©2006-2010 chorlton chapters

Chorlton Chapters League Table

This table lists the books we have read and discussed. As part of the monthly discussion, members at the meeting score the book out of 10 and the average of these marks gives the book its ranking in the table.

Rank	Title	Date Read	Score
1	to kill a mockingbird	sep 2007	8.86
=2	the reader	mar 2007	8.30
=2	if this is a man / the truce	jan 2009	8.30
4	a prayer for owen meany	nov 2006	8.20
5	the miracle life of edgar mint	feb 2010	8.07
6	the book thief	aug 2009	7.87
7	the go-between	nov 2009	7.85
8	rebecca	jun 2008	7.84
9	perfume	jan 2007	7.80
10	brave new world	oct 2009	7.79
=11	notes on a scandal	aug 2007	7.77
=11	we need to talk about kevin	nov 2007	7.77
13	a million little pieces	aug 2008	7.73
14	cloud atlas	aug 2006	7.72
15	in cold blood	sep 2008	7.50
16	the leopard	sep 2009	7.42
17	catcher in the rye	feb 2007	7.40
18	the wrong boy	mar 2009	7.38
19	the great gatsby	mar 2008	7.33
20	the barrytown trilogy/the van	jun 2009	7.22
21	the outsider	may 2007	7.13
22	26a	may 2006	6.86
23	buddha da	sep 2006	6.79
=24	the life of pi	jan 2008	6.78
=24	one big damn puzzler	nov 2008	6.78
26	the picture of dorian gray	apr 2008	6.69
27	american pastoral	apr 2009	6.63
28	the many-coloured land	jul 2007	6.60
29	never let me go	feb 2009	6.46
30	the name of the rose	may 2008	6.44
31	northanger abbey	jun 2006	6.38
32	brideshead revisited	oct 2008	6.24
33	slaughterhouse 5	oct 2007	6.14
34	stranger in a strange land	jul 2009	6.05
=35	panic	jul 2006	5.92
=35	northern lights	apr 2007	5.92
37	to the lighthouse	oct 2006	5.70
38	our kid	feb 2008	5.56
39	the other hand	jan 2010	5.13
40	the riders	jul 2008	5.08
41	running with scissors	jun 2007	5.00
42	the full montezuma	may 2009	3.88

Book choice for February 2010

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint [suggested by Laura Smith]

Debut novelist Brady Udall's The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a moving tragic-comedy that has been compared to the works of John Irving. The tender humour of this novel, coupled with subtly explored issues, makes this an outstanding read. Udall's prose style is engaging and refreshing, and the voice of the narrator is utterly convincing. When eight-year-old Edgar Mint gets his head squashed by a post van on the Apache reservation where he lives with his alcoholic mother, it is the beginning of a new life. Resurrected from near death by a junior doctor, Edgar find himself in a new environment, sharing a ward with three men in various states of serious injury, the focus of the hospital's attention and with no recollection of his previous life. So begins Edgar's journey.

This is essentially a rites of passage novel. But the passage that Edgar must take is more painful than most. With no memory and with only a typewriter for company, he faces alienation among his people, is disregarded as retarded and is shoved out of sight by white America to a tough school for troublesome reservation children. Edgar seeks the solace of acceptance or escape, anything to take him away from the suffering of being different, of being an outsider. By showing Edgar learning about himself, understanding the world around him, and experiencing everything again for the first time, Udall explores the big explosive themes of religion, race, identity and gender with a deft hand. There is nothing ham-fisted in his treatment of these issues. They are dealt with in a quiet but direct manner, through the eyes of a child coming to terms with the absurdity of humanity. This is, in some ways, also a rags-to-riches story and the notion of what exactly it is that enriches our lives is central. Edgar must first journey before he ultimately discovers this wealth. His journey is a search for identity, for the missing gaps in his life and it is only when all these gaps are filled that Edgar can discover his true worth. [review from amazon]

About the Author

Brady Udall is an American novelist.

He grew up in a large Mormon family in St. Johns, Arizona, graduated from Brigham Young University and later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was formerly a faculty member of Franklin & Marshall College starting in 1998, then Southern Illinois University, and now teaches writing at Boise State University.

A collection of his short stories titled Letting Loose the Hounds was published in 1998[6] and his debut novel The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint was first published in 2001. The characterization and structure of the latter has been favorably compared to the work of John Irving. Thematically it has been compared to Charles Dickens. Michael Stipe has optioned a film adaptation of Miracle, with United Artists hiring Michael Cuesta to direct.

The above adapted from Udall's Wikipedia page.

Review

(Almost) everyone loved it. The scoring reflects that: 8; 6; 9; 8.5; 10; 9; 6; 8; 9; 8; 8; 8.5; 7; and 8, giving an average of 8.07, snatching overall fifth place from The Book Thief, and sitting below A Prayer for Owen Meany.

 

Book choice for January 2010

The Other Hand [suggested by Cate Hughes]

We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterwards that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

So runs the blurb on the book's cover, which many reviewers have complained over-hypes the story and sets expectations that the book doesn't fulfil. Others disagree, such as Helen Cleaves writing on Waterstones' website:

The Other Hand is not an easy read. It is emotionally challenging, laugh-out-loud hilarious and demanding. It is also one of the most compelling books I have read for years. Not only is the plot strong and the characters convincing, but the writing itself grabs hold of you and refuses to let you go. Written with an intense energy and sparing precision where every word is made to work, Cleave's description is startlingly fresh, free from any of the usual cliches. This book provides a new way to look at life in England in 2008 - through the eyes of a refugee who as an outsider is well-positioned to question our assumed values and aspirations. And Cleave is not kind on the middle classes - I read this with some discomfort as he exposed the hollowness of suburban life. I won't give away the plot as the blurb is deliberately evasive. I would have preferred to have the story left unresolved. But this book's strength lies in the characterisation and quality of the writing. Like the first breath you take when you step outside on a freezing day from a warm cosy house this is a power shower of a book. It will wake you up. I have told people about this book and will be doing so for some time.

About the Author

Chris Cleave's website is largely a blog, and its frontpage is devoted to his Guardian column. If you dig around you can find this brief biog:

Chris Cleave is 35. He is a novelist and a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London. He is only 5'7" tall.

His debut novel Incendiary won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize, won the United States Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction award 2005 and won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007.

Inspired by his childhood in West Africa and by an accidental visit to a British concentration camp, Chris Cleave's second novel is entitled The Other Hand in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It is entitled Little Bee in the US and Canada.

Chris Cleave has been a barman, a long-distance sailor, a teacher of marine navigation, an internet pioneer and a journalist. He lives in London with his French wife and two mischievous Anglo-French children.

Review

All in all we decided that this is yet another novel by someone trying to be cleverer than he really is. The "voices" of Sarah and Little Bee are distinct enough, with the latter perhaps being more entertaining than the former, but we found little to sympathise with in either of them, with Sarah especially coming in for some harsh criticism on account of her behaviour towards anyone who isn't herself. Most agreed that the story started well, and the detention centre scenes were well-drawn, but it suffered a high dose of "so what" from about a third of the way through, and many people suggested it would have been more interesting had we picked up the stories of the other detainees - especially Yevette - at some stage. The ending didn't sit well with anyone, being in many respects literally incredible, from the presence of Sarah and Charlie on the plane back to Nigeria, to the fact of the soldiers still being so keen on apprehending Bee two or more years later.

The scores from the two groups revealed that the group I'd been in had perhaps given The Other Hand too easy a ride, even though we thought our scores were on the low side. The damage lines up as: 6.5; 6; 6; 6; 7; 2; 7; 8; 5; 6; 6; 7; 5; 6; 4; 3; 1; 5; and 1 resulting in an average of 5.13 and a rather disappointing 38th place (fourth from last), above only The Riders, Running with Scissors, and The Full Montezuma.

 

Book choice for November 2009

The Go-Between [suggested by Ash Davies]

Resembling both McEwan's Atonement and Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.

Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. Catastrophe is inevitable - and devastating to Leo. In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.

The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives - Leo Colston as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent. Some readers have commented on Leo's unrealistic innocence in matters of sex, even as a 12-year-old, but this may be a function of age. For those of us who can remember life without TV and the computer, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a life in which "mass communication" meant the telegraph and in which "spooning" was an adults-only secret. [Review by Mary Whipple on Amazon]

Naturally the book has a Wikipedia page.

About the Author

L.P. Hartley was an English novelist, short-story writer, and critic whose works fuse a subtle observation of manners traditional to the English novel with an interest in the psychological nuance.

After he got his degree at the University of Oxford (1922), Hartley wrote criticism for the literary reviews and published short stories, many of them fantastic or macabre. A collection, Night Fears, appeared in 1924. His novella Simonetta Perkins (1925) was a light exercise in cosmopolitan manners, with a plot that recalls Henry James's "international" stories. The Killing Bottle (1932) was another collection of stories. The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), his first novel in 19 years, was the first part of a trilogy about a brother and sister, Eustace and Hilda. The first volume treats their childhood. The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947) follow them in adulthood. Adept at depicting childhood, Hartley focusses the action of another of his novels, The Go-Between (1953; filmed 1971), on a 12-year-old boy who inadvertently causes a tragedy through his ignorance of the complexity of adult relations.

Relations between brothers and sisters were further explored in My Sisters' Keeper (1970). Hartley's most complex and fully realized novel is The Boat (1949), in which he explores the struggles of a crowd-avoiding individual in England during World War II, when group effort and identification were the norm. A volume of essays, The Novelist's Responsibility, appeared in 1967 and The Collected Stories of L.P. Hartley in 1968.

The above is taken from Hartley's biography on the Britannica Online Encyclopedia; he also has a Wikipedia entry.

Review

This space available to hold a review of November's novel by someone who read it (as once again, and shamefully, I didn't).

The scores at the meeting revealed a definite bias to liking The Go-Between: 7; 9; 7.5; 9; 8; 8; 4; 9; 9; and 8 giving it an average of 7.85 and a very creditable 6th place, two hundredths behind the Book Thief and an even smaller margin ahead of Rebecca. At Ash's suggestion I have now included the "league table" at the top of this page.

 

Book choice for October 2009

Brave New World [suggested by Uzma Ali]

Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" is both one of the best science fiction books and one of the most brilliant pieces of satire ever written. BNW takes place on a future Earth where human beings are mass-produced and conditioned for lives in a rigid caste system. As the story progresses, we learn some of the disturbing secrets that lie underneath the bright, shiny facade of this highly-ordered world.

Huxley opens the book by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on a tour of the Fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the high-tech reproduction takes place. Into this seemingly advanced civilization is introduced John, a "savage" from a reservation where old human culture still survives. Thus, BNW is also a tale of "culture shock" and conflict.

Huxley creates a compelling blend of bizarre comedy, serious character study, futuristic extrapolation, and philosophical discussion. His writing style is crisp and witty, and cleverly incorporates references to canonical works of literature. Probably the scariest thing about BNW is the fact that, in many ways, humanity seems to be moving closer to Huxley's dystopian vision. [review on Amazon by Michael J. Mazza]

This famous work not only has its own Wikipedia page but is another of those works big enough to warrant its own website. If you wish, you can also read the whole thing online.

