Les Misérables

If you start soon, you will be able to finish this novel (it’s 1194 pages long in the Vintage Classics edition) in time for the release of Tom Hooper’s forthcoming film adaptation. This new film itself is said to be an adaptation of the musical, so if you want the whole picture, you really do need to read the novel.

What will quickly become apparent is that this book is not content with being a mere narrative. It insists on expanding upwards and outwards, away from the plot, taking in a vast emotional and geographical landscape, and a few decades of French history. It challenges the notion that historical context is not part of the story. It resists the idea that there is such a thing as an inconsequential detail.

The temptation is there to skip portions of the text, and this is made easier by the very clear separations between the plot and each of the discursions, which are neatly contained in their own chapters. These tangential commentaries on diverse topics from the Battle of Waterloo to the history of Parisian sewers are, however, vital to Victor Hugo’s purpose in telling this story. They must be read. Unfortunately they have a habit of appearing just as the plot is becoming interesting.

‘The book that the reader has before his eyes at this moment, is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its every detail, whatever its irregularities, its exceptions or shortcomings, a step from bad to good, from the unjust to the just, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to awareness, from rottenness to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; end point: soul.’

The plot itself is terrific, if not a bit implausible. The relatively small group of central characters are drawn to each other like dancers of a madrigal, ceaselessly stepping towards, circling around and away from one another. Coincidences are freakishly common, but a skerrick of believability is restored by ensuring that in some instances, the dancers fail to recognise one another. In such a long novel, the regular reappearance of familiar names cannot fail to reassure.

Ultimately, it is clear that a realistic plot was not the goal. At the heart of the novel is concern for those who are frequently ignored — the people we might today call the 99% — including orphans, the elderly, the destitute and criminals. Les Misérables is a frank plea for more care for these members of society, for greater access to education, and for the equitable distribution of wealth. The central contest between escaped convict Jean Valjean (who represents justice) and Inspector Javert (the embodiment of the law) demonstrated for Hugo the important difference between the application of the laws of men, and the laws of God.

‘Of course, they seemed utterly depraved, utterly corrupt, utterly vile, utterly odious even, but they are rare, those who have fallen without being damaged on the way down; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and the ignominious mingle and fuse, poor bastards, in a single word, a deadly word, outcasts, les misérables, and whose fault is that? And then again, shouldn’t charity be greater, the deeper the fall into the darkness?’

Freedom

‘People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily … You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.’

Since Freedom has been called the literary sensation of 2010, it is tempting to try to find some fault in it. Unfortunately, even the typographical errors that accidentally slipped into the early print runs of this novel do very little to detract from its cleverness. Those who purchased one of these copies (a large number of which have been pulped) may even be hopeful of selling it as a collector’s edition at some later point in time.

This novel is as unaffected, crisp and surprising as dry ice. It tells the suburban history of Walter and Patty Berglund and their children, Joey and Jessica (the ‘show horse’ and ‘work horse’ of the family respectively). Jessica is the least present in the novel, perhaps because she is the most restrained.

The Berglunds are free to pursue all kinds of desires and objectives, whether sexual, altruistic, educational, or financial. (It’s interesting to note as an aside that the Berglunds spend a fair bit of time living on Barrier Street. It is only when they move away that the novel really begins to explore the tensions between personal freedom and collective good.) This liberty is bound to lead to mistakes and conflict. Ultimately, it is a novel about our freedom to choose how to respond to crises, and our freedom to forgive.

The novel took Jonathan Franzen nine years to write, and the evidence of this careful application of skill and patience is in the distance he has created between the reader and the characters, without dulling the impact of this saga or introducing too much cynicism. If you have the opportunity, this is a splendid novel to read over the course of a single weekend, or perhaps a holiday break, because it rewards total immersion. There is much enjoyment to be had in waiting for the first appearance of the word freedom itself, and spotting it at regular intervals thereafter. To borrow one of Patty Berglund’s favoured expressions, this novel is ‘non-optional’.

The Commitments

— What’s that you’ve got there?

— The Commitments. Roddy Doyle.

— Any good?

— Brilliant.

— Care to expand on that?

— You can read it in 24 hours, easy. Mainly dialogue and onomatopoeic transcriptions of music …

— Onomato …

— That’s words which sound like …

— I know what it means!

— DUH DUH DUH DUH, BA DA DA DA …

— Okay, I get it, I get it! Anything else?

