Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I am really surprised by the simplicity and transparency of the writing. I expected something much thicker than this, especially since it was written largely as early as 1818, though I consumed the 1831 edition. Yes, disbelief has not only to be suspended, but hung by the neck from the highest branch, and left there. Not only do we have the assembly of human bits, but we also have the being’s own story, which is couched in the same manner as Victor Frankenstein’s memoir, despite the fact that the “thing” claims he has yet to learn language. He does this, and then proceeds to read Paradise Lost, which is just hanging around the rural areas of Switzerland. But overall it is a very rewarding read, with lots of surprises, such as, for instance, that Frankenstein never refers to his creation as a “monster”. And it’s only as a result of the being’s mistreatment and the breaking of his word by Frankenstein that he embarks on his retributions against the family.

Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

A book started with much excitement and anticipation was finished with a whimper of "Why did he bother?"

We have Axl and Beatrice, a devoted elderly couple, ancient Britons who have lived amongst Saxons for almost as long as they can remember, decide to set off to search for a long-lost son who lives they know not where. Somehow, they will find him. Along the way they encounter Sir Gawain of the Green Knight, various young people, several older people and a few religious types. Sword-wielding warriors play their part, as do various ogres, pixies and a dragon. One monster turns out to be a dog.  A dog? With how many heads, how many eyes, and does it live up a donkey's arse?

Sorry to sound cynical, but if this book is really about the loving relation ship between the elderly couple, or indeed something related to the inevitable passing of time, then it is doubly unsuccessful. Rarely have I been so disappointed by a book from an author who can actually write.

Perhaps Isiguro suffered from writer's block, and this was his way of overcoming the problem. His wife, apparently, recommended the first draft for the bin. A woman of taste. Fantasy, it seems to me, is always an excuse for lack of imagination. How many legs shall the beast have? And just how I'll-defined do you want the threat? How many clichés can you take?

It is only my opinion. But it was a true waste of time.

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie is a thoroughly entertaining read. It’s a super-real experience, so vivid and sharp that the focus starts to blur even imagined distinction between the real, the unreal and the surreal. And when everything becomes clear, the process starts again.

We are transported to the sixteenth century and the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who has many concerns. Akbar, indeed, has all the concerns you would expect any self-respecting emperor might have. He agonises, for instance, over being “I” or “We”. Usually, of course, as befits his status, he is “We”. He has grown up as “We”, assumed himself to be “We” and continues to recognise himself as “We”. But recently he has tried “I” and found it lies strangely on the tongue and might even have changed his reflection in the mirror.

On top of this, he worries about his succession, the indolence and ambition of his offspring, the comfort of his harem, the performance of his armies, the future of his fortunes. But Akbar is also the ruler of a vivid imagination. His favourite queen, the one who adds grace to his harem, the one whose every step must be upon polished tiles, exists only in his imagination. He spends more time with her than with any other of his wives, and she probably consumes more of the palace budget than anyone, so perfectly does Akbar desire to provide for her insatiable needs.

So what might Akbar the Great make of a fair-haired young man in a multi-coloured coat who arrives with a story to tell, a claim to make and tricks of the hand that can be explained as illusions? His name is Uccello, bird, when we meet him aboard ship. Then he is Vespucci, a relative of he who had in the recent past sailed to and named the real new world that Columbus had both missed and misinterpreted. 

And later he transforms into Mogor dell' Amore, the mughal of love, or perhaps with a little imagination, the Mughal’s love-child. And more than that, he arrives bearing a letter from the Queen of England, herself a virgin in her own legend. Uccello Mogor Vespucci, whoever he might be, also has a claim. He is a direct descendent of the Mogul royal line by virtue of an almost forgotten princess, Qara Köz, who as an infant was abducted, traded, swapped, travelled, perhaps trammelled until she emerged in Florence as a young woman of enchanting, perhaps bewitching beauty.