About the Author

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 - 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts.

Aldous Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics.

By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank.

The above Wikipedia article continues with a more detailed biography, or try here for a shorter version that I don't want to reproduce as they seem a bit tetchy about copyright.

Review

This space available to hold a review of October's novel by someone who read it and/or attended this month's meeting (as I did neither).

The scores went: 7.5; 8.5; 7.5; 6; 8; 8; 8; 8; 7; 7; 7.5; 9; 9; and 8 resulting in an average of 7.79 and 8th place, two hundredths ahead of Notes on a Scandal and a hundredth behind Perfume.

 

Book choice for September 2009

The Leopard [suggested by Gill Smithson]

I think this may be the nearest thing to a perfect novel. It's set in Sicily around the time of the '100 days' - the beginning of Garibaldi's campaign to unite Italy (and extend the franchise along the way). The central character is an aging aristocrat. He is at once admirable, contemptible and pitiable. He is more aware than his peers that the power of his class is crumbling, along with his own previously formidable powers. His loyalty - to his family, his class, and a king whom he personally despises - dominates his actions, even while he knows the inevitability of failure. Yet his personal relations with his family are distant.

The book is a great work of art. Much is understated, implied, ambiguous. The revolution has bittersweet consequences: it is obvious what was gained, but something was lost (the author was also a count). So much is said in so few words. Occasionally the peaks of human artistry inspire awe: how can a person do this? This is such a peak. Paragraphs, pages even, are perfect.[review by Jonathan Ward on amazon]

A much longer and more erudite review is available here and naturally the book has its own Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo into one of the oldest families of Sicilian aristocracy. His father was the duke of Palma, and his grandfather was the prince of Lampedusa. The family had once been very rich, but had lost most of their property. Little is known about Lampedusa's private life. He lived a wild youth and only his mother could keep him under control. Likewise the family did not approve of his enthusiasm for literature - in the family library he read books of all kinds in several languages. During World War I Lampedusa served in the Italian army as an artillery officer, but was captured and imprisoned in Hungary. After escaping he returned to Italy on foot. His plans for a diplomatic career were ended by a nervous breakdown. The influence of his mother, with whom he spent much time abroad, hindered his literary aspirations. After she died, Lampedusa was free to devote himself to culture and write for his own pleasure.

The above is just the start of a much longer biog at that link, and he too has a Wikipedia page.

Review

Many of the 15 assembled in the face of the darkness and the rain to discuss The Leopard appeared to agree with the reviewer above that this book is a perfect read. From the sumptuous descriptions to the languid pace; the solidity of the characters to the inspiring and suggestive look at a fascinating period of history, it certainly provided plenty of food for thought. Food of a more traditional kind was also on offer, as Gill had thoughtfully provided a good supply of home-made Garibaldi biscuits to help the discussion along!

With only a few dissenters in the group, and even them admitting to an appreciation of di Lampedusa's language, the book looked destined for the Chorlton Chapters' top ten, but when the scores came in, 9; 9; 7; 6; 7.5; 7; 7; 8.5; 7; 7; 6; and 8 only gave it an average of 7.42 and 13th place, two hundredths ahead of Catcher in the Rye and a little way behind In Cold Blood.

 

Book choice for August 2009

The Book Thief [suggested by Michelle Nithsdale]

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak was the best-selling debut literary novel of the year 2007, selling over 400,000 copies. The author is a prize-winning writer of children's books, and this, his first novel for adults, proved to be a triumphant success. The book is extraordinary on many levels: moving, yet restrained, angry yet balanced - and written with the kind of elegance found all too rarely in fiction these days. The book's narrator is nothing less than Death itself, regaling us with a remarkable tale of book burnings, treachery and theft. The book never forgets the primary purpose of compelling the reader's attention, yet which nevertheless is able to impart a cogent message about the importance of words, particularly in those societies which regard the word as dangerous (the book is set during the Nazi regime, but this message is all too relevant in many places in the world today).

Nine-year-old Liesel lives with her foster family on Himmel Street during the dark days of the Third Reich. Her Communist parents have been transported to a concentration camp, and during the funeral for her brother, she manages to steal a macabre book: it is, in fact, a gravediggers' instruction manual. This is the first of many books which will pass through her hands as the carnage of the Second World War begins to hungrily claim lives. Both Liesel and her fellow inhabitants of Himmel Street will find themselves changed by both words on the printed page and the horrendous events happening around them.

Despite its grim narrator, The Book Thief is, in fact, a life-affirming book, celebrating the power of words and their ability to provide sustenance to the soul. Interestingly, the Second World War setting of the novel does not limit its relevance: in the 20th century, totalitarian censorship throughout the world is as keen as ever at suppressing books (notably in countries where the suppression of human beings is also par for the course) and that other assault on words represented by the increasing dumbing-down of Western society as cheap celebrity replaces the appeal of books for many people, ensures that the message of Marcus Zusak's book could not be more timely. It is, in fact, required reading - or should be in any civilised country. [review by Barry Forshaw on amazon.com]

About the Author

Australian author Markus Zusak grew up hearing stories about Nazi Germany, about the bombing of Munich and about Jews being marched through his mother's small, German town. He always knew it was a story he wanted to tell.

"We have these images of the straight-marching lines of boys and the 'Heil Hitlers' and this idea that everyone in Germany was in it together. But there still were rebellious children and people who didn't follow the rules and people who hid Jews and other people in their houses. So there's another side to Nazi Germany," said Zusak in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.

At the age of 30, Zusak has already asserted himself as one of today's most innovative and poetic novelists. With the publication of The Book Thief, he is now being dubbed a 'literary phenomenon' by Australian and U.S. critics. Zusak is the award-winning author of four previous books for young adults: The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, Getting the Girl, and I Am the Messenger, recipient of a 2006 Printz Honor for excellence in young adult literature. He lives in Sydney.

The above taken from his entry on Random House's author pages, Zusak also has a Wikipedia page.

Review

19 members arrived to discuss The Book Thief and in general reaction was very positive: to the characters, the prose and the style. One or two people thought Death didn't make a believable narrator, or were irritated by the bold, centred "asides", but those who finished it found it both moving and relevant in its depiction of ordinary people coping with extraordinary circumstances, and even some who were only halfway through had already reached a deep connection with the story. Most notably, a sizable majority would recommend the book to friends.

This month's scorecard goes: 10; 9; 8; 7; 9; 8; 10; 5; 9; 8; 6; 8; 5; 7; and 9 resulting in a creditable average of 7.87, giving The Book Thief 5th position out of 37, behind A Prayer for Owen Meany and nudging Rebecca into 6th.

 

Book choice for July 2009

Stranger in a Strange Land [suggested by John Beresford]

Stranger in a Strange Land, winner of the 1962 Hugo Award, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention de facto owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs.

The impact of Stranger in a Strange Land was considerable, leading many children of the 60's to set up households based on Michael's water-brother nests. Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters, so modern readers must be willing to overlook the occasional sour note ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault."). That aside, Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the master's best entertainments, provocative as he always loved to be. Can you grok it? [Review from Amazon]

The book has its own Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Robert Anson Heinlein was born on 7 July 1907, in Butler, Missouri, the third son of Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle Heinlein. At the time of Robert's birth, the family had been living with his maternal grandfather, Alva Lyle, M.D. A few months after Heinlein was born, his family moved from Butler to Kansas City, where he was to grow up.

His consuming interest, from the 1910 apparition of Halley's Comet, was for astronomy. By the time he entered Kansas City's Central High School in 1920, Heinlein had already read every book on astronomy in the Kansas City Public Library.

Heinlein has said that he read all the science fiction he could lay hands on from the age of 16. The cosmic romances of Olaf Stapledon affected him particularly. He read the first series of Tom Swift books, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells.

The above taken from the biographies page of the Heinlein Society website, RAH also has an entry on Wikipedia.

Review

With two notable exceptions, the group reaction to Stranger was surprisingly (to me!) favourable, although it was a smaller-than-usual group of 12 who gathered for the discussion this month.

Overall it came across as an interesting story which started well, lost its way a little in the middle, and ended... well... rather strangely. A book very much of its time, much of both the characterisation and the social commentary now seems very dated, and those who managed to find an abridged copy (something like 160,000 words) probably had a better time of it than those who struggled through the full text of 220,000.

In more detailed discussion, it was apparent that our modern audience didn't think the characters particularly believable, found it strange how Mike could get away with "disappearing" so many public figures and police without any comeback, and were for the most part amused by Heinlein's blatant wish-fulfilment in his descriptions of the Nest. Given all these shortcomings Stranger received a subdued scoreline of: 8; 7; 2; 7; 7; 7; 5; 5; 6.5; and 6 giving average of 6.05, which translates to 29th position, behind Slaughterhouse 5 and ahead of Panic.

 

Book choice for June 2009

The Barrytown Trilogy (The Van) [suggested by Gabby Evans]

Note for Chapters members: Gabby originally proposed The Van as her selection, and there was then some debate about whether we should read the whole trilogy. In the end it was decided members should read The Van first (which stands on its own as a novel) and the other two books later if they have time.

Though Doyle never intended to write a trilogy, his first three novels are so true-to-life and so representative of north Dublin that it is easy to see why they are now grouped as a "trilogy." All are set in the same blighted neighbourhood, an area of overcrowded tenements, unemployment, and hardscrabble living, but also an area full of life, dreams for the future, rowdy friendships centred around the pub, and close families. Focusing on various members of the Rabbitte family, the novels show life as it is really lived here, with moments of high humour and often hilarious interactions alternating with moments of sad realisation and broken dreams.

The Van focuses on the father, Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr., now unemployed, who goes to work with his best friend Bimbo, who has bought a "chips" van for selling burgers, fish and chips at sporting events, an experience that tests the friendship.

The dialogue throughout these novels is lightning-fast, filled with local dialect, crude profanities, witticisms, and can-you-top-this insults. In this neighbourhood, survival is based on toughness and the ability to think quickly on one's feet, and the dialogue often resembles a stage play more than a novel. Characterisation, which is thin in The Commitments gradually becomes more complex in later novels. With The Van, Doyle develops into a real novelist, using dialogue to depict the complex tensions which evolve between two best friends who eventually find themselves at each other's throats.

The Rabbitte family is both individualised and symbolic of the neighbourhood, and the three novels together show their need for dreams, along with their attitudes towards education, sex, factory work, and the church. We see their "escapes" from the workday, their physicality, and their amusements and humour. Here, in his Barrytown novels, Doyle shows the vibrancy of life in one blighted area and celebrates the small successes and the love which give meaning to their lives. [Review by Mary Whipple at Amazon]

The novel has a Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958.

His novels are The Commitments, (originally published in Dublin by King Farouk, thereafter London, Secker & Warburg, 1987); The Snapper (Secker & Warburg, 1990); The Van (Secker & Warburg, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Barrytown Trilogy [The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van] (Secker & Warburg,1992); Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (Secker & Warburg, 1993), which won the 1993 Booker Prize; The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (Secker & Warburg,1996); A Star Called Henry (Secker & Warburg,1999); Oh, Play that Thing (London, Jonathan Cape, 2004); and Paula Spencer (Jonathan Cape, 2006).