— It’s about a band. The hardest working band in Dublin, a working class band, for working class people. They’re on a mission to bring soul music to Dublin.

— What’s their message?

— Sex. Also politics. Mostly sex.

— Okay. Who are they?

— The main guy, the ideas man, is Jimmy Rabbitte. He auditions them and manages the band. Young guys, three girls. An old guy who plays the trumpet called Joey The Lips Fagan. Because he has a stage name, they all have to have stage names. But most of them have only just learned to play an instrument or sing.

— They’re novices.

— Exactly, which is why it’s so exciting. Optimistic. They think they can do anything, and they almost can. And it’s funny; really, really funny.

— Better than Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha?

— It’s a different kind of book. It doesn’t pound you in the guts and then steal your playlunch in quite the same way. But it does have soul.

— Lots of soul?

— Heaps of soul. Overflowing with soul.

— And this punctuation?

— Well, it’s not as if he’s French, is it? But he can get away with it.

This Is How

It is difficult but not impossible to claim M J Hyland as an Australian author. She doesn’t live here. She wasn’t born here. Only a small part of one of her novels takes place here. So those of us who would insist on calling her an Australian may need to rely on the fact that she spent part of her life here, and studied law and English at The University of Melbourne. This Is How is her third published novel, and like the first two, is written in the first person present tense and focuses on the life of a young person who is more than usually different from others.

In How the Light Gets In, Lou Connor, a teenage Australian exchange student, dreams of leaving the family with whom she has nothing in common, and finding acceptance in middle-class America. She sets out only to find herself living with a family whose apparent perfection lacks any real warmth. Lou cannot help rebelling against the stultifying parameters set by her host family the Hardings. However, while brilliantly written, the book is less convincing and less complete than the two that followed.

Carry Me Down, told from the perspective of 11-year-old John Egan, follows John on his quest to have his gifts as a human lie detector recognised in the Guinness Book of Records. When his family moves from the small Irish town of Gorey to Dublin it becomes clear that there are larger and more painful truths to be detected than John had ever realised. Hyland’s many great qualities as a writer (apart from her obvious knack for choosing wonderful titles) include her ability to convey the importance of young people’s concerns. Adult realities float into the consciousness of this excellent novel like sounds heard under water.

In This Is How, Patrick Oxtoby is a skilled mechanic who heads for a seaside town, a hundred miles from home, after being dumped by his fiancée. Lonely, awkward, anxious, and plagued by a difficult relationship with his father, Patrick sets about trying to start a new life, make new friends and meet new girls. To tell much more of the story would be to spoil it. Suffice to say, this book is capable of slicing into its reader with the deftness and facility of a very sharp knife. You won’t know what’s happening until it is too late. A modern Australian classic.

‘I got to thinking that Sarah had only been practising on me, getting her confidence in sex and romance and gathering up some extra nerve so she could move to another man. I got to thinking that I’d filled her full of hot pride, that she’d saved it up to use against me.

She said she was breaking up with me because I didn’t know how to express my emotions. Thing is, I didn’t have that many. As far as I was concerned, it was pretty simple. I was in love with her and I liked our life and we laughed a lot and it felt so good to be in bed with her and have her touching me. I liked what we had.’

You Shall Know Our Velocity

Dave Eggers’ writing is the literary equivalent of spreading a canvas on some grass, weighting each corner with stones, climbing a ladder, then splashing down bucketfuls of paint (lapis lazuli, crimson and jade), descending and having a nap while it dries, before expertly chipping off the ugly globs with a tiny file. You Shall Know Our Velocity is the kind of book that probably gets up and goes about its private business when you leave the room. It definitely wins all manner of silent arguments with your other novels while you are sleeping.

Following the unexpected death of their friend Jack, Will and Hand set out from Milwaukee, determined to give away $38,000 in cash in one week. The conditions of their round the world airfare require them to move west, without backtracking. The need to keep moving in order to make it back in time, and the vagaries of visas and time zones get in the way pretty much immediately. It’s also much harder than anticipated to give away so much money, because of course they can’t give it to just anyone. It has to feel right.

This is a book that understands the pain of being simultaneously confronted with the size of the world and the limitations of being allocated only one life. What about all the other lives you could live! The places you could go and things you could do, with more time. ‘We’d have a motherfucking shitload of dogs! Horses. Peacocks. Oh to live among peacocks. I’d seen them once in person and they defied so many laws of color and gravity that they had to be mad geniuses waiting to take over everything.’

