Keep Calm and Carry On – the art of the untroubled mind

This Christmas, I got a copy of Keep Calm and Carry On as a secret santa present. I’d hoped for a bottle of wine but hey ho. It was actually pretty good – with its little nuggets of no nonsense wisdom, so I thought I’d share a few of my favourites with you for January – season of the hangover, when the scales are groaning and coffers are empty.

 

“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”

- Benjamin Franklin

 

“Better bread with water than cake with trouble.”

- Russian proverb

 

“Luxury: the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.”

-Kahlil Gibran

 

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.”

- Honoré de Balzac

 

“Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.”

- Max Amsterdam

 

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

 

“The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.”

- Bernard M. Baruch

 

“How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than 60 years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?”

-Logan Pearsall Smith

 

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

-Henry David Thoreau

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The Informationist – the chase is on, through Equatorial Guinea no less…

I’m not usually one for thrillers, but when I was sent Taylor Stevens’ The Informationist, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s the first in a series about a cross-dressing, multi-lingual information hunter called Vanessa ‘Michael’ Munroe.

A Texas oil billionaire hires Munroe to solve the disappearance of his adopted daughter, who went tragically missing on her travels through Africa. Munroe, who spent most of her youth in Africa, specialises in using local knowledge, an incredible knack for languages and the instincts of a hunter to get the results no one else can – and for 2.5 million dollars, she agrees to head back to the continent that haunts her to find Emily Burbank.

Will she be able to shrug off the vigilant guard her employer has sent with her? Can she revive a trail that’s been cold for four years? Who has sent the people following her and why do they want to kill her – what do they have to hide? These are the obstacles Munroe must face in her quest to find Emily and they are not her only troubles. Returning to Africa will force her to finally face demons and ghosts she has long kept at bay and unexpected events leave her wondering who in her life she can really trust.

Reading this book reminded me of when I used to go on holiday with my family and, having finished all the books I had with me, I’d end up reading my dad’s Wilbur Smiths or Ian Rankins. I always got hooked in the end – in fact, I got massively attached to Inspector Rebus – there’s still something really appealing about a book that functions as a puzzle to solve.

One thing I liked about this particular book was its African setting – it was an interesting look into countries I knew absolutely nothing about, like Namibia and Equatorial Guinea.

Unlike some thrillers, The Informationist wasn’t overly predictable – Taylor Stevens keeps you guessing. As Publishers Weekly point out, the comparisons between Michael Munroe and Lisbeth Salander are easy to make – but I thought Stevens’ attempt at a 3D heroine was much more successful than Larsson’s – and Stevens didn’t bother with the tedious descriptions about ‘Power PC 7451 processors’ and the like that so plagued Larsson’s book.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is still a crime thriller, not a literary classic, but it’s not trying to be. What it offers is a slice of fast-paced escapism with a quirky heroine, some surprising twists and a satisfying ending. No doubt my dad would love it – and for me, it beats The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hands down.

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The Winter Palace – style, substance and sinister secrets

I’m going to start this review by saying right away that I was hooked on Eva Stachniak’s The Winter Palace from its very first page. The story of Catherine the Great’s rise to power, told by an orphan who became a spy in the old Empress’s court, is one full of old-fashioned mystery and intrigue. Our narrator, Varvara, begins by telling us: “I knew of hollowed books, trunks with hollowed bottoms, and the meanders of secret corridors. I knew how to open hidden drawers in your escritoire, how to unseal your letter and make you think that no one had touched it. If I had been in your room, I left the hair around your lock the way you had tied it. If you trusted the silence of the night, I had overheard your secrets.”

There is a great sense of style in Stachniak’s writing – Varvara’s narrative has an irresistibly conspiratorial air and the author also has a great talent for description. She paints the sights and sounds of Imperial Russia vividly – its colours, its smells, its atmosphere, its secrets. The life of a spy, a tongue, is one in which nothing is certain and no one is to be trusted entirely. Fortunes change, families rise and fall, snubs and humiliations are avenged and loyalty must be repaid, sometimes for fear of the consequences. How could you not be drawn in to the drama of it? How could you not root for Varvara, the orphaned daughter of a Polish bookbinder, whose sharp mind and clear understanding of the need to make herself indispensable are all that keep her from destitution.

