The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

I've been on the waiting list for this book from the Sheffield Public Library and I was finally able to pick it up on Saturday.  I started reading it this morning, and finished it an hour ago.  I think it's excellent.

The book is divided into two parts.  Part One is narrated from the main character, Tony Webber about what he remembers his last year in school and his first 2 years at University.  He talks about his relationship with a high school friend named Adrian Finn and later a girlfriend, Veronica Ford, at University.  Then about the way he remembers a tragedy, 40 years later when he is in his 60s.

Part Two begins when he gets a letter from Veronica Ford's mother leaving him something in her will.  This letter causes him to re-establish contact with Veronica and re-examine how he remembers the past, and what might have actually happened.

At some point in the story he re-reads a letter he sent to Adrian, his last contact with his friend before the tragedy.  He has forgotten what he wrote, and the bitterness he felt at the time.  This is a clever novel, as the memory sequences go back and forth between the present and the past.  It also makes readers ponder: Is there is a way we see ourselves, a narrative we write about ourselves, that is different from how others see us? And is what we think at the time what actually happened? 

As I approach 40, I do find myself looking back at events 10 and 20 years past.  There are certain, strange details that you remember with clarity, and through the prism of time understand them better than you did then.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I read this book a few years ago shortly after it won the Booker Prize.  I'm taking a short break from reading them, because most of the ones I've picked up lately, while good stories, seem to have some form of child abuse or neglect as the main story-line.  As I have a young child and there is another on the way,  I doing some "lighter" reading at the moment. This may be of interest to some.  An article about how to spot bad books: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=418955

That being said, Wolf Hall does open with the main character, a 15-year-old boy, who will grow up to be Thomas Cromwell, being beaten to a pulp, before he runs away.  However, at least this character is somewhat in charge if his own destiny, unlike some of the past titles I've read recently, where once a mistake or tragedy happens the main character is forever affected by it.  We as readers, or at least I personally, don't completely like Cromwell, but I do feel like we have a  good understanding of what makes him tick and why he does what he does in his rise to power as one of Henry VIII's most trusted advisers.

Interestingly enough, in the article that I refer to above, one of the contributors mentions Wolf Hall as a very bad book.   Says Susan Bassnett, from the University of Warwick,
"High on my list of Really Bad Books are two best-sellers: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, both of which I rate as dreadfully badly written. Brown wrote to a computer game formula: solve one level and move on to the next, whereas Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon."

I think Bassnet is being overly harsh... I don't think Wolf Hall was that bad.  It was a bit long, and it is not the Tudors (TV series of recent years) by any means... some people may like that about the book.  However, I thought it was worth reading.  Interestingly enough that same year I did read Hilary Mantel's much shorter An Experiment in Love.  As I now live in the north of England where many of the flashback scene's take place, I did find it very evocative of a certain time and place, though for the life of me I still didn't understand the meaning of the title.  An Experiment in Love centers on the first year of two female students in 1970 (the first in their respective families to undertake university degrees).  As in Wolf Hall, I think Mantel is very good a creating scenes and interactions between her characters, but again, I didn't completely like them as people, although I felt like I had a good understanding of what was going in their heads.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This is a compelling and disturbing novel centering around 3 people who clearly love each other but who have deep problems.  Set in the South Island of New Zealand, and incorporating Maori myth and language, the reader is immediately thrust into a realistic story that at the same time has a dream-like quality about it.  The story opens when Kerewin, a hermit, falls asleep outside on the beach.  When she wakes up she finds a little sandal.  Upon going home she finds an 8 year-old boy, the owner of the sandal, perched in a high window in her house.  The boy's name is Simon, he's mute, and he has in fact injured his foot.  Kerewin finds herself, as the novel progresses, intertwined in the life of Simon and his adoptive father, Joe 
This is a very well-written novel, some of it was difficult for me to get through, I must admit, because there are scenes of violence against children.  But I think an author that gets you into a novel enough to make you feel quite strongly about her characters has managed her craft very well.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Just finished this book on the train ride home today. It is quite a tome, but I enjoyed reading it.  The story centers on two sisters, Laura and Iris Chase.  One of them died shortly after WWII by suicide, the other is an old woman in 1999 recalling her life and the life and death of her sister.  Within this novel are two other narratives: the first one follows two lovers (one of the sisters and a young man) meeting clandestinely in the 1930s;  the other narrative is a story that the lovers are sharing with each other.  This story shared becomes the title of the actual book, The Blind Assassin, as well as the title of the fictional book written by Laura Chase and published after her death by her sister. 

