Book of the Month: The Mountain in the Sea

This was an impulse purchase in a TK Maxx earlier this year, because, well, octopuses.

It's a slice of speculative fiction set in the near future. Political entities and alliances have shifted, big tech companies run the world, and the boundary between human and machine intelligence has broken down. In the middle of all that a scientist fascinated by octopuses is invited to study a mysterious new species that may be sapient.

The scientist is aided by the first true android who may, or may not, be a conscious being. It is the subject of fearful hate and has been banned from most territories on Earth, so is working on the octopus project on a remote island atoll to keep it out of harm's way. Other forces are seeking to access the islands - one for the mysterious octopuses, and one just to harvest the fish that live in the protected zone.

As a 'first contact' story between two species that think very differently, this works pretty well. But there are some other story threads interwoven which are distracting.  I felt the storyline about a human crew enslaved on a fishing boat captained by an AI was horribly feasible but was superfluous to the overall plot. 

There are several conversations that act as exposition. Mini-monologues that explain certain things that, in-world, probably wouldn't need explaining. But generally that's my only real gripe and the exposition moves the story along rather than holding it up.

This is a very grounded science-fiction book, based on what we currently know about octopuses and the fascinating way their brains work. I felt like I already knew some of that from reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaiskovsky, but this went into it in more detail. In the acknowledgements, the author, Ray Naylor, outlines his impressive background reading. He successfully weaves this into the story without showing off about his research.

To conclude, then, as far as speculative fiction goes, this was reasonably believable. Society is changing unpredictable and technology is changing quickly, making the wider human world in this book feel realistic. And octopuses are wonderful clever creatures. If we ever did find ones that could communicate, our inter-species conversations might look a lot like this. 

Book of the Month: To The Lighthouse

I feel self conscious reviewing "classics". I worry I'm not 'getting it' and will look ignorant. But then, I also feel that if I'm not getting it, that says something too. So, here we go. Bear with me. 

There are some spoilers in this review. But this book was published in 1927, so you've had 98 years to read it before reading my spoilers. 

What I knew before reading the book - it was written by Virginia Woolf, a female author often described as a key feminist writer. No surprise then that To The Lighthouse is written almost exclusively through the point of view of female protagonists, mainly Mrs Ramsay, the mother of eight who narrates the first chunk of the book. Male characters are given short shrift, variously described as shallow, prickly, idealistic, boastful and with sensitive egos. 

The story starts with Mr and Mrs Ramsay on holiday on the Isle of Skye with their eight children and another half dozen assorted guests plus serving staff. It's evening. One of Mrs Ramsay's sons asks her if they can go to the lighthouse the next day. Mr Ramsay says no because the weather forecast is bad. Mrs Ramsay is silently annoyed at her husband for dismissively crushing her son's hopes. 

That takes up the first sixty pages. I was beginning to suspect the title was misleading and the family weren't going to go to the lighthouse. 

There was, however, a surprise reference to Cardiff - as a venue where Mr Ramsay was going to take his lecture tour. So, it wasn't all unspoken angst between the married couple. 

Mrs Ramsay oscillates between a dark pessimism about marriage and progeny, and then expends a lot of energy engineering opportunities for her house guests to get together. There is a proposal as two people are successfully coupled, and then she is on to thinking about the next match she could make. 

I had my hackles raised by some passing references to Anna Karenina. Fortunately Mrs Ramsay stands in stark contrast to Anna. For one thing, Mrs Ramsay seems much more realistic about life and finds joy in the things around her instead of mooning away over some idea that love is "out there".

And then, just when we've got to know Mrs Ramsay, she unexpectedly dies, in a throwaway paragraph at the end of a chapter. I don't know if the author got bored of her, or what. But it's a sudden - and bold - shift in the story. 

What follows is a brief series of vignettes, as the local cleaning lady tries to maintain the holiday home over several years. In the same way that the house declines, so too, Mrs Ramsay's idealised visions of the future are shown to come to naught. One son Andrew, who was supposed to become a famous mathematician, is killed by a shell during the war. A daughter, Prue, who is supposed to grow into a true beauty, dies due to pregnancy complications. The couple who got engaged on Skye get trapped in a loveless marriage. 

The message seems to be that whatever our hopes for the future, life gets in the way. It's pessimistic in the extreme and more nihilistic than I expected. 

The book ends with the remaining members of the family returning to Skye. The kid who wanted to go to the lighthouse finally gets to go, even though by this point he is a pouting teenager who really doesn't want to go. They arrive at the lighthouse but before they get out of the boat the book ends. 

Final point - the cover art. This book was part of a set of ten 'classics' that I was given several years ago. The cover art is deeply uninspiring, although after I read the book it felt very apt. (It doesn't show a lighthouse!) Then a few days after I finished the book, I saw a copy with a very different, and much nicer, cover that makes it look like a completely different type of book! 

(I was tempted to buy it but decided that would be silly.)

Three quotes from Coming Up For Air

This month I read Coming Up For Air by George Orwell. (Review here.) I like Orwell's prose and he has a sharp wit. Here are three quotes that made me laugh or nod in agreement.

As the main character ruminates on being married...

