What might have happened if Charles Lindberg had been elected?
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Wednesday, 10 August 2016
REVIEW OF I AM PILGRIM
REVIEW BY TOM
I Am Pilgrim: If HBW&tEotW is all about duality, I Am Pilgrim is positively quadrophenic, because that’s at least how many mysteries are packed into its 800+ pages. A murder in New York, a bullet-riddled assassination in Greece, the ultimate terror act across most of Southwest Asia, and a murder in Bodrum all collide in the ruins of an ancient Roman gladiator arena. The plot devices are far-fetched, the coincidences would make Dickens blush, and the characters are barely individualised versions of cinema archetypes, but it’s the best pot-boiler I’ve read in a long time. I like that it’s ambitious in its scope. I like even more that it’s written in a straight-ahead style that keeps all the attention on the action and characters. And I like best of all that 800 pages felt like 300. No, it is not great literature, but I think it’s a near-classic of its genre.
**** Stars
REVIEW OF HARD BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
REVIEW BY TOM
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A double-barrelled title for a book about duality, the first novel in what has become the distinguished oeuvre of Haruki Murakami. The odd-numbered chapters, each titled with three descriptions of subjects the subject chapter contains, take place in the narrative past set in an egg-shaped, walled enclave not unlike the “The Village” in the TV show The Prisoner. The even-numbered chapters take place in the narrative present not so much in a place as in a state of mind (the eponymous End of the World). Both settings are skewed versions of our own spaceship Earth, like the milieus of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle. Indeed, from this book Murakami would go on to forge a career as the contemporary Kafka (after all, he wrote a novel called Kafka on the Shore) that certainly reaches an apex in the one other Murakami book I’ve read, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That book manages to create a world only slightly divergent from our own in a way that is truly unnerving. Here, Murakami is just beginning to learn his craft, and the result is two worlds too abstract for that combination of frustration and foreboding that is the essence of nightmares. Still, HBW&tEotW is an admirable flight of fancy with promise that has been certainly fulfilled.
***½
Monday, 18 July 2016
JFDI BOOK NO. 27 DEAR LUPIN Roger and Charles Mortimer
DEAR LUPIN
Letters to a Wayward Son
Roger and Charles Mortimer
A compendium of letters to the prodigal son who never returned.
Wednesday, 1 June 2016
Saturday, 7 May 2016
Thursday, 31 March 2016
REVIEWS OF H IS FOR HAWK
James's review of H is for Hawk
J IS FOR JFDI
Praise is lavished on H is for Hawk across literary journals and newspaper reviews, the story of the author’s journey through grief even claiming Costa Coffee’s book of the year award. It wasn’t clear to me for some time why.
The book charts the progression of Helen Macdonald’s bereavement partnered by a goshawk that she buys shortly after the death of her father. The decision to buy a bird of prey which we learn is notoriously hard to train seems kneejerk. It coincides with a failed relationship and impending loss of job and home. But the evolution of the relationship between the hawk and the subject, interspersed with reference to a parallel relationship between T. H. White and his goshawk, helps us understand her journey and ultimately her reconciliation with the world.
There are several aspects of the book that are however unsatisfying. At the core of this is her father. We never get to know her father which means we never understand her relationship with him and why she is grieving to such a degree. This for me removed the much needed heart and warmth the book needs. Her life is caught up in academia so throughout the book I’m wondering how come she has so much spare time and money? I must also confess that, after reading Shantaram, 900-odd pages of first person narrative, another first person perspective left me exhausted. Finally, the geek in me wanted to know much more about falconry, though any further such detail would have dramatically changed the book and reduced it.
So why the praise? Two reasons come to mind; firstly, that it is beautifully written. The prose is concise and graceful, with strong visual language and an aural acuity. Whether we’re at St Brides Church or in the Cambridgeshire countryside or in her home or in her head, there is a clarity and crispness to the writing that fills the pages with meaning.
And this brings me to the second reason – the weight of the writing and the introspection makes it a book for professional book reviewers.
2 ½ from me, average score from all is around 3.
JOE'S REVIEW
P is for potpourri, which is how I felt about this
book. As many authors change character
perspectives to maintain interest and dramatic tension, Helen MacDonald changes
from her perspective as a suffering, depressed woman to that of T.H. White (can
we characerize him as a suffering, depressed man ?) to that of a nature
writer.
Of all of these perspectives I most liked the nature
writing: factual, beautifully descriptive and capable of transporting one to
the place and feeling of the scene. You
can imagine how it is to hold a hawk, watch a hawk, feel both the emotions of
the hawk as it is drawn to and obiedient to you as well as the emotions of
rejection and simply having the animal be oblivious to you. She is also superb at transmitting and
describing how the hawk must/probably sees the world and reacts to it. This part of the book really broadened my
(somewhat limited !) horizons- after all, I don’t think of hawks all too often.
The counterpoint to the excellent nature writing was the
description of her depression and grief about the death of her father. From what I read I couldn’t follow the depth
of her attachment- there were brief descriptions of him alone, her interaction
with him and his with others, but somehow I didn’t get to a feeling or understanding
of why she was so grieved. In a way,
quite the opposite- I wanted almost to say “get on with it”, you’re young (I
think), intelligent, have a Oxbridge degree, etc. So….with the one side; i.e. the descriptive,
emotive side of the cause of grieving not adequately described, I tended to
think more of her as weak.
The elements of T.H. White and the hawk were transferrence –
she was White, struggling to deal with a “hostile” world, she was the bird
seeing the world that humans inhabit, but in a sense superior and oblivious to
it. The descriptions and content were
interesting and partially compelling.
It is pleasing that at the end, she did overcome both the
notion that she was somehow both T.H. White and the hawk and realized that life
goes on- within you and without you.
The
Hawk[1]
don’t care.
[1]
Does she secretly wish that she were Kenny Harrelson ?
-------
Tom's review
I initially gave "H is for Hawk" 3.5 stars on the strength of the writing style. There is no doubt Helen MacDonald can wrap evocative imagery in a lyrical passage. But I'm downgrading my rating to 2.5 stars because, after our JFDI discussion, I came away thinking she had written a book way too calculated to be a critical darling.
If that was her goal, she nailed her landing, as critics can't seem to find enough ways to praise this book. For me, though, her self-image as an angst-ridden emo interwoven with a specialist subject (hawking) and a biography of an even more angst-ridden writer (T H White) feels like literary tick-boxing. The loss she feels over her father's death comes off more overwrought than heartfelt, while her struggles with human love and financial ease seem manufactured to the point of indulgence. In the end, the only despair I felt was for the awards the book world feels this memoir deserves.
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