Mogor Vespucci Uccello related how he and her apparently permanent, inseparable assistant, her Mirror, captivated the interest of Medici Florence. Suitors queued at the door, including Argalia, if indeed that be his name, a soldier of fortune. The abandoned princess is then adopted by European high society and learns to live by its rules. She has liaisons whose confusion is only doubled by the constant proximity of the Mirror, and offspring springs outward. Now for an emperor who already has the facility of imagining his favourite wife, Vespucci Uccello Mogor’s story fires the mind, re-ignites memory and raises possibility.

He dreams dreams, interprets them, re-interprets what he doesn’t like and then seeks them in reality, only to find them. A conjoined history that spans Asia and Europe unfolds and he, alongside the reader, sees the familiar in a new, conflicting light. But in the end, who is telling stories? Are the stories true? And, if we can imagine, who might judge them to be false? Is this trickery? Or is it claim? The Enchantress Of Florence is an enchanting read. It is provocative, humorous and in places iconoclastic. Fiction and fact become blurred and, even in reality, we can hardly distinguish between them. We create stories to enhance our experience and sometimes we believe them. Sometimes we also deign to believe what is real, but often we cannot agree on a definition of the label. It’s a magical experience, a conjuror’s achievement.

2030 The Lottery by Peter Moore

2030 The Lottery by Peter Moore is a pseudo-Orwellian poke into a possible British future. In contrast to Orwell, who placed his all-powerful state almost forty years into the future, Peter Moore sets his just twenty-three years hence. This suggests that the author believes that many of the changes in Britain’s social and political fabric that he depicts in his book have already taken place. Indeed there are references to a certain war that no-one wanted, changes to the country’s sovereignty status and well reported, now familiar questions concerning political integrity.

But still, the 2030 that the book depicts is considerably further removed from the present that its twenty-odd years of displacement might suggest. The position of the Royal Family has been undermined, parliament has lost all authority and, indeed, credibility, and the country’s interests and assets have been sold off to foreigners. Perhaps it’s not so far-fetched, some might argue. Britain is under the despotic rule of Cromwell. His political style is to brand anyone who is not wholly with him as being utterly against him. This is not a tolerant regime. And those who are against him are ruthlessly pursued.

Wat Tyler and his wife, Pandora (who has a box!) lead an opposition group. Wat is arrested and tortured, and though the authorities have perfected chemical tortures that leave the body apparently unharmed, Cromwell has his captive murdered and Pandora opens the box. A full scale revolt ensues, but only after it starts with a women’s protest. A leading opposition politician takes up the cause and there is a good deal of mayhem.

Throughout Peter Moore uses character names and settings to evoke previous wars, revolts and rebellions. Cromwell sanctions a civil war in response to Wat Tyler’s peasant revolt. But in 2030 The Lottery, it is Bradley tanks and fighter aircraft that engage in locations where pikes, swords and muskets were once employed. The book requires considerable suspension of belief- it is a novel, after all. It will appeal to readers who like to poke a finger of ridicule in the direction of public figures who have lost political trust. 

View this book on amazon 2030 The Lottery

Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World by Michael Elsmere

In Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere creates nothing less than a complete fantasy world of children’s literature. Rufus has been told a story by his father about a diamond of a size beyond anyone’s dreams. It is just waiting to be found, so, having lost his parents, Rufus sets out to do precisely that. 

It is a journey of total imagination, a journey through some quintessential scenes of childhood experience, settings of spectacular invention, surely reminiscent of places that many of us might have been. There is a treasure hunt bound for the Spanish Main, an adventure voyage on board ships from a chivalric, Romantic past.

But when the mission is redirected according to an omen unearthed by a submarine hero, Africa becomes the destination that Rufus and his companion, Jim, must explore. If only they could themselves have read the clues that explained how the under-sea horde was transformed into a diamond mine on land. 

In Rufus, Michael Elsmere has invented a wonderful, likeable character, a young lad with an imagination powerful enough to give ideas life and to do so in the most mundane of surroundings. The author also avoids cliché at all times. There are no platitudes of magic potions that appear just as they are required to do exactly what is needed, convenient shrinking or aggrandizement, and no mere description of scene after scene. 

