DAVID MITCHELL - THE BONE CLOCKS. NOVEL.

This book is shockingly bad.

'Shockingly', because David Mitchell is the author of some of the most imaginative, perfectly written, innovative novels of this century.

Cloud Atlas, in particular, is unique in its range of settings and styles and the way that it combines stories spread over centuries or millennia into a coherent narrative. The scope and breadth of imaginative power in this book is like nothing else ever written.

The Bone Clocks is, at times, similar in structure to previous Mitchell novels. The story is told in sections, spread over decades from the seventies to a dystopian 2032. The sections are all narrated from a different point of view, and so the voice and style changes from section to section.

Holly Sykes is the central character, a rebellious teenager in the first section growing up in nineteen seventies Kent, with an Irish mother and an English father. She hears voices, what she calls her 'radio people', that give her some insight into what will happen in the future.

Holly is a constant in the other narratives, though she is often a marginal character in the stories told by other characters, who are a brief lover of hers, a writer that eventually becomes her friend, and also her eventual husband.

The thing binding the stories together - apart from Holly - is a narrative about a great, centuries-long war between a group of 'carnivores', - The Anchorites - who eat people's souls in order to prolong their immortality, and another group of immortals - the Horologists - who are reincarnated into another body every time they die.

This is where the novel goes completely off the rails. Firstly the simplistic nature of the conflict - Good Horologists v Bad Carnivores - makes it read like a book for children. There is no moral ambiguity, no complexity at all.

Secondly, the whole story of this great war is unceasingly silly. All of the ideas are stolen from various sources, TV shows like Doctor Who and Charmed and Star Trek, from religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, from comics and sci-fi and a thousand books and films and programmes.

Yet the way Mitchell uses them leaches all of the wonder and fascination from the fantasy and sci-fi genres and reduces the whole concept to bland, random, silly ideas.

He invents a whole vocabulary to explain the phenomena he describes,  psychosoteric voltage, suasion, subsaying, an Act of hiatus, as if what he was talking about was unique, innovative, clever. The truth is that all he describes are simple fantasy tropes - such as telepathy, one person taking over another's mind, ESP, or psychic abilities - familiar to anyone who has ever watched Buffy or read science fiction or seen Game of Thrones in the last twenty years.

There are parts in the second last section, narrated by a Horologist called Marinus, that are frankly laughable. Where he describes the origin of the dark side of the immortals, and then the battle that takes place, it would have been rejected by Doctor Who as over-complicated, derivative and insipid.

As an example of the verbose nonsense that the writer comes up with in this section we read Marinus explaining why it is a bad idea to follow a particular course of psychosoteric action..

 “One, it’s against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories,”

The book is most disappointing because of who wrote it. David Mitchell has shown such a powerful imagination in the past that the failure of this book is a big letdown. His strength is his originality, and yet The Bone Clocks is a rattlebag of borrowed and stolen ideas, with all of the fascination wrung out. 

ANNA KARENINA - NOVEL. ANNA KARENINA - FILM.

Anna Karenina is actually two stories in one.

The first is about the eponymous heroine - the tragic heroine - Anna, who is married to the staid, solid Alexei Karenin. Anna doesn't really realise how small and unfulfilling her life is until she meets Count Vronsky, a dashing officer in the army.

There is a parallel narrative, one that involves Constantine Levin, an aristocrat who lives on his country estate.

Levin is an intense, serious man who lives in the country and dislikes the life of the city. He falls in love with Kitty, who is Anna's sister-in-law, is rejected at first by her, as she is in love with Vronsky. Eventually, Kitty accepts Levin, and they find a way to make their marriage work, despite their differences, and Levin's taciturn nature.

And yet there is so much more in this novel of practically a thousand pages. In fact, there is too much. There are pages worth of descriptions of grouse hunts, or grass cutting, and other parts that deal with the local politics of the 1870s Russia.

Much of it is hard to be interested in from the perspective of the twenty first century. The novel takes too many detours, contains too many digressions, is overweight and sprawling.

In many ways it has almost more historical value than literary. The reader learns a great deal about the lives of the Russian aristocracy, their obsession with all things French - they even speak French among themselves so their servants can't understand - and their lives of idleness and decadence.

Yet, when it comes down to it, it is Anna's story that gives the novel its value. In ways it is almost a feminist novel, we see that when Anna finally leaves her husband for Vronsky, he, Vronsky, is hardly effected by the scandal, but it is Anna who suffers, who is rejected by society, who is prevented from seeing her son.

Anna and Vronsky get what they wanted, and yet learn that this does not necessarily make them happy. Again, it is Anna who feels the brunt of society's disapproval, and it is she who falls into a deep depression, and it is her ending that is especially tragic.

In the other narrative, Levin is a vehicle for many of Tolstoy's own ruminations and doubts, his own questions about his estate and how it should be managed, and for his own philosophical questions, about goodness and God and love. Again, these can get a little repetitive, and Levin's intensity and seriousness make him a character that is hard to love.

