Fifty Two Weeks - 2024 in Literary Terms

 

The sun sets on 2024, Morley, Dec 31st

The past year has been extremely busy, in a way that has led to nearly all of my books being packed in boxes and stacked in the corner of a room in my wife's house. Across the year we did all of the background planning to build a new house at my property, which took up a great deal of time and mental space, and then I moved house, with all that that entails. As a consequence my reading was curtailed, but I still managed to get through some tomes, both brilliant and mediocre. The best was undoubtably the Javier Marias novel, Tomas Nevinson (2021). Marias was an exemplary literary figure, regarded as Spain's greatest modern writer, it's a pity he passed away during the pandemic. Tomas Nevinson was also a book club read, and so was definitely the best book club novel of the year, followed by Table for Two by Amor Towles (2024). The worst book club book and also the worst overall read of the year was definitely The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop (2023), although it was still a long way from the worst novel I've ever read, the execrable The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (2010), it makes me shudder just thinking about it!

Some of my books, before being imprisoned in boxes

Honourable mentions go to the very entertaining In the Approaches by Nicola Barker (2014), I really must explore more of her work, and The In-Between by Christos Tsiolkas (2023), which was also the best book I read by an Australian author. Overall the reading year was quite an interesting mix, during which I tackled Dostoevsky, which almost defeated me, but I got through in the end by sheer bloody-mindedness, it's rare that I give up on a novel in any case. I also finally got around to reading some of the music books I have laying around, the best being Bee Gees: Children of the World by Bob Stanley (2023). The Bee Gees were a much better musical proposition than many people remember and their story is fascinating. On that (musical) note, I'm taking a vow to read more in 2025, particularly as all of the books I can't help but buy are piling up. I'm justified in buying all these new books, as my main collection is boxed up for the next year, but then really who needs such excuses?

The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986)

Rating: Excellent

The Old Devils is one of those rare novels that is quite brilliant and has also won the Booker Prize. That is a bit harsh, as there have been quite a few winners that have been exceptional, but also some that are very disappointing indeed. The novel is erudite, stylishly written and also is very very funny; full of wit, satire and outright laughs. This is also a rare feat, as I've found that humorous literary fiction is hard to find and therefore I conclude that it is difficult to write. I only have to think of that notoriously reprehensible Man Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question (2010) and its risible attempts at humour to confirm that suspicion. There is, of course, another rarity at play in that the son (Martin Amis) is just as good as the father and I can't think of another quality father son combination in literature.

The Old Devils follows a coterie of elderly Welsh couples whose chief shared interest is drinking and attempting to deal with their various ailments and life disappointments. Back into their lives after decades in London comes Welsh poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon, a great beauty who left a number of the old devils heartbroken in her wake. Alun is one of those larger than life characters whose charisma and outrageously bad behavior as both a malcontent and philanderer almost steals the novel (and I suspect gave Amis an opportunity to satirize himself as an added bonus...). However Amis created a host of well fleshed out characters both male and female that elicit both insight and poignancy. The novel does perhaps go on a bit and has a few flat spots, however the emotional and satisfying ending makes up for any minor shortcomings. The Old Devils is an extremely satisfying novel and I'm going to start collecting Amis' books whenever I see them and also try and rectify the fact that I haven't read his infamous debt novel Lucky Jim (1954).

The Natural Way of Things - Charlotte Wood (2015)

Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem have only one thing in common: they have both won major awards. Cixin won the 2015 Hugo Award and it has just been announced that Wood has won the relatively new Australian award for female writers, the Stella Prize. From that common point both diverge, with Cixin’s novel standing as a brilliantly fresh take on an old science fiction theme, with quality writing and relatable characters; Wood’s novel is thematically heavy-handed, stylistically flawed and unrelentingly bleak. My dislike of this novel could mean that I’m a lone dissenter, after all the novel has garnered many positive reviews and literally just as I finished reading it the result of Stella Prize was announced; but if so I’m not afraid to be a lone voice in the wilderness because any judgement of a novel’s worth is a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity and I can’t deny the fact that I did not enjoy this novel at all.

The Natural Way of Things explores the particularly important and relevant issue of the misogyny that is an inherent feature of our patriarchal society and its sometimes close relationship with the nastier side of capitalism. The novel opens with two young women, Yolanda and Verla, who are struggling to awake fully from a drugged stupor and make sense of alien surroundings. They soon find that they are being held captive along with a group of other young women in an abandoned outback farm. Their immediate captors are two men, Boncer and Teddy, and a woman, Nancy, who seem to be in the employ of a nefarious corporate entity.The novel’s plot is not presented as a challenging mystery the reader can enjoyably try to solve, rather it is an allegory for the manner in which women can be treated by the patriarchy. Just why the women are being held captive is soon solved once they begin conferring between themselves during the rare times they are not being hounded by a stick wielding Boncer. The novel’s oppressive tone and its serious themes are not unusual in literature and can often be a successful technique to get the reader thinking, however in this case the novel’s effectiveness is hampered by Wood’s gratingly self-conscious writing style. I just could not warm to Wood’s writing and this seriously affected my interest in the plight of the women and what would eventually happen to them.

The Natural Way of Things is a challenge to read, not because it is a brilliant and complex example of contemporary literary fiction, but because it is completely bereft of subtlety and humour. This compromises what would otherwise be the novel’s strong points, such as the friendship between Yolanda and Verla and the psychological challenges the women face as they attempt to stay alive when things don’t go as planned for the captors. Another problem is that the two male characters are basically caricatures. Boncer is like a walking talking definition of misogyny and no one is surprised that despite his confident way with a stick and propensity to bark orders he is essentially insecure. Teddy is a cliched surfer dude who practices yoga when he’s not being Boncer’s sidekick or smoking dope while complaining about the bouts of nagging his ex- girlfriend put him through. The female characters do develop over the course of the novel, however the allegorical necessity for many of them to still be hapless victims by the end the novel proved to be a serious weakness. When the ending finally arrived I threw the book down onto the vacant seat next to me on the train, hoping that I would forget to take it with me when I disembarked.