The above taken from Irish Writers Online, where the rest of his "biography" consists of further lists, of his short stories, drama, TV series, books for children and awards. Follow the link if you're interested. Doyle, naturally, also has a Wikipedia entry.

Review

A gradually increasing crowd eventually numbering 24 crushed into the Lounge's beer garden again this month to take advantage of the sunshine (and watch our papers blowing away).

Splitting into two groups, there was a generally positive response to the book in the larger group, with everyone appreciating how Doyle's prose kept to the point and didn't waffle about. We felt the characters were real and well realised; three-dimensional and that Doyle "got us on their side" very easily by dumping us in the middle of their conversations and showing their lives how they really were: alternately funny and sad, encouraging and discouraging, blighted and blessed. Pretty much like real life, then.

The smaller group, although I wasn't privy to their discussions, gave generally lower marks to The Van, so we ended up with a scoreline that looked like: 7; 8; 8; 7; 6; 9; 6; 10; 10; 9; 8; 5; 7; 5; 6; 8; 6; and 5 giving average of 7.22, and conferring 15th place on The Van (just behind The Great Gatsby and ahead of The Outsider).

 

Book choice for May 2009

The Full Montezuma [suggested by Ellie Liddle]

Peter Moore is a travel journalist and radio broadcaster from Sydney; this side of the globe he's probably best known for The Wrong Way Home, a lively narration of his quixotic attempt to semi-circumnavigate the globe without stepping on a plane.

Moore's book The Full Montezuma is a moderately likeable, mildly intriguing first-person account of his travels in Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and neighbouring countries, accompanied by - the Girl Next Door - a "spunky blonde in a chamois bikini". Together, and sometimes apart, the two of them bus, boat and taxi around the principal sites of central America and the Caribbean, enjoying and enduring a six-month long low-budget mini-Odyssey that variously involves hurricanes, civil wars, and insurgencies, as well as the more predictable Mayan cities, Aztec ruins, drunk American students, and importuning mariachi bands.

Stylistically, it has to be said Moore is not averse to the odd cliché. "The zocalo has it all", "the highlight was the video", "the rest, as they say, is history", all occur in the opening chapters. Moore also fails to pull any "writerly" muscles trying to provide fresh information on the historical and political background. However, if all you require is an enthusiastic, undemanding, amiable companion on your armchair journey around a fascinating part of the world, this book could be just the ticket. [review from amazon]

The novel has a dedicated page on Moore's website.

About the Author

Peter Moore has a much better developed website than Alex Garland (*cough*) wherein the following amusing biography notes begin with:
The short version
Born 1962.
The long version
After a happy and carefree childhood on a five-acre farm on the outskirts of Sydney I attended Hurlstone Agricultural High School. Like most graduates of the Class of 1980 I still think about the pig we had to slaughter in Year Nine. Daily.

Read more on said biography page and/or check out his Wikipedia entry.

Review

Peter Moore graciously added a "welcome to Chorlton Chapters" note on his Full Montezuma page on learning (somehow) that we were reading his book this month. He may not be so gracious when he learns what we thought of it, although elsewhere on his website he says he stays away from critics and reviews generally, so if you're reading this Peter... look away now.

There was general antipathy to the book, with many people disliking his treatment of "the GND" (or even his referring to her as the GND in the first place). As a travel novel the book doesn't really reveal much about the places they visit, preferring to concentrate on the travelling involved. Whether this is because the act of travelling is supposed to be more exciting, or just because Moore's descriptive abilities are not up to the task of painting word pictures of exotic locations is unclear. The group (19 of us this month) thought his writing was generally lazy (an accusation that has been levelled before, according to his website) and some had an even stronger negative feeling about it, calling it clichéd and woefully in need of a stronger editor. The "Annoying Habits" feature at the start of each chapter struck a chord with many travellers (in partnerships) but was disappointing as it was never really followed through in the rest of the chapter.

With a scoreline that looked like: 0; 4; 2; 4.5; 5; 5; 2; 4; 5; 3; 4.5; 4; 5; 4; 5; 5; and 4 it was already obvious on the night that this was going to turn out to be our lowest scoring book ever simply because the previous lowest - Running with Scissors - had an average of 5.00 and TFM didn't manage a single score GREATER than 5. Sure enough the average turns out at 3.88, putting The Full Montezuma very firmly in last place out of the 34 books we've read so far.

 

Book choice for April 2009

American Pastoral [suggested by Lorraine Southern]

In his 22nd novel, Roth shows his age. Not that his writing is any less vigorous and supple. But in this autumnal tome, he is definitely in a reflective mood, looking backward. As the book opens, Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, recalls an innocent time when golden boy Seymour "the Swede" Levov was the pride of his Jewish neighborhood. Then, in precise, painful, perfectly rendered detail, he shows how the Swede's life did not turn out as gloriously as expected. How it was, in fact, devastated by a child's violent act. When Merry Levov blew up her quaint little town's post office to protest the Vietnam war, she didn't just kill passing physician Fred Conlon, she shattered the ties that bound her to her worshipful father. Merry disappears, then eventually reappears as a stick-thin Jain living in sacred povery in Newark, having killed three more people for the cause. Roth doesn't tell the whole story blow by blow but gives us the essentials in luminous, overlapping bits. In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended. [Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" ©1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.]

The novel has a Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city's lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M.A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, he taught creative writing, and for many years he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992.

His first book was Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella and five stories that use wit, irony, and humor to depict Jewish life in post-war America. The book won him critical recognition, including the National Book Award for fiction, and along with that, condemnation from some within the Jewish community for depicting what they saw as the unflattering side of contemporary Jewish American experience. His first full-length novel was Letting Go (1962), a Jamesian realistic work that explores many of the societal and ethical issues of the 1950s. This was followed in 1967 by When She Was Good, another novel in the realistic mode that takes as its focus a rare narrative voice in Roth's fiction: a young Midwestern female.

Roth has a Wikipedia entry and his own society from which the above biog is extracted (there is more).

Review

Fifteen people gathered to discuss American Pastoral - a group size that wouldn't normally require splitting into two groups, but as Manchester United were battling Arsenal in the back room, to the raucous cheers of a couple of dozen supporters, we decamped to the front bar and STILL couldn't make ourselves heard across the table. Full review notes will have to wait until someone else offers to write them, because I didn't read the book this month, so for now you'll have to make do with the scoring, which went: 6; 7; 2; 7; 5; 3; 1; 9; 6; 10; 9; 10; 8; 8; 8; and 7 (including a couple of votes from absent members) giving American Pastoral an average score of 6.63 and 21st place in our list, behind Picture of Dorian Gray and slightly ahead of The Many-Coloured Land.

 

March 2009

The Wrong Boy [suggested by Esmé Caulfield]

The Wrong Boy is the debut novel of Liverpudlian playwright Willy Russell, famed for his plays-turned-films Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, and the West End musical stalwart Blood Brothers. Both Rita and Valentine were star-making roles and if (and when) The Wrong Boy makes it to the screen, the main character Raymond is likely to have the same effect on one lucky young actor.

Teenager Raymond Marks has not had a charmed life. His profligate, instrument-loving father made an early exit, leaving him with a struggling mother and doting Sartre-fan grandmother. Fifteen minutes of potential glory when he saved a boy from drowning are cruelly compromised when it's discovered that the boys were near the canal indulging in what they called "flytrapping", and Raymond becomes "the precocious pervert, the evil influence, the filthy little beast". Eventually packed off to "Gulag Grimsby" at the suggestion of his despised Uncle Jason, Raymond pours out his life's woes in a series of missives to his idol, one-time Smiths' star Morrissey.

Writing his letters with improbable speed, Raymond is ingratiating, unstoppable and superbly miserable, as befits a Morrissey devotee - and lucky enough to be surrounded by a bevy of gift-wrapped Northern character parts. Russell's genius is to take situations and characters that are firmly placed in the banally familiar - and then push them to their comic limits. In The Wrong Boy those limits are tested to the full. [review from amazon.com]

The novel has a page of Russell's website devoted to it.

About the Author

Russell was born in Whiston, Lancashire and grew up in a working class family in Liverpool, England. After leaving school with one O-level in English, he first became a ladies hairdresser and ran his own salon. Russell then undertook a variety of jobs, also writing songs which were performed in local folk clubs. He also contributed songs and sketches to local radio programmes. At 20 years old, he returned to college and became a teacher in the Toxteth area of Liverpool. Around this time he met his later wife, Annie, and became interested in writing drama.

His first success was a play about The Beatles called John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert commissioned for the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and transferring to the West End in 1974. Three of his later plays became outstanding successes: Educating Rita (1980); Blood Brothers (for which Russell also composed the music), first produced in 1983; and Shirley Valentine, which first opened in Liverpool in 1986. Russell received BAFTA and Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for both Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine.

He published his first novel, The Wrong Boy, in 2000.

Russell has a both a website and a Wikipedia entry.

Review

Although there was quite a large crowd for a single group this week, everyone got involved in a lively and penetrating discussion. On the whole the book was enjoyed, although sheer irritation at many of the frustrating characters and events threatened to spoil it for some. Opinions varied on Russell's comedic accomplishment, though with general accord that there are some excellent set-pieces and well-written comic characters. The style of writing, in using letters to tell the story, was regarded as an unusual and effective device, although the style of writing struck some as artificial and unconvincing - a fault perhaps of the author's background in script writing. The conversation developed into some interesting ideas around the perils of individualism and flaws in social care programmes, and the issue of childhood alienation drew comparisons with last month's book. Ultimately, total agreement was reached on one issue, which was the desire to have the character of Gran in our families! [review by Ben Monk]

There were 16 people at the meeting who voted, and their votes went: 9; 8; 7; 5; 6.5; 4; 8; 8; 9; 8; 3; 7; 8.5; 9; 8; 10 giving The Wrong Boy an average score of 7.38 and 13th place in our list.

 

February 2009

Never Let Me Go [suggested by Paula Hyder]

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside.  The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial.  But for what reason were they really there?  It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory.  What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures.  Never Let Me Go is a uniquely moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.

The novel has its own Wikipedia entry.

About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro is the hugely acclaimed author of five previous novels: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day (1989 Winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995 Winner of the Cheltenham Prize) and When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize).  He received an OBE for Services to Literature in 1995, and the French decoration of the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Letters in 1998.

He has a Wikipedia entry.

Review

Another bumper meeting this month, with even larger numbers attending that last month, and another six new members.

We split into two groups for discussion, but Never Let Me Go effectively divided us into three groups. Some loved it, some hated it, but the overwhelming majority stuck to the middle ground, wherein there were aspects of it we liked (mainly the social questions around cloning humans to harvest their organs, the well-realised interactions between the students, the accurate depiction of life in an institution like Hailsham and the behaviours it engenders), but it was held back from being a classic by Ishiguro's cold, bleak prose (apparently a feature of most of his other work, and really only effective in The Remains of the Day), his lack of any clear explanation of the donations, or why the students remained complicit in the face of their fate. In the end, the novel raised more questions than it answered and while this may have been the author's intent, it made for quite an unsatisfying read.