All in all this is a flawed book. It is rich and detailed and fascinating in parts, but drags all too often, and could have done with a good editor.

The 2012 film of the novel, is a strange version. The screenplay was written by Tom Stoppard, a playwright, and this is apparent quite quickly.

The urban scenes that are set in St Petersburg and in Moscow contain action that looks like it is taking place on a stage. In many scenes the actors simply walk off stage, through a door and into another set. There is little attempt at realism, it is at times dream-like, at others very mannered and artificial.

For example, in a central scene at the racecourse, Vronsky is taking part in a horse race, watched by the accumulated Moscow aristocracy. Yet the horses are shown to be racing on a stage, and the race-goers are all sitting in a theatre, watching the race and reacting to it as if it were a play.

On the other hand, the scenes that take place in Levin's country estate are much more realistic, there is no playing around with the setting. There is a sense that the film is heightening Tolstoy's own country bias, and commenting on the unnaturalness of aristocratic city life, in contrast with the pure, real existence of the country.

To its credit, the film looks wonderful. The sets, the costumes, the landscapes, are all epic and luscious and grand, in keeping with the lives of the Russian aristocracy.

Many scenes are composed like a paintings, the colours are rich and deep, the stark white of the winter snow contrasting with the darkness of the buildings, and the shapes of the people. The various social gatherings are carefully constructed and choreographed, with all of the luxury of the time.

Yet after reading the novel, the actors chosen to portray the characters don't really fit. Keira Knightley is too slight and slim to portray Anna, who is described as full-figured and imposing. Vronsky too is a much more impressive figure in the novel than Aaron Taylor-Johnson, better known for starring in Kick Ass.

Least convincing of all is Domhnall Gleason as Levin, another character who is described as solid, well-built and stocky. Gleason is exactly the opposite, skinny and slim and not at all physically impressive.

The playing around with the urban scenes is alienating, and makes it difficult to engage with characters than inhabit such a strange, artificial world. The visual pleasures of the film almost make up for this flaw, but not quite. Though at least we don't have to hear about the intricacies of nineteenth century Russian politics!

THE GOLDFINCH - DONNA TARTT. NOVEL.

"Every shrink, every career counsellor, every Disney princess knows the answer: 'Be yourself'. 'Follow your heart.'

What if the heart, .....leads one....straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?" (p.761)

The central question of this book is, What if you cannot trust yourself? How do you live, if - because of damage, because of trauma - every instinct you have is self destructive?

The book's central character and narrator is Theo, a child of fourteen when we first meet him. He is caught up in an explosion in an art museum, where he is injured and his mother dies.

The Goldfinch of the title is the name of a painting that Theo takes with him when he staggers out of the smoky remnants of the blown up building. It is priceless, the work of a Dutch master of the sixteenth century.

Theo's tale, after the death of his mother, is one of a series of disasters, or near disasters. There is the bomb, which is the originator of all of the other problems of his life. He then goes to live with his neglectful, addict father in Las Vegas, falls in with Boris, who is even more damaged than Theo. His father dies, Theo returns to New York, and soon becomes an addict himself, reduced to fraud to fund his lifestyle.

Through it all is the painting, The Goldfinch. Theo keeps it through all of his travails, brings it to Las Vegas and then back to New York where he stores it in an anonymous storage facility. Though he goes years without looking at it, it is important for him just to have it.

The painting is a symbol of something, it an object from the last day that he saw his mother alive, it is something beautiful, an object from his childhood. It becomes something, the only thing, that Theo has to hold on to in his chaotic world.

In truth the book is too long, there are many scenes and parts that could have been shortened or cut completely. It gets a bit repetitive, when we learn about Boris and Theo's life in Las Vegas, and then about his dissolute, aimless, addict's existence in New York. Scenes are repeated, or almost so, there are details that are unnecessary, it needs a good editor.

Still, it is a compelling read. The first third is a bit slow, but once Boris, Theo's eccentric Ukranian friend, enters the picture, the book attains a richer texture, and a fascinating, intriguing character.

Boris is a year older than Theo - who he constantly calls "Potter", after Harry - and is a kind of orphan who moves around with his alcoholic, hopeless, violent father from city to city with his father's job.

Boris too is a drinker, and a druggie, but he and Theo form this airtight, all-encompassing friendship that is the best thing in the book. They are both damaged, neglected, practically parent-less, and so become each other's family, two inseparable halves of the one unit.

Boris disappears for years in the middle of the narrative, and it is only when he reappears that the story picks up again, gains some kind of momentum and vibrancy.

His character is the beating heart at the centre of the story. Though he and Theo are so inseparable for so long, Boris is really the counterpoint to Theo and his melancholy, he is energy and vitality and invention, and brings his own particular kind of entertaining chaos to the novel.

The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize this year. Whether it deserves this is an open question, but it is a book that is worth reading, if only for the sprawl of its narrative, and power of the storytelling, and the mischievous, charismatic, vibrant portrayal of its secondary characters.