When her mother dies of cholera, and her father follows her to the grave shortly after, penniless Varvara can expect little mercy, but when she is accepted as a servant in the Imperial household as a favour to her father, she makes more use of the opportunity than many would expect. Determined to gain the sympathy of the Empress, she begins wandering the palace corridors at night, hoping to run into her. When she, instead, runs into the powerful Chancellor, Varvara proves her talent for listening to those who are too careless or proud to imagine that they might be overheard or betrayed. She becomes a royal tongue, a keeper and betrayer of secrets, and is even admitted to the Empress’s bedroom to tell her stories and massage her feet.

Varvara now begins to feel herself indispensable – but Stanchiak is keen to impress upon her readers the idea that fate is fickle. In a court where subterfuge, lies and betrayal are the only means of power and advancement, everyone is watching studiously to see which way the wind is blowing. In such an atmosphere, it becomes difficult to tell who’s side anyone is really on. Who can Varvara trust? And who should she align herself to to secure her future in the days to come?

It has been a while since a book took me on a journey quite like The Winter Palace. I’ve never been big on historical fiction – I find that facts and fiction are sometimes awkward bedfellows – but Stachniak has reminded me to keep my mind open to it, in case I miss another wonderful book like this. As readers, we are with Varvara from childhood – just as we are with Catherine, from right back when she was plain old Sophie – and it is fascinating to see them grow from frightened, lonely young girls, at the mercy of the whims of the Empress, to strong women, fierce mothers, who hope to bend Russia’s fate to their will. Of course, Stachniak never lets us forget that fate is never tamed entirely. It bends to no one’s will for long.

One of the things that drew me in the most about this book was how real the characters felt. Empress Elizabeth is capricious, vain and selfish but she also has a conscience and her moments of tenderness. The Grand Duke is immature, petulant and spiteful, but he is also attractively simple, in the face of the endless false masks of others at court. Catherine herself is passionate and impetuous – by the time she seizes the throne she is no longer the clear-hearted girl Vavara first pledged allegiance to – but then she, like all the others in the book, has been shaped by the cruelties and humiliations that life, both in and out of court, has dished out to her.

There are no absolute heroes or villains in this book – nobody escapes bitter disappointments, betrayal, loss. Nobody just gets power and lives with it, happily ever after. Indeed, The Winter Palace is a fairly complete study of the sorrows and trappings of power. As in life, Stachniak doesn’t offer glib happy endings – she paints something much more real and this is where the strength of her novel lies – she gives us both the strange and the familiar.

In the fabulously exotic world of Imperial Russia, we get both the curious (birds on strings, cats in velvet jackets, muttered gypsy curses) and the universal (power, greed, passion and revenge) melded together in a wonderful way. The Winter Palace is the perfect book to curl up by the fire with in the cold months – let it transport you to another world as I did and let its real-world wisdom echo in your mind long after you put the book down.

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The Good Earth – the battle hymn of the tiger women?

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was the US bestseller in 1931 when it was first published. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and it also contributed to Buck winning the 1938 Nobel Prize. Phyllis Bentley, an overview of Buck’s work, says of her subject: “Mrs. Buck is entitled to take rank as a considerable artist. To read her novels is to gain not merely knowledge of China but wisdom about life”, and, having read The Good Earth, I wholeheartedly agree.

The book follows the life and fortunes of Wang Lung, a poor farmer who takes a slave for a wife, and with her begins to become more prosperous – although the gods are always ready to flood the fields or send no rain at all, leaving the locals starving and desperate. Buck covers everything – the joys, struggles and heartbreaks of family life, the intricacies of social hierarchy and filial duty, the seemingly unbreakable bond the villagers have with the earth and the skies, and the shift of attitudes across generations as the emphasis of prosperity changes from land to money. Finally, Buck contemplates the process of ageing, as we watch various characters go from being vital and relevant to being relics of a bygone age, barely even able to understand the new world that surrounds them.

