Jazzy Paris and not so jazzy married life

Sometimes, when you don't get a hundred percent into a novel, it's only fair to proclaim: "It's not you, it's me". Why on earth would someone without a solid interest in the home life of Ernest Hemingway (in this case me) read a book on Hemingway's first wife?

My excuse is a weak one: I was drawn to the title. I found Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, published as far back as 2011, in a well-stocked bookstore, remembered vaguely that it was well thought of, and bought it. The blurb promised that the setting would be "glamorous Jazz Age Paris", and that sounded exciting. It would also, I reasoned, be a way to learn a little more about an author I haven't read, though I really should have done. Although there's no language barrier to speak of, I'm scandalously ignorant about American classics. It will be remedied at some point, at least in Hemingway's case (and when it happens I'll be able to get at least one Nobel Prize-winner blog post out of it).

Is it a disadvantage to be pig-ignorant about Hemingway when you read this novel? At first I thought so, and felt slightly guilty for attempting it. It's not that I don't get why it was favourably received. McLain fights the corner of her protagonist, Hadley Richardson, very commendably and is good at showing, not telling. 

We're shown, not told, that Hadley is no victim but quite tough. She survives a bleak upbringing with some self-worth still intact; she can knock back liquor with the best (and worst) of them; she enjoys the bullfights her husband's obsessed with and isn't the least bit squeamish; she's physically strong and can even cross the Alps wearing the wrong kind of shoes. We're shown, not told, of Hemingway's faults, which aren't very endearing (but then he's very young at this time): he's spectacularly ungrateful to his benefactors and feels easily threatened, as when he scowls over a less-macho friend's fleeting success at amateur bull-fighting. Lastly, we're shown, not told, how the ménages-à-trois Hadley and Hemingway are surrounded with – which aren't very happy if scrutinised, especially not for the women – warp Hemingway's perception of what he can get away with while still hanging on to the wife he loves.

So why didn't I get fully into the first half and a bit of this novel? I think it was because it sometimes felt like a corrective narrative of something, and I didn't know anything about the story it was correcting. Also, though we do get to meet well-known Jazz-Age Paris dwellers, the focus – as I should have predicted – was on Hadley's and her Ernest's married life. It's convincingly described, but sometimes made me think about Goofy's novel about a man "who went around looking ordinary all day". Not because Hadley herself seems ordinary compared to her famous husband – another pitfall avoided by McLain – but because their domestic life feels rather mundane a large part of the time. This is, of course, less of a problem if you go into the story with a keen interest in all things Hemingway.

Once we finally get to the love triangle foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel, however, my pig-ignorance turned out to be a boon. Although Hadley warns the reader in the prologue: "This isn't a detective story – not hardly", I enjoyed trying to predict which Paris siren would be the one to make a serious play for Hemingway and threaten what appears to be a rock-solid marriage. If you already know a lot about Hemingway's life, then this part of the story doesn't become a mystery, which would have taken a lot of the fun out of it for me.

If you're a Hemingway fan, I think you'd like this novel in its entirety, not least because it throws some light on a wife who actually seems to have been the perfect match for him. If, like me, you know next to nothing about him, it's still a good read. Just don't expect too much razzle dazzle out of Paris.

Zhivago adaptations (no, the balalaika is not in the book)

This is a bit of a "duty post", to be honest: when I'd read Doctor Zhivago and blogged about it, I mentioned an interest in watching adaptations of the book, partly to see how they'd manage to tell a compelling story with such non-plot-driven source material. I have now watched both the classic film and the TV series, penned by Andrew Davies when the millenium was young and he was at the peak of his adaptation career. So I guess I should write about them.

I had a better time than this grudging introduction makes it sound. As I expected, the film turned out to be the more enjoyable viewing experience, while the TV series was more faithful to the book. But, somewhat unexpectedly, the TV version wasn't as faithful as all that, and it's really easy to be closer to the source material than the film.

Because the film takes great liberties indeed. What was most remarkable wasn't what it cut out – of course, a whole array of side characters who didn't contribute much to the story had to go – but what it added. There are grand set-piece scenes that aren't in the novel at all, such as when a group of deserters confront a new batch of soldiers on their way to the front. The whole framing device, with Zhivago's half-brother telling the story to the newly-found daughter of Zhivago and Lara many years later, is invented. Yes, there is a half-brother in the novel, and a love child, and in the epilogue it's hinted that the former will take care of the latter, but we never actually see them meet.

