High-Class Confectionery

Sweet Tooth

by Ian McEwan

I think this must be what the critics call a tour de force.
     Ian McEwan dines at the high table of contemporary English authorship. You expect his stuff to be good, and he rarely disappoints. He exhibits all the conventional auctorial virtues. His observant, insightful psychology is second to none. If he has a weakness, it is that his writing is so absorbing and instantly digestible that you devour it unreflectingly and may find it hard to remember anything about the plot or the characters afterwards. In other words, he’s the ultimate ‘good reads’ author – so good you may fail to notice his artistry.
     Sweet Tooth is a good read, to say the least. Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’)—Anglican bishop’s daughter, Cambridge maths graduate, MI5 employee and self-acknowledged beauty—is sent off to recruit T.H. Haley—redbrick university lecturer, writer of incisive essays and short fiction, reputedly hostile to Communism and the Soviets—into a small stable of authors it intends to support as a counterweight to the dominance of left-wing thought in Western cultural circles (the year is 1973). The support is extended through a dummy foundation and the authors don’t know they’re being used.
     Naturally, Serena falls in love with her target, and complications follow.
     Espionage, love, sex, betrayal, mystery, an artful intermingling of real life with fiction—Sweet Tooth has it all. But there is more to it than a mere rearrangement of well-loved fictional themes. McEwan, the master of the good read, has taken on the challenge of writing a novel that experiments in a postmodern way with the conventions of fiction. In other words, he has taken on the challenge of making a good read out of the kind of literary showing-off that usually results in a very bad read.
     And he has succeeded brilliantly. Sweet Tooth reads just like any other Ian McEwan novel—engaging, easy to swallow, so true to life that disbelief is not so much suspended as abandoned altogether on the very first page. The story is never compromised, never fails to entertain and make you want to read on to find out what happens next. There is not the faintest hint that anything highbrow and postmodern is happening.
     Oh, but it is. The literary experiment is hidden, as Americans say, in plain sight. McEwan leaves plenty of hints in the text to let suspicious readers know something is up. For example, when Serena and her lover are discussing books, we get this:

 Without leaving the chair he stretched forward and picked up John Fowles’s The Magus, and said he admired parts of that, as well as all of The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.’

Sweet Tooth features a manipulated reality like the one in The Magus and a readers’ choice of endings like The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It also has an unreliable narrator (whose identity, too, may not be the one we are given) and sundry other postmodern auctorial tricks. However, none of these are apparent to the reader until the end of the book. And when they are revealed, the result is not the usual disappointment – a breaking of what Serena, a voracious reader of novels herself, would call ‘the contract between the writer and the reader’. It actually redoubles the reader’s pleasure in the book, making it an even better read than it was before. And this, I think, is unique. I've never read an ‘experimental’ work that fully satisfied the terms of that contract before. In fact, it works so brilliantly that today, three days after I finished Sweet Tooth, I keep looking at it and wishing there was some of it still left to read.
     What an absolutely marvellous book this is.

Humour in Chainmail

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain

Re-reading this after 35 years or so, I found it alternately entertaining and tedious. The amusement-value of dropping a nineteenth-century Yankee technophile into chivalric society and making the most of the ensuing fireworks has not diminished; but neither have the preachiness, political naivety and frequent spells of tedium that mar this not-so-great novel by an undeniably great author.

Mark Twain employs three different styles in this book. There’s his usually zippy, hyperbolic, idiosyncratic but unmistakably American humorous voice, familiar to readers of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Then there’s a second, less showy, more conventionally Victorian style that he uses for the framing narrative (attributed to ‘M.T.’, no less). He also falls into this style when Hank Morgan, the hero, launches into yet another homily about the evils of monarchy, established churches, social stratification and inherited privilege, or rhapsodises upon the great superiority of democracy, egalitarianism and nineteenth-century gadgeteering. Some of Hank’s harangues are very trying, and I found myself skipping them with ever-increasing frequency as I advanced through the book.

But for tedium, nothing can compare with the third style Twain favours, which is Malory’s style from Le Morte d’Arthur – sometimes presented as pastiche, sometimes quoted directly from the source. In fact, its tediousness is commented upon in the text itself – but that doesn't make reading it any less stultifying. The quality of storytelling, too, declines steadily through the novel. Somewhere along the line Twain seems to have stopped caring about the plot, perhaps having growing too wrapped up in all the secular sermons he wanted to preach. Towards the end of the book, he completely takes his eye off the narrative ball – for example, when Hank Morgan and King Arthur are captured by slave-traders, the King never thinks to ask why Hank, whom he regards as a magician with powers superior even to Merlin’s, cannot use some enchantment to free them from their captivity; it would have been the natural question to ask. And when Hank finally escapes by picking the locks of his manacles, he immediately buys new clothes to disguise himself – where did he get the money? Surely the slavers would have taken all his possessions when they captured him? Straining credibility yet further, Hank’s escape is viewed by his gullible fellow-prisoners as magical – as if lock-pickers had not been in the world as long as locksmiths!

