Shantaram – worth its considerable weight in gold

Shantaram is an autobiographical account of author Gregory David Roberts’ experiences as a fugitive in Bombay, after his escape from a brutal Australian prison where he was serving a long sentence for the armed robberies he carried out whilst in the grip of a heroin addiction. The book is both awe-inspiring and long. Very long. In fact, the only other book I’ve ever read on the same epic scale was War and Peace.

You might think that there’s not much comparison, except in length, and on subject matter I’d agree: the events leading up to the French invasion of Russia seen through the eyes of five aristocratic families versus the events following the escape of a bank robber to India. But bear with me…. these books share more than length, perhaps because of their length. Like War and Peace, Shantaram weaves together the stories of so many different lives that intersect and transform over time, buffeted as they are by fate and circumstance. True, War and Peace spans a far longer period, but like Shantaram it is a detailed snapshot of place – Roberts’ Bombay is as lovingly drawn as Tolstoy’s Russia – and the journeys of the individuals in each book are hazardous and full of drama.

Roberts’ life has been, in many respects, stranger than fiction. In fact, if I’d read this as a novel I would probably have scoffed a lot more. For a start, Roberts comes across as pretty much the hardest man in the world. I lost count of the number of brutal fights he became involved in, and though he came off badly sometimes he never came off the worst. Perhaps I only say this because I am a little girl with soft, unblemished skin, who has led a charmed life but I can’t imagine running headlong into fights the way the author does – he makes Bruce Willis look like a pussy.
But Roberts is not just a hard man. He’s also a deeply sensitive soul who sets up a free medical clinic in a Bombay slum, rescues damsels in distress (even when said damsels are deeply unsavoury characters), smuggles dancing bears across borders when it’s required….the list of his heroic deeds is endless. If you had a friend like Gregory David Roberts (and I doubt many people do) you would know exactly who to call first in any crisis.

Now you might think that this superman sounds dubious, boastful or even full of shit – but you wouldn’t feel like that if you’d read Shantaram. I have. I’ve been living with this book for months. I was reading it when I was on a plane in heavy turbulence and I thought to myself, come on Literary Kitty, get a grip, your chances of dying in the next hour are miniscule compared to his, and he’s keeping cool – no one’s even trying to gun you down.

But I digress – what I was trying to say was that, despite him being as hard as nails, Roberts’ prose is as beautiful as poetry and full of the wisdom of experience. So many times when I was reading this book I wished I had had a pen so I could underline a phrase here or there and remember it. Had I done so there would have been hundreds of quotes. As it is, there is just one, marked with a star drawn in liquid eyeliner (messy – I don’t recommend it) where he says “We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die”. Haunting words from a man with quite a past.

Looking back on Shantaram, now I’ve finally returned my dog-eared, tea-stained, water-rippled copy to the shelf, I feel the book had everything – action, wisdom, beauty, laughs, sadness…I could go on. Just like with War and Peace (yeah, that again), you find yourself becoming attached to certain characters – you’ve been reading about them for long enough – and suddenly their lives take an unexpected turn and you’re shocked, horrified – just as you would have been if you’d known them. Roberts is very skilled at drawing his friends and acquaintances – he’s clearly someone who loves people and is fascinated by them and, as such, he takes everything in.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about what happens in the book because I do think that a lot of the excitement hinges on the twists and turns of fate in it. I will say that I loved Prabaker, the cheeky, earnest guide who becomes Roberts’ closest ally, and I never warmed to Karla, his complicated, mysterious love interest. As for Roberts himself, in his various incarnations as Linbaba, Shantaram and Gilbert Parker, I admired him from afar – never entirely feeling that I understood him (I’ll never be a knife-wielding, down-for-anything outlaw with a heart of gold) but always finding truth in his words.

For me, the key feature of this book was how often a phrase or paragraph made me pause, look up and think “that’s so true, even though I’ve never thought to or known how to articulate it”. Would I have wanted to live his life? No. Picking lice from my skin in filthy prisons, being beaten, stabbed, betrayed, seeing my friends die in violent and tragic ways, becoming a fugitive and leaving my entire life, including my child, behind, trading black market medicine with disease-ravaged lepers, starving in a freezing cave in Afghanistan, living in a Bombay slum during a cholera epidemic – none of those appeal to me. I don’t even like to watch wounds being stitched up on TV, never mind having to stitch them up myself on a mountainside with bullets flying all around.

