The Bone People – Keri Hulme

This got me thinking once again about whether there is a specifically female form of writing from which I will be eternally estranged. My friend Belinda adores stuff like this and Helen Garner (which I don’t), and I know many women that can’t stand more “male” writers like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. On the other hand I like such self-consciously feminist authors as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Hmm...I think I’ll have to work out some more coherent thinking on this and come back to it.

The central narrative about a female artist, a Christ-like orphan and the boy’s adoptive father is interesting enough but stylistically I found many of the flourishes distracting and irritating. Absurdly long, too.

My first New Zealand novel, I think, which is strange.

Luke

The third Gospel doesn’t provide much new information but the language is oftentimes slightly improved. Think of it as a later edition.

Blow Your House Down – Pat Barker

I was very interested in the women at the start of this book, when we are introduced to a group of friends who happen to be sex workers. Barker is brilliant at capturing the cadence of their speech and identifying the telling details of their lives. The second part of the book is less compelling, as a Yorkshire Ripper inspired thriller plot comes into play.

The Famished Road – Ben Okri

Reading this novel 20 years after it won the Booker, I can’t help but see it as the fag end of the golden age of Rushdie/Marquez magical realism. It isn’t a bad book at all and the Nigerian setting adds interest, but it spends a good 450 pages chasing its own narrative tail before a finale in which, finally, something happens.

The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe

This is an enjoyable sixteenth century romp, following our Sancho Panza-esque hero through various episodes of bawdy humour, gruesome violence and, um, brazen anti-Semitism. Well, nobody’s perfect.

Mark

A short, breezy version of the Jesus myth which entirely skips the whole nativity/killing of the first-born business as narratively irrelevant and jumps straight in at the baptism. Large chunks are very close to the Gospel of Matthew with just enough discrepancies to make a literal reading logically impossible.

Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges

Somehow or other I’ve never previously gotten around to Borges, a fact I will now make up for by reading the rest of this fascinating author’s work. The brief, cryptic stories are interesting in themselves but the effect is made even more resonant by the repetition of various key motifs; labyrinths, libraries, encyclopaedias.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept – Elizabeth Smart

It’s really a poem this, certainly too dense and ornate to be regarded as prose. Many people consider it to be a masterpiece, but I found it rather too hard going to enjoy and the plotting was ultimately uninteresting. Wonderful title, though.

Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively

This is a fascinating rumination on the role of the individual in history, ostensibly told from the point of view of an elderly narrator in a nursing home. However, the perspective occasionally, and intriguingly, appears to slip, the effect further enriched by the achronological storytelling.

The focus on individual viewpoints and the setting of key passages in wartime Egypt bring Lawrence Durrell to mind.

The Story of the Night – Colm Toibin

I read an interview with Toibin somewhere where he mentions that people who came later to his work are sometimes shocked when they go back and read his earlier stuff as they are full of fairly graphic hot man-on-man action. Having read plenty of Alan Hollinghurst, I did not allow these hair-raising encounters to faze me and I got on with appreciating this splendid novel.

The plot is loose, going from the protagonist’s relationship with his mother in 1970s Buenos Aires to some political doings and finally a surprising and moving love story. Somehow it all works as a unity, largely due to the brilliance and empathy of the writing.