The Island – no paradise here

I’ve had Victoria Hislop’s The Island on my shelf for a long time. It was given to me and I, thinking it was a romance, hadn’t found the enthusiasm to read it. But although the story starts with the young Alexis deliberating over whether to end her relationship with bossy boyfriend Ed during a holiday to her mother’s native Crete, the tale soon turns to the Cretan island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony, to which Alexis’s secretive mother has uneasy and long unspoken ties.

Alexis begins to delve into the story of her mother’s history and we trace her family back to her great grandmother – it’s quite a story, and the factual side of it, detailing the leper island and Cretan history, is fascinating. Victoria Hislop has obviously fallen in love with her subject and hers is a very tenderly drawn portrait of the lives of the fictional Petrakis family – its women, who range from brave and deeply loyal to haughty and adulterous, and also its men, especially the stoical boatman Georgiou who has to bear so many cruel twists of fate.

It’s a well-crafted story and even though it’s not the sort of book I’d normally buy I did enjoy it. My only criticism would be that it verges on depressing in parts – there’s a lot of suffering and though there is hope and joy, it’s sparse. The cover describes it as “a beach read with heart” but I don’t think it’s one I’d really want to read under a palm tree. Hislop does much to provide a fresh take on leprosy – her characters are far from the rotten pariahs of biblical tales – but they do suffer, often as much from ignorance and hysteria as from their physical condition, granted, but it still doesn’t make for a light and fluffy read. Then again, perhaps Hislop (who, in the interests of trivia, I should mention is the wife of Private Eye editor Ian Hislop) never intended it to be that sort of book. Perhaps she intended a more all-encompassing portrait of a family whose history is rich and full of secrets. Certainly The Island is perfect if you like the idea of a good emotional read that opens a window into an often misrepresented disease and its heartbreaking history.

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Fast Food Nation – the chips are down

So my friend The RZA lent me this book – he’s not actually in the Wu Tang Clan unfortunately but he’s a very nice man nonetheless. I wasn’t convinced I’d enjoy Fast Food Nation as I’m very partial to a cheese quarter pounder and I have no time for weak-stomached hippies who squeal: ‘but you’re eating eyelids!’ As far as I’m concerned, if it tastes good and I don’t feel like I’m eating eyelids as I swallow I’m golden. But Eric Schlosser was about to dig a bit deeper than eyelid scare-stories – and some of the things I learned in his book surprised me.

In 1998 more fast food workers were killed on the job than police officers – and the majority of those murders were committed by former (or even current) workers robbing the restaurant. The combination of low pay, poor conditions that breed little company loyalty, and deprived backgrounds means that the grisly outcome is not all that surprising.

Sad stories abound in Fast Food Nation – people who’ve given their lives and their health to their fast food industry employers (particularly in dangerous slaughterhouses) find themselves repeatedly injured, pressured to take the riskiest jobs in the workplace and finally thrown on the scrapheap, having been bullied and tricked out of their compensation. Imagine being injured at your job and then, because you no longer have the use of your arms, being pressured to sign a waiver with the pen in your mouth. Enough said.

As well as the abuse of injured and sick workers, I was shocked to hear about the lengths McDonalds have gone to in order to stop their workers unionising – to the extent of employing spies and shutting down restaurants where workers have begun to organise, only to reopen them weeks later, hiring only non-union employees.

It’s not just about the eyelids and trotters they put into the meat (although there are some quite grisly stories about animals being fed shit (as in a diet of actual faeces) and being made to cannibalise the remains of their own species). The interesting thing about Fast Food Nation is that it gives a three-dimensional image of the fast food industry. It’s not just the filth the food is made in, it’s how many workers’ arms get ripped off in machines on production lines moving way too fast, it’s how many towns have been wrecked by McDonalds pushing small independent businesses out and chaining the town’s teenagers to a life of minimum-wage, minimum-skill drudgery, it’s how dangerous it is for us to let any one corporation become too dominant. After all, how can we expect a profit-driven corporation to do anything other than seek increased profits for itself? Isn’t it madness to expect them to prioritise product quality, customer satisfaction, care for their employees? You might hope not, but that seems to be the way of it, and Schlosser argues that it is the government and, above all, the consumer, who must learn to prioritise these things.

