March Summary and Plans for April

I like the idea of the Desmond Elliott Prize, as I tend to read a fair bit of debut fiction and think it’s great that there is a prize that both acknowledges and encourages new writers, but I almost never agree with their shortlists or winners! Still, it is one I keep my eye on and it does usually prompt me to try a couple of books each year which I might otherwise have overlooked, so I’ll look forward to seeing what you make of the longlist.

March was a bit of a ho-hum month for me with no real standouts. A few very good books and no terrible ones though so it wasn’t a bad month.

I read a trio of modern ‘classics’:
Joan Lindsay’s ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (1967) I read whilst suffering from a chest infection and I think the high temperatures, sleepless nights and pounding headaches may have affected my reading of it, but it was a weird, otherworldly and rather disjointed book that seemed to veer wildly in tone from murder mystery to farce to a documentary style and I couldn’t make my mind up if I liked it or not.
‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ (1961) was my first Muriel Spark and I liked it enough that I’d try more by her but I wasn’t bowled over by it – the acerbic wit is wonderful, but I’d have preferred some more character development.
Wallace Stegner’s ‘Angle of Repose’ (1971) won the Pulitzer Prize and I feel like a bit of a philistine for not completely loving it – there are aspects of it that are superb but it is also incredibly tedious in its detailing of life lived day by day. The writing though was good enough that I want to read more by Stegner and hope his other novels have a bit more narrative drive.

Two new novels: Tim Pears’ ‘The Light of Morning’ about a British army officer working as a liaison with partisans in WW2 Slovenia is fascinating but is another book that dragged due to its focus on the day-to-day, and where Pears usually writes compelling books with characters you care about, this one was a bit dry – a romantic subplot is there (I think) to pull the reader through but he never really convinced me of the connection between his two characters.
Charlotte Randall’s ‘The Bright Side of My Condition’ is far better and it is a shame it is so far only available in New Zealand – based on the true story of four convicts who escaped Norfolk Island only to be stranded on a tiny and uninhabited island for ten years it is really well written and full of philosophical musings contrasting with the (sometimes brutal) business of survival.

Although I have still to get around to ‘The Orenda’ I did read Joseph Boyden’s first novel, ‘Three Day Road’ in March, about two Cree Indians serving in Belgium and France as snipers during the first world war. The scenes in the trenches are really well done and you feel as though you are there, but it was also nothing I hadn’t read before. The sections set in Canada though are fantastic – there is a chapter about a forest fire that had me with my heart in my mouth. I can’t wait to read his other two novels.
I read lots of short stories too (six collections) which I won’t bore you with.

I don’t really have any plans for April – I’ll probably read Damon Galgut’s new book and Siri Hustvedt’s. I’ll also try and get to another Pulitzer winner as that seems to have become an enjoyable little project for me and I have a few here to be going at (‘Gone with the Wind’, ‘A Death in the Family’, ‘The Caine Mutiny’, ‘Middlesex’, ‘The Known World’…).

Hope you have a great April.