Its combined voting pattern of: 8; 8; 9; 9; 7; 7.5; 7; 2; 9; 7; 5; 6; 9; 6; 3; 3; 7; 6; 6; 6; 7; 7; 7; 6; 5; 6; and 6 resulted in an average score of 6.46 putting it 21st in the popularity list (out of 31).

 

January 2009

If This Is A Man / The Truce [suggested by Richard Layfield]

The author was imprisoned in Auschwitz from March 1944 to January 1945.  Of the 650 Jews who entered the camp with him, 525 went to the gas chamber.  He survived, and here describes his experience during those ten months.  He explains the writing of this book as a need felt by all the survivors; 'the need to tell our story to 'the rest', to make the rest participate in it; the book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation.'  He writes simply, elegantly, precisely about his experience.  It is utterly matter-of-fact - not a hint of sensation, self-indulgence, or self pity.  And the effect upon the reader is exactly that which he sought for himself in telling the tale; an interior liberation.  To look at the worst that man can do, and know that the best cannot be destroyed by it.  [Review by Jane Rogers at Amazon]

Wikipedia entry.

About the Author

Primo Michele Levi (July 31, 1919 - April 11, 1987) was a Jewish-Italian chemist, Holocaust survivor and author of memoirs, short stories, poems, essays and novels.

He is best known for his work on the Holocaust, and in particular his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz, the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.  If This Is a Man (published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Wikipedia entry.

Review

Were people looking for a cheap night out in the depths of both January and the credit crunch, or is Chorlton Chapters becoming the go-to group for the readers of South Manchester? Whatever the reason 25 of us turned out to discuss If This Is a Man - one of the largest groups ever, which included NINE new members.

Unusually, too, most people had finished at least one of the two books, and opinions were divided between those who found it depressing and hard going (a significant minority) and those who believed it to be a work of literary genius from a man who survived the horror of Auschwitz through a combination of dogged determination and pure good luck.  A deep insight into the human condition when every civilising influence is stripped away, and yet men still find ways to segregate themselves and impose a meaningless hierarchy to everyday life, no matter how degraded that life becomes.

With a combined voting pattern of: 6; 7; 8; 6; 10; 8; 9.5; 9; 7; 10; 9; 8; 6; 7; 10; 10; 10; 9; 9; 9; 8; 9; 7; 8; and 8, Levi's work hit the high score of 8.30, giving it equal 2nd place with The Reader, behind our favourite book of all time To Kill A Mockingbird.

 

November 2008

One Big Damn Puzzler [suggested by Myra Bordon]

Is be or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler...  On the day the plane brought the white man to the island, Managua was, as usual, preoccupled with his translation of Hamlet.  As the only islander who could read, let alone write, he felt the burden of his culture rested plenty damn heavy upon his shoulders.  The plane's arrival meant he'd have to put aside his work, strap on his leg and make his way to the landing beach to greet the newcomer.  The island had welcomed visitors before, of course.  The British had been there, rather noncommittally, but they had bequeathed their language, half a hotel, the small pigs that now ran wild in the jungle, and Shakespeare.  Then the Americans with their military base, its soldiers and guns.  That had not been a happy time - as the many landmine casualties testified - apart from the Coca Cola.  And there was Miss Lucy, who had embraced island life and its traditions, even if she did over-indulge those silly She-Boys.  But what to make of this new arrival, this young lawyer from America with his strange nervous gestures and his fervent belief in doing the right thing and winning reparation for the Islanders?  Managua sensed that William Hardt's coming to the island would change everything.  And he would be proved plenty damn right...  This achingly funny, rich and supremely moving novel confirms John Harding as one of contemporary fiction's most entertaining and observant chroniclers of the human condition.

About the Author

John Harding was born in a small Fenland village in the Isle of Ely in 1951.  After local village and grammar schools, he read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he once sat next to Martin Amis during a lecture.  He worked first as a newspaper reporter, then as a writer and editor in magazines, before becoming a freelance writer.  His first novel was the acclaimed and bestselling What We Did On Our Holiday.  He lives in Richmond upon Thames with his wife and two sons.

Amazingly, John Harding has neither a website nor a page on Wikipedia, but there is some material here.

Review

An even larger group than last month - 23 - gathered to discuss "Puzzler" and the size of the turnout once again mandated a split into two groups.  While quite a few members didn't finish the book, there were three distinct reactions: Loved it; Hated it; Thought it was "OK".  The believability of the islanders abandoning their own language in favour of pidgin was called into question; the flashbacks were overlong and too numerous; and so on.  In contrast the books champions agreed with many of the online reviews: that it was a funny, life-affirming read that challenged many Western assumptions about societal values and cultural responses.

With a combined voting pattern of: 9; 5; 5; 7; 6; 7; 7; 5; 9; 7; 9; 4; 7; 7; 5; 7; 8; and 8, Puzzler enjoyed an average score of 6.78. giving it equal 16th place with Life of Pi (out of a total of 29 books read).

 

October 2008

Brideshead Revisited [suggested by Chloe Brew]

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War.  It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit.  Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them. [from amazon.com]

The book has its own Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 and was educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938).  In 1945 he published Brideshead Revisited and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952 for Men at Arms.  Evelyn Waugh died in 1966.

Naturally, he too has his own Wikipedia page.

Review

Despite the bitterly cold night, a bumper attendance at tonight's meeting - 22 people including five new members - split into two groups to discuss Bridie.  Once again this was a book that polarised its readers.  Was the first half better, or the last half?  Were the characters lively and entertaining, or were they tedious upper-class ciphers?  Was Marchmain's death scene just a death scene, or an allegory?  And why did everyone end up so lonely and unhappy?  The debate lasted a full hour and although quite a few members clearly did not enjoy the read at all, there's no doubt that books like this make for much more interesting meetings!  

Voting (amalgamated from the two discussion groups) went like this: 7; 4; 8; 8; 8; 2; 6; 5; 7; 6; 8; 7; 6; 7; 4; 9; and a final 4, giving an average of 6.24 and placing it 21st (out of 28), between Northanger Abbey and Slaughterhouse 5.

 

September 2008

In Cold Blood [suggested by Kate Bermingham]

"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans - in fact, few Kansans - had ever heard of Holcomb.  Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there."  If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre - journalism written with the language and structure of literature - this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers.  But Capote achieved more than that.  He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction.  The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise - the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.

In Cold Blood is considered the originator of the non-fiction novel and the forerunner of the New Journalism movement.  It details the 1959 slaying of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer from Holcomb, Kansas; his wife, and two children.  When Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, he travelled to Kansas to write about the crime.  With his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, he interviewed local residents and investigators and took thousands of pages of notes.  The killers were arrested not long after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book.

The story weaves a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder they were not capable of individually.  Capote's book also details the lives of the victims and the effect the crime had on where they lived.
[adapted from amazon.com and the book's Wikipedia page.]

About the Author

Truman Capote, best known for his extravagant, celebrated, and outrageous lifestyle as much as his famous works Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, reached a level of success few writers, celebrities, and socialites dream of.

Capote's professional career exploded with the literary acclaim of several short stories published in Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar and his first novel Other Voice, Other Rooms.

Shortly after critical acclaim for his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Capote hosted his famous Black and White ball in NYC.  This was the height of his social climb and he soon began his descent into drugs, alcohol, and reclusivity as his friends sharply rejected his thinly veiled portrayal of them in Answered Prayers.

The above taken from the homepage of Capote Bio. Naturally, he has his own Wikipedia page.

Review

A lively debate among the thirteen attendees at the club meeting generally agreed that In Cold Blood was an excellent piece.  Discussion covered Capote's life, his attitude to the killers and to the murder in general, the fact that he waited for them to be hanged to give him "the ending he wanted" when he could have used his research to give them a fairer trial, the ground-breaking nature of the first "faction" novel ever, and the question of how much of it was pure fiction.

Voting illustrated how highly regarded the book was, scoring as it did 7; 8; 8; 7; 7; 7; 8; 7; 8; and 8 resulting in an average of exactly 7.5 and placing it tenth, between Cloud Atlas and Catcher in the Rye.

 

August 2008

A Million Little Pieces [suggested by Wendy Williams]

When he entered a residential treatment centre at the age of twenty-three, James Frey had destroyed his body and his mind almost beyond repair.  He faced a stark choice: accept that he wasn't going to see twenty-four or step into the fallout of his smoking wreck of a life and take drastic action.  Surrounded by patients as troubled as he, Frey had to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he had lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he has.  A Million Little Pieces is an uncommon account of a life destroyed and a life reconstructed. [from amazon.com]

About the Author

James Frey is an American writer and the author of the current bestseller, Bright Shiny Morning.  He graduated from Denison University and also attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His first memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in spring 2003.  Its follow-up, My Friend Leonard (also a memoir) was published by Riverhead in summer 2005.  Both books became New York Times #1 bestsellers.  In late 2005 and early 2006, investigators discovered that elements of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were untrue.  Frey, along with his family, currently resides in New York City.

The above is adapted from Frey's Wikipedia entry.  Many of the Google references to the "fabrication" of this month's chosen novel, including statements from both the publisher and the author, are suspiciously broken, but you can read more here, or on the book's own Wikipedia page.

Review

Another healthy attendance this month with 14 existing members and one new joiner turning up to discuss A Million Little Pieces.  In general the style and writing in the book were well liked and there was general agreement that they accurately and vividly portrayed the thoughts of an addict.  The issue of the veracity of the tale was debated at some length, with most people agreeing it didn't matter much, while a few picked out areas they thought didn't ring true (examples being the character of Lilly, the feast before the boxing match, and the fact that so many strata of society were represented in the clinic.

As with last month's book, the discussion continued for well over an hour and in the end the book earned Wendy the first ever Chorlton Chapters round of applause for the selection.  Unfortunately scoring was not quite so enthusiastic, the results being 10; 8; 8; 7; 9; 9; 6; 8; 7; 7; 7; 7; 6; 8; and 9 giving it an average of 7.73.  This puts it in eighth place (out of 26) just one one-hundreth of a point ahead of Cloud Atlas and a little behind the joint sixth place 'Notes on a Scandal' and 'We Need to Talk About Kevin.'

 

July 2008

The Riders [suggested by Kathy Macdermid]

Fred Scully has gone to Ireland, where he is restoring a dilapidated cottage and waiting for Jennifer, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, to arrive from Australia.  But on the appointed day, Billie arrives without her mother, too traumatized to explain what happened during their last stop at Heathrow.  Thus begins a mad search through Greece, Italy, France, and Holland, always just missing the elusive Jennifer.  Though action-filled, this is primarily a study of the psychic price paid by an open-hearted man who loves deeply, if not wisely.  The novel's strengths lie in its richly detailed settings and in the archetypal fury of its portrait of psychic dissolution. [from amazon.com]

About the Author

Tim Winton began his first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), at the age of 19, while on a Creative Writing course at Curtin University, Perth.  It won the Australian/Vogel National Literary Award, and he has since made his living as a full-time writer.