MAY WE BE FORGIVEN - A M HOMES. NOVEL.

This is a bizarre book.

It is hard to really know what to think or say about it, but it probably helps to just give an outline of the plot.

The narrator and protagonist is Harry Silver, an academic who lives in New York State. The book tells the story of twelve months in Harry's life, from one Thanksgiving to the next.

In the space of a short number of days Harry's life is turned upside down. His brother, George, kills his wife and is in turn incarcerated, so Harry is left as guardian of his niece and nephew. He moves into his brother's house when his own wife, Claire, divorces him.

From there, we get a succession of eccentric characters, a lot of old, senile people coming and going in the narrative, and apparently unconnected and random events happening every second page.

Some of these events are disturbing, like his niece's female teacher engaging in a semi-sexual relationship with the girl. Many are apparently purposely random, like when Harry's nephew Nate decides to have his bar mitzvah in a little village in South Africa. Others are seemingly pointlessly bizarre, like the frankly stupid experimental "wilderness" prison that Harry's brother is sent to instead of a normal jail.

That said, the narrative is relentless, it draws you in and, once you have accepted that there is nothing here that makes a lot of sense, it becomes compelling, in a weird sort of way.

Harry, again for reasons not explained very well, is a Nixon scholar, and has an unusual obsession with the ex-president. Part of his journey is in coming to terms with his life's work, and the book that he has been writing on Nixon for fifteen years.

Along the way, as well as his niece and nephew, Harry gathers in a strange coterie of strays and orphans. He somehow ends up taking care of the elderly parents of a girl he has a brief relationship with. He also adopts the son of a couple that his brother killed in a car crash.

There is redemption, of sorts towards the end. Harry finally discovers a purpose for his life in looking after the three children, two pets and two elderly people that he has picked up along the way. He is fulfilled by the connection that he forms with these people, and his life is given meaning by their need of him.

Yet it is difficult to take the story seriously in many places, it reads like the writer is simply making things up as she goes along, chancing her arm with one strange plot point after another.

RICHARD FORD - CANADA. NOVEL.

This is a long book, in which two dramatic things happen, and then almost nothing else does.

This is a trite and simplistic summary of Canada, but in fact it is not that wide of the mark.

The truth is, there is absolutely no suspense whatsoever in this book. None. The first line of the novel is "First I will tell you about the robbery our parents committed." The second line is, "And then about the murders, which happened later."

On the first page we learn about the two events around which everything else in the book revolves. Approximately the first half of Canada relates, from the point of view of fifteen year old Dell Parsons, how Dell's parents fell into robbing a bank.

The second half, after Dell is taken to Canada and put into the care of the mysterious Arthur Remlinger, tells about how events led inexorably to two men getting killed.

There are details around Dell's family, the two small towns where he lives - one in Montana, the other in Canada -, we learn about his hobbies - bees and chess - and about some of the characters that surround him in either place. But really, apart from the two crimes that serve as muted climaxes in either half of the book, it is a very mundane story that is told in its five hundred pages.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Novels can survive and impress with very little, there is no need to have a story packed with detail and events and action for a piece of fiction to work. And for parts of it this is true for Canada, the pace is gentle and reflective, things are carefully and minutely described, there is no fuss or fireworks. It is a slow examination of a year in a boy's life.

It is about a number of things, but mainly it is about a search for belonging. Dell is constantly uprooted from military base to military base, as his father is in the air force and, just as he thinks he may be settling in to his small town in Montana, he is displaced again by his parents' arrest.

Dell is just looking for somewhere to call home, and he finally finds it in the place that serves as the title of the novel, in Canada.

And yet the novel is too insubstantial for its length. There is too much insignificant detail here, too much slow examination, too much revealed and not enough held back. There is simply too little mystery for such a large book.

We know everything already, well before it happens. We don't know exactly how it happens, but we can guess. There is nothing really at stake. The writing carries the reader along, and with a lesser writer than Richard Ford the book would have been tedious, but this strong writing cannot make up for the absence of tension in the narrative.

Canada has things to recommend it, the balanced, steady, lyrical writing, the carefully described detail, but in essence it is a novella trapped in the body of a large, overgrown novel. 

JOHN BUTLER - THE TENDERLOIN. NOVEL.

The Tenderloin is the name of this novel, but it is also a seedy area of the city of San Francisco where the protagonist and narrator lives. The city itself is a character in the book, its hills, parks, trams and landmarks, as well as the resonant titles of some of the locations there - Nob Hill, Alcatraz, Haight, Fisherman's Wharf - are all an intrinsic part of the tale.

The central character, Evan, is a twenty-one year old Irishman who goes to San Francisco in 1995, just when it is on the cusp of the Internet revolution. He spends most of the first few months in penury until he gets a low level job in a technology TV station and his world opens up.