But did I read this account of Roberts’ life – hell, not even that, just a short portion of his life – and think: god, I’m boring? Undoubtedly. If ever there was a man whose life deserved to be published in memoir form, Gregory David Roberts is that man.

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Gold – with slight tarnish

Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand was my favourite book last year, so I was incredibly excited to get hold of his new novel, Gold, which follows the fortunes of three Olympians preparing for London 2012. There is Zoe, the beautiful but troubled cycling fanatic; Kate, who is sweet and good-hearted but nevertheless Zoe’s biggest competition; and Jack, the happy go-lucky boy racer who is married to Kate, though Zoe has come between them more than once during their relationship. The final piece to the puzzle is Sophie, Jack and Kate’s Star Wars obsessed daughter who, as the Olympics approaches, is battling with leukaemia.  When the rules of the Olympics are changed (as they were in real life, so that only one competitor from each country can compete in certain events) Kate and Zoe can no longer race each other to the gold as they’ve long expected to and their lives are turned upside down.

Cleave says at the beginning of Gold: “the way you [the readers] talked about my last book gave me the licence to push myself even harder with the next one. You showed me that there are intelligent, warm-blooded, curious readers out there who I can write up to.” I was therefore hoping for something hard-hitting and engrossing – but on that note, I was pretty disappointed. I hate to say this as I wanted so much to love this book – but I have to. The characters veered off into cliché far too often for my liking. Zoe was the stereotypical troubled but talented tearaway – with the ubiquitous tragic event in her past making her who she is today. Kate is a saint, bland and self-effacing, and Jack is just a general lovely dad type. None of them really grabbed me and neither did the story – at least not in the way The Other Hand did.

To be fair to Gold, it was still very good. Cleave’s style is accessible and I think his books will always be readable and entertaining. He got me really excited about the Olympics and gave me a real depth of appreciation for what the athletes (and cyclists in particular) go through in the attempt to achieve their dreams. However, as much as I enjoyed the atmosphere Cleave creates in Gold, and as much as it did become a page turner when the agonising choices kicked in and disaster began to loom large over the athletes’ (and sick Sophie’s) lives, I just didn’t feel like the story had the same depth as The Other Hand. There are so many Zoes out there in the world of fiction that the hard-girl-hiding-private-pain thing feels a bit obvious and I didn’t think she was really that three-dimensional.

No doubt if I didn’t have such high expectations I would have enjoyed this book more, although I wouldn’t have been blown away. The author has praised his publisher for giving him the three years it took to write this book, saying “kudos to them for that, because it takes guts and conviction to resist the commercial pressure to bang out half-baked books.” And it does indeed, but I fear that this approach doesn’t show in Gold. Rather than using the platform created by The Other Hand to do something outrageous, Cleave seems to have gone for a basic, safe crowd-pleaser. It would be hard to hate Gold but it’s hard to fall in love with it too. It was a great read for the Olympics and a good general read but I expected so much more from my new favourite author. Maybe next time.

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The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. – an examination of the secret soul

I chose The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. because I fancied an easy beach-style read. Nichole Bernier’s debut novel concerns two families, the Martins and the Spensers, in the wake of Mrs Elizabeth’s Martin’s tragic plane-crash death just before the 9/11 disaster. In her will, Elizabeth has requested that her trunk of journals go to her friend Kate Spenser in the event of her demise and the book opens with Kate dutifully visiting Elizabeth’s widower, Dave, to collect the trunk.

Just before Kate leaves, Dave mentions that Elizabeth left her most recent diary on the nightstand before she left to catch her plane, and his reading of it suggested she was flying, not to an art retreat as she told them both, but to meet a man called Michael. The suggestion that Elizabeth was having an affair hangs heavy in the air but Kate finds the prospect of such a betrayal impossible to comprehend. Surely not Elizabeth, doting super-mum and cheerful, considerate housewife – the all-baking, all-loving leader of the playgroup who gently organised the lives of everyone around her – including Kate. But when Kate begins to delve into the diaries, much to the resentment of Dave Martin and the frustration of her husband, Chris, who rather thinks she should mind her own business, she finds that there was more to Elizabeth than she ever expected and the diaries open up all sorts of questions about her own life and what it means to truly know someone and be known in return.