Born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1960, he is the author of several novels for adults, including Shallows (1986), a novel set in a whaling town, and Cloudstreet (1991), the tale of two working-class families rebuilding their lives, both won prestigious Miles Franklin Awards in Australia.  A theatrical adaptation of Cloudstreet toured Australia, Europe and the USA to universal acclaim.  His novel That Eye, the Sky (1986) was adapted for theatre by Justin Monjo and Richard Roxburgh, and also made into a film.  A second film adaptation was made of In the Winter Dark (1988), featuring Brenda Blethyn.  The Riders (1995) was shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction, and also won a Commonwealth Writers Prize.  Many of his books are set in his familiar landscapes of Western Australia.

More information on the Contemporary Writers website, or the inevitable Wikipedia page.

Review

A slow burning meeting - by 7.35 only 5 people had turned up and yet within the next 15 minutes another 12 joined us, making a respectable 17 in all.  The Riders proved very much a "marmite" book, splitting the group unevenly into a majority of haters and a small number of lovers.  Even some of the haters appreciated Winton's prose style, although even this eventually irritated some of the more militant of that ilk.  Almost everyone despaired of the books total lack of plot, or meaning, and the (effective) child abuse of Scully's daughter Billie.  Various theories abounded regarding the meaning of the ghostly riders, whether Scully's wife ever existed, or was dead (possibly killed by him), what Irma was doing there at all apart from as an utter counterpoint to the character of Jennifer.

For all its faults, The Riders generated more debate than we have had for many months, the main discussion lasting well over an hour and sub-groups continuing to debate the novel while fetching more beer or even longer.  But when it came down to it, the scores tell their own story: 8; 4; 5; 6; 7; 4; 4; 4; 8; 8; 4; 4; and a final 0, with a large number of abstentions from those who hadn't finished or ever started. The average of 5.08 puts The Riders in second-to-last place just barely ahead of Running With Scissors.

 

June 2008

Rebecca [suggested by Siobhan Fitzmaurice]

A young, naive woman who is the paid companion of an obnoxious rich woman is taken along to Monte Carlo.  While she smarts under the rudeness and gauche behavior of her employer, she meets the dark, handsome widower Max de Winter.

What follows is a love story and a ghost story of a woman haunted by the powerful presence of the former mistress of Manderley.  We never learn the name of the heroine as she marries Max, moves into the rigid but elegant life at Manderley and tangles with Mrs. Danvers, Manderley's fearsome housekeeper.  What unfolds is not only a mystery but a story of obsessions and evil.

Du Maurier creates an unforgettable atmosphere of decaying beauty, frightening spirits and horror mixed with love and death.

This month's read also has its own Wikipedia page from where the above synopsis is borrowed.

About the Author

Daphne was born in 1907, grand-daughter of the brilliant artist and writer George du Maurier, daughter of Gerald, the most famous Actor Manager of his day, she came from a creative and successful family.

She began writing short stories in 1928, and in 1931 her first novel, 'The Loving Spirit' was published.  It received rave reviews and further books followed.  Then came her most famous three novels, 'Jamaica Inn', 'Frenchman's Creek' and Rebecca'.  Each novel being inspired by her love of Cornwall, where she lived and wrote.

Further information on her website, or Wikipedia page.

Review

A bumper meeting of 19 members old and new had to split into two discussion groups - possibly the first time this has happened at The Lounge?  A very popular read, with no real dissenters, which is unusual for this group.  Maxim was generally disliked as a character, Mrs. Danvers was everyone's favourite villain (with a lot of speculation regarding the true nature of her relationship with Rebecca) and quite a few suggested they would have liked to see the girl get together with Frank.  The scoring this month was very uniform: 10; 7; 8; 7; 7; 7; 8; 8; 8; 9; 7; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 7 and 8, which brings the average to 7.84 - not quite as high as everyone expected and only enough for 4th place - just ahead of perfume but a long way behind A Prayer for Owen Meany.

 

May 2008

The Name of the Rose [suggested by Rowena James]

Along with his apprentice Adso of Melk (named after the Benedictine abbey Stift Melk), the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville journeys to an abbey where a murder has been committed.

As the plot unfolds, several other people mysteriously die.  The protagonists explore a labyrinthine medieval library, the subversive power of laughter, and come face to face with the Inquisition.  It is left primarily to William's enormous powers of logic and deduction to solve the mysteries of the abbey.

This month's read also has its own Wikipedia page from where the above synopsis is borrowed.

About the Author

Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont.  His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars.  During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside.

Son of a family with thirteen children, and urged by his father to become a lawyer, he entered the University of Turin.  But, as what seems to be the fate of many great writers, he abandoned his studies of law; and against his father's wishes he took up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his doctorate of philosophy in 1954.

After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for Radiotelevisione Italiana and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956-64).  A group of avant-garde artists - painters, musicians, writers - that he had befriended at RAI became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career.  This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956 Il Problema Estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis.  This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.

Further information on his website, or Wikipedia page.

Review

A smaller meeting this month (9 members) and a very sparse review.  Basically the book was generally liked but several people felt it was an effort to read, especially the first part.  It was thought to be a very clever book with everything there for a reason but this made it very important to take in all the details which was one reason why it wasn't an easy read.  The Chorlton Chapters scorecard resulted in votes of 7; 8; 5; 8; 6; 4; 7; 8; and 5 giving an average of 6.44 and 16th place in our overall reading list.

 

April 2008

The Picture of Dorian Gray [suggested by Amy Gregg]

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant?  Why not both?  After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true.  Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent.  After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings.  "The roses are not less lovely for all that.  The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."  But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work.  Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions.  Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies.  An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."  Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts.  And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

[review from amazon.com]

Naturally this book is so famous it has its own Wikipedia page.

About the Author

Oscar Wilde needs no further purple biographising prose on this humble website.

Here is an extract from the biography on his "official website"

Oscar Wilde's rich and dramatic portrayals of the human condition came during the height of the Victorian Era that swept through London in the late 19th century.  At a time when all citizens of Britain were finally able to embrace literature the wealthy and educated could only once afford, Wilde wrote many short stories, plays and poems that continue to inspire millions around the world.

Read more here, or see what Wikipedia has to say.

Review

14 members again this month, split (rather unevenly) into lovers and haters of the book, with both points of view being robustly defended.  The Chorlton Chapters scorecard resulted in votes of 9; 8; 8; 7; 8; 6; 8; 1; 1; 8; 7; 7; and 9 giving an average of 6.69.  The two dissenters therefore succeeded in keeping Wilde's work away from the top spot, its score translating into overall 14th place behind Life of Pi (and only just beating The Many-Coloured Land!).

 

March 2008

The Great Gatsby [suggested by Rachel Johnston]

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."  That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known.  A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology.  Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's - and his country's - most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings.  Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...  And one fine morning - Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan.  The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer.  They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan.  After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means - and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing.  "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions.  His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear.  When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.  Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

[from amazon.com]

About the Author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem.  He attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen.

From 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey.  Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 as a second lieutenant in the infantry.  Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, "The Romantic Egotist" which was rejected by Charles Scribner's, who praised the novel's originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

After meeting eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, Fitzgerald had high hopes for the success of his revised novel, but it was again rejected by Scribners.  After the war he took a job, but the small salary was not sufficient to support the socialite Zelda, so Fitzgerald quit in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise, which was then accepted by Scribners and published on March 26, 1920.  It made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight.  There followed a second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, after which the Fitzgeralds took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.

They travelled to France in the spring of 1924 where Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael.  Revisions followed during the winter of 1924-1925 while in Rome, and the novel was published in April.  The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald's technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view.  Fitzgerald's achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were initially disappointing.

[abridged and adapted from "A Brief Life of Fitzgerald" by Matthew Bruccoli, found on the Fitzgerald Society website.  Don't forget Wikipedia!]

Review

A good turn-out this month including our occasional Canadian tourist and two new members swelling numbers to 14 enjoyed one of the most prolonged discussions of recent months, lasting a full hour.  In general the book proved a popular glimpse of life in the 1920s, of which it was considered an accurate portrayal, even though the characters were generally regarded as unsympathetic and, to a degree, one dimensional.  This month's voting went: 7; 8; 9; 8; 7; 9; 8; 5; 6; 7; 8 and 6 resulting in an average of 7.33 and giving it overall 9th place of the 21 books read so far.

 

February 2008

Our Kid [suggested by Louisa Morgan]

It was on a Sunday night in 1928 that Billy Hopkins made his first appearance.  Billy's tenement home on the outskirts of Manchester would be considered a slum today, but he lived there happily with his large Catholic family, hatching money-making schemes with his friends.  This book recalls an upbringing and an environment now vanished.

About the Author (in his own words)

I was born in 1928 in Collyhurst, Manchester (not a stone's throw from Les Dawson's stalking ground, also the birthplace of John Thaw, the actor.  There must be something in the water).  I attended St William's Infant School and St. Chad's Elementary School.  I passed the "scholarship" in 1939 and went to Xaverian College, (a grammar school), Victoria Park, Manchester.

In 1941, I was evacuated with the rest of the school to Blackpool where I had some pretty bizarre experiences, I can tell you.  At the age of fifteen, whilst still at school, I worked as a shoe-shine boy at the American Red Cross in St. Anne's Square, Manchester where I earned fabulous sums of money in tips from the American doughboys who gave me my first detailed sex education.  I left school in 1944 and went to work at the then Manchester Guardian as copy boy.  I had hopes of becoming their star reporter but when I saw that without an Oxbridge education there were few prospects, I moved on to become a pen-pushing clerk in the Inland Revenue.  The hum-drum routine was driving me slowly mad and so before this could happen, I decided to become a teacher and went to the College of St Mark & St John, Chelsea (1945-47).

I took up my first teaching post at a Secondary Modern school in Manchester in 1947.  I was put in charge of the top class - I was 19 and my pupils aged 14/15 and they bitterly resented having to stay on an extra year.  They gave me a hard time but my Collyhurst training had taught me a trick or two and I finally brought them round to their senses.

[Taken from the author's (home-grown) website, where there's a deal more of this].  What? No Wikipedia entry?

Review

A relatively small gathering enjoyed a lively discussion on this interesting book, ably aided and abetted by Louisa's prepared questions.  A few people really enjoyed the book, but many said either it wasn't as good as they expected, or had not done anything for them.  The language polarised many, the characters were not engaging enough, and there were no really memorable moments, although most expressed surprise at the amount of paedophilia Billy encountered.  As a historical "family saga" style narrative it worked well enough, but a small majority didn't enjoy this kind of book, and this was reflected in the voting: 7; 5; 6; 4; 6; 6; 5; 8 and 3 - an average of 5.56 (position 19 out of 20).

 

January 2008

The Life of Pi [suggested by Lorraine Southern]

Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique.  The plot, if that's the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi).  After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada.  His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard.  That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu.  The denouement is pleasantly neat.  According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada.  All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction.

(Review by Sean Thomas from amazon.co.uk)

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents.  He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India.  After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs - tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard - he began to write.  He is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both of them published internationally.  He has been living from his writing since the age of 27.  He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit.  Yann Martel lives in Montreal.  See also his entry on Wikipedia.

