Category: 2010

Categories
2010 Fantasy Novella

Light Boxes – Shane Jones

Five words from the blurb: Flight, banned, ominous, children, honey

I decided to read Light Boxes when David from Follow the Thread named it as one of his favourite reads in 2010. It is certainly an original book, but I can’t decide whether I like it or not.

The problem is that this book pushes the boundary of the novel so far that it almost becomes art. I read for the excitement/emotion of the plot and this book felt as though I was looking at a series of scenes instead of reading a novel.

The book is half the size of a normal paperback and each page briefly describes a new scene. Many of the pages are written in different formats and font sizes. For example, whispers are always written in a small sized font  and SHOUTING IN LARGE ONES. Lists and drawings are also used to illustrate points. The writing is simple, but packed with vivid imagery. I know that some people love these random scenes, but I think I failed to see the symbolism in it all.

Bianca’s ghost appears in the town. She wears red shorts and a white blouse and has long black hair. I watch her buy mint leaves and talk to shop owners about how soon until we will only experience summer. She walks through the streets passing out tulips whose petals have veins that spell out the word July.

The plot is very bizarre, but it is basically an adult fairytale in which an evil character bans the use of flight. The town has been stuck in a perpetual winter for more than 300 days and then the children start to go missing. It was all over very quickly and I was left wondering what the point of it all was. I think I’m just not the kind of person who appreciates art. If you want to spend an hour immersing yourself in a weird fantasy world then this is for you, but it was a bit too experimental for me.

Everyone else seems to love it:

Light Boxes is enchanting, whimsical and rather brutal in some parts. Mad Bibliophile

I could describe the experience of reading Light Boxes as being like witnessing a beautiful mirage, but that wouldn’t be correct, because a mirage is ultimately insubstantial. Follow the Thread

Light Boxes is almost inhumanly hopeful, offering insights both genuine and relevant, and distant echoes of our world in a war fought with futile tactics against a nebulous enemy. The Rumpus

Categories
2010 Chick Lit Other Prizes

The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell

 Winner of 2010 Costa Book Award for Fiction

Five words from the blurb: Soho, birth, motherhood, women, connected.

The Hand That First Held Mine has a dual narrative which follows two women who are separated by 50 years in time, but dealing with many of the same issues. The first thread follows Lexie, a 21-year-old girl, who leaves her 1950s Devon home to start a new life in London. She begins a relationship with a married man and struggles to deal with the problems this causes.

The second thread follows Elina, a Finnish woman who has just given birth to her first baby. The traumatic emergency caesarean affected her and her partner, Ted, deeply. As both struggle to come to terms with the near-death experience they also have to learn to look after their demanding new baby. The writing was vivid and packed with emotion – perfectly describing the turmoil that a new baby brings to a household.

Ted registers again how pale she is, how dark and deep are the circles around her eyes, how thin her limbs look. He is possessed with an urge to apologise – for what he isn’t sure. He scans his mind for something to say, something light and perhaps witty, something to take them out of themselves, to remind them that life is not all like this. But he can’t think of anything and now the baby is rearing back, crying, fidgeting, fists flailing, and Elina is having to open her eyes, sit up again, lift him to her shoulder, rub his back, untangle his hands from her hair and Ted cannot bear it.

I connected with Elina’s thread much more than Lexie’s. I think this is a combination of the fact that I have young children and so can relate to the feelings of a new mother, but also because I have little sympathy for someone who has an affair with a married man. Lexie’s thread felt like a well written piece of chick-lit whilst Elina’s thread had a bit more depth than that.

Both threads come together towards the end of the book, but rather than being impressed by the connection it all felt a bit contrived to me.

The book was easy to read and gripping in places, but I wished that the plot had been a bit more complex or thought-provoking. This book reminded me of  Peripheral Vision, but I felt that The Hand That First Held Mine didn’t have the same complexity or depth. I’m still thinking about the issues of motherhood raised in Peripheral Vision, whilst The Hand That First Held Mine offered no new perspective on the subject.