The saddest character of the book is O-lan, Wang Lung’s first wife. She’s basically a superwoman, giving birth to sons all over the place, delivering them herself, without help, and then striding straight back to the fields again and setting to work with a hoe. Many times her quick, clear thinking saves the family from starvation, robbery and loss of face. And how is she repaid? Not as she should have been, that’s for sure.

On this count, I disliked Wang Lung and yet Buck’s skill makes him more than a two-dimensional farmer of a bygone age. The reader has known him since the first day of his manhood when he went, shaking with nerves, to the Great House to collect his bride. He has a kind heart, a proud heart, and a deep-rooted insecurity that he never shakes off. He is not the same person at sixty as he was at twenty and that is what I love about reading an epic like this.

It is always suggested that War and Peace is tough-going but what people really seem to mean by this is that it is long! Reading it is a commitment to a huge number of pages and a large number of characters. But there is a rich reward for such commitment. I imagine it to be a little like raising a child – love and understanding are only complete when you’ve seen all sides of a person. It’s easier to sympathise with a grown man when you’ve seen how he grew into a man. Thus it is with the reader and Wang Lung.

In many ways, The Good Earth is a classic example of the maxim that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. I recently watched a program about lottery winners, one of whom reminded me a bit of Wang Lung. As the simple farmer’s son grows rich beyond his wildest dreams, we see him swap one set of troubles for another, just as the lottery winner felt that he had done. The more that Wang Lung yearns for peace in his house, the further it recedes from his grasp. In many ways, it seems he was never more content than he was by the side of O-lan in the early days, despite the scorn he has for her in later years.

One of the things that really tickled me about the book was its reminder of the oriental attitude to praise and self-promotion. There was a big uproar not that long ago about Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, wherein she discussed traditional Chinese parenting. The basics (according to her) are that Chinese mothers shame rather than praise and force where a western parent would relent. Of course, huge numbers of Chinese parents will have no time for this parenting model, especially these days, but there is an element of truth to what Chua says, especially amongst traditional Chinese. A Chinese friend of mine once complained I was too polite to her and said that in China this would indicate that we weren’t actually friends but strangers. I had been a little deflated before by some of her rather blunt criticisms of me, but here I was causing the same offence in the opposite way.

As Chua notes, “Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, ‘Hey fatty—lose some weight’”, something that’s generally considered abuse in western society. I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of that here – I only mention it as I noticed a lot of this in The Good Earth and I still find it perverse and, at times, theatrically absurd. When Wang Lung offers his wedding-day guests some food cooked by his new wife he says “it is poor stuff – it is badly prepared” despite thinking it excellent. When he takes his sons to their teacher for their first day of school he says: “Sir, here are my two worthless sons. If anything can be driven into their thick brass skulls, it is only by beating them, and therefore if you wish to please me, beat them to make them learn.”

Again, when his first daughter is born, Wang Lung’s wife dismisses him from the labour-room door by saying “it is only a slave this time – not worth mentioning”. Not an unusual attitude of the time, of course, but it did remind me of the plight of Chinese girls. I can’t even wear high heels out to a club without complaint – I shudder to think of my feet being bound tightly to crush the bones, leaving the flesh rotting beneath the bandages. I’m sure Wang Lung would think me dreadfully feeble.

Girls and women are referred to as ‘slaves’ throughout this book and the brutality they often suffer without complaint is tragic, its pathos not missed by Buck, who was a prominent humanitarian in her day. But she doesn’t overdo it by imposing modern values on Wang Lung’s world – and the shocking aspects of the family’s lives are told simply, without judgement. Perhaps this is easier because Buck herself grew up in China. Though she was born to western parents she spoke Chinese fluently and lived there for a large portion of her life.  Not for her the romantic, rose-tinted gaze of the outsider. Despite the elegance and the poetry of her words, Pearl S. Buck tells it like it is, and her book is all the richer for it.