Although I chose this book on its beach-read potential merit, it actually had a lot more depth than I had expected. The characters were authentic and sensitively drawn, the writing was elegant and emotive and the story was a real page-turner. If you are nosy like me and you love the thought of poking around in someone’s diary but have enough sense not to go poking around in the private affairs of people you actually know, then this book is for you.

Bernier covers the full range of emotions here and she writes intelligently about the big topics – intimacy, love, fear, death – and the nuances of human interaction. There are twists, turns, and moments where you don’t know which way the book will go; I found it hard not to be drawn in to the world of the diaries.

Bernier’s novel inhabits the world of secrecy that exists inside everyone and explores the idea that everyone has a private mental landscape and things they don’t care to share, or that they’re afraid to say out loud. A fascinating examination of the difference between the secret soul and the public facade, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. is much more than just an easy, beach-friendly read, and Nichole Bernier is an author well worth watching out for.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – leading us all by example

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is the story of a retired man trapped in a loveless marriage, estranged from his son and, it seems, from the world around him. He makes a break with his assumed destiny when he receives a letter from his old friend and colleague, Queenie Hennessey. She is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-on-Tweed and Harold resolves to send her a letter, but when he reaches the postbox, he can’t bring himself to post it; instead he carries on walking.

Harold is not equipped to walk to Berwick-on-Tweed from his home in Devon, of all places. He is wearing yachting shoes and has left his mobile phone at home. When he phones his wife, Maureen, to tell her of his plan, her reply is her usual, clipped ‘I think not.’ She reminds him that he is the sort of man who only walks to and from the car but, though he knows this to be true, Harold declines to return home. He has phoned the hospice and informed the staff that Queenie Hennessey must wait, that she must live, until he arrives.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a gentle book, in the most best sense of the word. It is not predicated on knife’s-edge action or shocking revelations (although there  are moments of both in the story); it is the tale of a man who changes his life, not in a moment but by putting one foot in front of the other and plodding towards an unexpected, unplannned future.

It’s essentially about an ordinary person moved to do an extroardinary thing. It’s about the people he meets along the way and what he discovers about himself. But if this makes the book sound formulaic then I’m doing it an injustice. It’s a lovely, original book with real, flawed, loveable characters. It’s heartwarming without descending into mush and I found it genuinely quite inspiring. Harold got under my skin, I suppose you could say. Sometimes now, when I feel like I really can’t be bothered to do something, I think of Harold in his yachting shoes, with his angry blisters and the shooting pains in his leg, with all the odds of age and previous character stacked against him, with no moral support, just a cold ‘I think not’, and I am reminded of the benefits of not looking too far ahead, of just putting one foot in front of the other and moving, however slowly, towards your goal, daft though it might seem at times.

You might think it sounds like I’m going soft in the head but I dare you to finish this book and still feel cynical. I dare you not to be charmed by lovely old Harold Fry and his unlikely cross-country adventure.

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Ursula, Under – its ups and its downs

Ursula, Under is the story of Ursula Wong, a young, half-Chinese, half-Finnish child who falls down an abandoned mine in the woods. As her distraught parents begin a mine-side vigil and the rescue teams pour in, Hill takes us back, way back, into Ursula’s family history. She is the last in her family line and we learn all about her rich history before we learn her fate.

I’m going to start by admitting, right now, that I’ve never been interested in genealogy. I’ve always been a bit mystified by those programs where people break down and weep upon discovering that their great-great-great-aunt was a geisha/criminal/street-sweeper. I find history interesting – especially the human side of it, but I don’t feel more interested in someone’s long-forgotten story if they share a bit of common blood with me. As far as that goes, I’d only be interested one generation back from a relative I actually knew in life. A great-grandmother – ok – let me enrich my understanding of my grandmother – but go back more than that and they’re a bunch of complete strangers! Ah well, that’s just me. If you do have an interest in that kind of connection you will probably take to this book a lot more readily than I did.

On the upside, Ingrid Hill’s writing is beautiful – she reminds me a lot of Pearl Buck – her style is very rich and very descriptive, even down to someone’s ‘spatulate’ fingernails. I like a good made-up word if it conjures something vivid and Hill does a lot of this – she has a true talent with the English language, which makes for a very picturesque read.

However, when it came to the book’s plot, there was something a little irritating about the way all these ancestors kept popping up out of nowhere – a Chinese alchemist, a Finnish foundling turned queen’s playmate turned exiled leper, a Jesuit tutor playing sperm donor to a disabled Chinese princess – there was something a little overwrought about the whole thing. On top of that, there was so much going on in every vignette that the book felt quite choppy.