And while we’re on the subject of magic: right through the book, it is presented as mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry, and the great Merlin is shown to be an incompetent fake and a dotard into the bargain. Yet, when the time comes for Hank Morgan to leave the sixth century and return to the nineteenth, it is Merlin's magic that effects the displacement. Surely the author could have found a better recourse than this?

And, finally, a word about centuries. Twain put Camelot and King Arthur in the sixth, smack in the middle of the Dark Ages. That would be about right, I suppose – just before the coming of the Saxons to Britain – if Arthur had, in fact, existed at all. However, the Camelot Twain describes – and it is recognisably the same one we visit in Malory, Tennyson and every other conventional re-telling of the Arthur legend – is a mediaeval society, and one that had to have existed after the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century, indeed after the Crusades, which is when the concept of chivalry was elaborated. Of course this tells us nothing except that Malory anachronised, like all authors of his era, and his successors followed his lead. Still, it might be amusing to imagine what a real sixth-century Camelot might have been like; pretty foul, I imagine. Has anyone written a King Arthur story like that?

Less Than Human

More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

One I missed back in the early Eighties when I was going through the classics of science fiction like a hot knife through butter. Maybe I’d have liked it better if I’d read it back then. Probably not.

It's an act of charity to call this book SF at all.  It’s supposed to be about the emergence of a new species, but from an evolutionary point of view the emergence described could not possibly take place – the whole concept is ridiculously unscientific. The story does contain one authentic science-fictional device – an antigravity generator – but it has only peripheral relevance and the author doesn’t even bother to make it credible. In fact, his account of how the thing is made and used positively insults the reader's intelligence.

The real story here is about a group of subnormal or disturbed young people with parapsychological powers. That’s right, telepathy, telekinesis and so forth. Such mumbo-jumbo, good reader, makes up the ‘scientific’ content of this ‘science fiction classic’ – justified by one lame paragraph in which the author asserts that credible evidence for such things exists. It does? Show me.

Oh, all right then, never mind: let's shove the ‘science fiction’ definition and ask how this works as fantasy. I think the answer is: it probably works all right if you’re a lonely, disturbed teenager who wants to believe your social ineptitude is a sign that you’re different and special. Readers over the mental age of sixteen, however, are likely to find it all a bit infantile and pathetic.

The writing has moments of genuine quality, but Sturgeon tries too hard and is much too fond of the egregiously quirky metaphor or syntactical conceit to be able to write good prose consistently. The general structure of the novel is messy and contains several confusing chronological shifts, which seem to exist only because the author couldn’t find a better way of telling the story. The consistent ferment of juvenile anxiety is exhausting and, if you’re a grown-up, tedious to a degree. As for the ending, it is irritatingly moralistic and even the genuine surprise at the end is spoiled by too much preaching.

So why was this ever a classic? I suspect the answer lies with those lonely, disturbed teenagers mentioned above. It spoke to them. It told them they were special – that maybe, just maybe, they were... more than human.

But they weren’t special, and neither is this book.

Uncertain Pleasures

Waiting for Sunrise
by William Boyd

It is 1913. Lysander Rief, an actor on the London stage like his father before him, is in Vienna to seek psychiatric help for a sexual problem. In his doctor’s waiting room, he meets, separately, a captivating but evidently disturbed young woman and an odd, military-looking man, both of them English. He later has an affair with the woman, suffers an entrapment, escapes it with the help of the man and returns home to England.

Then the First World War breaks out. In repayment for the help he received in Vienna, Lysander has no choice but to allow himself to be recruited as a British spy – or rather, spycatcher. The rest of the story is about his adventures in that role and his ultimately successful efforts to identify the traitor within the establishment who is feeding military secrets to the Germans.

Among literary novelists currently writing, William Boyd is probably the most reliable performer, surpassing even Ian McEwan in this respect. I have never read a book of his that I genuinely disliked, while some of them – such as A Good Man in Africa, Stars & Bars, Brazzaville Beach and his last before this one, Ordinary Thunderstorms – have been absolute corkers. Waiting for Sunrise (the title occurs at least twice in the text) is not quite as good as those, but it’s still pretty good. The ending is interestingly ambiguous – my girlfriend and I actually disagreed on who the traitor was – but satisfying all the same.

If you like your whodunits properly explained at the end, with all the loose ends tied up, this book may not be for you. There are a lot of unresolved questions at the end, or perhaps I’ve just been dense and missed some important hints. Be that as it may, readers who can tolerate a little uncertainty in their literary lives can get a lot of pleasure out of Waiting for Sunrise.