This was a very compelling, intriguing book that slowly reveals family history and has a couple of surprising twists.

I think it is one of my favorites from this Booker prize list, so far.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is a fascinating novel.  It centers around two twins, Rahel, the sister, Estha the brother, their dysfunctional family and the repressive society that they live in.  The story unfolds in two time periods, the present, when the twins are 31 years old, and in 1969 when the twins were 7 years old and tragic events occur which transform their lives and propel them into wounded adulthood.
The characters are complex, the main villain, Baby Kochamma, the aunt of the twin's mother, is a bully, but also  the victim of mistreatment herself.  None of the characters escapes the small things that together bring ruin, but they are all defined by their own experience of lost opportunity, personal endurance, and love.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

When I was living in San Francisco in the mid 1990s, my housemate Julie owened this book.  I'd seen the film, and I liked it.  She said she hated the film, and that the book was much better.  If I'd read the book first, I might have agreed.  But since I did see the film, and let's face it Ralph Finnes is excellent, I can't honestly say I like the book better.  I like them both, but feel they are two different things.

In the novel, you get to know more about the the other characters inhabiting the Italian Villa at the end of WWII.  We learn about Hana, the nurse taking care of the English Patient, who is a 20-year old Canadian nurse.  Hana is dealing with the loss of her father, who burned to death earlier in the war, as well as the loss of a former lover, also a soldier, and her living with her decision to terminate her pregnancy upon hearing of her lover's death.  We learn more about David Caravaggio, who knew Hana and her father before the war, and who is a professional thief recriuted into Allied intelligence.  We also learn more about Kip, the Sikh who works as a sapper, defusing bombs for the British/Italian forces.  He is a very interesting character, and it think it is a pity more of his story was not made of in the film.  In fact, if memory serves, Kip only seems to hook up with Hana at the end of the film, which is not the case in the book. 

Hana has some interesting daddy issues, as you would imagine, as she is tying herself to a man who is dying in the way she believes her father did.  Caravaggio has been tortured by the Germans, has had his thumbs cut off, and has become a morphine attitic in during his recovery.  He also knows how to make an interesting morphine cocktale that eventually gets the English Patient to talk.

The writing is superb, although it takes a few pages into the book to get into it.  The narrative is not straight forward or chronological, and is often narrated from different points of view.  The "English" Patient's character is morally ambigious. He sleeps with his friend's wife.  He works for the Nazi's. But even when he is burned to a crisp and high on morphine, he is charming as the devil and the author makes him very sympathetic. I think the filmmakers just found it easy to focus on his story, because aerial footage of the desert is a cinematographer's wet dream. The passionate love story which takes center stage in the movie, makes up a third of the novel, but as I said, there are a whole lot of other interesting things going on.

The four characters are living in their own world at the end for the war.  They've made their own little community and have their own mechanisms for keeping the destruction outside away from themselves for several months.  It think its interesting that most of the novel takes place in North Africa or Europe, but what jolts them back to reality are the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't recall any of this being mentioned in the film.  Colonial/post colonial history and politics affected people in a very personal way.  This novel is more than a simple love story.  It's about personal survial, nationality vs making your own identity, and memories that transcend time and space.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

I finished reading this book on the train home from work last night.  Despite the title, only one chapter of it takes place in the Netherlands, the rest of the story happens in various places around London and the Lake District. 
McEwan is a wonderful writer, at times putting his characters and his readers in very strange, weird situations, that spin out of control.  Atonement, his other novel that I've read, while a completely different story all together, does manage to go over some similar themes: memory, moral dilemma, delusion and betrayal.

This story opens with two old friends, successful in their professional fields, one a classical composer, the other a chief newspaper editor. Both men are their late 50s, at the funeral of, Molly Lane, the former lover of both men.  The death of this vivacious woman makes them think about their own mortality. Over the next few weeks, a pact made with each other after the funeral, turns their friendship into personal tragedy.