I watched Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film Super Size Me with interest but god dammit I was hungry at the end of it! And I’m not going to lie, the crispy golden fries on the front of this book had much the same effect – but so far I’ve resisted going back to McDonalds since reading the book. (OK, I did get Mr Literary Kitty to make me a faux-all-in-one breakfast wrap at the weekend – but he didn’t abuse any workers in the process.) This is largely because of my admiration for the defendants of the McLibel case – one of the most moving stories in the whole book.

The McLibel case was an English lawsuit filed by McDonald’s against five environmental activists Their organisation, the tiny ‘London Greenpeace’ (separate from Greenpeace itself) distributed pamphlets that were critical of McDonald’s. McDonald’s then took umbrage and sued them. Whilst three of the five parties sued quickly capitulated to the burger giant, former postman David Morris and gardener Helen Steel decided to take the corporation on. They were denied legal aid and represented themselves in court, against an army of McDonald’s litigators, and the case continued for twenty years. Twenty YEARS.

I won’t go into the details too deeply here as it’s a complex case, though I highly recommend reading up on it, but the upshot is that Morris and Steel fought and fought through every setback – every time the court award McDonald’s damages the pair appealed. As the case was dragged through the courts the cockiness of McDonald’s was exposed and a very bright light was shone on its practices – a PR disaster for the company, undeniably.

The British press unsurprisingly took a keen interest in this ‘David and Goliath’ case. In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights finally ruled that the original case had breached Article 6 (right to a fair trial) and Article 10 (right to freedom of expression) and ordered that the UK government pay Steel and Morris £57,000 in compensation – an incredible result given the challenges the pair faced (such as McDonalds using spies to infiltrate their organisation – to the extent of giving Morris a gift of baby clothes for his new child in order to obtain his address for surveillance!).

It made me think: if people so under-resourced are prepared to go to such lengths to fight against greedy, sinister corporate culture – can’t I abstain from eating the odd burger and chips? The example of Morris and Steel is genuinely inspiring – a beacon of hope in the bleak, homogenised and desperate future painted by Schlosser.

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Starter For Ten – I give it a seven

I’ve had David Nicholls’ Starter for Ten on my bookshelf for ages, and not because I wasn’t keen to start it. I was saving it. Just like I save the dumplings in a casserole or the strawberry and honey chocolates in a box of Milk Tray. However, I’d been saving it so dutifully that I’d actually forgotten I had it, making rediscovery an extra treat in itself.

So what of Nicholls’ debut novel? Was it what I hoped for, having been utterly charmed by the authentic and deeply affecting One Day? The answer is yes and no.

Yes because Nicholls is a great accessible writer who brings ordinary people and their thoughts to life, and also because the book is very funny. I knew I was off to a good start when the opening chapter made me laugh out loud. Brian Jackson, the book’s narrator, sets the scene as he tells us why he hates summer (primarily the way it makes the sun shine on the TV screen in the afternoon) and what he hopes to learn at university (a litany of weird and wonderful things that most people could probably relate to if they put to paper the odd things that float around their heads).

It was no surprise to learn that Nicholls spent much of his twenties as an actor, nor that he has been a fairly prolific screenwriter since, amid writing his novels. I didn’t realise that he’d actually adapted Starter for Ten for the big screen (I’m about to go and dig the film out) but his writing always has a filmic feel to it so I can imagine how such a thing would work (and how wonderful and unusual to be able to see a film of a book that is still totally the author’s vision!).

Anyway, Starter for Ten is the story of spotty Kate Bush fan Brian, who leaves his widowed mother and working class mates in Southend to go to university, where he falls in love with the unbearably beautiful Alice Harbinson and prepares to have his moment in the spotlight on his beloved University Challenge.

One thing you could never take away from David Nicholls is how well he depicts the mundane, and manages to make it funny and endearing. He’s like (and this is a huge compliment coming from me) the Richard Curtis of books – he can do both light-hearted and heartbreaking and he does them equally well. He’s great with teenage angst – and anyone who’s ever been away to uni will find something of their own experience in his, whether it’s his mum trying to press trays of cold meat and everything else bar the kitchen sink onto him as he tries in vain to get out the door, the vile experience of being deathly hungover in a grotty student bedroom, or learning how to navigate a new landscape of painful irony, the political earnestness of those who’ve never had to test their theories in the real world, and proper old-fashioned snobbery. Don’t get me wrong, Brian Jackson is no slick hero in this, watching all the foolishness go by – he manages to balance feelings of inadequacy and snobbery with a complete inability to stop talking even when he’s talking rubbish…..which leads me on to the No part of my analysis.