"When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage."

I knew exactly the kind of day he meant with this...

"You know the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter suddenly seems to give up fighting.  For days past we'd been having the kind of beastly weather that people call 'bright' weather, when the sky's a cold hard blue and the wind scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got a chance."

And as a driver of an older car with a lot of mileage on it, this bit about his car rang true too...

"You wouldn't believe any machine could vibrate in so many directions at once. It's like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds of wobble, or so I remember reading."

It shows how good a writer George Orwell was that 85 years after this book was published I was smiling and nodding as I read it.

Anna Karenina - a book I hated because of the main character

Back in the 90s there was a show called Ally McBeal, which I didn't mind except for one key flaw. I couldn't stand the main character - Ally McBeal.

The show itself was quirky, funny, had some interesting characters. But Ally McBeal herself was just irritating beyond all reason. In fact, I often said that if that character was killed off and the show continued as Not Ally McBeal, I would have watched it.

Anna Karenina is the classic literature Russian novel version of Ally McBeal. It's an interesting time period, in an interesting place, in a long-gone cultural epoch, full of interesting characters having interesting discussions. Except for Anna Karenina, who has to be the most unlikeable romantic heroine ever written. If the book was called anything else and her character cut from it completely it would be a much better book.

Consider this, throughout the book, Leo Tolstoy repeatedly tells us that Anna is "gracious" and "charming" and "delightful" and "witty", and yet, we never see any examples of her grace, charm, delightfulness or wit. It's like telling us a comedian is the funniest man who ever lived with jokes that would make us cry with laughter. And then not telling us any of the jokes so we can see what you mean.

Anna is obsessed with her own happiness, or lack thereof. The story starts with her mooning around because, despite having an incredibly privileged life in an era when peasants stayed poor until they died at a very young age, and a faithful husband, when so many other women are being cheated on left, right and centre, and a son who she loves, she feels she doesn't have the romantic 'love' that she deserves to have. It's her 'right' to feel in love and her husband is denying her that right and so on and so forth, for pages and pages of self pity at her supposedly awful 'circumstances'.

Then she falls in love with a cavalry officer, Vronsky, who initially at least is painted as a fairly thoughtless, self-interested guy. He is attracted to Anna because of her beauty, charm, wit etc etc - you know the stuff we never actually see any evidence of except that we are told she has it. And then they start knocking boots. Her husband finds out but doesn't want the shame of divorce, so basically accepts it. Then Vronsky resigns from the army and he and Anna leave Russia and wander round Europe in a romantic hump-fest. At some point in all this Anna gets pregnant and goes back to her husband, who takes her in and promises to look after the baby girl. But pretty much as soon as she drops the sprog, Anna is back off with Vronsky. She gets mad at her husband for not letting her see her son - the son she so readily abandoned because she was in love. But now the separation from her son becomes yet another way that she is the poor, wronged soul in all this.

But, hey, she came back to him, so lucky Vronsky, right? No, not really. Because pretty soon Anna is mad at him for not loving her enough no matter what he tries to do, and so she decides to spite him by throwing herself under a train. Now, I have to admit I have a soft spot for trains, and finding out a train was the way the world was rid of Anna Karenina has only made me love them more. Of course, such a death was devastating, ruining poor Vronsky's life even further, so much so that at the end of the book he has returned to the military life and gathered a volunteer army to travel to the Balkans to fight the Turks and most likely die in the process.

If that was all there was to the story, it would be dreadful. But there are some other stories and characters within the book that kind of redeem it. The character Levin, for example, clearly a cipher for Tolstoy himself in many ways, is interesting, even though he is obsessed with 'modern' farming methods and issues of land ownership. Levin's wedding ceremony is really well described and vivid, especially the daze that both he and his wife feel they are in during the proceedings, as if everything was a dream. There is also a scene where Levin and his wife, Kitty, sit by Levin's brother's death bed waiting for the inevitable, which rings incredibly true and is very sad.

There is also a lot of incidental detail about the lives of the rich in comparison to the lives of the poor. The gap between the worlds of peasants and gentry is noticeable and it's easy to see how Russia would prove fertile ground for the communist revolution a generation or so after Tolstoy. With hindsight you can see it coming, with the contemporary social issues in Anna Karenina indicators of a society with gross inequality and subjugation of the masses.

All that additional content makes the book worth reading. Someone should create an excised version with Anna's tiresome demands to be loved taken out. I predict Not Anna Karenina would be a much better book.

Interim bookey post - an extract from Burmese Days by George Orwell

The other reviews are coming soon. In the meantime, I've finished my first book for 2016: Burmese Days by George Orwell. It's a novel set in Burma during the British Empire. This bit amused me highly.

An hour passed, and a melancholy, earth-coloured Indian loitered up the drive, dressed in a loin-cloth and a salmon-pink pagri on which a washing-basket was balanced. He laid down his basket and salaamed to Flory. 

‘Who are you?’ 

‘Book-wallah, sahib.’ 

The book-wallah was an itinerant peddler of books who wandered from station to station throughout Upper Burma. His system of exchange was that for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognize and refuse a Bible. 