Review

A three-way split this month:  1. Those who either hadn't read it, or hadn't managed to get past that first milestone that everyone recognised was a "hump" in the book.  That tedious first 25-30% of the book meant that quite a few never made it as far as the lifeboat.  2. Those who'd read most or all of it and didn't think it worth the candle.  3. Read it and liked it.  The last section, with the Japanese shipping guys, threw a lot of people.  Was the story of the tiger really an allegory, and the "alternative" story the real one?  Or were both of them just a young boy's fantasy?  A way of coping with the extraordinary stress of being alone in an open boat for 227 days?  And how sad was it that the tiger never really "said" a proper good-bye?  There are innumerable on-line reviews for this work, and many of the points you'll find there were expressed during the discussion.  This month's scores reflected the three-way split referred to above.  They were: 7; 5; 9; 5; 5; 9; 7; 7 and 7, which gives an average of 6.78 (position 12 out of 19).

 

November 2007

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver [suggested by Rachel Johnston]

Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian's son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy - the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

Lionel Shriver is a novelist and has written for The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Enquirer, among other publications. She writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Born in the US, she has lived in Nairobi, Bangkok and Belfast. She is married to a jazz drummer and is based in London and New York. Her earlier novels include The Female of the Species, Ordinary Decent Criminals, A Perfectly Good Family and Game Control. We Need to Talk About Kevin is her seventh novel.

Review

An even better group for this month's discussion (15 and one new member) and from the scores it's a fair conclusion that most people who read it enjoyed it.  The debate touched on a number of aspects of both the book and the issues it raised.  Would you want to have children?  Can you be certain of developing a natural bond with a child?  There was praise for Kevin's mother for seeing her job through even though he's a monster, but questions whether his credentials as a monster were exaggerated by being told through her eyes alone.  How much was Franklyn to blame?.  Does Kevin pick up on his mother's constant antipathy towards him, and is this the cause of his madness?  Was it realistic for him to turn to murder with the fairly minor provocation he endured, when real murderers are often much more atrociously abused?  Many readers saw Kevin as an unrealistic, one-dimensional character and at least one person felt that there was much more to the book than a simple diatribe on how horrid children can be, examining as it does issues of society, weapons, education and responsibility.

With scores of 9; 8; 8; 8; 9; 8; 7; 8; 7; 7; 8; 6; and 8 giving an average of 7.77, We Need To Talk About Kevin matches the CC score for Notes on a Scandal and therefore finds itself in joint fifth position.

 

October 2007

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut [suggested by Kathryn Berzins]

Now the most-nominated book (this is the third time it's been presented for selection and the second time by Kathryn, although this time she drafted Rebecca in to do the honours) we basically selected it because we knew it would keep coming back until we did.

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.  In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel.  He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..."  Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945.  Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority.  Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humour.

The book is so famous it has its own Wikipedia page

Most readers interested in the fantastic in literature are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut, particularly for his uses of science fiction.  Many of his early short stories were wholly in the science fiction mode, and while its degree has varied, science fiction has never lost its place in his novels.  Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterize the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them.  His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality.  Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it.  In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it.  Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space," as it were.  And unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the "black humor" mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.

All the above information is lifted from Kurt Vonnegut's website which then goes on to discuss his graphic art at great length.

Review

A good group for this month's discussion (12, including three new members) with opinions fairly evenly split between those who liked it and those who didn't.  The "nays" were generally of the opinion that the book was irritating (especially in its use of "so it goes") and plotless, jumped about too much and was hard to get into.  Strangely, these were precisely the qualities that endeared the book to the "yays," who agreed with the received wisdom that Vonnegut was a genius especially in his juxtaposition of narrative (for instance where the nestling of jewellery between breasts sits beside a description of bombed Dresden, or where the aloof behaviour of the Tralfamadorians is used as a counterpoint to humans' attitude to war), wit and multi-layered prose.  This month's scores were 9; 6; 4; 3; 9; 6.5; 8; 4; 4; 6; and 8 delivering an average of 6.14 and beating only Panic, Northern Lights, To The Lighthouse and Running with Scissors.

 

September 2007

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee [suggested by Lisa Williams]

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus - three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman.  Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child.  The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up. Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale.  We first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school.  She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley.  At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness.  Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding.  During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well - in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them."  By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. [review by Alix Wilber - the first of 1660 customer reviews on Amazon.com]

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee.  Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville.  Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38).  As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and she enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lee was only five years old in when, in April 1931 in the small Alabama town of Scottsboro, the first trials began with regard to the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men.  The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial.  Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old boy, to death.  Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled.  The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird, her first and only novel, which was published in 1960 after a two-year period of revising and rewriting under the guidance of her editor, Tay Hohoff.  To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize despite mixed critical reviews.

See also her Wikipedia page.

Review

Although only a small group (8 eventually) gathered to discuss this book, with only one exception it was loved by everyone who had read it.  The characterisation; the nuances; the perspective of the narrator Scout; the slowly unfurling ambivalences of life in rural America - everything about the novel came in for praise and generated much discussion about the various prejudices displayed by most of the inhabitants of the novel, the lessons (both literal and figurative) and the inevitability of the outcomes. The voting, at 10; 10; 9; 9; 9; 10; 5, gave the novel an average of 8.86 making it the runaway favourite Chorlton Chapters book so far, a full half a point ahead of its nearest rival, The Reader.

 

August 2007

Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller [suggested by Rowena James]

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this - it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it.  It's an abuse of her very limited power - he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.  Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her.  Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her.  This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession - and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. [review from amazon.com by Roz Kaveney]

Zoe Heller was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford University and Columbia University, New York.  She is a journalist who, after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature writer for The Independent.  She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph and earned the title 'Columnist of the Year' in 2002.  She is the author of two novels: Everything You Know (2000), a dark comedy about misanthropic writer Willy Miller, and Notes on a Scandal (2003) which tells the story of an affair between a high school teacher and her student through the eyes of the teacher's supposed friend, Barbara Covett.  It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for fiction, and was recently released as a feature film, starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench.  She lives in New York.

See also her extremely sparse Wikipedia page.

Review

I would welcome some input from the group for this review, but in the absence of that, or more time to write it myself, this month's discussion will be restricted to a record of the voting, which gave it: 9; 8; 9; 8; 8; 7; 7; 7; 6; 7; 9; 9; 7 - an average of 7.77, which makes it our fourth most popular book ever, just below Perfume.

 

July 2007

The Many-Coloured Land by Julian May [suggested by John Beresford]

Although having achieved some success with short fiction, Julian May seemed to leap from nowhere into SF major status with this initial sequence of four books (The Saga of The Exiles).  The Many-Coloured Land is one of those wonderful books in which the narrative refuses to provide explanation of its own internal history.  In the first chapters, tantalising hints are given about "the Intervention" and "The Metapsychic Rebellion" and the reader gradually picks up the pieces of human history throughout the text although some references are not explained until much later in the novel sequence.  It is not clear whether the entire overall saga (which comprises eight books) was initially designed as such, but as the full narrative is in the form of a time-loop, the final novel comes back to almost the point at which The Many-Coloured Land starts.  Deftly manipulating a multi-character storyline, May starts us off in a near future in which human colonists are being set up on hundreds of ethnically-streamed fresh planets; many humans are developing metapsychic operancy with talents such as psychokinesis, telepathy, the transformation of matter, illusion spinning and mental coercion.  Five alien races, members of a kind of superpsychic gestalt, have made themselves known and are helping Humanity along the road to Coalescence.  Meanwhile, Madame Guderian, a French hotelier, is custodian of an odd piece of Earth history.  Her late husband had constructed a machine which interfaced with a unique geological and temporal anomaly within the Earth's crust.  He had built, in effect, a time portal, but one which led only one way, back to Earth's Pliocene past.  After a traveller paid handsomely for the privilege of escaping the modern world into Exile, Madame Guderian began a trade in transporting `misfits', those discomfited by the strange complex place their society had become.  Once in the past, however, the travellers find themselves enslaved by the Tanu, an oddly humanoid race.  The aliens had fled to earth from their own world where they were being forced to abandon certain traditions which their enlightened brethren deemed barbarous.  We follow the fortunes of several travellers, all of whom got to know each other in the orientation and survival training sessions before they left.  May's characters are an eccentric bunch: a "blinded" Grandmaster Metapsychic lady; a disgraced space captain; a neurotic Viking; a psychotic lesbian sports player; a recidivist trickster; a lovesick sociologist; a bereaved palaeontologist; and an "old school" nun.  It sparkles with wit and a depth of character and background research which is refreshing and breathtaking.  It is by far one of the best series of books of the late Twentieth Century, and is compulsory reading for fans of SF.  [Review from amazon.com by Rod Williams]

Julian May grew up in Chicago, and became involved in science fiction fandom in her late teens.  She sold her first professional fiction, a short story called "Dune Roller", in 1951 to John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction.  She met her future husband, Ted Dikty, later that year when he requested permission to reprint the story in his anthology series; they were married in 1952.  She chaired the Tenth World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago that same year.  After selling one more short story, "Star of Wonder" (to Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1953), she dropped out of the science fiction field.  During the 1950s, May wrote thousands of science articles for the World Book encyclopedia.  In 1957 she and her husband founded a production and editorial service for small publishers, specializing in children's non-fiction.  Between 1957 and 1981 she wrote more than one hundred books for children and young adults, all non-fiction, and two stories under her own names and a variety of pseudonyms.  In 1981 she returned to science fiction with the Saga of the Exiles.  In 1987 she continued the series with Intervention followed by the Galactic Milieu Series: Jack the Bodiless, Diamond Mask and Magnificat.

The above short bio is taken from Julian May's Wikipedia page, which also contains an extensive bibliography.

Review

Holiday season, varied other overt excuses and, I suspect, a less popular choice than most months meant that our group discussion this month was confined to a small but select group of 7, two of whom had not read the book.  Of those who had made some progress, most were either surprised to be enjoying it, or expected to, although May's rather tenuous development of her characters, and her penchant for describing scenes externally rather than through the minds of one or other character, came in for some criticism.  The ideas were widely seen as strong and interesting, even if their execution lacked conviction.  More than one person suggested that the text showed signs of immaturity as a writer, with plot holes, shifts of perspective and failure to follow up interesting ideas all cited as evidence.  Overall there was agreement that the major story lines could have been accommodated in any "world" but both the future and the past conjured up by May were full of fascinating detail.  The majority of readers thought they would complete the trilogy given the chance.  The (very short!) scorecard for this month reads: 2; 9; 6; 7; 9 - an average of 6.6 putting it below Buddha Da and above Northanger Abbey in the ratings, slightly below the mid-point of the table.

 

June 2007

Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs [suggested by Ben Monk]

There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir Running with Scissors that speaks volumes about the author.  While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home.  "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours."

There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription medicines and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a paedophile who lives in a shed out back.  But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill.  Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother.  And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorises it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a cappella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward.