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Comfort Food for Imperial Nostalgists

Random Harvest
by James Hilton

Hilton was a mid-twentieth-century English writer of bestselling middlebrow tearjerkers, a bit like Nevil Shute. He is best known today for two books that became blockbuster movies: Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Lost Horizon, which gave the world Shangri-La. His works are now out of copyright, and you can download them as Kindle files from various sites (thank you, Sharmini Masilamani!)

Random Harvest is a typical example of Hilton’s work. The hero, a reluctant but successful between-the-wars business magnate and politician, is haunted by missing memories: he has lost three whole years. The lacuna commences with his being wounded in a failed decoy operation during the First World War and ends with him coming to himself on a park bench in Liverpool moments after having been knocked down by a car. The book is about those lost years, and the hero’s hunt for them. It is told by his (male) private secretary, a man who knows all his employer’s secrets save for those the latter cannot recall himself. All is finally revealed, of course, and there is a completely unexpected – to me, at least – twist at the ending, put there to ensure that the reader will close the book more or less satisfied, no matter what has gone before.

This is a well-plotted, well-written, gentle novel. Readers who wish to be intellectually or politically challenged will find nothing to engage them here; indeed, the anodyne prose and precision-tuned plotting contain little that will excite or challenge anybody. That is neither its function nor its virtue; Random Harvest is a book written to help middle-aged, middle-class, politically moderate readers pass the time on trains, or fall asleep at night. At this it succeeds wonderfully, if at the expense of a tendency to drag – a tendency that grows rather pronounced at times.

Writers like Hilton and Shute appealed mainly to the middle-class, more or less conservative English reader of their day. A large part of that appeal lay in their ability to evoke and champion a stable, well-ordered Anglocentric world that was crumbling even then; they offered (false) assurance that England would always endure, that the sons of the shires would ever, as in Housman’s poem, get them the sons their fathers got that God might save the Queen, and that there would be honey still for tea until the end of time. They chronicled the long afterglow of Victorian England, and their appeal was nostalgic even in their heyday; it is doubly so now, if only to the dwindling band for whom such things ever had an appeal in the first place.

This is not, for instance, a book that will appeal to Americans; the sort of comic, exaggerated P.G. Wodehouse caricature of Englishness they love so much is not in evidence here. Some elderly Canadians (fans of Robertson Davies in his lighter moments, perhaps) will enjoy it; and wherever nostalgia for the days when Britain ordered and set standards for the world still persist – for example, in former British colonies now reverting pell-mell to barbarism – a few ageing readers will rediscover a seduction here to which it does no harm, now and again, to yield.

Two Novels by David Mitchell

David Mitchell has been swarming up my totem-pole of favourite writers with remarkable agility of late. Years ago, I read Ghostwritten and loved it. A few weeks ago I finished number9dream and was mightily impressed. Now here’s Black Swan Green, another five-star read in my book.

 Black Swan Green

If you’re only a sophomore reader (meaning: if what a book’s ‘about’ is still the main criterion of whether or not you will pick it up and read it), a synopsis of the plot of Black Swan Green may well put you right off. The subject isn’t new, and it isn’t exactly heart-thumping stuff either. An English boy comes of age in a Worcestershire village west of the Malvern Hills. It’s not a particularly remarkable location, neither is it a dump. It’s middle-class Middle England.

The boy, Jason Taylor, is likewise unremarkable. The only unusual things about him are that he stutters, and can apparently write poetry. He is the narrator of his own story, telling us about his life at school, games and fights with other kids his age, efforts to be accepted by his peers, and early adolescent experiments with sex and love. He tells us about his family life even as his home is breaking up around him. Finally, he tells us about a moral decision he made, and we realize that it will determine for good the kind of man he will grow up to be. That’s pretty much the whole story.

But what David Mitchell is good at is making things matter, the way they matter to us in real life. Although the elements of Jason’s story are everyday occurrences, what Mitchell wants is to show us how questions and decisions of vast, life-changing importance can turn on just such trivial events, how our responses to them are shaped by who we are, and how they in turn shape us. Jason, in the book, often uses the word ‘epic’ as a term of enthusiastic approval (as other teenagers might use brilliant, cool or excellent), and one is tempted to read this as an ironic pedal point used to highlight the book’s key conceit. The things that happen to Jason Taylor and those around him in the village of Black Swan Green are small, as things go, yet their implications are epic. This is a book about the heroic character of ordinary life, and as such is is an unqualified success. We tremble for Jason Taylor as we might tremble for Jason of Iolcos. Indeed, we may tremble harder, since it is easier for most of us to relate to a modern schoolboy than to an ancient Attic hero.

