August 10, 2010 · 2:28 pm

The Tiger Claw: Not Memorable

    —> I liked this tiger picture because he looks puffed up and self-important, which is often how I feel while I’m writing posts. <—

It’s been two weeks since I finished The Tiger Claw and I sat down to update and couldn’t at all remember what I had read since Galveston, which can’t be a good sign (whether of my memory or of the texts, I can’t be sure).

I took The Tiger Claw on a week’s holiday with my family, which always means ample time to read. Even with all kinds of opportunity, I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading. I suppose there’s only one way to put it: The Tiger Claw was boring. And it has no right to be! It’s set during World War Two (always a scintillating period) and features Noor Khan – an Indian-British-French resistance fighter. There should be intrigue! action! fast-paced… anything! Alas, even with occasional moments of action the heavy-handed imagery and aspiring-epic scenery descriptions makes it feels like nothing happens for four hundred pages. I do admit I found the last hundred or so to be engaging, but really, not enough of a payoff to make up for the sluggish first 4/5ths.

I’m glad I’ve written this, as maybe it will mean I’ll remember having read this book. Maybe.

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July 23, 2010 · 2:18 am

Galveston: Forgettable

    Id never tell anyone not to read Paul Quarrington’s Galveston, but neither would I recommend it. The novel sees three storm chasers arrive on a small island – Dampier Cay – a day before the arrival of a category 5 hurricane. Two of the chasers have traumatic pasts. One is just in it for the glory.

The parts I liked? Learning bits about hurricanes. Descriptions of the wind.

Parts I didn’t? Endless and extreme symbolism, such that I felt battered myself by the barrage of this-means-this and look-out here comes another symbol, duck! you might get hit by significance!

Meh. Not good, not bad. Nominated for the Giller, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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July 23, 2010 · 2:13 am

Black Swan Green: Breaks the Rules

                                     I received Black Swan Green as a birthday gift from a friend with whom I regularly exchange books. And while he is responsible for the misadventure of All Their Names, he did not let me down in the slightest with the gift of David Mitchell.

I’d given him Adrian Mole to read and so he gave me this book of teenage angst in Thatcherite Britain as a compliment. The comparisons end at the age of protagonist and time period.

Black Swan Green delivers in every possible way: compelling narrator and protagonist, subtle and nuanced symbolism, simple – yet impossibly engaging – plot line, evocative setting.

It was such a relief to read something unquestionably good.

My favourite line in the book?

“Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right” (118).

Because isn’t that it? And Jason Taylor brings adages of this sort to the reader in ways that are neither cliche nor trite, but that remind the reader of what it might be like to be a better – or to want to grow up to be better.

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July 16, 2010 · 12:18 am

Never Let Me Go: Great premise

                               As part of my great “find an amazing summer read that I can then recommend with good conscience to everyone I know” project, I played around with the website What Should I Read Next (www.whatshouldireadnext.com). You insert a book you liked reading and the site spits back a list of books you might like based on user-generated lists of books people like. The site suggested I might like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Never one to be immediately persuaded by an internet suggestion, I checked out some reviews and found that not only was it nominated for the Booker, but my mum liked it, too. Off to the library!

I did like the book. At first I really liked it. A lot. I had a few glimmering moments where I thought “yes!” But, as with so many things (icecream sundaes, for instance), the glory of the first few moments was not sustained through to the end. The premise of the book is really neat, and I won’t say much about it because part of the enjoyment of the first 1/3 is in trying to work out the “mystery.” That said, the “mystery” element is my chief complaint, if only because it seems Ishiguro has a fairly limited range of ways to introduce “mysterious” elements. The first person protagonist would drop some juicy information and then immediately say “but I’ll get to that later,” and then proceed to give the back-story. This sort of plot structure “tantalizing detail – extended back-story – bit of a reveal – repeat” continued throughout and became quite distracting. At a certain point the “mystery” stops being mysterious and should no longer be treated that way.

The protagonist, Kathy H, is also a bit of a whiner and yet oddly still a bit full of herself. I’m not sure I like to dislike the first person protagonist, or even if I was supposed to dislike her – but I did.

All by way of saying: great premise (kept me thinking about the ethics of the novel for days after I’d finished), but the form is repetitive and frustrating and the protagonist is sulky. I continue my search for the great summer read (happily tomorrow is my birthday and I am bound to get a least one new novel…).

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