Burroughs' perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic.  And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs' survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. [this review from amazon.co.uk]

Augusten Burroughs was born in 1965 and raised in Western Massachusetts.  He is the author of the memoirs Running with Scissors (2002) and Dry (2003), and the essay collections, Magical Thinking: True Stories (2004) and Possible Side Effects (2006), all of which were instant bestsellers both in hardcover and paperback.  The #1 New York Times bestseller, Running with Scissors, has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two-and-a-half consecutive years.  He is also the author of the novel, Sellevision (2000), which is currently in development for film.  His books are published in over 25 countries.  The film of Running with Scissors, written and directed by Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck) and executive produced by Brad Pitt, will be released on October 10th, 2006.  Critics have raved about the film in private press screenings and Oscar buzz is building in the national media.  The picture stars Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox, Jill Clayburgh, Joeseph Fiennes, Gwenyth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, with newcomer Joe Cross portraying Augusten.  Augusten himself is featured in the film at the very end.  The film version of Sellevision is in pre-production, to be adapted for the screen and directed by Mark Bozek.

The above rather out of date bio is taken from the Augusten Burroughs website.  As usual he also a Wikipedia page.

Review

Despite the inclement weather 13 of us gathered in the Lounge Bar to discuss this month's read.  A surprisingly large number had finished the book this month and once again discussion was very animated.  No-one had much sympathy for any of the characters, although Augusten became quite likeable during the read.  The book was episodic in its latter half, we felt, as if there hadn't been enough material to maintain the narrative.  No-one could understand why the effective child abuse had been allowed to continue, and Kathryn pointed out that many of the more outrageous scenes (living outside, the hole in the roof, pooing on the floor, etc) were either completely fabricated or wildly exaggerated according to the "real" Finch family, who had taken action against the author for invasion of privacy and libel.  A lengthy article containing interviews with the surviving family members can be found here. To the extent that anyone had a "favourite" character it tended to be Hope or Jeff, but the general mood of antipathy to all the characters prevailed and although so many of us finished it, no-one admitted to really enjoying it (even though it may have made us laugh out loud a few times).  The scorecard for this month reads: 5; 6; 6; 7; 6; 6; 4; 4; 2; 3; 6; 5 - an average of exactly 5 and making it our lowest scoring book ever, by quite a large margin.

 

May 2007

The Outsider by Albert Camus [suggested by Lynsey Rodger]

Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits a random act of violence.  His lack of emotion and failure to show remorse only serve to increase his guilt in the eyes of the law, and challenges the fundamental values of society a set of rules so binding that any person breaking them is condemned as an outsider.  For Meursault, this is an insult to his reason and a betrayal of his hopes; for Camus it encapsulates the absurdity of life.  In "The Outsider" (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the predicament of the individual who refuses to pretend and is prepared to face the indifference of the universe, courageously and alone.

The Outsider (also known as The Stranger) has its own Wikipedia page.

Born November 7th, 1913 in Algeria son of French 'pied-noir' settlers Camus grew up in poverty in the proletarian neighbourhood of Belcourt in Algiers.  His natural talent was spotted by teacher Louis Germain who helped the young Camus win a high school scholarship.  Camus would later dedicate his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to Germain.  While at school Camus developed a love of football and played well in goal.  He wanted to play professionally but tuberculosis, a disease that would plague him for life, ended these dreams.

The above is the first section of an extensive biography that may be found on the pages of the Albert Camus Society.  Naturally he also has his own Wikipedia page.

Review

Another small turnout this month - 11 of us, including a visitor from Toronto, gathered once again in the Lounge Bar to discuss May's book.  Three of those attending hadn't read the book, but for such a small book it generated a very animated discussion among those who had read it.  Lynsey had prepared a list of searching questions for the audience, who felt that Meursault had no sympathy for anyone and was almost completely disconnected from the world - almost autistic.  It was felt that we shouldn't pity him but it was hard not to: he is the way he is and can't help it.  The original French title was L'Étranger, which can be translated as the outsider, or the stranger, or the foreigner, and there was a lengthy debate about how the original slipped easily between these meanings whereas the translation had to use one or another and as a result put Meursault in a box.  It was felt unfair that his lack of grief over his mother's death was used to prove he was a bad person simply because there was no motive for the murder (except for his explanation of "the sun").  On the question of transparency, we debated what it means to "be yourself" when most people put on different personae for their work life, home life, and being with friends.  The Outsider was voted the #1 "milestone" book for men, and the group felt this was probably because at that age women are more inclined to communicate and conform, whereas men don't communicate and try to be different.  The scoresheet results for this month were: 6; 8; 5; 7; 6; 9; 8; 8 - an average of 7.13 which puts The Outsider firmly in the middle of the scoring of our past reads.

 

April 2007

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman [suggested by Lisa Williams]

Lyra's life is already sufficiently interesting for a novel before she eavesdrops on a presentation by her uncle Lord Asriel to his colleagues in the Jordan College faculty, Oxford.  The college, famed for its leadership in experimental theology, is funding Lord Asriel's research into the heretical possibility of the existence of worlds unlike Lyra's own, where everyone is born with a familiar animal companion, magic of a kind works, the Tartars are threatening to overrun Muscovy, and the Pope is a puritanical Protestant.  Set in an England familiar and strange, Philip Pullman's lively, taut story is a must-read and re-read for fantasy lovers of all ages.  The world-building is outstanding, from the subtle hints of the 1898 Tokay to odd quirks of language to the panserbjorne, while determined, clever Lyra is strongly reminiscent of Joan Aiken's Dido Twite.

Read an alternative (much longer) review of Northern Lights here.

Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before his family settled in North Wales.  He received his secondary education at Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, and then went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English.  He started teaching at the age of 25, and taught at various Oxford Middle Schools before moving to Westminster College in 1986, where he spent eight years involved in teaching students on the B.Ed. course.  He has published nearly twenty books, mostly of the sort that are read by children, though the natural audience for his work spans many ages.

Pullman's first children's book was Count Karlstein (1982, republished in 2002).  That was followed by The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in a quartet of books featuring the young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart.

The above is abridged from his website but don't expect it to be updated much.  His home page bears the legend: "Welcome to my website.  I hope you'll find it interesting and easy to find your way around.  I shall be updating it regularly, so do keep coming back to see what's new." but then has a "January message" (at the end of March) which continues: "The trouble with intending to say something regularly is that I haven't always got something to say.  How in the world do newspaper columnists find 600 words without fail every couple of days?  And these people who fill cyberspace with their blogs day after day after day?  Or preachers coming up with a sermon every week?  It's not like writing a novel.  I know how to keep going at that.  But most of the time I'd rather read than write, and rather listen than talk..."

Review

Probably owing to uncertainties about the venue, 12 members turned out to the Lounge Bar to discuss April's book.  The majority enjoyed it as a fantasy yarn, but there were a few dissenting voices, claiming that the story didn't engage them, that Pullman had an annoying habit of talking down to his audience, and obvious plot points were laboured ad nauseam.  While this would be OK for an exclusively young readership it was felt that this made for a less enjoyable read as an adult.  The much vaunted "betrayal" was seen by many as a damp squib - either because they had forgotten about it, or because it was telegraphed too early, or its impact was lessened through being unintentional rather than deliberate.  The concept of Dust and what it might be did not exercise anyone's mind in the main, the group was evenly split on the question of whether they liked the idea of a daemon, and a sizeable group thought the bears were the best creatures.  The commonest criticism of the work was that it was too derivative and while many enjoyed reading it, only three people said they intended to read the rest of the trilogy.  The scoresheet for this month read: 3; 6; 5; 6; 4; 5; 8; 7; 7; 7; 5; 8 - an average of 5.92 - equal second from bottom place with To The Lighthouse.

 

March 2007

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink [suggested by Susan Owens]

Originally published in Switzerland and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading and shame in post-war Germany.  Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman.  He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again.  But, to his horror, he does.  Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime.  As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust?  "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable...  Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt?  To what purpose?"

The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages.  What does it mean to love those people - parents, grandparents, even lovers - who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known?  And is any atonement possible through literature?  Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue and excess in any form.  What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre and post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent and between words and silence.  (Synopsis from Amazon.com)

The Reader has been an Oprah Winfrey book club choice

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944.  A professor of law at the University of Berlin and a practising judge, he is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning crime novels.  He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

For more information see his Bibliography at fantastic fiction or his Wikipedia entry.

Review

17 members, old and new, attended March's meeting.  We had been unable to find alternative premises so once again we braved the noise in the Polar Bar (caused this time by the crowds rather than the jukebox) and once again we split into two groups to discuss the book.  The Reader generated more discussion than any other book we've read so far.  The relationship between Michael and Hanna, her character, control of him, overweening reluctance to reveal her illiteracy even when it cost her her freedom, the potentially abusive affair, his guilt, his unwillingness to reveal Hanna's illiteracy to the judge, her suicide, all were scrutinised and debated at great length - far longer than for any previous choice and beating even the record set last month for the longest discussion.  The difference this month was that the popularity was reflected in the scoring, the results being: 7; 7; 8; 9; 9; 8; 8; 9; 8; 10; 9; 8; 7; 9; 9; 8; 8.5 - an average of 8.3 beating A Prayer for Owen Meany into second place!

 

February 2007

Catcher In The Rye by J.D.Salinger [suggested by Mair Morgan]

The Catcher in the Rye was first published in the United States in 1951, and the novel remains controversial to this day for its liberal profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst; it was the 13th most frequently challenged book of the 1990s according to the American Library Association.  Despite this censorship, or perhaps due to it, the novel has become one of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, and a common part of high-school curricula in many English-speaking countries, such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia.  Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales over 10 million.

The novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage alienation and fear.  Written in the first person, The Catcher in the Rye relates Holden's experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a university-preparatory school.

The novel covers a few important days in the life of Caulfield, a tall, lanky, highly-critical and depressed sixteen-year-old who decides one night to run away from Pencey Prep, just before Christmas vacation.  Because he is so critical of others, and points out their faults only to exhibit them himself later, Holden is widely considered to be an unreliable narrator, and the details and events of his story are apt to be distorted by his point of view.  Nonetheless, it is his story to tell.

(Synopsis from Wikipedia)

Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951.  A major theme in Salinger's work is the strong yet delicate mind of "disturbed" adolescents, and the redemptive capacity of children in the lives of such young men.  Salinger is also known for his reclusive nature; he has not given an interview since 1974, and has not made a public appearance, nor published any new work (at least under his own name), since 1965.  In the mid 1990s, there was a flurry of excitement when a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to bring out the first book version of his final published story, "Hapworth 16, 1924", but amid the ensuing publicity, Salinger quickly withdrew from the arrangement.

For more information visit Salinger's entry on Wikipedia or his fan-created minipedia.

Review

February's meeting boasted 14 members but we still had to break into two groups owing to the noise in the Polar Bar.  Catcher polarised opinion, a few people hating the story, but nevertheless grudgingly enjoying reading it, the others being swept along by the compelling first-person narrative with its uniquely idiosyncratic style and its painfully accurate portrayal of teenage angst in general, and of being an outsider in particular.  Of all the books read by the club so far, this generated the most debate, the multi-layered telling seeming to offer endless opportunities for interpretation, speculation and empathy.  Despite its apparent popularity, the voting left Catcher with an average score somewhat below the record, the results being: 8; 6; 7; 7; 7; 6.5; 7; 9.5; 8; 7; 7; 7; 7; 9 - an average of 7.4.

