angelayoung's reviews
336 reviews

Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre

1.0

I read this just before it won the Booker Prize (2003) and I kept reading because I was fascinated by the language but I didn't like its subject-matter (boy is accused of taking part in a high-school massacre, protests his innocence but is tried nevertheless; also has a very peculiar relationship with his mother). I saw, in DBC Pierre's agents' office, a post-it note stuck to a window with a long-odds bet that it would win the Booker and so I was intrigued ... but I think the best thing about the book is that it won that agent some money at the bookies, not that it won the Booker. The protagonist lacks sympathy and DBC Pierre didn't manage to pull off the trick that Mark Haddon managed so well in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime: of making a naturally unsympathetic character sympathetic (or at least a character I wanted to know more about).

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

5.0

Edith Wharton is a mistress of subtle fiction (as her heroine Jane Austen is). Subtle in the sense of making her characters so intensely well that - just as in ordinary life - I wasn't surprised by what happened to Ellen Olenska but I couldn't quite have predicted it. I knew her character so well that I instantly recognised that the things that happen to her, or that she causes, are the only things that can possibly happen, but those things aren't obvious before they happen (aren't telegraphed by Wharton because they don't need to be): Ellen simply is Ellen (just as Newland and May are Newland and May and couldn't be anyone else). I have much to learn from the way Wharton makes her characters. (I did learn much when I wrote an ending to her unfinished novel, The Buccaneers http://www.angela-young.co.uk/books/the-buccaneers/... but the learning never ends.)

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

4.0

I loved the scene where William Thornill watches the native people open oysters with their fingers just as easily as he might unfurl a leaf (the leaf analogy isn't Kate Grenville's, it's mine: I can't remember hers exactly but the impressions her words made on me have has stayed firmly with me). The native people don't need a knife to open an oyster as Thornhill does and this scene embodies the endemic differences between the settlers and the native peoples: the settlers can find everything they need in their environment, the settlers can't. I didn't like the violence in the book but I know that without it the book wouldn't have been truthful to its time: it's an atmospherically enveloping evocation. Grenville also wrote Searching for The Secret River, a writing memoir of her time writing and researching The Secret River ... I'm going to read it soon.

Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy

4.0

This is a wonderfully funny book and I had the privilege of hearing Andrea Levy read extracts from it in her inimitable Jamaican. It is also a thoughtful book about the nature of home, where home is and what it means. And it is lyrically written.

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

4.0

I know many critics have called this book's ending flawed and that the voice of Dr Grene isn't as beautifully or well-written as that of Roseanne's, but I disagree. I thought it a wonderful plaiting together of their two voices so that the end is that wonderful thing in a novel, an end that when you read it you realise couldn't have been any other but it's still a surprise (a comforting one in this case). And the language is more like the language of hymns or elegies or poems than prose, and the images Barry conjured in my mind were so clear: I can still see that cottage by the water as if I'd lived there myself. And it tells a history of Ireland ... . Beautiful.

The Magus by John Fowles

4.0

My memories of this book are somewhat hazy, as if I'd read it while under the influence of too much sun and ouzo. But then the book is like that: it's sometimes difficult to work out what is real and what is not: what is happening inside Nicholas Urfe's mind and what is objectively true, what the strange Conchis (meaning, perhaps, phonetically at least, consciousness? asking us to question the nature of consciousness?) intends. But for just that reason it is mesmerising. I love all Fowles's work and I've just discovered that this was the first novel he wrote although not the first to be published (The Collector was the first published). And also that he rewrote it many times before publication and again after publication until a final version was published in 1977.

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

5.0

I saw the film (with Harold Pinter's screenplay and brilliant adaptation of Fowles's double-ending) before I read the book so, while I read, I had Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep (with all that flaming red hair) in my mind but they were perfect faces for the characters. I was even more touched in the book than I had been in the film by Sarah Woodruff's courage and her strangely beguiling nature which, I think Fowles intended, she doesn't truly understand herself and that makes men find her intriguingly and fascinatingly unknowable. Charles Smithson's desperate pursuit of her is a metaphor - I think - for the way we all long for the unknowable, the mysterious, the soulful ... and how, if we find it, we are likely to be surprised by what we find: it won't be what (or how) we thought it would be. When Woodruff finds freedom in teaching and being part of an artistic community (when she finds herself), she no longer has to pretend and Fowles's own interventions throughout the novel (he questions his characters and their settings, writes about them as well as writing them) come to the fore when he suggests three possible endings so we, the seekers after a perfect (happy?) ending, must decide for ourselves. One of the best novels I've ever read.

The Collector by John Fowles

4.0

This is a creepy book (but brilliantly so) and makes me wonder whether AS Byatt was influenced by it when she wrote Possession (for the preserved, petrified butterfiles and insects; and the parallel stories)? And it's steeped in The Tempest: Clegg is a Caliban and Miranda is, obviously, a Miranda. Clegg's first name is Ferdinand whom The Tempest's Miranda eventually loves. It's told by Clegg and then by Miranda and then by Clegg again and the alternating points of view show the characters in all their, often cruel, humanity. I remember Terence Stamp's creepy performance in the film. This isn't a lovable book but it is brilliantly evoked and made me think hard about why human beings do horrible things to each other, why they want to pin each other down and make them their own.

Rites of Passage by William Golding

3.0

This is the first of a trilogy - I haven't read the other two - but the thing that chiefly stays with me from Rites of Passage is the humiliation of the clergyman - mostly at his own hands. And it echoes Golding's fascination with what happens to us when we let go of our self-imposed polite gentility, the mannerly constraints we impose upon ourselves. A friend told me once that as we get older the psychological filters we have installed begin to lose their filtering abilities, begin to fade, and our true selves emerge. I can only hope that the filters I've installed haven't blinded me to my true self even half as much as those that the Reverend Colley installed.

Small Island by Andrea Levy

5.0

I loved this book: it's told from the points of view of several of the characters, a device that never fails to intrigue me. And I discovered so much about the terrible prejudice with which we in the white Motherland greeted the black Jamaicans we'd invited to come here. Teachers couldn't get teaching jobs and those who'd fought in the Second World War, on the Motherland's side, were hardly able to find places to live. Andrea Levy's voice sings through the book and the moving conclusion lives on in my heart both emotionally and as a metaphor for racial union and harmony. May racial harmony become such a commonplace that, one day soon, we don't even think to remark on it.