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Band of Brothers – a word from the brave

Usually I read the book and then watch the film. This time I did things topsy-turvy. Thanks to my history-obsessed boyfriend, I became a massive fan of the incomparable TV series Band of Brothers long before I read Stephen Ambrose’s book. Which was better? That’s the real question.

I feel like a massive traitor but for once I have to say that I preferred the series to the book. Don’t get me wrong – the book inspired the series and the series is pretty faithful to the book; but for me the big difference was how easy it was to appreciate what it was like for soldiers in snowy, surrounded Bastogne or anywhere bullets were whistling an inch-gap from their helmets, perhaps even burying themselves in the body of the much-loved comrade crouching beside them.

Whilst the series gripped me instantly with its portrayal of the hardships, strength and courage of the men of Easy Company, the book took longer to get going. On the page, the details of drills, training, hierarchy and strategy seemed drier, the human elements of them harder to appreciate.

I have to say at this point that this is entirely my own personal perspective – my boyfriend found that the detail given in the book added a great deal to his understanding of the challenges the men faced and a valuable background to the topic as a whole. I certainly wouldn’t want to put anyone off what is still a fantastic book by my admission that it wasn’t all entirely my cup of tea.

I did also find that my enjoyment of the book grew and grew as it progressed. Once everyone had been introduced, once the scene had been set, once the nitty-gritty details had all been set down, the stories of the men emerged and the scope of the book enlarged. It was wonderful to hear the men speak in their own words, through numerous diary entries and letters to loved ones, as well as in later life in a series of in-depth interviews with Ambrose.

At the beginning of each of the TV episodes, the real men being dramatised on screen give little soundbites, but the book expands on this and has them speak in their own words far more frequently. The book delves more into the men’s thoughts and fears in their quiet moments and takes you to certain places that the series does not.

Read the book and then watch the series – that would be my advice. Steep yourself in the facts and the raw narrative and feel the reality of what the men of Easy Company undertook during the war…then settle down in front of the TV and prepare to be blown away by the horrifying and thrilling visual spectacle of it all.

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The Survivor’s Club – a matter of life and death

I borrowed The Survivor’s Club by Ben Sherwood from the library because I have always suspected I wouldn’t be that fearless hero who, when a fire ravages the children’s hospital, comes running out of the blaze with my hair still in place and a few kids under each arm. I was interested to see what survival skills I did have, though, and I thought I might learn some more.

So here are some of the things I learned. Scared of flying? Your chances of being in a plane crash are 1 in 60 million. More surprising than that is that if your plane does crash, there’s a 95.7% chance that you will survive. According to Sherwood, you have ninety seconds, when a plane runs into trouble, to save yourself. As the first three and the last eight minutes of a journey are when the vast majority of plane crashes occur, these are the times you should be alert for your quick getaway. Sherman warns us that, ideally, we should not sit more than five rows from an exit – when people start panicking and blocking the aisles, he says somewhat darkly, those further away are the people who don’t get out.

Sherwood claims that people’s unfounded but unshakeable belief that they will die if their plane crashes leads to a lot of unnecessary deaths. People take their shoes off and get drunk. They don’t note the exits or listen to the safety announcements. But can they be blamed for this misguided fatalism? According to the book, front page reporting on air crashes is 6,000 times greater than on cancer per thousand deaths and 1,500 times greater than auto crashes. I suppose that plane crashes are more exciting news than cancer deaths precisely because they are so much rarer but it does call into question how we feed our fears through warped news coverage. I suspect that more people are scared of dying in a plane crash than they are of contracting cancer – even if that’s not logical when you look at the facts.

Among other myths that Sherwood dispels are: that most heat loss comes from your head (in fact, it’s only about 8-10% – mum, you lied!), that keeping positive helps you live longer (in fact, it’s the grumpy cynics who endure, statistically) and that there’s no such thing as ‘luck’(he talks about ‘the science of luck’, which explores why good things often happen to the same people).