So the narrative monologues of Alec Guinness were all the script-writer, not Pasternak. Which brings me to a feature which really stood out to me: how good the script was, not least the unheard-of-in-the-novel material. All of Komorovsky's enjoyable cynical zingers, for instance? Not in the book. Add to this the sterling acting from the star-studded cast, and it must be said I hugely preferred watching the film to reading the book. The balalaika may possibly have been a step too far on the soupiness scale, though.

The first hour or so of the TV version, I seriously wondered why Andrew Davies had bothered. I had expected it to be closer to the book from the get-go than the film was, but no, not really. The same narrative short-cuts are taken as in the film: young Yuri is taken in immediately by the Gromekos after his parents' death, thus cutting out boring uncle Nikolai completely; Pasha is caught up in a demonstration where soldiers mow down civilians as a young man, not as a boy; and Lara gets hold of his gun in the process (in the novel, the gun belongs to Lara's brother, not present in either adaptation and no great loss). 

What's more, the TV series takes liberties of its own: it starts with Yuri's father's funeral, not his mother's, and Yuri is supposed to have been present on the train when his father kills himself (in the novel, it was his friend Misha). While Zhivago in the novel was clearly very fond of his mother and didn't really have any relationship with his father, in the TV series, the roles are somewhat inexplicably reversed.

So to start with, the TV series tells roughly the same story as the film less enjoyably. The scenes between Lara and Komarovsky are so drawn out that even I, who will mostly find excuses for all manner of "problematic" erotic power play in fiction, felt uncomfortable. It didn't help that Keira Knightley, undeniably pretty and good in more lively roles, is the wrong type for Lara, especially compared with the smouldering Julie Christie. As the lout in Notting Hill would say: "she's too 'olesome".

The series did pick up after a while, though, and tackled some of the bleaker aspects of the novel, which was gutsy. Lara's husband Pasha was much closer to Pasha in the novel, which I liked; instead of the priggish revolutionary of the film, we see the naïve and good-natured young man who only later becomes implacable, by way of his experiences and disappointments. I appreciated, too, that his final scene with Zhivago was included. Tonya was lovely in both adaptations, and in the Davies version she is allowed to voice some resentment in a conversation with Lara.

You can see how Pasternak's habit of letting his characters drift in and out of the narrative has proved challenging for both adaptations. That Zhivago's half-brother should play such a large part in the film and not be included in the TV series, and that both creative decisions make sense, is an example. Just to make them a little more important to the plot, existing characters are often partly reworked and repurposed: in the TV series, Misha (not included in the film) nourishes an unrequited love for Tonya; in the film, the prison labourer Kostoed (not included the TV series) becomes a colourful figure played by Klaus Kinski. As I mentioned, both adaptations cut out Zhivago's uncle, of whom Zhivago is very fond. But he doesn't really do anything, so out he goes.

To sum up, if you haven't read the novel, I'd say watching the film is quite enough; it does keep the most interesting part of the story (the romance) and is a good watch in its own right. If you have read the novel and are curious to see what a more faithful adaptation looks like, then the TV series could be worth a try. Be prepared for sudden departures from the original story even in the TV version, though. For instance, Davies provides Zhivago and Lara with a son (who for dramatic purposes looks just like his dad). Here, the film was closer to the novel: it was a daughter.

"One of the greatest love stories"? Nah.

I'm already tempted to scrap my Nobel Prize Reading Project. Are winners chosen as a sort of endurance test for the reading public? I've purposely gone for prose writers, hoping for something gripping and epic, but the most readable authors so far have been more small-scale – I did enjoy Alice Munro and Kazuo Ishiguro (not really part of the reading project, as I read him before I started it). In contrast, I found Vargas Llosa hard to get through, gave up early on García Márquez, and now I've ploughed through Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago I can't help feeling cheated.

I mean, Doctor Zhivago is supposed to be the accessible choice, isn't it? An intense love story later filmed with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and a star-studded cast overall? Where else would I find the epic experience I was looking for, the kind of novel teeming with colourful characters that 19th-century novelists excelled at? Sadly, my expectations were misplaced – Pasternak may have many estimable qualities, but you couldn't call him a master storyteller.

