This page is reserved for short reviews of books that I have read recently. The reviews are in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top.
According to Ralph Messenger, one of the central characters in David Lodge's novel Thinks..., 'the study of human consciousness is the last frontier of human enquiry'. The study of human conciousness is, of course, very much the domain of literature, too, and in this novel David Lodge uses the medium of literature in order to investigate the currently fashionable discipline of Cognative Studies.
Ralph Messenger is the director of the Holt Belling Centre for Cognative Science at the (fictitious) University of Gloucester: a scientist, extrovert, logical, and atheist, he provides the yang half of an 'opposites attract' type of relationship. The yin side of the relationship is provided by Helen Reed, a recently bereaved novelist undertaking a six months contract to teach the Creative Writing M.A. course at the university. She is a novelist, introvert, intiuitive and (as you might not be too suprised to discover, considering that this is a David Lodge novel) a laspsed Catholic. The story follows the involvement of this unlikely pair of lovers, and - as a kind of parallel theme - brings together and compares the scientific and the literary approaches to the study of the consciousness.
'We can never know for certain what another person is thinking,' Ralph says. The narrative techniques of a novel, however, do allow us to be privy to the characters' thoughts - or at least up to a point they do. The chapters of this novel mainly alternate between Helen's conventional first person journal and Ralph's 'experiment' of recording his thoughts as a stream of conciousness monologue into a hand held recorder; however in both cases it is apparent that the narrators are censoring their own thoughts and it is left to the reader to draw inferences on what is really going on inside their heads. There are also chapters using a detached omniscient narrator, in which we simply watch the action from outside, and various parodies written by Helen's Creative Writing students. At times, the novel does threaten to become an encyclopaedia of narrative techniques.
Many of the incidents in the novel do seem to be contrived in order to either provide an analogy of some particular theory (such as the charity duck race at Bourton on the Water being used to explain Chaos Theory), or to spark off a discussion on some aspect of Cognative Studies, but as it is quite obvious that the novel is not intended to be realistic these do not jar to much.
Lodge provides no firm conclusion as to whether the literary or the scientific exploration of the conscious is to be prefered, or even if they complement each other. He seems to be saying that the human mind is such a mysterious entity that neither approach can do more than scratch the surface.
The novel is very entertaining, not least in the fact that it provides a excellent layman's introduction to the complex field of Cognative Science.
Ken Nott, the radio DJ hero of Dead Air, thinks of himself as a home-grown Howard Stern; but beneath the tough carapace of the shock-jock there is a vulnerable man struggling to make sense of his own life and the world around him. As his relationships crumble and his friendships become strained, a chance meeting with the beautiful and exotic Celia provides him with the opportunity to reconsider his life. It's just unfortunate that Celia happens to be married to a notorious crime boss...
The novel carries the story along at a cracking pace, introducing us to a vivacious and engaging cast of characters. As a cutting satire of the media (radio, TV and the newspapers all find themselves in the firing line) it cannot be faulted.
Although Banks is clearly using Nott as a mouthpiece for his own political views, the novel is never allowed to descend into pure didacticism. It may help that my own politics are moderately left-liberal, so I feel a certain amount of accord with the views expressed in Nott's rants, but what politics does exist is primarily there to revealling Ken's character, and is never allowed to become purely soap box rhetoric.
Ken gets himself into a series of scrapes that gradually increase in gravity as the novel progresses, and I did feel that towards the end the situations were getting dangerously close to the absurd. Some scenes start to tip dangerously close to the farcical, but Banks' skill is able to hold them neatly balanced just on this side of the credible.
Like The Rotters' Club, (reviewed below) the book is packed with the contemporary references necessary to establish period (that period being, very specifically, post September 11, 2001) - but Banks manages to weave these references into the plot in a more subtle manner than Coe, ensuring that the novel effectively catches the zeitgeist of the early twenty first century.
Iain Banks is one of the very best authors writing in the UK today and this novel can only further his already well-established reputation.
This is a novel about growing up in Birmingham in the seventies - a subject that I believed I would have a strong affinity for, considering that I too grew up in Birmingham in the seventies. There was a great deal in this novel that was familiar to me - the Trade Union unrest at the Longbridge car factory, for instance, and the IRA pub bombings - but the main thing that struck me is how alien the era seems. Admittedly, the protagonists of this novel are older than me, so maybe some of the references fell outside my own personal horizon, but much of the action might just as well have taken place on another planet.
The novel is full of contemporary references to achieve the necessary period colour, but the game of 'spot the reference' quickly becomes wearying. Often these references seem to be little more than the author showing off how much research he has done. They do little to further the plot or help with character development and consequently seem to simply get in the way.
The story is competently told, and Coe certainly has a good ear for dialogue; but I think he made a mistake in using too many central viewpoint characters, none of which seem to be particularly well differentiated, to the extent that I was struggling to remember which of the various group of schoolboys at the centre of this story was which. Perhaps if he had made more effort to create contrast between the characters a little better, and resisted the temptation to switch between viewpoint characters as often as he does, then there would have been far less confusion. A majority of the chapters are in the third person, but a few are in the first person, which does little to alleviate the bumpy ride.
The book is marketed as a comedy, but I found the attempts at humour a little heavy; at its worst tending to turn the hero, Ben, into a accident prone clown - such as in the early scene in which he forgets his swimming trunks. Rather than engaging our sympathy for Ben, it merely makes us wish that he would get a grip on himself.
This is another book that disappointed me greatly. It is the first book by Jonathan Coe that I have read, and it did little to encourage me to read any other books by this author.
I am a huge fan of The Name of the Rose, even to the extent of intending to learn Italian well enough to read it in the original language. But unfortunately none of Umberto Eco's other novels have come up to anything like the same high standard as his debut. I enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before, but there is little in either of these books that would encourage me to read them again.
I hoped that Eco's return to the Middle Ages might also signal a return to form, but I was sadly disappointed. Eco attempts to tell the story in the style of a medieval romance, which is probably intended to be a post-modernist comment, but the technique only serves to distance the characters from the reader. That, coupled with the fact that the novel contains what is in effect a double narrative - with the hero Baudolino telling his own 'back-story' at the same time as the main story unfolds - makes reading this novel more of a chore than a pleasure.
I have nothing against experimental or 'difficult' novels (Indeed, I have read Ulysses three times) but to encourage the average, non-academic reader to persevere with such a novel, the author must at least give an indication of the rewards that are available to those who make the effort. Sadly, I did not receive any such encouragement from Baudolino.
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