Whatever you do, do not make the mistake of thinking that this novel has no strong emotional base. This writing is modern, self-assured and cool. But this is more than an empty display of technical ability. It is much more than a diversion from everyday life, despite its capacity to entertain with its streetsmart humour and to delight with well-placed departures from orthodoxy. Eggers is not afraid to get close to the edge of the most frightening craters that we peer into while alone in the dark, alone in our own heads.

As in subsequent works like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the more recent Zeitoun, he does not skirt around death, guilt or anger. Here is a writer with honesty, heart and the ability to write it all. You should read this book. But that isn’t why you’ll read it. You’ll read it, in a hurry, because you won’t be able to stop yourself.

Zuleika Dobson: Or an Oxford Love Story

Oh Zuleika! What can be done about her? Apparently, not very much. Zuleika Dobson is Max Beerbohm’s only novel and was published in 1911. (It doesn’t appear frequently in bookshops but can be found online with relative ease.) Zuleika Dobson is an orphan, a former governess and a mediocre conjurer. This doesn’t stop the adorable young woman from breaking hearts from every stage on which she appears in Europe and America. Unfortunately for Miss Dobson, the scores of men who dote on her are missing the one thing she requires: the appearance of not loving her at all.

The thing is, Zuleika simply can’t bring herself to love a man who grovels at her feet. This seems about to change when she goes to stay with her elderly uncle, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford. Of course, heads turn and new devotees assemble the moment she alights at Oxford station. But Zuleika hadn’t reckoned on the Duke of Dorset, easily Oxford’s most eligible bachelor. So determined is he not to fall in love with any of the young women who had always been so determined to woo him, the Duke assumes a frosty manner and rebuffs all of Zuleika’s early advances. All too soon, however, Zuleika begins to exert her usual potent magic and the Duke’s heart is lost. Naturally, this means Zuleika must fall out of love with him as quickly as she fell into it. In an attempt to demonstrate his boundless affection, the Duke declares his intention of taking his own life. As soon as this fact becomes generally known, every other undergraduate in the university vows to follow his fine example.

This is a good story, lightly written and often humorous. It does have the distinct feel of a very long and convoluted inside joke – perhaps it was intended for a certain type of Oxford alumnus. This doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of others, but gives the sense that the enjoyment would be increased for anyone with personal experience of the University. Zuleika Dobson shimmers with wit and rare words, as if Beerbohm had written the whole thing while giving a quiet chuckle, and the dictionary open beside him. While it is amusing, the novel lacks any real variation in tone or pitch. It is a good book, which, with some careful editing, could have been half as long and twice as good.

‘Bright eyes, light feet – she trod erect from a vista whose glare was dazzling to all beholders. She swept among them, a miracle, overwhelming, breath-bereaving. Nothing at all like her had ever been seen in Oxford.’

In Cold Blood

Many books are called ‘compelling’ and this one deserves to be. In Cold Blood is an extraordinarily well-structured and carefully paced work of what has been called ‘novelistic journalism’. Truman Capote has his readers absolutely in his control from start to finish.

The book opens by introducing us to the Clutter family, four members of which were murdered in their home in Kansas in 1952. Allowing the reader to grow to like these immensely likeable people is necessary to the story’s emotional force. It is necessary in order to communicate the magnitude of the crimes and the horror of them.

This is not a detective story. The reader learns very early in the narrative who committed the crimes. Rather, the scenes unfold in chronological order from multiple vantage points, the result of six years of dedicated research on the part of the author. Knowing the outcome of the police investigation in advance somehow does not detract from the suspense of following it at a distance. The ability to describe the crime and its consequences in such detail give it a weighty reality that is often sickening.

Capote goes to great lengths to describe the backgrounds of those who committed these crimes, an approach which allows each of us to draw our conclusions about the causes of crime in any society. What the book does very successfully is to demonstrate the futility of capital punishment for the deterrence of at least some serious crimes. This is because the crimes were committed by persons in the knowledge that if they were to be caught, they would likely hang. Without making any pronouncement on the efficacy of the criminal justice system of the time, Capote leaves room to cast it into doubt. What punishment can be appropriate for anyone involved in the murder of an innocent family, when nothing can give them any comfort or redress? What is the alternative?

That Capote took six years to write the book is proof of his conviction that the story was worth exploring, and worth writing well. He was right.