To be clear: if you go into Doctor Zhivago expecting a tale mostly about the doomed love between the titular doctor and the beautiful Lara you will, like me, be disappointed. It's irritating as many promising ingredients are there, buried beneath lots of other stuff. I expected to find Lara a drag, and I'm not her biggest fan, but in the end I found her far more bearable that Yuri Zhivago himself (more on him later). And she does live an interesting life. Sometimes I wondered if the novel wouldn't have been a better read if it had centered on her instead of on Zhivago, and on random characters loosely connected to him.

What's more, Komorovsky – who has an affair with Lara when she's a young girl and is supposedly responsible for Zhivago's father's suicide – is a promising villain. But he's not in the novel nearly as much as one would expect. After Lara is finally able to cut all strings to him, he disappears completely for a large chunk of the book only to reappear towards the end as a way of getting Lara out of harm's way, but also out of Zhivago's life. Lara's husband Pavel Antipov, hardened by war, revolution and personal experiences, is set up as an interestingly menacing Javert-like character. In the end, though, he actually gets on quite well with Zhivago and only poses a threat indirectly, in that his wife is in danger when he falls foul of the authorities.

Add to the mix Zhivago's wife Tonya, who is lovely and gives her husband no excuse to cheat on her, and you have a love quintet I would have been happy to read at least a mid-sized novel about. But the romantic part of the story is swamped under pages of side plots, or not much plot at all. We spend an inordinate amount of time with secondary (if that) characters of negligible importance to the storyline. One whole section of the book, we follow the wife of a Siberian storekeeper whom Zhivago doesn't even meet. Her son later rats on Antipov in order to save and be reunited with his mother, and that's all the relevance she has to the main story.

For the longest time, I tried to tell myself that my frustration was mostly due to my own vulgar tastes, and that for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. I did wonder towards the end, though, exactly who does like this sort of thing. If you're really into descriptions of nature, this novel might be for you, as there are a lot of those, sometimes evocative, sometimes with similes that feel a little strained. ("Even the sun [...] approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would" – how is the sun like a cow?) 

Also, if you have a keen interest in everyday life in Russia around the time of the revolution, there are vignettes that, though they don't contribute much story-wise, can be memorable in their own right. Sometimes the lives of the random side characters hook into each other in unexpected ways. An idealistic young commissar who thinks he can win hearts and minds with his oratory is shot when making a failed speech to bunch of rebellious soldiers. Much later, Zhivago meets a fierce partisan soldier who admits that it was he who fired the shot and that it's the one killing he regrets. I did go "Ah, nice" over that one.

If you are more lyrically minded than me, then (Pasternak was primarily a poet), and don't insist on a strong narrative, you may appreciate this novel a lot more than I did. But it wasn't for me. Two more things came in the way of me enjoying it. One was the translation, which is the most recent English one and seems to adhere to the school of thought that puts faithfulness to the original before a natural flow. Seeing the original idioms shine through has it own charm, but it soon palls. The characters speak stilted English, as if continuously expressing themselves in a second language, which means that dialogues are almost as hard to get through as the descriptive passages.

My final gripe is the title character himself. First, I thought he was just a bit bland, but later he does show personality – a pity it's not a very appealing one. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is an insufferable prig. His nearest circle is remarkably tolerant about this; even his father-in-law, after Zhivago more or less tells him not to embarrass him in front of others with conservative talk, answers graciously and without irony: "I like the way you pose the question". Lara, naturally, thinks he's wonderfully intelligent. Zhivago grows swollen-headed so that he even when he's down on his luck silently judges his critical friends: "The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and that you knew me." He keeps his thoughts to himself, though, "so as not to distress them".

I'll say this much: I really want to rewatch the film – which I saw ages ago and hardly remember – and watch the TV series now, because I'm curious how these adaptations reshaped the novel into a coherent romantic drama. "One of the greatest love stories ever told", the Daily Mail is quoted as saying on the blurb. They were talking about the film, right? 

Harris on the rise of the machines

It's high time for a book-themed post – only, unsurprisingly, it won't be about a Nobel Prize winner. It is safe to say that the Nobel Prize Project is languishing somewhat. I gave up on A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez after only 40 pages (why I lasted the course with Vargas Llosa and not García Márquez I really would not want to speculate). With Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, I'm doing somewhat better – I've made it 150 pages in, and am just interested enough to keep reading. But it's going slowly, and I find myself starting and finishing far lighter fare in parallel to plodding through Zhivago.