The novel is good on this, the burgeoning tech sector in California, the chancers, innovators, nerds, forward thinkers, and also the skeptics and Luddites, like Evan's friend, Milo, who don't believe that this Internet thing will ever catch on.

It is also good on the experience of being young and clueless and living in a foreign city. Evan is constantly tripping up, flailing around in his attempt to adapt to a place where potatoes are only a rare optional accompaniment to a meal and not the central part of it, where people really do sleep their way to the top, and where nerds camp overnight on the street in order to be in line to buy a new version of Windows.

Evan, as a central character, is a little annoying, however. He spends most of the novel messing up, taking his boss's car out  though he has never learned to drive, almost causing a boat he is on to crash, alienating friends, losing jobs. Towards the end he is a complete mess, alcoholic, utterly confused about his sexuality, not even very likeable.

And he never reaches any kind of resolution. He goes back home, just as confused as he was when he arrived.

The strength of The Tenderloin lies in the writing, which is zippy and funny and smart, full of pop culture references, wry observations and sharp dialogue. Girls are described as "Anistonian", in a slick reference to the Friends character. People talk in short, smart, pithy conversations, say things like "Boo ya," and "Feel me?", and the spirit of the times is constantly sketched out using markers like the OJ trial.

There are a number of weaknesses in the book though. It is frequently unclear, characters are introduced, not really described properly, and then briefly reappear again later when you have forgotten who they are. And even the title is never actually explained in the text of the book, a trip to Wikipedia is necessary to find out what relevance The Tenderloin has to the actual story. Unexplained, the title just hangs there as a needless mystery that is not very interesting when it is solved.

The biggest weakness though, is in the story and the central character. It is laid out like a coming of age story, though in fact Evan doesn't actually mature or grow at all. He doesn't seem to learn any important thing about himself in his time in San Francisco, and I found it difficult to even care about his development towards the end of the novel.

The Tenderloin is a vibrantly written, funny, smart book, that is let down a little by a weak protagonist and a narrative that doesn't really progress.

HENRY JAMES - THE GOLDEN BOWL. NOVEL.

Reading Henry James from a twenty-first century perspective is a very strange experience. Written in 1904 The Golden Bowl is Henry James' last novel, and was included in a list of the one hundred greatest American novels that I read recently.

 

People certainly do not write like Henry James anymore, and if they did they wouldn't get published. For one thing, almost nothing happens in this 450 page novel. The plot can be safely summarised in a two paragraphs.

Adam Verver, millionaire, collector and widower, has a daughter, Maggie, who falls in love with and marries an Italian prince, Amerigo. It is clear that Amerigo has married for money, as he is impoverished. He had a relationship with another American woman, Charlotte Stant, but as she was poor they couldn't marry.

Later, Adam, Maggie's father, marries Charlotte. Charlotte and the Prince resume their relationship, this time adulterously. Maggie finds out and is unsure how to react.

And that's really it. James' style though, is so dense, so obsessive about examining and poring over every implication of every sentence of every conversation, and every detail of every action, that scenes and conversations take ten, twenty, thirty pages to describe.

His style is very opaque too, sometimes it is necessary to read lines and paragraphs two, three, four times to find out what they are saying. At times it is not even English, as we would recognise it - "Only see me through now......and I leave you a hand the freedom of which isn't to be said!" There are many sentences like this, that use strange constructions and unusual combinations of words that are either particular to the early twentieth century or more likely, of James' own making.

And at times he is not a very clear writer. He will write a paragraph talking about "she" and "her", and it will be unclear if he is talking about Charlotte or Maggie. References are seemingly deliberately ambiguous, conversations are vague and cryptic, and he hardly describes anyone or anything physically so it is difficult to get an image of the characters. It is at times like reading through a fog.

In fact Henry James does exactly what you are told not to do in writing courses, he doesn't "show" he "tells". Everything is intellectualised, over explained, pulled one way and the other, he doesn't give the reader any real leeway to make up his own mind. James is in charge, and he tells you what to think.

Also, the world that the characters live in is very claustrophobic, the action takes place in two or three grand houses in London, and one mansion in the country. And the five or six main characters are all turned inward, in towards their own thoughts and obsessions and betrayals, in to their own little privileged world. It is difficult to identify with them.

They are people with immense amounts of money, and moreover people who do no work whatsoever. They spend their time going for luncheon (it is never lunch) and talking in drawing rooms and telling each other that they are "beautiful", "splendid", "extraordinary".

The other thing they do best is not talk about what is really happening. Everything about the affair between Charlotte and Amerigo is unspoken, Maggie finds out but does her best to make sure that no-one knows that she knows, and in fact never at any stage confronts anyone with her knowledge. They are a small society devoted to covering up, to not talking about what is really happening, to maintaining what James himself calls "the silver tissue of decorum."

It is a bizarre world, and an intriguing novel, for all of the opaque writing, the incomprehensible paragraphs, the endless sentences. Our view of events is so dense, black-hole dense, with layer after layer of detail and thought and analysis, one on top of another, that it is like going deep and deeper still into the characters' motivations and beliefs and emotions.