Honestly, there’s so much interesting stuff in this book. You’ll hear the stories of various unusual survivors (such as Vesna Vulovic who fell six miles through the air and lived), you’ll get a chance to work out your own survivor profile (apparently I’m a fighter!) and you’ll get answers to the questions: can you kill the will to live? and can you postpone your own death?

You’ll also learn that, if you’re going to have a major injury, a stab is better than a bullet, which is better than crashing into a brick wall, and that if you’re going to have a heart attack, the best place to survive it is in a Las Vegas casino!

Maybe some of this seems a little morbid, but The Survivor’s Club is actually packed with inspiring stories and it’s a very interesting analysis of the human spirit. It allows you to consider how you’d react if you found yourself in a really sticky situation without actually having to get in one – and I like to think that if one of these dreadful things did happen to me, one of Sherwood’s facts would pop into my head and I might raise my chances of survival by a few percent. You never know!

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Room – a fresh take on a dark place

Emma Donoghue’s seventh novel, Room, a shortlist candidate for the 2010 Booker Prize, created much fuss when it emerged that the author had used as inspiration for her book the case of Elisabeth Fritzl and her son Felix. (Felix Fritzl was five years old when he was released from the high-security cellar in which he had spent his entire life and the press made much of the ‘dungeon tot’ who was seeing grass and the sky for the first time.)

In an interview with the Guardian, Donoghue insists that the story of Elisabeth Fritzl, who was imprisoned for 24 years in a cellar by her rapist father, acted as a catalyst for her novel, rather than a template, and she is keen to emphasise that she has no interest in cashing in on people’s appetite for gruesome horror stories. “I knew that by sticking to the child’s-eye perspective there’d be nothing voyeuristic about it,” she says, and there’s a lot of truth to this. I shied away from reading Room for quite a while – not a Sunday afternoon read, I thought – but this is not necessarily so. As Donoghue attests to: “Ma has managed to keep Jack almost oblivious to the sexual side of things – the creaking bed makes him edgy, but lots of other things, green beans, for instance, make him edgier still.”

Indeed, Room is not all about the horrors of captivity. In many ways it is a tale that is largely about a mother’s resourcefulness. Though we see through Jack’s unknowing eyes moments where his mother is fit to burst with despair, Jack himself knows nothing but Room. This is starkly apparent in the way Jack doesn’t use articles. There is only Room, Plant, Bed, Meltedy spoon – as far as he knows there is only what exists in Room, except for the things you can find in the outer-space fantasy world that is ‘in TV’. It’s a fascinating investigation into the adaptability of children – Jack is brought up with a certain worldview and he knows it to be true in the way that we know the world to be true – it’s the place we live and we don’t know anything else.

As Donoghue says, “the real value of telling a freakish story is to illuminate the normal and universal…I would never have written Room if I hadn’t glimpsed a way to make the strangeness of Jack’s Room somehow universal – a sort of microcosm of our world… We all start in a very small place (the womb) and emerge into a bigger one, then again in childhood we gradually move from a narrow social setting to a bewilderingly complex, even international one. So Jack’s journey is everyone’s journey, just speeded up.”

As well her interest in the quasi-normality of Jack’s journey, Donoghue was keen to show the normality, in many ways, of the experience of his mother in bringing him up. In an interview with the Independent she says, “It may sound outrageous, but every parent I know has had moments of feeling as if they’ve been locked in a room with their toddler for years on end. Even 20 minutes of building towers of blocks can feel like a lifetime. I’m not saying that Ma’s experience is every mother’s experience, not at all…But there’s a psychological core that’s the same: the child needs you so much that you don’t fully own yourself anymore.”