One of the books I had no problem finishing while leaving Zhivago aside was The Fear Index by Robert Harris. This was how badly I wanted a gripping read; although I had made up my mind not to try this Harris offering, I ended up reading it anyway, while inwardly steeling myself.  When I saw on the blurb that the main character was a hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann, who is suddenly targeted by an unknown enemy set on pushing his fear buttons, I imagined I knew what kind of story I was in for. I thought Alex would be an arrogant city slicker and the main aim of the novel would be to Teach Him A Lesson. 

Luckily, this enjoyable thriller wasn't the cautionary tale for the rich I had feared it would be. True, it is a bit sniffy about wealth-creation, but the main target is not supposedly greedy individuals (as in, more adept at making money than you or me or Harris), but the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Alex is not some smooth city type, but rather a socially awkward scientist who's perfecting an algorithm designed to make better market choices than any traders of flesh and blood. It's his business partner Hugo's job to do the smooth-talking while Alex can go on working with his algorithm – only, sometimes he has to show himself and make a suitably brainboxy impression. It's on a day like this, when he's set to present a new and improved algorithm to a bunch of hard-nosed clients, that his life starts spiralling out of control.

Now, generally I'm favourably inclined towards technological advances, especially if they make my life more comfortable. But I'm not above indulging in some mild technophobia if need be – it's preferable to wealth-bashing, anyhow. It was a bit alarming, I must confess, to learn that algorithm-based market trading is apparently A Thing. Hugo complains at one point that the fund's office is full not of tough traders with balls of steel, but of nerdy boffins with dandruff in their hair. For my part, I always imagined market traders to be of the steel-balled, human kind. I've been impatient with the lemming-like tendencies of financial markets to drop and keep dropping at the slightest hint of alarm. Why are city boys so jittery, I've asked myself – can't they exercise some restraint and common sense? If a lot of financial decisions are indeed made by computers following a pre-programmed pattern, it would explain a lot; common sense is hard to program.

Having said that, this is not by any means a realistic thriller, nor is it meant to be. It reminded me of Harris's earlier book Archangel in that it starts off from a premise you can get on board with and then takes it to such lengths that you end up shaking your head in disbelief. All the same, the notion that the same kind of AI that comes up with suggestions for further viewing on your streaming service might one day decide on how your savings are invested is chilling enough to build a paranoia-feeding thriller on. In a way, I'm glad it went over the top, because it has the calming effect of reminding you that this is all fiction. Whatever happens financial-algorithm-wise in the real world, it will never turn out like this. Surely?

The prize-winning prose of Alice Munro

The second read of my Nobel Prize-winning Author Project was a bit of a cheat. After all, my aim with the project is supposedly to discover new authors whom I would normally consider too fancy for me. Nevertheless, I selected Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro, although I had already read her short story collection Too Much Happiness. Munro was a pretty safe bet, in other words, because I already knew that I enjoy her writing. Sort of.

My experiences with Too Much Happiness were mixed. It started out with the short story "Dimensions" which I really liked but which gave me a false impression of what a typical Munro short story would look like. The main character in "Dimensions" is living on autopilot after a terrible tragedy, but is brought back to life as it were by a dramatic, cathartic event. I expected more in the same vein, but cathartic events proved few and far between in the other stories. Near-misses, occasions that could have been momentous but don't quite come off, are more Munro's thing, and the prevailing tone is one of mild regret. Disappointed, I put the book aside for a long while when I reached the story "Face". A boy with a birthmark and a father who hates him – could it get more depressing?

When I gave the book another chance it turned out that the story, although not exactly cheerful, wasn't as depressing as I'd thought. It struck me then that although life could often have turned out better for Munro's characters, it could also have turned out a great deal worse. Sometimes something truly horrific happens, as in the chillingly convincing "Child's Play", but mostly pitch-dark tragedies like the one in "Dimensions" are absent, which makes it easier to do without the subsequent uplift.

When I stopped expecting the dramatic highs and lows of "Dimensions", I started to appreciate what can really make Munro a joy to read: the clear, precise, prose. I'm usually the barbaric kind of reader who pays more attention to character and plot than language. If I have a preference when it comes to the prose of "literary" fiction, it tends towards the flowery rather than the refined (think Dickens and Balzac). And yet Munro's style, apparently simple but full of astute observation and flowing easily along without long knotty sentences, won me over. I read the end of Who Do You Think You Are? during a plane journey, when I usually don't have the patience to focus on anything more demanding than chick-lit, and it went really well – I also found myself more relaxed than when I'm bound up in the stress-inducing problems of chick-lit heroines.

