A Palace in the Old Village - from Morocco with indifference

A Palace in the Old Village by Tahar Ben Jelloun (First published in the UK by Arcadia Books in 2011) A short novel that centres on an immigrant worker in France as he approaches retirement. He’s become disenchanted with his adopted country and the values it’s instilling in his children. To overcome it, he plans to spend his retirement back in his Moroccan village, building a house for his whole family to live in.

One of the great things about books (and tv, film, paintings, photography, music...well, you get the picture) is that they can take you to places (and times) you’ve never been before. Art can be your own personal transporter, just like in Star Trek but without Scotty (or Geordi for you Next Generation fans). It can instantly transport you anywhere.

If it’s done well, of course.

If not, you end up just hanging around in the departure lounge.

I had high hopes for this book, from “Morocco’s greatest living author” no less. I love books that take me places I know nothing about. There’s been a lot from India in recent years, and Japanese novels seem to have got a lot of fans too. But I’d never read anything from North Africa. So I packed a bag and settled in for a trip.

It’s not that the book is particularly badly written. Tahar Ben Jelloun clearly has a lot of control of his art, or he wouldn’t have such a reputation or be so widely published. The purpose of the book was clear, the story lucid enough, the narrative coherent. He portrayed a very believable and sympathetic central character. All the right ingredients were there.

But there simply wasn’t enough bite to it. I’m not a reader that demands a twist in every page. If anything, I verge more on the pretentious side of the scale than the thrill seeker (much as I dislike myself for it). But even for me, this book was too much “issue” and not enough “story”. (Is overboard to admit to being a little pretentious and use quote marks in the same paragraph? Oh well, too late...)

The author has very obviously started out with a message, and then tried to construct a story that will help him to tell it.

I don’t like that.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, just that it shouldn’t be done so starkly. There’s nothing wrong with making a point through fiction. Orwell did it all the time, and I like reading him. In fact, I’d go as far as to say a book needs to have a wider moral point or two in there, but it needs to be in the background. In A Palace in the Old Village, it’s not so much in the foreground as permanently tattooed on your eyeballs. You simply can’t escape it for a second or two and just enjoy the story.

There is, however, one saving grace. The book constantly switches between first person and third person narrative. “That must be distracting”, I hear you scream. Well, no, it isn’t. In fact, the first few times the tense was switched, I didn’t even notice it. Hand on heart, it was done so subtly that I didn’t know it’d happened. I’ve never seen that attempted, never mind achieved. It really was very well done, and was a quirk that meant the book didn’t totally suck balls.

Until the very end of course, when the resolution of the story was so contrived that Paolo Coelho should be a little worried (that’s right, I just dissed Coelho. I guess I just don’t like anyone much in this blog post, huh?) The fairytale quality of the last few pages jarred so violently with the rest of the book that it left a bit of a scowl on my face when I turned the last page. Not a taste you want a book to leave in your mouth.

Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe the author was making a point about the differences between France and Morocco (again).

Either way, it didn’t work for me.

3 GBR

And that’s mainly because of the whole first person/third person quirk.

After that, I need the next thing I read to be good, I really do. Not time to give Coelho another try, then.

The Sunset Limited - a "huh" of a book

The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy (2006: Vintage Books. First published in the UK in 2010 by Picador). A novel written as a conversation between two men – one an ex-con ex-addict who has found God, the other a professor whose world view has led him to the brink of suicide. Between them, they debate which is more valid - the ex-con’s hope or the professor’s lack of it.

It was never going to be a cheery ride from the man that brought you No Country for Old Men and The Road. If Coldplay is “music to slit your wrists by” then Cormac McCarthy seems to be the literary equivalent. If I were his parents, I’d be worried about that boy.

Not a frown-upside-down sort of book then. But let’s not write it off entirely just because it fails in the cheeriness stakes.

It is, as the cover suggests, a “novel in dramatic form.” Which means the entire book has the look of a script. It’s easier to read than most scripts, mainly because it’s a two way dialogue set in a single room; just two voices to keep track of, 140-odd pages of a single conversation.

I did, however, breeze through it. Not entirely with a hop in my step, of course, but with a furrow of thought etched firmly on my forehead.

This is a thinker of a book, slap bang in the “really makes you think, huh” genre. The script style really works, mainly because McCarthy achieves two very distinct voices and maintains them with a strict discipline. It’s easy to forget that the two characters are products of the same mind. You really do feel like a fly on the wall of really quite an interesting conversation.