I feel almost guilty for disliking The Natural Way of Things so thoroughly, after all Charlotte Wood spent a great deal of time and effort writing it, and believe me, it is a difficult thing to actually write a novel, let alone a good one. There is no doubt that the novel explores worthy themes and I am under no illusions regarding the nature of the patriarchal society we live in, however rather than causing me to think about these issues seriously I just couldn’t get past the novel’s flaws. This was a book club read, so I’m wondering how my fellow members will react to the novel during next week’s meetings. I have a feeling that it could go the way of that other infamous prize winner, The Finkler Question, when 33 of the 35 book club attendees thoroughly disliked the novel. For a long time now I wondered whether I’d ever read another novel as completely dreadful as The Finkler Question. Finally I believe that I have and that means that The Natural Way of Things suffers the ignominy of joining The Finkler Question on this blog as being only the second book to be rated as truly and utterly reprehensible.

The Torch - Peter Twohig (2015)

Peter Twohig’s book The Cartographer (2012) hit the right note with book buyers and became a run-away popular fiction success. Set in the year 1959 in Richmond, a working class suburb of Melbourne, it featured an eleven year old boy who took shelter in the drains and lanes of the city to escape the man responsible for a murder he accidentally witnessed. The Torch begins shortly after the end of The Cartographer and the child protagonist is one year older and is, you guessed it, up to shenanigans in the drains and lanes of Richmond, this time seeking the kid known as Flame Boy before he, gasp, strikes again.

The Torch begins well enough, with the un-named protagonist (he refers to himself variously as The Spirit of Progress, The Railwayman, The Ferret and is called the Blayney Kid by most of the adults) having to move with his mother to his grandfather’s house due to their home having been burnt down by, you guessed it, Flame Boy. Unfortunately it’s not long before the flaws of this novel become all too apparent. There are a multitude of characters, literally hundreds; most are incidental and many are caricatures of what is supposed to be your typical Australian of 1960. As the book progresses there just seems to be no end to them, causing the principal characters to get lost in the general commotion. The Blayney Kid’s narration is chock full of Australian colloquialisms that are initially endearing, but soon become so irritating that the inward groaning starts to become audible. The attempt at giving the Blayney Kid some psychological depth with his angst over his twin brother’s death and his nascent romantic adventures fall flat. All the fires, car crashes and marauding criminals could have had more impact if the narrative had more tension, instead the same tone persists throughout. The rather flimsy plot, of which I do not wish to go into because, frankly, it’s just not worth it, is stretched out like an old rubbery elastic-band across the novel’s 457 pages. In the end, despite some faint hope, nothing truly significant is revealed and you look at your watch and think, my god I’m still alive (I’ll be putting in these blatant Bowie references for some time to come).

The Torch was selected by my library book club members, perhaps due to the success of The Cartographer, but at the meetings many were underwhelmed and disappointed and seemed to be enjoying their coffees much more than the book they had to trawl through. Perhaps if this shaggy dog tale had been more rigorously edited and had lost about half of its length it could’ve been a contender. The Torch came close to becoming only the second book on this blog to be rated as ‘reprehensible’, but it was saved by the fact that The Finkler Question was just so awful that other books have to try really hard to be its equal.

End of Times (Well, this year anyway...)

By the end of the year all the words just pile up, so there’s a need to assess the situation so we can all move on. Looking back I note that my reading this year was reasonably eclectic, but unfortunately not always satisfying. Thankfully there weren’t any books read that were as noxiously offensive as the infamous Finkler Question (I will not even reference it - you just don’t want to know...); but probably the least worthy was Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts. That was a book club read, so I had no choice in the matter - the things I do! Enforced reading has its benefits however, with Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites proving to be one of the best novels I have ever read, and that’s no mean feat. Other highlights include The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, J.G.Ballard’s The Complete Short Stories, Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection and Annabel Smith’s The Ark, which achieves that rare feat of pushing at the boundaries of the novel.

Do I have any New Year’s resolutions? No - I just want to read.

The (Reprehensible) Finkler Question - Howard Jocobson (2010)

At the end of each year I give my book club group at the library the opportunity to vote on both the best and the worst books read during the year. Three years ago The Finkler Question was overwhelmingly voted the worst book of the year. This was the year it won the Man Booker Prize, a fact that all thirty active members could not fathom considering it was totally unappealing in almost every way. When considering my choice for the worst book of 2013 I realised that I still hadn’t read a book that came close to the awfulness of The Finkler Question. I can’t even bring myself to give even a brief synopsis, the memories are simply too distressing, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I may well be overdoing this a bit (true, but only a bit), but for a book that was meant to be funny (it wasn’t at all) and had won a major prize, surely it should display some finer points? Unfortunately the extremely irritating protagonist, overdone theme of identity (of the possible Jewish kind*) and a prose style like fingernails down a blackboard were reprehensible. There I’ve said it: reprehensible. This is a nice segue to the real reason why I'm talking about this book. Recently I created a ratings link on this blog, but my lowest rating of reprehensible was not represented due to the fact that no book has deserved such a description during the lifetime of the blog. Recently I realised that I may not read a reprehensible book for a long while and that the rating would remain tragically unrepresented. So, it was logical; all I needed to do was make a brief post about just how the dreaded The Finkler Question scarred me for life and the problem would be solved. 

If anyone happens across this post and had a good time reading The Finkler Question, then please tell me why I’m wrong. Meanwhile read it at your peril!

* This is in no way an anti-Semitic comment.