May 24, 2010 · 2:18 pm

The Bishop’s Man: Good.

     Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man is a good read. Also timely. It came out just after Nova Scotia priest Raymond Lahey was arrested on allegations of sexual abuse. Unfortunate circumstances for a novel to be timely to be sure, but it certainly gave the reading an added resonance and urgency.

The novel’s first person protagonist, Father Duncan, is a “fixer.” He arrives in towns with a “wayward” priest and deals with the situation. To this primary narrative is added the flashbacks of Duncan’s time spent in Central America and his fraught relationship with his own father.

My only complaint comes from these flashbacks. I found the “mystery” element of them (the reader only becomes aware of what exactly happened in Central America and with Duncan’s father in the last pages of the novel) to be distracting. The influence of the protagonist’s past on his present can be mysterious, but in this narrative I felt the past was being held back for the sake of mystery alone (and perhaps to keep the reader engaged), and not to add anything to the complexity of the present. And the big “reveal” was not revelatory at all, which suggests to me that the information about Duncan’s past might better have been told from the start so that the interpenetration of past-present might be experienced by the reader, too.

That said, I did enjoy the sequencing of the novel: past and present blended together – at times, almost indistinguishably such that it took several paragraphs to locate the action “in time.” I also enjoyed the contemporary plot and the relationships among Duncan and the town people. If you enjoy mystery-for-the-sake-of-mystery, and even if you don’t, this novel is worth the read.

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May 10, 2010 · 2:15 pm

Olive Kitteridge: Too sad, too neat

              The Pulitzer Prize winning, Olive Kitterdige, has a beautiful opening chapter. We meet Henry, his wife Olive, their son Christopher. The themes of the novel are introduced in subtle, yet poignant ways: what does it mean to lead a good life? what kinds of compromises are made to sustain a relationship? what makes life and relationships worth having?

These questions are taken up in the first chapter in the relationship between Henry and his shop-worker, but recur throughout the novel in the various short-stories that make up each chapter (indeed the “novel” is perhaps better thought about as a short story collection that gains coherence through the reappearance of the titular character, Olive, and the thematic concern with the value of life and relationships). Had these questions been peppered with other concerns the reader might be more inclined to dwell in the weightiness that each provokes, but as it is, the constant return to the heaviest of questions – why live? – caused me to disengage from the stories, too sad to continually – and in different contexts – contemplate.

Likewise the ending of each chapter fell into the “too neat” category by tidily reaching some kind of epiphany in a homily-like sentence or two that left this reader concerned that the complexity of “how to live a good life” had been resolved with the trite and too neat answer “live honestly,” or alternately, “lie to protect those you love.”

That said, the stories are richly detailed and the characters (especially Olive) are fully imagined. And as a short story collection (you know my loathing for short stories) it holds the reader as the reappearance of Olive lends it some narrative (beyond thematic) consistency. The realist mode lives! and if you dig realism and the weightier questions (asked and answered in each story), then you’ll certainly appreciate Olive.

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April 28, 2010 · 11:51 pm

Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years: Did not disappoint

      This man is not Adrian Mole. Like the trip to the recreated Anne of Green Gables house when my father asked if the house was “really” where Anne lived, fiction does not live. And what a shame that it doesn’t. There’s nothing I’d like more than to ring round Adrian’s house (well, the piggeries) and find him fastidiously drinking his afternoon tea and waxing poetic about his prostate.

But really, finding out that another Adrian Mole book had come out was happy news, and once again, Sue Townsend has delivered a remarkably witty and insightful novel featuring one of my all time favourite male protagonists. What isn’t to love about Adrian? Nothing makes a reader feel more love for a character than feeling smarter and more sophisticated than the (altogether hapless) first person (diarist!) protagonist. But if Adrian were entirely daft I might not love him as I do; instead, it is precisely Adrian’s flaws and vulnerabilities that make him so loveable. The reader at once feels superior to Adrian and identifies with him.

For a reader who values character consistency and complexity, Adrian certainly satisfies. And for a reader who values the endurance (and here I mean both in the literal sense of a character who just. keeps. going. and in the sense of a character whose sensitivity and earnestness far surpasses his particular political moment and geographic location) Adrian does not disappoint. And funny. So funny.

Note: Adrian Mole, From Minor to Major, (the collection of the first four – or five? – Adrian novels) is the first and only book I’ve ever stolen, and I did it by accident (I swear). I started to read it while in the library, and walked out still reading it (well before the days of electronic door monitors) and forgot to sign it out. Shame.

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April 28, 2010 · 12:09 am

Albion’s Story: Better than it should be

                        Novels that rely heavily on Freudian and Lacanian references and images have no business being even remotely enjoyable (see: Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers). Likewise a first person narration of a violent, predatory, sadistic and narcissistic protagonist are, at best, an exercise for the reader in empathizing with the darker aspects of humanity (see: Nabokov’s Lolita), and done poorly, rewarding for the reader in the sense of self-satisfaction of never being like the narrator (or even believing that such a narrator could ever find a real, living equivalent) (see: the latter half of The Kindly Ones). 

So it is that Kate Grenville’s Albion’s Story is better than it should be, but still a long way off from good. The Freudian and Lacanian emphasis is repetitive and exhausting, but before becoming so (that is, in the first 50 pages) the narrator’s anxiety about his (sexual) maturation, virility and coherent identity are, somewhat, intriguing. What, he asks, does it mean to be a “whole” individual? what is required of man of reason and what is required of a man of nature? Unfortunately these questions continue to be asked throughout the novel, never gaining complexity, proposing a few answers.

The narrator is despicable. He rapes, degrades, and emotionally abuses every woman he encounters in the text, including his wife and daughter. His narrative voice repeatedly proclaims that the women “want” this kind of abuse; or, justifies abusive actions based on an innate feminine weakness of will/intelligence that requires his intervention. Such misogyny is taxing for any reader – even when these thoughts are made absurd by the sheer repetitiveness of their utterance. I was, therefore, surprised to find myself sympathizing, however briefly and reluctantly, with the narrator in the last ten pages of the narrative. I can only account for this sympathy by supposing that Grenville succeeds in temporarily separating Albion’s sadism from his desperate loneliness, traits that the narrative otherwise represents as begetting one another.

Reading Albion’s Story one cannot help but wonder whether the novel might have made an entirely successful short story. A compressed version would allow the reader to sustain a degree of openness to Albion’s character that the repetitive misogynist thoughts and actions negate. Likewise the heavy-handed layering of Freudian and Lacanian thinking might be parsed and focused. As it is, the gem of the last ten pages is not equal to the slog of the first three hundred.   

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