‘No, sahib,’ he would say plaintively, ‘no. This book (he would turn it over disapprovingly in his flat brown hands) this book with a black cover and gold letters—this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly.’

2015 in review: Books I read by Douglas Coupland

I've been logging (and rating) the books I read for a number of years. In the past I've listed the ones I've given a five star rating to (five being my arbitrary maximum), but I haven't listed my yearly reading for some reason. So, here starts a new tradition!

I've grouped these in rough categories rather than list them in order. I've read six Douglas Coupland's novels this year, so he has his own post to kick this off, for no other reason than it's my blog and I can do what I like.

Miss Wyoming
Susan Colgate is a reluctant beauty pageant winner who gets a chance to escape from her monstrous 'pageant mom' when her plane crashes and she can walk away. When she returns to public life a year later she attracts the attention of a film producer who went through a similar process by giving all his possessions away. It's an interesting study of how success ends up owning you. I wouldn't rate it as one of Coupland's best novels, but it was surprisingly upbeat and ended on a more hopeful note than most.

Life After God
This isn't really a novel; more a collection of sort-of fiction that kind of ties together. It was full of amazing quotes. I listed some here. One became the opening lines of a sermon in the summer.

Hey Nostradamus
This was devastatingly beautiful. It's really four stories, starting with the victim of a high school shooting who is secretly married and pregnant. Then it cuts to her secretly widowed husband several years later, then to his new partner, and finally to his religious fanatic father. I found it profound in its analysis of the way the pursuit of religious holiness ends up corrupting people and turning them into terrible human beings. This quote stood out: "There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can colour their view of the weak and the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite." (p.28) I also used a quote from this book to begin my tribute to my Grandma at her funeral.

Worst. Person. Ever.
This was fantastically funny and vulgar. Raymond Gunt is a freelance TV cameraman and literally the worst person ever. He regards himself very differently, of course. Given the opportunity of a wonderful job in a tropical paradise he jumps at it, but then falls victim to a sequence of amusingly horrible events, many of them caused by his own terrible personality, which makes his suffering very enjoyable to read. Very different from Coupland's other novels, but brilliant.

All Families Are Psychotic
This is probably the maddest Coupland story that I've read, a real whirlwind of twists and shocks. A female astronaut is waiting to blast off on a shuttle mission, while her utterly dysfunctional family try to make their way to the launch site. The astronaut's mother is the most interesting character with a fairly nihilistic take on life. Throw in an eccentric European multi-millionaire, a cure for AIDS, and hijinks with crims and it remained unpredictable right to the end. Not my favourite of his novels, but pretty good.

The Gum Thief
Roger works in Staples. He's in his early 40s and the reason he works there is simple: his life has fallen apart. His much younger co-workers become the inspiration for him to start writing a novel. Weaved into the novel are several of his real-life experiences. One stand out thought was "Where does personality end and brain damage begin?" (I've thought that about a few people since reading this.) I really quite liked this book. It moved at a more relaxed pace than All Families Are Psychotic (thankfully) and made me think a bit. If I had one criticism, he has a character leave North America to go and visit Europe, which he's done in previous books. I know it's to make juxtapositions and take the characters out of their comfort zones, but does it always have to be Europe? And if it does have to be Europe, does it have to be London or Paris or wherever? Why can't it be Wales or another lost corner of the old world?

If you only read one of these... read Hey Nostradamus. Particularly if you are of a religious persuasion.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

I'm a late adopter when it comes to books and this one has been around a while. This was Cathy's 'Secret Santa' book at book group. She read it in one sitting and then suggested I read it. I found out later that was because she wanted to discuss the ending with me.

The story is about a nine year-old boy called Bruno who moves from Berlin in 1943 when his father is promoted to Commandant at a concentration camp. He hates it there as he is lonely and there is nothing to do. But then he befriends a boy called Shmuel who is living on the other side of the fence, inside the camp.

The tension builds towards the end and I had a vague sense that something bad was going to happen - as presumably Bruno will realise what is going on and what is going to happen to Shmuel. However, the ending wasn't quite what I expected and it stayed with me vividly for a couple of days.

What is clever about the book is that for almost all of it you know more than the main protagonist. There are several moments where Bruno just doesn't get what is going on - for example when he tries to explain to Shmuel that he should have caught a less crowded train to the camp, because the one Bruno travelled on had plenty of room.

Another interesting element is that, with the exception of one young soldier, the Commandant and his family are portrayed as ordinary people doing what they think is right and good and proper. Bruno's mother drinks a bit too much; his father is authoritarian; his sister, Gretel, just accepts the existence of the camp as how things are - but none of them are bad people, even as they participate to a greater or lesser extent in the Holocaust.

It's to John Boyne's credit that as an author he didn't wimp out at the end. Having made you care about the characters, the power of the story would have been considerably less if he had given it a happy ending.

I gave this book five stars, so it will join the list. It's not one I will read again in a hurry, mainly because it's so memorable. In many ways, reading it reminded me of when I saw Schindler's List - the shock and horror of what happened in the Holocaust confronted me anew. Again, John Boyne, did well to take something so well-known and yet make me as a reader feel horrified all over again.