Certainly I looked upon Ma with admiration. I don’t have children but I can well imagine that to only have a five-year-old for company would be trying. To be solely responsible for bringing up a happy, intelligent child within the confines of one locked room sounds like a heavy burden and yet Ma takes pains not to plonk Jack in front of the TV all day lest his brains turn to mush. Watching her read him the same couple of books over and over made me shudder and think ‘I would have given up’ but perhaps ‘giving up’ is harder than it sounds. Ma has days when she is ‘Gone’, according to Jack, where she just lies on the bed, barely moving and silent, but these pass and she throws herself back into her mammoth task – helping Jack make new toys out of scraps of rubbish, making him brush his teeth religiously and teaching him endless new words. With the days still coming at them, long and relentless, what else is there for either of them to do but carry on? They must make happiness out of what they have – each other.

Although I have nothing but praise for Donoghue’s superb, original and deeply moving book, I did have a couple of misgivings as I tore hungrily through it. Firstly, I wondered how the book would sustain itself over four hundred pages in a five-year-old’s narrative if its characters were to remain behind the locked door of Room. This worry – I shan’t say much more lest I ruin the book’s excellent heart-banging, adrenaline-pumping moments – proved to be unfounded.

My other reservation, which it seems was also shared by Guardian reviewer Susanna Rustin, was that Jack was a little too adult to be entirely plausible. OK, he is his mother’s 24/7 sole companion and she concentrates hard on giving him an excellent education…but Rustin objects to the fact that “completely missing from the prose is any sense of panic, disorientation, depression, the nameless terror conjured up by a string of associations” that is so common amongst children. I certainly remember feeling frightened of things when I was small. But then, perhaps this is because I am a different person – or perhaps this is because I grew up in a wider world. What need has Jack for real fear in Room? He needn’t be warned of Stranger Danger. He’s not going to get hit by a bus. His world is small, manageable, safe – he even yearns to go back to Room once he has left it, reminding us that happiness and security are altogether subjective ideas.

I take Rustin’s point that, like the darling ‘dungeon tot’ of the tabloids, Felix Fritzl, whose apparent delight in his new sunshine-filled world warmed the hearts of those readers who prefer happy endings, “at times the world according to Jack feels just too charming”. But in the end I find it hard to criticise Donoghue, despite my initial misgivings. Children of five are often pretty adaptable – and not all children of five are the same. Jack is not entirely unmarked by his life in captivity but he has not had the experience his mother has had – she has protected him from much of what she has suffered. I’m also wary that, by insisting that people who have been through extreme situations should be a certain way, we readily fall into the trap of tabloid journalism. Any “attempt to capture and package the meaning” of what Jack and his Ma have been through will always be inauthentic. Their situation is, in many ways, unique and, rather than wondering whether they should be more or less damaged than they appear, it seems more satisfying just to delight in this book. It is such a page-turner, it is so original and when it comes to getting completely lost in a book, Room is superlative.

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We Need to Talk About Kevin – only half the story?

This is a bit of a break from tradition for the Literary Kitty – so I hope you’ll all allow me…I just wanted to give my thoughts on the film version of We Need To Talk About Kevin. I fell in love with this book in February of this year (yeah, I know, I’m so behind the times) and I was pretty keen to get down to the cinema for the film.

So I settled down with my friend Ryan and an oversized bag of pick and mix (because I’m greedy and I can never quite judge how many foam bananas and fizzy peach rings I’ll be able to eat in an hour and a half without feeling sticky-mouthed and sick) to see whether Lynne Ramsey had managed to recreate Lionel Shriver’s masterpiece on the silver screen.

Things started off well, with a haggard-looking Tilda Swinton embodying the post-disaster Eva Katchadourian to perfection and Jasper Newell playing a disturbingly good child Kevin – all creepy, half-smirking stares and an undercurrent of knowing malevolence. I continued to be impressed when Newell changed seamlessly into the teenage Kevin, played by Ezra Miller. Mother and son looked exactly as I had imagined them from the book. Dad Franklin, played by John C. Reilly, was less suave than I’d imagined him in his early days, but hey ho, that’s life.