Their relationships are much more complex than they appear on the surface. Maggie and her father, Adam, have a definite Oedipal thing going on. There is a hint from Charlotte near the end when we finally get to some honesty, that the father-daughter bond has made her own marriage to Adam difficult, as if she were always in competition with Maggie.

Though of course we never hear about sex. We are left in the dark - just as Maggie herself is, as she hints at later - as to whether Charlotte and Amerigo's affair is a sexual one. We assume so, but it is never made explicit.

It is a hypnotic, at times irritating, slice of fiction, brought together by the golden bowl of the title. This is an artefact that Maggie buys on a whim, until she discovers the crack in its perfection, a symbol of the flaw at the heart of their seemingly perfect lives.

The Golden Bowl requires patience, though does pull the reader along relentlessly, sucking you in to their airless world. It may be just too much for a lot of people, too dense, too slow, too claustrophobic, too incomprehensible at times, but it is also a strange, unsettling, intriguing experience. Frustrating but with its own fascination.

A.M. HOMES - THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. NOVEL.

This is a very curious book. And also kind of addictive and wonderful.

It is the story of Richard Novak, who lives in LA and who has made money in finance.

We know almost nothing about him at first, he is undescribed, faceless, seemingly anonymous.

Los Angeles, and its natural environment, are also key elements in the novel. There is a sink-hole in the ground that is expanding and threatening to envelop Richard's house. Also there is tar soaking through walls and into buildings. Then forest fires start, and threaten to burn down the whole city. Things are unstable, crumbling.

This is mirrored in the character of the protagonist, Richard. His world too is unstable. He has tried to gain a measure of control over everything by sticking to a routine, hardly leaving his house, shutting himself off from new experiences, keeping to a strict diet.

Yet one day he experiences a bout of intense, full-body pain that throws him into agony and forces him to go to the hospital. His health issue makes him reassess his life, and prods him back out into the world again, to meet people and take chances again.

And he goes from one extreme to another. From the life of a quasi-hermit to someone who performs acts of great bravery, who becomes friends with famous people, who attracts all kinds of eccentrics. "You're like a freak magnet," one of the other characters says to him at one stage.

Like The Place Beyond the Pines, this is another story of fathers and sons. Richard's key trauma is his lack of a relationship with his son, Ben. Richard's regret at not being there for Ben when he was growing up is the central reason for the existential crisis that he goes through, and their reconnection is the key to Richard's reawakening.

The book is curious for a number of reasons. For one thing, the novel is peopled with characters, famous, eccentric, colourful, though we hardly know what any of them look like. They are kind of faceless. The reader has to do the work of imagining a physical presence for each of them.

And the narrative just proceeds along relentlessly, from one strange and slightly surreal encounter to the next bizarre happening, all told as if we were listening to the news, totally deadpan. It is all so underplayed, and yet so intriguing and entertaining, that it takes a while to get used to the style.

Once you do, it is a story that draws you in, slowly but steadily. It also succeeds in making you want the best for all the characters, they are all flawed and ambivalent, but also completely likeable.

The novel is funny, horrifying, intriguing, perplexing, addictive. It may not save your life, but it will make it briefly better.

MARK HADDON. THE RED HOUSE. NOVEL.

Mark Haddon made his name with a book for children, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. He has now written a book for adults.

The novel is set in a house in Wales - the red house of the title - where eight members of an extended family, aunts, parents, children, step-cousins, spend a week's holidays.

Inevitably, with eight people squashed into a remote house in the countryside for seven days, there are conflicts, revelations, epiphanies, growth, life changes, arguments, fallings out and makings up.

In fact it almost feels like a list of issues to be addressed - homosexuality - check, sibling rivalry - check, an extramarital affair - check, mental illness - check, bullying - check.

The setting is also important. These are all urban people, who are unused to being in the country. Most of them, except the teenage Alex, are uncomfortable outside the city. As Richard thinks, "The deep greens of the foliage. You didn't get this in a city, the way the light changed constantly."

Taken out of their comfort zone they all react in different ways. Some reject the nature around them, some embrace it, some try to defeat it.

The setting is the catalyst for the drama. The four adults and four children are squashed together in one house away from everything they know. There is a spark of romance between some of the teenagers, suspicion among the men, incomprehension between the two women, a near death experience.

The style is very distinctive. The writing jumps from person to person, describing each scene almost simultaneously from differing viewpoints. We get a paragraph from Dominic's perspective, then from his son, Alex, then from his daughter Daisy, then we hear from his brother-in-law, Richard. Jump, jump, jump, jump.

It can be disorientating to read this, with the perspective constantly changing. At times it is not clear who we are reading about, and by the time we work it out we are on to some other character. Though the style does manage to create a wholeness, a sense of completeness to the narrative. We see the events through all of the characters' eyes, and so we have the opportunity of being inside the heads of all the important people in the story. It is intense but largely successful.

