God Bless You, Mr Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is a wonderful writer with a gentle, witty and humane approach tempered by a clear-eyed rage at the iniquities of the world. This is one of his more whimsical efforts but it nails the complacency of inherited wealth brilliantly. Our hero, Eliot Rosewater, is considered mad for wanting to share his unearned money with the poor, rather than use it to make yet more cash. The story’s sentimentality is offset by the fact that the poor here really are undeserving - variously ungrateful, stupid, feckless and extremely funny.

I was also touched by Eliot’s impromptu secular rite of baptism:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-:

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

The Clerkenwell Tales – Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd is a marvellous writer about London, as shown in London: the Biography, his book on Blake and his best novels (The House of Doctor Dee, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem). This book evokes London brilliantly, with constant references to the sounds and smells of the city and its variety of people.

The Clerkenwell Tales is set in 1399 and tells a tale of religious skulduggery as witnessed by a sequence of characters familiar to those who have read The Canterbury Tales. Ackroyd also has contemporary events in mind. The main danger is a group of religious fanatics who believe they are “chosen” and cannot be punished for any sin including terrorism and murder. It transpires that these fanatics are merely pawns in a much bigger political game. What can Ackroyd possibly be suggesting?

As a thriller it only half-works thanks to a lack of focus, but it’s worth reading for the historical detail and thought-provoking political subtext. If you’re new to the author, though, go for one of the books I mentioned up there in the opening paragraph.

The Uxbridge English Dictionary – John Naismith et al

This gem is a spin-off from the second-greatest radio show ever*, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. It’s a simple premise really - just a selection of words given new meanings, ranging from the whimsical to the downright filthy. There are big laughs on every page. Here are a few examples:

Myth – A female moth
Colonnade – A fizzy enema
Geraniums – The cry of the Royal Paratroopers Flower Arranging Display Team
Archery – To lie whilst under oath and at all other times
Countryside – The murder of Piers Morgan

* Number one being Round the Horne, obviously

The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski

A man has his eyes gouged out with a spoon. A second man is eaten alive by rats. A woman is killed by a glass bottle being smashed inside her. There are numerous examples of savage domestic violence, child abuse, animal cruelty and plague.

This all happens in the first 60 pages; then the Holocaust starts and things begin to get really grim.

In order to get away with this pitiless stuff, the writer needs to reward the reader with some real intellectual or emotional brilliance, which sadly this novel fails to do. The imagery is overstated and the plot is simply a sequence of horrific events.

There is also a disconnection between the narrator’s childlike view of the world and his sophisticated language. When using a child as the main point of view, the writer has 3 sensible options:

1) 3rd person, e.g. Lord of the Flies
2) 1st person using childlike language, e.g. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
3) 1st person using a adult voice looking back, e.g. Spies

All the examples above are successful. The Painted Bird goes for a mix of 2 and 3 and it just doesn’t work.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes - Georges Simenon

Monsieur Monde leaves his house in the morning and goes to work. Inexplicably, he then walks out of the office and disappears, choosing to head out alone to start a whole new life. Only it isn't really inexplicable. I suppose most people have had fantasies about leaving it all behind and starting afresh, probably pictured in moody black and white and soundtracked by There is a Light That Never Goes Out.

It's not an original theme, but Simenon writes brilliantly on the psychology of M.Monde in a way reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The similarity is apt, because the protagonist often feels like a criminal even though he has stolen nothing and hurt nobody. The ending is unexpected and strangely chilling.

The best book I've read this year? Maybe - I'll decide in early January.

The Long Tail - Chris Anderson

Based on a brilliant article in Wired magazine, The Long Tail describes the changes in business structures made possible by new technologies. This touches on a lot of my passions - technology, movies, books, libraries - so I found it an interesting read. However, it didn't tell me a lot that I couldn't already find in the original piece, so just read that unless you're really interested.

The Accidental Woman - Jonathan Coe

A first novel that sets out to parody first novels, I would have to award this book high marks for self-assurance but a lower score for execution. The narrator is supposed to be sly and ironic but I found him irritatingly superior. I do like a book to have a vague stab at a proper ending too, although there are some good gags top keep you entertained until the story just stops.

The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things As They Are - William Godwin

If you had a time machine, where would you most like to go? It’s an ageless pub debate and I swing between London circa 1603 (to catch the first performance of Hamlet) and the same place in the 1790s. This is a work from the latter period, a time when Europe was reeling in the wake of the French Revolution, the New World was fully opening up, Gothic literature was all the rage and Blake was producing his best stuff. How good would that be?

Caleb Williams was written in 1794 and is a fascinating document of its time. Essentially it is a radical political tract dressed up as a ripping adventure yarn. The narrator is an innocent servant imperilled by the machinations of his social superiors, who use society’s tools to torment him. The implication is that society needs to be changed, and the novel was denounced by establishment commentators at the time.

In literary terms, there are shortcomings (especially in terms of sensible plotting) but I love the typical 1790s overstatement. Every setback is a horrifying calamity, every kindly character a faultless saint and a full stop is never used where an exclamation mark will do. The young Jane Austen would have lapped this exciting stuff up before calming down somewhat and inventing the modern novel.

(Cheers to Bunjo for the recommendation.)

The Lost Decade and other stories - F.Scott Fitzgerald

Short stories from a writer I've always meant to read more of ever since loving Gatsby at uni. This was pretty well as I expected - disillusionment among the American rich written in exquisite prose.

Occasional jars for the modern reader: a minor character in one story is called Eva Goebels, and somebody's feet are described as "niggerish".

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke

‘“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could”’

This may sound odd, but I didn’t really get into this fully until somewhere around page 500, at which point I was only halfway through. A book really needs to justify being this long, but this pulls it off with aplomb – I read the last few hundred pages in a couple of days.

The central conceit is the existence of Faerie magic (think Midsummer Night’s Dream) in early eighteenth century England, and the book could be read as a winning pastiche of the Austen/Thackeray style. The depiction of Waterloo, in particular, recalls the most memorable sequence of Vanity Fair, and Northanger Abbey came to mind throughout.

I tended to read it as superior fantasy literature, the sheer level of imagination raising it above the level of most exponents of the genre. There are brilliant stories, often tossed off as footnotes or asides, on almost every page.

I would have liked the relationship between the magicians and the church explored more thoroughly – there was plenty of space to do it in, after all – but the issue is mentioned but never really explored.

Running Wild - J.G. Ballard

A brief and unconvincing novel suggesting that over-protected children could violently rise up against their parents. It was written in the eighties and it shows, although I suppose a parallel could be drawn with the apparently comfortable upbringings of the 7/7 bombers, say. This is definitely a minor Ballard, though.