Who Do You Think You Are? is described by its blurb to be a "collection of stories" which "reads like a novel". My first reaction to this was: "Well, that's because it is". The interlinked stories follow the same protagonist, Rose, chronologically, highlighting some events first during her girlhood, then in adult life. It's hard not to think of the stories as novel chapters. They do seem to build off each other, and characters such as Rose and her stepmother Flo aren't reintroduced in every story, which makes me wonder how well they would function as independent short stories out of their context. But maybe we are told just enough about the characters in each particular story to follow what happens within its framework. In any case, it's far preferable to read the stories as a collection: you get a much clearer picture of Rose and the people closest to her.

Who Do You Think You Are? has the secondary title "Stories of Flo and Rose", and Rose's relationship to Flo proves to be the most important in the book. It's an odd one: they are close, and mean a lot to each other, and yet Rose never thinks of Flo as her mother, in spite of Flo marrying her father and taking over the care of her when Rose was still a baby. Flo is rarely referred to as a stepmother either, and when it happens it's mostly when Rose explains the nature of their relationship to an outsider. To Rose, Flo is just Flo. She makes a good job of raising Rose generally, but her complaints also lead to Rose's father beating his daughter up for the first time – something which then becomes a regular occurrence, until he dies when Rose is still a teenager. Another source of tension, though not as much as one could have expected, is that Flo clings to a way of life that Rose is desperate to get away from.

This collection was originally called The Beggar Maid after another of its stories, then renamed Who Do You Think You Are? after the last short story which takes place in West Hanratty, where Rose grew up in a slummy neighbourhood. I can't help thinking The Beggar Maid is a punchier title; after all, the double meaning of Who Do You Think You Are? has been explored in a well-known TV programme with the same title where famous people have a look at their family history (though Munro's collection probably predates it). Still, as the short story "The Beggar Maid" describes how a wealthy young man, Patrick, falls in love with Rose and what it leads to, this title does shift the focus away from Flo and West Hanratty, and Rose's relationships to various men prove less central to her than that to her stepmother. She has a few typically Munro-ian near-misses man-wise, but by this time I took it philosophically, and true enough, when Rose catches up with the same men later it proves that maybe they were not all that. Only once did I feel a bit sad when a relationship ended prematurely, on account of something that could easily just have been a misunderstanding.

Rose isn't always likeable, but she is believable, and Who Do You Think You Are? is well worth reading – though less because of Rose or even the colourful Flo than the beautiful way it's written. Vargas Llosa had other qualities, but I didn't admire his prose style much (maybe something was lost in translation); at my sceptical early stage of reading The Feast of the Goat, when I came to a particularly clumsy piece of exposition, I thought uncharitably: "I can't believe he won the Nobel Prize". No such thoughts come to mind when you read Munro. She deserved that prize.

Portrait of a dictator as an old man

I have this ambition to read at least a couple of novels by Nobel Prize-winning authors this year, not least because I suspect them to prove blog-worthy. So it's a little contradictory of me that I haven't been that keen on blogging about my first Nobel Prize-related read of the year, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (which I read in an English translation). It's partly because I didn't care for it as a whole, but also because I realised – too late – that the subject matter is somewhat sensitive, seeing as Vargas Llosa wrote about an oppressive regime from not that long ago, which many people must still have memories of. However, perhaps it's best not to overthink it. Parts of the novel did leave an impression, so I might as well go ahead and write about it, hoping I don't tread on too many toes in the process.

For some reason, Vargas Llosa (who's from Peru) hit on the idea of writing a book about the end of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Or, more specifically, the end of Rafael Trujillo himself, who was shot in 1961 after thirty-odd years of ruling the country (officially or unofficially). The novel has three main plot strands: one follows a fictional character, Urania Cabral, daughter of a loyal Trujillista politician (also fictional), who returns to her home country in the Nineties for the first time since she left it at the age of fourteen after a nasty experience involving Trujillo. Urania feels the need to confront her father, even though he's suffered a major stroke and is more dead than alive. Plot strand number two follows Trujillo during the last day of his life more than thirty years earlier. Plot strand number three concerns his assassins, as they sit waiting for his car that same evening, debating whether he's going to show up at all. Most chapters are told from one of these three viewpoints, though some other characters join the mix towards the end of the novel. For instance, we get a chapter told from the point of view of Trujillo's successor Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president who gains real power once his Chief is gone and uses it to steer the country towards democracy (but who nevertheless comes across as something of a slippery customer).