This is, above all, a moral tale. There’s not a word of preaching in it, but we are made aware from the outset that is the hero’s integrity that is at stake. The moral issues are presented imaginatively, as well as clearly and comprehensively; it speaks volumes of Mitchell’s technique as a writer that he achieves this in the authentic narrative voice of a middle-class English schoolboy of the 1980s. Even though the reported speech of other, older characters is often pressed into service to help, making this work without ever dragging Jason out of character cannot have been easy.

One is obliged to salute an author capable of such technical virtuosity. Yet technique and virtuosity are not the visible hallmarks of Black Swan Green. Lovers of Italo Calvino will probably find little to titillate them here. This is a book about feeling: about the emotional bases of our shared humanity and how we become the people we are. I have rarely felt so warmly towards a book I’ve just finished as I do toward this one.

number9dream

I’m not sure if Mitchell‘s premise in this novel – namely, that Japan is a society run by and for the yakuza, who manipulate politicians and bureaucrats like puppets – is true, but the fact that he can actually make a sceptic like me wonder about it is sufficient testament to his skill as a writer. Happily, it is the least of such evidences here presented. This is literature disguised as a thriller, but unlike most literary fiction it has a satisfactory plot and a proper ending. That the proper ending is actually a false one makes it even better.

Indeed, I don’t see how this book could be more perfect.


Like Black Swan Green, number9dream is a coming-of-age novel. Eiji Miyake is considerably older than Jason Taylor; he is emerging from the long, dark tunnel of adolescence, into which Jason is just entering. Jason is a city boy, more or less, who happens to live in a village; Eiji is a village boy finding his feet in the high-tech anthill of metropolitan Tokyo. He is there partly because there is nothing left for young people in his dying, depopulated home village, but mostly he is there to find his father. Eiji and his sister are the children of a rich and successful Japanese businessman, a man of very high status, and a mistress with a drinking problem whom the businessman later rejects. The mistress returns in shame to her home village to bear her bastards (twins, a boy and a girl), whom she then abandons. Eiji and his sister are brought up by their grandmother.

Eiji’s quest for his father forms the backbone of the plot of number9dream. His search takes him on a tour of Tokyo, from the fortresslike office buildings of the rich and powerful to the tacky pachinko pleasure-domes of the masses, taking in along the way such varied scenery as a top-rank geisha club, a sleazy love-hotel, abandoned pork-barrel building-sites and ‘bridges to nowhere’, a central railway station and a street directory’s worth of video parlours, capsule hotels, coffee shops and noodle stalls. Mitchell, who lived and taught in Tokyo for years, is strong on local colour. He has an amazing gift for felicitous description (at one point, he even manages to make the struggles of a cockroach in a sticky trap fascinate us), and generally manages to bring the place to frenetic, neon-dazzle life.

But the real pleasure of number9dream, as with all Mitchell’s novels, is not the setting but the characters. His gift for character-drawing seems to be based on a preternatural ear for dialogue and a clear-eyed empathy that enables him effectively to be his characters. This was apparent in his first novel, Ghostwritten, which was also excellent, but here it is on display in a fuller flowering. Every character in number9dream (and there are many) has his or her unique voice, easily distinguished from all the rest. This is a marvellous gift, one many great novelists lack: male characters in Nabokov or Hemingway, for example, all speak with their author’s voice, or else in some tin-eared simulacrum of vernacular speech. Mitchell has a better ear for individual turns of speech than either of these masters. Best of all, he makes his characters distinct from one another without turning them into caricatures as Dickens was obliged, for his market, to do.

Eiji Miyake’s search for his father is complicated by his father’s unwillingness to be found, as well as by the other imperatives of Eiji’s life, such as falling in love with a coffee-shop waitress who dreams of being, against her family’s will, a concert pianist. The biggest obstacle, however, turns out to be the yakuza, Japan’s equivalent of the mafia, into whose toils he unwittingly falls in the course of his search. Slowly, Eiji comes to learn – and we learn it too, sharing the discovery and his astonishment at it – that Japanese society is run by and for the yakuza, who have all the bureaucrats and politicians in their pockets and who allow the Emperor to continue as a figurehead, just as the shoguns did in the bad old days. In fact, we are brought to believe that the yakuza are simply the modern-day successors of the shoguns, and that Japanese society has changed little in this respect since pre-Meiji times.

Whether this is true or not I cannot tell; I have never been to Japan and have few Japanese acquaintances. However, it would seem to explain a lot of what foreigners find mysterious about Japan: the paralysis of its government, the power of its bureacrats, the silent, cowed conformity of the masses and the country’s apparent helplessness to extricate itself from the mire of stagnation and decrepitude in which it now seems trapped. However that may be, Mitchell makes us believe it, at least for the duration of the novel – another testimonial to his powers as a writer.

But all this is peripheral stuff: at the core of number9dream is Eiji’s story – one that feels, not just real and true, but also important and satisfying. This novel ranks among the best I’ve read.