Overall the novel has some interesting elements, and is enjoyable to read. But I didn't really connect with any person in the story, the issue driven narrative is a bit trite and predictable, at the expense of the characters.

The book is saved from being a kind of literary soap-opera by the strength of the writing and the pace of the narrative. And at least, in the end, while there has been change and development, there are no simplistic solutions, no easy resolution. As Dominic thinks, towards the end of the book, "when Alex grabbed hold of him he thought something would change. Revelation, turning point, but it doesn't happen, it never happens."

They leave, having learned important things about themselves, but with no more answers than they had when they arrived. 

JENNIFER EGAN - A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. NOVEL.

This is an intriguing book. The main source of fascination is the way that the story is told.

There are thirteen separate narratives, almost short stories, that feature a cast of about ten central figures who move into and out of each other's lives over the span of about four decades.

Sasha is one of the main characters. She is an assistant to a music producer, Bennie. Bennie's ex-wife, Stephanie, has a mentally disturbed brother, Jules, who once attacked a movie star, Kitty. Kitty worked with Dolly, a PR consultant whose daughter, Lulu, reappears in the end of the novel as Bennie's new assistant, when they are both working with an old boyfriend of Sasha's, Alex.

And on and on and on. Connection after connection between the stories, probably too many to count. The effect is to slowly and subtly create a view of a whole universe spanning decades, a universe with depth and breadth.

The second interesting aspect of the narrative is that the chronology slips and slides all over the place.

We go from the two thousands, to the eighties, to the nineties, back to the seventies, and then forward into the future, to 2022. The story is like a snake, weaving and twisting its way over and back, forward and sideways and backwards.

It should feel disorienting, all this chopping and changing, these new characters appearing all the time, but the individual stories are told so well that the reader doesn't have the chance to get bored or annoyed. The style and power of each story hold our attention.

It does, however, feel a little gimmicky at times, like a writing exercise. One story is told entirely on slides, as in a Powerpoint presentation on a computer, which is fun, but also feels a little forced. As if the writer was just showing off.

And there are obvious influences reflected in the novel. All the different viewpoints and the messing about with chronology is reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. One story sounds exactly like Brett Easton Ellis and another employs the habit of putting asides, observations and extra information in long footnotes, a la David Foster Wallace.

Yet none of this detracts from the success of A Visit From the Goon Squad. We do manage to feel like we are reading about one whole universe, despite the thirteen disparate narratives. One character will be mentioned in passing in one section, and will then be the central figure in the next one. We slowly build up a picture of the insecure, fleeting, vibrant lives of the people who inhabit the novel, most of them involved in PR, the music business, academia, travel.

We see Sasha, and Benny and Alex and Scotty at different points in their lives. We are taken through their crises and triumphs, and given snapshots of a day or two at a time that tells us all we need to know. Some characters are central, some are bit-players, but all are rounded and given depth, and brought alive.

And in the end the fact that there are thirteen stories is a strength. It is obvious why it won the Pulitzer Prize. There is a variety of perspective and style and tone that makes the novel rich and deep and compelling.

PHILIP ROTH - NEMESIS. NOVEL.

Reading Philip Roth is a pleasure. He has been doing this so long now, writing intricate, beautiful stories, he could probably do it in his sleep. He is an effortlessly poetic writer, gets directly to the core of characters' motivations and feelings, and draws you in and in to his narratives without you even realizing it.    

Roth was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, and many of his novels, including this one, Nemesis, are set there. This story returns to the Newark of Roth's youth, like The Plot Against America, his novel from 2004.

The action revolves around the polio epidemic that swept through the north-eastern United States in the forties. We learn about the progression of the disease, from a few isolated cases, to tens, then hundreds of effected. At this time there was no clear idea why or how polio spread, and its progression seemed to be simply random, though it did mainly attack children.

The action takes place during the summer, a sweltering, boiling one in Newark. This is one of the novel's strengths, you can almost feel the heat, it practically comes up off the page as Roth describes the heatwave, the constant sweating, the oppressive sun, the massive desire to escape. "The sun was so hot," Roth writes, "that you would think that rather than darkening your bare skin it would bleach you of all color before cremating you on the spot."

In the midst of this inferno, we meet the central character, Bucky Cantor, a teacher and playground coordinator, who knows many of the children who are afflicted by the dreaded polio. It is through his eyes that we experience the stifling summer and then the epidemic as it sweeps through the Jewish community of Newark, killing and paralysing kids as it goes, as devastating in its own way as the World War that is going on at the same time.

The novel is in large part a character study of Bucky. The fact that his father was convicted of fraud when Bucky was young makes him into a person who strives for the opposite, someone who demands integrity and honour from himself in everything. Bucky has an exaggerated sense of duty, and this is key as the epidemic grows worse and he escapes Newark by going to work in a summer camp, where the heat is much less than in the city, and the pristine landscape is polio-free.