Throughout Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World, Michael Elsmere offers elegant prose that provides regularly evocative surprises. It provides a quite beautiful vehicle to explore the power of imagination, to re-experience the joy of discovery. OK kids. Rufus is a good lad. He is perhaps about the same age as you. He’s lost his parents and there’s a diamond to be found. There’s a sailing ship, pirates, treasure, gold, shipwrecks, talking birds, submarines and electric eels. There are eggheads who know how to read things that other people can’t even see. Maps are redrawn in people’s pockets and point to new places. 

There are lions, jungles, snakes, beautiful ladies and witches. There are deserts, oceans, seas, mountains, caves, caverns, stones, stalactites and schools. And so Rufus And The Biggest Diamond In The World becomes itself a celebration of the form in which it exists. It is gentle, subtle writing to convey truly exciting, fast-paced fun. And kids, I suspect a few parents, especially those that might be rendered a little tearful by genuine nostalgia, might enjoy reading Rufus themselves. It’s a book that genuinely inhabits multiple levels, a story that will enrapture the young, and a concept that will fascinate the once young.

But then, when you have read Rufus, you will want to read more, because that is what Rufus is about. These imagined worlds are themselves bigger, greater, more vivid and more real just because they are imagined. 

 View this book on amazon Rufus and the Biggest Diamond in the World

A review of The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

I have visited Turkey, but not Istanbul. It’s one of those iconic places that keeps cropping up in travel plans, but then gets overlooked, possibly because its name fits so easily into my thoughts that I convince myself I have already been there. Having just read Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, that illusion will be orders of magnitude stronger. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature and this seems to have spurned new translations of his work, new versions which hopefully can widen his readership in the English-speaking world.

The Black Book is a gigantic work. And, in the way that I suspect most readers might understand the term, there is no plot. Suffice it to say that Galip wakes up one morning and his wife has disappeared. He assumes she has gone off to seek out her first husband, Celal, a well-known newspaper columnist. Galip sets off to find Celal and, he assumes, his wife, but strangely the journalist has also disappeared. As a means to help him track down the two missing people, Galip immerses himself in Celal’s life, his writing and, gradually, his very identity. Effectively he becomes the person he is seeking. He re-reads his past work and discovers unknown things about his own, his wife’s and her former husband’s past. By then, however, we cannot be sure if we are dealing with reminiscences of Celal, Galip’s interpretations of them, Galip’s reworking of them, or, indeed, Galip’s own words presented as if they were those of Celal.

But the plot in The Black Book is almost irrelevant. It’s not a book that one reads to discover what happens. It’s a book that’s replete with flavour, experience and history, and the reader feasts on vast helpings of all three.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul – let’s face it, there is no other city on earth that has been named three times and where, on each occasion, that name has passed into language as an expression of political, strategic, religious and economic pre-eminence. It’s a city that bridges continents, ideologies and faiths. Nowhere else on earth has a greater claim to the very quintessence of humanity than Istanbul. And yet modern Istanbul is a Turkish city, and perhaps its most fascinating aspect is its potential to mirror contemporary debates on religion versus secularism, tradition versus modernity, imperial past versus global present.

The Black Book has thirty-six chapters, each having its own title and prefacing quotation. The form, at least in part, is its content, in that each chapter could be read as if it were an article written by Celal or by Galip impersonating Celal. There is no linear narrative. We experience what inspired the writer and there is no ordering of time or place. But we feel we are in that city. We feel we are living its history, whatever that might be. And we feel we are experiencing contemporary debates on its and its people’s identity. The city is central to everything in the book, with its multiple histories and allegiances mixed into the melting pot of its contemporary form.

Throughout, Galip finds he gradually becomes his quarry, Celal. He trades identities and roles, but never permanently, never for sure. In this way the characters become the city, whose sense of place and multiplicity of identities pervade all, thus mirroring the apparent confusion of its – and humanity’s – complexity. But the people eventually are always welcomed by some aspect of the city’s – and humanity’s – multi-faceted nature.

The Black Book is a work that demands to be re-read, but not because it is in any way a difficult or impenetrable read. I have never been to Istanbul, but like the book, I feel it will be an experience that, once tried, will demand to be re-visited.