Bring up the Bodies: A Review

And in the final of my reviews of Man Booker longlisted novels, I turn to:

 

Hilary Mantel’s latest, Bring up the Bodies, needs little introduction.  It is the second part of her life of Thomas Cromwell, following on from the 2009 winner of the Man Booker, Wolf Hall.  To say that this novel was impatiently awaited by her many, many fans would be an understatement.  They even did an hour long TV special, with an extended interview with Mantel, and they rarely do that on TV these days.  Writers just aren’t interesting enough (apparently).  It is here that I must admit to being a late convert to Mantel’s fiction.  I read about a third of Wolf Hall in 2009 and found it unbearable.  I couldn’t warm to Cromwell, to the decision to present everything in the first person present.  In short, I found the novel a chore.

When it was announced last year that Wolf Hall would now have two sequels, and not just the one that Mantel had originally planned I thought, rather disingenuously, that she was simply cashing in on her success.  (And why not?  Novelists these days rarely enjoy great success, and offer suffer in penury.)  When Bring up the Bodies was longlisted I thought, again rather disingenuously, the Booker judges are just bowing to popular demand that the novel be included.  When, early on, she was announced by the bookies as the favourite to win, it did nothing to allay my doubts.  That I decided I had to read all twelve books on the longlist, I left Mantel to the end.  To read Bring up the Bodies would mean to read – and this time finish – a novel I didn’t enjoy in 2009.  So reluctantly I picked up Wolf Hall and started to read…

Never have I made such a volte-face.  Starting Wolf Hall again, it was like I was reading a different novel to the one I remembered.  Mantel’s study of Thomas Cromwell is majestic in is power and reach, psychological true, and it brings sixteenth century Britain to living, breathing life.

Bring Up the Bodies continues the life story of Cromwell with Anne Boleyn and the beginning of the kings relationship with Jane Seymour, whom he will meet at Wolf Hall in 1536.  The real strength of Mantel’s imagining is to make the familiar seem strange again, and to make us forget we know how this story is going to end.  We all know Anne Boleyn is to be beheaded, but what Mantel does is show us how this came to be, to understand it in the context of its day. 

No matter how majestic Bring up the Bodies is, I think full judgement on Mantel’s work cannot be truly made until she has finished the last volume in her series, which she plans to do with The Mirror and the Light.  As a work in progress it is superlative. 

Will it win the Booker?

If it does, I think it will be the first sequel to do so.  It is good enough to.  It is certainly deserving of a place on the shortlist.  Whether it takes the top spot is going to be a tough call.

The Garden of Evening Mists: A Review

In the penultimate of my reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:

 

Tan Twan Eng came to prominence with his 2007 debut novel, The Gift of Rain.  That novel received a large amount of critical praise and saw him longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (won eventually by Anne Enright’s The Gathering).  His latest novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, has seen him again longlisted for the Prize (alongside fellow contender in 2007, Nicola Barker).  That his two novels have both been longlisted for Britain’s most prestigious literary prize speaks volumes about his talents.

From the opening line - “On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” – Twan Eng’s novel announces its author’s control of image, scene and story.  Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling has retired from her post in Kuala Lumpur for reasons unknown (to the reader and to the other characters), but it soon becomes clear she is suffering from a neurological condition that will see her lose all ability to remember a thing.  So she returns to the gardens high in the Cameron Highlands where once she met the “gardener of the Emperor of Japan”, Nakamura Aritomo.  Aritomo, his relationship with the young judge Teoh Yun Ling, and the upheavals of Malaysia after the Second World War form the spine of the novel, as the judge seeks to craft a memorial garden to her sister who died in a Japanese internment camp.

As the brief synopsis above makes clear, Twan Eng’s novel is a deep novel, about history, memory, art, the relationship with nature and geography.  British imperial rule is discussed, there are connections with South Africa and Japan; in a country suffering major trauma, we see the first seeds of globalisation.  All of this together sometimes overwhelms the novel – it is almost like there is too much being packed in.  Massacres in villages pass by like images from another war and seem to have no impact upon the leads, but they are happening on their doorstep.  All of this, as well, suggests a fast-paced novel – something like Maugham may have written, and is indeed invoked in the novel – but Twan Eng is more interested in the poetry of a scene, the precise wording to evoke supposed depth.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it drags the novel to glacial speed.

That said, The Garden of Evening Mists is not a poor novel.  It is a very good one, and Tan Twan Eng remains a stylist of the highest order.  I simply think that in this novel he has over-extended himself.  I think a novel with a closer gaze – on the relationship between the judge and the gardener, between nature, memory and respect – would have deepened what is already there in his novel, sometimes struggling to break free of the shackles of over-plotting.

Will it win the Booker?