The novel then moves towards a kind of climax, and it is sickening in its horrible inevitability. The end is devastating, like a smack in the face. There is a clash between Bucky's view of the world, his instinct is to see an agent or perpetrator behind the epidemic - his bitterness at God, who he blames - and the view of the narrator. This narrator - who, it turns out, is one of the kids, now grown, who was hit by polio in Newark - prefers to emphasize the role of blind, meaningless chance for how our lives turn out. And we see that this is clearly true, there is no rhyme or reason to the progression of the disease, it takes fit and healthy people as much as the young or weak.

This is a wonderful, affecting, powerful book. It is Philip Roth at his best.

TÉA OBREHT - THE TIGER'S WIFE. NOVEL.

After Midnight's Children, more Magic Realism. And, after The Life of Pi, more tigers. Here is a whole novel based around the relationship between tigers and humans, tigers on the loose, tigers as both threat and symbol of the natural world, in all its brutality and beauty.

Though you need patience with this book. The story progresses from two points in time. The main story is set a couple of years after the Balkan war of the nineties. Natalia, the narrator, is a doctor going into a neighbouring country to organise vaccinations for children there. And in alternating chapters we hear the story of Natalia's grandfather, and his life in the small village where he was born, and his adventures with the tiger's wife, a deaf-mute woman who does everything in her power to insure that an escaped tiger is not killed by the village people.

So it takes a long time to build momentum. There are two stories being told, with different chronologies and a lot of digressions, and so while the narrative is never tedious, it does like to wander off into apparently unconnected accounts of the various local characters in the grandfather's village. It is necessary to stick with the novel to begin to see some kind of connections between all the narratives.

And yet it is questionable whether it is worth the wait. The writing flows easily, it takes no effort to read the book and the stories are rich and deep and detailed, spanning decades, taking in city and country, real and supernatural. Yet there are in truth too many digressions, the narrative going back and forward in time, mentioning this character and that until it is hard to keep track of exactly who is who, and difficult to find characters to care about.

Finally there is a resolution of sorts at the end, an attempt to tie up loose ends. This linking the two chronologies of the story, however, is lacking, incomplete, providing more questions than answers.

Also, the novel can't seem to make up its mind whether the world it describes is just as we see it, or whether it is reality suffused by magic, like in the universe of Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

There is an attempt at magic realism through the character of the Deathless Man, who, as the name suggests, cannot die, yet it is hard to see the point of this bit of fantasy in what is in general a fairly realistic, unsuperstitious perspective. In fact the writer says, on p.310,

"when confounded by the extremes of life....people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, to stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening."

It is made clear that the villagers superstitions are just that, irrational, based on ignorance and fear, yet there is also this man who cannot be killed popping up throughout the narrative. It is out of place, this appeal to the supernatural.

So this book is a mixture. The story is too diffuse to be effective, and failed to hold my attention or engage me. And it is trying to have its cake and eat it, regarding the existence of magic and the supernatural. Yet it is well written, rich, with individual characters and narratives that are fascinating in themselves. 

JULIAN BARNES - THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. NOVEL.

This is a bite-sized little novel, a novella really, and tells an apparently simple story that slowly develops into something far more complex and dense.  

Tony Webster is the narrator, he tells us about his school days, his three best friends at the time and his first real girlfriend, Veronica, who he met in university. He spends one weekend in Veronica's parents' place in Surrey, where he thinks he is being patronised and ridiculed by everyone except Veronica's mother. Eventually Tony and Veronica split, Veronica starts going out with Tony's friend Adrian, who the group of friends has always seen as the most intellectual, and the most idealistic of them all. There is a suicide, and the group of friends drift apart, and get on with their own lives.

Fast forward forty years, Tony has been married and divorced, he has lost contact with the people from his past, until he receives an unexpected bequest in Veronica's mother's will. From there he feels compelled to dig into what happened in his twenties, and re-connect with his old flame Veronica.

As could be expected from a novel about someone looking back to their youth from the vantage point of their sixties, the book is about memory, and the passing of time. As the narrator says at the beginning, "Time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down." Time seems to have passed quickly for Tony, he tells of the intervening forty years between his time with Veronica and his present in about two pages, it has been a life half-lived, with few details. We get the impression that he regrets not having done more with his life, he regrets his caution, his lack of drive.

There is a lot unsaid in Tony's narration, or at least a lot half-said. He is not quite an unreliable narrator, as he is not totally deluded, but he is at the very least ignorant about a lot of things, and makes many assumptions that are not borne out by the facts. He is, though, aware of this. At one stage he says, "when we are young we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old we invent different pasts for others." And this is what Tony does. Even after retirement, when he tries to get back in touch with Veronica, he misinterprets everything about her responses to him, even holding out some vague hope of a rekindling of their relationship while all the time she has nothing but contempt for him. He is fundamentally clueless. Veronica herself tells him, more than once, "You just don't get it, do you?" And he doesn't.

