Some short (and often negative) book reviews

As I have repeatedly said, I'm a great believer in the useful book review. Please consider these reviews in that spirit.

Shy, Max Porter

I'm a fan of Max Porter. I'd say a big fan: I thought Grief is the Thing with Feathers was amazing and I loved Lanny too. But I'm sorry to say that Shy is only for the Porter completists. It's a Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem-England type thing, with Porter-esque quirks. Fine, but you may well have better uses for your time. 

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer

The title story is quite good, probably worth your time, but that one's head and shoulders better than the other ones in the collection, a surprising number of which feature demons. (Surprising to me, anyway, given that I was expecting charming, anecdote-ish stories of the old shtetls.)

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

God gives burdens, also shoulders, as Gimpel says. One of my happily-shouldered burdens is to review all of Smith's work (see this blog, passim). I would describe The Fraud as a careful book: it's entertaining and interesting enough, light and readable, but it lacks something of the zip and energy - the sheer aliveness - of her best work. The pros include her imaginative sympathy for different people, always one of her strengths: in this book, it's the second Mrs Ainsworth who stands out in this regard, as Smith can't help but turn someone we might laugh at into a real person. The cons include the sex life of the main character, which seems under-motivated, to my (male) mind. I described The Autograph Man as rather indulgent of the literary male: perhaps The Fraud is in part an attempt to redress the balance, although even in laughing at the various literary male, Smith can't help seeing something of value to him.

Babel, RF Kuang
Prepare for a slightly longer review here.

Babel is, in many ways, one of the worst books I have ever read. And it surely must be one of the worst books to get a glowing review in the British broadsheet press and to win multiple prizes. Don't worry - I'll get to the 'buts' in a bit, but I can't let you loose on a book set in a (slightly) alternative reality Oxford of the 1830s without warning you that it is absolutely chocka with Americanisms and anachronisms: a character says "just a tad", there is sticky toffee pudding, there are docents and postdocs, the female undergraduates (there is an explanation for the very existence of female undergraduates - it's not that silly) hang out in male undergraduates' bedrooms, a "Professor" says that she won't get "tenure", every thought appears to involve 21st century racial categories and so on. I don't know that every page contains a howler, but I'm pretty confident that every chapter does. At one point someone says (in effect) "when you were in London, did you see the King?" and receives the reply "William? No, what with the Poor Law and the Factory Act, there's been a lot of rioting so he stays at home" (yes, the "William?" is genuinely in there). The whole thing is terribly woke as well: everyone who is non-white (including some "Black" with a capital B characters) is a goody and almost everyone who is white is a baddy (the main exceptions being Luddites and a few other honest working class characters); killing innocent people is bad if you're white but, I think, ok if you're not; the British Empire is super-bad in every way, including being maybe responsible for the state of Haiti, but somehow also incompetent and idiotic; oh, and I almost forgot to mention that British people boil their food too much and don't use seasoning (although our cakes seem to be ok).

It's high time for the "buts", of which I have two. The first "but" is that the book is an fascinating glimpse into a modern worldview in which universities are massively powerful. For reasons that make (somewhat) more sense in the alternative reality of the book (in which silver plus skilled translators equals powerful magic) than in real life, the climax of the story comes when a group of undergraduates seek to overthrow the British Empire by [if you're going to read it, turn away now] ... seizing control of a university building! Other glimpses of this worldview are also evident: for example, an Oxford Professor is seen as a high-prestige job that might plausibly come with a high-status wife (yes, I know - married professors in the 1830s ...), a house in Hampstead and a country estate. At one point we are shown some 'aesthete' undergraduates, almost all of whom are set on having careers in the professions after Oxford: again, the idea is that universities control access to power and wealth and, allied to that, that high-prestige jobs are the source of power and wealth. 

That may be just a sociological insight you weren't terribly interested in, but my second 'but' is a more literary one: it's actually not a bad read. Not bad at all. I read it all the way to the end, despite everything that was silly and annoying about it, and at each point I wanted to know what happened next. The action was well-paced, the characters, twists and so on were all well-done. (In fact, it had such merit that I half-suspected that there was going to be a really big twist - e.g., that China were to replace Britain as imperial hegemon - and turn out just as bad! But sadly no.) I am not the target audience for an anti-colonialist tirade, but I enjoyed it. If you took the book, removed all the wokery and replaced the historical details with something plausible (or perhaps set it in a sci-fi world where it made sense) then it would just be a cracking good read. 

So my final verdict is that Kuang is a writer of real talent. She's still young and I expect that her mature work will be pretty solid.

The Ebb Tide, Robert Louis Stevenson 

Cracking good novella. Would make a great film (indeed, I see that it has been filmed a few times, although the still from the French adaptation here gives you precisely the wrong idea of what the book is like), although I'd change the ending for the big screen. Also, it is a more effective attack on colonialism than Babel.