However, as the film went on my frustrations increased. So much of what was great about the book wasn’t covered by the film. Eva and Franklin’s life before Kevin was swept over in an almost wordless montage that mainly involved Eva dancing in the rain with long hair. I know that films can’t cover everything that books do (which is why watching a film almost always renews my appreciation for the wonders of the novel) but there was something unsatisfactory about the way we hardly got to see Eva before Kevin.

I’d read the book so I felt I already had the inside scoop but I wondered how I would have felt if I hadn’t already read it. Could I have identified with Eva in the same way if I hadn’t known what she lost with the arrival of Kevin? Could I have understood her if I hadn’t been made aware of her deep reluctance to become a mother and the social pressure applied relentlessly to her from Franklin, amongst others? Would I have been as haunted if I hadn’t known what her relationship with Franklin had once been like?

Don’t get me wrong, the film was beautiful to watch. Seeing Eva scraping the red paint from the front of her house day after day was poignant and Swinton played her role impeccably. She can make you feel a world of pain with one tiny, almost imperceptible movement of her face. Likewise, Ezra Miller captured Kevin’s restless malice with little more than a dart of his dark eyes. As a visual spectacle, the film really worked and it captured the essence, I thought, of Shriver’s fantastic book.

But….this wasn’t quite enough. Underneath it all, I still felt like I was connecting with the book’s characters, in their visual form. I still had Shriver’s letters running through my head and I still felt like most of the poignancy came from what I already knew.

I’d be interested to know what someone who hadn’t already read the book thought of the film. Did it feel complete to you? Did you connect fully with the characters or were there unanswered questions for you? Did you wonder why Eva and Franklin ever got together in the first place? Did you wonder what exactly happened in the school gymnasium?

I suppose the issue is that, for me, the devil is in the detail. If you’re like that too, I think you’re best off reading Shriver’s fantastic book, and saving the film as a kind of visual dessert.

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The Age of Absurdity – full of good sense

“In a world that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane relationships and perpetual youth, we can find ourselves tormented by dissatisfaction and anxiety, fearful that everyone is having a better time than we are.” So says Michael Foley, author of The Age of Absurdity. Is it true? Probably. At least for most people some of the time.

Foley delves into the cultural mores of the modern ‘age of entitlement’, reminding us that having strongly-held beliefs about what you deserve is often a recipe for disaster. Teenagers demand respect – and there is a growing idea that everyone deserves respect regardless of personal merit. People feel they deserve promotions, happiness, love, job satisfaction, good health and good luck, especially if they’ve suffered a run of bad luck.

We are surrounded on all sides by advertising – especially the hard sell of the ‘aspirational lifestyle’ – and Foley argues that people are becoming unshakeably convinced by the idea of their own potential. Children these days are increasingly told, by their parents, by their schools, by pop stars and by the media that they can ‘be anything they want to be’. In the modern age, we are constantly told that everything is within our grasp. One might think that this is a positive thing – it’s good to have expectations, right? Well, not according to Foley. He argues that freedom from expectation is actually the very thing that makes a person happy. We can’t have everything we want, so the idea that we should be able to – that we’re entitled to it – fills us with impotence, rage and misery.

“Seduced from the left by the righteousness of entitlement and from the right by the glamour of potential, it is easy to believe that fulfilment is not only a basic right but thoroughly deserved, and that attaining it requires no more thought, effort or patience than an escalator ride to the next level of the shopping centre.” The idea that fulfilment can be effortless is one that Foley scorns wholeheartedly. He derides self-help gurus peddling ‘ten easy steps to happiness’, insisting that obtaining happiness is difficult and involves lots of reflection and practice.

At first glance, it might not seem appealing to think of happiness as difficult to obtain and it might be hard to swallow the idea that nothing is deserved, but on reflection it seems to me to be profoundly liberating. Those who follow the self-help gurus’ 10 simple steps and find that they don’t produce the desired effect may well despair. But Foley urges us to not give up at the first hurdle, and to make the quest for happiness a long-term goal.

As for feeling entitled, does it really bring us anything except arrogance and petulance? If we get what we want we feel it is no more than we should have and if we don’t get it we are aggrieved. Isn’t it better to feel grateful when things go our way and understand that they won’t always?