Overall, this was an entertaining diversion, but I don’t expect to remember much about it in a few months time.

The thoughts of other bloggers:

Every word is perfectly chosen, every sentence is perfectly constructed. Fleur Fisher in her World

…it didn’t pack the same punch for me as After You’d Gone… Leafing Through Life

It’s a vivid story of motherhood that honors the whole woman. The Literate Housewife

Categories
2010

The Spider Truces – Tom Connolly

The Spider Truces is a coming-of-age novel set in rural Kent. That description would normally send me running in the opposite direction, but I was intrigued by the second thread of the book focusing on spiders. I was immediately pleased that I decided to give it a try as in the same way that The Behaviour of Moths (The Sister in the US) taught me about moths, this book proved to be a mine of interesting information about spiders.

Spiders in the bath are usually male house spiders that have fallen in while searching for females. By closing their book lungs and tracheae, they can survive in water for half an hour or more. Even spiders that appear quite dead can suddenly get up and walk when they dry out and open up their breathing systems again.

Unfortunately I found the spider facts so interesting that they started to overshadow the main plot.  I found the story of Ellis, growing up in the 1970s and 80s, too slow and gentle. It was beautifully written and the descriptions were incredibly vivid, but I became frustrated by the level of detail. I just wanted the pace to pick up and I’m afraid it never did.

Ellis and Denny would leave early for the Marsh, setting out when the village was a dark procession of cadaver houses and hollow-eyed windows. At shearing time, they heard the cries of ewes separated from their lambs reverberate across the flatlands and rise to them on the escarpment at Bilsington Monument. In midsummer, they listened to the hum of a light aircraft looping the loop over the Midley ruin. At dusk, Ellis saw smugglers out of the corner of his eye. They sought the eeriness of winter. The beauty of summer. The holiness of it all.

I also felt I was too young to appreciate much of this book. If you grew up in the 1960s or 70s (especially if it was in Kent) then I suspect that you’ll love reminiscing about many of the things mentioned.

I know that a lot of people will love this gentle, meandering story, but I only made it to the end because I loved the spider facts.

Recommended to those who love well-written, descriptive books – especially if you can remember the 1970s!

Categories
2010

Player One by Douglas Coupland

I loved Generation A so was excited about trying Douglas Coupland’s new book. Unfortunately it wasn’t in the same league, but it still had a lot to recommend itself.

Player One is set in an airport and tells the story of five people who become trapped in the cocktail lounge when high oil prices ground all planes and threaten to cause a global catastrophe.

The book started well. We were introduced to each of the characters and they were all entertaining individuals with unique personalities. I was especially pleased to see that one of the characters happened to have Aspergers and that her realistic presence helped the group on several occasions.

The plot was fast paced and readable and the writing was littered with thought-provoking remarks which added to my enjoyment of the book. 

“The thing about being poor is that it takes up all your time.”

Coincidences are, in fact, so rare that it’s almost as if the universe is engineered solely to keep them at bay.

Take my word for it, a day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle – it’s a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong failed to go wrong.

Unfortunately the frequency of this wisdom increased in the second half of the book until all plot became absorbed in an endless barrage of deep thoughts. I felt as though I was being ranted at and that the characters had been developed soley to deliver Coupland’s philosophical messages.

The story ended quite abruptly and I was frustrated by the lack of any real conclusions.

Newspapers have become quite excited by the dictionary-like appendix in which Coupland invents words to describe modern day situations. There was a lot of truth in these pages, but I thought the back of a novel was a strange place to put them – they deserve to be in a book of their own.

Androsolophila: The state of affairs in which a lonely man is romantically desirable while a lonely woman is not.

Overall, I recommend the first half of this book to anyone and the second half to those who love excesses of philosophy.

I read this with Judith from Leeswammes’ Blog. We had very a similar reaction to the book and I encourage you to read her Player One review.

Categories
2010 Science Fiction

Finch – Jeff Vandermeer

I loved The City and the City and was craving a book with a similar style. An Internet search led to Finch, another detective story set in an imaginary universe. Its impressive blurb and Vandermeer’s numerous award nominations led me to request the book from the publishers. Unfortunately this book pushed my tolerance of the bizarre to the limit and I ended up being more than a little confused.