There were times when I just hated Brian Jackson. Obviously he’s not meant to be entirely sympathetic – who is at that age? He’s an inexperienced, awkward teenager trying to shuffle his way through the world, but sometimes I got frustrated by the way he was always his own worst enemy. Maybe (and I really hesitate to say this) it’s a gender thing – like the way my boyfriend (who bought me this book) always laughs hysterically at The Inbetweeners, while I oscillate between laughing, cringing and thinking ‘For god’s sake, why would you ever say that?!’

My university experience was also pretty different to Brian’s so I think that, on top of the fact that I can’t really relate to people who dig endless holes with the stupid things they say (I’m more of a clam up awkwardly and say nothing whilst thinking ‘Say something, anything’ type of person) I couldn’t connect to the story quite as much as I hoped to.

I found much more of myself in One Day, and although it’s possibly a bit narcissistic to assess books that way, it did make me enjoy it more. Nevertheless, David Nicholls’ great skill is in holding a mirror up to the horrid parts of the human mind – those thoughts everyone likes to pretend they don’t have – and I still think there’s something for everyone to relate to somewhere in this book. It’s funny, incisive and very, very readable. It doesn’t quite hit the high notes of One Day but it’s still undoubtedly worth a read.

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The Auschwitz Violin – an old song, but not played out

Maria Àngels Anglada’s international hit, The Auschwitz Violin, is the first of my latest batch of books from Lovely Mum. At a mere 128pp with big margins and large type, it’s also one of the briefest books I’ve read in a very long time.

It follows the story of Auschwitz prisoner and luthier (violin maker) Daniel, who is tasked with making an instrument for the unpredictable camp commander Sauckel (a real life Nazi who was hanged after the Nuremberg trials). If he fails, he learns, his life will be traded for a case of Burgundy wine with the sadistic Dr Rascher (another real-life war criminal), who wants healthy bodies for his dreaded experiments.

As he applies himself to the task of making the violin, Daniel rediscovers his humanity and sense of pride – once more he feels like a human being hard at work, not just a number, a piece of meat waiting to be exploited or frivolously murdered. The question is, will Daniel have done enough to save himself? What will be his fate?

The Auschwitz Violin was completely panned by the Metro, which called it: “A saccharine paean to the strength of the human spirit [that] does nothing to justify the flatness of a story lacking any sense of the unimaginability of hell.” It is held up as “an example of the unfortunate industry of Holocaust fiction: neat, moral tales that borrow historical resonance to inject drama into their earnest pages”. So, is it fair to accuse Anglada of jumping on the ‘Holocaust bandwagon’? Does her story justify its telling?

I do think the Metro review was harsh – I didn’t find the book saccharine, but you could argue that there was a certain flatness to it. Possibly because the book was so short, it was difficult to invest in Daniel in quite the same way as one might normally – we are only privy to a very short period of his life. The book didn’t hold me in a vice-grip but it was well-written and interesting and it gave a very personal vision of concentration camp hell. As is her prerogative, Anglada doesn’t focus on the physical hardships of camp life as much as the uphill struggle of trying to remain positive in the face of hopelessness. Her emphasis is on the human need to keep a sense of dignity and identity and in this way I think she does add something worthwhile to the canon of Holocaust fiction.

I was ambivalent about her liberal use of extracts from historical documents – sometimes these didn’t seem to add anything to the story – but a couple of them really brought a poignant sense of context to Daniel’s tale. The most notable of these was an inventory of items recovered from particular concentration camps, which read like this:

“Men’s clothing, used (not counting white clothing), 97,000 items”

“Women’s hair, 1 wagon, equivalent to 3,000 kilos”

These dispassionate lists are harrowing, especially when set within a very human, personal story, and they remind us of the sheer scale of Nazi atrocities – as well as the way they were perpetrated – often in a very businesslike manner.

Overall then, is Anglada’s book worth the read? I would say yes. It’s certainly not a big commitment; I read it over the course of a couple of days in short sittings. At its heart, it’s an eloquent little novella, refreshing in the way it doesn’t wallow in the degradation of the Holocaust, choosing instead to give a small snapshot of dignity, snatched from the jaws of humiliation.