The quality of Twan Eng’s prose certainly deserves to be recognised.  It strikes me – as it does with fellow long-list entrant and second novelist, Ned Beauman – that there are greater novels ahead.  Both their first novels saw them writing the thing they had always wanted to, their second novels have seen them over-extending themselves for portentousness, and their third should see them finding a deeper focus.  That The Garden of Evening Mists is not an entirely successful venture will, I think, see it remain as a longlisted novel – but I suspect he will appear again in later years, and is certainly a novelist I could see winning the big prize in a few novels time.

Skios: A Review

In another of the reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:

Michael Frayn has nothing left to prove.  Already an award-winning playwright and novelist, he won over the critics many years ago.  He is well known for his farces – the play Noises Off, his 1999 novel Headlong, for instance – and Skios doesn’t do anything to change this reputation.  This is a farce of basest kind, and all the better for it. 

The plot of Skios is tough to summarise: let’s just say that two men arrive on the Greek island of Skios, one for a date, the other to give a talk, and through a simple act of misrepresentation by one, they end up switching lives.  I believe Frayn has gone on record as saying he wanted to see if a theatrical farce could work on the page, as a novel – and this is the best description of how Skios works.  It is a theatrical farce that would work really well with actors to bring it all to life.  In fact, as I read, I kept picturing the stage (and the screen, as this could work very well as a film).  That is not to say that it reads like a film treatment, which some novels these days certainly do, but that certain trappings that you would accept on stage don’t work as well on the page. 

All of the above sounds like major criticism of the novel.  It is, but this is not to say that for the majority of its length, Skios is actually very funny.  It’s base – there are national stereotypes, it is crude, and it becomes overly complicated in the final act – but Michael Frayn does pull off (just about) the crude theatrical farce as novel.  It does, however, fall apart in the final few chapters.  It has the problem that all farces have – how to resolve all the problems created in a satisfying manner.  Frayn brings all the storylines towards collision, and then suggests what is going to happen and then has something else happen entirely.  Events that have had no real meaning in the novel take on significance and it becomes distinctly unsatisfying.  To me it was a real misfire of an ending that undid a lot of the good work that had come before it.

Skios is not a novel you are ever going to read more than once: it is all surface sheen and no true depth, and it is best read in one sitting (I gulped it down in three hours), but for entertainment it is a good laugh, if overly slight.

Will it win the Booker?

Its appearance on the Man Booker longlist does seem more like a gratuity to Frayn: he’s not yet won the Booker, and he probably should have done so for Headlong (where he had the misfortune to come up against JM Coetzee firing on all cylinders with Disgrace), and it has been ten years since his last novel.  Seniority in his field could see him put through to the shortlist, but Skios is not his best novel, not by a longshot, and so this might see him getting culled. 

Philida: A Review

In my reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:

 

André Brink’s latest novel, Philida, seems very personal.  It tells the story of a slave woman, Philida, in the years and months before the emancipation of the slaves hits South Africa, in 1834.  She is indentured to the Brink family, and she has been in a sexual relationship with the son, François, and has four children by him.  Philida has gone to the magistrate to make a complaint against François: he promised her freedom and is now reneging on the deal.  But the Brink family are on the verge of bankruptcy, and nobody is buying slaves, and they are working less efficiently now they know that freedom is coming.  The lives of everybody involved in this story are about to change – the whole world is about to change.

The opening of Brink’s novel marks Philida out as a unique and forthright young woman.  It takes courage to speak to a magistrate about promises broken, especially when you are a slave and the person you are speaking out against is your master and his family.  Brink presents Phlida through a first person narration that is chock-full of lyrical language, spoken in local patois at times, and further presents a woman who, given the chance, could become somebody powerful.  It is not just Philida’s side of the story we hear, however.  Brink gives voice to the slave masters.  This is where I think the true power of Brink’s novel lies: it is easy to make us feel sympathy for a woman like Philida, and to endear her to us,  but to make men who believe in slavery, and think nothing of beating their charges, sympathetic to the reader is a real challenge – and Brink pulls it off.  You might not like François Brink and his actions, but you can understand them and him.

In a lengthy acknowledgement at the end of the book, André Brink confirms what we have suspected: that this story is the true story of his ancestors, albeit fictionalised from the point where documentary evidence ceases.  Given that it is his forefathers story, one might be given to thinking that Brink has coloured his tale positively, but it is important to note he does not shy away from the true horror of slavery.  We hear of brutal sexual assaults, mothers that kill their children to save them the fate of slavery, of beatings and cruelty, but this is not a harsh novel.  It is a story beautifully told, one full of resilience and courage amongst the brutality, in voice that is powerful and clear.  Brink conjures up South Africa in the 1830s with distinct clarity.  It is a haunting novel fully deserving of the praise levelled upon it.  It is no surprise it has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Will it win the Booker?

The subject matter is right up Booker’s street.  It is well-written, emotional, engaging and true.  It is a novel that can be read a number of times, there are such depths to it.  I think it would be a surprise if it fell from the short-list, and I think it could be one of the big contenders to win the top-spot.  I was thoroughly won over by Brink’s novel.