At first, I was frankly bored and irritated by the novel, fervently wishing that I'd tried Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter instead. All three plot strands seemed mostly an excuse for exposition. The unfortunate Urania has read obsessively about the Trujillo regime as a (not very effective) way of coping with her trauma, which is mighty convenient for an author who wants to show off what he knows. Also, the "Trujillo bad" message conveyed wasn't exactly mind-blowing. Wow, a modern dictator behaves in a modern-dictatory manner? Whatever next, dog bites man?

After some time, though, the Trujillo part of the story started to become more interesting. It made me sit up when, in the interactions with his goons, he didn't come out of it altogether badly. Modern dictators are often portrayed as either monstrous or pathetic (sometimes both), which can make us who are fortunate enough to live in democracies feel rather insufferably smug. We can tell ourselves there's no way we'd ever buy what these freaks and losers were selling. Vargas Llosa doesn't go down this easy path. His version of Trujillo is not without good points. He's disciplined, hard-working, intelligent and convinced that what he's doing is the best thing for his country. Even his enemies give him credit for appreciating talent in others. It's not hard to imagine how this man rose to power and kept it for more than three decades. At the same time, you understand why even some of his closest associates want to get rid of him (perhaps especially his closest associates – though generous with money, he's not the world's greatest boss). Even Vargas Llosa's focus on Trujillo's problems with his failing prostate doesn't come across as merely sneering. It's there to tie in with the Urania part of the story, but the prostate problems also serve as a symbol for old age, the one enemy the old bruiser is unable to fight against.

The conspirator part of the story also picks up as soon as they literally get into gear, ready to carry out their assassination plans, and things start to go pear-shaped from the word go. Here, it's the events rather than the characterisation that fascinate. The conspirators are an amiable enough bunch, if a little interchangeable. (There's an awful lot of name-dropping here and elsewhere – I must confess to only getting a reasonably clear idea of the role of one in ten characters mentioned throughout the novel. Why was that guy Fifí in the plot again?) Vargas Llosa does them something of a disservice by focusing on their personal reasons for wanting to kill Trujillo, when a little more patriotic fervour wouldn't have gone amiss. In the end, though, the tale of the conspiracy is engaging mainly because of how badly it's going. The assassins may succeed in killing Trujillo, but they are endearingly rubbish at plotting generally. When a high-ranking ally lets them down, they have no plan B and no exit strategy. They've not even considered how or with whom they could hide if things turned dangerous, which was always a strong possibility. I groaned when one of them confided that he'd purchased a strychnine pill to commit suicide with if the worst came to the worst. You don't commit suicide with strychnine! It's a horrible death. What, did the regime ban Agatha Christie books or something?

The Urania part of the story, though, never quite gelled with me. True, the event that triggered her trauma, which she recounts to her aunt and cousins when she's accused of being ungrateful to her father, is pretty horrific. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I thought she was a poorly written character and I couldn't feel much for her. In some scenes, as when at first she tries to avoid upsetting her relations, she becomes more human, but before long she's back in Scarred Victim mode. Quite often she acts as a plot contrivance to impart information to the readers – telling her relatives the gist of her past experiences would have been quite enough, but as we readers need to know the gruesome details, she recounts it all. When she doubts that she's done the right thing afterwards, she cheers herself up by remembering the fate of Trujillo's Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes. Vargas Llosa clearly wants us to know he got his comeuppance in the end, but as said comeuppance came with collateral damage, it's in somewhat poor taste for Urania – and, I must say, Vargas Llosa – to gloat over it. More importantly, Urania has no reason to think about Abbes at all.

One more problem with the Urania story, which wouldn't have mattered in another kind of novel, is that she's a fictional character. If the whole novel had been mainly about fictional characters, with the historical characters serving as a backdrop, the tale of Urania's woes would have worked better, as an illustration of the sort of thing that could happen to you during Trujillo's reign. But sandwiched between characters with real counterparts and events that really did happen, the fictional elements feel awkward. The real Trujillo may have been a beast to some poor real-life fourteen-year-old, but he can't be accused of being a beast to Urania (or her father, for that matter), because they didn't exist. And if we are supposed to view Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat as merely a fictional character, then what was the object of the exercise?