No sooner had you gotten into one of the stories but you were whisked off elsewhere by Hill, perhaps to one of the less interesting cameos. I wanted to know about Ursula down the mine and, frankly, I got a bit peeved that the author kept trying to distract me with a load of shiny past-baubles! I guess it comes back to my distaste for the genealogy craze: even if Ursula has a Chinese alchemist in her history, what actual difference does that make? I can take an interest in her life on its own and I can take an interest in her ancestors’ lives individually, but the fact that they have a vague DNA connection doesn’t really make the story hang together – not for me anyway.

One thing I really did like, however, was Hill taking up the position of an omnipotent god and informing us what would have happened if this father had lived, or this accident hadn’t happened. Looking into what almost was really appealed to me. After all, history already gives us what was – authors are the only ones who can give us what might have otherwise been.

All in all, there are plenty of good things to say about this book. It’s beautifully written, it’s a rich tapestry of painstaking research and it has its compelling characters – especially in the more modern sections – but did I savour every page of it? I can’t say I did.

There’s something of The Children’s Book in Ursula, Under – in its epic scope and feel. If you loved The Children’s Book you will probably like this…but if you only read one, there’s no contest. Byatt’s epic weaves the stories of interconnected families and generations together, whereas Hill’s gives you one family’s selected history in fairly random stop-start chunks. I personally think that, given her considerable talents, Ingrid Hill could have done better.

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The Quiddity of Will Self – curiouser and curiouser

I’m going to preface this review by saying that I’ve never read any Will Self. To me he’s always just been a media personality with rather furious looking eyebrows. I once read an article about him, though, in which he described how and where he writes. Answer? In a very nice room and on a typewriter. The luscious literary study made me feel jealous that I don’t even have a desk and the typewriter business made me feel rather sorry for the junior staff at his publisher. I bet they curse his name when they’re typing up his manuscript! But I digress.

I plan to give his books a go now, after reading Sam Mills’ twisted homage to him – How The Dead Live will probably be my first port of call. The idea of the dead just moving to a different part of London appeals to me. It’s original.

I suppose originality is what drew Sam Mills to Will Self, and it’s what, in turn, will draw readers to The Quiddity of Will Self. It’s a sort of meta-novel with so many layers and so many worlds wrapped up within it, it makes your head spin. Described as quirky and highly original on its jacket, it certainly lives up to that promise. I’ve read a lot of books and I’d be stumped if I was forced to compare it to anything else.

Mills quickly draws you in to a shadowy world and leaves you unsettled as the parameters of reality within her narrative shift constantly. It’s hard to tell, a lot of the time in this book, who is mad and dangerous and who is the victim of a bigger, more sinister conspiracy. You’re often left wondering whether you’ve bought into the fantasy version of events – whether you’re stumbling around in a dream world, not quite grasping the truth. In that sense, you share her characters preoccupations.

At the same time, Mills offers you a vision of a future (in 2049) that feels unnervingly possible, where sesquipedalians are being wiped out and vocabulary has been halved. This, Mr Literary Kitty tells me when I settle down to watch The Only Way Is Essex, is the sort of future I’m helping to create. (I try to argue that being an editor cancels that out but he never looks convinced.)

Anyway, Sam Mills has gone some way to convincing me that Will Self is not a curmudgeonly luddite but a real lover of the English language. Mills herself, it seems, is another disciple. There are surprises lurking in every corner in this book, and among the best are the little nuggets of language I’ve never come across before – the concepts of quiddity (whatness) and hacceity (thisness), for example.

So if you’re looking for something to get your teeth into, or a book to push you out of your comfort zone, give this dark and refreshingly different tale a try.

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Mad Women – Peggy Olson eat your heart out!

When my friend at Transworld tweeted about Jane Maas’ exciting memoir about the Mad Men-esque world of advertising in the sixties, I knew it would be right up my street so she kindly sent me a review copy. It skipped my to-be-read queue and I started it pretty much straight away, hoping it would be full of salacious tales and amusing anecdotes. Was I right? Well, it was a little bit short on salacious tales – Jane Maas is still a renowned figure in the world of advertising and I guess old habits die hard – no one gets to the top in the advertising (or any other) game by tattling on the people who made them their money. As the Telegraph wryly notes: “She [Maas] must be tougher than she writes herself, but this is advertising.”