 

January 2007

Perfume by Patrick Suskind [suggested by Linda Wong]

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.  He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover, he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's.  Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in Paris.  Yet there is one odour he cannot capture.  It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin.  And to get it, he must kill.  And kill.  And kill.

(Review from amazon.co.uk)

Patrick Suskind was born in Ambach, near Munich, in 1949.  He studied medieval and modern history at the University of Munich.  His first play, The Double Bass, was written in 1980 and became an international success.  It was performed in Germany, in Switzerland, at the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and at the New Theatre in Brooklyn.  His first novel, Perfume became an internationally acclaimed bestseller.  He is also the author of The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story, and a coauthor of the enormously successful German television series Kir Royal.  Mr. Suskind lives and writes in Munich.

Review

A bumper crowd of 19 members broke into two groups to discuss Perfume.  Everyone enjoyed the novel, despite the fact that almost no-one had any sympathy for the main character Grenouille or indeed any of the other characters.  Suskind's language, especially the descriptive sections, were widely praised even if on occasion it went on too long.  Several people commented that the first half, and the expectation of the murders, was better than the second half and the reality of them.  It all seemed a little rushed towards the end.  A few people had seen the movie and warned off the rest of us!  Another high vote this month, the results being: 8; 8; 8; 8; 6; 7; 8; 7; 7; 7; 7; 9; 9; 8; 8; 9; 9; 7.5 - an average of 7.8.

 

November 2006

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving [suggested by Caz Kemp]

Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mum with a baseball and believes - correctly, it transpires -that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.  John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work.  Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy.  The scene of doltish Dr Dolder, Owen's shrink, drunkenly driving his VW down the school's marble steps is a marvellous set piece.  So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in.  But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose".  When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't change the fact that he was born to be martyred.  The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy - from Vietnam to the Contras.

The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business.  Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum - the two characters share the same initials.  A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history and God.

(Review from amazon.co.uk by Tim Appelo)

Review

Quite a short debate this month as (a) the group started off quite small at 12; (b) two of the group hadn't started it (*cough*); and (c) only two of the group had finished it.  Nevertheless most people agreed it was brilliant and then went very quiet in the face of Caz's long list of hard GCSE questions.  The voting, when it came, went: 10; 8; 8; 9; 8; 9; 7; 8; 7; 8 - an average of 8.2, which as predicted is by far the highest the club has scored.

October 2006

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf [suggested by Lisa Taylor]

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory.  For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.

The most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's work, "To the Lighthouse" is based on her own childhood experiences, and while it captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, it also explores the shifting complexity of adult relationships, marriage and the changing class structure of its time.

(Review from amazon.co.uk)

Review

Quite a lively debate this month, despite the fact that only 7 out of the 15 people at the meeting had come close to finishing the book.  Reactions varied from "fantastic," and "I enjoyed it" through "middling" to "found it hard to get into" and "gave up halfway through."  Most readers found the extraordinarily long winding sentences with their alternative viewpoints, melodic style and convoluted structure which seemed to evoke music while at the same time rendering the reader incapable of completing a sentence within the space of a bus journey or indeed without returning to the beginning (often on the previous page!) and recommencing the almost impossible task of gleaning any fragment of meaning or character or description before being lost again in a swirling vortex of verbs and nouns until one started to feel ones life literally ebbing away only to find, there at the very edge of torment the blessed relief of an eventual full stop. :o)  This is, apparently, Woolf's most autobiographical novel and written when she was in the pit of depression.  Readers liked the "sense of something coming" (the Lighthouse, presumably) but found it hard to cope with the frequent subject/object shifts and to work out some of the relationships.  We also liked the way we could hear what each character is thinking in a scene, and much of the descriptive text, particularly the bit about the painting.  In the main the characters were seen as believable - the stereotypes are still alive and well today! - and someone likened it to the "Famous Five."  Opinion was divided on whether we would want to read anything else by the same author, and voting went 6; 5; 3; 9; 6; 3; 8 giving an average of 5.7 (the lowest so far).

September 2006

Buddha Da by Anne Donovan [suggested by Mair Morgan]

Anne Marie's Da, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh.  So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Centre, no one takes him seriously (especially when his pursuit of the new lama ends in a trip round the Carmunnock bypass).  But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his wife, Liz.  Cracks appear in their apparently happy family life, and the ensuing events change the lives of each family member.

Review

A healthy turnout this month, including four new members - the most we've had in one night since the second meeting.  Buddha Da didn't evoke a strong negative or positive reaction from the group.  While most people said they enjoyed it (and more seemed to have finished it than usual!) its lack of highs or lows of emotional response was reflected in the scores: 7; 8; 6; 7; 7; 6; 7; 7; 6; 7; 7; 6; 7; 7; - an average of 6.79.  Quite a few people thought that the central characters were well sketched, even if Jimmy was a bit self-centred.  Poor Barbara came in for a lot of stick, seen variously as a home-wrecker, not a very good Buddhist, lonely, or simply someone who found it hard to get hold of a good decorator.  The short space of time in which a marriage breakup and reconciliation occurred was seen as unrealistic by Simon, who also pointed out that having Buddhism as the pivot for the plot was irrelevant - it could just as easily have been Rugby Union, flower arranging, or any other activity that might cause a man to go off and spend copious amounts of time away from his wife and family, to the detriment of both.  OK, maybe not flower arranging.  Amy wondered whether the author would write another book around the theme of Buddhism, since she appeared to know so much about it

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

This is getting beyond a joke, although members can now register their votes online in our forum, Chapters Chatter, and discuss the finer points of books past and present.

August 2006

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel.  It's a big book, for a start, bold in scope and execution - a bravura literary performance, possibly.  (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dream was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats.  Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book - where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas - is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges.  (See what I mean?)

Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race.  The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece.  Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered.  A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer.  And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home.  (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight).  All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far.  Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism.  

Review

A small turnout this month resulted in the group discussion being once again united.  Cloud Atlas scored 9; 9; 5; 7; 7.5; 8.5; 8.5; 6; 9 - an average of 7.72.  While this is the highest score so far it must be noted that only 9 out of the 13 attendees voted, the rest not having finished it either because of lack of time or a conscious decision to stop (or not start) because of antipathy towards the book.  No-one disputed the cleverness of the book, both in its structure and language, but several people said that this was not enough - there was not enough payback from the investment in reading time.  Of those that liked the book, most agreed that they didn't like every section.  There was some debate about the running themes in the book: what was the meaning of the comet tattoo?  Were all the characters in fact the same spirit reincarnated?  Why were some earlier stories referred to as fiction in later ones?  Were the obvious parodies of modern-day icons (MacDonalds, for instance) meaningful to the overall plot?  Of those who finished the book, people who liked it thought the end satisfying whereas those who didn't thought it was a "so what" ending and didn't tie up the stories in an way that explained what it was all really about.

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

Sooner or later, definitely.

July 2006

Panic by Jeff Abbott

Things are going well for young film-maker Evan Casher - until he receives an urgent phonecall from his mother, summoning him home.  He arrives to find her brutally murdered body on the kitchen floor and a hitman lying in wait for him.  It is then he realises his whole life has been a lie.  His parents are not who he thought they were, his girlfriend is not who he thought she was, his entire existence an ingeniously constructed sham.  And now that he knows it, he is in terrible danger.  So he is catapulted into a violent world of mercenaries, spies and terrorists.  Pursued by a ruthless band of killers who will stop at nothing to keep old secrets buried, Evan's only hope for survival is to discover the truth behind his past.  An absolute page-turner, Panic has been acclaimed as one of the most exciting thrillers of recent years.

Review

This month, once again, the group remained together for the discussion.  Scores out of ten (from an attendance affected by the holiday season) went 7; 7; 5; 3; 4; 5; 8; 8; 8; 3; 5; 8 with one abstention - an average of 5.92.  The low score reflected the fact that the group were almost totally polarised into likers and dislikers (an even split of those voting).  Broadly speaking the likers treated it as a light "holiday read" and were prepared to overlook its many failings, whereas those that hated it really did hate it, citing the two-dimensional characters; massive plot holes and inconsistencies; unbelievability of a young director being asked to take over The Deeps with no training; disturbing and graphic violence; lack of even basic research into espionage (or anything else!) and so on.  But it wasn't all bad news.  Even the book's detractors managed to find some redeeming features, two that spring to mind being Ben's enjoyment of some minor characters and Mair's appreciation of the descriptive passages.  Overall only two people said they would want to read more work from this author.

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

Err, yeah.  Next month?

June 2006

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

With its lovable, impressionable heroine and its themes of growing up and learning to live in the real world, "Northanger Abbey" remains one of Jane Austen's most irresistible and up-to-date novels. Catherine Morland is the very ideal of a nice girl from a happy family, but she is blessed with an overactive imagination. She is also obsessed with Iurid Gothic novels, where terrible things happen to the heroine, which gets her into all sorts of trouble...When Catherine meets funny, sharp Henry Tilney, she's instantly taken with him. But when she is invited to his home, the sinister Northanger Abbey, her preoccupation with fantasy starts to get in the way of reality. Will she learn to separate out the two in time?

Review

This month the group remained together for the discussion.  Scores out of ten went 7; 9; 9; 7; 8; 6; 2; 5; 4; 7; 3; 7; 9 with one abstention - an average of 6.38.  With a couple of people hating it and a couple indifferent, the majority really loved it, even those who had not expected to.  Only one or two people were aware that the book was intended as a parody of similar novels of the time.  Simon singled out General Tilney as the most interesting character, on account of his largely unexplored darkness.  Most of the rest of the group agreed that the most well-realised characters were John Thorpe ("everyone knows someone like him!") and Henry Tilney, with Catherine being seen as a very lacklustre "heroine" who didn't really do anything to deserve all the nice things that happened to her.

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

Still not available this month, but we should have it for next month, honest!

May 2006

26a by Diana Evans

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue.  It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering.  Down below there is not such harmony.  Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing.  Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe.  Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson.  It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way.  How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?

Review

A large attendance at the meeting split the group for the discussion.  Our half scored the book 7; 7; 7; 7; 9; 5; 6 - an average of 6.86 out of 10.  Just about everyone enjoyed reading it, most did not foresee the ending although one of our number had known it would end like that from the very beginning having understood the message of the photos on the front and back covers.  The time the girls spent in Nigeria was highlighted as the best part of the book for many.  The collapse of the embryonic flapjack empire, the foreheads, the stiff-gelled hair and the chicken bums were variously quoted as the most humorous parts.  Several people wondered if the author had another book in her, since this was so obviously autobiographical.

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

Not available for this month because we haven't invented it yet.

April 2006

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's passionate love for each other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

Review

A mixed review from the group - several people didn't finish the book, either because they didn't like the format, or couldn't relate to any of the characters. A straw poll of the bar-ward group gained scores varying from 4 to 9 out of 10. Two people really liked it as a straightforward love story, quite a few enjoyed Niffenegger's writing style if not her content and would be happy to read more by her. Several people mentioned getting to the end and feeling "so what?"

Chorlton Chapters Scorecard

Not available for this month because we haven't invented it yet.