As well as dealing with contemporary western culture’s general atmosphere of absurdity, Foley devotes specific chapters to the absurdity of work, age and love. The absurdity of work chapter will no doubt resonate with anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment – particularly the bits about away-days for team-bonding. “On an away day there is only the free lunch to look forward to, but even this is depressingly familiar – the standard corporate cold buffet, with the same tasteless sandwich quarters and Asian finger food for exotic effect, and the same fresh-fruit platter with pineapple and melon slices and the two strawberries no one ever has the nerve to eat.” I’ve eyed those same strawberries myself in days gone by.

But I reserve my greatest recommendation for the chapter on the absurdity of love. Foley points out that “in contemporary cities, the couple relationship may be the only source of connection, structure, meaning and enchantment. In traditional societies there were religions to confer meaning and magic rituals to structure the year, communities to offer strong connections and extended families to provide support. Now the poor groaning ‘relationship’ has to provide all of this, to take upon its weakened back the entire burden of living.”

Maybe your relationship isn’t like this – maybe you’ve mastered the art of looking within for happiness, but I’m willing to bet that you know plenty of relationships that are like this. No doubt you know at least one person who has no concept of personal responsibility, who lurches from one romantic disaster to the next, passionately infatuated one minute and vengeful the next. To Foley, “it is astonishing how those with a string of failed relationships rarely accept that they themselves must be at least part of the problem”, and yet such attitudes are common.

Foley points out the absurdity of the fact that, “as the actual relationships have become more like short-term business transactions, the belief in eternal love as an essential prerequisite has grown stronger.” That really resonated with me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying let’s go back to the forties, when you had to stick a marriage out or live with the stigma forever, but it is bizarre that people often expect romantic relationships to be their everything these days, despite the fact that they commit to them less completely and are prepared to give so much less of themselves to the partnership. As Foley neatly says, “The less tolerant the practice, the more demanding the theory.”

I could go on all day about Foley’s fascinating views on the absurdity of love but I shan’t spoil the book for you, especially as Foley explains them with far greater elegance than I would be able to. The last thing I will say is that, whilst this book could have been a grumpy, nit-picking tome that whinges about modern life, it is not. It gives plenty of good advice about how you can live a bit more happily in the modern world by avoiding some of its most common pitfalls.

If nothing else, it offers food for thought on a subject that’s relevant to anyone living in the developed western world… especially if they’ve ever despaired as they sat in their office cubicle or sought a Disney-style happy ending.

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The Other Hand – genuinely spellbinding

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave came to me via Lovely Mum. I would never have bought it myself because the cover is generic and uninspiring and the blurb, which earned a lot of sneers in the publishing world when it came out, starts off by saying “we don’t want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it”. Gimmicky or what?

Thank god Lovely Mum didn’t have similar qualms, because this book is truly special. It is the story of two women: one a Nigerian refugee, one a magazine editor from Surrey. I won’t tell you how their worlds collide – I know, I know, I’m joining forces with the dastardly blurb-writers – but I can’t spoil it. I thought I would insist on it but I find that I can’t.

Instead, I will just tell you to buy the book. Buy it now. It will swallow you up as soon as you begin. You will find yourself impatiently awaiting your journey home. You will lie awake at night thinking about the women. Your eyes will fill with tears at times. You won’t care that you’re in public. You will smirk to yourself at the antics of the five-year-old boy we must call Batman. You will wish you had a pen to mark out the words you never want to forget.

It is hilarious, it is horrifying, it is desperately, desperately sad. It is still haunting me. It is peerless. It opens a window into a dark world whose depths you would otherwise struggle to imagine. It is meticulously researched and lovingly crafted and it will make you itch to do something in the way that even the best and saddest books rarely do.

Buy it. Buy it. Buy it! I won’t tell you again. I haven’t read anything remotely as wonderful as The Other Hand for years, if ever.

Buy this book