And what a conversation. The cover (rather dramatically) touts it as a debate over the meaning of life. Don’t let that put you off too much though. It’s not all grand statement and metaphysical dilemma. That does creep in of course, but McCarthy delivers the big questions (and struggling answers) in such an authentic voice that it doesn’t jar (much); it doesn’t appear too forced or unnatural.

Another tick in the credit column is the length. I think McCarthy has got this just about right. It’s a very quick read. Novella length really, and the script format means that the pages fly by. Which is needed. Dwelling on a single conversation in a single room for too long could be fatal. Similarly, tackling the themes he does without giving enough room for you to ease into it is a big danger. The book steers well between the two potential gutters.

So, it’s a clever, thought provoking, well paced, well written book. But (and it’s perhaps the biggest but outside of hip hop) it didn’t force me back into my seat. I didn’t look at it longingly, counting the seconds until I could pick it up again and have a bit of a read. When I turned the last page, I uttered out loud the kind of “huh” that is more commonly provoked by finding out I’ve got 50p more than I thought I had in my pocket. This was not a “wow, I just found a £20 note under the sofa” book.

Interesting? Yes.

Worth reading? Certainly.

Worth shouting from the roof tops about? Breathtaking? Joyful? No, no and no.

6 GBR

Not a bad score in the context of GBR, which is turning out to be quite a strict scale. 6 GBR is good. 6 GBR means go read it. It won’t take much time, and you’ll be glad you did.

Just don’t expect it to change your life.


p.s. Just found out the book was also made into a TV film for HBO starring Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee. Aired in the States in Feb apparently. Might have to try and get me a copy of that. God bless our dual region DVD player...

The Great Gatsby - from blind spot to main attraction

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926: Charles Scribner’s Sons) A novel set in 1920s Long Island, where the narrator has just moved into a modest house next door to the mysterious, flamboyant host of glamorous parties, Jay Gatsby. Through the narrator’s eyes, we learn more about Gatsby and why he is where he is. And the more we learn, the more tragic a figure he becomes.

This is firmly in the class of book which I felt I should read. I really didn’t know much about it before I picked it up. It’s one of those books that comes up in conversation every now and then, or is referred to on TV, and I just end up blankly smiling and nodding, hoping that no one realises I haven’t got a clue about the reference they’ve just made.

So I picked it up more out of desire to colour in a bit of a blind spot than anything else. After a few pages though, I quickly forgot about the blind spot, and started enjoying it.

It’s a bit of (alright, a lot of) a cliché to say that a book is multi-layered. But I’m not sure how else to say it. So I’m just going to go ahead and commit the cliché. Please try to get past it and believe me when I say...

This book has a lot of layers.

Every time I picked it up, I felt as if something new was happening. There was significance on every page, and I’m certain I didn’t pick up on anywhere near all of the meaning; all of the themes. I’m not saying this is a grand, epic of a book with hidden depth that takes careful reading to unlock. Those books tend to be tiring and taxing to read - this was not. It’s a ruddy good story. It’s fun to read, simply as a tale in its own right. But at the same time, you’re aware as you’re reading it that Fitzgerald is weaving bigger issues into the 192 pages as well.

And that is really an art. I mean, this thing was written in 1926. It’s the best part of 100 years old. It deals with big questions and big emotions. All these things, you would think, would be major barriers to it being an enjoyable read for a man in 2011, skipping through a few pages here and there on the train into work. But none of that gets in the way. If anything, I found myself reading it too quickly. The story kept me glued to the page, fidgeting with the corners until I could turn them over, in a way that I haven’t for a while.

Generally speaking, I’m against reading (or watching) anything more than once. There are millions upon millions of great things to read and watch, and so going over anything twice is simply taking time away from encountering something new. No doubt, masterpieces exist, but do any of them deserve a second look when there’s another masterpiece lurking around the corner. Having said that, there are exceptions. And I think this may be one of them. I think I may actually read this one again. There’s so much packed into these pages that I want to understand better.

So, if I’m going to give this book a second look, I’d certainly recommend that you give it at least a first one (that is, if you haven’t already). Cue the drum roll for the biggest GBR yet...

9 GBR

I know, copping out a little on the 9. If this is a “masterpiece” that I’m deeming worthy of the almost unprecedented step of a second read, why not 10? Well, as I’ve said before, got to leave myself somewhere to go. The day I give a 10 is the day I find a book that makes me need to lie down for a while after I’ve finished it to recover. I’m sure it exists somewhere.

Oh, and for the record, the high GBR score is nothing to do with the fact that this also happens to be my brother-in-law’s all time favourite book. No pandering here. Honest...