The story builds towards a kind of climax, our uncertainty about what has happened in the past matches Tony's, until slowly the truth is revealed. It is a little like a kind of literary whodunnit whose final revelation is temporarily shocking, but which is not expanded on and not really developed. The ending, after so much mystery, is slightly anti-climatic, though this fits in with the theme of the book. What has happened has happened, there is no changing that, and the past is what it is and cannot be reformed or twisted or reshaped just by telling it in a different way.

The value of the novel lies in the journey towards the revelations at the end, and not in the twists themselves. It is a dense book, which would probably be worth re-reading, about someone whose life has disappointed him, though he is incapable of figuring out why, and who is prone to assuming things which are totally untrue. It won the Booker prize in 2011. I find it hard to say that the novel is prize-worthy, it seems too slight for that, but there is something interesting there in what at first seems like a very simple story. The complexity builds, layer after layer, until we have a very compact, tightly packed novel that draws you in and makes you want to know more.

ZADIE SMITH - N.W.. NOVEL.

I think that anything that Zadie Smith writes is worth reading, even if, like this book, it is a bit rambling and lacks a centre.

The blurb at the back of the book says that it is the story of a city. It is not quite that, but it does attempt to give something of a portrait of North West London, around Willesden, Kilburn, Harlesdon, through a number of characters who the narrative follows.

And yet it is very unfocused, diffuse, hard to grasp. The focus moves from one character to another, characters that are vaguely connected but only vaguely, without ever really following through, without ever really drawing the disparate strands of the story together. There is an attempt near the end to hint that the four people who are more or less central to the book are fundamentally linked, but it is half-hearted at best. This is the great let-down, it is hard to engage with something so shifting, so unresolved.

The strongest part is when we learn about Keisha, who later changes her name to Natalie. This is all about identity, or the lack of it, of losing touch with roots, of this kind of modern deracination, being confused about who you are. Natalie is the centre of the book for me, if it even has a centre, and is the only character who grabbed me in any way. She is complex, conflicted, having it all yet deeply dissatisfied, and profoundly uncertain about who she is or what she wants.

Yet the impact of Natalie's story is diluted by the other, by Felix and Leah, who to me are far less interesting, less real. There are beautiful sentences, insights, jokes, word plays, all the bright cleverness that Zadie Smith achieves so effortlessly. But something is lacking in the novel that was there in On Beauty and White Teeth, a drive, a unity of purpose. A pity.

LIZ MOORE - HEFT. NOVEL.

After reading Keith Ridgway's book, this was a relief. It is a simple book, based around the solid virtue of actually telling a story. Or two stories, in this case.

There are alternating narratives here, both told in the first person. Arthur Opp is the first character we hear from, a man of massive proportions, nearly 50 stone, who hasn't left his house in more than a decade. The second protagonist is Kel Keller, a high school student with an alcoholic mother and a promising baseball career.

The link between them is Kel's mother, Charlene, who used to be Arthur's student. It's not a very obvious link, but it doesn't matter, the charm and humanity of the two protagonists carries the novel. Because we hear their voices, and see inside their heads, we identify with them, have compassion for them, maybe come to understand why they act as they do. It's hard to feel contempt for a person of such enormous size as Arthur when we hear, at various times, the contempt that he has for himself.

The voices are consistent, and the stories progress steadily, and intertwine, and come back to their own path, and then back together again. They are simple stories, moving, with characters that engage. There is no fireworks here, just a narrative that draws you in effortlessly and characters that you can care about. A simple, enjoyable novel.

KEITH RIDGWAY - HAWTHORN AND CHILD. NOVEL.

What a waste of time. This book actually started to make me angry, about half way in, and things didn't get any better after that.

Hawthorn and Child are two London police detectives who, as the novel opens, are investigating an attack on a young man in the early morning. It starts off slow enough, but there is a crime involved, and so you expect some revelations, some investigation, something. But then the novel veers off, it looks at snapshots of other people's lives, almost all of them unnamed, though most of them with some tenuous connection to the eponymous policemen.

And that's it. There is no narrative, no progression with any of the stories, no sense of unity in the novel, just person after unnamed person, some internal monologue, a suicide, unexplained. In fact, nothing is explained, nothing has any meaning, it is nihilist and empty and pointless. A waste of time. There are plenty of good books out there I could have been reading, and I had to burn all these hours wading through this turgid non-event.

More than that, the writing is utterly opaque. There is no colour to descriptions, and in fact almost no descriptions at all. None of the characters is described at all physically, and generally it is hard to tell them apart, especially the two main characters. And most of the sections simply consist of a story about "he" or "she" or "I", and so you are four or five pages in to each section before you know who is who, and what their relationship is to the story. And by then you have stopped caring.

None of the narratives reach a conclusion, none of them fit into the overall story, such as it is, we learn nothing, there is no character development, no resolutions, no point. I kept expecting some kind of effort at unifying the various threads, but there is none. They exist as discrete entities, with no development or meaning. After The Parts, which I really enjoyed, this is a horrible, self-indulgent letdown.