Various Pets Alive and Dead – Marina Lewycka

This review was originally published on the excellent LiteraryMinded.  Thanks to Angela Meyer for the opportunity, and the free book.

The title of Various Pets Alive and Dead might make you think it involves lots of cute animal stories and some kind of furry genocide. Instead, it’s a very political novel about the global financial crisis and the failure of the leftist ideals, played out through the intergenerational conflict of a family of hippy-commune escapees. This probably doesn’t sound like the most fertile ground for a comic novel, but its author, Marina Lewycka, milks the politics for as many laughs as possible, and even manages to throw in the odd ill-fated hamster or doomed family of rabbits.

Lewycka’s fourth novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead tells the story of Serge and Clara, and their mother Dora, who, along with her partner Marcus and the other quirky members of their collective, raised her children in an old country house on a healthy diet of free love, socialism and lentils.

About a Boy – Nick Hornby

I tore through About a Boy in a couple of days, even staying up late into the night to finish it, which I haven’t done in ages.  This isn’t to say that it’s the best book I’ve read in the past year, but it is the most readable, largely thanks to its very British sense of humour.  I haven’t read a lot of books whose priority is to be funny, but those that I have, such as The Finkler Question, seem to use the same kind of humour, full of understatement, overstatement and comically frank descriptions.  And like The Finkler Question, About A Boy isn’t just aiming to make you laugh: it also has something to say about some pretty dark themes, and late 20th Century England.

It does this by focusing on the unlikely friendship between Marcus, a socially awkward twelve year old burdened with a chronically depressed mother, and Will, a thirty-six year old man-child who lives a care-free life on the royalties of a Christmas pop-song written by his father.  The two meet at a picnic for single parents: Marcus is there with one of his mum’s friends; Will is there because he has fabricated a son to pick-up single mothers.

Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad

Like all great classic literature, Lord Jim embodies the era in which it was written, while maintaining a timeless, human element.  Some things about it seem outdated: its initially slow pace, its paragraph structure, its debatable racism and colonialism.  But its main theme of romanticism, in all its undeniable attraction and destructiveness, is as relatable today as it would have been when the novel was first serialised over one hundred years ago.

From the novel’s opening chapter, all the major plot points are alluded to.  This establishes the novel’s tendency to tease the reader with the consequences before delving into the causes, an effective technique from both a narrative and thematic point of view.

When we meet him, the titular Jim, a young Englishman, is working as a water clerk, fleeing some ignominy, and destined for some ambiguous glory.  We are given some details of his background: he is the son of a parson whose head was filled with notions of adventure and distinction on the high seas following “a course of light holiday literature”. 

The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson

The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and received glowing reviews from in The Guardian and The New York Times, but if the luke-warm response from my book club and the three star rating on Amazon.com is anything to go by, this book typifies the chasm between critics and the everyday literature reader.

This is not to say that Howard Jacobson’s novel is terrible.  It is funny and well written with some fantastic, witty similes.  But it also self-conscious and trying, and has a central theme which many readers will not engage with.

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

My favourite part of my copy of Frankenstein, a Wordsworth Classics edition, is the Introduction.  Written by Doctor Siv Jansson, it succinctly explains some of the key themes of the novel and how they explore the social anxieties of early 19th Century Europe.  According to Jansson, Frankenstein’s monster (who is never named in the novel, but who I’ll just refer to by his most common pop culture name for ease) represents: the fear of science perverting the natural order; the terrible consequences of defying the Christian God by creating life; and paranoia about a British revolution (this last one was a bit of a reach).  Jansson also explains how Shelley was concerned with “the essential ‘masculinity’ of scientific thought, and the responsibility of the scientist in the aftermath of his experiments”, and how the Monster becomes brutalised because Frankenstein fails to nurture him.

All of which sounds really interesting.  But it’s not.  In fact, just like her protagonist, Shelley has unleashed upon the world a hideous, shambling creation that causes only pain, although in the novel’s case it is the pain of boredom, and overwrought writing.

Kim – Rudyard Kipling

Imperialist, racist, misogynist – Kipling has been called all of them.  And there’s plenty of evidence to support these accusations in Kim, the novel that many consider to be his masterpiece.  But labels oversimplify things, and Kipling’s portrayal of India under the Raj is, like the novel’s protagonist, so wonderfully fractured and complex that it defies easy condemnation.

It’s also easier to forgive an author for subscribing to the worst philosophies of their time when they produce such a fantastic adventure story, full of individual characters and dynamic descriptions.

From Hell – Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Review by Gabriel

To comic book fans, Alan Moore is a superstar.  People who don’t follow the medium may be familiar with his works that have been made into movies, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, The Watchmen, as well as the graphic novel that is the subject of this review, From Hell.  However, even those who saw these movies may be unfamiliar with Moore’s name, as he completely disassociated himself from all of the film adaptions due to their questionable quality or divergence from the source material.

His reputation is well deserved.  He is master of blending sympathetic characters and humour with high concept science fiction and philosophy.  From Hell is one of his greatest achievements, in which he navigates the cliché minefield of the Jack the Ripper mystery to create something original and mesmerising.  He does this by exploring what the Ripper murders, and people’s continued fascination with them, reveal about the society and culture in which they occurred.

Moore’s work can be relied on to challenge readers, and From Hell raises questions about the depiction of violence and its perpetrators.  His partner in crime (all puns intended, especially the bad ones) is Dave Gibbons Eddie Campbell, whose sketchy, murky style perfectly capture the grime of London’s East End at the end of the 19^th Century.

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

review by Gabriel

A Study in Scarlet is the premier Sherlock Holmes adventure, and therefore a pretty influential text in the detective fiction genre.  It’s a hell of a lot of fun and could be held up as an example on how to write sentences, create a sense of place and establish important characters.  However, I assume that Conan Doyle was still perfecting his craft when he wrote it, because there are some poor structural choices that really dampen the excitement of the book.  There are also some thundering clichés, especially surrounding one character that becomes a sinkhole for bad writing.

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

review by Gabriel

The Remains of the Day tells the story of an old English butler’s trip to the country to visit a friend.  It doesn’t sound like the most riveting concept in the history of literature, does it?  Yet Kazuo Ishiguro’s tale of the closeted life of a domestic servant is dazzling for the scope of its observations on humanity and English culture.