Maas even admits that her 1986 book Adventures of an Advertising Woman was largely a piece of advertising in itself and concedes that she glossed over the bad jobs, the bad clients – sometimes to the point of downright lying. So how do we know she’s not doing the same thing from a different angle this time? The answer is that we don’t – nor do we ever with memoirs – but my impression was that Jane Maas was in more of a position to be frank this time. On some topics and on some people she is refreshingly forthright. And if she’s still close-lipped about some things, who can blame her? She’s still very much a woman in a man’s world, as she says at the end of the book when she asks us how much has really changed for working women, especially those with families. Not a lot, seems to be her answer. We still have a long way to go – and I’m sure a lot of modern working women would agree with that.

Mad Men fans will no doubt be curious about the woman described on her book’s jacket as “a real life Peggy Olson” but how similar are they, really? Peggy is lot more acid than Jane, who seems diplomatic and warm throughout; and Jane is certainly more conventional (no jettisoned illegitimate babies in her closet – at least as far as we know). If nothing else, Mad Women is a portrait of a woman who is professional to her core. Without a hint of self-pity she reminds us that in those days if you cried, you did so alone in the privacy of your laundry room and never spoke of it to anyone – even those women in a similar position. Then, even more than now, it did not do for women, already considered the feebler sex, to show weakness.

Despite the praise Maas heaps on her rather lovely-sounding and modern-seeming husband, she doesn’t delve much into her personal life unless it’s necessary to illustrate something professional. So the book gives us the life of Jane Maas the ad-woman but we only ever catch a glimpse of Jane Maas the just-woman. But then Jane Maas is from another era, when there was little space in the life of that rare bird: the working woman, especially if she was also a wife and mother, for a private internal life. Maas is quite frank when talking about this – after career, husband and children (in that order) there simply wasn’t time left for much else.

It fascinated me that Maas was so matter-of-fact about admitting that she may not have been the best mother or given her children enough of her time – as much because she seemed to have no regrets about it as anything else. I’m not saying that being a disinterested mother is to be applauded but it’s telling that a man who spends his life in the office is still regarded as a hard-working provider when his wife, if her career is equivalent is still (and I’m not talking about the sixties now) considered suspect – selfish, hard, a traitor to the mothering sex. (The Daily Mail does a fine line in insipid stories with titles like ‘Beware the Pot-Noodle Mums’.)

In her understated way, Maas is brilliant at illustrating these double standards. She amusingly recalls a beaded curtain she once put up at her office door to echo the creative approaches of her male colleagues at the time… and the horror with which it was greeted by a male visitor who suggested it looked like the entrance to a brothel (Maas quickly took the offending item down).

Other amusing anecdotes (the book was right on the money in this respect) included the delightful retelling of Maas’ experience of working with Roald Dahl and his wife. The man is a literary legend (Matilda was probably the greatest book I ever read as a child – and I read a lot of books) but Maas offers a rare personal slight here: “Roald is a shit” she tells us (although not without explaining why).

Mad Women is full of interesting little snapshots of life in the sixties – Maas recalls being requested for jury service and finding out that women didn’t even have to present a case to be exempt – you could simply tick a box that said ‘because I am a woman’. To someone like me who was born in the mid-eighties it seems shocking but Maas has a much more pragmatic attitude to the whole situation. Like many other women of her generation, she often remarks with a shrug that ‘that’s just the way things were’. Indeed they were – but far be it from me to suggest that Maas and her peers simply stood by and accepted it. (We’re talking about the first woman to ever run her own advertising agency here!) They simply shared a sense that women would only be able to push themselves forward with action, not complaint.

Maas accepts a furniture-mover telling her crossly to let her boss decide where to put the desk in her new office (even though she is the new company president) without so much as batting an eyelid – because that is still the world she lives in. Of course, however right she may be (and I think she is) about women still having a huge uphill battle in the workplace as well as in the domestic arena – it is not lost on me that this is not the world I have to live in. Plenty of people still think that women are not the business equal of men, but they are no longer allowed to say it aloud without potential consequences. It may not be a giant leap, but it is certainly a step forward. And without women like Jane Maas leading the way, gritting their teeth against patronising comments and hiding their tears so as not to be classed as ‘hysterical women’ – would we be so far along today? Somehow I doubt it.

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