Finch is set in a world dominated by fungus. The ‘gray caps’ are fungi with the ability to walk, but the cities are also covered with networks of mushrooms whose spores have the ability to affect people in numerous evil ways. The central character, Finch, is a detective who is asked to investigate the double murder of a gray cap and a human. The research is very different to that of our world and involves everything from seeing the dreams and lives of others by eating their ‘memory bulbs’ to battling with giant mushrooms. It was all too weird for me. I never really understood the physical laws of the universe and my continual confusion meant that I couldn’t connect with the story.

The writing style also took a long time to get used to. The sentences were often clipped and this gave the text a jumpy feel.

When they looked outside, they’d seen a dome-like haze above the north part of the bay. Green-orange discharge like sunspots. They’d just watched it. Watched it and not known what to say. What to do. Barricaded the house. Spent the rest of the night with weapons within reach.

The pace was fast, but the numerous chase scenes held little interest for me. I wish that the plot had been slower so that I’d have a chance to understand the motivations of the characters a little better.

I also think that I was at a disadvantage by not having read Vandermeer’s two previous books set in the same world. Although all three books are independent I’m sure that a greater knowledge of the surroundings would have led me to appreciate the book far more.

Overall this book was too confusing for me – I need my fictional worlds to comply to more basic principles!

Recommended to anyone who wants to read something very different.

Have you found anything similar to The City and the City?

Categories
2010 Non Fiction

Fordlandia – Greg Grandin

In 1927, Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, bought a 5,000-square-mile area of the Amazon rain forest. He wanted to combat rising rubber costs by creating his own supply and to bring his idealised version of America to a remote area of Brazil. Ford created a small town in the middle of the rain forest. Neat rows of houses were built, along with everything an American family would need to entertain them. Unfortunately golf courses and cinemas were not enough to distract from the dangerous wildlife and diseases that plagued Fordlandia. The battle between Man and nature was constant and it wasn’t long before Ford’s dream of creating a civilized society in the jungle was shattered.

I knew nothing about Ford’s jungle city and was intrigued by a community constructed from scratch. Unfortunately the book was more like a biography of Henry Ford than an insight into life in the jungle and so there were many points when I found this read frustrating.

It was interesting to learn about Ford’s ideas for creating perfect societies. I thought his plan to build cities in long lines, instead of around a dense city centre made a lot of sense and I admired his desire to give everyone high wages and free health care, but I thought there was too much politics in this book. My lack of knowledge of US politicians in the 1930s compounded the problem, but I think that even if I had known who all the people were I would still have become bored by the level of detail.

Most of the country’s prominent liberal internationalists, intellectuals, and religious leaders, like William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, and Louis Brandeis respectfully declined the industrialist’s invitation to join his odyssey. “My heart is with you,” apologized Helen Keller for not being able to make the trip. Jane Addams did accept but fell ill and couldn’t sail. That left Ford with an odd and volatile assortment of lesser-known dissenters, vegetarians, socialists, pacifists and suffragists as companions.

I loved learning about the construction of Fordlandia, but I longed for some personal or emotional insight into the town. The facts were delivered in a cold, clinical way and I wish they had been brought to life by focusing on individuals instead of just general statistics.

By the end of 1929, ninety people had been buried in the company cemetery, sixty-two of them workers and the rest “outsiders who had died on the property.” Most of the deaths were from malnutrition and common disease. But lethal snakebites, from vipers especially, infections from ant, hornet, or vampire bat bites, and, before proper shelters were built, jaguars, which occasionally snatched babies right from their hammocks, all made the plantation especially dangerous during those early years. 

The density of the facts meant that this was a very slow book for me to read. I couldn’t manage more than a few pages at a time and often became bogged down in the detail. This book is very well researched and contains everything you could ever wish to know about Henry Ford, but I hope that someone grabs this idea and creates a wonderful piece of historical fiction from it.