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Lucky Man – the sting in the tale

 

I ended up reading Lucky Man, Michael J. Fox’s memoir, because my boyfriend (an early 80s baby and mega-fan of Back to the Future and Teen Wolf) kept telling me it was good. I was sceptical and when I read the first portion of the book I remained unconvinced. To me, Michael J. Fox was pretty much just the short guy from Spin City and I found it hard to dredge up much enthusiasm for stories of how he grew up (in a big military family with a supposedly psychic aunt who predicted his adult success) and where (in Canada).

I found it hard to warm to the man whose story seemed to be that everything, and I mean everything, came easy to him. He was cute, charming, smart, musical and everyone who ever met him seemed to think he was just wonderful. It all seemed pretty two-dimensional….until his whole world came crashing down when he, at the peak of his teen-idol success, was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease.

It is Fox’s own view that his disease was the making of him as a man (hence the seemingly incongruous title of his book) and it’s certainly the making of his memoir. I’m sure relatively few people can relate to his story of coming to America and finding almost immediate acting success, just as very few will be able to relate (on an experiential level) with his battle with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 30 – but where the first is a story of given talent, carelessly spent, the second is the story of what is written in the human soul when all pretence has been stripped away.

At that point I realised why Fox didn’t bother with any false modesty in the part of the book that dealt with his rise to fame – he wanted the reader to truly understand how difficult it was to come to terms with a diagnosis like Parkinson’s when it was more or less the first thing in his life not togo his way. A fascinating account of how a person who is not equipped to cope with disaster learned to face real hardship, Lucky Man is by no means a depressing read. In fact, it’s quite inspiring.

In the closing pages of the book, Fox says, “I couldn’t be this still until I could no longer keep still”, and it is this concept that made the memoir so fascinating to me. What is the point of a man having everything if he doesn’t know how to appreciate it? And what does it matter what a man lacks if he’s content with what he has?

I’m not suggesting that Fox enjoys the increasingly crippling physical limitations of Parkinson’s (which the book does not shy away from describing in sometimes quite excruciating terms) but I believe him when he says his illness has helped him on a road to inner peace that he never would have otherwise walked. I suppose that’s why he says on the back of the Lucky Man jacket that if you offered him a a world “in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before, I would, without a moment’s hesitation, tell you to take a hike.” However good our luck is and however much we are blessed with, our lives still only reflect our state of mind – that’s a great leveller, when you think about it.

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The Hairdresser of Harare – makes it feel real

The Hairdresser of Harare is the story of Vimbai, the queen bee of the hair salon where she works. Though she is estranged from her family after a dispute over money, Vimbai’s job gives her status and satisfaction at a time when unemployment is soaring and so is inflation. Then Dumi turns up.

Dumisani, a charming young hairdresser who has his customers announcing that they ‘look like Halle Berry’ when they look in the mirror, impresses Vimbai’s boss Mrs Khumalo straight away and soon Vimbai finds her crown slipping….

I enjoyed this book and I found Vimbai an engaging character. She is haughty and bossy and yet good hearted and vulnerable in a way that resonated a lot with me. Tendai Huchu paints a vivid picture of life in Harare, which goes on as normally as it can do given the inconvenience of lugging huge bricks of banknotes around with you, the scarcity of opportunity and the seeming impossibility of looking ten years ahead into the future.

Dumisani is keen to befriend Vimbai, despite her reservations about him and the pair get over their rocky beginning to find friendship blossoming – but Dumisani is not all he seems. Vimbai, in her innocence, has no idea of the nature of his secret, even though the reader surely will, but the success of the story doesn’t hinge on shocking plot twists and turns (although it is not without its surprise moments).

The Hairdresser of Harare is about capturing an atmosphere, a moment in time and place. Its characters are all ordinary in their own ways and yet they are not ordinary. No one is entirely good, no one is entirely bad – everyone has their reasons, their secrets, their scars – and this is what makes the book so readable. Huchu’s accessible style keeps the pages turning and I invested in his characters – they felt entirely real.

A quirky, likeable book with a great cover from a writer who can conjure up a real sense of atmosphere and authenticity. The Hairdresser of Harare is well worth a read.

