 2 would seem too harsh and 4 unmerited therefore I'm afraid I shall have to do so again.

Probably better just wait for the movie:

3/5