In the end, however, I was impressed with parts of the novel, and I don't completely regret choosing it over Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Vargas Llosa's instincts as a novelist prevent it from becoming merely a political pamphlet, and the message that at least I was left with – that dictatorships are generally a terrible idea, even when the person in charge doesn't appear to be a total nutcase – is not a bad one.

Nobel-prize-awarded reading (yes, really)

2018 does seem to be shaping up to become a better book year for me  than 2017. The Austen Rereading Project, from which I’ve been taking a break the last couple of weeks (I’ll start it up again soon with Persuasion) has made sure that there were at least some books on my reading list which I was sure to like. What’s more, the project seems to have fulfilled its purpose of making me more keen on reading generally again.  I recently, to my immense self-satisfaction, finished Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and what’s more I did enjoy it.

Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature – when they’re not a complete misfire (no names need be mentioned – the answer is blowing in the wind…)  –  tend to be too high-brow for my vulgar tastes. Never Let Me Go seemed a good choice, though, if you wanted to read something Nobel Prize-worthy which was neither too long, too involved or too earth-shatteringly depressing, and so I decided to give it a go. Granted, it’s not exactly a cheerful tale, but the premise isn’t as off-putting as, say, that of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (which I’m never going near as long as I live). I found on starting to read it, too, that the prose style was very clear and easy to follow – thankfully, no thorniness, long sentences or inexplicable wordplay. However, this  is not the only reason I liked the novel, though I’m always grateful to authors who don’t set out to make the readers feel like idiots.

To be honest, I had my doubts about the novel’s premise. When I first read the carefully worded reviews of Never Let Me Go, which implied that there was some sort of twist which the reviewers felt duty bound not to reveal, I thought: “Come on. It’s as clear as day. The characters in this novel are reared to be organ donors. That’s not even an original concept: isn’t it a staple of sci-fi dystopias?” That Never Let Me Go was not a sci-fi novel (though it does depict an alternative reality) did not, in my eyes, make the conceit automatically cleverer, nor did the fact that the protagonists are raised in surroundings that recall the idyllic picture of public school life you often find in classic children’s and young adult fiction. It looked like a forced contrast to me – “oh, look, poor innocent children growing up in a fool’s paradise, not knowing what horrible fate awaits them”.

Never Let Me Go did not turn out to be as crude as that. In fact, crude and polemic are the last things this novel is. It’s a book where the author has really thought through his idea and the different aspects of it, and before long I became gently fascinated by the ins and outs of the setup. So, the pupils of the Hailsham school are marked out to have their organs harvested in later life – after a spell as carers for other donors, they will keep giving donations until they “complete”, that is die. That  much is clear pretty early on. But where did they come from? Why are they encouraged to be “creative”, and why is so much effort put into their education seeing as they don’t have much of a future? As one key player formulates it at the end of the novel, “Why Hailsham at all?”. At one level, the novel reads like a literary thriller where you try to pick up the clues to what goes on in this world. The everyday life of the Hailsham pupils, during and after their time at the school, is rendered with believable detail. They’re not living in some vague thought experiment; their reality seems very real. Also, we sense the very human unease the outside world experiences in connection with them and others in their situation. In the sci-fi scenarios mentioned above, victims of forced organ donations and the like are treated with determined callousness, because it’s a dystopia where pretty much everyone is supposed to be horrible. In Never Let Me Go, people have a conscience, and this has an effect – sometimes good, sometimes bad – on how the donor question is handled.

Another point in the novel’s favour is that it’s narrated by its most likeable progatonist, Kathy H., a girl who may seem naïve but who is in fact very observant. Her closest friends are less interesting: Tommy, the boy she falls in love with, has a healthy curiosity about the reality of their situation, but he’s a blockhead in romantic matters. Ruth, Kathy’s friend and for a long time Tommy’s girlfriend, is a bit of a mean girl, who from the first expects her friends to go along with her self-deceptions in order for her to look better in the eyes of other pupils/students. The power play between the three, and how they’re affected by the presence of others outside of their circle, makes for an engaging read.

I wasn’t heart-broken over Kathy or the other characters, but their fate is affecting enough, and satisfyingly, answers to the questions you have been posing to yourself are provided towards the end. Ishiguro isn’t too fancy to tie up loose ends, for which I was thankful. If you feel up to reading something high-brow and gently melancholy, then Never Let Me Go is a good bet. The Swedish Academy did something right there (you knew that one was coming, right?).