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Fifty Shades of Grey – a dark mirror

I was determined not to buy Fifty Shades of Grey, as I’d heard it was poorly written, cringingly sexed lifestyle porn. That said, when a colleague offered to lend me her copy (which was complete with what looked like teeth marks) I was curious.

When I started reading it, I was surprised it had been slated to such an extent (that’s the price of popularity, I suppose). It was by no means as awkwardly written as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which was beloved, seemingly, by everyone but me). OK, I wasn’t a fan of the way Ana kept referring to her ‘inner goddess’ or repeating ‘holy crap’ but everyone is entitled to their own style. I have read many more poorly written books – at least E.L. James can hold a story, write a reasonable bit of dialogue and produce characters you can get your teeth into.

Yes, the book is lifestyle porn in the sense that it explores the pleasures of the playboy lifestyle, the joy of having nice things and being able to buy exotic experiences – but it’s not an endless exercise in product placement as some people would have you believe. James is no Stieg Larsson, faithfully recording the exact make and model of each of her characters’ possessions. Anyway, it’s escapism – why should Grey be forced to be a noble but poor supermarket worker?

As for the sex, there are repetitive bits and there were times when I was getting on the tube first thing in the morning and I really wasn’t in the mood to read about bondage, but I have read much cringier sex in my time. The problem is, though, that there’s too much sex in the book to call it anything other than porn, but it’s a bit too long-winded and chick-lit-esque to be proper porn – not to mention that at one point Grey pulls out Anastasia’s tampon in order to have sex with her. I cannot think of a less sexy or more horrifying inclusion in a porn book. I actually dry-retched when I got to that point. WHY?

Moving on from that though (I think we’d better), I’m ambivalent about where the book sits in the world. Is it, as some people say, a revolutionary sex manual for unfulfilled wives and girlfriends across the globe, or is it a monstrous piece of misogyny that is putting back the cause of feminism fifty years?

Well it must be at least partly the former. I admit that I was shocked to find that the book’s subject matter was still considered shocking to the public at large. I saw men on Twitter saying they would be horrified to see their partners reading the book – this shows that the book is necessary and boundary-pushing to a certain extent. Can we really still be shocked by the idea of women as consumers of porn? This seems weirdly Victorian. Madonna was years ago, people!

On the other hand, detractors (I saw a program where Rachel Johnson, editor of The Lady and sister of Boris, was practically apoplectic with disgust for Christian Grey) say that it is misogynist filth that is anything but liberating to women. Is that fair? Well, there were bits of the book that made me decidedly uncomfortable. I found myself wondering why women were worshipping a protagonist who wanted his partner to eat from a prescribed list of foods, who wanted her to obey him in and out of the bedroom and who wanted to punish her painfully for any perceived transgressions. I got that it turned him on in the bedroom but forcing a grown woman to clean her plate in a restaurant when she’s not hungry is controlling in a deeply, deeply unsexy way.

I suppose the thing that made me most uneasy was that I could imagine so many women in abusive relationships superimposing their own partner’s face over Christian Grey’s and finding new excuses not to leave. The book plugs the reader firmly into those fallacies that say: real love is jealous and possessive. It’s OK to submit to the will of an attractive man even if what he is asking of you makes you anguished. Being rich makes for a happier, more exciting life. If a man is troubled, he should be excused for his kinks. Attempting to change and help him is not foolish but heroic. God help us if we believe these things.

Every time Christian commanded Ana to eat, I found myself wanting to pick up the plate and throw it in his face with a few choice words. Couldn’t we have a protagonist who just likes bondage but isn’t weird and screwed up and controlling outside of the bedroom? I think that would be more revolutionary.

Having said that, though, I think that E.L. James does strive to show reality in the book. She documents Ana’s difficulties with the lifestyle Christian is offering, she shows her pushing back sometimes successfully against his boundaries and she doesn’t excuse all of his behaviour. She also never set out to write a moral guide for troubled relationships – she writes fiction and she should no more have to make her characters agreeable than Dostoyevsky or Dickens. If we think Fifty Shades of Grey is damaging to women, romance and relationships everywhere, perhaps we should think why this is.

Is it not offensive to women to assume they cannot critically assess a book and dismiss a cruel protagonist when they see one? Maybe some cannot, but that is a problem that has deeper roots than literature. I don’t think E.L. James can be blamed – all she does is hold the mirror up.

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